Tag: Barack Obama

This may or may not be really awful

Perhaps the worst lede on a political column you’ll read this week comes from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

He is willowy when people yearn for solid, reed-like where they hope for substantial, a bright older brother when they want Papa, cool where they probably prefer warmth. All of which may or may not hurt Barack Obama in time. Lincoln was rawboned, prone to the blues and freakishly tall, with a new-grown beard that refused to become an assertion and remained, for four years, a mere and constant follicular attempt. And he did OK.

Media Nation is no Peggy Noonan-basher. I often found her insights during the presidential campaign to be valuable. But what you submit to your editor is supposed to be what you write after you’re done clearing your throat.

Live-blogging Obama’s news conference

I’ll be live-blogging President Obama’s news conference tonight. If you like multi-tasking, please drop by a few minutes before 8 p.m.

8:00: Bill Bennett, on CNN, says independents now favor Republicans. But Real Clear Politics average on Obama’s job-approval rating shows the president at 61.2 percent favorable, 30.5 percent unfavorable. Who are these independents?

8:04: Cites Geithner’s bank plan. Good timing for news conference — Geithner finally got off the mat yesterday.

8:06: “I’m as angry as anybody about those bonuses” but “we’re all in this together.”

8:07: Much shorter opening statement this time.

8:11: Chuck Todd: Why haven’t you asked the American people to sacrifice, given that some (who?) have compared the economic crisis to war? But Chuck — the crisis is eased when people spend.

8:15: Still thinking about Todd’s question. What does it even mean? Savings rate is higher than it’s been in many years — and that’s a big part of the problem.

8:19: Chip Reid of CBS News another economic ignoramus: Isn’t that debt what you were referring to when you said we didn’t want to pass it on to next generation?

8:20: Obama: I inherited a huge deficit from Republicans. My budget will drive it down.

8:26: The questions show a fundamental lack of understanding that, in the midst of an economic crisis, the best approach for the federal government to take is to spend in order to offset at least part of the lack of spending by the private sector. If anything, as Krugman keeps pointing out, Obama isn’t doing enough.

8:27: Mexican reporter asks about drug violence in her country and spillover effect on the border. Who let her in? Serious, substantive questions not allowed.

8:31: Obama’s lost in the weeds responding to a question from Stars and Stripes on military spending. Or, to be more accurate, he’s led us into the weeds and now we’re lost.

8:33: Ed Henry of CNN: Why is Andrew Cuomo getting better results going after AIG than you and Geithner? Good question. Then, before Obama can answer, he follows it up with another dumb budget question. Not surprisingly, Obama chooses to answer the dumb budget question.

8:36: Obama on why he waited to express anger at AIG: “It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”

8:40: Mike Allen of Politico: Are you reconsidering tax deduction for health care and charity? Do you wish you hadn’t made that promise? Obama: We would return to the Reagan percentages, and it would only affect one percent of the American people. If you’re rich, you’d be able to write off 28 percent of charitable deductions, not 39 percent.

8:43: Allen: Charities say this will hurt giving. Obama: No, it won’t. What really hurts charities is an economy that isn’t working.

8:46: Ann Compton of ABC News: How is race affecting your presidency? Obama: I’ve been focused on the economy. Racial significance of inauguration “lasted about a day.” “Are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe.”

8:48: Washington Times guy: How much did you wrestle with your conscience over embryonic-stem-cell research? Half a nanosecond is my guess as to what would be a truthful answer.

8:52: Agence France-Presse guy: How are you going to bring peace to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation given Israel’s new anti-Palestinian government? Funny — no mention of Hamas’ terrorism against Israel. Obama: Former enemies in Ireland celebrated in the White House on St. Patrick’s Day. “What that tells me is that if you stick to it, if you are persistent, then these problems can be dealt with…. I’m a big believer in persistence.”

8:56: “We’re moving in the right direction.” Geithner now has a plan. We’ve reached out to Iran, but that will take time. We haven’t eliminated the influence of lobbyists immediately, nor have we eliminated pork-barrel spending. The idea is to keep moving forward. “This is a big ocean liner, it’s not a speedboat. It doesn’t turn around immediately.” But after four years, I hope people will see we’ve moved in the right direction.

8:57: And that was that.

9:03: Bill O’Reilly: He was boring! Karl Rove: “I think he’s sort of an arrogant guy.” Now they are sharing their deep knowledge of economics.

9:06: O’Reilly: When I interviewed Obama, man, I was so great.

Final word: I’ll be wrapping up morning commentary for The Guardian tomorrow. But it strikes me that what we saw tonight was the normalization of the Obama presidency. This was no big deal, very much unlike his last prime-time news conference. Obama seemed to feel free to deflect stupid questions. It helped that Geithner’s having a nice little two-day run.

People should pay attention to Obama’s closing, in which he talked about persistence and the long run. It’s how he got elected. And it seems to be how he approaches politics, and life.

David Brooks’ reality-based conservatism

I think this column speaks incredibly well of both Team Obama and David Brooks.

Earlier in the week, Brooks went off on President Obama, characterizing his budget and spending priorities as “a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs,” and calling for an alliance between moderate conservatives (such as himself) and moderate liberals to stop Obama’s runaway ambitions.

The White House responded to Brooks by laying out its case, arguing that the president hasn’t abandoned his preference for a cautious, incremental approach to problem-solving, but had to respond to an unprecedented financial crisis. Given a few years and a little luck, Obama’s aides say, and things will be back on track.

Brooks writes:

I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly….

Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation.

I’m guessing that Brooks doesn’t think Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party. Or, if he does, he’s horrified.

Obama’s bankrupt opponents

In recent days I’ve been struck by the overwhelming nature of the problems that face us, and the utterly bankrupt nature of the conservative response. Because the more mindless of those responses drives me crazy, I will instead present the rational but wrong David Brooks, who writes today:

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

I think Brooks is fundamentally mistaken in his assessment of what the Obama administration would like to do. Everything we know about President Obama tells us that he is an exceedingly cautious politician — a mainstream liberal, not a creature of the far left, who, given his choice, would have liked to proceed deliberately.

He can’t. Not with the economy falling apart, the auto industry careening toward bankruptcy, the financial system in meltdown and housing as dead as it’s been in decades. (Let’s not forget, too, he’s also dealing with war and terrorism on multiple fronts.) Finally, as Obama argued during the campaign, a lot of what ails us economically can’t be fixed without finally doing something about health care.

In the midst of all this, it is striking that the Republicans have nothing to say. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who will deliver the Republican response to Obama’s address to Congress tonight, is getting a weird amount of attention for rejecting about $90 million in federal unemployment assistance — while eagerly grabbing $4 billion in stimulus money.

I don’t know if you caught Jindal on “Meet the Press” Sunday, but he came across as Sarah Palin with better syntax: plenty of pre-rehearsed soundbites, but little or no ability to answer moderator David Gregory’s simple questions.

It’s no wonder that Obama’s job-approval rating is so much higher than that of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at a similar early stage of their presidencies.

Conservative wistfulness over Obama

At Human Events, D.R. Tucker posts a thoughtful reaction to my Guardian commentary on conservatives who are willing to give President Obama a chance.

Tucker detects wistfulness on the part of conservatives who wonder how things might have turned out differently if the Republican Party hadn’t spent two generations driving away African-American voters. He writes:

Obama and other post-civil-rights-movement black leaders came of age in a time when they were told, in ways direct and subtle, that the GOP wasn’t really interested in them. Perhaps if the GOP had attempted to attract black support in those days, charismatic and gifted figures like Obama would have become conservative Republicans instead of liberal Democrats.

There’s a missing ingredient here. The Republican flight from empiricism, embodied in such divisive figures as Sarah Palin and George W. Bush himself, has at least as much to do as race when it comes to the GOP’s failure to attract people who like their politics reality-based.

But there’s no doubt that the Republicans have finally shrunk their tent to such an extent that it can no longer hold a majority — at least not as presently constituted.

Obama for sale

The newspaper business may be hurting, but Barack Obama — whether he realizes it or not — is doing what he can to help.

The latest paper to cash in on Obama’s popularity is the Boston Herald. According to a newsroom source, the paper has published an ad-free, 32-page color magazine called “Boston Celebrates President Obama,” which will cost $2.99 when it hits newsstands tomorrow. Overseen by city editor Jennifer Miller, the magazine will include contributions by everyone from Keith Lockhart to Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the hosts of NPR’s “Car Talk.”

The Boston Globe, meanwhile, printed 65,000 copies of an eight-page extra on Tuesday afternoon, following Obama’s swearing-in. The Los Angeles Times and several other papers did the same, and those that didn’t printed more copies of today’s paper than usual.

The New York Times is being unusually aggressive. I managed to scarf a couple of copies on Election Day, visions of eventual eBay riches dancing in my head. Yet the Times is still selling copies of that day’s paper, and has now added today’s edition, along with a lapel pin and a photo. So much for the three copies I scored in Danvers Square at 5:30 this morning.

Maybe I should invest in those Obama coins that Montel Williams is pushing? Uh, I think not.