State of the Union

Maybe Toledo Needed Obama at Their Police Graduation More Than Columbus Did

Only a month ago, President Barack Obama swooped into Columbus for the day, gracing us with his presence and letting us hail him for saving 25 police jobs in the Capital City.

Maybe the President should have chosen Toledo to grace his presence instead, where the struggling economy has forced an already hard-hit area to shed 150 police officers.

One can’t help but scratch their heads and wonder if the 334,709 votes Obama received in Franklin County vs. the 142,852 votes he received in Lucas County was a factor in Obama’s decision to hail Columbus?

Campaigning vs. Governing - The Tale of DHL

Campaigning:

In the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe called the burgeoning lose of 8,000 jobs at DHL in Willmington, OH, "the most important development in the campaign."

Governing:

Now that DHL has announced that they are moving those DHL jobs from Ohio to Kentucky, the White House released the following statement:

                        

Oh, wait, we haven't heard anything from the White House on this "most important development."

Imagine if...

Alex Castellanos writes:

Imagine if, a week before he dispatched John McCain in November, Barack Obama had stood before the American people and told them what he would actually do.

"My fellow Americans, if you elect me president next Tuesday, I propose to grow our government to unprecedented size, increase federal spending to never-imagined levels and double the debt in our country. I will support $1.3 trillion in new taxes even as our recession deepens. I will take advantage of the crisis to expand federal control of health care, the energy industry, banks, Wall Street and the car business, fire GM's CEO and sign a stimulus bill with nearly 9,000 earmarks.

"I will undo much of Bill Clinton's welfare reform by giving 'tax cuts' to non-taxpayers. I will propose a crushing tax on energy, making it more expensive to drive to work or cook dinner. I will choose men who have not paid their taxes as my key economic advisers and will have no one in my Cabinet who can fairly be called a 'businessman.' I will shrivel the deduction charities count on for over 40 percent of their contributions.

"I will propose an omnipotent czar with the power to regulate, sanction and, ultimately, seize any business we judge could threaten the economy of this country. My Treasury Department will enable $165 million in bonuses to failed financial industry executives, and then I will give that industry an additional trillion-dollar bailout, indebting middle-class Americans to buy their toxic assets. All this I will do in my first two months, before April Fools' Day."

If Barack Obama had said this, he would not today be president. Yet this is the record he will run on in 2012. And this is the record Democrats in Congress will have to defend in 2010.

Where is the love?

You know it's getting rough for the Obama administration when even their leftist allies in the media are starting to gripe.  Here are the highlights of a brutal editorial in the latest issue of The Economist:

• Hillary Clinton might have been somewhat accurate in her quip that "the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job training."     

• Obama's "performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped." 

• Polls are starting to show "independent voters again prefer Republicans to Democrats, a startling reversal of fortune in just a few weeks." 

• "Mr Obama has seemed curiously feeble."  

• His stimulus package was "subcontracted to Congress, which did a mediocre job."  

• His budget "is wildly optimistic," and he has taken "too long" to produce his bank bailout plan. 

• "The failure to staff the Treasury is a shocking illustration of administrative drift."    

• Obama made a "series of bad picks of people who have chosen or been forced to withdraw." 

• He "mishandled his relations with both sides in Congress" and failed to behave as the centrist he promised. 

• He "seems unable to" control his own party.  "Democrats are messing him around," and he is "letting them get away with it." 

In summary, "Mr Obama has a long way to travel if he is to serve his country—and the world—as he should."

Ouch.

50 percent approval & overexposed

Pollster John Zogby now sees President Obama's approval ratings dropping to "around 50-50," and the dean of Boston University's College of Communication weighs in on tonight's prime-time press conference.  From the Boston Herald:

As for the president’s love of the limelight, it could backfire, according to a media watcher.

“I thought he overexposed himself weeks ago,” said Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University’s College of Communication.

“I wonder when the public will say ‘Instead of being in front of the camera, be in front of a spreadsheet.’ ”

Obama: The economy sucks. Hahahaha!

Steve Croft at 60 Minutes rightly asks President Obama if he's "punch-drunk" after the president can't control his giddy laughter when talking about the nation's economic problems.

The Obama Economy

The Wall Street Journal looks today at the duration and impact of the last few national recessions (with the help of economist John Cogan).  They conclude with this:

The optimistic message in Mr. Cogan's comparisons is that recessions eventually end. How long they last, and how severe they get, depends in part on the choices our leaders make. The choices that Mr. Obama and Congress are making so far are not contributing to confidence, much less to recovery.

Another liberal pounces on Obama

Just a few days ago, it was uber-liberal NYT columnist Maureen Dowd lashing out at President Obama for his "disturbing spells of passivity."  

Now it's liberal NYT columnist Paul Krugman's turn:

"But among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern."

It ain't workin'

From Donald Luskin at SmartMoney.com:

We can't blame President Obama for the mess he inherited. But we can definitely blame him for making it worse. Stocks are off 28.4% since his election, 15.2% since his inauguration, and 17.2% since his so-called “stimulus” bill was enacted. To say the very least, whatever he's doing, it ain't working. ...  I have to say, I'm beginning to worry that stocks are cheap for a reason. That reason may be President Obama.

From Michael Boskin at The Wall Street Journal:

It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.  

Democrat Reality Check

From Peter Wehner at National Review:

Here’s an interesting data point comparison: Barack Obama’s approval rating in the Gallup Poll today is 61 percent, with 28 percent disapproving (the Real Clear Politics aggregate of polls has his overall job approval rating at 59.8 percent). A March 5-7, 2001 Gallup poll found President Bush's job approval at 63 percent as well, with only 22 percent disapproving. So George W. Bush, at a comparable time in his presidency, was in marginally better shape than Barack Obama is right now, at least based on the Gallup Poll survey.

This runs counter to conventional wisdom that Obama is tremendously popular, and that Bush (based on the divisive nature of the 2000 election) was not. In fact, according to the Gallup Poll data, what President Bush did was rise in the esteem of the public during the first five weeks of his presidency, while Obama has lost a bit of altitude.