Complaining about getting what they wanted

The WSJ has a needed reminder about the history of Obama's economic approach to the recession. The Democrats have passed everything they wanted except for cap and tax and card check. They had the numbers in Congress and they used them.

When it took office in 2009, many of us advised the Administration to focus on nurturing the recovery first and postponing social-policy priorities that would only add more economic uncertainty. All the more so given this recession's unusual financial roots.

Instead, Democrats embarked on the most sweeping expansion of government since the 1960s, imposing national health care, rewriting financial laws from top to bottom, attempting to re-regulate the telecom industry, and imposing vast new costs on energy, among many other proposals. Not to stop there, in January it plans to impose a huge new tax increase on "the wealthy," which in practice means on the most profitable small businesses.

Central to Mr. Obama's political strategy for passing these priorities has been trashing business and bankers as greedy profiteers. His Administration has denounced or held up as political or legal targets the Chrysler bond holders, Wall Street bonuses, Goldman Sachs, health-insurer profits, carbon energy investors, and anyone else who has dared to oppose any of its plans to "transform" U.S. society.

Only yesterday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee, Mr. Obama was at it again, declaring that "anyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it'll trickle down to working folks running faster and faster just to keep up—they just haven't studied our history. We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness."

Whatever else one can say about such rhetoric, it is not the way to restore business confidence or turn a fragile recovery into a durable expansion. It has only spread fear and even greater uncertainty.

As for blaming the Republicans, with only 40 and then 41 Senators they couldn't stop so much as a swinging door. The GOP couldn't even block the recent $10 billion teachers union bailout. The only major Obama priorities that haven't passed—cap and tax and union card check—were blocked by a handful of Democrats who finally said "no mas." No Administration since LBJ's in 1965 has passed so much of its agenda in one Congress—which is precisely the problem.

So we've had plenty of opportunity to try things the Obama way and the results haven't been pretty. They might still want to blame the rich, and Obama had plenty of those zingers in his speech yesterday as William Jacobson points out. While he was whining about how his critics talk about him, he was also busy bashing Republicans and the wealthy. The Democrats chose a different path for addressing the economy and we see the results.

To put it another way, the real roots of Mr. Obama's economic problems are intellectual and political. The Administration rejected marginal-rate tax cuts that worked in the 1960s and 1980s because they would have helped the rich, in favor of a Keynesian spending binge that has stimulated little except government. More broadly, Democrats purposely used the recession as a political opening to redistribute income, reverse the free-market reforms of the Reagan era, and put government at the commanding heights of economic decision-making.

Maybe if the Obama administration had some actual businessmen in it, they'd know the sorts of things that Missouri businessmen told Fred Barnes during the height of Recovery Summer.

Some were Republicans, some weren't, but they said roughly the same thing. We're not expanding our companies. We're not hiring. Bankers said they weren't doing much lending, but there weren't many borrowers either. One pessimistic businessman said he'd like to move his company offshore. Another said he wanted to hire but had backed off because his firm would exceed 50 employees and then be subject to the mandates and requirements of the new health-care law.

Now that Recovery Summer has brought slower growth and meager hiring, it's clear who had a better sense of the country's economic condition. It wasn't cheery officials in Washington whose prediction of a summertime boom was based on economic numbers from the spring. It was folks far from Washington and immersed in the real economy who saw economic stagnation ahead and were adjusting their business decisions accordingly.

Their view of the economy was no secret. You just had to get out of Washington to hear it. Had administration experts done that—if they did, it escaped attention—they'd have spared themselves the embarrassment of a Recovery Summer without a recovery.

Washington and the rest of America have grown apart. And the gap has widened as those in Washington and outside have experienced the economic downturn, the Democratic agenda, and the Obama presidency quite differently.

The administration just doesn't get it. They're in Washington where employment is humming along. Bureaucrats aren't in a recession. The Obama Democrats don't understand why businessmen aren't hiring as they try to figure out what their labor costs will be under the Democrats' economic plans. They passed the bills they wanted on finance, stimulus, the auto-bailout, the state employees bailout, and are still trying to pass their policies on energy and unions. And those ungrateful businessmen are still not hiring? Who'd have thunk it?

Whining isn't presidential

Barack Obama went off script yesterday and the result wasn't pretty. He was speaking in Ohio about his records and proposals to jumpstart the economy. And then he let loose with this complaint.

More telling, Obama offered an aside that spoke to his diminished state and captured the mood of a president and party under assault.

“They talk about me like a dog,” Obama said with a chuckle of his political opponents. “That’s not in my prepared remarks but it’s true.”

A bit thin-skinned, isn't he?

Was he awake during the Bush presidency? The Clinton presidency? Heck, I remember the way that opponents talked about Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. That's what happens in politics. Remember the jabs that W. was a "miserable failure," a loser who liked to send soldiers to die so as to get reelected? Of course, you do. It was just a few years ago.

But Obama seems to think that he's the first politician to be criticized severely by his opponents. There was a reason that that line wasn't in his prepared script - it's unpresidential and his aides would have realized that Obama just sounds self-absorbed and self-pitying. Did Obama think that he was such a glorious, practically divine figure that he would be immune from criticism or ridicule? Well, reality is where the rest of us live and in that reality, Americans criticize a politician whom they don't like and whose policies they disapprove. Presidents need to be tougher than to start whining about criticism before sympathetic audiences.

The myth of World War Keynesian spending

Paul Krugman has written yet another column berating us for our stubborn refusal to acknowledge that we need to spend more money on stimulus. In his eyes, we should be recreating World War II without that whole war and Holocaust action.

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.

But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.

Now you might think that this guy is a Nobel Prize winner and writes from an elevated perch at the New York Times, he must really know what he's talking about. Au contraire. He really doesn't seem to have a grasp of history. Victor Davis Hanson looks at this argument from a historian's view.

I’m not an economist, but as an historian, I consider this an abject misreading of the postwar period, at least through the early 1950s. The war years were characterized by frenetic hyperactivity: Americans worked long hours, women were brought into the work force, new towns and manufacturing centers sprang up, and people gave up necessities — all on the assurance that this furious pace and consumer scarcity would be short-lived.

As WWII ended and the clean-up began, there was an enormous amount of pent-up global demand for goods. Given the wreckage in Europe, Japan, and Russia and the underdevelopment of India, Asia, and South America, we were about the only ones with the industrial and commercial wherewithal to supply the world rebound — often receiving cheap oil, gas, minerals, and interest in exchange, which supplemented our own vast supplies of comparatively cheap and easily recoverable resources. Nor should we forget the psychological element: Americans, after winning two wars, were enormously confident about their newfound international stature and influence.

At home, four years of consumer deprivation during the war and the weak demography of the 1930s had combined to create huge demand, all while society was increasingly leaving the farm for good and becoming suburbanized. The result was that in the late 1940s and 1950s, the birth rate soared and consumers enthusiastically made first-time purchases of washers, dryers, fridges, cars, etc. Thus, the American economy grew by leaps and bounds.

Today’s situation is not comparable: We are in hock to foreign creditors for trillions and have not been a net creditor since the 1980s. A China, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, or India is as or more likely to supply recovering demand for food, steel, or electronics. One can read Krugman-like arguments in Greek newspapers today — that only more massive borrowing can stimulate Greek demand, provide jobs, and grow Greece out of its recession. As if present-day deficits and aggregate debt with soon-to-be-rising interest payments don’t really matter.

Well, yeah. That should be obvious, shouldn't it? But Krugman loves this point. William L. Anderson who writes the Krugman in Wonderland blog echoes Hanson's argument and then points us to this paper by Robert Higgs refuting the common argument that the massive federal spending of World War II was what lifted us out of the Great Depression with the rather basic point that employing people as soldiers fighting a dangerous war is not the optimal way to reverse unemployment. The parallels that Krugman clings to just aren't there. And once we discard that argument, we're left with this question that Peter Robinson asks.

In the four decades since, have there been any instances in which a Keynesian fiscal stimulus has actually worked? In Canada or Sweden? In Belgium or France? For that matter, in Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein or Monte Carlo?

Well, has it? Even if there is an example somewhere, has spending for the sake of stimulus worked in American history?

Cruising the Web

Pat Sajak determines the qualities of "The Most Insufferable Man in the World." The comments are fun, too.

Jeff Jacoby dissects the ridiculousness of the "Cash for Clunkers" folly.

Amity Shlaes has a mini-tutorial on how public unions got the power to organize and the laws that protect the benefits they win from politicians who then reap their reward in political support from the unions.

Harry Reid must think Nevadans are exceptionally stupid as he tries to explain away his "war is lost" statement about Iraq. In his post-modern exculpation, he was merely helping General Petraeus out. In fact, Petraeus couldn't have achieved success without ol' Harry. Yeah, right.

Hmmm. "Triage" is never the word you'd like to be using to describe your party's political efforts two months out from the election.

It's. Good. To. Be. William. Shatner. It sounds as if he's having the last laugh on all the critics who have mocked him and comics who have imitated him over the years. I enjoy that he can mock the need to get the "nuance" right on a Priceline ad.

Does the Obama administration really worry about gender when picking a chief economic adviser? Apparently, that was what they did when picking Christine Romer. Geeesh! Talk about not being serious about the economy.

Politico looks at a top ten list of contrafactuals in politics over the past year. Always fun, although purposelessness.

This is the silliness in how our government does things

In an article about President Obama's plan to propose making the research tax cut permanent, there is this little tidbit of how our nation's solons approach such matters.

The research credit, which has existed in some form since 1981, has strong bipartisan and business support. Yet the prospects for Mr. Obama’s proposal are unclear. Congress returns from a break in mid-September but will be in session only a few weeks before leaving for midterm election campaigning. Also, Republicans do not want to give Democrats boasting rights to legislative victories, even for a proposal like this one, which Republicans have long espoused.

And there is the issue of the credit’s cost. It has always been passed as a temporary credit because of the revenue losses; Congress has extended it 13 times for as little as six months, and the uncertainty has long vexed businesses. It lapsed after 2009, and a proposal to renew it for this year is pending in the Senate.

Making the credit permanent would cost an estimated $85 billion over 10 years, and expanding it would cost $15 billion more, according to the administration.

Doing so, however, would end one of the longest-running budget gimmicks in town: Presidents and Congresses of both parties have called for a permanent extension but ultimately kept it temporary to reduce deficit projections. Based on that history, the Treasury would probably give up as much as $100 billion in the coming decade in any case.

Under Democrats’ pay-as-you-go law, however, the full 10-year cost would have to be offset by other savings.

So here is something that both parties support, but they don't dare make it permanent because of how that would affect budget projections. So, for almost 30 years, they've been playing around with this thing so they can do their gimmickry over the budget. I also suspect that another motivation that the legislators have is that they like voting for a popular tax cut so why not vote for it every few years or even months and then go tell small businessmen what they did for them. Maybe they can squeeze out a few more donations by keeping the tax credit temporary and worrying businessmen every time it needs to be extended. And then how typical is it that the Democrats let the thing expire last year in the midst of the recession? Why wasn't that part of the stimulus?

Yes, we do have enemies

Daniel Gordis has an article in the Jerusalem Post about what Americans can learn from Israel - we need to learn that yes, we do have enemies. And no matter how politically correct we want to be, we forget this at our peril. He tells this anecdote to illustrate his point.

YEARS AGO, we took our then teenage daughter to an evening sponsored by the army, at which religious parents could ask questions about what the army would be like for their daughters. Some of the parents were downright hostile, clearly opposed to the prospect of their daughters joining the IDF. At one point, an obviously angry father stood up, turned to the base commander and asked (or more accurately hissed), “Do you make the girls work on Shabbat?”

The room was perfectly silent, for everyone knew the answer. No one moved. Even the base rabbi said nothing. He stood at the podium, leaned into the mike and, lost in thought, played with his beard.

Suddenly, one of the three soldiers who’d been brought to address the parents, a young woman with her uniform shirt buttoned up to her chin, her sleeves extending to her wrists and her armyissued skirt down to her ankles, looked the father right in the eye, and without being called on, said to him, “Of course we work on Shabbat.” And then, after a second’s pause, she added, “Gam ha’oyev oved beshabbat” – the enemy also works on Shabbat.

It was a game changer. “What?” she essentially asked. “You think we do this for fun? There are people out there trying to destroy us. Either we’re as serious about this conflict as they are, or they’re going to win.”

And that is not an attitude that American elites have. They would rather concentrate on those Muslims who don't want to kill westerners rather than acknowledge that there are Muslims who are terrorists.

I hadn’t thought of that young woman in years, but ever since the Cordoba Initiative controversy erupted, I’ve remembered her repeatedly. For Israelis do have something to teach Americans, and it’s very similar to what she said to that father. It goes something like this: It’s fine to say that “America is not at war with Islam,” to point out that most Muslims are not terrorists and that many American Muslims are moderates. That’s true, as far as it goes.

But it only goes so far. Because America is at war and its enemies are Muslims. Politically correct hairsplitting runs the risk of Americans blinding themselves to that simple but critical fact. It makes no difference what percentage of the world’s Muslims wants to destroy America. There are enough of them that US air travel is now abominably unpleasant and, more importantly, enough of them that more strikes on America appear inevitable.

The US got lucky on Christmas Day when the bomber headed to Detroit failed to detonate his explosives, and was lucky again in Times Square in May, but less fortunate at Fort Hood. Yet those may be but the beginning. We could, heaven forbid, come to see 9/11 as child’s play.

THE UNITED States’ future is under attack, but Americans resist admitting it. President Barack Obama has sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, but he has also said that he intends to pull them out by July. Can we imagine FDR declaring war on Germany, but then adding that the war had to be over in a year, or in two? It would have been laughable. And America would have lost. The US has to decide – is it committed to destroying those who wish it ill, or is it willing to be destroyed by them? Those, sadly, are its only two alternatives.

And more sadly still, President Obama and many in this country have chosen the latter alternative - not explicitly, but in their attitudes that it is worse to cast suspicion on Muslims whether they're doctors corresponding with American-hating radical imams or terrorists found on an airplane trying to set off explosives or mysteriously-funded imams who decline to criticize acknowledged terrorists than to risk seeming Islamophobic. And that is the lesson that Israel can teach Americans - the importance of acknowledging our enemies.

As Cliff May points out in his very effective takedown of Time Magazine, Fareed Zakaria, and Joe Klein.

It all adds up to this: By defending such terrorist groups as Hezbollah, while simultaneously denouncing those attempting to understand the motives and methods of ruthless jihadis and insidious Islamists, Klein, Zakaria, and Time are not just spreading disinformation — serving junk food for thought — they are pursuing intellectual disarmament in the middle of the War against the West.

By so doing, they also undermine those many Muslims who do not want to live under the rule of the Taliban, Khomeinist mullahs, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other militants intent on imposing their oppressive versions of Islam on all of us.

The Lebanese historian Antoine Sfeir has written that "to attack the Islamists, to denounce their actions and their lies, is not to attack Islam. To attack the Islamists is, on the contrary, to defend the Muslims themselves, the first though not the only victims of the Islamists." Zakaria, Klein, and others at Time can't seem to grasp this idea. Henry Luce would not have put up with them.

Cruising the Web

Timothy Carney contrasts how the liberal media portrays the supposedly evil Koch brothers versus the nobility that they ascribe to George Soros. They're so in the tank that they don't even recognize how soaking wet they are. [Full disclosure: both my daughters had Koch-funded internships when they were in college.]

Oregon Democrat, Ron Wyden is working hard to get waivers for the state of Oregon from the very ObamaCare provisions that he voted for.

Blessings for those like myself who are obsessed with election news - Jay Cost is now writing regularly for the Weekly Standard. In yesterday's post he analyzes the 10-point lead in Gallup's generic ballot.

Paul Mirengoff notes an outright lie from Barbara Boxer. Why should anyone be surprised that she wants to walk back her excessively mean-spirited exchange with Condoleeza Rice?

More bad news for the UN's supposed consensus on climate change.

A self-identified leftist advises liberals on five things that conservatives is doing right. The first one would be an important corrective to liberals - go out an talk to "regular people."

Pat Caddell is increasingly pessimistic about how his fellow Democrats are doing in this year's election.

Kevin Hassett and Allan Viard refute the liberal talking points on why small business would not be hurt by raising the tax rates on those making over $200,000.

The FTC has discovered the height of iniquity - Chuck E. Cheese actually markets their restaurants to children. Who would have guessed that? And who would have thought that that was wrong?

What does Obama truly believe about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Charles Krauthammer notes that President Obama is so ambivalent on being a wartime leader that he has formed policy decisions based on domestic concerns. This has led to the feeling that Obama regards the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as distractions from all the domestic transformations that he seeks to make in domestic policy.

Many have charged that President Obama's decision to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan 10 months from now is hampering our war effort. But now it's official. In a stunning statement last week, Marine Corps Commandant James Conway admitted that the July 2011 date is "probably giving our enemy sustenance."

A remarkably bold charge for an active military officer. It stops just short of suggesting aiding and abetting the enemy. Yet the observation is obvious: It is surely harder to prevail in a war that hinges on the allegiance of the locals when they hear the U.S. president talk of beginning a withdrawal that will ultimately leave them to the mercies of the Taliban.

How did Obama come to this decision? "Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics," an Obama adviser told the New York Times' Peter Baker. "He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration."

If this is true, then Obama's military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate members of Congress, pass health care and thereby maintain a president's political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.

Paul Mirengoff is more aggressive in characterizing Obama's words on the wars. He calls the President "two-faced" when he compares the words that Obama spoke when he spoke to soldiers at Fort Bliss on Tuesday. As Doug Feith points out, the President said something to those soldiers that I don't believe that he has not said before in public.

When President Obama spoke earlier in the day on August 31 to soldiers at Ft. Bliss, he made a notable acknowledgement that the war in Iraq had contributed to the well-being not only of Iraqis, but Americans too. He said that “because of the extraordinary service that all of you have done, and so many people here at Fort Bliss have done, Iraq has an opportunity to create a better future for itself, and America is more secure.”

Have you heard the President characterize the war in Iraq as important to America's security before? Wasn't that exactly what they argued against since 2004? Arguing that the Bush's bad decisions on Iraq had weakened the United States was the mantra of the Democrats from John Kerry to Barack Obama. But, when speaking to soldiers, that was what Obama is now willing to claim, but not to the American public when he spoke from the Oval Office. He isn't willing to rally support for the wars he is leading the American forces in fighting by explaining to the American people why it is important for us to be fighting there. That would just be a distraction from his domestic agenda and we've seen how poorly he has been able to rally American support for that agenda, why should we be surprised that he can't rally their support for wars that he doesn't want to be fighting in the first place?

Meanwhile, this cartoon that Lucianne is featuring perfectly captures Barack Obama's approach to the whole blaming Bush game.

Advice to Students

Walter Russell Mead has some very good advice for students headed off to college this year. I wish all students could learn the lessons he is offering. Here is one example:

3. You are going to have to work much, much harder than you probably expect.

I’m sorry to bring you bad news, but your generation faces the toughest competition any American generation has ever known.

Your competition isn’t sitting in the next library carrel. Your competition is in China and India – and your competition isn’t hanging out at frat parties or sitting around watching sitcoms with dorm-mates. It isn’t getting stoned and it isn’t putting its energy into chasing the opposite (or apposite) sex. Your competition isn’t taking lots of courses on gender studies; it isn’t majoring in ethnic studies, or (unless it is planning to go into movie making) the history of film.

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees Americans a higher standard of living than other people. Those of you who spend your college years goofing off in the traditional American way are going to pay a much higher price for this than you think.

Ditto, ditto, ditto. I know that my high school students today work twice as much as I did in high school back int he benighted seventies. They are involved in many more activities and are volunteering in their communities. And, on top of that, they're spending lots of time on the internet and Facebook. They seem to have more hours in the day than I did at their age. But then I read actual books in my spare time which I don't think many of them do. Except for books about vampires and Harry Potter, of course.

Read the rest of his advice. And then send it on to any college-bound students you know.

Teacher effectiveness is news worth reporting

The WSJ sends kudos to the Los Angeles Times for its series publishing the data on the city's teachers' effectiveness by using the "value-added" metric measuring the level at which students enter a teacher's classroom compared to their level when they leave. Have they learned anything in that year granted that students come in with varied backgrounds in learning. Predictably, the teachers unions are raising a fuss about the Times series. They don't want it to be public how effective individual teachers have been.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told ABC News that she objects to the Times publishing the database because it's an "unreliable" gauge of teacher effectiveness and shouldn't be used "in isolation of everything else." And the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the local union, is upset enough that it is planning a protest outside of the Times building later this month.

But no one is arguing that student test scores be the sole basis for determining whether a teacher is doing a good job. What proponents, including L.A. school district officials, have said is that value-added assessments should be a part of any evaluation.

Currently, less than 2% of teachers are denied tenure in L.A., and teacher evaluations don't take into account whether students are learning. Ms. Weingarten prefers to continue a system of meaningless teacher assessments that almost never result in an instructor being fired for performance. So she wants to shoot the messenger for telling readers things they clearly want to know.

Exactly. And not only the readers should want to know such information. The teachers and school administrators should want to know that information. Those who are measured as not helping students to progress should want to know that so they can work on changing what they're doing. If a student is not learning after a year in that teacher's classroom, that should be important information. If a teacher can spend a year with a student and not help that student make progress, something is wrong and no one should be satisfied with such results. I certainly would want to know such information if there were metrics for the history courses I teach. At least I have the results from the Advanced Placement tests that my students take.

The fact that the teachers' unions want to shoot the messenger simply reveals, yet again, that their concern has little to do with student learning compared to their main focus on job protection. That is what unions do, but for some reason we have given way too much deference to teachers' unions as spokesmen for education in general. We don't go to the UAW to find out what cars should be produced, why should we go to the teachers' unions to find out about the best education policies? They don't even want information on education effectiveness.

Obama's top economic adviser admits she was and is clueless about the economy

Dana Milbank, no conservative stooge, attended a speech by the outgoing chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Christine Romer. And Milbank found Romer's presentation rather startling in her admission that she just didn't know how bad the economy was going to be.

Romer, wearing a green suit, read brightly from her text - a delivery at odds with the dark material she was presenting. When she and her colleagues began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize "how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy." They "failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be."

Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. "To this day, economists don't fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would." Her defense was that "almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction."

That miscalculation, in turn, led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent.

No wonder most Americans think the effort failed. But Romer argued, a bit too defensively, against the majority perception. "As the Council of Economic Advisers has documented in a series of reports to Congress, there is widespread agreement that the act is broadly on track," she declared. Further, she argued, "I will never regret trying to put analysis and quantitative estimates behind our policy recommendations."

But the problem is not that Romer did a quantitative analysis; the problem is that the quantitative analysis was wrong. Inevitably, this meant that, as she acknowledged, "the turnaround has been insufficient."

And what to do about this? Here, Romer became uncharacteristically hesitant to make predictions. She suggested some "innovative, low-cost policies." But the examples she cited - a "national export initiative," new trade agreements and a "pragmatic approach to regulation" - aren't exactly blockbusters.

"The only sure-fire ways for policymakers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run are for the government to spend more and tax less," she said. But asked about the main Republican proposal, extending George W. Bush's tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000, Romer replied that doing so would be "fiscally irresponsible."

So short summary: she didn't know what was going on so her predictions were all off. But she's proud of her quantitative analysis even though it was based on false assumptions. Isn't that rather key for any sort of economic modeling? Oh, and she has no idea of what they should do now except that tax cuts are not the answer because that would be "fiscally irresponsible" even though she thinks the government should be spending more money and taxing less." Confused?

So is Christine Romer.

The President's speech - perhaps the best Obama could do, but still some jarring lines

While I rather agree with Bill Kristol that the President's speech was the best we could expect from an anti-war president in a time of war, I also didn't like his repetition of his deadline for Afghanistan and I agree with Jonah Goldberg's criticism of the economic portion of the speech. When speaking of Afghanistan, Obama underlined his commitment to having a definite deadline on when we leave a war when he said, "As with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited time to provide space for the Afghans to build their capacity and secure their own future." That's a long way from the heartfelt language of Secretary of Defense Gates who was sounding a lot more determined in the speech he also gave yesterday.

“If the Taliban really believe that America is heading for the exits next summer in large numbers, they will be deeply disappointed and surprised to find us very much in the fight. And the realization that we will still be there after July 2011 aggressively going after them will, I believe, impact their morale and willingness to continue resisting their government and the international coalition.”

So whom do we believe, Gates or Obama? And what about what the commandant of the Marine Corps, General James T. Conway, said last week that the Taliban is relying on Obama's deadline to keep fighting.

"We think right now it's probably giving our enemy sustenance. . . . We've intercepted communications that say, hey, you know, we only have to hold out for so long," he said.

It's a far cry from President Bush's repeated determination to stay the course in Iraq, a determination that Senators Obama and Biden certainly criticized at the time. Conway thinks that some of the Taliban are losing their determination to keep fighting and the Taliban is bucking them up by telling them that they only have to hold out until July. How much harder would it be for the Taliban to send that message if Obama were making the same message that Bush emphasized when Bush supported the surge in Iraq?

The swivel to the nation's economy felt like a limp attempt to mimic the Gettysburg Address swivel to the need for civilians to take up the cause of those who have fought and fallen. But instead of linking the burden that our fighting men and women have carried to what we still need to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama tacked on a call for us basically to go along with Obama's domestic agenda.

And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They have met every test that they faced. Now, it is our turn. Now, it is our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for –the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President.

Goldberg wrote,

This is what really disgusted me. If you read this closely, what Obama is saying is that not only do we owe it to the troops to rally around his discredited and partisan economic agenda (“It’s our turn”), not only is it a test of our patriotism to sign on with his environmental and industrial planning schemes, but that doing so “must be our central mission as a people.”

I find everything about that offensive.

I know that, with the nation's attention focused on our economy, Obama probably felt that he had to say something about the economy and his speechwriters were probably looking for some sort of transition from the war talk, but the result was an failed attempt to draw a connection between our support for our troops with Obama's domestic agenda. It was jarring and unappealing.

Cruising the Web

Amity Shlaes pays tribute to federalism as she looks at how New Hampshire and Connecticut's governors are tweaking their respective neighbors, Massachusetts and New York, on taxes. Competitiveness among states can be one of the strengths of our system.

John Stossel explains how the Americans with Disabilities Act has not exactly achieved its goals. In fact, in some aspects, the result has been the opposite of its intentions.

Now that we all know that the best job to have is one in the federal government, you can find out which are the best agencies to work for.

Michael Barone theorizes that Americans are simply down on what he calls Big Units: big business, big government, and big labor.

Rob Long says that liberals are in the anger phase of the five stages of grief. Ed Driscoll expands this by looking at how many liberals just don't seem to like Americans. But then Chris Matthews and Joan Walsh see Barack Obama as the American dream, "almost pluperfect," whatever that is, and are still saying that the only reason conservatives don't like him must be his race. They just don't get it.