Debate comments

The best moment of the debate was Newt Gingrich telling Brian Williams and John Harris that he wasn't interested in helping them drive a wedge between Republicans. A lot of the questions were inviting one candidate to criticize another Republican candidate. Mostly, they wanted to have the other Republicans bash either Romney or Perry. It made having Gingrich up there on the stage worth it.

Ron Paul's purpose on the stage seems to be to bash Perry. Romney must be hoping that Paul has a prominent voice in the whole campaign fight. Of course, I'm sure that Ron Paul has a good store of attacks to make on Romney, but since Romney is appealing to a different audience than Perry does, Paul's attacks on Perry will sting more than his attacks on Romney.

Brian Williams seems genuinely put out by the whole idea of cutting the federal government. He's arguing his own opinion when he challenges Ron Paul on FEMA.

Why not spend more time on jobs since that is the issue the people are most concerned about. I don't think there are many people who really care all that much about the whole Gardasil issue. Romney was right. That was a mulligan that Perry would like back. What about Romneycare? That's a much bigger mulligan.

Cheers to Newt for his words on charter schools. Unfortunately, Race to the Top, like most government programs, sounded nice but ended up just giving money to selected states to basically spend the way they'd like. My state, North Carolina, won a whole lot of money and after that the governor started holding hearings on what type of schools to fund. Isn't the time for figuring that out before you hand out the federal grants?

Romney had a good answer to Williams' question: Are you a member of the Tea Party? Romney's right. You don't carry a card of membership - it's not a party, dang it! Romney turned the question around to define what he thinks the Tea Party represents and to associate himself with those beliefs - government's too big, taxing too much, and we need to do more to stop government from retarding job growth.

What is the purpose of that question except that Brian Williams believes that the Tea Party is something bad that a Republican candidate would not want to be associated with.

There was an interesting discussion in one of my AP Government and Politics classes today. The students had read an excerpt in their readings book from Kate Zernike's book on the Tea Party, Boiling Mad. She made the point that the Tea Party is not one single entity but made of many disparate people and groups who have different interests and backgrounds. She also refuted the image of the Tea Party as racist and cited a report by a liberal Democrat who had gone to film what she expected to find of racism in the Tea Party rallies and was so surprised to find people who were polite and friendly without any racist comments. My students said they were surprised to read that since they'd thought the Tea Party was racist. I asked why they thought that and they said that that was the impression they'd received from the media, particularly from Jon Stewart. Thus is an impression created among people who aren't really paying attention and are just picking up vague impressions from what they're hearing from the MSM and Jon Stewart. It's an insidious thing.

If they're going to bring in a Hispanic reporter to ask a question about immigration and then dismiss him as if Hispanics are only interested in one topic, I demand equal-time pandering. Let's bring in a Jew to ask about their views on Israel.

Brian Williams is just appalled that a Republican audience applauded capital punishment. I think Republicans give him cooties. And Texas gives him extra big cooties. He's probably thinking about the extra-long shower he's going to have to take tonight after an evening among the barbarians.

Jonah is smack on:

It'd be nice if at Dem debates they asked as many qs about the real harms done by govt as all these hypothetical ones abt lack of govt.

(Thanks for the correction: Of course, it's Brian Williams, not Wilson. Brian Wilson of Fox or the one from the Beach Boys would have had a less condescending attitude.)

Cruising the Web

The Detroit News says that government central planners could learn a lesson in their city's woes with the People Mover.

California politicians want to make sure that domestic employees get minimum wages, workmen's comp, rest and meal breaks. This would cover maids, housekeepers, babysitters and perhaps house-sitters and dog-walkers if they're over 18 years old. Gee, I wish someone had mandated rest breaks when my children were small. The state now wants to regulate every possible economic transaction that anyone might make.

Hans A. Von Spakovsky eviscerates all the liberal arguments that requiring an ID for voting is equivalent somehow to Jim Crow laws.

No wonder Jimmy Hoffa wants to go to war to help reelect Obama - he's sure rewarded them for their support for him win election in the first place. Just count the ways, he's given them special benefits and neglected to criticize them for all the sorts of things he is happy to criticize businessmen for.

President Obama might have had nice rhetoric in Detroit about how unions are all about shared sacrifice. But not in Michigan. There the public employee unions were quite happy to put the screws on non-unionized public employees.

Obama is speaking to union members from the state of Michigan, where then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm rescinded a 3% pay raise for non-unionized state employees while allowing the 3% raise scheduled for union employees to proceed....Far from sharing the sacrifice, Michigan unions sloughed the sacrifice off onto non-unionized workers during the budget crisis. In fact, unions even opposed the idea of paying 3% of their salary into their retirement fund to offset costs. As the state budget floundered and non-union public employees took a hit, unions mounted fierce protection of their pay. And, they did so despite the fact that between 2007 and 2009 only "one group is actually becoming richer in Michigan: government employees," as the Detroit News noted in a March 12, 2010 editorial.

That's neither shared sacrifice nor shared prosperity.

Paul Gigot writes that Sarah Palin might have been a contender, but she never took the steps after the 2008 race that might have helped her be a realistic candidate. I agree.

The true costs of Obamacare about to hit Wisconsin

Peter Suderman at Reason points us to a report on the costs of Obamacare for Wisconsin. Gruber is a supporter of the health care reform and he was also a consultant for Romney's Massachusetts health care reform. The analysis of what Obamacare would cost the state was ordered by the former Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, who was a big supporter of the health care reform law.

The report does say that about 340,000 Wisconsinites will get insurance coverage, though half of them will be on Medicaid. It's not clear how the state is going to afford all those new enrollees in Medicaid.

But the real kicker that might surprise Wisconsinites is what the plan is going to do for those who already have health insurance.

Meanwhile expanding the state’s health insurance coverage will come at a significant cost to hundreds of thousands of individuals, especially within the individual market, where the law has the greatest effect. Gruber projects that the average individual market health insurance premium will cost about 30 percent more than if ObamaCare had never passed. For most individual market enrollees, the average premium increase will be even higher: 87 percent of the individual market is projected to see a premium price increase of 41 percent.

Defenders of the law might note that more than half—about 57 percent—of those who get their insurance through the individual market will benefit from the law’s generous health insurance subsidies. But even discounting the enormous public cost of financing those subsidies (which account for roughly half of the law’s $950 billion price tag over the next decade), it’s still not much consolation for the majority of individual market enrollees.

That’s because more than half the individual market will still end up paying more: “After the application of tax subsidies,” the report projects, “59 percent of the individual market will experience an average premium increase of 31 percent.”

And over half of small businesses are going to see their premiums rise as a result of the law. I wonder how many of those businesses will give up their coverage for their employees and throw them onto the state services.

Gee, you might say, that's not what Obama and the Democrats promised us. Remember all those promises that Obama made about how nothing would change for those of us who are happy with our coverage.

Never mind.

Ignoring the officers on the ground

President Obama has a habit of ignoring what the officers on the ground recommend because their recommendations don't accord with the President's ideological predilections. A couple of years ago at this time, he listened to Joe Biden and came up with his own numbers for how many troops we should have in Afghanistan.

President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page "terms sheet" that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars," to be released on Monday. (The Washington Post will print excerpts of Woodward's book beginning Monday on the Web, mobile and print editions.)

According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.

"This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. "Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room."

Obama rejected the military's request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. "I'm not doing 10 years," he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. "I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

Woodward's book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger."

In the end, Obama came up with his own plan to bring the troops down to 30,000 which was 10,000 less than what the generals recommended, but more than what Biden wanted.

Now, he's done it again with his decision that we should drop the number of U.S. troop in Iraq down to 3,000 from the 45,000 there now. And needless to say, that isn't what the officers on the ground are recommending.

Senior commanders are said to be livid at the decision, which has already been signed off by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta....Currently, about 45,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq. The generals on the ground had requested a reduced number of troops remaining in Iraq at the end of the year, but there was major pushback about "the cost and the political optics" of keeping that many in Iraq. The military's troop-level request was then reduced to 10,000.

Commanders said they could possibly make that work "in extremis," in other words, meaning they would be pushing it to make that number work security-wise and manpower-wise.

Now, sources confirm that the administration has pushed the Pentagon to cut the number even lower, and commanders are concerned for the safety of the U.S. troops who would remain there.

"We can't secure everybody with only 3,000 on the ground nor can we do what we need to with the Iraqis," one source said. Another source said the actual total could be as high as 5,000 when additional support personnel are included.

A senior military official said by reducing the number of troops to 3,000, the White House has effectively reduced the mission to training only.

This is a totally political decision rather than a military decision. He wants to have the numbers down and the expenses down so that he can start the election year bragging about how he's brought the numbers down. But he is endangering the troops that we have there with such a small number. He's risking giving back what we have gained in Iraq and having it return to sectarian violence and Iranian influence because he wants to make a splash with the left-wing of his party in an election year.

Think of this, he is planning to have less than one-tenth of the numbers of troops in Iraq that we presently have in South Korea which is now at 37,500 including all personnel. We have close to 80,000 in Europe. Are the military needs in Iraq so much more less than what they are in South Korea or Europe?

Somehow he thinks he knows more than the commanders on the ground about what is the minimum necessary to keep what we have achieved there.

Cruising the Web

Noemie Emery wonders if liberals are "piquing too soon" in their hysteria of hatred for Rick Perry.

With their dream boat imploding with President Downgrade's approval ratings, rage may be the liberals' maximum bet for survival. But even this ploy has its risks. It's now 14 months until the election. Can they keep this rage up for that long? If the Rickster flames out, it's a huge anticlimax, and their adrenaline levels fall rapidly. How can they rev themselves up for a run against Mitt, whom they're portrayed all along as the "sensible" candidate? Could Mitt be portrayed as a plausible monster? Compared to rampaging Rick, Romney would seem like a dove, and/or a genius. He becomes a nonthreatening change from a faltering president, and a draw for swing voters and Democrats. Their chances appear to be nil.

Or let's say that Rick makes it, and goes on to the finals -- how would that work for them? They could find that their efforts have worked all too well. They portray him as a bigot and cretin, a thug and a bully, and they succeed! Centrists tune into the debates and convention, expecting a Neanderthal to show up in a sheet, talking gibberish. Instead, they see an adult, calm and articulate, comparing his methods to those of the president, and, above all, comparing results. They decide his critics are the irrational people; and their overkill makes his performance seem much more impressive. (This worked for President Reagan, another bigoted dunce from a backwater college, who even starred in a film with a chimp.)

These bien pensants need to realize that their task is not to congratulate each other on how superior they are to Rick Perry, but to convince independents that he's too scary to be elected. And hate-mongering about how stupid he is could well backfire as Emery wrote.

Law schools are starting to feel the pinch as applications are down while people start to realize that a law career, instead of being an instant ticket to an upper class career, might leave them unemployed and over $100,000 in debt.

Obama missed an opportunity yesterday in Detroit of speaking out about the true pathologies haunting black families, particularly in Detroit.

Jennifer Rubin notes that Sarah Palin's speech in Iowa against crony capitalism could serve almost as well against Rick Perry as Barack Obama. Perry's opponents are certainly taking notes. And if they need some help, the Washington Post has some more details about Perry's wealthy backers and the favors that he's sent their way as governor.


Ron Brownstein wonders if the past ten years could qualify as America's "worst decade ever." By decade, he means any ten-year period, not necessarily a chronological decade. Then he basically answers his own questions by naming much worse decades" the period from 1854 to the end of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination. That would win my vote, though the Great Depression and start of WWII or the miserable 1970s deserve some votes. This past ten years would rank far, far behind.

It was a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for green jobs."

Jeff Bergner has a great article about the myths that liberals believe. The subtitle says it all: "Liberals believe the darnedest things. Here's a sample of the sorts of myths you could hear every night on MSNBC.

Myth #2: Conservatives represent special interests. If liberals represent the American people, whom do conservatives represent? They are in bed with “special interests.” Listening to liberals, you would never guess that the titans of Wall Street regularly fill the coffers of Democratic candidates, or that the pharmaceutical industry couldn’t wait to cut a special deal on Obamacare, or that well-paid public-sector union leaders regularly extract generous salaries and benefits from their Democratic allies, or that the education unions put their own interests ahead of American youth, or that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bask in the protection of Democrats in Congress, or that many so-called leaders of minority communities actually have few real followers but rely on liberal policies and laws for the status they claim. In fact, liberalism is one nonstop orgy of special pleading and identity politics.

And this is my favorite.

Myth #9: Good intentions are enough for liberals. But accurately judging consequences is less important to liberals than moving forward. Liberal programs do not represent testable social-policy experiments to be judged by their results. They represent compassion, so their critics are heartless. Money spent on these programs cannot be wasted because they are investments in people. Liberals are to be judged by the purity of their intentions.

Read the other eight.

I guess one example of the foregoing is that Ed Schultz feels it's perfectly acceptable to say that Marco Rubio is "not a true American." Can you imagine if a conservative said that about Barack Obama?

Jennifer Rubin notes that Romney is running on capitalism. That's his strength. Health care - not so much. Romney apparently did a notably fine job at the DeMint forum last night. We don't know yet how he would have managed with Perry in the forum since the governor had to leave to deal with the dreadful wildfires in Texas. Sometimes, real life trumps politics.

President Civility strikes out

Although President Obama has failed to move the American people on any domestic policy speech that he's given, his advisers still think that he's a magnificent clean-up speaker that they can send out there to wow and woo the American people. As Jonah Goldberg has written, all they've got is "more cowbell."

Arguably, the only successful speech he's given in his presidency was his speech calling for more civility in our political discourse after the shooting in Arizona. Of course, since calling for civility is an easy pitch to hit out of the park. Convincing people on policy choices is much more difficult. Appealing to the better angels of our nature is easier than convincing people that his health care reform was a good idea.

But that speech was just as empty rhetoric as his campaign speeches calling for hope and change. He meant civility when talking about Democrats. Talking about his political opponents - not so much. This was clear from his lack of reaction when he appeared at the Labor Day event when Teamster Union leader said of the folks coming out to Tea Parties that Democrats should "take those son of bitches out." After Hoffa went on with his martial call to action to "win that war," he appealed directly to the President sitting there listening.

“President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march…Everybody here’s got a vote…Let’s take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong,” he concluded.

President Obama just got up after the speeches and paid tribute to all the leaders present saying he was proud of Jimmy Hoffa. He neglected the opportunity to renew his call for civility. The White House had no comment later on when asked about his calls for changing the tone in Washington. When it comes to accepting the call to action from a necessary interest group, civility is just not so important.

That's fine. But let's not have any more hypocrisy from the left jumping on whatever metaphor a Republican uses. I don't think that James Hoffa meant anything more than a spirited call to action. If he calls Tea Partiers, "sons of bitches," that's his right. It's distasteful and illustrative, but his using any more refined insults wouldn't disguise what he really thinks. I'm not complaining about his language, but the hypocrisy of the President smilingly accepting that language while still posing as the leader of the civility chorus. Spare us the hypocrisies and let's carry on with that battle that Hoffa was talking about.

Meanwhile, Don Surber has some thoughts about that union army.

I am curious as to whom they plan to take America back from. Themselves? The unions and the Democratic Party won it all in 2008 and afterward they confiscated GM and divvied up much of $500 billion (the spending part of the stimulus) among themselves in the cynical pursuit of the almighty buck.

The President told the unions yesterday that they've done so much to "build and protect the middle class." Obama went on to say, "Unions have always been about shared prosperity." Not so, they're about getting as much as they can for their workers, not the middle class in general. As Henry Payne writes,

This is willful nonsense.

The loud union protests in the past year from Wisconsin to Michigan have been about resisting sharing — whether pay cuts or co-pays for health plans. These are the kinds of sacrifices that taxpayers have been making for years in the private sector — even as unions greedily helped themselves to prosperity at the same taxpayers’ expense.

When the U.S. Post Office is bankrupt because we can't pay the union-negotiated pensions and workers can't be let go to cut back on unnecessary expenses, tell us about how the unions are about shared prosperity. They're about their prosperity and everyone else's shared sacrifice.

Why the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers

Michael Grunwald in Time Magazine reports that the Obama administration recently restructured the loan guarantee to Solyndra so that the investors, one of whom was a big-time Obama campaign donor and the other was associated with the Walton family, would be paid out first ahead of the federal government in case of a bankruptcy. The administration doubled down on their original investment because they figured they'd already invested so much in the company, they had to keep on pumping in federal funds.

“We were already in deep,” one official recalls. “We looked at every relevant scenario to maximize the recovery for the taxpayer. We did due diligence as if this were a brand new transaction…The takeaway is, at every juncture we did whatever we could to ensure the best possible outcome for the taxpayer. I think we structured a pretty impressive deal.”

In other words: The operation was successful, but the patient died. Politically, it’s probably an impossible case to make. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Grunwald then goes on to absolve the Obama administration of fault in this case because they had good intentions and when you're spending billions of dollars investing in companies, some of them are just bound to fail.

This is sure to play out as a scandal, but based on what we know so far, it shouldn’t be. Private loans go south all the time. The federal loan guarantee program has budgeted $2.5 billion for failures like this; so far, the program has made about $30 billion worth of loans, and has leveraged another $20 billion in private financing.

The Obama administration has made bets on hundreds of clean-energy companies in dozens of clean-energy sectors; some of those bets in its portfolio are bound to go bad, just as Richard Branson picks an occasional lemon. It’s legitimate to question whether the government should have made this particular bet, or whether it overplayed a weak hand, or whether it should be making bets in the first place. But if we’re going to have a clean energy industry in this country, this kind of thing is going to happen. It doesn’t mean anyone cheated.

Nice try.

Even if this episode doesn't strike you as a particularly smarmy bit of crony capitalism, it should still make one doubt that the federal government should be in the business of picking companies to invest in. Let the private market do that. If we are going to have a viable clean energy industry it must be because there are profits to be made in doing it. If not, we'll just be throwing taxpayer money at all sorts of companies established to win those federal dollars rather than to make a profit selling something the American people want to buy. Since so many of the spending that the Obama administration has made in supposedly clean energy has turned into a big bust, it's time to reassess the whole proposition that Time's Grunwald accepts whole hog - that the government is the best allocator of scarce resources.

Demagoguing disaster relief

Liberals are hooting and hollering about Eric Cantor's words that increased FEMA spending on natural disasters should be offset by cuts elsewhere instead of continually piling it into emergency spending. But such faux outrage ignores that the Republicans have actually proposed increased spending on disaster relief. And we're having more and more of these federally-funded declarations of natural disasters. President Obama has declared a natural disaster on an average of one every two and a half days. If we're having these many disasters, then it should be part of normal budgeting instead of falling into an ever-expanding emergency spending pile. As the WSJ reports, the GOP aren't saying that they don't want to fund natural disaster relief; they just want to cut spending elsewhere. And actually, contrary to how the Democrats are trying to portray Cantor's point, the GOP has proposed increased spending for disaster relief. It is the Democrats who want to block that in order to prevent those offsets to one of their favorite boondoggles - picking favored companies to whom they want to funnel money.

Here's the story: In June, House Republicans passed the 2012 Homeland Security appropriations bill, which included an amendment adding $1 billion to the Disaster Relief Fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In a sensible move for taxpayers, the amendment offsets this new disaster funding by cutting spending on the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. This may ring a bell with readers as the funding conduit for one of Washington's adventures in crony capitalism.

In 2009, the Department of Energy announced that it would loan more than half a billion dollars through this program to a California-based company, Fisker Automotive, to make luxury electric cars. About a month after the loan package was conditionally approved, CEO Henrik Fisker and Joseph Biden appeared in the Vice President's hometown of Wilmington, Delaware to announce that Fisker would now be making some of its cars at the city's old General Motors factory.

So the Democrats are trying to block cuts in money to go to a company so that it can build electric cars (that few Americans seem to want to buy) in Joe Biden's home state.

One reason the House bill has less funding for Democratic priorities is because, even before the hurricane, Republicans had decided that the President's budget didn't have enough money for the Disaster Relief Fund. So they funded it at $850 million above the President's request. Then as they realized that the damage in places like Joplin, Missouri would put additional strain on the fund, the GOP added the amendment that provided still more disaster assistance and cut funding for Mr. Biden's beloved electric cars.

The White House hasn't asked for more funding, though White House budget director Jacob Lew wrote to lawmakers Thursday suggesting it could be well north of $5 billion. But so far Mr. Cantor is being blamed for opposing disaster relief because he has been trying to spend more than the President, and to place that above other spending priorities.

By the way, this political theater is having no impact on victims in need of help. The MSNBC gang may like to pretend that Mr. Cantor is stealing blankets from homeless flood victims, but the Washington debate is largely about funding for construction projects that may be years in the future.

Yes, FEMA has warned that its disaster fund is running low, a warning it issues almost annually. And the agency has said it won't approve new municipal construction projects until it gets more funding. But rebuilding, for example, a bridge in Vermont likely couldn't happen for months or years anyway as the locals debate designs, approve plans and conduct environmental reviews. The agency's emergency assistance—water and generators, or money for new windows or clothing—continues without interruption.

To have any hope of controlling spending, Congress has to make choices. That means having the fortitude to give up more corporate welfare to finance more urgent disaster relief.

But making choices and tradeoffs is something the liberals never seem to want to do. They'd prefer to mischaracterize and demagogue. It's all part of never letting a disaster go to waste, but it's not about actually finding a way to best spend limited federal resources. They'd prefer to just close their eyes and pretend that those resources are unlimited if only the greedy GOP would allow them to tax more rich people.

Cruising the Web

Mark Steyn argues that we need to change our culture before we can successfully change our economy.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?

As Byron York reports, all the liberals have left is to paint the right as a bunch of theocrats in order to scare independents from voting for them. Hope and change have failed so fear is their greatest electoral tactic.

In an excerpt from a new biography of Jane Fonda, the activist actress is portrayed as a naive and weak fool who just wanted to be involved in leftist causes but didn't understand them or know how to gain prominence without surrendering her personality to stronger-willed men. She was being used by everyone involved in her political causes from her husband Tom Hayden to the Black Panthers and the various anti-war groups. She provides a primary example of why no one should pay attention to what movie stars say about politics.

Mickey Kaus catches the Obama team in a revealing blunder. They sent out a fundraising email saying that "[i]t’s been a long time since Congress was focused on what the American people need them to be focused on. As Kaus points out, the Republicans have controlled the House for only 8 months. It must just seem longer to the Democrats. I guess the Pelosi Democrats weren't focused on what the American people wanted them to be focused on either.

Alex Beam writes in the Boston Globe that, if the Koch brothers didn't exist, the liberals would have to make them up. Even if they've done less than other groups like Bloomberg's media empire, they're still viewed as the source of all satanic evil in politics.

Seth Mandel notes the attitude of the supposedly above-it-all Barack Obama. The WHite House and Obama are clear that they're done, after these 8 months, of trying to work with Congress and so Obama is going to take a speech before the Joint Session of Congress to propose plans that they know the Republicans oppose and then proceed to paint them as obstructionists when they oppose his proposals. Meanwhile, he'll try to to channel everything he possibly can through executive action.

So he’s not going to go through Congress anyway. He has no plans to get anything passed in the legislature, he just wants to slam Republicans while the public is watching. And notice the barely-veiled conditionality of that municipal spending: it’s not actually to offset costs, just to boost the teachers’ unions by having districts that agree to take the funds stop firing teachers.

Where is that first-class temperament when we need it?

John Hinderaker has some fun with CBS's supposedly neutral reporting on the President's speech. It's an outrage that the President has to delay by one day his plans to save the American economy.

But to conclude, let’s just focus on CBS News’s claim that Obama’s new proposals–whatever they may turn out to be–are “too important to wait another day.” If those proposals are so important, where have they been for the last 2 1/2 years? Or, to be more cruel, where were they last week when Obama was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard? “Too important to wait another day?” Tell that to the president.

While conservatives might be happy that President Obama temporarily delaying EPA's ozone rule, let's not forget that he's just pushed its implementation back to after the election. And let's not ignore all this time waiting for the decision on the EPA rule has cost businesses.

But, given what this spin at least inadvertently admits in an attempt to avoid admitting even more, let's look at the cost of this mismanaged effort, of his having imposed just the sort of wasteful bureaucratic redundancy which he says here is costly and not helpful to good governance (don't want to put words in his mouth but isn't that the implication of avoiding more, going forward?)

What has it cost us all, this past 20 months of EPA wasting taxpayer money because they looked at the calendar but apparently didn't really look at the calendar? Also requiring the productive sector of the economy to spend huge sums responding and delay investment decisions, maybe even move elsewhere?

John Podhoretz argues that Obama is stuck in a rhetorical trap for his speech this week. He'd like to blame the economy on all the structural problems that he was stuck with when he became president, but such downbeat talk will not achieve the speech's purpose of giving people confidence in the economy. And all Obama is left to propose is more of the same failed policies that he's already tried. So he can propose more of the same stimulus ideas that he would like to pretend were working to bring us out of the recession until all of that "run of bad luck" happened. When the GOP block those plans, he can run against them as a rerun of the 1948 supposed "do nothing" Congress. Given that his proposals aren't all that popular in the first place, it is no certain bet that the public will be convinced that it is a terrible thing that the Republicans are blocking them.

Vandals in Poland have painted swastika on a Holocaust memorial and painted the words "they were flammable" on the monument.

And newly released documents reveal that Neville Chamberlain held secret talks with Hitler's government after the Munich agreement in order to try to make the Nazis less unpopular in England so as to advance Chamberlain's policies of appeasement. This was before the Germans moved into Czechoslovakia thus making it quite clear that they had no intention of living up to Chamberlain's treasured Munich agreement.

The Detroit News begs President Obama to adopt policies that would stop stifling real economic growth. Of course, that would mean backing off from all that he has stood for and done in his first term. So don't expect such common-sense understanding of why businesses aren't hiring now.

The U.S. Postal Service is nearing default on its payroll. The true problem is the union contracts that it's signed that prevent it from laying off the workers it needs to lay off as it contracts to survive in a world where more and more people are sending e-mails instead of going to the Post office. They're also bound into expensive pension plans for retired workers and generous health care for current workers. It's in a dangerous bind between declining revenue and increasing costs. Get used to it - this is the model that many local and state governments have gotten used to with their government workers. They won't be able to pay the workers they have now because of promises made to workers no longer working.

And this is a story to really make you angry. Remember the infamous 2005 Kelo v. City of New London Supreme Court case that allowed local governments to apply eminent domain to take private land away from homeowners or private businesses in order to give the land to other private companies so that they can perchance build something that would bring in more jobs or tax money to the community? Well, six years later, that land taken from Susan Kelo and her neighbors is still sitting empty because Pfizer never developed it. And now it's being used as a dump site for storm debris from Hurricane Irene. So much for the Supreme Court's confidence that New London had a careful plan of how to best use that land. Once again, we should remember that government is not the best determiner of how to plan economic growth. And when we hand such planning power over to the government, rights tend to be trampled on and that growth often just somehow doesn't seem to appear.

Cruising the Web

Michael Barone explains to Ruth Marcus why Congress would not have overturned Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Back then, a majority of those in Congress supported civil rights. It was the Southern Democrats who opposed such measures and who blocked reforms in the Senate.

Tim Carney points out how the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn confuses a hypothesis for 'findings."

Jay Carney uses Obama's own standards to explain how Obama has been a failure.

Ed Driscoll reviews the further downfall of Newsweek despite the supposedly inspiring leadership of Tina Brown.

Instead of wondering if Rick Perry is dumb, how about wondering if Obama could have made it as an Air Force pilot?

David Harsanyi is exactly right. Intelligence isn't the issue for Rick Perry. Being right is the issue.

Jennifer Rubin points to what could be a major problem for Rick Perry. He needs to explain his personal spending of Texas public funds. Why has he been living in a $700,000 mansion why the governor's mansion is being renovated? Why has he sealed his travel records?

Rubin also has a great post looking at the silliness of both the liberal criticisms and conservative talk on Rick Perry. We're familiar with the lame attacks that the liberals have already been making on Perry. But conservatives are fooling themselves if they think that Obama is so weak that any Republican could defeat him. And the same conservatives who were yearning for someone like Paul Ryan who is an "intellectually rigorous, courageous conservative" now seem to be throwing out that requirement when it comes to Rick Perry. Let's wait until he's shown he can withstand tough interviews on the Sunday shows and if he can answer criticisms about his crony capitalism in Texas. Can he explain how he'd reform federal entitlements instead of just having slogans against Social Security? Let's see how he does with those challenges before anointing him.

Rubin also has a great post

Jonah Goldberg explains that the President's advisers seem to think that the answer to everything is more cowbell...i.e. more Obama speeches. But Obama's magic has faded.

Again, save for his biggest fans, his speeches are often akin to the teacher’s dialogue in the Charlie Brown cartoons. If he yanks the American people away from what they’re doing (including watching the season debut of pro football), just to recycle the Barack Obama schtick again, he’ll get nowhere.

In short, this White House needs a lot less cowbell.

Nick Gillespie lays out why all that Obama has tried to stimulate the economy has failed and will continue to fail. Michael Goodwin is equally unimpressed with all the boilerplate and blather that Obama inserts regularly into his speeches.

Anonymous White House aides admit that they were aware all the time of the GOP debate that they were trying to preempt with Obama's move to schedule his speech to Congress. They simply figured that it wouldn't matter because it was going to be on a cable station which isn't "sacrosanct." So they just sent Jay Carney out to lie when he said it was all a coincidence. And they're the ones who are just furious that Boehner made them look both sly and weak at the same time.

Is the proper attitude for the anniversary of 9/11 for Americans to feel contrite?

Veronique de Rugy lays out the case for why we need fundamental regulatory reform. Not just getting rid of regulations, but changing the way that the federal government makes regulations.

Hmmm... Does the most transparent administration in history have something to hide about granting the $535 million loan guarantee to the now failed solar panel company, Solyndra? If not, why do they keep stonewalling the House Energy and Commerce committee?

The Obama team might be hoping that they can match Ronald Reagan's reelection victory but they're ignoring the major differences in the success of Reagan's economic plans and the popularity of his measures compared to Obama's. And FDR's 1936 victory shouldn't provide any reason to cheer up either.

Andrew Roberts is exactly right. Why should people care if a candidate "looks presidential?" Why do we constantly hear that silliness?

An enormous amount of the media coverage of presidential candidates is focused on whether or not he (or, very rarely, she) "looks presidential."

Grow up, America! Has the great democratic system of the Republic really come down to choosing leaders not on the basis of what they say, or even the way they say it, but on the way they fill a suit while saying it?

There's your cue, Chris Christie!

Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker writes that the celebration of the end of the free market is premature. Contrasting the performance of the markets and government doesn't make government look good. Too much of what government has done since the beginning of the of the current recession and economic downturn has exacerbated the economy's weakness. It's rather like how federal actions turned the depression of 1929 into the Great Depression.

The lesson is that it is crucial to consider whether government regulations and laws are likely to improve rather than worsen the performance of private markets. In an article "Competition and Democracy" published more than 50 years ago, I said "monopoly and other imperfections are at least as important, and perhaps substantially more so, in the political sector as in the marketplace. . . . Does the existence of market imperfections justify government intervention? The answer would be no, if the imperfections in government behavior were greater than those in the market."

The widespread demand after the financial crisis for radical modifications to capitalism typically paid little attention to whether in fact proposed government substitutes would do better, rather than worse, than markets.

Government regulations and laws are obviously essential to any well-functioning economy. Still, when the performance of markets is compared systematically to government alternatives, markets usually come out looking pretty darn good.

The line that sums up the entire Obama presidency

And now comes the news that one of the President's favored green companies is going toes up and the taxpayers are on the hook because of the federal loan guarantees that Obama pushed through.

President Obama faces political catastrophe in the form of Solyndra -- a San Francisco Bay area solar company that he touted as a gleaming example of green technology. It has announced it will declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. More than 1,100 people will lose their jobs.

During a visit to the Fremont facility in spring of 2010, the President said the factory "is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. "

It's not his statements the administration will regret; it's the loan guarantees. The President was celebrating $535 million in federal promises from the Department of Energy to the solar startup. The administration didn't do its due diligence, says the Government Accountability Office. "There's a consequence if you don't follow a rigorous process that's transparent," Franklin Rusco of GAO told the website iWatch News.

And if you're wondering why millions of loan guarantees were given to a company without enough investigation, Karl at Patterico has the answer.

You will be shocked to learn that Solyndra’s majority owner, Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, was a major fundraiser for the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign.

Shocking, just shocking.

But how about this as a summary of the entire Obama presidency?

The administration didn't do its due diligence.

That about sums up everything he's done on the domestic front, doesn't it?

It doesn't matter when the President speaks; his ideas are still bad

The President's allies are pressing him to be bold. Unfortunately, he's already been bold. There was that whole stimulus bill which ended up blowing around a trillion dollars and doing little for the economy or employment.

Veronique de Rugy reports on two studies that investigated why the 2009 stimulus bill didn't deliver jobs.

The papers primarily examine how people elected to use their stimulus dollars, and why. A key finding is that hiring unemployed workers with stimulus money wasn’t as common as hiring workers from other firms.

Hiring isn’t the same as net job creation. In our survey, just 42.1 percent of the workers hired at ARRA-receiving organizations after January 31, 2009, were unemployed at the time they were hired (Appendix C). More were hired directly from other organizations(47.3 percent of post-ARRA workers), while a handful came from school (6.5%) or from outside the labor force (4.1%) (Figure 2). Thus, there was an almost even split between“job creating” and “job switching.” This suggests just how hard it is for Keynesian job creation to work in a modern, expertise-based economy: even in a weak economy, organizations hired the employed about as often as the unemployed

They also provide a real life illustration of what economists call the ‘crowding-out effect.’ In this case, however, it was labor, and not capital, being crowded out. And the paper confirms that there is no such thing as a shovel-ready project:

Tyler Cowen comments,

One major problem with ARRA was not the crowding out of financial capital but rather the crowding out of labor. In the first paper there is also a discussion of how the stimulus job numbers were generated, how unreliable they are, and how stimulus recipients sometimes had an incentive to claim job creation where none was present. Many of the created jobs involved hiring people back from retirement. You can tell a story about how hiring the already employed opened up other jobs for the unemployed, but it’s just that — a story. I don’t think it is what happened in most cases, rather firms ended up getting by with fewer workers.

There’s also evidence of government funds chasing after the same set of skilled and already busy firms. For at least a third of the surveyed firms receiving stimulus funds, their experience failed to fit important aspects of the Keynesian model.

This paper goes a long way toward explaining why fiscal stimulus usually doesn’t have such a great “bang for the buck.” It raises the question of whether as “twice as big” stimulus really would have been enough. Must it now be four times as big?

So if the President relies on the same sort of stimulus in his proposals next week, it will just be a vain hope to pretend to be doing something about the economy but not really concerned enough to correct what went wrong with the Democrats' first stimulus.

One of the ideas that the President is endorsing is creating a so-called "infrastructure bank." The WSJ explains why this is a horrible, no-good, terrible idea. Basically, it would duplicate the failed model of Fannie Mae.

Here's a novel idea: Have Congress create a "bank" that could borrow huge sums with only a small federal outlay and would be independent of any political interference. If you believe in this miracle, you probably thought Fannie Mae was a private company that wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime.

We're referring to Washington's latest marketing tool to sell spending to a skeptical public, a new federal "infrastructure bank." For the low, low price of $30 billion or so, President Obama says Congress can conjure hundreds of billions in new "grants and loans" to rebuild "roads, bridges, and ports and broadband lines and smart grids."

He says the bank would put "all those construction workers" back to work and "be good for the economy not just for next year or the year after that, but for the next 20 or 30 years." In a cats and dogs living together moment, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO are both in favor. Since both unions and construction companies would be beneficiaries, this alone ought to give taxpayers pause.

This is the Fannie Mae model applied to public works. The new bank would be a government-sponsored enterprise, or GSE, whether or not anyone admits it. The bank would have an implicit subsidy for its debt because it is backed by the government. And the debt it issued would be "off-budget," which means it wouldn't show up in annual outlays. When she first proposed the concept in 2008, Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro explicitly described the bank as a "public private partnership like Fannie Mae."

Of course, the Democrats refuse to acknowledge Fannie Mae's culpability in the housing bubble. So why should they worry about creating another government-sponsored monstrosity? They also refuse to acknowledge that one reason why government-sponsored infrastructure doesn't lead to increased employment is because of the requirements that the companies obey Davis-Bacon rules that require them to pay union prevailing salaries. We've spent hundreds of billions already on infrastructure and gotten little bang for our billions of bucks.

Taxpayers also get less for their money because federal projects must follow Davis-Bacon Act rules that require "prevailing wages." This law has come to mean de facto union wages on all public projects, inflating costs by 10% to 30%, depending on the project and location. Democrats and Republicans both refuse to relax Davis-Bacon rules, and the infrastructure bank would require them. The bank would also divert dollars to the mass transit lobby, which favors rail projects that serve a tiny fraction of commuters.

Instead of a Washington-centric bank that picks winners and losers, Congress would be wise to move in the opposite direction: devolving most public-works decisions to the state and local levels so users decide whether they want to finance a new school, bridge or water system. The feds can focus on maintaining the interstate highway system and then let states and localities choose what to fund. Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake and others have bills that would let states opt out of the federal highway program in return for getting back the federal gas tax money that its residents send to Washington.

GOP Congressman John Mica of Florida, Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is no fan of a federal infrastructure bank. He says he wants more state and local control of funds because "that way they won't have to come to Washington to get approval."

Mr. Mica is dealing with a reality that eludes many in both parties: With a $1.28 trillion deficit, Uncle Sam can't afford to keep serving as paymaster to states and localities. The infrastructure bank is merely a new gimmick to maintain the old system.

The Republicans won't agree to this gimmicky ideas. But passing these proposals isn't Obama's goal. He just wants to create the impression that he has ideas and then turn to bashing the GOP for opposing his wonderful proposals. They're quite open that that is their goal.

The next swing comes in the form of a jobs speech that will likely contain more dings on Congress than new policies that would dramatically lower the unemployment rate by next fall.

One White House official cautioned that Obama’s jobs speech will not be a “fire-breathing” partisan address. But the official said the president will be putting Congress on notice: Help him create jobs or get hammered as extremists more interested in playing politics.

Obama will continue with increased pressure on Congress through the fall, focusing on his immediate opponents and convinced that by doing so, Americans will come to see him as the centrist, jobs-focused politician in Washington.

“There’s no doubt that the president and Democrats are back on offense” one Democratic official said. “The Republicans can no longer claim the tax-cut mantle — they will now have to explain away why they are fighting to preserve tax cuts for the wealthiest and tax breaks for large corporations but are opposed to continuing tax cuts for the middle class.”

As if tax increases will do anything to increase employment. But at least it gives him an opportunity for demagoguery. And that's what it's all about.

UPDATE: And if the President starts blathering again about "green jobs," we'll all know how unserious he is about job creation. In a sweet irony, his own support for labor and environmentalism has helped to slow down job growth.

President Obama's green jobs agenda has become a victim of its own red tape. Several internal reports show that state-level projects have stalled for years due to federal regulations favored by labor and green groups — big boosters of the green jobs push.

The reports offer a peek into the dysfunction within the White House's green jobs initiative. In 2009, Obama dedicated $7.2 billion of stimulus funds to build "clean tech" jobs. He vowed to create 5 million jobs over the next decade.

So far, that effort has "created or retained" just 7,140 jobs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That's about $1 million per job. The number is actually down from last year, when the EPA claimed 16,605 green jobs.

Gee, $1 million per job - he'd have done better to have dropped money from a helicopter. So why haven't all these efforts created jobs?

Audit reports by the Energy Department's Inspector General Of fice offer some clues as to why: Trying to comply with federal reg ulations such as the Davis-Bacon Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Buy American Act has stalled many projects.

These particular cases involve grants made available directly to state energy agencies for projects such as green jobs training and retrofitting government buildings to make them energy efficient.

A total of $3.1 billion was made available to states for this. In theory these should have been some of the closest to "shovel ready" projects, because state and local governments would be spending the money directly.

But the inspector general found that many projects are just getting underway after more than two years. In several cases, the money hasn't even been spent. Some states are now scrambling to act before funds are rescinded.

There's more horrifying examples of what a waste this all was at the IBD article. And this was all so predictable. Many people warned of this very fact when the stimulus was being discussed back in 2009, but the Democrats barreled ahead.

Keep all of this in mind when the President lays out his ideas next week. He might have ideas, but they're bad ideas.

What was Obama thinking?

So why did Obama pick the same night as a Republican debate for his prime time speech to both houses of Congress? I can think of three possibilities: they didn't know about the GOP debate and so it was a total coincidence; they knew about the debate and predicted that Boehner would refuse and figured that the whole kerfuffle would make the GOP look ungracious and overly political; or they knew about the debate and were secretly quite happy to upstage the debate.

It seems very difficult to believe that they were totally unaware that there would be a GOP debate that night. The debate has been talked up as the coming-out of Rick Perry on the debate stage. The White House is full of political minds who are always trying to make their guy look good. They know that this speech is the kick-off of Obama's election campaign. If he can't convince the country that he is fighting full bore to decrease unemployment, his only hope for reelection is that the GOP self-destruct. So it's hard to believe that they didn't know what was on the political calendar for that date. If they didn't, they are incompetent and should be replaced.

So, if they knew about the GOP debate was their goal to try to upstage Rick Perry's debut or was their goal to make John Boehner look petty? Or perhaps both? Could Obama be playing politics with the efforts to create job? Remember that his whole theme is that Washington politicians need to put politics aside and put the country first. His constant theme is that the Republicans are playing politics because they don't care about the unemployed. So it's not hard to believe that the presidential reelection hopes didn't play into his gamesmanship on the scheduling of the speech. As Chris Cillizza writes, "[t]here are no coincidences in presidential politics."

The whole thing is so ridiculous. The President has had ample chances to focus on jobs. His previous attempts at stimulus have been utter failures. He then chose to spend a year on health care with no concern about how his plan would put a damper on companies hiring new workers. He proposed a budget this year that was laughed off the stage and couldn't garner a single vote even from the Democrats. He then gave a speech with no specific plan attached so it couldn't even be scored by the CBO. After the drama of the debt-ceiling increase he then combined campaign trips to the Midwest with attacks on the Republicans before heading off for a vacation on Martha's Vineyard. He hasn't exactly been applying the "fierce urgency of now" to getting the economy to grow.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
And it's so typical of this guy's arrogance that he didn't follow ordinary procedures and consult with Boehner and Reid over the timing of the speech. After all, he's inviting himself into their house and their branch of government. Informing them 15 minutes before going public with their announcement doesn't count as consultation.

That the White House sprang the speech on short notice to everyone isn’t in dispute. The president’s letter was leaked to the press shortly after House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was told of the request.

So much for his pretense of trying to rise above politics by working together with the Republicans. Then they were forced to try to leak the impression that the Speaker had signed off on the scheduling before they went public. The Speaker's spokesman vociferously denied this.

A Boehner spokesman went on the record to deny the claim. “No one in the Speaker’s office — not the Speaker, not any staff — signed off on the date the White House announced today,” Boehner press secretary Brendan Buck wrote in an email. “Unfortunately we weren’t even asked if that date worked for the House. Shortly before it arrived this morning, we were simply informed that a letter was coming. It’s unfortunate the White House ignored decades — if not centuries — of the protocol of working out a mutually agreeable date and time before making any public announcement.”

The White House has now backed down from saying that Boehner "cleared" the timing of the speech and arhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife saying that they consulted him. Ryan Lizza tweets,

"Cleared" officially downgraded to "consulted." So someone at WH anonymously passed along inaccurate information to several journos. Nice.

By playing politics with his speech, he's insured that the conversation about his speech will be about this whole mini-brouhaha instead of about his plans for the economy.

"It’s a bad idea [and] seems a little small,” said one Democratic consultant granted anonymity to speak candidly. “And it suggests perhaps his jobs plan won't be that appealing because now the coverage will be about the strategy and not the substance.”

Another senior Democratic operative suggested that scheduling the speech simultaneously with the GOP debate actually wouldhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif muddy rather than clarify the contrast the White House is hoping for heading into 2012.

“If you’re trying to define this as a choice and not a referendum, why step on the opportunity for the American people to see the alternatives?” the source asked.

Krauthammer suggested last night that the Republicans missed an opportunity. They could have moved back the timing of the debate to start after the President's speech and then have spent the evening bashing him.

As Allahpundit writes, the worst thing about this whole story is that the President's speech and supposed plan will do little for the economy.

The worst part is that, with the economy on the brink of a double-dip and consumer confidence falling off a cliff, this guy’s mind is still so preoccupied with the campaign that he can’t muster a moment of presidential leadership without counter-programming it against a Republican primary event. He could have given this speech at any point. Six months ago, the day after the debt-ceiling deal was struck, last week, yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day before the Republican debate, the day after. Any of those would have been fine — the earlier thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife better, of course, given the magnitude of the problem — but that doesn’t occur to him because his own reelection is ever foremost in his imagination. We’ve known that for months, ever since he rolled out his horrendous budget that punted on entitlements so that he’d have a freer hand to demagogue the GOP, but in case you forgot, let this refresh your memory. If you could somehow promise him right now that he’ll get a second term no matter what happens with jobs, he’d tear the speech up and watch the Packers/Saints game himself. Pathetic.

In the end Obama backed down and agreed to the Thursday scheduling of the speech. Note the headline in the NY Daily News.

Obama caves to Boehner's wishes, now will deliver speech to Congress on same night as NFL opener

Not the headline that the President wanted. It's still not clear if the NFL will move back the 8:30 kickoff of the Packers-Saints game. Boy, that will win Obama friends and positive reactions from the public.

Whatever Obama was thinking in his gamesmanship about scheduling the speech, it has backfired and made him look small and weak. Not the impression of leadership that he's trying to project as he famously "pivots" to the economy.

UPDATE: And just in case anyone was falling for Obama's whole pose of rising above politics in trying to lower unemployment, note this classy move.

Within minutes of agreeing with congressional leaders Wednesday night on an address to a joint session next week, President Obama flashed out an email to millions of supporters criticizing the chambers, their members and vowing to pressure them to enact his as yet unspecified job creation ideas.

"It's been a long time since Congress was focused on what the American peoplObama during his address to the American Legion 8-30-11e need them to be focused on," the Democrat charged in an email with the subject line: "Frustrated."

It's not exactly clear how long "a long time" Obama was thinking of. But until midterm voters produced a historic House turnover to Republicans last November, Obama's Democratic Party controlled both houses with substantial majorities and gave him vast spending, reform and healthcare programs.

It was, at least in part, voter reaction to such legislation that produced the divided government in D.C. now.