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Obama is running out of human shields

by Mojambo ( 118 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Health Care, Progressives at November 1st, 2013 - 11:30 am

The culmination of the failure of American Progressivism has been the Health Care fiasco.

by Daniel Henninger

A reader remarked last week that Barack Obama is running out of human shields. With the father of ObamaCare unavailable to explain the greatest fiasco of his presidency to Congress, the American people had to settle Wednesday for his surrogate, Kathleen Sebelius.

Let us try to understand clearly what is happening now with the Obama presidency. On display to everyone watching this week is not merely the failure of a federal website or a software program or Ms. Sebelius’s management skills. This is the failure of the very idea of progressive government. Not liberal government. Progressive government.

That battle a few weeks ago over the government shutdown was a familiar Beltway spectacle. But what is happening this week to ObamaCare and the political class that created it is historic. Forty years from now, the millennials who in 2008 and 2012 believed in and voted for the progressive ideal—limitless, mandated, state-led goodness—can tell their grandchildren they watched it fall apart in 2013. This is the glitch that failed.

In the 1990s, the American left, burdened with 90 years of unfortunate left-wing metaphors, rebranded itself in the U.S. as the “progressive movement.” Teddy Roosevelt invokes cheerier memories than Leon Trotsky. In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the left rode to power with Barack Obama.

Mr. Obama is, without embarrassment, a man of the left. American progressives saw their win with Mr. Obama as the overthrowing of the postwar Democratic liberalism that culminated with the Clintons, a liberalism willing most of the time to coexist with markets, property and private enterprise. Progressives hated these accommodations. They were purer than that. He was purer than that. Together, they created ObamaCare.

What made ObamaCare an exemplar of progressive politics and policy is precisely what has been on view this week in news stories and the Sebelius hearing. […….]What made it peculiarly progressive were the mandates. And not just the law’s individual and business mandates to purchase their insurance. The essence of modern Democratic progressivism is: “You will participate in what we have created for you, and you will comply with the law’s demands.”

Nothing could have been more crystal clear than the explanation for all the canceled insurance policies from the White House’s Jay Carney, the bland face of progressive coercion: “What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide. So it’s true that there are existing health-care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”

[……]

American progressivism is politics by cramdown. Ask Jamie Dimon. Ask the coal miners the EPA is putting out of business. Ask the union workers waiting for jobs on the Keystone XL pipeline. Ask Boeing in South Carolina or the harmless tea party groups from towns no one has ever heard of that were shut down by the IRS, or the 20,000 inner-city parents and students who marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest obliteration of their charter schools by New York’s progressive mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio.

Up to now, most of the events of the Obama presidency have passed in and out of the news as just politics. But with ObamaCare and its details touching so many people all at once, it has become impossible not to recognize that the Affordable Care Act is an offensive ideological exercise, not merely an entitlement program. [……]

Perhaps the better question is, will the political class help them understand what ObamaCare is, or wanted to be? Most Republican politicians aren’t particularly comfortable doing ideology. But the left revels in it. Mr. Obama bellows it in every speech. And absent someone shouting that the progressive emperor suddenly isn’t wearing any clothes, they will win with it again.

Barack Obama may have spent a lifetime failing up, but eventually it’s just failure. He has presided over five years of sickly economic growth, inadequate job creation, a doubling of the food stamp population and now this—ObamaCare.

Progressive government has failed in the U.S. Most fascinating to behold will be whether the Democratic presidential candidate who follows this meltdown will embrace it, fake it or move on.

Read the rest – Progressive Government Fails

Tags: Daniel Henninger
Posted in Barack Obama, Health Care, Progressives | 118 Comments »

Obama’s credibility is melting

by Mojambo ( 113 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Healthcare, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria at October 25th, 2013 - 12:00 pm

Obama’s credibility was built on a negative i.e. that he was not George W. Bush. He has proven to be time and time again (despite being into his 5th year of the presidency) to be not only an amateur but an ideologue with a special talent of infuriating our friends all the while coddling our enemies.

by Daniel Henninger

The collapse of ObamaCare is the tip of the iceberg for the magical Obama presidency.

From the moment he emerged in the public eye with his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention and through his astonishing defeat of the Clintons in 2008, Barack Obama’s calling card has been credibility. He speaks, and enough of the world believes to keep his presidency afloat. Or used to.

All of a sudden, from Washington to Riyadh, Barack Obama’s credibility is melting.

Amid the predictable collapse the past week of HealthCare.gov’s too-complex technology, not enough notice was given to Sen. Marco Rubio‘s statement that the chances for success on immigration reform are about dead. Why? Because, said Sen. Rubio, there is “a lack of trust” in the president’s commitments.

“This notion that they’re going to get in a room and negotiate a deal with the president on immigration,” Sen. Rubio said Sunday on Fox News, “is much more difficult to do” after the shutdown negotiations of the past three weeks.

[……]

When belief in the average politician’s word diminishes, the political world marks him down and moves away. With the president of the United States, especially one in his second term, the costs of the credibility markdown become immeasurably greater. Ask the Saudis.

Last weekend the diplomatic world was agog at the refusal of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah to accept a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Global disbelief gave way fast to clear understanding: The Saudis have decided that the United States is no longer a reliable partner in Middle Eastern affairs.

The Saudi king, who supported Syria’s anti-Assad rebels early, before Islamic jihadists polluted the coalition, watched Mr. Obama’s red line over Assad’s use of chemical weapons disappear into an about-face deal with Vladimir Putin. The next time King Abdullah looked up, Mr. Obama was hanging the Saudis out to dry yet again by phoning up Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani, Assad’s primary banker and armorer, to chase a deal on nuclear weapons. Within days, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, let it be known that the Saudis intend to distance themselves from the U.S.

What is at issue here is not some sacred moral value, such as “In God We Trust.” Domestic politics or the affairs of nations are not an avocation for angels. But the coin of this imperfect realm is credibility. [……]

Bluntly, Mr. Obama’s partners are concluding that they cannot do business with him. They don’t trust him. Whether it’s the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, the French, the Iraqis, the unpivoted Asians or the congressional Republicans, they’ve all had their fill of coming up on the short end with so mercurial a U.S. president. And when that happens, the world’s important business doesn’t get done. It sits in a dangerous and volatile vacuum.

The next major political event in Washington is the negotiation over spending, entitlements and taxes between House budget chairman Paul Ryan and his Senate partner, Patty Murray. […….]

Then there is Mr. Obama’s bond with the American people, which is diminishing with the failed rollout of the Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare is the central processing unit of the Obama presidency’s belief system. Now the believers are wondering why the administration suppressed knowledge of the huge program’s problems when hundreds of tech workers for the project had to know this mess would happen Oct. 1.

Rather than level with the public, the government’s most senior health-care official, Kathleen Sebelius, spent days spewing ludicrous and incredible happy talk about the failure, while refusing to provide basic information about its cause.

Voters don’t normally accord politicians unworldly levels of belief, but it has been Barack Obama’s gift to transform mere support into victorious credulousness. Now that is crumbling, at great cost. If here and abroad, politicians, the public and the press conclude that Mr. Obama can’t play it straight, his second-term accomplishments will lie only in doing business with the world’s most cynical, untrustworthy partners. The American people are the ones who will end up on the short end of those deals.

Read the rest – Obama’s credibility is melting

Tags: Daniel Henninger
Posted in Barack Obama, Healthcare, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria | 113 Comments »

Thanks to their terrible messaging skills, Obama Romneyizes the Republican Party

by Mojambo ( 206 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney, Republican Party, Tea Parties at October 18th, 2013 - 7:00 am

I have always maintained that the Republicans have failed to learn the lessons of 2008 and the new information age that we are in. In many ways they are so stuck in a 1980’s mindset.

by Daniel Henninger

One of the more compelling finds in the opinion-polling swamps is that most people would like to see the entire Congress replaced. A more modest proposal: Let’s replace all the Republicans in Congress with their children or grandchildren. Bring in the 15-year-olds. How could it get worse?

From the House to the Senate, the Republicans look dazed and confused. Three weeks ago, Ted Cruz stood in the Senate chamber for nearly a day, looking like a hero. Today, with the GOP brand in a vertical dive, he looks like a Bozo balloon.

What do children know that the Republicans in Congress don’t know? The kids know, because it is the mother’s milk of their battery-powered lives, that if you don’t recognize shifts in the mighty flows of information, you will be swept aside, abandoned. You will be BlackBerry.

For all the changes in information delivery, not much ever changes for the GOP’s messaging skills.

Wind back to the 2012 presidential election. Recall how after it was over, the GOP promised that it would duplicate the incredible modern messaging machine the Obama team created across every available new-information platform. That delivery system was why across four years Barack Obama kept hammering “the 1%” and “the wealthiest.” He was feeding the machine that was emailing, texting and tweeting this propaganda to targeted audiences.

Now suddenly comes a marketing ploy from the GOP’s backbenches: “Defund ObamaCare.” This idea was supposed to rally the nation against the Affordable Care Act. So if you were to ask students in marketing at the local community college what they thought of “Defund ObamaCare,” what do you guess they might say? […….]Defund ObamaCare is now the Republicans’ New Coke.

Want a look at how a pro is spinning the Washington mess? Punch into Twitter.com and type “Barack Obama” into the search window. Click on “Barack Obama,” next to the “End This Now” logo. The Obama tweets the past week have been fairly amazing. As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda.

[…….]

Everyone recalls the 2012 campaign’s carpet bombing of “the wealthiest,” even after they’d been shelled with a tax increase. Barack Obama has found—actually, it was handed to him—a scapegoat analogous to “the wealthiest” and “the banks” for his campaign to suppress votes for GOP candidates in the 2014 elections. It’s “tea party Republicans.”

Barack Obama: “Tea Party Republicans are threatening an economic shutdown. Tell them to #EndThisNow.”

[……..]

Wednesday’s first Obama tweet: “Day 16 of the #TeaPartyShutdown. This can’t continue—Congress needs to #EndThisNow.”

This isn’t routine partisan noise. The Obama Twitter account lists 38,258,000 followers. Unless some of these are fake, that’s nearly 30% of the total popular vote in 2012. All through the week, this number rose as the site poured forth boiling oil.

Virtually every Obama tweet demonizes the tea party. Last week, within minutes of the collapse of the Obama-Boehner talks, the tweeting robot called “Barack Obama” had hung the collapse on the “tea party.”

Wednesday morning (with even the New York Post cover depicting Uncle Sam going over Niagara Falls on the “Brink of Disaster”), the machinery that runs @BarackObama rolled into view. It’s the former Obama re-election apparatus, which has shape-shifted into a 501(c)(4) group called Organizing for Action.

[……..]

Republicans complain constantly that the media “lets him get away with it.” The media is floating down the electric river. No, they—the message-impoverished Republicans—let him get away with it. The Washington GOP is now a political Gulliver, tied down by tweets and twerps.

A month ago, before the congressional Republicans’ General Custer Caucus used “Defund ObamaCare” to vote themselves into their current, bullet-riddled fort, the Obama characterization of the entire GOP as “tea party Republicans” would have been a pathetic stretch. He was the one being laughed at by the whole world for his vanishing red lines in Syria and a foreign policy that even his own defense secretary described as “swinging from vine to vine.”

Not anymore. Barack Obama is Romneyizing the Republicans. He’s doing to Ted Cruz and the House Republicans what he did to Mitt Romney and the 1%. It may be voter brainwashing, but in the expanded media age in which we all marinate, it works.

Someone in the tea party outside the Beltway had better wake up and smell the smoke. The great nemesis has done it again: He’s turning them into political toast.

Read the rest – Obama Romneyizes the Republicans

Goldwaterite Comments:

One of the reasons I opposed this showdown was for the simple fact the Republicans have no message discipline. Besides having turncoats like John McCain back stabbing them, they never have a coherent argument. MacDuff made a very astute observation; Obama and the Democrats state what they are for. Republicans never say what they are for, just what they oppose.

Another factor in my reluctance for this showdown is the technological edge the Democrats have. Despite last years disastrous technology gap, this recent showdown proved the Democrats are light years again in using technology to get their message out. We may laugh at their animal hats, but the Tech savvy Hipsters ran circles against the “uptight” Republicans once again. I do not exaggerate when I say Hipsters are a danger. They once against proved they can outclass anything Republicans throw at them.

Finally once again the Republicans proved they have no tactics nor strategy. Instead of going after low hanging fruit like Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, they went after Obama. Despite his lower approval ratings, many Americans have an emotional attachment to Obama. He’s more than a President, he’s a cultural symbol. Until the Right grasps this, Obama will chew them out for lunch time and time again.

The only way to defeat the Progressives is through asymmetrical guerrilla warfare. They have the advantage in technology, numbers and message discipline. Only a long term strategy of attrition and going after their weak points like Harry Reid will do them damage. These martyrdom suicidal stands like the recent budget showdown only play into the Democrat’s Party strength. Sadly the current mentality among Conservatives is one that honors defeat, not one that strives for victory. It’s the honorable loser mentality why and why I have no political hope for the future of the Right. All I can advise people is to take care you of yours for the foreseeable future. Until the Right learns strategic long term thinking and message discipline, the Progressives will rule this nation.

Please read AZ Old Dog’s post on Data Mining.

Here is Politico’s behind the scenes anatomy of what happened during the showdown.

Tags: Daniel Henninger, Data Mining, Ted Cruz
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney, Republican Party, Tea Parties | 206 Comments »

Barack Obama and the L-Word

by Mojambo ( 60 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Joe Biden, Liberal Fascism, Media, Mitt Romney at October 11th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

Barack Obama, his campaign advisers, and his running dogs in the media all have the maturity level of 15 year old girls who as Mr. Henninger says “Drop F-bombs so casually on the NYC subways”.

by Daniel Henninger

The election campaign of the 44th U.S. president is now calling another candidate for the American presidency a “liar.” This is a new low. It is amazing and depressing to hear this term being used as a formal strategy by people at the highest level of American politics.

“Liar” is a potent and ugly word with a sleazy political pedigree. But “liar” is not being deployed only by party attack dogs or the Daily Kos comment queue. Mitt Romney is being called a “liar” by officials at the top of the Obama re-election campaign. Speaking the day after the debate in the press cabin of Air Force One, top Obama adviser David Plouffe said, “We thought it was important to let people know that someone who would lie to 50 million Americans, you should have some questions about whether that person should sit in the Oval Office.”

[………]

Explicitly calling someone a “liar” is—or used to be—a serious and rare charge, in or out of politics. It’s a loaded word. It crosses a line. “Liar” suggests bad faith and conscious duplicity—a total, cynical falsity.

Politics isn’t beanbag, but politicians past had all sorts of devices to say or suggest an opponent was playing fast and loose with the truth. This week’s Obama TV ad, “How Can We Trust Mitt Romney?” would have been perfectly legit absent the Plouffe “liar” prepping.

[………]

Every other time he talks, Barack Obama says “millionaires” should pay more taxes, when all his proposed tax increases clearly start at individual incomes of $200,000. That isn’t a “lie.” It’s a president taking three steps to make a layup.

This tack won’t erode Mr. Romney’s new support and may do damage to the president’s candidacy. The polls aren’t jumping around because Mitt Romney is a bamboozler. They’re moving because the 2012 electorate is volatile. The first debate proved voters are looking for answers to their economic anxiety.

The Obama campaign’s resurrection of “liar” as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.

The purpose of calling someone a liar then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics. That’s what is so unsettling about a David Axelrod or David Plouffe following accusations of dishonesty and lies with “whether that person should sit in the Oval Office.” And that is followed by President Obama himself feeding the new line in stump speeches without himself ever using the L-word.

This Obama campaign is saying, We don’t want to compete with Mitt Romney. We want to obliterate him.

How did it happen that an accusation once confined to the lowest, whiskey-soaked level of politics or rank propaganda campaigns is occurring daily in American politics?

No one has worked harder to revive this low-rent tactic than New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. To my knowledge, Mr. Krugman is the only columnist writing for a major publication in U.S. journalism who has so routinely and repetitively accused people of being liars.

[……..]

The L-word’s strength is directly proportional to the rarity and appropriateness of its use. Today in our politics it is as skuzzily routine as the F-bomb has become among 15-year-old girls on the New York City subways. This is not progress.

It will be interesting which variation of “lie”—if any—comes out of Joe Biden’s mouth in his debate with Paul Ryan. Mr. Biden comes from a political generation that could play rough, but it knew the limits of going too low at the presidential level. Or used to.