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Why would Democrats advertise that they’re giving up on the “white working class”?

by Mojambo ( 49 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Progressives, Tea Parties at December 1st, 2011 - 11:30 am

As per the thread I had on Tuesday – no comment.

by James Taranto

Our item yesterday on Democrats’ giving up on the “white working class” vote, along with Bill McGurn‘s column on the same subject, got us to puzzling over why. Not why would they do it–the theory that President Obama has irretrievably lost support within this voting bloc, and is better off focusing his attention on minorities and college-educated whites, is entirely plausible. But why would they advertise it?

“I guess the Democrats are telling us they don’t need our votes,” Tammy in Illinois writes to CNN’s cranky commentator Jack Cafferty. Maybe Tammy was going to vote Republican anyway, but this sort of insult is sure to cost the Dems some WWC votes.

Imagine an analogous situation: a Republican incumbent who did decently among Hispanics but whose strategists conclude has lost significant support in that segment of the electorate. If they start putting out the word that the GOP is giving up on the Hispanic vote, it would ensure that the party loses more Hispanic votes, and perhaps also the votes of non-Hispanics who don’t like the idea that the GOP is anti-Hispanic. It could also do long-term damage to the party’s ability to win over Hispanics in future elections.

Would there be any compensating gains? Maybe, if one assumes there is a significant segment of the electorate that is antipathetic toward Hispanics. Similarly, it could be that the Democrats’ disrespecting of the WWC is a tactic aimed at playing to the prejudices of other Democratic-leaning voters, especially college-educated whites. Recall that then-Sen. Obama’s delivered his notorious disquisition on “bitter clingers” to a well-heeled cackle of rads in San Francisco.

Yet in our hypothetical Republican example, surely it would be shrewder for the GOP to speak to the putative anti-Hispanic voters in “dog whistles” rather than making the antipathy explicit. (Though somehow it seems the only people who recognize those dog whistles are liberals.) Similarly, there are subtler ways for the Democrats to appeal to professional-class snobbery than by telling the WWC to vote Republican. Recall, too, that the “bitter clingers” exposition was delivered in private, or so Obama thought.

Is it even possible, then, to save the Democrats’ open disrespect for the WWC from the judgment that it is spectacularly stupid and nothing more? Reader, we’re going to try.

[…]

The rise of the so-called Occupy Wall Street movement, combined with Obama’s more confrontational tone, lifted their mood, but it was a temporary high. The urban encampments turned out to be squalid Obamavilles, not an American Arab Spring or a liberal Tea Party. Most of them are gone now, victims of bad weather or health-and-safety ordinances. And with Obama having scored few victories on Capitol Hill or in public opinion, the left could return to its summer funk any day.

It is important for them not to believe that all is lost–that Obama still has a credible shot at re-election. Openly ceding the WWC to the GOP, even if it actually ends up harming Obama’s re-election prospects, may be the price these strategists feel they have to pay in order to make credible their claim that Obama has any path to victory at all.

To be sure, all is not lost for Obama. This column is of the view that he has been on a losing trajectory since very early in his term, but any number of things could happen in the next 11 months to alter that trajectory. The economy could suddenly improve. An international crisis could arise to which Obama responds with mastery (or luck). The GOP could nominate a candidate who repels independent voters for reasons of ideology, competence or character. A third-party candidacy could split the Republican vote.

We’re not saying any of these eventualities are likely, or that they would necessarily help Obama. (Jimmy Carter had an international crisis, an “extreme” challenger, and a third-party GOP candidate, and he lost badly anyway.) But a necessary condition for an Obama victory is that his own party not throw in the towel months before the election. Abandoning the WWC may be a desperation move to forestall that possibility.

Read the rest: ‘They don’t need our votes’

Tags: James Taranto
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Progressives, Tea Parties | 49 Comments »

Progressives increasingly see Obama as a loser

by Mojambo ( 68 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Progressives at August 14th, 2011 - 9:00 am

Barack Obama has already claimed the mantle of being our worst president ever. Lacking Bill Clinton’s flexibility, he is a rigid ideologue who does not even know how to give a little now, in order to gain a lot more down the road. The wages of being an ideologue is failure. I would bet that there are thousands of Democrats out there who wish that Hillary had won the nomination in 2008 instead of Obama. Hillary has been singularly unimpressive as Secretary of State but the thinking goes at least she would have Bill behind her in a “two for one” deal (as revolting as the idea is ) which they promised in 1992. Obama cannot run on his miserable record of the past three years so he will go like a pit bull on a poodle on the Republican opponent.

by James Taranto

Barack Obama’s recent political difficulties have proved shattering to many of his erstwhile enthusiasts. One of them is Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate.com, who in a column last week declared himself fed up—with America.

The lesson of the debt-ceiling deal, Mr. Weisberg sobbed, is that “there is no point trying to explain complex matters to the American people. The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed.” A pithier expression of this lament was the headline of an online column by liberal Republican Charles Fried: “Obama Is Too Good for Us.”

It takes an authoritarian mindset to look at a failing leader and fault the people for failing to follow him. But Mr. Weisberg has long harbored suspicions about his countrymen’s fitness to be led by the man he described, in an August 2008 column, as “handsome, brilliant and cool.” At the time, Mr. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Mr. Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Mr. Obama lost to John McCain, Mr. Weisberg concluded, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist.

[……]

Just ask Drew Westen, who noted in a New York Times op-ed that Mr. Obama “had accomplished very little before he ran for president,” that he “had a singularly unremarkable” academic career, “publishing nothing . . . other than an autobiography,” and that as a state senator he “voted ‘present’ . . . 130 times.” Mr. Westen, a psychology professor who moonlights as a Democratic tactician, was spared the charge of racism only because he waited until this past Sunday to reveal those misgivings. In his essay, he acknowledged that in 2008 he was “bewitched” and “enthralled” by Mr. Obama’s “eloquence” and thus “chose to ignore” the candidate’s deficiencies.

Unlike Mr. Weisberg, Mr. Westen attributes Mr. Obama’s adversity to the president’s shortcomings, not the voters’. But like Mr. Weisberg, he insists the problem is one of communication. As Mr. Westen tells it, “Americans were scared and angry” when Mr. Obama took office. Like traumatized children, they “needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end.” He reproves Mr. Obama for having refrained from identifying “villains,” including “Wall Street gamblers,” “conservative extremists” and George W. Bush.

In reality, Mr. Obama has been no slouch in the vilification department, regularly demonizing, among others, “millionaires and billionaires,” insurance companies, “corporate jet owners” and Republicans, including Mr. Bush. Mr. Westen errs in assuming that normal American adults are as easily enthralled as he is by political fairy tales.

[……]

Actually, Mr. Obama botched the budget negotiation not because he wouldn’t fight but because he didn’t know when to give in to minimize his losses. He stubbornly clung to his demand for a tax increase long after it was clear that was a deal breaker, yielding only when the alternative was to risk imminent catastrophe.

By contrast, Bill Clinton never even made such a demand in the budget battles of 1995-96, from which he emerged victorious. Later he worked with the Republican Congress to enact conservative policies, including welfare reform in 1996 and a cut in the capital gains tax in 1997.

Mr. Clinton was ideologically flexible, whereas Mr. Obama is rigid. Yet the left stuck with Mr. Clinton even through his impeachment. Everyone loves a winner, and progressives are angry and disconsolate with Mr. Obama because they increasingly see him as a loser. But if the president is a loser, it is precisely because he is one of them.

Read the rest – The Left’s summer of discontent

Tags: Bill Clinton, James Taranto
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Progressives | 68 Comments »

The question being “Is Obama a Socialist?”

by Mojambo ( 74 Comments › )
Filed under Economy, Media, Misery Index at July 3rd, 2010 - 11:00 am

To me the answer would be a resounding “Yes!”. Even Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric (which owns Obama loving NBC and MSNBC) claims that Obama hates Business (not a good attitude to have if you value an employed nation). James Taranto points out (in his usual clarifying way) the verbal gymnastics that the MSM employs to cover up the grim economic news of Democratic administrations in general (“unemployment claims rose unexpectedly last month”) and Obama specifically (always giving it a glass half-full spin and refraining to use the term”jobless recovery” that was so often used during Bush’s presidency). They throw thee term “recovery” around promiscuously when there is no indication at all about us being in a “recovery”. Also you will notice that when they report a slight dip in unemployment they will not differentiate about how many government workers were hired as opposed to private sector workers -the key indicator regarding a “recovery” should be private sector full-time jobs.

by James Taranto

Here’s a pair of questions that some people are, surprisingly, asking: “Is Obama Really a Socialist? Some Say So, but Where’s the Evidence?” That’s a Christian Science Monitorheadline, and while the second question is entirely rhetorical, suggesting the paper (or is it just a website now?) comes down on the negative side, the story is actually inconclusive:

Neither dispatch uses the phrase “jobless recovery,” which was a staple of economic coverage during the Bush years–even though, before the last few months of 2008, unemployment seldom topped 6%.

The assertion is getting louder: President Obama is a socialist, a wealth-redistributing wolf in Democrat’s clothing gnawing at America’s entrepreneurial spirit.

It’s easy to buy “Obama is a socialist” bumper stickers on the Internet. Political commentator Dick Morris said, in a column circulated on GOPUSA.com, that conservatives are “enraged at Barack Obama’s socialism and radicalism.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich titled his new book “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine.”

So, is Mr. Obama trying to form The Socialist Republic of America? Or are the accusations mainly a political weapon, meant to stick Obama with a label that is poison to many voters and thus make him a one-term president?

As is often the case in politics, the answer is in the eye of the beholder.

Well, “Answer Is in Eye of Beholder” is about the dullest headline one could write without mentioning Canada, so we can see why the Monitor went for something with an ever so tiny bit more sex appeal. Still, what’s interesting here is that the Monitor is treating the question even as a legitimate one.

The left has portrayed the assertion “Obama is a socialist” as the product of hallucinogenic tea. Polls attempting to show that Republicans are crazy–both the one Markos Moulitsascommissioned and the one John Avlon inspired, helped design and touted but did not commission–have included it along with such genuinely insane claims as “Obama was not born in the U.S.” and “Obama may be the Antichrist.” Yet you won’t see a mainstream publication weigh the pros and cons of those claims and conclude that “the answer is in the eye of the beholder.”

What’s more–and this was our first thought on seeing the Monitor story–we’re pretty sure we never saw a similar story during George W. Bush’s time in office seriously pondering the question of whether he was a fascist, though left-wingers called him that all the time.

We suppose this is in part because the left has so cheapened the term “fascism” as to leave it with little meaning other than as a term of abuse. Socialism also has better PR than fascism does, and hence is more respectable: Some European countries have socialist parties that are part of mainstream politics, and although Obama does not call himself a socialist, one member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, wears the label with pride.

These days “fascism” is less often associated with Mussolini’s party, which was its namesake, than with the Nazis, even though Nazi is an abbreviation for National Socialist. And somehow the socialist label seldom gets applied to the other defunct totalitarian state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

If the media take somewhat more seriously the claim that Obama is a socialist than the claim that Bush was a fascist, it certainly isn’t because they’re biased in favor of Bush. Rather, it has to do with the merits of the assertions.

[…]

Lagging Indicator
When a Democrat is in the White House, media coverage of the economy tends to be a lagging indicator of bad news and a leading indicator of good news–which is another way of saying that, as we noted yesterday, reporters’ usual approach can be summed up as “always look on the bright side of life.”

Things must be really getting bad, because the lagging indicator seems to be catching up. In yesterday’s column we analyzed a dispatch by Christopher Rugaber of the Associated Press that previewed today’s jobs report and tried to explain away the expected bad news. Later yesterday, though, Rugaber filed another dispatch that was far dourer, including its title, “Evidence Mounts That Recovery Is Hitting the Skids.”

Rugaber weighs in again today with a story on the actual jobless numbers, and his mood hadn’t improved overnight. The title gave the bad news first: “Payrolls Drop by 125K, Jobless Rate Falls.” The story, too, begins with the bad news, and swiftly explains why the good news isn’t so good:

A weak June jobs report offered the latest evidence that the economic recovery is slowing.

Employers cut 125,000 jobs last month, the most since October, the Labor Department said Friday. The loss was driven by the end of 225,000 temporary census jobs. Businesses added a net total of 83,000 workers, the sixth straight month of private-sector job gains but not enough to speed up the recovery.

Unemployment dropped to 9.5 percent–the lowest level since July 2009–from 9.7 percent. But the reason for the decline was more than 650,000 people gave up on their job searches and left the labor force. People who are no longer looking for work aren’t counted as unemployed.