Has there been anything more ridiculous then the sight of Joe Biden on television running around the country on a fools errand, acting like the late Billy Mays the infomercial pitchman, touting a “Recovery Summer” despite all the evidence that there is no recovery and the American people are not buying into it? If we win in November (and I believe we will) it will be in spite of the Republican party (a party referred to as “the stupid party”) and because our opponents have made such a palpable muck of things.
by Rich Lowry
Joe Biden was an inspired choice as spokesman for the “summer of recovery.”
If the Obama administration wanted someone with little credibility to lose, who will say anything without a hint of shame or compunction, whose mouth habitually outruns the facts and common sense, it found its man.
Biden is still hawking his recovery summer, even as GDP growth slows to a crawl, and he’ll still tout the marvels of the stimulus even if we dip into negative territory again later this year. He makes the late, great pitchman Billy Mays look restrained and rhetorically scrupulous by comparison.
Biden is joined at the hip to the most disastrous White House shibboleth since President Gerald Ford’s “whip inflation now.”
In a vaguely Soviet act of governmental exhortation, in 1974 Ford wanted local citizens’ groups to “whip inflation now,” or WIN. He offered a shiny “WIN” button to anyone enlisting “as an Inflation Fighter and Energy Saver for the duration.” Six months later, only one local committee had been formed, and even Ford concluded the initiative was “too gimmicky.” Inflation remained unwhipped.
[…]
In a favorite administration statistic, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus increased the number of people employed by 1.4 million to 3.3 million in the second quarter, a suspiciously wide range redolent of seat-of-the-pants guesswork. All the report proves is that if you adopt a model that assumes that the stimulus created jobs, it created a lot of them. The stimulus excels in this ethereal category of assumed job-creation.
If the stimulus provided any initial boost to the economy, it was a sugar high, its effect neither healthy nor enduring. It’s been a chilly summer of recovery. Macroeconomic Advisers, which estimates growth on a monthly basis, says GDP growth declined 0.4 percent in June. Only 61,000 private-sector jobs were created in June and July. Biden must be banking on a hell of an August.
Read the rest here: Joe’s shameless ‘recovery’ line
Chris Christie has become the anti-Obama by following one of Reagan’s great strengths – appealing to people beyond his base constituency. That is why I feel we need to tone down the red meat social issues and concentrate on those issues which affect the most Americans which is jobs, taxes and each family’s burden of the national debt. When President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981 after they broke the law and were warned of the consequences, he sent a message to the rest of America – “I am president of the United States, not a puppet of any union.”
by Kevin Hassett
With all the crazy talk of President Barack Obama being the antichrist, it’s sort of amusing that the anti-Obama is a guy named Christie.
To understand the political force sweeping our country, one need only search the words “Chris Christie” on YouTube. The New Jersey governor’s town hall appearances have received hundreds of thousands of hits and glowing comments because the man, like Ronald Reagan before him, has an uncanny ear for what troubles Americans.
The truth is, a mensch like Christie could never have emerged in American politics if super-slick Obama had not enraged so many Americans first. If Jimmy Carter created Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama created Chris Christie.
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Small Town
On June 15th, Christie appeared at a town hall meeting in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The crowd assembled was hardly a stereotypical BMW-driving Republican audience, looking like a group that could represent any small town in America
One senses that these Americans rarely gather all in one place, and that when they do, the gravity of the moment is palpable to them. And then Christie says, “our way of life is being challenged by an economy where we have too much debt, too big a government, too much spending and taxes being too high. We all know it in our hearts…we all understand that the day of reckoning is here.” And while he speaks, the people gather — even Wilda Diaz, the Democratic mayor, seem to nod in agreement.
[….]
Angry Teachers
And attack he does. One of Christie’s most popular YouTube moments is a confrontation with an angry teacher, who upbraids him for not paying her enough. When Christie replies that if she doesn’t like the pay package “then you don’t have to do it,” the crowd cheers like the Giants just scored a touchdown.
[….]
Reagan became on overwhelming political force because of his ability to appeal to audiences beyond his natural constituency, as Christie did at that Perth Amboy gathering. Christie clearly has the same knack, and will become an irresistible political force if New Jersey can recover.
It is an open question whether it will, but if it does, then the Republican Party may have found a real star.
Read the rest here: Christie Channels Reagan to Become Anti-Obama
