► Show Top 10 Hot Links

Posts Tagged ‘Nile Gardiner’

The decline and despair president

by Mojambo ( 130 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections, Elections 2012, Politics at October 31st, 2011 - 11:30 am

As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit once put it – “when a Jimmy Carter rerun now represents a best-case scenario” for  the Obama administration, you know you are in trouble. It is not America which is in decline, it is this miserable administration which is declining as more and more people however reluctantly are seeing him for the failure that he is.

by Nile Gardiner

This week, The Hill newspaper published a poll that is dispiriting to anyone concerned about the future of America as the world’s leading power. It was one of the most damning yet, illustrating just how far most Americans believe their country has fallen in recent years. According to The Hill:

More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.

A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is “in decline,” the survey found, while 57 percent predict today’s kids won’t live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they’re either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they’re “very worried.”

[…]

At the same time, international perceptions of American power are also worsening. A September report conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found a growing number of respondents in 18 countries questioning America’s ability to remain ahead of its main competitor China. As Pew found:

Across the 18 countries surveyed by Pew in both 2009 and 2011, the median percentage saying China will replace or already has replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower increased from 40% in 2009 to 47% two years later. Meanwhile, the median percentage saying China will never replace the U.S. fell from 44% to 36%.

Looking specifically at economic power, many believe China has already assumed the top spot. In the 2011 poll, pluralities in Britain, France, Germany and Spain named China – not the U.S. – as the world’s leading economic power. Remarkably, a 43% plurality of Americans also named China; just 38% said the U.S.

The Hill’s pessimistic survey of US domestic opinion encapsulates the sense of malaise and decline running through Barack Obama’s America, nearly three years into his presidency. You won’t necessarily see it in downtown Washington DC, now the richest city in the nation thanks to the relentless rise in federal spending, but it is starkly evident across most of the United States, from the poverty-ravaged suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio to the US foreclosure capital of Las Vegas, Nevada.

The dire state of the economy is at the heart of the public’s disillusionment with the course their country is taking. A recent CNN poll found that 90 per cent of Americans believe the “economy stinks,” and seven in 10 declared that President Obama has not helped the economy in a CBS News survey. With 14 million Americans out of work, millions of families struggling to pay the mortgage, the prospect of a double dip recession on the horizon and the biggest budget deficit since the Second World War, it is not hard to see why fewer than one in five Americans believe the US is heading in the “right track” in the latest RealClear Politics poll of polls.

[…]

Instead of hope and change, the Obama presidency has delivered decline and despair on a scale not seen in America since the dying days of the Carter administration. Both at home and abroad, the United States is perceived to be a sinking power, and with good reason. The big-spending interventionist economic policies of the current administration have been little short of disastrous, and have saddled the US with its biggest debts since 1945. The liberal experiment of the past few years has knocked the stuffing out of the American economy. Job creation has been barely non-existent, and millions of Americans are now significantly worse off than they were a few years ago. Even The New York Times has acknowledged “soaring poverty” in Obama’s America, citing a Census Bureau report showing the number of Americans officially living below the poverty line (46.2 million) at its highest level for more than half a century, since 1959.

Despite the bleak outlook, America can and must rebound later this decade, but it certainly won’t be capable of doing so in the hands of the current president. Levels of public disillusionment with the federal government have never been higher, and almost everything the current White House touches ends in failure. It will require another epic Reagan-style revolution to turn this great nation around and get it off its knees. Fortunately, what China lacks, the United States still has in abundance – the spirit of individual freedom, the love of liberty, a sense of justice and fair play, freedom of speech and worship, and an instinctive desire to act as a powerful force for good on the world stage. America must continue to lead the world, for the alternative is too grim to contemplate. But it can only do so on the foundations of a strong economy with low taxes and limited regulation, free of the shackles of towering debt as well as the deathly hand of big government.

Read the rest: Why Barack Obama is the decline and despair president

Barack Obama’s calamitous 1,000 days

by Mojambo ( 146 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Business, Economy, Iran, Israel, UK, unemployment at October 20th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

The Republican Party needs to get its spit together and find an acceptable candidate because this guy Obama is ripe for the taking. What amazes me is all the people who are surprised to see that Obama is not nearly as intelligent as they thought he was. He should never have gotten near the nomination (or for that matter the Senate) but thanks to a combination of the ineptness of George W. Bush and John McCain which unfairly tarred the conservative brand, racial guilt, and a lapdog media – he rose to a position of which he was not even remotely qualified – and we are paying a terrible price for it. Give him a second term – and watch the real totalitarian come out.

by Nile Gardiner

If recent polls are any indication, it is doubtful that President Obama will enjoy another 1,000 days in the White House. And looking at his track record over the course of his first 33 months in office, it is not hard to see why. It is hard to think of a presidency in modern times that has done more to damage the United States both at home and abroad than the current one, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter’s. Like his Democratic predecessor in the 1970’s, Barack Obama has left the world’s dominant superpower on its knees, with faith in US leadership now being questioned across the globe.

Since taking office in January 2009, President Obama has ushered in a period of relentless economic decline for the United States. His administration has added $4.2 trillion to the national debt (now standing at $14.9 trillion), lost 2.2 million jobs, introduced a vastly expensive health-care albatross, and spent nearly $800 billion on a failed stimulus package. At the same time, house prices across the country have tumbled at an unprecedented rate, consumer confidence has plummeted, and millions more Americans are now dependent upon food stamps. International confidence in the US economy has fallen to its lowest levels in decades, with credit agency Standard and Poor’s downgrading of America’s AAA credit rating for the first time in 70 years in August this year. As I noted in a piece at the time:

Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the United States has embarked on the most ambitious failed experiment in Washington meddling in US history. Huge increases in government spending, massive federal bailouts, growing regulations on businesses, thinly veiled protectionism, and the launch of a vastly expensive and deeply unpopular health care reform plan, have all combined to instill fear and uncertainty in the markets.

Is it any wonder that just 17 percent of Americans now believe the country is moving in the right direction, according to RealClear Politics? Or that 81 percent of Americans “are dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed”, according to Gallup? As a series of major Gallup polls have shown, public disillusionment with the federal government has now reached an all-time high, with 69 percent of Americans now saying “they have little or no confidence in the legislative branch of government”, with 46 percent believing “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”

And President Obama’s record on the world stage has also been poor. Despite two high-profile successes in taking out al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and more recently Anwar al-Awlaki (both upon the foundations of President Bush’s war on terror), US foreign policy under Obama has been a confusing mess. The shameless appeasement of Iran has allowed the rogue state to advance perilously close to nuclear weapons capability, while the naïve “reset” approach towards Russia has only encouraged a more aggressive and assertive Moscow. At the same time, traditional alliances with Great Britain and Israel have been downgraded, and key allies in eastern and central Europe thrown under the bus to feed the Russian bear.

[…….]

As Barack Obama approaches the remaining 14 months of his presidency, there is a distinct air of US decline. It is of course a state of decline that can be reversed with the right policies and leadership in place. There is nothing inevitable about the demise of the United States, but its renewal must rest upon a dramatic reversal of the most Left-wing agenda of any American presidency since 1979.

[……..]

The biggest failure of this administration, and there have been many, has been its central belief that government knows best, and that the way to prosperity is to spend ever greater amounts of taxpayers’ money on the backs of hard-working Americans. As a result, the United States is a nation on a precipice, facing towering debts and the threat of a double dip recession at a time when 14 million Americans are already out of work. Ultimately, it is economic freedom, minimal government intervention, and greater individual liberty that can put America back on its feet, rather than endless bailouts, higher taxes and suffocating government regulation, all hallmarks of the Obama experiment. Ultimately, the world needs a powerful United States that is a beacon of hope to the world, rather than a basket case of failed liberal policies.

Read the rest – Barack Obama’s disastrous first 1,000 days

A second-rate university lecture at the United Nations

by Mojambo ( 113 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, George W. Bush, United Nations at September 22nd, 2011 - 2:00 pm

Obama is an inarticulate speaker, a master of muddled cliches, a sanctimonious and over bearing narcissist, and at best is qualified to be a lecturer in Sociology at a Community College. His naivete is only matched by his rigid  left-wing world view. I can only shudder to think what would have happened to the West had Obama been president during the Brezhnev era of Soviet aggression.

by Nile Gardiner

After watching President Obama’s 40-minute address to the United Nations General Assembly this morning, I think the White House should seriously consider hiring a new team of speechwriters. There was little depth or direction to this muddled speech, which seemed to meander from one foreign policy topic to another without really saying anything of substance. In fact it came across as several speeches cobbled together in haphazard fashion, with the president trying to appeal to a multitude of different audiences at the same time. This was more like a professorial address by a university lecturer than a speech by the leader of the free world.

Even the assembled world leaders, used to hearing some of the most dire speeches in history during UN meetings, seemed lulled into a state of suspended animation as the president droned on.

[…]

George W. Bush was hardly popular at the UN when he was president, but the assembled international elites did listen intently to what he had to say, and the dictators and tyrants who gathered in Turtle Bay genuinely feared him. In the case of his successor, I very much doubt that America’s enemies on the world stage were quaking in their boots when he took to the podium today. There was no real projection of American power in Obama’s words, and he instead offered a great deal of internationalist mush in its place.

The president’s speech was hopelessly naive in parts, with constant reference to the ideals of the United Nations, despite the world body’s appalling track record from Rwanda to the Balkans, and endless rhetoric about why “peace is hard work”. While extolling the dream of a nuclear-free world, the Iranian nuclear crisis received only a cursory mention from the president, despite the imminent threat of a nuclear-armed genocidal rogue state emerging in the Middle East. There was no indication given today that the Obama administration will stand up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his relentless drive to build Tehran into a regional superpower.

On the Israeli-Palestinian issue there was the usual drawing of moral equivalence between the two sides, which has become a hallmark of the Obama approach to the matter. While the president used harsher language than usual in describing the threats Israel faces from its neighbours, his speech will do little to convince Israel’s government that he is a truly reliable friend. Although the president seemingly tried to avoid overtly insulting the Israelis on this particular occasion, something he has done several times in the past, he placed great emphasis on painting the two sides of the dispute as complete equals in the eyes of Washington, declaring that “the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in each other’s shoes.”

[…..]

Read the rest – Barack Obama’s U.N. speech sounded like a second-rate university lecture

A drowning presidency headed for defeat? Obama hits rock bottom in Gallup poll

by Mojambo ( 160 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections, George W. Bush at April 16th, 2011 - 2:30 pm

As Mr. Gardiner points out –  Obama is still moving to the Left even as his popularity is starting to precipitously fall. Arrogance, hubris, incompetence, and inexperience as well as a petulant and immature distaste for making compromises and a refusal to learn from mistakes, are taking a toll on this monstrous presidency.

by Nile Gardiner

The latest Gallup Daily tracking three-day average represents a new low for Barack Obama, with just 41 percent of Americans approving his job performance as president. This matches his previous lows in August 2010 and October 2010, just before the mid-term elections, and it is significantly down from his 2011 average of 48 percent. The president’s disapproval rating now stands at 50 percent, the highest point since August last year. In contrast, George W. Bush’s approval rating at this stage of his presidency stood at 70 percent (April 2003), and the average for US presidents in the ninth quarter stands at 57 percent.

Disconcertingly for the White House, his ratings have plummeted among independents, from an average of 44 percent in 2011 to just 35 percent this week, devastating figures if translated at the ballot box in 2012, where securing the independent vote will be vital. Even among Democrats, support for the president is now running at just 77 percent, down four points from the 2011 average, and down seven points from the average for 2009-11.

As Gallup points out, Obama is now as unpopular as he has been at any stage of his presidency:

President Obama is now as unpopular as he has been at any time since he became president. He faces difficult challenges ahead in trying to improve the economy and get the federal budget deficit under control, and must do so with Republicans in control of the House. His ability to navigate these challenges will help determine whether he will be elected to a second term as president. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton all were similarly unpopular at this stage of their presidencies, but the last two were able to turn things around in time to win a second term in office.

[…]

And if his heavily panned performance this week on the budget deficit is anything to go by, it is unlikely that the president’s ratings will be significantly improving anytime soon. Barack Obama faces an increasingly disillusioned electorate which, as the latest RealClear Politics average of polls shows, overwhelmingly believes the country is heading down the wrong track. With deep-seated fears over the economy, including towering levels of federal debt, dominating voter concerns, the Obama presidency seems destined for another fall, perhaps on an even bigger scale than the setback the Left suffered last November.

In sharp contrast to his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, who did survive low ratings in his third year to ultimately win a second term, Obama is drifting further to the left rather than the political centre, a move which will only further alienate independents who moved decisively against him in the mid-terms. And as for comparisons with Ronald Reagan, who also recovered from low approval ratings to bounce back in 1984, the Gipper was simply in a different league to Barack Obama, displaying the kind of decisive, principled leadership that is sorely lacking in the White House today.

Read the rest: A floundering presidency heading for a fall? Barack Obama hits rock bottom in latest Gallup poll.