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End the occupation; Throw the bums out!

by Mojambo ( 146 Comments › )
Filed under Socialism, Tranzis at November 3rd, 2011 - 11:30 am

In New York, the Milk Street Cafe has had to lay off 21 employees because people are not coming into the restaurant which is geographically too close to the smelly miscreants camping out in Zuccotti Park. To the Giuliani bashers out there – I can tell you now that had Rudy been in charge instead of the faint hearted girlie man Mike Bloomberg – that park would have been cleaned out a couple of weeks ago. The only people these freaks and fleabaggers are hurting is regular working people who used to actually like to go there on lunchtime and eat their lunch and read a book. the Sultan Knish points out that it is the city that is under occupation, not only Wall Street. I love the Knish’s suggestion about trying to occupy Detroit – who would notice?

by Daniel Greenfield

The big lie of Occupy Wall Street begins with its name, it isn’t occupying Wall Street, it’s occupying the resources of a city with a budget crisis on its hands.

Wall Street has been locked down since after September 11 and the Zuccotti Park encampment and its associated barricades isn’t doing much to impact the lives of the brokers and financial analysts the idiots in their best protest gear are braying about. The people who are being impacted are the small businesses adjacent to the protesters who are experiencing a return of the post 9/11 lockdown that wiped out so many downtown businesses.

But the people who are suffering the most from the OWS brats are the 1 percent, not the top 1 percent, but the bottom 1 percent, the people who are the most dependent on city services that are being diverted directly or indirectly by OWS.

That means the kid in the projects who needs the police to be there instead of macing white guys from Portland who think that braiding their hair makes them just like Bob Marley. It also means patients who need medical services from city hospitals whose budgets are already being cut, and will be cut further because of the unexpected expenses for the city associated with having thousands of idiots decided that a park in the middle of the city is their ideal location for a campground.

Because of OWS, public schools, public libraries, public hospitals, roads and homeless shelters will not have money. That will have a direct impact on the lives of actual underprivileged people.

And this isn’t just happening in New York City, OWS have targeted urban areas with municipal budget deficits, tying up resources and diverting funding from the most vulnerable members of society. They have done this in Oakland, whose budget is already made out of strings and wires, and which isn’t a world financial center.

Why do this in Oakland? Because they could. For the same reason that they trashed a grocery store and two banks. The people paying the price for that will be the customers and employees, and it will be the people of Oakland whose will lose services to cover the cost of Occupy Oakland. A week of Occupy Oakland clashes cost a million dollars. That million dollars will not be coming out of the banks.

The same thing is true everywhere. Wall Street will not be footing the bill for Occupy Wall Street, the people who actually live in the city will be the ones left with the tab when the parasitic trash that washed in here on a haze of pot smoke and greasy backpacks go back to wherever the hell they came from.

The Obama Administration, whose allies are behind the protests and which is using it as the kickoff to an election campaign in order to reach out to younger voters, will not be footing the bill either. It’s the people who live in the city, the rich, the poor and the middle-class who will pay for it.

For the cost of Occupy Wall Street, dozens of libraries could have been built, hundreds of classes could have been added to public schools and who knows how many lives could have been saved in a city that has already slashed its fire department to the bone. Instead all that money is being poured down the gullet of upper class brats with useless college degrees who want to stage their own temper tantrum at the behest of the professional political activists without giving a damn about the cost to real people.

Around 4 million dollars for police overtime in New York City alone. The various assorted other costs associated with a massive homeless encampment that’s being provided with electricity and trash pickup can’t even be calculated. Not to mention processing some a thousand or so of the bozos through the system and then handling their lawsuits afterwards.

In Boston, police overtime is over the 2 million mark. In Atlanta costs are approaching half a million. In Charlotte, the tab for the police alone is over a hundred thousand dollars. In Minneapolis it’s over 200,000 dollars. Occupy Seattle, 105,000. Occupy Denver is approaching the half a million mark. A cop at Occupy Denver told the group that each added police car following them was another 5,000 out of the city budget.

Want a real joke? Try Occupy Detroit, a movement to occupy a city which is already a disaster area and facing ruin, chanting against the last few businesses that are keeping the place alive. Maybe if the banks pull out of Detroit, then the people there will be better off.

Who’s to blame for this whole mess? The lion’s share of the blame belongs to the media which turned a bunch of pretentious idiots standing around with fake cardboard signs into a mass movement with constant coverage and which has served as their press outlet, rabidly pouncing on any politician even thinking about giving the bozos the boot.

The media co-created OWS and they own it. There is no pretense of objectivity when reporting on what’s going on, from the pretense that they represent some kind of oppressed average joe down to promoting the absurd and bizarre lie that Bank of America dropped its card fee because of the protesters, rather than because of a massive exodus of customers.

And much of it belongs to fainthearted mayors who failed to act when they should. Giuliani would have never tolerated OWS setting up shop blocks from City Hall. And Koch, no matter what he says, wouldn’t have put up with it for very long either. But Bloomberg has sent so many mixed messages that he might as well be texting his speeches. Had New York City taken the lead, the whole mess would have been over weeks ago. Instead Zuccotti Park became a warm nest for the parasites and their massive campout.

It is anyone’s guess how many sexual assaults happened because Bloomberg was too gutless to take on ACORN and the media, but even one is too many. And during the next budget debate, OWS will be blamed without assessing the responsibility of city officials to enforce the law.

[…]

Had the Occupy brats decided they wanted to set up shop in Central Park, the damage to one of the country’s wonders would be horrifying. Zuccotti Park is no great loss, but the cowardice of public officials in the face of professional agitators is. The job of the mayor is to represent New Yorkers, not ACORN and the Daily News. When even a leftist nerd like Congressman Nadler has called for cracking down on the abuse behavior of the OWS parasites, it’s obviously past time to act.

Giuliani shut down the homeless encampments and the sight of a massive encampment back in the heart of the city is a disgrace. It is a disgrace created by the chicanery of the media, the cowardice of elected officials and the ruthless cunning of a class of professional activists determined to ram through their Community Organizer in Chief by any means necessary.

[…]

Read the rest: End the occupation

The New York Post editorial pretty much says it all.

Time’s up: The Zuccotti Park vagabonds have had their say – and trashed lower Manhattan – for long enough.

They need to go.

Be it voluntarily – by packing their tents and heading off in an orderly fashion.

Or by having th NYPD step in – and evict them.

But go they must: Their lease on Zuccotti Park has expired.

And it’s their own fault.

What began as a credible protest against bank bailouts, crony capitalism and the like has, in large measure, been hijacked by crazies and criminals.Beyond that, too many protesters demonstrate by their actions a level of contempt for residents, businesses and workers in the area that long ago crossed the line.

No one should have to put up with the incessant noise, filth and downright dangerous conditions the protesters have foisted upon lower Manhattan.

The drumming and tambourines.

The yelling and screaming.

The public urination and defecation.

The drugs.

The lewdness.

The criminals and their crimes.

It’s all got to end.

No one has greater respect for the First Amendment than this paper. Even radicals — especially radicals — have a fundamental right to public protest.

We don’t even quibble with some parts of the protesters’ message — such as their resentment of the massive bailouts of banks using taxpayer money.

And we certainly respect the right of Brookfield Properties, owner of the park, to permit the protests.

But there comes a time when enough is enough.

Certainly, Brookfield does itself no great honor by pretending to be satisfied with the status quo.

Sure, we understand the pressure the company’s been under — including, most shamefully, from cynical New York pols looking to cozy up to the heavily out-of-towner-based group, local radicals, and their manipulators in the labor unions seeking to capitalize on the “occupation.”

That pressure explains why Brookfield has been reluctant to push City Hall — publicly — for action.

Brookfield wasn’t speaking yesterday. But surely, it wants the nightmare to end — even if it’s too frightened to say so.

“My guess is that we basically look to the police leadership and mayor to decide what to do,” Brookfield’s chairman, John Zuccotti, said last month.

But passing the buck to City Hall solves nothing. Mayor Bloomberg & Co. have essentially been hiding behind the fact that Zuccotti Park is not city property.

“If Brookfield were to come to us and say that their rules are being violated … the Police Department will do what it has to do,” Bloomberg said last week. “But this is not a public park.” No, it’s not.

But it is a public nuisance — and it needs to be dealt with just like any other public nuisance.

Clearly, the city has the right to do just that.

What’s needed right now is mayoral leadership.

Could Mayor Bloomberg, at long last, be leaning in that direction?

“You know, I think increasingly you’re seeing that communities, businesses and residents in lower Manhattan feel that they are the ones that are being occupied,” Bloomberg said yesterday.

“This isn’t an occupation of Wall Street. It’s an occupation of a growing, vibrant residential neighborhood in lower Manhattan, and it’s really hurting small businesses and families.”

Added the mayor, “Other people have rights, too, and I am very concerned about the other peoples’ rights, as well as those of the protesters.”

[…]

Read the rest: Time to throw the bums out!

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Socialism, Tranzis | 146 Comments »

The state of the 2012 presidential race

by Mojambo ( 85 Comments › )
Filed under Conservatism, Elections 2010, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney, Tea Parties, The Political Right at November 2nd, 2011 - 8:00 pm

The Sultan Knish makes clear that the belief that we are guaranteed a win next year because Obama’s policies are so unpopular is a fool’s paradise. Obama has gone back to running as an insurgent even though he is the incumbent president and is reverting to the us v. them tactics of his community organizer days. As the Knish points out “Obama’s original victory was implausible, it took extensive work, planning and money. The idea that it can’t happen again should be buried deep right now. It happened once. It can happen again if we let it. The other side is not going to play by any rules, it is not going to run a conventional campaign, it will pull every dirty trick it can think of and change the game as many times as it takes to win.” We need to make this campaign a campaign of ideas not funny soundbites. Don’t get complacent over the 2010 victories and for the love of God do not even contemplate Newt Gingrich!

by Daniel Greenfield

The race for the Republican nomination has all the appeal of a three-legged sack race by a bunch of blindfolded angry drunks– and it’s not entirely the fault of the candidates. Elections used to be events, now they’re a permanent process that begins some time after the last election wraps up. The long round of debates is the slow long road to the primaries that succeeds in making everyone seem unequal to the task.

After the battle of 2010, conservatives were looking for a candidate to raise the standard and lead a charge on Washington D.C., instead we’re stuck with a bunch of politicians with feet of clay and clumsy soundbites. The debate isn’t about ideas, not about what needs to be done in Washington D.C. or even what the candidates believe, it’s a bunch of personality clashes between men who want the job, but lack the combination of ideas, competence and inspiration to make it happen.

We have inspirational candidates, we have candidates with ideas and we have candidates who project competence– but we don’t have all three in the same man or woman, and so we’re left having to pick and choose between the negatives.

[…]

While Obama is assembling a campaign built around class warfare, there is no serious challenge coming from his opponents which means the left is achieving its mission of creating an Anti-Tea Party to take back the debate. The victories of 2010 rewarded the insurgent party. Now Obama’s people are determined to present him as the insurgent fighting against a GOP congress and big business. It’s a narrative tailored to peel away enough independents and conservative Democrats to score a win and it may work.

There’s been a little too much complacency after the victories of the midterm election and the weak numbers for the White House have convinced some politicians that they’re fighting over a carcass. They’re not.

Obama’s original victory was implausible, it took extensive work, planning and money. The idea that it can’t happen again should be buried deep right now. It happened once. It can happen again if we let it. The other side is not going to play by any rules, it is not going to run a conventional campaign, it will pull every dirty trick it can think of and change the game as many times as it takes to win.

OWS should be a wake up call that this election will not be a cakewalk. The failures of the coffee party and every alternative to the Tea Party created a dangerous complacency. Now the mobs are abroad and the game is being changed… and this is just the first phase of what will be the ugliest campaign ever fought.

[…]

For the people who make a living analyzing all the insider games that can be fascinating, but it’s also a dangerous sidetrack to avoid. The media has already done a good job of getting the candidates to clumsily take a few swings at each other and we aren’t any better for it. Pawlenty’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t take a swing at Romney, it was that he wasn’t a compelling standard-bearer. The Perry-Romney exchange was flat out embarrassing for everyone involved. Cain has emerged in the lead because he is vocal, unapologetic and eager to communicate his message. The same reasons that Bachmann at one point had the lead.

What we need is a standard bearer who merges that unapologetic and enthusiastic message with a sense of leadership. That’s what Ronald Reagan delivered in his time. There’s no use in wishing for a Reagan, but it’s also important to remember that leaders don’t emerge out of nowhere, they are shaped by the expectations of the people.

The media would like to reduce the Republican candidates to a bunch of clowns, so far they have gotten their way with the help of a conservative media all too eager to drive traffic with another controversy. But what they want and what we need are too different things. We don’t need viral videos and controversies– what we need are men and women who speak strongly about what is wrong with this country and what needs to be changed.

Short term victories can be scored with gimmicks, but the long term battle is not going to be won on those terms. Once the race begins in earnest voters will look to two men to see which of them has the answer. The media will do its best to make one of those men look like an idiot, a bigot, a buffoon and a complete failure. And it will do it best to make the other man who actually is an idiot and a failure look like an inspirational genius.

Will the public buy it? Last time around they bought into the idea that inexperience is an asset and that a state senator from one of the most corrupt states in America was more qualified to take the helm during a national emergency than a respected senator and veteran. They also bought into the idea that Sarah Palin was a dunce and Joe Biden was a respected expert on foreign policy.

That doesn’t mean the race is hopeless, it means that it’s our race to lose. And it’s going to be lost or won on ideas, not on personalities.

[…]

The media is not afraid of Cain, Perry, Romney, Gingrich or the rest of the gang. None of them are Reagan and even if they were, the media could still destroy them. What they are afraid of is ideas. Men come and go, but principles count. The left isn’t in this because they believe in one man, but because they believe in the revolution. It’s the rise of “right-wing populism” that they are afraid of. They are arrogant elitists who look down on everyone else and condescend to them and fear them.

What keeps them up at night is a man who can step forward, lay out all the common sense ideas that they have worked so hard to discredit in front of the public and step off the stage to their cheers. They know it can happen and they expect it to happen because they know quite well how unpopular the menu of ideas on the left side of the plate are.

What frightens them is a conservative who doesn’t look for common ground with them, but looks at them with good-natured contempt and tears up their arguments into small pieces with a few words. The words don’t have to be well-chosen, the candidate doesn’t have to be an articulate speaker, but he has to be a standard bearer for the deep rooted common sense beliefs of the country. That abiding sense of right and wrong that the left has worked so hard to pervert, distorted, mock and bury away as a last resort.

It’s confidence that is the key ingredient. That is what many thought they saw in Perry. Maybe it’s still there. It’s what many see in Cain and what others see in Bachmann and Gingrich. For all their flaws they carry that confidence with them. And if they can overcome those flaws and focus on the issues, then they might make a difference.

The power of the left is built on the illusion of consensus, and that illusion only works when there is no disagreement or those who disagree are shunted to the side as liars and buffoons. Their consensus is unnatural and it only operates in the absence of dissent. Like the naked emperor traipsing down the street and expecting no one to notice, all it takes is a loud enough cry to wake people up again and to burst the illusion of a consensus.

The left is not vulnerable in its personalities, at least it hasn’t been since the Dukakis disaster, it is vulnerable in its ideas which run counter to what most people believe is so. The more indefensible they are, the weaker they are.

The perception that we will win because people dislike Obama should be put to rest now. That may help us, but it will not win it for us. All that the other side has to do is convince the public to dislike our candidate even more. We will only win if we deserve to win by making this an election of ideas, not a smirking contest. Only when there is a clear dividing line drawn down the middle and when the left is hit on the consequences of its policies over and over again, while the alternative is made clear will we win.

Read the rest: The State of the Race

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Sultan Knish
Posted in Conservatism, Elections 2010, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney, Tea Parties, The Political Right | 85 Comments »

The Education Bubble

by Mojambo ( 85 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Business, Education, government, Progressives, unemployment at November 1st, 2011 - 11:30 am

The Sultan Knish points out that our ever emphasis on churning out college graduates has ultimately been self destructive. We have neglected manufacturing and private sector jobs and instead prefer to have the government do the hiring. The “geniuses” with the MBA’s from Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Wharton are the ones who created the economic mess that we are now in. It would have been better if at least 1/2 of the MBA’s instead went to trade school and learned how to service an engine or fix a leaky pipe. “Pump enough money into education and the jobs will create themselves” has been manifestly wrong!

by Daniel Greenfield

Flip through enough of the 99 percent signs and you realize that the majority of that demographic aren’t complaining about the lack of financial regulation or income inequalities, so much as they’re upset that they took on loans to pay for college degrees to get jobs that don’t actually exist.

The fault here isn’t Wall Street’s, it’s a policymaking apparatus that decided the way to deal with the loss of manufacturing jobs was to get as many college graduates out there as possible to create the industries of tomorrow.

This was Clinton’s platform and it’s Obama’s “Winning the Future” platform, pump enough money into education and the jobs will create themselves. The Dot Com boom in the nineties seemed to back up that policy with entirely new companies springing to life with valuations in the hundreds of millions and twenty somethings at the helm. But a good deal of those companies were nothing more than the foam on another bubble– and more problematically the cream of the tech companies were created by college dropouts. Even more problematically, the tech companies liked to save money by importing Chinese and Pakistani employees on H1-B visas as cheap labor, while their lobbies insisted that this would protect “American” innovation.

But the real problem was that swapping manufacturing for college degree jobs solved nothing. American companies that manufacture anything become the tip of an outsourced iceberg. All the companies with the shiny logos depend on Chinese manufacturing and raw materials. They can’t create anything that the People’s Republic of China can’t take away from them when the time is right.

[……]

And yet the tech industry is the closest to a college degree success story that we have. The failures are legion.

The problem with the “college degrees for everyone” approach is that creating more college graduates does not proportionally create more jobs, it creates more unemployed college graduates and devalues the worth of a college diploma. Too many college graduates mean that employers will look for higher degree levels. High school diplomas used to be a certificate of competence, then that was devalued through promotion in a system where teachers were expected to move students up to the next class no matter what. When college became the new high school, it was devalued in the same way. There are city and state colleges with students who are barely literate, not in the “kids these days use too many abbreviations” way, but in the “functionally illiterate” way.

If the goal is to move everyone to the highest level of education possible, the result will not be a more educated population, but an educational system with lower standards and a population that is less educated than ever because actual education becomes more inaccessible as the standards are lowered.

Make sure that everyone can “afford” to take out college loans and the marketplace will compete for students with traditional universities offering a large buffet of “educational choices”, most of which are not educational or represent any kind of career path outside academia, and private colleges offering useful sounding degrees that no employer will look twice at.

For the liberal politicians it’s a triple score. Money pours into academia which they can use as their own think tanks. The educational system gets four years or more to process students through more sophisticated indoctrination mechanisms. And then the students who can’t find jobs join the ranks of the usefully disaffected because somebody must be to blame… and it can’t possibly be the people pulling the strings of the people shouting at them through megaphones.

Clinton told working class voters that the manufacturing jobs were gone, but their kids would all have college degrees. Obama went one better by telling working class voters that they would be retrained to hold down “Green Jobs”, even as they’re falling faster than the Green companies and their sweetheart government pork. Those lies are what make the class warfare rhetoric out of DC so doubly despicable.

Politicians have never honestly talked to voters about what happened to the American economy, instead they fell back on the same mantra of opening up new markets through globalization and creating new jobs through education./

None of this is new. The country with the highest degree rate in the world is Russia. The USSR ran its citizens through its educational system at a rate that Elizabeth Warren could only gasp in awe at. But what was its education actually worth? About as much as American degrees are becoming worth. If you throw enough money and manpower at the educational system, you will have a really big educational system. What you will not have is anything of worth to go with it.

[…….]

According to the OECD (another useless globalization organization wrapped around a WW2 fossil) the Israeli educational system is a hopeless failure. In its 2009 evaluation claimed that Israeli students were behind Turkey, Dubai and Russia in math and science. Yet peculiarly enough Israel keeps collecting Nobel prizes and turning out minor things like instant messaging, drones and Kinect. When reality contradicts statistics, it’s wise to go with reality. That’s a skill most politicians haven’t learned, but it’s a rather valuable one.

The universalization of education is not about remaining competitive in a global marketplace or any of that other nonsense piously repeated by politicians with their hands in more pockets than a thieving octopus– it’s about promoting the homogeneity of ideas across a population. Which is why the importance placed on universal education increases as a country becomes more culturally diverse or internally divided.

The original Department of Education was created two years after the Civil War. The Kalamazoo School Case, which set the precedent for forcing taxpayers to fund public education and created the entire system of property tax school robbery we live under today, took place during the same period. As was the National Education Association whose Committee of Ten played a key role in the standardization of the national curriculum.

[……]

When this is understood, the failure of innovation in the system is also obvious. The educational system is not a means of empowering thinkers, but of standardizing a static consensus of ideas. It’s a great way to learn liberal dogma, but an inefficient way of learning anything else. The expansion of the system is not about remaining competitive with China, just as funding more “Green Jobs” is not about “Winning the Future”, it’s about shaping the voters of tomorrow.

[……]

The system would rather have 10,000 subsidized jobs that it creates than 10,000,000 jobs in the free market. It would rather have a middle class of 5 million college graduates, (40 percent of them government employees), than have a free market middle class of a 100 million, (only 30 percent of them college graduates and less than 0.5 percent of them government employees.) And it would rather have an angry mob camped out near Wall Street, than have a viable economy.

The educational bubble isn’t creating a new Middle Class that will keep social security viable, it is creating dissatisfied people who feel that they are entitled to better and don’t know who to blame. Like the rest of the government, the education bubble is too big to fail, which means that by the time it fails, so will the whole country.

Read the rest – The Education Bubble

Tags: Bill Clinton, Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Barack Obama, Business, Education, government, Progressives, unemployment | 85 Comments »

Classwarfare is his last best defense

by Mojambo ( 83 Comments › )
Filed under Conservatism, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Republican Party, Socialism, Tranzis at October 27th, 2011 - 8:30 am

Daniel Greenfield aka The Sultan Knish – notes something which is rather funny in a pathetic sort of way – Barack Obama who is the Establishment, is running as an insurgent incumbent (sort of like running against yourself). This is primarily because he cannot run on his miserable record and he is still trying to recapture the “Yes, We Can” magic of 2008 by running on a class warfare theme. The question is will enough fools be willing to re-buy it?

by Daniel Greenfield

Obama’s team is nothing if not creative. After running for his first term as a force of change, he’s off and running for his second term as… the force of change. Don’t like the last change, this will be the change from that change to a whole other change.

“We Can’t Wait” oddly echoes with Obama’s old slogan, “We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For.” Now after having waited for three for ourselves… we can’t wait for another four years of the same thing. The problem with waiting for ourselves while waiting to vote again for the man who got us into this mess is that it means we’ll be waiting a long time.

But “We Can’t Wait” echoes another slogan that the Obama team was extremely familiar with, the left’s “We Can’t Wait To Drive the Bush Regime Out.” This time around Obama might have called it, “We Can’t Wait to Drive Boehner Out”, but it’s a slogan that would have confused most people.

What we really can’t wait for is the next phase of the Obama campaign, which has completely swallowed any pretense at actual governing, and is just treating the business of government as the backdrop to a series of negative campaign ads.

[…]

If the voters actually think about the message, instead of chewing the predigested CNN and WaPo memes shipped hot and fresh from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then they might want to ask themselves why they should elect a man so incompetent that he can’t govern unless he controls all the branches of government.

[…]

The timing of the Occupy Wall Street protests lines up neatly with Obama’s class warfare reelection campaign and his weak Wall Street fundraising. Last time around Obama took home bundles of cash from the Street, this time he’s reduced to counting matchsticks. All the class warfare shtick serves a dual purpose, find someone to run against and warn the banks and brokers that they better reach into their wallets for the reelection campaign or the mob will do it for them.

The class warfare theme skips the question of whether Obama should campaign against Romney, for his wealth, business connections and religion; against Perry, for his accent, business connections and religion, or against Cain for his business connections, and in the left’s time honored way of dealing with black men on the right, his intelligence. Instead he can just campaign on a platform of fighting against corporate control of government—even while he has his hand so deep in the corporate till there are logos on his knuckles.

[…]

From “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For” to “Greater Together”, the slogans once again try to fool younger voters into feeling as if they are part of his story. Back on the talk show circuit, the magazine cover, the smirk is flashed and everyone cheers at the right moment. The change is coming.

The problem with the incumbent as the insurgent is that the public blames the incumbent for the things that happened on his watch. For the incumbent to run as an insurgent, he needs an enemy to blame for everything that came before. The Republican congress fits part of the bill, with constant warnings that electing members of another party has so badly gridlocked the government that the bills he won’t submit aren’t being voted on.

The whole bill though demands an enemy. A bigger enemy than a bunch of congressmen that most people couldn’t name if they were being waterboarded. Capitalism.

[…]

Obama can’t run on his record for the same reason that Charles Manson can’t apply for parole based on how many murders he was involved in. The negative is all he has left. Teach the people to hate someone else more than him—and he might as well be toasting his second term.

That’s why it doesn’t matter if he’s at a 43 percent approval rating or a 33 percent approval rating. If he can get his opponent to a lower approval rating, then he will win. And the Republican party has made it a little too easy for him. Whoever wins the nomination won’t be a McCain, but neither will he be a Reagan or even a Bush. The problem though is that Obama looks more like Carter or Dukakis and his only stopgap is a press corps that’s eager for treats and a scratch behind the ear.

Class warfare is his last best defense

Class warfare is his last best defense because it shifts the discussion from him to an amorphous foe. Who are the bankers anyway? Why is home heating oil so expensive, why are there so few jobs and why are student loans so expensive. The bankers, obviously. The more people curse Wall Street, the less they’re thinking about how badly the guy with the grin messed up the country.

But on election day, the “bankers” won’t be on the ballot, and painting his opponent as a tool of big business interests is a charge that the media will echo, but is likely to only have a limited resonance with the American public. Most people know what crony capitalism is, even if they don’t have a name for it, and they know that lobbyists write their checks to everyone.

[…]