Yet another answer to Jonathan Alter's Challenge

Mickey Kaus offers yet another good response to Obama apologist Jonathan Alter's bizarre challenge to say what should have been done differently. I have now seen dozens of reponses to Alter. Can we stipulate Alter's challenge has been met and exceeded? How myopic must you be not to learn from your mistakes? What compels Alter to keep defending the indefensible?

1. Not subcontracted out the details of the 2009 stimulus to interest-group-addled Congressional Democrats. 

2. Sold his health care reform as a valuable benefit for voters that would give them security (they’d be covered) and freedom (they could leave their jobs without losing insurance) rather than as an eat-your-peas plan that would not only “bend the cost curve” 

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. 

4. Pivoted to jobs

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism“

7.  going vigorously after Wall Street.

8. Not appointed pro-union innovators to NLRB who try to hamstring our biggest remaining industrial exporter 

9. Faced with Republican demands for leaner government, embraced them! 

10. Defend the core of Medicare, a popular universal program that works and (according to Orszag) is cutting costs, rather than proposing to  shrink Medicare by raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67. 

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All it needs is additional counters for Michelle's taxpayer funded vacation tab, the tons of carbon emitted by endless AirForce One campaign fundraising flights, the number of rounds of golf played in current Fiscal year and the number of hearings put on C-Span. And, oh yeah, the number of days since the Senate last proposed a budget.

An Obama-made becalming of the economic waters

A spot-on analysis by Hugh Hewitt . Does Obama have the smarts and the guts to change for the good of the country?

This is an Obama-made becalming of the economic waters, an inevitability when Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, an out-of-control federal regulatory blob consisting of the Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Interior and more, combined with massive deficits to create the perfect storm for the private sector.

Amity Shlaes described in her magnificent "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" how President Franklin Roosevelt and his group of political operatives and academic theorists prolonged the terrible times brought on by the Crash of 1929 by endless "innovation."

The uncertainty that resulted drove capital and the entrepreneurs who might have deployed it underground. Unpredictable government was a menace to private-sector planning and investment, but this fundamental truth eluded Roosevelt.

Sadly, Obama, wearing his Alinskyite blinders and advised by his Chicago gang, either didn't read or failed to understand Shlaes' arguments. Every promise he made about every policy and program he proposed has turned to ash, and the national headache is profound and debilitating.

Don't expect "hope and change" to be the defining brand of the president's bid for re-election. But do expect a "hair of the dog" set of proposals when the president unveils the specifics of his latest "hard pivot" to jobs.

Could the president really trust his mainstream media allies so much that he would dare propose a second stimulus? It would require an almost Mount Everest amount of self-regard and economic ignorance to believe that more federal spending is the ticket out of our near zero-growth economy.

Obama Won't Escape Blame for Credit Downgrade

Phillip Klein is 100% correct in this assessment.

This timeline gives the clear impression of a weak non-leader whose presidency was highjacked by ideologues who kept Obama working on their pet liberal dream issues rather than the issues important to the country. He never quite got around to pivoting back to jobs and the economy. Rather he spent like a drunken Liberal sailor..

This is Obama's downgrade...

Standard and Poor’s explanation for why it downgraded U.S. debt is written in such a way that it can be seized upon by all ideological stripes. The statement cites the unwillingness of Republicans to raise taxes and of Democrats to agree to entitlement cuts. And the rating agency’s discourse about the political dysfunction will provide column fodder for Washington pundits who long for the days when both parties would work together to reach compromises. But make no mistake, when all the dust settles, it will be difficult for President Obama to escape blame for this.

Defenders of Obama will attempt to pin the blame on his predecessor, President Bush, and on intransigent Tea Party radicals in the current Congress. But that would leave out the part in between. For his first two years in office, Obama’s party controlled both chambers of Congress – for part of that period, he had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. During that time period, he and his fellow Democrats could have passed his supposedly ideal, long-term, deficit-reduction package -- one that represented a “balanced approach” between spending cuts and tax increases. It also could have delayed the deficit reduction for several years, so it wouldn’t have affected the current weak economy or the “investments” he considers crucial. Forget about actually accomplishing serious deficit reduction -- he didn’t even attempt it.

When Obama came into office, he argued that we needed deficit spending to boost the economy, so he passed a $800 billion stimulus package. Then, in one of his first supposed pivots to the deficit, he convened a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ in February 2009. But that actually turned out to be part of a different pivot altogether. It was during that summit that then White House Budget Director Peter Orszag declared, “health care reform is entitlement reform.”

And so, for the next 13 months, Obama spent all of his energies trying to get health care legislation across the finish line. The end product was a plan that, according to both the Congressional Budget Office and actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, did not bend the health care cost curve down.  Let’s even set aside the argument over the accounting gimmicks that were employed to obtain a CBO score that showed modest deficit reduction. The reality is this: the law used money raised through tax hikes and Medicare cuts that otherwise would have been available for deficit reduction, to instead expand Medicaid by 18 million beneficiaries and create a massive new health care entitlement.

Of course, there’s more. After health care passed last March, Obama punted on the debt for the rest of the year as he awaited a report from his fiscal commission. He then ignored its recommendations and released a budget so ludicrous that within two months, it failed 0 to 97 in the Senate and he himself rejected it. He instead delivered a speech about his deficit reduction vision, which didn’t have enough details for the CBO to score. And then he spent the last few months arguing that he was prepared to offer Republicans a “grand bargain,” but to this day he hasn’t released details of this supposedly awesome deal that Republicans refused, beyond calculated leaks to favored reporters.

But there’s another reason why Obama won’t escape blame for this. Obama was elected president at a time when Americans felt the nation was in decline, and his central job was restore their faith that our best days were ahead of us, as President Reagan did after the Carter era. Whether you think he was dealt a poor hand or not, the bottom line is that the sense of decline has only deepened during the Obama presidency, and the first-ever downgrade of U.S. credit, whatever its ultimate financial implications, is yet another symbol of that decline.