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Get out the marshmallows and gather ’round the campfire, boys and girls, President Obama is about to give another speech. Whoopee.
OK, so the idea doesn’t exactly send a tingle up your leg or make you swoon with visions of Hope & Change. In that case, you don’t have to wait a minute longer for him to actually declare how he’ll create jobs. Here’s what he will say next week.
“Folks are hurtin’.”
“We have to invest in the future.”
“We need a balanced approach.” “My hope and expectation is that we can put country before party and get something done for the American people.”
The first three are boilerplate arguments for ever-more government spending and ever-higher taxes. Whatever else he says, that will be the heart of his “pivot” to jobs.
There’s nothing new in the approach because it’s exactly what he’s said and done since he took office. He probably calls for tax hikes in his sleep.
It’s the last phrase — “put country before party” — that is especially noteworthy and troubling.
Starting with his Midwest bus tour, the demand that Congress (read Republicans) “put country before party” has repeatedly popped up in his speeches, as it did Monday, when he introduced a new economic aide.
It’s a twist on another staple of his us-against-them rhetoric. Mostly, he’s aimed to divide America along class lines, with his nonstop references to “millionaires and billionaires.”
That was cynical enough, but the message behind the new talking point is darker and more ominous.
The inference that anybody who doesn’t agree with him is putting party before country is essentially an accusation that opponents are unpatriotic. It says they are pulling against America and, by logical extension, labels them as traitors.
This is rancid politics by any reasonable measure, and it reveals the president’s desperation. He sees the polls and knows the odds are rising that he’ll be a one-termer because he broke the bank on failed economic policies.
By landslide proportions, 55 percent of voters tell Gallup they disapprove of his job performance and 76 percent say the economy is getting worse. His signature issue, ObamaCare, now commands support from only 39 percent of the nation, the Kaiser Foundation says.
Equally telling, Americans for the first time view the federal government more negatively than any major business or industry, with only 17 percent having a positive view of Washington, Gallup reports. That’s below the oil and gas industry!
Yet even at this late date in his term, Obama has no new ideas on how to create jobs, nor is he willing to embrace the GOP push to cut spending, reform the tax code and trim the regulations strangling business growth. He is sticking with the same failed Big Government policies that got him and the nation to this downgraded moment.
He has largely given up on changing the substance of his economic and fiscal record before the election. White House deliberations reportedly focus not on what ideas would create jobs, but on how to frame the argument so he is not blamed for the failure.
It’s a game plan that hangs on impugning the integrity of any and all opponents. It’s pure character assassination, but, because he won’t change policies, cheap politics is all he has left.
As I have noted before, that’s not the kind of president he said he would be. But that’s the kind of president he is.
Dem runs very scared
There’s a delightful fragrance coming from Anthony Weiner’s old congressional district. It smells like an upset.
“I believe we’re going to win,” former Mayor Ed Koch told me yesterday. He crossed party lines to back GOP businessman Bob Turner, and senses that Democrat David Weprin is starting to panic.
Weprin, a state assemblyman, ducked out of a debate he had promised to attend in Middle Village, Queens. He offered a lame excuse about logistics after Hurricane Irene, which was odd because Turner’s home was in the flood plain and had to be evacuated — and he still made the debate.
Displaying a touch of political theater to milk the blunder, Turner’s team sent a car to Weprin’s house with an offer to drive him to the debate.
“Weprin’s running away from the debate is sheer terror,” Koch said. “He’s overwhelmed.”
Weprin also recently flubbed a question about the size of the national debt, putting it at $4 trillion — when the real number is $14 trillion. For somebody who touts his financial experience in city and state government, that’s no small mistake.
Registered Democrats have a 3-1 edge in the Brooklyn-Queens district, but one poll showed Turner trailing by only six points. The special election is scheduled for September 13.
Although Turner pulled 40 percent against the disgraced Weiner last year, this contest looked like a Dem slam dunk until Koch got involved. He wants to send a message to President Obama, whom he accuses of “throwing Israel under the bus.”
Obama’s falling popularity is also helping Turner. A recent poll showed Obama underwater with New York voters for the first time, meaning more disapproved than approved of his performance.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is also backing Turner. He and Koch are scheduled to campaign together with Turner later this week.
A ‘SPOT’ OF TROUBLE AT SOFITEL
It is a shocking experience to read the prosecutors’ court document asking for dismissal of criminal charges in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. In fact, there are two shocks.
The first is the vast litany of lies the maid told prosecutors and a grand jury in making her allegations of rape. She should be charged with perjury and, if convicted, deported.
The second shock is what else prosecutors found in Strauss-Kahn’s room, Suite 2806, at the Sofitel hotel. After noting that a section of carpet had traces of his semen and the maid’s DNA, a footnote dryly summarizes test results from a section of the wallpaper and four other carpet stains apparently left by previous customers. “Three of the other stains on the carpet contained the semen and DNA of three different unknown males, and one other stain contained amylase and a mixture of DNA from three additional unknown individuals. The stain on the wallpaper contained the semen and DNA of a fourth unknown male.”
Yikes. That room was so dirty, bedbugs would be an upgrade.
Silly game of tag
From The Times of London: “Security firm staff sacked for tagging offender’s false leg … They put electronic tag on offender’s prosthetic limb, which he could then remove to escape detection.”
Don’t give Lindsay Lohan any ideas.
Loathing fear
So the United Nations is beating the fear drums about a mutant strain of bird flu.
Sorry, but thanks to Irene, we’re all tapped out of fear just now. Give us a few days, and we’ll be ready to be afraid again.