Comments Posted By John
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WHAT PLANET HAS OBAMA BEEN VISITING THE LAST YEAR?
I hear bankers are real popular these days. What is the president thinking with a strategy of forcing the GOP to defend AIG and Citigroup.
The American public will rise up as one to defend the perks and salaries of the country’s financial wizards by damn.
They're not going to jump up and down for them -- and I'm sure most believe Obama's sincere in his hatred for banks and big business. But with Obama targeting them while still going to the mat for Geithner and Bernanke, and not mentioning Word One about the problems caused by Congressional Democrats like Barney Frank in running interference for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the housing collapse, I doubt people are going to see Barack as wanting equal justice for all here, and will just figure he's trolling for a suitable scapegoat until he can get John Boehner as House Speark and/or Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader in January of 2011.
Comment Posted By John On 28.01.2010 @ 12:04
But if President Obama now sees that playing the class warrior card as his only option, he will continue to browbeat bankers, insurance companies, and other stock characters in the Karl Marx collection of one act plays. Eventually, he will run out of people to blame - perhaps even George Bush whose policies he continues to follow and promote - and then where will he be?
Basically waiting for the Republicans to take back at least one house of Congress, so he can attempt to triangulate against them in his bid for re-election in 2012 in the same way Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the GOP Congress as his foil in 1995-96.
Obama's populist strategy would love to go after the Republican power brokers right now if he could, but with Nancy Pelosi running the House and Harry Reid in charge of the Senate, the only conservatives with power in D.C. he can go after right now are the five members of the Supreme Court. So Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy become the ones with the targets on their backs, along with banks and big business, because Obama can't attack Congress (or, rather, doesn't have the guts to attack Congress) as long as his party's in power.
Comment Posted By John On 28.01.2010 @ 11:13
ZUCKERMAN'S LAMENT, KRUGMAN'S DISGUST
The difference between Mort and Paul is, looking towards 2012, Krugman has noplace to go, other than to sit home -- hypothetically, the Democratic left could field a primary candidate against Obama, the same way they tried to launch Teddy's bid in 1979 when they thought Jimmy Carter's problem was he wasn't liberal enough.
Zuckerman, on the other hand, already jumped ship from the Democrats in 2000 and 2004, when the Daily News endorsed George W. Bush over Al Gore and John Kerry. He and other moderate Democrats would have an option to their right, depending on what they think of the 2012 Republican nominee (and of course, what Obama does and which way he moves over the next 33 months).
Comment Posted By John On 21.01.2010 @ 11:19
SCOTT BROWN BITES THE HEADS OFF LITTLE CHILDREN AND DRINKS THEIR BLOOD
The most amusing thing about this post is how the comments prove your argument.
"What counts is that nothing Democrats ever do is worse than any one thing a Republican has done."
Comment Posted By John On 17.01.2010 @ 08:37
WHAT HUFFPO'S BILL QUIGLEY WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT HAITI
Let's see ... Haiti won its independence from France in 1803, so shouldn't Quigley be yelling this is all Thomas Jefferson's fault?
Comment Posted By John On 16.01.2010 @ 13:29
A <em>ROGUE</em> REACTION: PALIN IS NO REAGAN
I have my doubts about Palin -- right now she's more feeding off her core supporters than given the swing voters she would need to get new specific reasons to support her (other than just generic conservatism). On the other hand, when Reagan was Palin's current age he was starring with Nancy in "Hellcats of the Navy" and just closing out his time as Screen Actor's Guild leader, so Palin potentially has quite a bit of time to gain 'gravitas' among the unconvinced before she becomes too old to run for higher office (and the left was treating Reagan's presidential aspirations as a joke in 1980, let alone 1956).
But if it does come down to Palin running in 2012, and if she does get the nomination, and if the Obama Administration continues heading in the path it's on today for the next 3 1/2 years, the anti-Palin crowd outside of the core Obama supporters will have a decision to make -- Sarah? Barack? Push for a third party candidate a la John Anderson in 1980? Don't vote at all? Definitely things to think about between now and the 2012 primary season.
Comment Posted By John On 20.11.2009 @ 12:28
IS THERE ANY WAY SARAH PALIN CAN RECOVER?
This is not to say that Palin is stupid. She’s intellectually lazy. I wouldn’t necessarily call her incurious in a George Bush sort of way but neither would I refer to her as possessing the innate intelligence of a Ronald Reagan who actually did change the narrative about himself. Reagan had an active, curious mind and the good sense to reach out to experts who educated him, as well as filling in knowledge gaps by reading voraciously. Palin does not seem to have that spark, that drive, that hunger for knowledge that anyone as ill informed as she admits herself to be should possess. Therefore, I hold no hope that she can transform herself into a reasonably well informed politician.
How Palin does in 2012, if she decides to run will probably depend a lot on how she handles herself as a speaker and fundraiser during the 2010 cycle. But I think you're looking at Reagan with 20/20 hindsight here, as far as the image he was given by Democrats and the media in roughly the same time period of late 1977, following his first major national exposure during his run against Ford in the '76 GOP primary.
Obviously, as a former movie actor governor of California and someone who launched an abortive presidential run in 1968, Reagan had far more of a national image going into 1977 than Palin did. But to say that Reagan was able to "change the narrative" in the year after the '76 election is disingenuous. Reagan was still be portrayed by the big media and the Democrats as an air-headed ex-actor, and that was the general view of the moderate swing voters (future Reagan Democrats) at the time.
It was the awfulness of Jimmy Carter, especially in the period following the '78 midterms that made the swing voters willing to take a second look at Reagan, despite his portrayal as both an idiot and a fanatic who would blow up the world. And that's the other half of the equation facing Palin or whomever the Republican nominee turns out to be in 2012.
The '12 election will be a referendum on Barack Obama more than it will be one on his opponent. The question is what level of anger/frustration does Obama have to create in swing voters who went with him in 2008 to get her to change her vote. Right now, I'd agree that Palin has to do some more pro-active work to get her negatives down among that group, but the worse Obama does, the more those voters are going to be willing to look at Sarah, or any other Republican, as an alternative. She just has to make sure she's ready if and when that time comes around (and if Obama somehow turns things around via either his policies shockingly working out or by some sort of Clinton/Morris triangulation following major Democratic losses in the 2010 midterms, it won't matter how much polish she or any other GOP nominee has; the swing voters will stick with Obama rather than change things if they think the country's going good).
Comment Posted By John On 16.11.2009 @ 21:15
So Sarah is not ready (or maybe never ready) for the big time. So what. Ronald Reagan was considered an empty head after he left as Gov. of California, but he worked hard to educate himself and did a good job as President. (no I am not saying they are equals.)
Is Sarah capable of this? Only Sarah knows and only Sarah can make the necessary changes. She is young (politically speaking), appears to be ambitious, and is at least trying to be part of the solution not the problem.
Talking to real people, not other politicians, is the best way to get educated as to where the American people are and where they want to go.
Give her a chance. Allow her to be herself and learn her own way.
John
Comment Posted By John On 16.11.2009 @ 13:58
YES TO HOFFMAN, BUT NO LITMUS TEST PLEASE
As far as third party vs. GOP goes, it's noteworthy that Sarah Palin came out in support of the New Jersey and Virginia Republican candidates for governor this morning. If you go by the media portrayal that Palin is the leader of the rabid take-no-prisoners wing of the conservative movement, you would think she would have supported Daggett as the third party candidate in New Jersey instead of Christie. But she didn't, because it's a different situation from the Scozzfava situation in NY-23, and more akin to the 1970 New York State Senate race, where conservatives rebelled against Nelson Rockefeller's hand-picked fill-in for Bobby Kennedy, Charles Goodell (NFL commissioner Roger's dad), and elected Conservative Party candidate James Buckley over Goodell and Democrat Thomas Ottinger.
Most conservatives get the situational differences between different elections, and when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em as far as supporting a candidate who they may not be 100 percent in synch with ideologically. They're not going to reflexively go running off and support every third party candidate who's to the right of the Republican nominee, unless that person's record is so beyond the pale that it's unlikely they would support a quarter of what you believe in if elected to office. Scozzfava falls under that criteria in her race against Hoffman; Christie doesn't in his race against Daggett, and the majority of people on the right can tell the difference.
Comment Posted By John On 27.10.2009 @ 12:26
THE NFL IS WORRIED ABOUT A 'RACIST' OWNER?'
Bllomberg News reported on Wednesday that the Checketts group, in addition to including Rush Limbaugh, also had George Soros as an investor in their bid to buy the Rams.
Aside from the weird aspect of Limbaugh and Soros being in the same investor group, and even leaving aside George's political activities, for a league that is facing an end to its current player contract and has a number of owners deathly concerned that owners like Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder are going to try and destory revenue sharing and turn the NFL into a mirror of Major League Baseball -- where a handful of deep-pocket teams dominate the playoffs year after year -- I'd be far more scared of Soros being in, based on his past history of try to corner and/or destroy foreign markets by using his finances to game the market, than I would of Rush Limbaugh.
Comment Posted By John On 15.10.2009 @ 07:19
