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Early Jobs Projections Could Haunt Obama in 2012 – NYTimes.com

thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com11/4/11

Friday's tepid jobs report brings a fresh reminder of the stubborn difficulty President Obama and his team face in overcoming the argument that his administration has failed to address unemployment.

Droves Of Democrats Balking On Obama 2012 | Politicons

politicons.net11/14/11

Radioactive Obama… Politico has a piece highlighting the droves of Democrats that are refusing to back Obama in 2012. …

Just one year from the 2012 election and President Obama is in an extremely perilous political situation.

The poor economy he inherited hasn’t recovered and has most likely worsened.

Published unemployment is stuck above 9% with real unemployment being around 18.5%

Long-term unemployment is at record post-war levels.

The housing sector, where most people’s personal wealth was and is concentrated, remains mired in deep recession.

The scandals surrounding Republican-led investigations into Solyndra and Operation Fast and Furious are deepening.

Obama Had Overwhelming Majorities In Both Houses Of Congress

Although the President had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress in his first two years, he has only two major legislative achievements to his credit:

The stimulus bill.

And Obamacare.

The stimulus bill is generally perceived as having been worse than a total failure, because it’s perceived as having been motivated more by politics than economics, and because much of the $800 billion was directed towards public service union members and liberal causes; i.e. "green energy", rather than real economic recovery.

Obamacare also remains deeply unpopular with the general public and is headed for the Supreme Court, which could well find its key provision unconstitutional next summer, just as the election gets into high gear.

The Economy And America’s Status

Budget deficits soared during the Obama years, with three trillion-dollar-plus deficits in a row.

And this has caused the national debt to swell to a level that, relative to GDP, has not been seen since the end of World War II and for the first time ever, the United States lost its AAA credit rating, which was a deep embarrassment for the country and also the administration.

Obama’s Ratings

So it shouldn’t be surprising that under these circumstances, that the President’s approval ratings have been in sharp decline, with some of his key supporting groups, including the youth and Hispanic voters to a greater or less degree abandoning him.

Obama’s Re-electability

No recent President was re-elected with unemployment above 7.8%, and that was in 1984, when unemployment was falling rapidly as a major economic boom accelerated.

So What Happened?

How did a man who three years ago won a higher percentage of both the popular and electoral vote than any Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide almost fifty years ago find himself fighting such uphill odds to keep the White House?

The answer to that seems to lie in the somewhat exceptional circumstances that existed during the 2008 election, and Barack Obama’s personality which fitted the times.

In 2008, the American electorate was thoroughly tired of both the Bush administration and the Republican Party, which had lost its majority in Congress in 2006 for the first time in twelve years.

The Republican field of presidential candidates in 2008 was a weak one, with the eventual winner, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, widely perceived as being too old for the job.

So Obama, who was only forty seven years old, seemed in contrast, like a breath of fresh air.

He seemed personable, articulate (nobody had yet focused on his TelePrompTer) and he was the first ever bi-racial candidate for a major-party nomination with any serious chance of winning.

His biggest opposition was Sen. Hillary Clinton, the first woman candidate who also had a serious chance of winning, but she was already well known to the American people, having been First Lady for eight years; and she carried a lot of baggage from her husband’s administration.

Obama, in contrast, was a blank slate and to some extent still is because of the main stream media which is still protecting him.

Obama Hid His Tracks

Obama only served a little over three years in the US Senate, where his record was thin, and he mostly voted "present” rather than take a stand on issues.

Which we can now see was because he didn’t want evidence that could later be used against him.

How Obama Won

The Obama campaign used his lack of Washington experience to the fullest, much like Herman Cain is using his now.

They cultivated an image of a new kind of president, one who would cut through the old Washington merry-go-round of partisan bickering and special-interest pandering.

He would be post-partisan, a President who would throw the special-interest moneychangers out of the temple of the nation’s capital.

Obama’s biggest advantage in the 2008 election however, was that the mainstream media, failed to reveal any of his major negatives, such as having been and active member of the New Party (communist) and promoted all of his seeming positives; simply because it so desperately wanted to see an extreme left-wing, bi-racial candidate elected.

So What Happened To Candidate Obama’s Promises?

Running for President and being President, are two entirely separate matters however, and once in the White House a new Obama emerged, one who was quite different from the post-partisan, special-interest-bashing one.

What metamorphosed, was a hyper-liberal ideologue who attended to his special interests, such as labor unions, as assiduously as any other Washington politician had ever done before.

And what’s more, an arrogance and a rigidity that had not been seen in the candidate before, became increasingly evident, and expressed itself in such things as his State of the Union speech in January 2010, wherein he publicly criticized the Supreme Court, many of whose members were sitting in front of him for one of its decisions, which was totally unprecedented behavior.

Soon Gone Was The Bi-Partisanship

"I won the election”, he bluntly told Rep. Paul Ryan when the latter tried to negotiate regarding Obamacare, and it resulted in his two major pieces of legislation passing with almost no Republican votes in either house.

The Tea Party

What happened next was a groundswell of opposition to the Obama administration’s big spending ways which quickly became known as the Tea Party, and it’s something that Obama naively or arrogantly ignored for too long.

Obama Vainly Ignored The Clear Writing On The Wall

Republican candidates did extremely well in the off-year elections of 2009, winning the governorships in both New Jersey and Virginia with control-the-spending campaigns, and even greater evidence of voters’ dissatisfaction was when Scott Brown, who was a little known Republican, won the special election to fill the Senate seat of Democratic icon Ted Kennedy in deep-blue Massachusetts in January, 2010.

Obama Has Been Slow To Learn

Obama simply made a few token political adjustments, and in November, 2010, a tidal wave election gave decisive control of the House back to the Republicans and added seven Senate seats to their column, with Republicans also winning races for governor and state legislative seats across the width and breadth of the country.

Obama did admit that he had taken a shellacking, but he seems no more willing to change his ways than before because his latest plan to stimulate the economy is little different than his first one, and it has no chance of being enacted.

Can Obama Win Reelection?

Unlikely unless:

The economy turns around.

The Republicans nominate another weak candidate, which is possible.

The Supreme Court upholds Obamacare, or avoids making a decision before the election.

Obama’s biggest problem however seems to be that he’s totally egocentric and believes that his way is the only right way.

It’s highly unlikely that he’ll change, and increasingly likely that he’ll be a one term president, which is something that he said that he’d prefer.

"I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president".

And if that comes to be, then he’ll be able to say that he was right about that too!

Prof. Niall Ferguson on Obama: A colossal failure of American foreign

The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak's cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. …

Publish Date: 09/30/2011 6:43

http://politicalarena.org/2011/09/29/prof-niall-ferguson-on-obama-a-colossal-failure-of-american-foreign-policy/

RealClearPolitics – President's Foreign Policy Failures Increase

President Obama, like most American presidents, is lucky that the public pays little attention to foreign policy and rarely casts its votes on the basis of presidential foreign-policy performance. It required something as dramatic …

Publish Date: 09/28/2011 5:53

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/09/28/presidents_foreign_policy_failures_increase_111498.html

Click on the image to enlarge it.

ObamaCare finally scraped through and seems too have given Obama a little boost back home, but his overseas agenda is looking worse and worse.

Before going into the blunders it needs to be said that although the Obama administration did achieve a missile treaty with Russia, it was far more profitable for Russia than for the U.S. because Russia needed to reduce the costs of its nuclear arsenal, and the arms talks with the U.S. gave it some wanted prestige.

So Who Has Obama Upset So Far?

Canada

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly criticized the Canadians for failing to invite all eight members of the Arctic Council to a recent consultation and the following day, the Canadian Foreign announced that Canada will be ending its Afghan mission next year.

Just one day after the above was written, Clinton again publicly attacked Canada.

This time critiquing it’s approach to abortion.

Israel

Obama behaved as badly as is possible by telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he was going to have dinner and hoped that Netanyahu would have come up with some better ideas by the time he returned.

The E.U.

The administration recently angered the EU by refusing to attend a summit in Madrid and the EU powers are no longer leaping to Washington’s support on Afghanistan.

Britain

The administration angered Britain by seeming to side with Argentina over negotiations about the Falklands Islands and a British parliamentary committee has just pronounced the US-UK special relationship as over.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s  President Karzai was angered because his visit was cancelled.

Brazil

Obama upset the Brazilians by rushing over to Copenhagen to try and snatch the 2016 Olympics from Rio and Brazil’s President Lula da Silva has now publicly rejected Secretary Clinton’s public request for support for a sanctions resolution at the U.N.

Turkey

Turkey is angry about the passing of another version of the Armenian genocide resolution through a key House committee and it’s now getting closer to Iran with Russia.

Obama Is Perceived As Weak And Naïve

North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have totally rejected the administrations overtures and the administration’s actions have simply given the world the impression that the administration is weak.

It’s possible that the reason that Israel is being given such a hard time right now, is not so much because of its insistence on building homes in east Jerusalem, but because the U.S. needs to gain some badly needed credibility.

April 7, 2010

Just a quick follow up to the above;

via Ganguly: India Is Annoyed With Obama – Newsweek.com.