Thursday, June 21, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
A White House mess
By JOHN PODHORETZ
Last Updated: 12:48 AM, June 19, 2012
Posted: 10:28 PM, June 18, 2012
One little-known fact about the world of journalism is that news organizations prepare obituaries of famous people while those people are still alive, so that packages of material will be ready to go when a death is announced.
Over the past week, journalists have been writing articles that have the quality of these sorts of pre-obituaries — only the event they’re anticipating isn’t the last breath of an individual but the defeat of President Obama’s re-election bid.
Even more striking, these journalists aren’t conservatives indulging in their deepest wish, but rather liberals who admire Obama and want to see him win a second term.
Al Hunt, who was for decades the voice of liberal conventional wisdom as the Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, declared yesterday in his Bloomberg column that Obama “needs an intervention.”
Channeling the view of a dozen unnamed leading Democrats, Hunt said “the central challenge” is for Obama to craft “a compelling narrative from the president and campaign, which [these Democratic sages] describe as unusually insular and arrogant.”
The Obama people won’t listen, he complained: “Any outreach by Obama’s Chicago acolytes to hear out these arguments is limited and superficial. A longtime Democratic strategist predicts defeat unless there is some boldness.”
E.J. Dionne — perhaps Obama’s most devoted op-ed-writing fan — reported that campaign honcho David Axelrod was finding it necessary to buck up the staff because it has become clear their guy may lose. “Obama,” Dionne lamented, “is not blessed with the opportunity to be simple.”
Romney, you see, can be simple because he can say Obama’s policies haven’t worked. What a gyp!
Obama, Dionne continued, “has to show that he knows things are bad for a lot of people but also insist that his policies made things a whole lot better than they would have been. He has to argue that the Republicans are blocking his proposals to improve the economy, but he doesn’t want to look like a politician inventing an alibi.”
All of the president’s good work — which, in the view of these writers, includes the stimulus and ObamaCare — is simply too difficult to defend in the face of the “easy” Romney attacks.
This behavior should be familiar to anyone familiar with the behavior of political journalists from time immemorial — and it should worry Obama supporters.
Well-run, well-managed campaigns are chronicled admiringly. Poorly-run and ill-considered campaigns are the recipients of massive amounts of unwanted, unsolicited and annoying advice.
And part of the reason for the copious quantity of advice is to allow the adviser to say “I told you so” when his counsel is disregarded and the candidate loses.
Hunt’s piece suggests the frustration in dealing with White Houses and re-election campaigns that don’t know how much trouble they’re in. Every president and his team seem to remain absurdly calm and preposterously sure of themselves even as the political winds are shifting.
The odd habit of taking a cat nap on the subway track while the IRT is bearing down on you at 60 miles an hour isn’t unique to this administration. In 1993, I wrote a book, “Hell of a Ride,” that chronicled the suicide of the George H.W. Bush presidency in part due to the excess of calm inside the White House bubble.
The same self-destructive calm was in effect in 1994, when Bill Clinton’s party was shocked to find itself decimated by the Republicans in the midterm elections; in 2006, when George W. Bush’s party was similarly thumped — and in 2010, when Barack Obama’s party was shellacked.
To be sure, the Obamaites have revealed they’re not entirely without a pulse, as the president’s audacious declaration on Friday that he would simply not enforce immigration laws on around 1 million people demonstrated. That was a nervy move, designed to secure political advantage with Hispanic voters and put Romney in a difficult position.
Now, I think Obama is right that, as a matter of policy, the United States should make special provision for those brought to the United States as children by illegal-immigrant parents. But it is wrong, and possibly unconstitutional, for a president to arrogate to himself the power to pick and choose which laws his administration is going to enforce.
That is banana-republic stuff. Of course, you’ll never hear his acolytes saying so. They’re too worried about him losing to object to questionable behavior on a matter as inconsequential as the rule of law.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/white_house_mess_cnskCpbKKgLIIaUh3wMZHK#ixzz1yGvL2UpZ
A Slick About-Face on Oil - Barron's
President Obama takes credit for more oil and gas drilling in the U.S., while the American Petroleum Institute cries foul. Why voters won't be fooled.
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President Obama's oil politics are changing -- again. He's scraping off his anti-oil war bonnet in advance of the election and taking credit at every campaign whistle-stop for increased U.S. oil and gas production, even though most of the drilling is occurring on private, not federal, land. The reason for Obama's about-face is that the election is shaping up to be close. Since the public largely favors exploiting all of our domestic gas and oil resources, on and off shore, Obama feels he must lip-sync a version "drill, baby, drill."
A few voters might be fooled by the president's rapid lane change, but investors remain unimpressed. His change of tone hasn't affected energy-stock prices. In fact, Obama's energy shape-shifting never has had a measurable impact on investors. On the first trading day following the President's vilification of big oil in his Jan. 25, 2011, State of the Union Address, the Energy Select Sector SPDR (ticker: XLE) closed at $71.84, up $1.68. On April 17, 2012, following his remarks in the Rose Garden that insinuated shady commodity traders were manipulating petroleum prices, the XLE closed at $69.35, up $1.11 cents.
ONE POLITICAL CHANGE THAT might make a significant difference for the energy sector, however, would be Obama's defeat. Investors who believe that will happen should begin wading into the sector now. Obama might already have lost the White House for failing to deliver his promised turnaround in the economy. Many voters view his stimulus as a flop. They object to the government's rewriting of health-care policy. They perceive Obama to be a job-killer, not a job creator, for backing speculative green-energy ventures run by his supporters and obstructing the creation of tangible jobs by not supporting energy projects like the Keystone Pipeline from Canada and drilling off of our coasts. Many voters were angry about all of this in 2010 and, according to most polls, after two years they remain angry.
Oil and gas executives aren't assuaged by the president's recent public turnabout. His administration in their view remains a costly bottleneck to the exploration and development of new fields off of our coastlines, in Alaska, and on federally owned lands in the west. Obama also wants to hike industry taxes significantly, in part to reduce the pricing advantage of petroleum fuels over renewable energy.
The fossil-fuel crowd complains that the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) permitting process is so slow that it discourages gas and oil development. Some permit reviews take three years, according to the Western Energy Alliance. The BLM, under pressure from the Obama administration, promises to reduce the review time to 60 days or less by May 2013 when a new automated system is in place. Oil and gas drillers say new proposed fracking rules inspired by the Environmental Protection Agency are duplicative of state rules and would increase the time, cost,and risk of drilling for gas on federal lands.
Republican Rep. James Lankford, who chairs a government-oversight subcommittee, protested at a May 31 hearing on fracking that the EPA was becoming an obstacle on the nation's road to energy independence. He said, for instance, that in 2005 the Congress exempted drillers from regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act -- except when diesel fuel was used as a component of the chemicals used to split shale to extract natural gas.
"The EPA appears to be attempting an end-run around the statute by brazenly redefining diesel fuels to include virtually any petroleum product," Lankford said.
Some of the EPA's rules seem absurd. Last week the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers filed suit against the agency in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging a requirement for refiners to blend gasoline with cellulosic ethanol or pay the EPA a waiver credit. Cellulosic ethanol doesn't yet exist in commercial quantities. Yet the EPA forced refiners pay $6.78 million in waiver fees in 2011 for failing to blend in 6.6 million phantom gallons.
THE INDUSTRY IS INTENT ON MAKING the president's anti-oil record a major campaign issue. Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute, which is based in Washington, D.C., has been travelling around the country to "educate" voters about the costs of Obama's policies. The API never before has waged an election-year issue campaign.
A genuine pro-oil policy, he says, would create 1.4 million new jobs by 2030, raise $800 billion in new tax revenue, and cut dependence on Middle Eastern oil. He likes to talk about high-school grads working on North Dakota's Bakken Field who are making $90,000-per-year or more.
Gerard claims his industry has bipartisan support. When he visited Missouri this month to boost the Keystone Pipeline, which is being delayed by Obama, he was joined onstage by Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon and trade-union representatives. About $1 billion would be spent building a portion of the pipeline through Missouri. When Gerard visited Denver soon after to speak to about 400 businessmen, he was joined onstage by Gov. John Hickenlooper, also a Democrat.
When Barron's recently told one of the president's top economic advisors that the API was waging such a campaign, and being joined by Democrats, the advisor expressed surprise. Hadn't the oil men been listening to President Obama's speeches? Every word, it seems.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Obama Entering a World All His Own
Obama Entering a World All His Own: pBarack Obama’s increasingly desperate struggle to win re-election is causing some of his worst traits to be put on display, including petulance and self-pity. The latest example occurred during a fundraiser in Baltimore, when the president said, “Because folks are still hurting right now, the other side feels that it’s enough for them to just [...]/p
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