Today, post US-credit-downgrade by S&P, stocks are tanking. Obama gets on live TV in the middle of the trading day, lies brazenly about the narrowly averted threat of govt default (a bogus threat that he himself used to try to lever Republicans into agreeing to more of the profligate tax-and-spend that put us into the current mess), and reminds everyone that he is still holding out for tax increases. While he does this the stock market is steadily ticking down and gold is steadily ticking up. Finally he starts talking about Afghanistan and stocks recover a bit, only to tank again later. Is there nobody on his staff with the sense to tell him to avoid making gratuitous comments about markets during trading hours? Or is he simply so arrogant that he thinks that he can talk the market up so that the public won’t see him as the colossal failure that he is? Who knows. You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but it’s generally wise to assume that you can’t fool markets any of the time. Markets tell the truth and they discount bullshit. A politician stupid or desperate enough to go up against the markets with bullshit arguments like Obama’s is submitting to a public lie detector test that he will fail. A humbler man might learn from such an experience. I doubt that Obama will, and the American public will continue to pay for his bad ideas and arrogance.
Obama
Quote of the Day
A comment by ArtChance in response to this NRO piece by Stanley Kurtz:
We few out in the Country who actually practice adversarial public sector labor relations knew what Comrade Obama was the second we laid eyes on him. By “adversarial” I mean work for a Republican government in a union state where you actually have to bargain with unions. In Democrat controlled states, the government conspires with unions against the people and the legislature.
When I saw him make his famous speech at the ’02 (IIRC) convention I said to myself, “I know you, you’re the one they think they can dress up and pass off as reasonable.” He’s pretty much a by the book communist/union organizer and anyone who deals with him should know Alinsky like a Baptist minister knows the New Testament.
Somebody like Obama is almost impossible for “nice guy” Republicans to deal with. The Republicans get their ideas about negotiating from “Getting to Yes” while Obama and his ilk get theirs from “Rules for Radicals.” In the recent debt debate, Obama didn’t want a deal, he wanted a political process that could be played to his advantage, and he was very successful against the “nice guys” in getting that. Typical of an Alinskyite, he never made a concrete proposal, just some pie in the sky positions, and made the Republicans negotiate with themselves to try to come up with something he would buy. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a public employee union knows that game. If you start from the position that a agreement with them is your objective, you wind up compromising yourself into their position, which is exactly what Boehner/McConnell did. Both of them are too much from the “nice guy” tradition to understand that the only way to bargain with a communist-trained negotiator is to start out with a position that if he is forced to accept it, will kill him politically or economically and make it so that the default from his not reaching agreement is having to live under your untenable for him conditions. In other words, you really do have to do what the Ds were accusing the Tea Partiers of, you hold a gun to their heads, a political or economic gun of course, and quietly say, “be reasonable so I don’t have to use it.”
Interesting Poll And Money Action
The Dems winning the presidency is trending down on Intrade as you can see on the sidebar. As of this writing it is sitting at 56% or so. I like Intrade better than polls since people are actually putting their money where there mouth is at Intrade, whereas with polls there are tons of other factors at play.
That said, Ann Althouse has an interesting poll up today framed thusly:
If you HAD to bet one thousand USD of your own money on whether or not Obama would be re-elected, would you put the money on Obama or not? The results so far are 75-25 that he will not get re-elected.
I have been pounding the table all along that when the rubber hits the road, the dissatisfied left and others will crawl across broken glass to vote for Obama and that he will win. I still think he will but am not as certain as I used to be. In other words, I wouldn’t bet you dinner on it. And that is good.
*Full disclosure – this blog is an Intrade affiliate.
King of the Word People
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR:Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
(Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth)
Yesterday, Andrew Klavan put up a post titled Just Words?, in which he describes Obama in these terms:
The president, in short, has a problem with his mouth: words keep coming out of it that have nothing to do with the truth. He doesn’t even speak plainly. In matters that might be controversial or unpopular, he almost never calls anything by its proper name. He talks about “cutting spending in the tax code” when he means raising taxes; about “making investments” when he means more government spending. And the parts of what he says that can be clearly understood almost never describe his true intentions or his ultimate actions.
and
During Hillary Clinton’s losing nomination fight against Obama, the Clinton camp famously charged that while Obama’s speeches were impressive, his record was virtually non-existent. “When all is said and done, words aren’t action. They are just words,” the Clintonistas said.
and
Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to care what his words mean, only how they sound, only what they get him. The answer, then, is yes, when this president speaks, it really is just words.
As I’ve previously observed, a large and increasing proportion of Americans earn their living through the manipulation of words and images–lawyers, writers, entertainers, journalists, professors outside the hard sciences, certain types of consultants. For people in these professions, there is a constant temptation to over-value their own and related activities such that they wind up implicitly believing that nothing really matters but words/images and their deployment; that all other forms of human endeavor are trivial in comparison. Not all people in these fields fall prey to this fallacy (Klavan, after all, is himself a writer) but many do. Obama is the avatar of such people.
An Explanation for Obama’s actions
The debt ceiling debate has dragged on creating frustration and some anxiety about the economic consequences of default. President Obama has even threatened to withhold Social Security checks, claiming there would be no money for payment. Through most of this he has seemed to me to be unserious about the matter and using it chiefly to try to improve his chances for re-election. Fred Barnes has now come up with what I consider a good explanation for his behavior, including the last moment maneuvers yesterday.
First, the trade treaties:
The path to ratification by Congress was greased after President Obama renegotiated trade treaties with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Obama would supply Democratic votes. Republicans were already on board, President Bush having put together the treaties in the first place. It had the look of a done deal.
It wasn’t. In May, the White House suddenly insisted the treaties be accompanied by roughly $1 billion in Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA as it’s known in Washington. Organized labor was demanding TAA funds be set aside for workers whose jobs might be lost as a result of the treaties. Obama took up the cause.
Then there was the oil pipeline from Canada:
The Keystone XL pipeline from the oil sands in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast is another win-win issue for Obama, if only he’d embrace it. Canada is America’s leading foreign supplier of oil. The more Canada exports to the United States, the less we’re forced to rely on unfriendly folks in the Middle East and on Latin American countries (Mexico, Venezuela) whose oil production is declining. With the new pipeline, Canada would increase its exports by as much as 700,000 barrels a day. (The United States consumes 10-11 million barrels daily.)
A permit to build the pipeline was requested nearly three years ago by TransCanada. Because it would cross an international border, approval must be granted by the State Department. This was expected to be a snap, particularly after gasoline prices reached $4 a gallon. White House aides thought so, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated she was ready to approve it.
Then the environmental lobby, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, began a campaign against approval, and the Environmental Protection Agency joined in. It criticized the State Department’s first environmental impact statement, which found the pipeline would have little effect on the environment. Clinton buckled, and a second impact statement was ordered. Last month, EPA said the new study was “inadequate.”
Both of these initiatives promised thousands of new jobs and would seem to be helpful to Obama in his quest for a second term. In both cases, a left wing member of his base intervened and his support collapsed.
Now, the debt ceiling:
The Speaker and the President had nearly agreed on a plan that included $800 billion in “revenue enhancements” but did not raise rates. What happened ?
House Speaker John Boehner’s (R., Ohio) office is pushing back against White House claims that the new revenue in the “framework” being discussed in the now defunct negotiations would have been generated by letting current tax rates expire. “That is simply false,” writes Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.
In reality, Steel writes, the White House offered a “ceiling” of $800 billion in new revenue over 10 years that would be achieved through comprehensive tax reform (e.g., eliminating loopholes, credits and deductions) in a way that would stimulate economic growth. This would not constitute a tax increase.
Following the release of the Gang of Six proposal, however, the White House then insisted on an additional $400 billion in actual tax increases, for a total of $1.2 trillion in revenue that would become the new “floor” for revenues. Additionally, the administration backed away from several aspects of the tax reform package they had already agreed to, including a protection against tax hikes on small businesses and a guarantee that they would only be three tiers of tax rates, the highest of which would be below 35 percent.
In regard to Social Security, the two sides had agreed on a change in the way the government calculates inflation (the so-called “chain CPI”) that would extend the program’s solvency. However, the White House reneged on a previously agreed-upon solvency target and offered a weaker target that would yield 25 percent less in savings.
What had happened was that the “Gang of Six” report was released and the revenue (tax) increases there looked better to Obama so he reneged on the pending deal with Boehner. There was also considerable discussion that Democrats were furious with him because he had not insisted on tax increases. Revenue from loophole closing was not enough.
No. I think what happened is Congressional Democrats got a whiff of a possible deal where you get entitlement cuts and tax reform, say, next year — which might increase revenue or might not — and they panicked because a) they have a religious belief in raising the taxes. If you don’t have that, you can’t have a deal, so it created a kind of a theological panic.
Obama, it seems, cannot stand up to the rest of his party. He will negotiate but once some interest group objects, he is gone. No deal.
It’s a good thing the Soviet Union is gone.