The President Is No B+

Written by Karl Rove in today's Wall Street Journal. This man is the best writer in America. One of the few people I would vote for without reservation, fortunately he is too smart to run for office. Unashamedly conservative and he knows right from wrong and good policy from bad. Awesome piece read the whole thing.

The President Is No B+

In fact, he's got the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year.

By KARL ROVE

Barack Obama has won a place in history with the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year: 49% approve and 46% disapprove of his job performance in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll.

There are many factors that explain it, including weakness abroad, an unprecedented spending binge at home, and making a perfectly awful health-care plan his signature domestic initiative. But something else is happening.

Mr. Obama has not governed as the centrist, deficit-fighting, bipartisan consensus builder he promised to be. And his promise to embody a new kind of politics—free of finger-pointing, pettiness and spin—was a mirage. He has cheapened his office with needless attacks on his predecessor.

Consider Mr. Obama's comment in his interview this past Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" that the Bush administration made a mistake in speaking in "a triumphant sense about war."

This was a slap at every president who rallied the nation in dark moments, including Franklin D. Roosevelt ("With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph"); Woodrow Wilson ("Right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts"); and John F. Kennedy ("Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed . . . will be met by whatever action is needed").

This kind of attack gives Mr. Obama's words a slippery quality. For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it "flawed" and blamed "the last administration" for launching it "hastily."

Really? Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner designed it. If it was "flawed," why did Mr. Obama later nominate Mr. Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman and make Mr. Geithner his Treasury secretary?

Mr. Obama also claimed at Brookings that he prevented "a second Great Depression" by confronting the financial crisis "largely without the help" of Republicans. Yet his own Treasury secretary suggests otherwise. In a Dec. 9 letter, Mr. Geithner admitted that since taking office, the Obama administration had "committed about $7 billion to banks, much of which went to small institutions." That compares to $240 billion the Bush administration lent banks. Does Mr. Obama really believe his additional $7 billion forestalled "the potential collapse of our financial system"?

Mr. Obama continued distorting the record in his "60 Minutes" interview Sunday when he blamed bankers for the financial crisis. They "caused the problem," he insisted before complaining, "I haven't seen a lot of shame on their part" and pledging to put "a regulatory system in place that prevents them from putting us in this kind of pickle again."

But as a freshman senator, Mr. Obama supported a threatened 2005 filibuster of a bill regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He doesn't show "a lot of shame" that he and other Fannie and Freddie defenders blocked "a regulatory system" that might have kept America from getting in such a bad pickle in the first place.

The president's rhetorical tricks don't end there. Mr. Obama also claimed his $787 billion stimulus package "helped us [stem] the panic and get the economy growing again." But 1.5 million more people are unemployed than he said there would be if nothing were done.

And as of yesterday, only $244 billion of the stimulus had been spent. Why was $787 billion needed when less than a third of that figure supposedly got the job done?

Mr. Obama also alleged on "60 Minutes" that health-care reform "will actually bring down the deficit" (which people clearly know it will not). He said his reform reduces "costs and premiums for American families and businesses" (though they will be higher than they would otherwise be). And he claimed 30 million more people will get coverage through "an exchange that allows individuals and small businesses" to purchase insurance (though 15 million of them are covered by being dumped into Medicaid and don't get private insurance).

Mr. Obama may actually believe it when he says, "I think that's a pretty darned good outcome" and congratulates himself that he could succeed where "seven presidents have tried . . . [and] seven presidents have failed."

But voters seem to have a different definition of success. And they are tiring of the president's blame shifting and distortions.

Mr. Obama may believe, as he told Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview, that he deserves a "solid B+" for his first year in office, but the American people beg to differ. A presidency that started with so much promise is receiving unprecedentedly low grades from the country that elected him. He's earned them.

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

Reagan Policies: Still The Best Way

This article in The Wall Street Journal from 2 weeks ago pretty much sums up the size pussies Congressional republicans are growing. No leadership is stepping up and speaking out for whatever reason. This is messed up because they all know that tax cuts for all Americans got us out of the last recession, not a massive spending plan that will saddle our great-grandchildren with debt they cannot ever pay their way out of. Rush, Hannity and Levin are not republican leaders they are conservative talk show hosts. There is a huge void in republican leadership which is strange because they cannot do anything anyway might as well take some risks, the truth is on their side. They do not have enough votes to stop Obama or Pelosi or Reid, you think someone would have the stones to step up. Sad, really sad.


MARCH 5, 2009
Has Obama Buried Reagan?
The GOP is faltering in its defense of Republican ideals.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
3/5/2009


The Democratic idea bank of Robert & Robert says it's safe to unload on Ronald Reagan.

Robert Reich: "It is the boldest budget we have seen since the Reagan administration, and drives a nail in the coffin of Reaganomics. We can basically say goodbye to the philosophy espoused by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher."

President Ronald Reagan compares Republican and Democratic economic policies on taxes and spending at the White House.

Robert Shrum: "Obama is not only unwinding Reagan's policies; he is offering a Rooseveltian paradigm that justifies government pragmatically."

Hmmm. Let us consider an alternative universe.

The stock market has been in a free-fall (with a bounce off a ledge yesterday), dismantling the saved wealth of millions of individual Americans who must feel they are living through the exploding rubble of some Hollywood disaster movie.

In reaction, Republicans, true to form, set sail for a deserted island to ponder a dispute between Rush Limbaugh and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. At issue: Who's captain of the GOP Titanic. Americans are ready for a message of economic growth, but who will deliver it?

Someone said, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." Why are the Republicans wasting it?

If the Democrats are willing to bet the entire U.S. economy on a 1931 theory known as the Keynesian multiplier, surely Republicans can excavate and relearn the core idea handed down to them by Ronald Reagan. That idea was known as economic growth.

Freed to choose between these two competing ideas, I'm guessing many voters would go for growth. All that's needed is just one Republican who can explain this idea halfway as well as Ronald Reagan.

Arguably at no time in their lives have more Americans been this sharply focused on the economy. They think and talk about nothing else. The Republicans have been handed on a tarnished silver platter the chance to offer the American people an alternative vision of how their economy works -- and grows.

They should take political ownership of the 75% of the U.S. economy that the Democrats have abandoned -- the private economy.

Over the past four decades and the decline of private-sector industrial unions, professional Democrats -- politicians, intellectuals like Robert & Robert, campaign professionals, unions and satellite groups -- have severed their emotional and intellectual connection with private production.

Today, frontline Democrats see the private sector as doing two things: It produces tax revenue for $3.9 trillion federal budgets, and it shafts workers. The private sector in the Democratic worldview is necessary but nasty. Their leadership gives the impression of not having the simplest understanding of how an employer's life unfolds day to day.

This week's NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds President Obama with a 60% approval. That's high alright, as in high anxiety: 44% say the nation is "off on the wrong track," 41% see it headed in the right direction, and 15% of respondents are in a gray fog.

I have a poll question: Has anyone in America had a single upbeat conversation about anything the past three weeks?

Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many feeling undone. There isn't much in his plan to stir the national soul. It's about "sacrifice" now so that we can live for a future of small electric cars and windmills. This may move the Democratic Party's faith communities, but it cannot revive a great nation. If the Democrats want to embrace market failure as a basis for their ideology, let them have it. As politics, it's a downer.

What Ronald Reagan knew and they don't is that what moves a nation is the vital, teeming life of the private economy -- work, ideas, innovation, the excitement of production, getting bigger. Growth. In the past this world was depicted as blast furnaces and factory chimneys. Today the economy's sinews are harder to see, but they exist in tens of thousands of small-cap, mid-cap and fat-cap companies.

The Republicans -- Romney, Huckabee, Jindal, Pawlenty, Sanford, Newt, Sarah and several hundred 2010 congressional candidates -- must rediscover a way to talk about the living world of the real economy. Their vocabulary now consists mainly of policy-wonk spinach -- "fiscal responsibility," "reduce the debt," and even "tax cuts." True but insufficient.

What Rush Limbaugh was trying to tell that conservative audience in so many words was, Don't be embarrassed. Don't be embarrassed about embracing the world of free markets, competition, entrepreneurship and profit. If you don't know how to talk about it, reread the apostles and evangelists of private economic growth -- Ronald Reagan's "A Life in Letters," Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose," Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson."

Politics, it has been recently demonstrated, is about ideas and language. The conservative movement is not at a loss for proven ideas, and in the U.S. the most powerful of these -- running in an upward line since the Industrial Revolution -- is the idea of private economic growth. The Democrats don't want the private economy anymore and conservatives have forgotten how to talk about it. Democrats are betting their opponents will forget even where Ronald Reagan is buried. They should be so lucky.

Write to henninger@wsj.com