From Audacity to Animosity [ Editado ]

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From Audacity to Animosity
No president has alienated his base the way Obama has.
By PEGGY NOONAN..

WSJ 12/10/2010
      We have not in our lifetimes seen a president in this ppsitiomnHe spent his first year losing the center, which elected him, and his second losing his base, which is supposed to provide his troops. There isn’t much left to lose! Which may explain Tuesday’s press conference.

       President Obama was supposed to be announcing an important compromise, as he put it, on tax policy. Normally a president, having agreed with the opposition on something big, would go through certain expected motions. He would laud the specific virtues of the plan, show graciousness toward the negotiators on the other side—graciousness implies that you won—and refer respectfully to potential critics as people who’ll surely come around once they are fully exposed to the deep merits of the plan.

    Instead Mr. Obama said, essentially, that he hates the deal he just agreed to, hates the people he made the deal with, and hates even more the people who’ll criticize it. His statement was startling in the breadth of its animosity. Republicans are “hostage takers” who worship a “holy grail” of “tax cuts for the wealthy.” “That seems to be their central economic doctrine.”

       As for the left, they ignore his accomplishments and are always looking for “weakness and compromise.” They are “sanctimonious,” “purist,” and just want to “feel good about” themselves. In a difficult world, they cling to their “ideal positions” and constant charges of “betrayals.”

     Those not of the left might view all this as straight talk, and much needed. But if you were of the left it would only deepen your anger and sharpen your response. Which it did. “Gettysburg,” “sellout,” “disaster.”

Editorial Board Member Steve Moore on the tax deal.

    The president must have thought that distancing himself from left and right would make him more attractive to the center. But you get credit for going to the center only if you say the centrist pposition you’ve just embraced is right. If you suggest, as the president did, that the seemingly moderate plan you agreed to is awful and you’ll try to rescind it in two years, you won’t leave the center thinking, “He’s our guy!” You’ll leave them thinking, “Note to self: Remove Obama in two years.”

     In politics, the angry person is generally understood to be the loser, which is why politicians on TV always try not to seem angry. And politics is always, at the end of the day, a game of addition, not subtraction.

      Mr. Obama’s problem is not only with the left of his party. Democratic professionals, people who do the work of politics day by day, don’t see him as a bad man or a sellout, but they scratch their heads over him and privately grouse. They don’t understand a Democratic president who, in the midst of a great recession, in our modern welfare state, doesn’t know how to win support!

      The other night Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, was on “Hardball” sounding reasonable on the subject of Mr. Obama, but I thought his eyes, his visage, his professionally pleasant face were screaming: Those crazy birthers are wrong, he’s not from another country—he’s from another galaxy! He doesn’t do politics like any normal person!

     The left has been honestly disappointed in Mr. Obama. He did not come through as they think he should have in myriad ways—the public option, closing Guantanamo, war, now the tax plan. But—and this makes it all more complicated and fascinating—the left does not say Mr. Obama has been revealed to be at heart a conservative, or a Republican. Most of them know he is one of them—his worldview is more or less theirs, his assumptions are theirs. Does anyone doubt he would have included a public option in health care if he thought he could have? He judged that he couldn’t. He didn’t have the numbers in the Senate. It isn’t an argument about philosophy or ideology. It’s only an argument about what’s practical and possible.

    Some on the left argue that if only the president had talked more, and more passionately, if he’d worked it harder, he could have brought the country to support leftist programs. But why do they think this? The general public has seen the president out there for two years talking and promoting a generally leftist direction. Voters demonstrated in elections through 2009 and ‘10 that a generally leftist direction is not what they want.

All of this—the disenchantment of the left, the confusion of the party’s professionals—has led to increased talk of a primary challenger to Mr. Obama in 2012.

      And here too the president’s pposition would be without parallel.

When Pat Buchanan challenged an incumbent president in his party’s presidential primary in 1992, he was going at George H.W. Bush from the right. Mr. Bush’s base wasn’t the right, it was the party’s center. His support came from people who said not “I am a conservative,” but “I am a Republican.” Mr. Bush wasn’t challenged from his base.

       When Ted Kennedy challenged a sitting president of his party in 1980, he was going at Jimmy Carter from the left. But Mr. Carter’s base wasn’t the left, it was more or less in the party’s center.

      When Ronald Reagan challenged a sitting president of his party in 1976, he was going at Gerald Ford from the right. Like Mr. Bush, Ford’s base wasn’t the right, it was the party’s establishment. Eugene McCarthy in 1968 the same—he challenged Lyndon Johnson from the left, while Johnson’s base within the party was the establishment.

    Modern presidents are never challenged from their base, always by the people who didn’t love them going in. You’re not supposed to get a serious primary challenge from the people who loved you. But that’s the talk of what may happen with Mr. Obama.

   The Democratic Party is stuck. Their problem is not, as some have said, that they don’t have anyone of sufficient stature to challenge the president. Russ Feingold and Howard Dean have said they aren’t interested, but a challenger can always be found, or can emerge. If anything marks this political age, it’s that anyone can emerge.

     The Democrats’ problem is that most of them know that the person who would emerge, who would challenge Mr. Obama from the left, would never, could never, win the 2012 general election. He’d lose badly and take the party with him. Democratic professionals know the mood of the country. Challenging Mr. Obama from the left would mean definitely losing the presidency, as opposed to probably losing the presidency.

    There is only one Democrat who could possibly challenge Mr. Obama for the nomination successfully and win the general election, and that is Hillary Clinton. Who insists she doesn’t want to.

    What are the Democrats to do? If you are stuck with a president, you try to survive either with him or, individually, in spite of him. Some Democrats will try to bring him back. How? Who knows. But that will be a great Democratic drama of 2011: Saving Obama.

      The White House itself still probably thinks the Republicans can save him, by overstepping, by alienating moderates. But so far, on domestic matters, they’re looking pretty calm and sober. They didn’t crow at the tax compromise, for instance, even though they knew the left is correct: It wasn’t a compromise, it was a bow. To reality, but a bow nonetheless.

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Swindle Of The Year

by Charles Krauthammer (more by this author)

Posted 12/10/2010 ET

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 -- and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years -- which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?
    
If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years -- $630 billion of it above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts.
    
No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president's deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality.
    
Some Republicans are crowing that Stimulus II is the Republican way -- mostly tax cuts -- rather than the Democrats' spending orgy of Stimulus I. That's consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget.  
    
At great cost that will have to be paid after this newest free lunch, the package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference between victory and defeat in 2012.
    
Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own re-election chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, tea-party, this-time-we're-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.
    
And he gets all this in return for what? For a mere two-year postponement of a mere 4.6-point increase in marginal tax rates for upper incomes. And an estate tax rate of 35 percent -- it jumps insanely from zero to 55 percent on Jan. 1 -- that is somewhat lower than what the Democrats wanted.
    
No, cries the left: Obama violated a sacred principle. A 39.6 percent tax rate versus 35 percent is a principle? "This is the public option debate all over again," said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nationalize health care there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private insurers into public utilities. The left is similarly clueless on the tax cut deal: In exchange for temporarily forgoing a small rise in upper-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimulus -- what the left has been begging for since the failure of Stimulus I, but was heretofore politically unattainable.
    
Obama's public exasperation with this infantile leftism is both perfectly understandable and politically adept. It is his way back to at least the appearance of centrist moderation. The only way he will get a second look from the independents who elected him in 2008 -- and abandoned the Democrats in 2010 -- is by changing the prevailing (and correct) perception that he is a man of the left.
    
Hence that news-conference attack on what the administration calls the "professional left" for its combination of sanctimony and myopia. It was Obama's Sister Souljah moment. It had a prickly, irritated sincerity -- their ideological stupidity and inability to see the "long game" really do get under Obama's skin -- but a decidedly calculated quality, too. Where, after all, does the left go? Stay home on Election Day 2012? Vote Republican?
    
No, says the current buzz, the left will instead challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. Really now? For decades, African-Americans have been this party's most loyal constituency. They vote 9-1 Democratic through hell and high water, through impeachment and recession, through everything. After four centuries of enduring much, African-Americans finally see one of their own achieve the presidency. And their own party is going to deny him a shot at his own re-election?
    
Not even Democrats are that stupid. The remaining question is whether they are just stupid enough to not understand -- and therefore vote down -- the swindle of the year just pulled off by their own president.

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The Obama-Stockholm Syndrome

By George Neumayr on 12.9.10 

     Early in the week, the press spoke of Barack Obama's willingness to extend "an olive branch" to Republicans. By the middle of the week, his "olive branch" looked more like a thorn bush.

    A politician who promised a glorious new era of civility and concord was referring to his Republican opponents as hostake takers on the issue of tax cuts. "It's tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed," he said. It doesn't occur to him that he qualifies more as the captor in the analogy. After all, he is the one who was threatening to take action against the people by raising tax rates on job-creating business owners.

     Obama can only hope that the American people will be seduced by a political version of the Stockholm Syndrome, a term that was popularized after Swedish robbers took hostages at a bank in 1973. During the five-day ordeal, the hostages, instead of resenting their captors, grew emotionally attached to them and made excuses for them after it ended.

        Obama thinks the American people should feel gratitude to him for offering to release them from a tax-hike crisis into which he had thrown them. He casts himself as the passive negotiator in the struggle, but he is one who has been controlling Washington for two years.

     His stance as a proponent of tax cuts for the middle class is as plausible as his stance during the healthcare debate as a champion of the Hyde Amendment. Had Obama been in Congress during the Reagan era, he would never have voted for middle-class tax cuts or a ban on government funding of abortion. But whenever a conservative policy drifts to the middle of a debate, he acts like he came up with it. He suddenly becomes an "angry" advocate for a policy he doesn't like but has to take, or appear to take, out of political necessity.

      The Democratic Party counts on a political version of the Stockholm Syndrome on most issues, for almost all of the debates in Washington revolve around "saving" the people from crises Democratic policies exposed them to in the first place. The way it usually works is that the Democrats create a program the federal government shouldn't have established at all, the program inevitably fails, and then they rush in to "reform" it. Obama has talked about "education reform" in this way, as if his party had nothing to do with the failed policies and programs under discussion, as if he favors releasing children from unionized public schools with vouchers in hand.

      Obama could put on a smile back in 2008 when he spoke of moving to "the middle," because he didn't think he would actually have to do so. But now that political pressures force him to the middle on a few issues, his smile has turned into a snarl. Real moves to the middle tax his ego badly. He regards the left's lack of docility and the right's resistance as a personal affront, and to build himself back up he has to play the victim and tear America down. "This country was founded on compromise. I couldn't go through the front door in this country's founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn't have a union," he spouted bitterly at Tuesday's press conference.

     The media was very impressed by his "passion." But it was more like pouting that he had to give up yet another cheap, ill-considered campaign promise. That he knew his liberal base would be reading his stitched-up lips and hearing "no new taxes" on job creators made him feel very uncomfortable and defensive. So while ostensibly rebuking liberals he promised to practice class warfare at a more opportune time in the coming years.

    In his post-defeat November press conference, he said that the American people failed to view his socialism as only temporary. But as his promise of class warfare at a later date shows, it's only his minor suspensions of socialism that are temporary. It pains him to let the productive keep their own money, and he expects his spared victims to feel grateful for not having been mistreated more.

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OBAMACARE DOES FUND ABORTION AND OBAMA LIED ABOUT THAT TO AMERICA

Published by Lee S. Gliddon, Jr. on Sep 1st, 2010 

Dear Friend of the Preborn:

We knew that OBAMACARE and the Executive Order were shams—in supposedly not funding abortions. Now the truth has come out! It really does! Surprise: we knew this all along; and so did Rep. Bart Stupak.

A newly released Congressional Report found that abortion restrictions attached to OBAMACARE would not apply to high-risk insurance pools run at the state level. This action prompted many Republican senators to urge the Administration to issue new rules.

I urge you to urge others to help REPEAL OBAMACARE—for the lives and safety of the preborn! 56% of Americans favor the REPEAL of OBAMACARE! Rasmussen Polls indicate that majority of Americans want OBAMACARE REPEALED! In spite of a well-oiled promotional “repackaging” tour by the Administration, that number has grown since its initial passage months ago!

Just two weeks ago, the ASSOCIATED PRESS had to back-track an earlier statement, when they admitted: “Government insurance would allow coverage abortion.”

Congressman Bart Stupak and others who were “wined and dined and stiff-armed” gave up on insisting on their previously-proposed tough anti-abortion language in OBAMACARE. However, they accepted an Executive Order to be signed by President Obama that would prohibit taxpayer funding of abortions through OBAMACARE. HOWEVER—

The controversial Executive Order was not sufficient to ban taxpayer funding of abortions. THE EXECUTIVE ORDER WAS A COMPLETE SHAM – geared only to pass legislation. And that legislation – Obamacare – must be REPEALED… to help save the lives of the preborn! WE knew then – and it has now been proven – that they were selling out their PRO-LIFE PRINCIPLES! At Students for Life, we will never do that!

A majority of Americans now self-identify as pro-life. But does the Administration care? Apparently NOT!

The high-risk pool program is one of the new programs created by sweeping health care legislation, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which President Obama signed into law on March 23. This legislation authorizes $5 Billion in federal funds for the program, which will cover as many as 400,000 people when it is implemented nationwide.

The current administration will give Pennsylvania $160 Million to set up a new “high risk” insurance program under a provision of OBAMACARE enacted in March. Will you please help us to repeal Obamacare and save the lives of preborn babies?!

Please CLICK HERE to FAX every Member of the United States Congress to urge them to support the REPE...

Here are the facts: OBAMACARE can force taxpayers to subsidize Abortions and may even force private insurers to pay for abortions. This monstrosity of a bill for socialized medicine is not in the interest of pro-lifers. It must be repealed!

President Obama said: “Reproductive care is essential care, basic care.” That sounds good to the ear, BUT that also means it will pay for abortions! Although it is supposedly “illegal” to fund abortions with federal dollars, two states will pay for the life-ending procedure with federal funds under OBAMACARE. Last month Maryland and Pennsylvania announced they will use federal tax dollars to provide abortions under OBAMACARE.

Under the law each of the nation’s 50 states must offer people with pre-existing conditions health insurance until federally subsidized exchanges are fully established in 2014. Pennsylvania will receive $160 Million and Maryland will receive $85 Million.

BOTH PLANS WILL CONTINUE TO COVER ABORTION!

Even after the abortion plan was exposed by pro-life groups, the Department of Health and Human Services tried to quell the controversy, by announcing it would not allow abortion funding except in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother. So, Taxpayer dollars are funding abortions!

Students for Life of America also discovered two weeks ago that the Universtiy of North Carolina was forcing students to pay for abortion health care coverage! Students in the University of North Carolina system were being required to buy a campus health care plan that includes abortion coverage if they don’t have a private insurance plan. Students without private coverage who oppose abortion on moral grounds would nevertheless pay into an insurance pool that subsidizes abortion coverage. Students for Life stepped in to expose the truth and the UNC System back-tracked to allow a different pool and opt-out of the abortion service in their plan. While this is good news, we’ve also found that there could be federal funds going towards student abortions in North Carolina. We’re launching a full investigation and have asked the Governor of North Carolina (Gov. Beverley Perdue) to do the same!

PAYING FOR ABORTIONS SHOULD NOT BE A PRE-REQUISITE TO LEARNING!

 Many states have already gotten in the act of doing what is right… they have passed legislation which basically repeals OBAMACARE – but allows Americans to opt out of government run healthcare. 71% of Missouri voters voted in favor of opting out of government-run healthcare. In other words, repealing OBAMACARE. Virginia and over 20 other states have filed lawsuits against OBAMACARE. I could go on and on about socialized medicine… about nearly bankrupting our country with increased healthcare costs of $160 Billion in six years, etc., etc. BUT—

I must remain focused. At Students for Life, we help provide guidance to over 350 different pro-life groups. Our sole focus is on the protection of the life of the preborn. YES, we shout it everywhere we go: WE ARE PRO-LIFE! OBAMACARE is NOT! And it must be repealed. In the 37 years since abortion has been legal in the United States, there have been over 50 million abortions. With a majority of Americans, including young people, now identifying themselves as pro-life, Students for Life of America is working overtime to make sure that OBAMACARE is overturned and repealed!

Students for Life of America is working around the clock to abolish abortion by:

1. EDUCATING the next generation of Americans on the truth about abortion and is empowering them to end abortion in America.
2. ESTABLISH a pro-life group on every college campus across the country and to train the future leaders of the pro-life movement.
3. INFORMATION GIVING. With programs such as our Missionaries for Life internship, Med Students for Life Campus Program, and our Wilberforce Leadership Fellowship, Students for Life is working to not only save the preborn today but also to win by ending abortion in America.

Please join us today by investing in Students for Life with $25, $50, or $100. Together, we can stop President Obama’s liberal agenda for America and get on track to abolish abortion in our lifetime. Will you please help us to REPEAL OBAMACARE!

For Life,

Kristan Hawkins
Executive Director
Students for Life of America

The Catholic Case Against Obamacare
ProLifeblogs.com ^ | 7/22/09 | Voice in the Crowd

I have frequently thought on many issues that the Democratic Party provides the “wrong answers to the right questions.” How can we provide better assistance to the poor? How can we make sure workers are treated fairly? How can we help women with unwanted pregnancies? How can we give everyone access to needed health care...

As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have told us, everyone deserves medical care, and it is a noble end goal. My own bishop, William Murphy, penned a letter to US Senate Committee on Finance on behalf of the USCCB citing:

“The moral measure of any health-care reform proposal is whether it offers affordable and accessible health care to all, beginning with those most in need...”

In noting this, it is still my opinion, and I do not speak for the Magisterium, that the Catholic VISITA UNIVISION.COM PARA MAS INFORMACION should be AGAINST the President’s Health Care Initiative. There is a grave devil in the details of his plan. The devil is RATIONING.

This concern is so front-and-center, that the Fourth Estate is even shining the spotlight on it. The Wall St. Journal reported from Obama’s town hall meeting this week. A concerned citizen brought up a very real-world, tangible family experience she had and asked Obama if the same respect of life would be given under his plan:

“At one point in the town hall, broadcast from the East Room by ABC news, a woman named Jane Sturm told the story of her 105-year-old mother, who, at 100, was told by an arrhythmia specialist that she was too old for a pacemaker. She ended up getting a second option, and the operation, for which Ms. Sturm credits her survival.

“Look, the first thing for all of us to understand that is we actually have some — some choices to make about how we want to deal with our own end-of-life care,” Mr. Obama replied. After discussing ways “we as a culture and as a society [can start] to make better decisions within our own families and for ourselves,” he continued that in general “at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”

What Mr. Obama is describing is his preferred health-care future. If or when the Administration’s speculative cost-cutting measures under universal health care fail to produce savings, government will start explicitly limiting patient access to treatments and services regarded as too expensive. Democrats deny this eventuality, but health planners will have no choice, given that the current entitlement system is already barreling toward insolvency without adding millions of new people to the federal balance sheet.”

So basically if someone is 65 years old and is diagnosed with a cancer that has a high mortality rate; here is your Advil according to our President.

With this statement, there is the 800-pound gorilla in the room that no one will mention. They will dance all around it, but not land on it. Obama’s health care plan will make a clear distinction between two classes of people. Those who are worthy of health care treatment, and those who are not.

Mike Kinsley, who was the original liberal-defending host of CNN’s Crossfire, also sees this reality in The Washington Post:

“But that doesn’t mean rationing will be easy to avoid. Statistics on life expectancy or infant mortality are averages. The easiest way to raise your averages — maybe even the best way, if we’re being honest — is to concentrate on the general level of care and not to squander a lot on long-odds cases. But if the long-odds case is you or a family member, you may well feel differently.

...Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he’d get it and you wouldn’t, it’s rationing.”

Even super-liberal Mike Kinsley knows what is coming.

Now, back to my Catholic case against the President’s Health Care Plan. The danger, as mentioned, is setting up two classes of people. Some of the darkest chapters of world history began with this premise and resulted in holocausts. This is not hyperbole.

If we, as a society, determine that someone who is possibly treatable does not warrant life-saving or life-extending care because of their demographics or situation- just pain medication - the next logical, expedient, cost-savings and obvious secular step is saying why should this person suffer with absolutely no hope. It’s pointless. We should put them out of their misery. Euthanasia is the demonic offspring to the rationed health care that Obama speaks of. This is my grave concern and should be yours.

The immediate front lines of this second class of people, and starting point, will be the handicapped, the elderly, the infirmed and less-than-perfect newborns.

This is why His Excellency Bishop Murphy then follows the above statement in his letter to our government with:

“All people need and should have access to comprehensive, quality health care that they can afford, and this should not depend on their stage of life, where or whether they or their parents work, how much they earn, or where they live or where they come from.”

Obama’s Health Care Plan is in direct conflict with this second statement and therefore, in my opinion, can not be supported by Catholics. There are other, better solutions out there that do not lead to this culture-of-death end, literally.

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