It would be unfair to suggest that 52% (or whatever the figure was for those who voted for Obama last year) were technically brain dead because, alas, like voters everywhere they simply (and I do mean 'simple'!) voted in their own self-interest. Obama, following Saul Alinsky's creed, promised them bread and circuses and they duly swallowed the lies whole. However, one thing is now clear beyond debate, Obama, himself, is as thick as six short Gurkhas!(*) Interestingly, I have just read two articles saying roughly the same thing but rather more politely than me.
First of all, 'The Kraut' is withering in his assessment:
Barack Obama, already naturally inclined to believe his own loftiness, graciously accepted the kingly crown and proceeded to ride his reelection success to a crushing victory over the GOP at the fiscal cliff, leaving a humiliated John Boehner & Co. with nothing but naked tax hikes.
Thus emboldened, Obama turned his inaugural and State of the Union addresses into a left-wing dream factory, from his declaration of war on global warming (on a planet where temperatures are the same as 16 years ago and in a country whose CO2 emissions are at a 20-year low) to the invention of new entitlements — e.g., universal preschool for 5-year-olds— for a country already drowning in debt.
To realize his dreams, Obama sought to fracture and neutralize the congressional GOP as a prelude to reclaiming the House in 2014. This would enable him to fully enact his agenda in the final two years of his presidency, usually a time of lame-duck paralysis. Hail the Obama juggernaut.
Well, that story — excuse me, narrative — lasted exactly six months. The Big Mo is gone.
John Boehner and the GOP called his bluff on the 'poker game' over sequester which entails automatic cuts to government spending and, surprise, surprise, the only breakdown in services came as a result of Federal officials obeying orders from the White House to make the ensuing cuts as painful as possible to the public so that blame could be laid at the feet of the Republicans. Alas, for the less than clever dicks in the White House, this nefarious plot was quickly uncovered and anyway, inconvenienced members of the public, like their counterparts everywhere, instantly blamed the government for every breakdown in services:
Things began with the near-comical cancellation of White House tours and ended with not-so-comical airline delays. Obama thought furious passengers would blame the GOP. But isn’t the executive branch in charge of these agencies? Who thinks that a government spending $3.6 trillion a year can’t cut 2 percent without furloughing air-traffic controllers?
Looking not just incompetent at managing budgets but cynical for deliberately injuring the public welfare, the administration relented. Congress quickly passed a bill giving Obama reallocation
authority to restore air traffic control. Having previously threatened to veto any such bill, Obama caved. He signed.
Meanwhile, his crusade on gun control has turned into a fiasco with membership of the National Rifle Association growing apace and his efforts to have legislation passed have been foiled not just by Republicans but Democrats, with an eye to their home base, as well.
Grover G. Norquist in The American Spectator is even more dismissive of Obama's fumblings. He reminds us that in his first two years in office, the President had control of both Houses and was thus able to pass more or less any law he liked. He wasted that opportunity by concentrating on an eye-wateringly large splurge of government 'stimulus' spending, and in ramming through 'Obamacare'. (Incidentally, the bills for that gigantic folly are only now just beginning to become apparent to a dismayed public but, hey, never give suckers an even break!)
Then in 2010, his Democratic majority in the House was tossed out. Two years of power as complete as exists in American national politics ended and were followed by two years in which others held the power to say no. The Republican House wrestled away $2.5 trillion in spending reductions as the price for increasing the government’s “debt ceiling.” Obama could pass no new
legislation. His first term lasted two years.
By winning a second mandate, Obama was again in possession of real power but, as Norquist tells it, within less than two months he blew it - and even worse, he failed even to realise quite what a political disaster he had brought about. There were around $500 billion p.a. in what were called the 'Bush' tax cuts which had run for years but which required annual endorsement by the Congress or they would automatically fail. Were this to happen Americans would be hit by an enormous tax hike which would total around $5 trillion over 10 years. This was Obama's sword of Damocles - but he dropped it! I will let Norquist explain the tricky details:
Obama spent the months of November and December reveling in his power to get his pound of flesh from the rich. He thought, as he sat across from Republican negotiators, that he was empowered by his election victory, his personal popularity as measured in polls. He misunderstood. His power flowed from the fact that he held the fate of a $500 billion annual tax hike in his hands. Like an upriver landowner with a dam and sluicegate, Obama alone would decide how much income would flow and to whom and for how long.
He chose to take $600 billion in tax increases over the next 10 years. That was 15 percent of the tax cuts that were lapsing. His increases targeted the top 1 percent. On January 1, taxes automatically increased $500 billion. On January 2 the Congress voted to cut taxes $280 billion that year and $3.7 trillion over the decade.
In his lofty generosity he agreed to take only 15% of the possible tax hike when the 'Bush' tax cuts lapsed and he targeted the top 1% of earners. But, what he failed to realise is that by agreeing to that arrangement the 85% of 'Bush' tax cuts that remained were now fixed forever and from now on any desire or demand by Obama and the Dems for tax rises can only be achieved by new legislation. In other words, there is no golden pot of tax income to be had every year when, as in the past, the 'Bush ' tax cuts came up for re-affirmation. Here is Norquist's explanation of why Obama fumbled the golden ball:
WHY, THEN, DID HE give away power? There are three schools of thought. First, Obama believed his own press clippings. He really thought he was in possession of a mandate, that the world would bend to his will, because he won the election. But elections are good for four years; popularity endures until it doesn’t. He mistook the source of his power in the fiscal cliff negotiations and didn’t understand that making the lapsing tax cuts permanent removed his
unanswerable threat and ended his power.
Second, after Republicans agreed last year to delay the debt ceiling vote and the imposition of the sequester, Obama believed they were retreating. The courtier press reinforced this by joining in the premature celebration. What was really happening was more akin to the Carthaginian troops falling back in the battle of Cannae…luring the Romans into believing they were collapsing.
Republicans wisely took the debt ceiling vote and the sequester—an automatic spending cut of $1.2 trillion over the decade—away from and outside the blast radius of the fiscal cliff negotiations where Obama held the power.
Third, Obama assumed that he had the whip hand on the looming sequester fight just as he did in the fiscal cliff talks. Here the establishment press created some of his confusion, because they paraded Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham across the TV networks to announce that they spoke for all Republicans in preferring anything—anything—to reductions in the increases in the Pentagon budget. Obama assumed the GOP would raise taxes, or at least delay or kill the
sequester, to protect its precious Pentagon spending. But the “defense spending is sacrosanct” caucus in the Republican Party now has approximately 20 members, and 17 of them are newspaper columnists without a vote in the House or Senate. The small-government worldview is in control now. Obama misunderstood the changing correlation of forces.
Norquist summarises the self-inflicted wound that Obama has perpetrated against himself:
So now we are in sequestration. Now the spending cuts are automatic. The Republicans have the upper hand. Obama cannot raise taxes or reduce the sequester without a majority vote in the House and Senate. And it is unlikely that Speaker John Boehner or Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will give away control as easily as Obama did.
According to reports, Obama was never much good as a 'community organiser' so it figures, as they say 'over there', that he's hopeless, helpless and hapless at running a country.
(*) I occasionally make use of the old army expression "as thick as six short Gurkhas" and it suddenly occurred to me that people might misunderstand and assume that I was indicating that Gurkhas were stupid. Nothing could be further from what I actually mean which is that your average Gurkha, being of stocky build, gives the impression of being wider than he is tall, hence six of them in a row is very 'thick' indeed. I wish to make that very clear because under no circs would I ever wish to upset a Gurkha!
