American Interest: Falling Between Two Stools

[nonniey]

This is one of the better Anaysis of the President I have seen. And by a democrat to boot - go figure)

"President Obama is now passing through what one must hope for both his sake and ours are the worst moments of a presidency no longer young. ....

Snip....The President looks like a man who is ridden by events; at just the moment when the nation craves a strong leader, the President looks weak, dodgy, uncertain. The contrast with the inflated hopes that an untested and inexperienced Senator Obama did so much to build up is crippling. Obama has fallen so far precisely because he and his supporters so hugely oversold him....

Snip ....He is a man of half measures, a man who spends so much money hedging his bets that he loses even when he wins.

Time and again the President angers one side without conciliating the other. His public demand that Israel agree to a complete settlement freeze as a condition for peace talks alienated Israelis (and not just supporters of Prime Minister Netanyahu); his subsequent back peddling humiliated and angered the Palestinians. He pleased no one, fumbled what he had once proclaimed a crucial priority of his administration, and is left with reduced influence with both sides.

At home the President’s hedging has antagonized and energized the right without delivering the goods to his base on the left. ...

...This repeated lunge for the sour spot — the place where costs are high and benefits are low — now seems to be a trademark of the President’s decision-making style. On the left it is earning him Carter comparisons from people like Eric Alterman;....

Snip .....Take the original sin of this administration: the failure to handle the economic stimulus package in a way that would have given the President enough fiscal room to jump start the economy in the short term without spooking either the voters or the bond markets. Hindsight is easy, but even at the time many observers warned that the stimulus was poorly crafted.

President Obama in effect offered a compromise stimulus package: to avoid angering Republicans the overall numbers were smaller than the more left wing economists in Democratic circles thought would work, but liberals in Congress were greatly mollified by the freedom that the President gave them to craft the stimulus to benefit key constituencies.

As a result, the overall package was deeply flawed. The headline stimulus number was enough to energize Republican and conservative deficit hawks, but left Obama vulnerable to charges from the left that he hadn’t done enough to create jobs in the deepest recession since World War Two. Worse, the stimulus was inefficient, with its money spent over a long period of time. Much of the spending would come in only years after passage, significantly reducing the prospects that the stimulus would kick start the economy.

Now the President and the Democrats generally are stuck in a trap of their own manufacture. State and local governments, starved for funding and losing the federal assistance in the stimulus package are laying off workers and cutting benefits from one end of the country to the other. Unemployment, especially including the long-term unemployed who have dropped out of the labor market, remains painfully high. Key Democratic constituencies feel the administration’s economic policies have failed even as the political logic forces President Obama and his team to start negotiating deficit cuts. He is back to disappointing his friends without winning over his enemies, and that is no good place for a President to be............

Click Link for entire article.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/04/27/falling-between-two-stools/

[mardi gras skin]

The President looks like a man who is ridden by events; at just the moment when the nation craves a strong leader, the President looks weak, dodgy, uncertain. The contrast with the inflated hopes that an untested and inexperienced Senator Obama did so much to build up is crippling. Obama has fallen so far precisely because he and his supporters so hugely oversold him.

I remember wishing Obama would wait 8 more years before running. He was oversold and underprepared.