The "They Did It" Presidency (Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy)

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Tuesday, March 10, 2009 The "They Did It" Presidency [Victor Davis Hanson]

Obama's awkward corrective call to the NY Times that "Bush is the socialist, not me!" comes after claiming that the Brit protocol disaster was due to his weariness and the frenzy of the job. That claim comes after the White House orchestrated attack on Rush. Yet the problem for Obamians is not in the stars, but in themselves, mostly a result of that classically unfortunate combination of hubris and inexperience. The Obamians need to get a life and govern the country, rather than blaming their gaffes on Bush, Rush, life, etc. . . .

03/10 09:24 AM

Bad/bad [Victor Davis Hanson]

With Clinton we got high taxes (bad) but balanced budgets imposed by the spending caps in Congress (good). With Bush we got tax cuts (good) but deficits (bad). With Obama we get tax hikes (bad) and astronomical deficits (bad).

Two notes: We are not going back to the Clinton tax hikes, but something far scarier, with states raising taxes, the fed doing the same, and new proposals to lift the caps on FICA payroll taxes. And these vast increases won't go to pay for the deficit, but to fund new spending/borrowing plans that come on top of deficit spending.

03/07 11:38 AM

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 Re: The "They did it" presidency [Mark Steyn]

Victor, I have to say the first six weeks of the Age of the Hopeychange have surprised me. I expected it to be bad, but I didn't expect it to be so incompetent. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama's executive skills: As I said back in the fall re the comparisons with Governor Palin, Barack ain't run nuthin' but his mouth. This is the first real job he's had where you're supposed to show up at nine in the morning and make decisions.

So I had no expectations about his executive competency. But I assumed he had folks around him who could take care of that kind of stuff - that he'd be the smiley-face hopeychange frontman on an ideologically disastrous but ruthlessly efficient team. I figured he'd have a Deputy Assistant Associate Secretary of whatever who'd know what the form was for a prime ministerial visit by a close ally, and an Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary who wouldn't compound the gaffes by telling Fleet Street who cares about the Brits anyway. I expected he'd have an Assistant Associate Deputy Secretary who'd know that Russo-American relations weren't the proper forum for lame prop gags, and a Deputy Associate Assistant Secretary who, once the decision were taken to go ahead with the lame prop gag, would at least be able to translate correctly one single word from English to Russian.

What happened? Where's his team? It's not like 2005, when the Senate Dems were holding up Condi and vetoing Bolton. Senate Republicans would be happy just to rubberstamp one big photocopied [INSERT NAME OF NOMINEE HERE] form. But, as many have noted, the soi-disant "smoothest transition in history" ground to a halt the moment Bush flew off to Crawford.

Perhaps, in his hectic round of promotional interviews, David Frum could find time - just for eight or nine seconds, say - to offer some thoughts on why the President's administration is not as "honed" as his physique.

03/10 10:24 AM

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 Re: Re: The "They Did It" Presidency [Andy McCarthy]

To me, what is most startling about the phenomenon VDH and Mark describe is actually listening to the president stuttering and bumbling his way through that follow-up call to the NYTimes. (The recording can be heard by clicking on an MP3 link in this Times story.) It's cringe-making stuff — the poor delivery, the claim that Bush is the real socialist and Obama the free-marketeer (does anyone actually believe Obama opposed, or would have opposed, the prescription-drug entitlement or nationalizing the banks? that he'd ever in a million years do anything but build on these statist policies, as he has been doing since day one?), the craven refusal to utter Bush's name when the Times reporter asks the obvious follow-up question, the whopper about how he's got so much to do the last thing he wanted to be concerned about was the market (from the guy who spent his career carping about "economic justice" and criticized the Warren Court for not being radical enough in economic matters), etc.

If Obama had haltingly spouted this nonsense off-the-cuff at a press conference, that would have been bad enough. But he (or someone) actually decided this would be a good call to make — and they had 90 minutes to think about what he was going to say. That's not just bad, it's scary bad.

03/10 11:30 AM