How dare he?

Tavis Smiley: Obama Is First President In My Career Not To Invite Me To The White House So?

One-Term Presidency?

It was a year and a half ago when President Obama told Diane Sawyer of ABC News in an interview that he would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. Now, coming off one of his worst weeks since taking office, Mr. Obama is nearing a decision on whether he really meant that. Is he willing to try to administer the disagreeable medicine that could help the economy mend over the long term, even if that means damaging his chances for re-election?

Who is kidding whom? He has a reelection committee. His advisers are leaking all over the place, theorizing about the next election, about possible opponents. C'mon, give us a break.

Obama plan: Destroy Romney

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee. The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.


This is part of the pattern that has emerged during the Obama presidency: blame the other guy. But this could blow up in their face: the candidate who ran on hope can not be the candidate running on a slash-and-burn platform and hope to retain support. He will lose supporters. And while many of those would not vote for Romney, they might well stay away from the presidential election polls, as a means to vote against Obama.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

The Obama campaign might well be careful about portraying the other candidate as inauthentic and unprincipled, as Obama increasingly comes across as, yes, inauthentic and unprincipled. Weird? Is that a code word for Mormon?

I'm responsible ... right?

Obama says he inherited economic problems - President Barack Obama said on Monday he inherited many of the country's problems with high debt and deficits when he entered the White House, sounding a theme likely to dominate his 2012 re-election campaign. Speaking at a Democratic fundraiser, where families paid $15,000 to get a picture with him, Obama defended his economic record and noted that problems in Europe were affecting the United States. "We do have a serious problem in terms of debt and deficit, and much of it I inherited," Obama said. The financial crisis, he said, made the problem worse.

But, I'm in charge now, so it is my responsibility, and it is time to stop blaming someone else for the troubles I should be fixing. He might have said something along those lines, but did not. And that is the crux of the matter: it is somebody else's fault, not his, the preasident maintains. But 2½ years into his term, it is time he accepted responsibility.

87% disapprove

In the wake of the debt-ceiling debate, 82 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job—the highest ever, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. I'd like to hear what the other 18% think.

N.R.A. to Sue Over Bulk Gun Sales Rule

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday filed a lawsuit challenging a new federal regulation requiring gun merchants along the border with Mexico to report bulk sales of certain semiautomatic rifles, contending that the Obama administration exceeded its powers by imposing the rule last month without Congressional permission.

The NRA opposes all restrictions on gun ownership, operating under the rubric that any restriction is the beginning of outright banning of gun ownership. Stupid and nonsensical, but that is their ideology.

“We will vigorously oppose that lawsuit,” Mr. Holder told reporters on Wednesday. “We think that the action we have taken is consistent with the law and that the measures that we are proposing are appropriate ones to stop the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico.”

Unless, of course, as with Operation Fast an Furious, it is the policy of the government to flood Mexico with guns.

We got a deal

I am not a fan of declarations of things will never be the same, or of the current penchant to include the words Here's how in any pronouncements, but perhaps this article does have quite valid points. In the aftermath of the deal worked out between te Three Stooges (namely, Obama, Democrats and Republicans), all talking heads are in a rush to provide instant, profound analysis.

My judgment is that all the Three Stooges look worse now than before the most recent crisis: Obama looks indecisive, seems to have no spine, to not understand how to use power, to be reluctant to twists arms (let alone kick a little ass), and to have no guiding principle other than reelection; the Democrats seem timid, weak, ignored by a president of their own party, and unable to fight the opposition effectively; and the Republicans look to be hostages of their right wing.

Nonetheless, perhaps the Republicans came out looking the best of the three. Speaker Boehner resisted the Tea Party dictates in the end, and he got his party to vote for the legislation.

Debt-ceiling increases are now tied to deficit reduction. With President Obama's signature, every future president until America's debt monster is tamed must come to Congress on bended knee and plead for the privilege of avoiding default.

Obama looked weak an dineffective, and was unable to impose his will. Then again, he does seem to believe he should be imposing his will. Score one for a weak president.

Bipartisan entitlement protection lives on. No one has the nerve to cut spending in any meaningful way. For all the GOP fervor to rein in government spending, the agreement defers all decisions about entitlement spending to a so-called super committee with an internal architecture almost built for stalemate. The legislationcreated a committee to com eup with cuts. Last year's Deficit Reduction Commission, already all but fiorgotten, is an indicator of how this new committee will fare: badly.


Congress's back-loading of spending cuts lives on. A Democratic president and a tea party-inspired Republican Party will mutually agree to cut domestic discretionary spending (defined by budget authority) by $10 billion compared with 2011 budget totals. That's out of projected domestic discretionary spending of just more than $2 trillion for fiscal 2012 and 2013. Crumbs.Half of one percentage point.

Speaker John Boehner wobbled but didn't fall. Does that make him a force to be reckoned with? Well, he still has the Sperakership. And he did get the votes.