The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...until one day people start noticing that bad news has been building up all along.

//The most important factor that brought the Democrats to their current dilemma must be blamed on President Obama. The president remains popular with the party base and a formidable force despite his lame duck status. But lost amid the adulation he receives for his historic status as our first African-American president and his ability to transform domestic and foreign policy via ObamaCare and the Iran nuclear deal is the fact that he has also helped destroy the Democratic Party as a viable force in American politics.

Since he first took the oath of office in 2009, the Democrats have declined in every possible measure of popularity and power. Fewer voters not only identify with the party but it has suffered massive losses on the state and federal levels that are virtually unprecedented for one with an incumbent president. The lack of a deep Democratic bench can be traced to the fact that the ranks of leading Democrats have been thinned by two consecutive midterm election wipeouts. Barack Obama has been a magical political figure but his magic was limited to himself. The fact that the only representative of the next generation of Democrat office holders in the 2016 race was Martin O’Malley speaks volumes about the party’s inability to produce leaders.//

Undeniable truth number 11 - a person can survive if they are arrogant and they can survive if they are incompetent...

...but they can't survive if they are both incompetent and arrogant.

//We all know people of towering arrogance and we all know people of staggering incompetence, but Barack Obama is quite possibly the perfect package. No one on the scene today combines these two qualities in quite the same way as Mr. Obama.

On the incompetence side, and sticking just with the president’s policies and record in the greater Middle East, there is Mr. Obama’s mishandling of the rise of the Islamic State, which just last year he referred to as the “jayvee team” and just last week declared was “contained.” Recall his threat to Syrian President Assad that if Assad used chemical weapons on his own people it would constitute crossing a “red line” (Assad did and Obama did nothing), and his stop-start-stop support for opposition forces in Syria.

Then there is the president’s decision to pull out all American troops from Iraq, which had disastrous consequences; his failures in Afghanistan (including announcing a withdrawal date even as he was announcing a surge in troops); his bungled relations with Egypt; his failure to support the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which Charles Krauthammer called “the worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history.” Add to that Mr. Obama declaring his policies in Libya, Yemen and Somalia to be models of success before things collapses in all three countries, his alienation and mistreatment of Israel, and his botched handling of relations with our Arab allies – not to mention policies that have allowed Russia a presence in the Middle East unlike any its had since Anwar Sadat expelled the Soviet Union from Egypt in the early 1970s – and you have a catastrophic foreign policy record. It was only in the summer of last year that the Wall Street Journal reported, “The breadth of global instability now unfolding hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s” – and things are more disordered, chaotic and violent now then it was then. Things are so bad that the president has even lost CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.//

To be fair, this is the longest he's ever held a job.

Obama never learned how to negotiate, and now it is too late for him to learn.

//Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year's end unless Republicans passed a bill.  It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway.  This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

I’m not sure that isn’t what Obama thinks he’s doing, and I’m sure many of my left-leaning readers are chuckling right now at the comparison.  But Mitch McConnell is not a seven year old; he’s an adult, and he just won an election in which voters repudiated Obama and his party. (Temporarily, I am sure, but just the same: As someone once said, “Elections have consequences.")  McConnell is not  the proverbial Tea Party extremist who won’t negotiate; he’s an establishment guy, known as a strategist and a tactician, not an ideologue (which is why the Tea Party isn’t that fond of him).  In short, he’s someone who can make deals.  Responding to McConnell’s rather gracious remarks about finding common goals by announcing that you know what the American public wants, and you’re going to give it to them no matter what their elected representatives say, seems curiously brash.  It might chill the atmosphere today when he sits down with congressional leaders.

 I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans.  It’s not as if he has a long, distinguished record of passing legislation in a mixed environment.  His later years in the Illinois State Senate enjoyed a solid Democratic majority, and he jumped into the U.S. Senate at a propitious time. Soon after he arrived came the wave of 2006, when Democrats controlled both houses of congress by comfortable margins, and Senator Obama was far too junior to be negotiating with the White House.  Then came the financial crisis, and another wave, and Obama spent the first two years of his presidency in a happy situation where he could get things done without needing the support of the opposition.  He didn’t even negotiate with his own party; the Senate negotiated his health care bill, and Nancy Pelosi whipped it through the House.

 Post 2010, of course, he also hasn’t had much practice negotiating.  I’m not interested in another tedious argument about who did what to whom; whatever the cause and whoever’s fault it may be, the fact remains that the president has spent the last four years in a stalemate: Neither party can leave, and neither party can win.

 It’s a little late in the president’s career to learn the fine art of making deals with people who fundamentally disagree with you, but might be willing to work on whatever small goals you might share.  I suspect it feels more comfortable to go along with the strategy that has worked decently well over the last four years: hold your ground, complain about Republican intransigence, and hope that Republican legislators give you another opportunity to play long-suffering adult in the room.//

Obama plays the race card.

Inevitable.

How to explain Barack Obama’s dramatically declining approval numbers? Well, there’s the fact that five years of Obamanomics has brought America to its lowest civilian workforce participation rate from about the decade average at the beginning of the June 2009 recovery to a 36-year low. The passage of ObamaCare turned out to be the most competent part of the whole thing, and the rollout has been an utter disaster. On top of that, our foreign policy is at its lowest ebb since Jimmy Carter, and it’s clear now that the Obama administration didn’t bother to prepare for threats in places where even a child could see them. Plus, there’s that whole Lie of the Year — “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

The President has another theory. Apparently he thinks that people suddenly discovered his ethnicity:

Obama’s election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late.

Er … riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. In order to buy this nonsense, one would have to believe that millions of people approved of him despite his ethnicity for several years before deciding over the last few months to discover their inner Bull Connor. And that just coincided with Obama’s biggest blunders and the exposure of his dishonesty in selling ObamaCare to the public

The most incompetent leadership in history.

Peggy Noonan writes:

For four years I have been told, by those who’ve worked in the administration and those who’ve visited it as volunteers or contractors, that the Obama White House isn’t organized. It’s just full of chatter. Meetings don’t begin on time, there’s no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at somebody’s whim. There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down, see a call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again.

It does not sound like a professional operation. And this is both typical of White Houses and yet on some level extreme. People have always had meetings to arrange meetings, but the lack of focus, the lack of point, the sense that they are operating within accepted levels of incoherence—this all sounds, actually, peculiar.

And when you apply this to the ObamaCare debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,” and other people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and made speeches.

Because the doing isn’t that important, the talking is.

Let's not be too hard on him, President was his first real job.

Obama's polling numbers plummet.

Best analysis ever of ...

...Why.We.Are.So.Boned.


From Moe Lane:

Let me give all of you the basic background, first: Obama has yet to make a decision on the Keystone Pipeline, and he’s more or less going to seriously anger a key block of supporters either way. If he approves the pipeline, he annoys Hollywood celebrities, radical environmentalists, and other scientific illiterates; and if Obama rejects it, he infuriates Big Labor, or at least those parts of it that still do actual work. The result? Barack Obama is… dithering; which pleases nobody. The union workers aren’t working, and the scientific illiterates are justifiably paranoid that the current no-by-default is unsustainable in the long run. So, of course, both sides are now trying to pressure the White House into resolving the situation.
What both sides don’t quite realize is that the problem that the administration is facing a structural problem, not an ideological one. It’s not that the White House doesn’t want to resolve the issue; it just doesn’t know how. 

This next part is unavoidably geeky, but necessary: because it’s there where you can find the specialized jargon that can describe the Obama administration. To sum it up for the gaming geeks who are reading this: Barack Obama is a munchkin mini-maxer who has put all of his points into “winning elections” because he found an exploit that made him President early. And now he’s trying to solve everything else via The Gun Is My Skill List and/or button-mashing, with predictable results. 

…No, seriously: if you have a very specific background that entire paragraph makes crystalline sense. But I will happily translate. 

To begin with: a munchkin (or power gamer, or mini-maxer, or a bunch of terms that cannot be repeated here) is a type of gamer (roleplaying, computer, roleplaying-computer) who looks for loopholes in the rules – because games have rules, and there isn’t a ruleset in the world that cannot be manipulated by somebody with enough motivation/obsession. And it turns out that the American Democratic primary system was full of such loopholes, which is why Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008 despite losing almost all the big Democratic primary states (and arguably the popular vote, depending on how you score Michigan). And it also turns out that the intersection of our electoral system with our rapidly-expanding online culture can produce what computer gamers call “exploits:” which is to say, a glitch in the system that gives someone an unintended benefit (if it just crashes the system, it’s a bug). Strictly speaking, the system is not designed to elevate a state Senator to the Presidency in five years – for what turned out to be very good reasons – but it can be done. 

The problem, though, is that Barack Obama (and I should note that I am lumping his election team in with him here, as Obama largely does not really have much of an independent personality himself) has what the gaming community calls “mini-maxed” himself. Let me explain that one a bit more: lots of video games allow for the player to control a character that gets better at the game as he or she goes through the various game ‘boards.’ Special abilities, improved combat techniques, cool-looking items: if you’re playing a game that is something else besides a straight combat game, you can usually improve how you interact with computer-generated characters (“NPCs”) in the game, or learn how to make your own cool items, or whatever else the game designers thought that you’d like to do. Since gamers like to have unique characters (this is very much the young adult male equivalent to playing dress-up with dolls) there’s usually a way to customize your character, which is to say: people get to choose how and where the character improves. 

Mini-maxing is when a player designs a character that is fantastically good at one thing, at the expense of everything else. So you could end up with a character who is, say, obscenely good at hitting things with a sword – but can’t convince a bunch of sailors to drink free beer. The mini-maxer doesn’t mind; he’ll just go around the game trying to resolve as many problems as he can by hitting them with a sword (tabletop gamers – err, “D&D players” – often call this The Gun is My Skill List, although obviously substitute a sword for a gun in the name). The problems that the mini-maxer can’t resolve that way he’ll either ignore until later, or else flail about on the screen while hitting the buttons quickly and/or at random (“button-mashing”), in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.
And that’s where we are now. Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that’s not ‘elect Democrats.’ Or ‘elect liberals.’ Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.’ It’s just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don’t have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case. Barack Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway. 

If none of this sounds like any way to run a railroad – or lay a transcontinental energy pipeline – well. It’s not, particularly. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with the guy until January 2017. Sorry about that: I did what I could.

Pat Sajak spells it out.

Defining Moments

Pat Sajak · 22 hours ago

It's as if President Obama climbed into a tank, put on his helmet, talked about how his foray into Cambodia was seared in his memory, looked at his watch, misspelled "potato" and pardoned Richard Nixon all in the same day. It's fun to imagine the hand-wringing that must be going on within the White House as staffers try to figure out how to undo the damage their boss has done with his anti-entrepenurial riff. Defining moments in politics are strange beasts. Sometimes they're only recognized in hindsight, while sometimes they throw the train off the tracks before a sentence has been completed. Sometimes their effect can be contained and minimized, while sometimes their effect on the political narrative mestastasizes. This one is very bad for the White House.

These defining moments take hold most devastatingly when they confirm what a large portion of the electorate already believes. Taken alone, it seems unfair that a single moment, an unguarded remark or a slip of the tongue can carry such weight. They're often dismissed as "gotcha" moments, but when voters are able to nod and say, "I knew it," these moments stick and do terrible damage. We have witnessed such a moment.

Source.

On which point, James Taranto delves into the psychology of Obama's resentment of earned success:

Meanwhile, @BarackObama tweets a quote attributed to somebody identified only as "Jacob, Michigan": " 'President Obama had the courage to step up and save General Motors, and because of it, I have a job today.' " William C. Durant didn't build GM, but Barack Obama saved it.

The claim that Obama saved GM is fraudulent. What he did was use political muscle to intervene in a bankruptcy process in order to ensure a settlement on terms favorable to his supporters, the United Auto Workers union, at the expense of taxpayers (or "freeloaders," in the president's parlance) and bondholders. It would be more accurately characterized as an act of larceny than salvation.

Yesterday's column discussed the philosophy behind Obama's belittlement of the successful. Today we'd like to examine the psychology behind it. For it seems to us that Obama's generalities about success being undeserved are absolutely true in one particular case: that of Barack Obama. Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.

Let's run through the list of Obama's achievements.

"The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today," the New York Times reported Feb. 6, 1990. Obama himself understood his election to be a product not of unusual ability but of luck: "It's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks," he told the Times. "You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance."

He was lucky to be privileged and he was lucky to be black. But for the former, in his own telling, he never would have had the opportunity. But for the latter, his election would scarcely have been noticed outside Harvard Yard. In an interview with the Times, Peter Yu, Obama's predecessor as law review president, used apophasis to raise the possibility that the honor was undeserved: "Mr. Yu said Mr. Obama's election 'was a choice on the merits, but others may read something into it.' "

REad the whole thing.

The "Reagan Scenario" for 2012.

Michael Barone writes:

Instead, in his one debate with Carter, on the Thursday before the election, Reagan echoed a 1934 Franklin Roosevelt fireside chat, which he remembered but the press corps didn't. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" he asked voters.

Opinion moved quickly. Weekend polling showed an unprecedented 10-point shift from Carter to Reagan. Pollster Pat Caddell had to go to the White House Monday morning and tell Jimmy Carter that he was not going to be re-elected president of the United States.

Could something like this happen this year? It is my view that Obama was helped in 2008 by a widespread belief that, in the abstract, it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president. I know I felt that way myself.

This year, I sense that many, perhaps most voters do not want the country to be seen rejecting the first black president. Such a feeling might be buoying Obama's support despite the lagging economic recovery and the widespread opposition to his signature policies.

If that is correct, it is possible that in the last days of the campaign a large number of voters will decide, quietly and out of public view, that they just don't want any more of what they've had for the last four years and they will try the other guy and see if he can do better.

Obama is now getting push-back from the judiciary...

...and from a former law student.

Apparently, Obama didn't teach the "boring" Con-law stuff; he was permitted to cherry-pick the interesting Civil Rights stuff:

Imagine if you picked up your morning paper to read that one of your astronomy professors had publicly questioned whether the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun. Or suppose that one of your economics professors was quoted as saying that consumers would purchase more gasoline if the price would simply rise. Or maybe your high school math teacher was publicly insisting that 2 + 2 = 5. You’d be a little embarrassed, right? You’d worry that your colleagues and friends might begin to question your astronomical, economic, or mathematical literacy.

Now you know how I felt this morning when I read in the Wall Street Journal that my own constitutional law professor had stated that it would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the Supreme Court to “overturn[] a law [i.e., the Affordable Care Act] that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Putting aside the “strong majority” nonsense (the deeply unpopular Affordable Care Act got through the Senate with the minimum number of votes needed to survive a filibuster and passed 219-212 in the House), saying that it would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” for the Supreme Court to strike down a law that violates the Constitution is like saying that Kansas City is the capital of Kansas. Thus, a Wall Street Journal editorial queried this about the President who “famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago”: “[D]id he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison?”

I actually know the answer to that question. It’s no (well, technically yes…he didn’t). President Obama taught “Con Law III” at Chicago. Judicial review, federalism, the separation of powers — the old “structural Constitution” stuff — is covered in “Con Law I” (or at least it was when I was a student). Con Law III covers the Fourteenth Amendment. (Oddly enough, Prof. Obama didn’t seem too concerned about “an unelected group of people” overturning a “duly constituted and passed law” when we were discussing all those famous Fourteenth Amendment cases – Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut, Romer v. Evans, etc.) Of course, even a Con Law professor focusing on the Bill of Rights should know that the principle of judicial review has been alive and well since 1803, so I still feel like my educational credentials have been tarnished a bit by the President’s “unprecedented, extraordinary” remarks.

Fortunately, another bit of my educational background somewhat mitigates the reputational damage inflicted by the President’s unfortunate comments. This morning, the judge for whom I clerked, Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, called the President’s bluff.

Here’s a bit of transcript from this morning’s oral argument in Physicians Hospital of America v. Sebelius, a case involving a challenge to the Affordable Care Act:

Judge Jerry E. Smith: Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?

Dana Lydia Kaersvang (DOJ Attorney): Yes, your honor. Of course, there would need to be a severability analysis, but yes.

Smith: I’m referring to statements by the President in the past few days to the effect…that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed “unelected” judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed – he was referring, of course, to Obamacare – what he termed broad consensus in majorities in both houses of Congress.

That has troubled a number of people who have read it as somehow a challenge to the federal courts or to their authority or to the appropriateness of the concept of judicial review. And that’s not a small matter. So I want to be sure that you’re telling us that the attorney general and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts through unelected judges to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases.

Kaersvang: Marbury v. Madison is the law, your honor, but it would not make sense in this circumstance to strike down this statute, because there’s no –

Smith: I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday…a letter stating what is the position of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice, in regard to the recent statements by the President, stating specifically and in detail in reference to those statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review. That letter needs to be at least three pages single spaced, no less, and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the President’s statements and again to the position of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice.

I must say, I’m pretty dang proud of Judge Smith right now. And I’m really looking forward to reading that three-page, single-spaced letter.

Of glass ceilings and glass jaws...

...and maybe just a little bit about affirmative action.

Has Obama ever actually had to work for anything?

Many have commented that last week was the worst week (so far) for the Obama administration, but I don’t think the apparatchiks have quite yet realized how bad things are going to get for them. The decision to insult and attack the Catholic Church was spectacularly stupid, even as a crass political tactic, since there are some 77 million Catholics in the country, representing about a fifth of the population. True, Catholics tend no longer to vote as a bloc (the old FDR coalition has splintered as the Irish and Italians moved out of the cities and up in the world), but a thumb in the eye to one is a thumb in the eye to all, especially when that one is the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York.

Now it’s the judiciary’s turn, and that is likely to end equally badly for the president. Because this isn’t simply an attack on a judge or court because of one ruling; it’s a pre-emptive strike on a decision that has yet to be issued. Worse, it’s not really a blitzkrieg against even the Supreme Court but is rather a direct strike against the Constitution and the Founders. And a majority of Americans understand that the Constitution is the only thing separating us from tyranny on one hand and barbarism on the other. We’ve understood for a while now that Obama finds the separation of powers inconvenient, but this takes his will to power to a new level.

Which brings me back to my point from yesterday: The Punahou Kid is not used to being crossed, nor to being treated with anything less than obeisance. All his life, he’s gotten away with his lighter-than-air act, blissfully aware than even when provably duplicitous he’ll be able to skate, thanks to his protective horde of media buddies, led by Jake Lingle himself.

In the Leftist world-view, there is no yesterday, only the fierce urgency of now in the service of tomorrow — which they feel rightfully belongs to them. Which is why and how stories go down the memory hole, and why Obama will conduct his 2012 campaign by essentially running against himself and promising that next time, things will turn out better. The real “dog whistle” will be Obama signaling to his supporters that “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The Great Equalizer in the battle between right and left is the Left’s congenital tendency to overreach, to let the mask of affability slip and to reveal themselves for what they really are. By now, the Obama administration’s overt hostility to the country as founded ought to be clear to everyone (for the Left, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature), and it’s mistaken its fleeting supermajority (the result of years of concerted media Bush-bashing) as carte blanche to act on it.

But there’s — thankfully — still a glass ceiling to this fashionable anti-Americanism. Obama was the first Democrat to win a majority of the vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976, and that was a mistake the electorate quickly rectified with the two Reagan landslides. Four years of Nancy Pelosi were all the populace could stomach and it’s likely that the same will be true of Barack Obama. As the Patient Deflection and Unaffordable Care Act demonstrated, even with a supermajority the Democrats still had to resort to bribery, prevarication and legalistic chicanery to get it passed.

Of course, that assumes the GOP candidate can move past the “he’s in over his head” bromides and directly engage the great battle — the Cold Civil War — of our times. Obama’s never had to take a real punch, never had his core assumptions challenged, never been forced to defend his governing philosophy — which is why he reacts so petulantly when crossed. He’s got a glass jaw, which is something increasingly evident to the public; let’s hope it is to the candidate as well.

With all due respect, affirmative action has been a corrupting influence on everyone...

...What about the non-minority students who don't get to have their professors write dissertations for them?

How do they feel about the value of degrees given to minorities if this kind of thing is "normal"?

Abraham H. Miller writes:

When I read Thomas Sowell’s column (March 13, 2012) about an African American graduate student in mathematics at a prestigious university who had his dissertation written for him, I was shocked. Not because after spending more than three decades in academia I didn’t know such things existed. I just didn’t know they existed in mathematics and, perhaps, the real sciences. I thought that kind of intellectual corruption was confined to the social sciences and humanities.

So familiar am I with the process of writing dissertations for black students that I believe I can claim to know the professor who thinks he invented it. In fact, he alleges to have devised the euphemism to cover it up, which he “brilliantly” called “heavy editing.” Were he to come forth and accept recognition for this achievement, it would be the singular and most palpable accomplishment of his academic career.

To be a black graduate student and be constantly reminded that your race results in the special privilege of having a dissertation written for you does nothing for your self-esteem. To survive in this kind of intellectually abusive environment, one must turn against it. One must deny its legitimacy. If one weren’t radicalized before, one most certainly is radicalized afterward.

This explains Derek Bell’s critical race theory. Bell knew that he was not qualified to teach at Harvard. He proposed a theoretical standard by which Harvard was not qualified to judge him. Barack Obama’s admission to Columbia University remains a mystery. He became the president of the Harvard Law Review without ever having written an article for it. Obama knew that he was where he was because of his race. He too embraced a cultural explanation of a different reality and a political radicalization that affirmed that reality.

The ego must defend itself. We are not about to be objective about our limitations. We are going to rationalize our experiences. If we are found wanting, we are going to denounce the standards that make it so.

Chris "My Legs are Tingling" Matthews reveals his unhappiness with the Prom King President.

Watch this video and note that Matthews is surprised that a person whose career has involved voting present isn't doing anything - including calling Congressmen - as President.

Tales of the Prom-King Presidency.

Obama leaves top Senators on hold for twenty minutes, until someone else came on the line with a vague idea of what the conference call was about.

President Obama’s relations with Senate Democratic leaders are deteriorating along with his poll numbers.


With Obama’s approval ratings at record lows and the 2012 electoral map favoring Senate Republicans, the president and Senate Democrats are, in many ways, on divergent paths. Vulnerable Democrats from red states see Obama as impeding their chances of winning reelection, while the president often seems aloof to their concerns.

Obama, focused on winning a second term, has distanced himself from Congress altogether, at times not making the distinction between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
 
There have been recent flare-ups between the White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his deputies. This comes 13 months before the 2012 elections, when control of the Senate is up for grabs.


The proximate causes of friction can seem slight, such as a recent breach of protocol, which left Senate Democratic leaders grumbling.

Obama left his party’s top senators, who had assembled for a conference call, hanging on the phone for nearly 20 minutes before National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling came on the line with a seemingly vague notion of what the call was supposed to be about, Democratic sources said.

The White House and Reid’s office did not comment for this article.

Reid has been Obama’s most important ally in Congress, but the relationship has never been particularly affectionate, even though Reid was one of Obama’s first Senate colleagues to privately urge him to run for president.

Obama and Reid speak frequently on the phone, but the conversations can be terse. One Democratic source quipped that it’s often a contest to guess who will hang up on the other first. Reid, as it turns out, doesn’t have a habit of saying goodbye when he ends a call.

The White House has had to rely on Reid because, unlike former President Clinton, Obama has little appetite for regularly calling Democratic lawmakers.

So, why was the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case swept under the rug?

It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the President and the NBPP were political allies, could it?

And how come this never came out earlier...say, in 2008?

For those of you who have followed the story of the unexplained dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case, Andrew Breitbart has a blockbuster story over at BigGovernment.


Breitbart has turned up photographs taken in Selma, Alabama, in March 2007 of candidate Obama sharing a platform with members of the New Black Panther Party as well as departing with them for the main anniversary march. A photograph shows NBPP chairman Malik Shabazz standing just to the left of Obama, with another New Black Panther in between wearing the same type of black, paramilitary uniform the Panthers wore in Philadelphia on Election Day in 2008 when they were blocking the entrance to a polling place and hurling racial epithets at voters and poll watchers.

Shabazz was one of the defendants whose case was inexplicably dismissed at the orders of higher-ups in the Justice Department after Voting Section lawyer Christian Adams and section chief Christopher Coates had already won the case against him and the other defendants. BigJournalism also has two articles about this well worth perusing, including one on the background of the NBPP and another on the possible collusion between Media Matters and the DOJ on hushing up the NBPP story.

Breitbart points out that the White House has refused to identify the “Malik Shabazz” listed on White House visitor records as having been at the personal residence of the president on July 25, 2009, only two months after the voter intimidation case was dismissed. According to Adams’s new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, “the fact that the future President of the United States shared a podium with leaders of the New Black Panthers, marched with them, and received a public, formal greeting from their party has vanished from the history of Obama’s campaign.”

If another presidential candidate had shared a podium, marched with, and received an endorsement from the KKK, it would justifiably be front page news and we would be seriously questioning the judgment of that candidate. If that candidate got elected and his administration then dismissed a lawsuit it had already won against the KKK, it would have led to serious consequences and serious questions being asked from the mainstream media. So why, when the color of the racists is reversed, is such behavior ignored?

President Obama's literary mistakes.

We have been told repeatedly that President Obama is brillian - brilliant! - as often as we are told that various Republicans are dumb - dumb! - but no one in journalism has been interested in finding a transcript of Obama's grades, although George W. Bush's "gentleman 'C's" were the stuff of journalistic fodder for years.

This seems to gesture at the possibility that the President's college transcripts may not support the meme that he is brilliant.

The American Thinker has analyzed more pertinent evidence that underscores this possibility - a grammatically confused letter written by Obama when he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review:

Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.


Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."

If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.

Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "

Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:

"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?

Although it is as fashionable as belching in church to suggest the possibility that Obama may have been a lackluster student promoted into a position at Harvard through affirmative action, that possibility seems to have the ring of truth:

In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.


Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."

She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.

In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."

To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."

Obama has done well for himself.  He has exploited the opportunities given to him.  If he has ridden affirmative action to the presidency, such that, once again, he finds himself in over his head and has to rely on aids like teleprompters. (See, e.g. "President needs two teleprompters for three minute speech.")

"Progressives" aren't hopelessly befuddled....

...it just takes them four years longer than everyone else to see the fargin obvious.

Glen Reynolds links to Mickey Kause:

Is Obama finally bringing left and right together? Byron York on Drew Westen’s Sunday NYT piece chopping up Obama from the left:

Why has Obama been such a disappointment? Westen comes up with a few theories that sound strikingly familiar to Obama’s critics on the right. Perhaps Obama “is simply not up to the task” of being president. Perhaps the Democrats who were so dazzled by his campaign speeches should have noticed “some disquieting aspects of his biography.” Among those disquieting aspects: “that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted ‘present’ (instead of ‘yea’ or ‘nay’) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.” Go to any conservative blog, and you’ll find many similar critiques, dating to well before the 2008 election.

P.S.: Westen also finds Obama’s core argument that his health care reform will “bend the cost curve” to be an “unbelievable and even more uninspiring claim.” Common ground! …

Here is the Westen essay.  You'll find this on page 4:

The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.


A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

Well, duh.....

"President jabs enemies, mocks symbols of patriotism."

Obama has been coming across as a bully by bad-mouthing his opponents in situations where they have no choice but to sit still and listen.  Add the White House correspondents dinner to his State of the Union speech where he excoriated the Supreme Court and the speech where he lambasted Paul Ryan:

Self-deprecation has long been a hallmark of presidential appearances at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Whether riding high or struggling in the polls, a president's surest way to score points with the press and the Washington political establishment is to make fun of himself. While he's also expected to get in a few digs at his opponents, over the years the theme of the dinner has usually focused on a president who's big enough to make jokes at his own expense.


In his remarks to the correspondents association dinner Saturday night, Barack Obama came up with a new formula: Cut the self-deprecation to a minimum and unleash a series of attacks on his adversaries -- and start the performance in a way that seems to mock not just his enemies but the very idea of what it means to be an American.

Obama's routine started not with his own words but with a White House-produced video that juxtaposed a pulsing image of his birth certificate with traditional patriotic symbols -- the flag, an eagle, Uncle Sam, Mount Rushmore -- all to a song called "Real American," best known as part of World Wrestling Federation shows. The video seemed to jeer at conventional notions of patriotism; it was, as Politico's Ben Smith wrote, "crafted in the spirit of 'South Park' and 'Team America World Police' and 'The Colbert Report' in what you could interpret either as an ironic, subversive send-up of American patriotism or as a kind of post-ironic homage." In any event, it seemed almost aggressively nonpresidential. "The presidency seems an odd vehicle, even at a roast, for mocking patriotism," Smith concluded.

Obama's speech began with a riff about the birth certificate controversy, using another video, scenes from "The Lion King," to joke that maybe he really was born in Africa, after all. But the real point was to take a shot at Fox News. "I want to make clear to the Fox News table: That was a joke," Obama said. "That was not my real birth video. That was a children's cartoon."

And then there were digs at Donald Trump and others.  For example:

But the evening's main target was Donald Trump. "No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald," Obama said. "And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter -- like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?"


Obama was just getting warmed up on Trump. "All kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience," he said to Trump, who was sitting at a table near the back of the room. "No, seriously -- just recently, in an episode of 'Celebrity Apprentice' at the steak house, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled." Trump scowled; the wildly pro-Obama room loved it. They were happy to see Trump, who had engaged in unfounded speculation about Obama's birth certificate, get his comeuppance.

One last shot at Trump -- a mock-up of what a Trump White House & Casino would look like -- and Obama was on to a little more gentle self-deprecation, which was actually a set up to a little self-praise. Obama's writers created a trailer for an imaginary movie, "The President's Speech," in which deficit-cutting Republicans take away funds for Obama's teleprompter. For a moment the president is lost -- the video included previously unseen outtakes of a few Obama flubs during the recording of his weekly address -- until he is rescued by his gaffe-prone vice president, Joe Biden. The music swells. "A president loses his teleprompter, but wins the future," the trailer concludes. After the video, Obama turned serious, making a few remarks about the tornadoes in Alabama and U.S. troops overseas.

Needless to say, could you imagine the outrage if Bush had gone after John Kerry or Michael Moore in the same way at the Correspondent's Dinner?

The comedian class played their self-assigned role as "comforter of power":

The audience might have expected the night's main act, "Saturday Night Live" comedian Seth Meyers, to be a little tougher on the president. It didn't happen. The thrust of Meyers' Obama jokes was that the president is no longer quite as wonderful as he was a few years ago. Surveying the current Republican presidential field, Meyers suggested it was unlikely any can defeat Obama. "I'll tell you who could beat you," Meyers said to the president, sitting just a few feet away. "2008 Barack Obama. You would have loved him." Meyers also mentioned Obama's gray hair, which is as safe a subject as could be imagined; the president himself has talked about his hair in many public appearances. But Meyers' joke -- "If you're hair gets any whiter, the Tea Party is going to endorse it" -- wasn't about Obama at all but was instead a shot at the alleged racism, or perhaps the age, of Obama's opponents.


In the end, Meyers went as easy on Obama as Obama went on himself. If there were any jokes to be had in presiding over a failing economy, running the national debt to unprecedented highs, pushing a still-unpopular national health care proposal into law, losing control of the House of Representatives in a historic landslide, taking over failing auto companies, spending $800 billion with scant success on economic stimulus, fighting the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to an embarrassing stalemate, and, in the latest phrase to sweep Washington, "leading from behind" -- if there were any jokes in all that, Meyers didn't find them.

A Mid-Career Retrospective

Jonathan V. Last writes about the "American Narcissus":

Yet you don’t have to delve deep into armchair psychology to see how Obama’s vanity has shaped his presidency. In January 2009 he met with congressional leaders to discuss the stimulus package. The meeting was supposed to foster bipartisanship. Senator Jon Kyl questioned the plan’s mixture of spending and tax cuts. Obama’s response to him was, “I won.” A year later Obama held another meeting to foster bipartisanship for his health care reform plan. There was some technical back-and-forth about Republicans not having the chance to properly respond within the constraints of the format because President Obama had done some pontificating, as is his wont. Obama explained, “There was an imbalance on the opening statements because”—here he paused, self-satisfiedly—“I’m the president. And so I made, uh, I don’t count my time in terms of dividing it evenly.”


There are lots of times when you get the sense that Obama views the powers of the presidency as little more than a shadow of his own person. When he journeyed to Copenhagen in October 2009 to pitch Chicago’s bid for the Olympics, his speech to the IOC was about—you guessed it: “Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night,” he told the committee, “people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of .  .  . ” and away he went. A short while later he was back in Copenhagen for the climate change summit. When things looked darkest, he personally commandeered the meeting to broker a “deal.” Which turned out to be worthless. In January 2010, Obama met with nervous Democratic congressmen to assure them that he wasn’t driving the party off a cliff. Confronted with worries that 2010 could be a worse off-year election than 1994, Obama explained to the professional politicians, “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.”

And:

Obama’s vanity is even more jarring when paraded in the foreign arena. In April, Poland suffered a national tragedy when its president, first lady, and a good portion of the government were killed in a plane crash. Obama decided not to go to the funeral. He played golf instead. Though maybe it’s best that he didn’t make the trip. When he journeyed to Great Britain to meet with the queen he gave her an amazing gift: an iPod loaded with recordings of his speeches and pictures from his inauguration.

And:

It’s troubling that a fellow whose electoral rationale was that he edited the Harvard Law Review and wrote a couple of memoirs was comparing himself to the man who saved the Union. But it tells you all you need to know about what Obama thinks of his political gifts and why he’s unperturbed about having led his party into political disaster in the midterms. He assumes that he’ll be able to reverse the political tide once he becomes the issue, in the presidential race in 2012. As he said to Harry Reid after the majority leader congratulated him on one particularly fine oration, “I have a gift, Harry.”

They don't make Messiahs like they used to.

Democrat consultants Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell in The Washington Post calls for Obama to be a one-term President.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.