Jack Kelly on the Obama “stimulus” plan:
Shortly after a Quinnipiac University poll reported July 7 that President Barack Obama’s job approval rating in Ohio had fallen 13 percentage points in two months to 49 percent, the White House dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to that crucial swing state to defend the administration’s efforts to deal with the economic crisis.
This was a mistake, for two reasons.
The first is that almost every journalist reporting on the vice president’s speech would feel compelled to reference the Quinnipiac poll. This, noted Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, was like “hanging a lantern” on the problem.
The second is that Joe Biden is a motormouth, liable to say anything. The White House slapped him down after Mr. Biden said on ABC’s “This Week” program July 5 that the administration had “misread how bad the economy was.” (When asked about the remark, Mr. Obama said there wasn’t a misreading, just a lack of information in the early days of his presidency.)
Speaking in Cincinnati to a crowd of “about 200,” some of them protesters, Mr. Biden asked for patience. “Remember we’re only 140 days into this deal,” he said. “It’s supposed to take 18 months.”
This isn’t what Mr. Obama and his aides were saying in February. Back then we were told the $787 billion stimulus bill had to be rushed through Congress to keep unemployment from rising to 8 percent.
We are already at a 9.5% “official” unemployment rate and are actually already much higher in the real world. Read all of Kelly’s column, especially the part that describes exactly how many jobs the “stimulus” has generated in New Hampshire.
All temporary. All for one year. ALL in government. And very, very few.
My theory of why the health care “reform” suddenly stalled, despite the screeching from the left and the fawning from the media (yeah, that’s redundant, I know) is that the Democrats in Congress are staring at some really, really, really bad internal poll numbers right now. Not the overly-massaged national public polls but the internal ones that tell them how to vote.
And they are seriously questioning whether they want to be tethered to this Obama mess any more than they already are.
That is why the White House is coordinating attacks on wavering Dmocrats. A strategy that will, I sincerely hope, backfire in a spectacular manner.
Harvard must be feeling quite humiliated at the type of intellectuals they have produced; who ever would admit any association to such silliness.
All Democrat politicians have to be watching this and asking themselves the question, who’s next? The fact that Obama and his attack dogs have no compunction whatsoever about attacking any fellow Democrat that dares to even look like they might disagree with him has to make those who haven’t been targeted yet when it will be their turn. That is the level of thuggishness this administration has stooped to. They attack their own party. They attack private citizens. It seems like they are like a pack of rabid dogs that are continually looking for new prey. And still his approval ratings are above 50%. Have we become a nation of the deaf, dumb and blind?