The Amateur: Why Barack Obama Is Losing The Presidency

The race for the White House isn't over, but there is very little good news for the incumbent president. With Romney ahead in Florida, New Hampshire, and Virginia, and tied with the president in Ohio, the writing appears to be on the wall for the Obama presidency. The president has less than two weeks to turn it around. Why has it come to this? For the last four years the United States of America has been ruled by an amateur.  From the moment he took office until this very day, the actions of the 44th president have shown him to be grossly incompetent. The president has not lost yet, but he is losing.

In 2008, everyone knew Presidential Candidate Barack Obama had no executive experience. His political career consisted mainly of community organizing in Chicago, some years in the Illinois state legislature (a voting record undistinguished aside from his repeated votes to squash a bill banning partial-birth abortions, a barbaric practice that embarrasses many pro-choice advocates), and one term in the U.S. Senate. But Americans have historically shown a willingness to take a chance on an amateur. John F. Kennedy had a similarly short and undistinguished career in the U.S. Congress before making his successful presidential bid in 1960.

Amateurs make mistakes. Soon after becoming president, John F. Kennedy made a huge one. He allowed a hair-brained invasion of Cuba by fewer than 2,000 CIA-trained exiles, up against more than 25,000 Castro troops. Now, it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that 2,000 is no match for 25,000 (even if Kennedy had delivered on the promised air-cover). But Kennedy had not been on the job for long, and he was intimidated by the metal-clad chests of the generals advising him to approve the mission. Such lack of astute judgment of options presented by subordinates is a sure-fire sign of amateurism. Luckily for America, John F. Kennedy learned from his mistakes and was on his way to becoming an effective president when he was assassinated in Dallas. Unfortunately for America, Barack Obama is no Jack Kennedy.

Einstein's definition of insanity is to repeat the same behavior expecting a different result. By that law, President Obama should have been committed to an asylum long ago. For this politician never learns from his mistakes. From the moment he took office in 2009, Obama told aides his policy toward Israel will be guided by "tough love". By this, he explained that America is likely to gain concessions from the Muslim world by giving Israel a public dressing-down. Obama continued his tough love policy toward Israel for the next four years and what has America gained from the Muslim world in terms of concessions? Let's see, perhaps in Obama's mind the following count as concessions:

•  An Iran as defiant as ever in the pursuit of developing atomic weapons while calling for Israel to be wiped off the map.
• An Iran that has the gall to plot an assassination of U.S-allied foreign leaders in Washington  D.C., through Latin American proxies.
• An Iraq that has told us to leave its country without a status of forces agreement, thus eliminating any material gain the U.S might hope for from the seven year-long Iraq War.
• A Libya that is crawling with Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists brave enough to launch and successfully execute an assault on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, resulting in the deaths of four Americans, including the Ambassador.
• A Tunisia that has flag-burning marchers who chant "Obama, Obama, We Are All Osama!"
• An Afghanistan whose troops are murdering U.S. troops in growing numbers of attacks.
• An Egypt that has allowed vandalism of the U.S. embassy and a parliament whose members openly declare to the populace, "Prepare for war with Israel!"

Are these what the president calls concessions? If not, than why has the president not changed course on his Israeli foreign policy. Why has he not learned from his mistakes? For all my friends who think Obama has reversed the image of the "Ugly Americans" in the minds of the world, the evidence is crushingly to the contrary. This president has shown nothing but American weakness. Weakness gets laughed-at, not respected. Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan wielded American power un-apologetically, and gained respect from world leaders. People respect strength, not arrogance, but strength. If we want peace, we must be prepared to fight for it. And in so doing, we can call the bluffs of the Chavez'es and Ahmadinejad's of the world. But if we project weakness, they will go in for the kill. The moment Osama bin Laden thought he could bring America to its knees was when we pulled out of Mogadishu with our tails between our legs in 1993. He once testified this to a reporter.

In the twilight days of his re-election campaign, the president has doubled-down on amateurism. A few weeks ago, Obama told the Israeli prime minister he had no time in his schedule to meet with him. Immediately afterward, the president went to be a guest on David Letterman's comedy show.  Then, there was a gathering of world leaders at the UN in New York. The president skipped it and went with Michelle to star in an episode of The View, followed by campaign fundraising with Jay-Z and Beyonce. This president does not lead, he only campaigns!

The full rankness of the president's amateurish nature was on display throughout the three presidential debates with his challenger, Mitt Romney. In the first debate, Obama seemed like he was hardly in attendance. That debate was crucial because it defeated the entire premise of the president's re-election campaign, which was "Kill Romney" from the start. For the last year, the president has shown no interest in laying out an agenda for his second term. All he has wanted us to do is hang-on and trust that the reforms of the first term will kick-in. Aside from that message, the rest of is campaign has been to scare us to death about the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president. This image of the uncaring, cutthroat-capitalist Romney evaporated when the real Mitt Romney showed up at the first debate and showed compassion, command of the facts and issues most relevant to the country, and made himself appear a viable and attractive alternative to Barack Obama. In the three debates, Obama's attacks on Romney have consisted of the most meager substance and have instead hit at some vague target like "the rich one-percent" whom Romney has supposedly been mainly concerned with helping, and how Romney does not care about the rest of us. Such class warfare is emotional, not factual.

It is not surprising that almost overnight, following the first debate, the ground shifted in the polls from a solid Obama-lead, to a deadheat, and then to a steadily climbing Romney-lead. Obama's performance improved in tone and energy (but not in substance) in the second debate. Romney absolutely skewered the president's record on the economy with a withering barrage of facts. The president was strafed with the Keystone veto, the wasted taxpayer dollars on financially bankrupt solar companies, the AAA credit downgrade, and stagnant job growth, among other hits. Romney was moving into the kill with his interrogation of the president on the Libya embassy scandal when the moderator, CNN's Candy Crowley,  injected herself into the debate on the president's behalf saying, "he called it" [the embassy attack] "terrorism" in the Rose Garden speech. She turned out to be wrong.

The third debate showed the president to appear petty and peevish, making condescending remarks to Romney such as, "We're glad you think Al Qaeda's a threat." No Mr. President, we wish you could demonstrate to us that YOU think Al Qaeda's a threat, but your cover-up of the cause of death of four Americans in Benghazi with persistent remarks that a youtube video and spontaneous protests caused the event tells us you do not think Al Qaeda's a threat! Romney avoided a fight with the president in the third debate because he wanted to present himself with the confidence of being a presidential candidate who is winning. Consequently, the challenger appeared presidential and the incumbent appeared as the challenger. Since then, the Romney surge has continued in all the swing- state polling.

The president's most recent display of amateurism has come in the wake of the third debate and in the shadow of the Romney tide: the publication of President Obama's second term agenda! Yes, it is a handsomely packaged booklet entitled The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs & Middle Class Security. One has to look in vain for Obama's second term agenda in all his many speeches over the last year, and in all three presidential debates the last three weeks. With two weeks left until election day, with his campaign staring defeat in the face, Obama rolls-out his second term agenda. What does it contain? More of the same. More spending. More stimulus. Nothing new. More of Einstein's definition of insanity, with the nation teetering on a fiscal cliff. Pure amateurism - true to form.

There is no single issue defeating the president. It is not jobs or the economy. If it were, than why has he gained no traction from an unemployment figure that has dropped below 8 percent in the last few weeks? Barack Obama is losing because the public is waking up to the notion that this man has been out of his depth, in over his head, incompetent, in his performance as president of the United States. We have been ruled by an administration that is bringing the country ever closer to a run on the dollar, immeasurably more vulnerable to terroristic attacks, and to being a laughing stock among the international community. Like King Belshazar in the book of Daniel, he has seen the writing on the wall, he has been found wanting, he knows his days are numbered, his reign is coming to an end, very soon.

Jason A.

Is It Bias To Love Your Country and Hate All Threats To Its Well-Being?

In the heat of a presidential campaign bias is the boogeyman everyone watches out for in the debates between the candidates and in the people moderating these events. Similarly, readers are examining the content of blogs to detect bias, including this one.

A very good friend of mine privately praised the factual nature of these blog posts but said that the exposition is biased to favor Mitt Romney. To that I must answer that this observer is inclined to go where the facts take me, and the truth often hurts. As John Adams famously said in court (defending the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre), "Facts are stubborn things." Facts are objective. They are immovable. They are inconvenient.

If the analysis in these posts does not rake Mitt Romney the way it often does Barack Obama, there are a few reasons for this. Firstly, Mitt Romney has not been president of the United States. Therefore, the stakes of his actions have not yet had a trans-formative impact on the lives of the American people on a national level. The opposite is true for Barack Obama. Therefore, critical analysis of Barack Obama's performance in public office receives a higher priority than does a similar analysis of Mitt Romney. Secondly, this observer has not yet seen anything in Mitt Romney's character, or public and private conduct that warrants immediate criticism as far as known facts are concerned. As I've watched this campaign unfold I have not found a "Reverend Wright" who preaches "Goddamn America" to the candidate's open ears or a "Bill Ayers" terrorist who was once a colleague of the candidate. Romney's Mormon religious beliefs should not in any way discredit him as a presidential candidate. He has never used those convictions in a way that is contrary to the laws of the country or dangerous to the religious freedom of the American people.  If my readers have come across facts to the contrary, by all means forward those to this observer for critical analysis.

But let's focus on bias in of itself to get to the heart of what people ought to be worried about and what they ought to not worry about. Bias is when a point of view is being advanced in a way that distorts or hides the truth. The mere stating of an opinion is not quite the same thing as bias. Journalists, public figures, and historians ought to have opinions and ought to state them freely. Opinions are terrific. They give us something to think about; something to examine; something to learn from; Opinions are healthy. Bias is toxic. Bias is partiality. Bias is prejudice.

I am willing to advance the notion that patriotic feeling and loyalty to one's country is not bias. "My country first" is not the same thing as "my country, right or wrong." The folly of the latter is exposed when it is examined against the crimes of Nazi Germany, for example. "My country first" is a reasonable sentiment the people of a democratic society have when they are going about their duty to hold elected officials accountable to do what is in that society's best interests. If those elected officials do what is right for the people who have entrusted them with public office, they deserve praise not only from their own countrymen and women but also from others in the international community.

For example, this observer has nothing but admiration and respect for Charles de Gaulle, the French patriot and World War II hero. Many American history buffs of that period do not like de Gaulle. They view him as haughty and anti-American because of his many stated criticisms of the United States throughout the span of his public career. I disagree, if de Gaulle came across that way it was only because the man was so patriotically French. We are talking about a man who saved his country from disaster not once, but three times! The first occasion was when he organized resistance movements to the Nazi occupation; the second was when he set up a government that secured order in France following the D-Day liberation; the third was when he came out of retirement in 1958, when his country's government teetered on anarchy and the possibility of a military takeover. He saved the day by setting up a new constitution that has (for the most part) secured French political stability and prosperity for the better part of half a century. Patriots like de Gaulle deserve respect from their countrymen and from all people everywhere because they serve as an example of how one person can and should try to make a difference for the betterment of the society that produced them.

The facts (stubborn as they are) demonstrate that the actions of Barack Obama as president of the United States undermine the best interests of the country that has entrusted him with the highest office in the land.  

• 2008 Voters did not vote for 5 trillion in new national debt. 
• 2008 Voters did not vote for a downgrade of this country's credit rating in the world (no more AAA). 
• 2008 Voters did not vote for an unemployment rate that is the same as when Obama took office.
• 2008 Voters did not vote for decreased energy independence (as evidenced by the Keystone veto).
• 2008 Voters did not vote for a tripling of the price of gasoline (as evidenced by the Keystone veto, which has hindered American production from keeping up with demand).  
• 2008 Voters did not vote for a halting of off-shore drilling permits coupled with a subsidizing of off-shore drilling for Latin American companies to develop drilling in their waters.  
• 2008 Voters did not vote for a weakening of the American-Israeli alliance (some maybe, but not most).  
• 2008 Voters did not vote for Obama to wait three years to back crippling sanctions on an Iran bent on becoming a nuclear power while stating a desire to see Israel wiped off the map.  
• 2008 Voters did not vote for Obama to tell the Russian foreign minister that missile-defense talks should wait until after the 2012 election because Obama will then have "more flexibility." 
• 2008 Voters did not vote for a reduction of security at our embassies throughout the world, which has led to the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya (on September 11th of all days) despite desperate and urgent pleas for help! 

In these many ways, President Obama has demonstrated a lack of love for this country and a willful negligence regarding threats to its well-being. It is not bias to point out these facts. If Mitt Romney has said or done anything of this magnitude that is against the best interests of the American people please forward the facts to this observer!

Jason A.

Recession Myths: De-Constructing the Webs of Historical Falsification


This post highlights the most important issue a voter should have in mind when deciding who to vote for in the middle of a bad economy. The Great Recession of our time resembles the Great Depression of our grandparents' time in ways that are more eerie than you may realize. This post includes the statements of historical actors and present ones. I intend all quotes to be paraphrases more than direct quotes because I'm quoting them from my own memory, which is an imperfect faculty.

For starters, there is no difference between a recession and a depression. Until the Great Depression of the 1930's, the term depression was applied to every instance when there was a decline in economic growth. Depressions as such happened every ten or twelve years. Usually, they ended after 18 months and the recovery was often a booming one.

But something strange happened in the 1930's that made the term depression apply only to that crisis. There was no bounce back. Instead the economy limped, ever so sluggishly, with low growth, for eleven years! The scars ran so deep that the term depression came to be associated with an entire generation. Depression became not just a word associated with economic indicators, but rather, it defined the mood and psyche of the people old enough to remember suffering through that terrible decade! 

Subsequently, a new term was needed to describe usual periods of economic reversal, and so recession provided that need. The American economy boomed following the Second World War. Recessions still happened, sometimes more than once in a decade. But they were brief, and the damage temporary. Sometimes the stock market crashed (in 1987, and again in 2000) with mild consequences except for the people who had a vested interest in the industries that took the plunge.

But suddenly in 2007 and 2008, another recession broke out, and the aftermath has been more depression-esque than anything experienced since the Great Depression. What happened that made both the Great Depression and the Great Recession stand out among the cycles of boom and bust throughout history?

There are many striking parallels shared by both crises. Among them are

• In both cases a calamity was brought-on by choices made the government and the Federal Reserve. 
• In both cases the blame was shifted from these culprits to more convenient ones like "Wall Street", "greedy banks", and the "elite." 
• In both cases the solutions applied by the government made the calamity worse and longer-lasting. 
• In both cases few Americans understood the truth about what caused the crisis and what solved it. This misunderstanding stemmed from layers of mythology perpetrated by public officials, the media, and educators who have affinity for an activist government.
• In both cases the crisis broke-out under a Republican president thought to operate under a "hands-off" approach to governance, but in fact was a believer and practitioner of activist governance. 
• In both cases the Republican president was succeeded by a Democratic president who did more (not less) of them same.
• In both cases the damage and suffering was spread over a wider swathe of the public than needed to be the case.
• In both cases the recovery (if that's what it can be called) was slow, grinding, fitful, sporadic, and unpredictable. This reality kept people (with money) from having the confidence to invest.

Let us tackle the parallels...

Myth:
Teachers and textbooks tell of a decade when credit was cheap and people were living high on the hog. This decade was the 1920's. More commodities were purchased with credit than ever before (radios, cars, household appliances, etc.) People became rich trading stocks in these booming industries. Their greed fed a frantic boom which was followed by an equally intense bust when the stock market collapsed at the end of that decade. Retribution followed the greed when Wall Street bankers jumped out of windows or shot themselves. This was the cause of the Great Depression, or so we've been taught.

Fast Forward:
Following the Great Recession of 2008, similar mythology has put the blame for the crisis on "Wall Street" and the greedy "one percent". But As the deconstruction (below) shows, the real culprits were the same as in the Great Depression: the government and the Federal Reserve.

Deconstruction:
Anyone who understands how credit works knows that the people spending the credit are at the end (not the beginning) of the decision-making circuit. The decision-making begins with the Federal Reserve and the leeway given it by elected officials. In the 1920's, Benjamin Strong (Governor of Federal Reserve Bank of New York) inflated the U.S. and the world economy with massive and continuous injections of money available for credit. 

Strong and his counterparts in Britain (Montagu Norman) and in Germany (Hjalmar Schacht) sought to play God with credit. They wanted to see if they could engineer a formula to keep the world on a permanent economic boom. Elected officials in Washington did nothing to restrain the Fed. This money fed the speculative boom on the stock market which in the end caused the great crash. At some point, prices got too high for the people paying.  It was Washington and the Federal Reserve in an experiment in social engineering, not "greed", which caused the Great Depression. Even so, the Great Depression may not have been anything more than a normal downturn had it not been for the massive efforts of Washington to reverse it.

Fast Forward: 
Similar acts of social engineering by the government and the Federal Reserve caused of the Great Recession of 2008. This time, the motive was to level the opportunity of the masses to become homeowners. Was this a noble goal? Perhaps so, but idealism is often a poor substitute for practicality. Beginning in the 1990's and continuing for a decade, leaders in the White House (Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush), Capitol Hill (Barney Frank, among others), and in the Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan), browbeat lenders to lower mortgage application requirements for lower and middle income people to qualify for a loan. This would never have been a problem so long as most of these borrowers could pay on their loans.

The chickens came home to roost when waves of foreclosures pulled down the entire economy in a systemic free-fall. Since then President Obama, congressional Democrats, liberal media commentators, and thousands of "occupy" protesters have demonized the financial and business communities across the nation. They should have aimed their fingers at the White House and Capitol Hill instead.

Myth: 
For quite some time, it was accepted wisdom that the stingy Republican president, Herbert Hoover (31st U.S. President 1929-1933), made the Great Depression worse by taking a "hands-off" approach to solving the crisis when a rescue of the workforce could have reversed the downward spiral of deflation which ground the economy to a standstill.

Deconstruction:
It is true that Hoover preferred keeping banks solvent as opposed to providing shovel-ready jobs. Direct government relief was not in fashion in those days. Nonetheless, he made great strides to protect workers and, ironically, worsened the crisis. He backed labor unions in keeping wages artificially high. With prices plummeting, employers had no choice but to lay-off workers in masses. By 1932, 25 percent of the workforce was unemployed. Hoover stood no chance of re-election.

Myth:
The same myth followed that recovery began with the massive government relief programs of Hoover's successor, a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (32nd U.S president 1933-1945). 

Deconstruction:
It is true that Roosevelt and his helper, Harry Hopkins, created 4 million jobs in a six month period between late 1934 and early 1935 (as many as President Obama claims to have created in four years). Yet, unemployment did not break single-digits for the remainder of the 1930's. Many people had to compensate by working two or three part-time jobs. Consumer spending was low. The stock market was a tomb. All this, despite unprecedented deficit-spending by the Roosevelt administration and millions of acres of land opened by the federal government for the development of hydroelectric power, roads, parks, you name it.

Myth and History Repeat
More recently, another president believed in the myth of the do-nothing Herbert Hoover and the do-everything Franklin D. Roosevelt. This president was George W. Bush (43rd U.S. president 2001-2009). In his memoir Decision Points Bush repeats myth and history by boldly declaring to an aid, "I'm gonna be FDR not Herbert Hoover", upon learning of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession in September 2008.

Bush and Congress responded with the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which enabled the U.S. Treasury to spend $700 billion dollars to buy up the risky assets held by the nation's lenders. This influx of cash would save the financial system from collapse. In the coming months, Bush's successor would follow-up this bailout with additional bailouts of the auto industry. The assumption behind the approach was to save the entire economy by preventing the fall of public and private institutions deemed "too big to fail." 

Bush misunderstood history, worsened the crisis by delaying a genuine recovery, and in an Oedipus-like way, became Herbert Hoover, another victim of the myth of the stingy, do-nothing Republican. His Democrat successor, Barack Obama (44th U.S. president 2009 - present) was even more convinced he was FDR than was Bush. 

Looking at the Obama presidency from the hindsight of four years, it is hard to place Barack Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the same paragraph. When Roosevelt wanted shovel-ready jobs, he called up people (like Hopkins) who had a proven record of despensing relief in a responsible way. The result was genuine work-relief for millions Americans and the families that needed that paycheck to avoid hunger. The same accomplishment hardly applies to President Obama.

Yet, a relief economy funded and run by the government is not a permanent recipe for economic growth. It is vastly expensive and it involves the government in management practices its officials are not trained for. FDR understood this and wracked his brain to find ways to get the private sector to take over. But in this, he became a victim of his own rhetoric. In his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR had vilified the "forces of selfishness" who were supposedly to blame for the Depression. He boldly puffed, "Let it be said that in my first term, the forces of selfishness met their match. Let it be said that in my second term, they met their master!"

Consequently, "the forces of selfishness" sat on their money and decided to wait out the Roosevelt tide. Genuine recovery did not come until after the Second World War. By then Roosevelt was dead and the great crash was sixteen years in the past!

President Obama has shown himself to have all of FDR's shortcomings and absolutely none of his strengths. A poor delegater, Obama has relied on Congressional Democrats to craft his relief programs in the form of legislation, instead of assigning that task to people with a proven record of positive results in planning and implementing relief work. Having failed in this, the president jokingly mused, "shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we thought."

In the full blaze of his re-election campaign, the president touts a 7.8 percent unemployment rate (down from 8.1 percent, a few weeks ago) as evidence that his policies are working. Let us assume the unemployment rate is accurate (and I am not at all convinced it is). Obama's stimulus spending was spent years ago and 7.8 is about what unemployment was when he took office. After four years and 5 trillion dollars in new debt having been pumped through the economy, what Obama is telling us is that things are exactly the same as when he took over! With a 16 trillion-dollar national debt, and nothing to show for it, we are worse-off than four years ago.

Why does activist governance not work?
The short answer is that it delays recovery by keeping bad capital locked-up in the system. By this I mean the people who make poor investments are allowed to stay in the system, at precisely the moment when the system can not bear them anymore and is trying to flush the bad capital out. Billions of taxpayer dollars are then pumped into the veins of companies with poor financial sense. The continued presence of bad capital keeps good capital from getting a footing in the economy. The power of labor unions is a particular hindrance to recovery. They will not allow wages to fall, therefore they have to tell their members, "oops" when they receive a pink slip instead of a wage increase.

The auto bailouts illustrate what I mean by "bad capital" staying in the system. GM claimed it needed a bailout to avoid bankruptcy. GM ended up in bankruptcy after having been bailed out. Nobody remembers the Depression of 1919 - 1920. Republican president Warren Harding inherited that crisis. All he did was slash expenditures, slash taxes, and allow wages to fall to their natural level. Nobody got a bailout. Yet, within a year, the depression was over and the Roaring 20's followed. Yes, the recovery was a "roaring" one! We can have that tomorrow. We just need to elect leaders who will do what it takes and let the private sector take over.

What is interesting is that the public does not seem to be buying Obama's spin anymore. We are only two weeks into the presidential debate series. Fourteen days ago, Obama was ahead of his challenger, Mitt Romney, in all the leading national and swing-state polls. Now, the challenger is ahead of him in many of the swing states and has broken a six-point lead over him in the latest Gallup national poll. Could it be that the American people have figured out something that has eluded presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Bush, and Obama, for the last 80-plus years? Could it be that activist governance has finally fallen out of fashion. We will find out November 6.

Jason A.

Can Obama Blame Bush?

We've all heard President Obama say time and again that he "inherited" from President Bush "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" and that it takes more than four years or eight years to "clean up the mess." Blaming Bush has been part of the wiring of the Obama team since they began campaigning for the presidency in 2007. In 2008, Obama called Bush "unpatriotic" for adding $4 trillion to the national debt in eight years. He called it "irresponsible" to saddle the nation's children and grandchildren with debt paid for "by a credit card from the national bank of China."

Sometimes Obama officials tell the truth when they blame Bush; other times they tell filthy lies when blaming Bush for their own poor choices. The filthiest lie was when Press Secretary Jay Carney stated at a White House press conference (when asked about the calamitous $500 billion-dollar loan made to the now bankrupt Solyndra) that "the process leading to" the Solyndra loan "began under President Bush." The message is that the Obama administration is not responsible for another Bush blunder.

The reality is that the Bush administration rejected Solyndra's loan-guarantee request! It was rejected because the administration's budget office told the president Solyndra's financial state was so precarious that the company would be bankrupt in a year's time. President Obama received the same advice from the budget office, but made the loan-guarantee to Solyndra anyway. A loan-guarantee means that the taxpayers are co-signing for the loan. In this case, the taxpayers were co-signed to a $500 billion-dollar loan to a company that couldn't pass the credit check!

Aside from this most flagrantly dishonest example of Bush-blaming, can we still swallow Obama's claim that cleaning-up Bush's mess has been such a huge task that he needs a second term to finish it. Let's examine this claim in a little detail.

The Bush years were not so long ago. It seemed like a rough ride at the time. On 9/11/2001, the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked by terrorists. Three thousand Americans were dead. The same evening, the president of the United States gave a radio address announcing that this country was now in a state of war. I was twenty years old. War was something my generation did not grow up with. The Gulf War of 1991 had only lasted a few weeks and Vietnam had long been in school history textbooks. When I was growing up, politics was bland, uninteresting. It seemed far away. Times had been good.

Then, George W. Bush (43rd president of the United States 2001-2009) led the nation into scary waters. Suddenly, our country was fighting a world-wide war against terrorism. Troops by the tens of thousands were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq to defend our freedom and to bring our enemies to justice. War is costly, not just in lives and property, but in finance as well. Republican presidents do not like to raise taxes to pay for increased expenditures. President Bush was no exception. To finance the wars, he borrowed the money instead of charging the American taxpayer. Within a year and a half of the attacks on 9/11, the United States was running record deficits. By the end of the decade, the national debt was $4 trillion dollars higher than it had been previously. This state of affairs could not go on forever. If it did, an eventual run on the dollar would wreck the American economy and make the American dream a thing of the past.

As it turned out, the economy was wrecked by the end of the Bush presidency, but it was not triggered by the national debt. Another monster had been growing alongside the debt and had received much less attention than the national debt and deficits. This monster was a housing bubble, fed by the availability of sub-prime mortgages. To make a long story short, for many years, there had been a collusion between the government and the banks to make mortgage requirements low for lower-income people. Soon, all manner of investment fed off the flourishing mortgage market. Risky mortgage securities were sold, bought, and re-sold again. The entire cycle depended on the ability of the homeowners to pay on the mortgages.

In the summer of 2007, the job market stalled and a wave of foreclosures swept the nation. A year later, the wave arrived at the doors of the major lending houses. Lehman Brothers went under and suddenly the government enacted the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which enabled the U.S. Treasury to spend $700 billion dollars to buy up the risky assets held by the nation's lenders. This influx of cash would save the financial system from collapse. In the coming months, this bailout would be followed-up by additional bailouts of the auto industry. The assumption behind the approach was to save the entire economy by preventing the fall of public and private institutions deemed "too big to fail."

For us to tackle the essential question of whether Obama can blame Bush, we must first ask ourselves what Bush did, what Obama has done, and if their respective approaches to problem-solving were similar or different. President Bush and Senator/President-Elect/President Obama were both at the center of the decision-making behind the bailouts. From September 2008 until January 2009, they worked together and were of the same mind. Bush told Obama the plan he and Treasury Secretary Paulson wanted. Obama agreed and promised to deliver the needed votes from Senate Democrats.

After January 2009, President Obama followed-up the bank bailouts with auto bailouts. Then, his first stimulus bill gave the states an $800 billion-dollar bailout. Soon more, massive infusions of cash into the economy were piped-in.

Four years later, where are we? We are stuck with with high unemployment, a $16 trillion-dollar national debt, and a downgraded credit rating for the United States. (As of 2011, America has lost its AAA credit rating for the first time in history).

Who is to blame? (A) Wall Street Fat-Cats? (B) Republicans? (C) Democrats? (D) Bush? (E) Obama? (F) Poor people who get in-over-their-heads with a mortgage they can't pay? (G) Fannie and Freddie (gov't sponsored enterprises)? (H) The Federal Reserve?

Everyone shares a part of the blame, but I blame B, C, D, E, F, and H, much more than A and G. Yet, Wall Street and Fannie/Freddie have had more fingers pointed at them than everyone else has had. This is unfair. Can we imagine ourselves turning down a perfectly good opportunity to legally make a ton of cash from trading mortgage-backed securities, or from any other commodity? Why have so many fingers been pointed at Fannie/Freddie when they just take orders from the government when it comes to setting lending rules? Congress, the President (Clinton and Bush), and the Federal Reserve (Greenspan) pressured Fannie/Freddie and banks throughout the system into making easy mortgage loans.

Bush is partly to blame for the mushrooming debt and the bloated, risky sub-prime mortgage market that tanked the economy in 2008.  But who is Obama to be blaming his own failure to fix the problem on Bush when he worked in tandem with him in growing the debt and by responding to the same crisis with the same measures? Since Obama has taken office as the 44th president, he has added $5 trillion [more than Bush added] to the national debt and the consequence has been a downgraded credit rating for the country. According to his own stated principles, Obama is "unpatriotic" for being "irresponsible" in saddling the nation's children and grandchildren with debt paid for "by a credit card from the national bank of China."

The eventual run on the dollar everyone feared in the Bush years has become an even greater likelihood under Obama! Obama can not turn us away from a headlong sprint toward a cliff by taping-down the gas pedal and keeping us headed in the same direction! There is not a chance he will make us better-off in another four years.

Jason A.

What Strong Leadership Looks Like: The Example We Need In 2012

A year and a half ago, I was reading Paul Johnson's Modern Times: The World From The Twenties to the Nineties and I was struck by this claim:

"Eisenhower was the most successful twentieth-century president."

You would never have heard anything like this from the mainstream media, from most college professors, or from very many people in Hollywood. On the contrary, all day long it is Kennedy, Kennedy, and Kennedy. This is because John F. Kennedy (35th U.S. president 1961-1963) had that glamorous, GQ image liberals think is such an important leadership quality. By contrast, Eisenhower came across as old, bald, and boring. It didn't help that he was a Republican.

Kennedy stood up for civil rights reform, that is, he gave emotional speeches supporting it. It matters not that Kennedy failed to get a significant civil rights bill passed through Congress; surely he would have succeeded in another attempt had he not been gunned down in Dallas, in November 1963. Maybe... Or maybe not... We will never know.

But Eisenhower, in the judgement of many historians, was aloof about the need for civil rights reform. Eisenhower sent an airborne division into Little Rock, Arkansas, to forcibly desegregate a school there, or rather, make sure the officials complied with a court order to do so. But he didn't do it out of the kindness of his heart. He did it to show states couldn't defy federal courts. Right?

Paul Johnson's claim about Eisenhower being the most successful twentieth-century president got me interested in researching this old, bald, boring, aloof, old president, a little further. Then, last summer, I picked up a new, hardback biography on the old man entitled Eisenhower In War And Peace by Jean Edward Smith. The book offered a new, fresh take on the 34th president, and sought to debunk fabrications and distortions about him. Among the revisions was new evidence, not new, but ignored by most researchers, that show Eisenhower to be a very active and effective president in combating race discrimination. Here are the facts:

*Eisenhower desegregated the armed forces. The previous president, Truman, gave the order and gets the credit. However, until Eisenhower was elected the order was ignored by the military. Eisenhower made sure they complied with the order and held them accountable.

*Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren, John Harlan, and William Brennan to the U.S. Supreme Court: all fierce activists for civil rights reform. Many Eisenhower appointees to the justice department were of the same ilk and would play a pivotal role in the civil rights fights of the 50's and 60's.

The book uncovers many more nuggets of reality that dispel the unfair notion that Eisenhower was aloof on civil rights. Part of the reason not much of it has come to light until now is because Eisenhower, unlike some other presidents, did not get on a soapbox and blab all day long about his accomplishments. He worked behind the scenes to do what he wanted and allowed other people to reap the credit.

Johnson's and Smith's work raised the stature of President Eisenhower in my ranking of U.S. presidents. Then, a week or so ago, I found myself thumbing through a reference work of essays on the American presidents. When I got to the essay on Eisenhower, the first paragraph stopped me dead in my tracks! I read it over and over to let the meaning sink into the recesses of my understanding. It got me thinking about the very qualities that make a presidency successful, and I realized why such qualities are sorely lacking in the current White House. Here is the text of the paragraph form the book The American Presidency: The Authoritative Reference (Editors Alan Brinkley an Davis Dyer):

"The Eisenhower Presidency [34th U.S. president 1953 - 1961] was one of the most unusual in modern American history. Both Eisenhower himself and many of his top aides had no previous experience in public office. Even more atypical, he and they had spent most of their adult lives rising to the the top in other fields of endeavor, most notably the military, business, law, and education. In no other twentieth-century presidential administration did the professional politician enjoy less prestige and influence. Despite, or perhaps because of, those circumstances, Eisenhower's presidency was highly competitive, effective, and successful, the most so of any presidency since World War II."

-David L. Stebenne
Ohio State University

Here Is The Rundown of Eisenhower's Other Presidential Successes:

*expansion of Social Security coverage to the self-employed and to the domestically employed

*the interstate highway system, funded not by the deficit, but by a fuel tax

*construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway

*the end of the Korean War (a campaign promise, fulfilled within months of taking office)

*stopping Communist China from attacking Taiwan, without using nuclear weapons

*stopping a war between Britain, Israel, and France vs. Egypt over Suez

*allowing Senator Joe McCarthy enough political rope to hang himself by bating him into a fight with the military

*curbs on union power

*cuts in federal spending which led to a balanced federal budget

*expansion of the U2 surveillance plane program, which later allowed us to discover nuclear-tipped, Soviet missiles being installed in Cuba, and pointed at Florida

*telling the Soviet Union to go take a hike when they gave us an ultimatum to evacuate ALL of Berlin (an ultimatum, which was given again to Kennedy, who meekly abandoned East Berlin, which was soon walled-off from the world)

The second item on the above list, the interstate highway system, had a greater trans-formative impact on the daily life of the American people than any other single domestic reform of all time. It provided many "shovel-ready" jobs that helped the economy rebound from a brief recession, and paved the golden age of the American auto industry. 

Have another look at some of the other items. Do you notice that many of them have to do with advancing American interests abroad without getting into costly wars? Some of them have to do with ending wars, or using American might to prevent other countries from attacking each other. America back then was functioning like a superpower, in a respectable way. Ask yourself, based on recent events in the Middle East, Is America still respected as a superpower? This is a timely question.

Now, have another look at the paragraph from The American Presidency: The Authoritative Reference. You may notice that some of the bold words have to do with business and other private-sector leaders running the country instead of professional politicians. The difference between business leaders and professional politicians is not just a difference in life-occupation, it is also a difference in character. This point was given clarity to me, recently, when my ears caught a segment from Neal Boortz's radio show.

Boortz explained the difference between a businessman and a politician in these ways: 

*one is sought for their job; the other seeks their job

*one invests their capital, and their ability to stay in power is based on results; the other invests the capital of taxpayers and blames other entities for failures

*one is hired by people who run the industry; the other is hired by anyone who shows up to cast a vote

*one is qualified based on credentials, experience, and job 
performance; the other is qualified by age, citizenship, and friends who are willing to promote their candidacy by making promises to an electorate, some of whom are barely literate

Dear Reader,

In thinking back to the first presidential debate between President Obama and Governor Romney, last Wednesday, assuming you watched it, which candidate do you think embodied the private-sector, results-based leader and which one embodied the professional politician? I'd be interested in reading your comment below.

Jason A.