I could hardly agree more with Jennifer that the Obama administration is clueless regarding how to repair the American economy and get the unemployment numbers moving in the right direction. Unwilling to do what needs to be done, they hold “summits” instead, as if enough photo-ops will do the trick.
But they better do something — and fast — as their poll numbers are doing a very passable imitation of the Titanic. As Byron York points out, even Democratic strategists such as James Carville and Stanley Greenberg are now seeing the unmistakable signs of an impending election disaster next year.
Tomorrow morning the unemployment figures for November will be released. Since April 2008, when the rate was 5 percent, it has been rising inexorably. It was flat in September 2008, when it was at 6.2 percent, and declined in July 2009, from 9.5 to 9.4. Otherwise it’s been up, up, up until now it’s at 10.2 percent, up .4 percent from the previous month.
If there’s another sizable uptick tomorrow morning, can the Obami really just keep whistling and devote all their political energies — photo-ops aside — to passing a hugely expensive health-care bill?
We’ll see.
Hillary is slowing destroying Obama’s candidacy by exposing its fault lines that would have been revealed a long time ago if he had ever run for a serious, contested election before running for the most important job in America.
File that subject away with the other key lesson learned from this primary season – that the delegate-counting rules for the DP must be changed to allow a clear and earlier victory for the better candidate (winner takes all and fewer caucuses).
I do not think Hillary will be president this time around. Either the superdelegates will go with a wounded Obama anyway and go down with his sinking ship so as not to offend their two most loyal constituencies (rich liberals and blacks), or she will win the nomination and lose to McCain in the general. One Republican operative recently said, “Half the country thinks that Hillary rides a broomstick.”
I think her sights are on 2012. A loss to McCain in a year when they should have won will cause a major bloodletting and settling of accounts in the Democratic Party. Would anyone want to bet that the Clinton duo comes out on top of that civil war?
Christopher Hitchens last month compared Hillary to a Zombie. No matter what you throw at her, she keeps on coming. I’d bet on the Zombie coming back in 2012 with a rebuilt, remade party minus some key liberal luminaries who will be dumped by the wayside.
Ellen S,
I think they would fear losing Blacks more than the rich liberals. They can always harvest the impressionable young who attend college to fill those ranks (obviously that wouldn’t fill the monetary hole left). But they know if just 10% of Blacks do not vote for them on a national election, they have no chance of winning an election–none. It’s the new plantation.
This campaign, at least on the Democrat side, has been a process of tearing down whomever seemed to be in front at the time. First Hillary was the favorite, and was naturally the target of the brunt of the criticism. I should say the criticism was tepid as the media seemed to favor a HRC presidency (even SNL caught on), so that such obvious points as the fact that she is not qualified, that she can point to no accomplishments of her own, that she is claiming experience based on being married to a president who barely spoke to her and didn’t even give her national security clearance, that her husband turned out to be fecklessly iresponsible on such issues as al-Qaeda, North Korea, etc. and not much of a role model, and that her campaign amounts to “vote for me, my name is Clinton” or “vote for me, I’m a woman”, have been pretty much ignored, as has the general shabbiness of the whole pathetic spectacle. Then Obama-mania set in, and people disconcerted by the hysterical nature of the phenomenon and the enigmatic nature of the candidate started to worry that they were getting a ideological Trojan horse from the Jimmy Carter school of self-loathing (I was on to this early in the game), thus making Obama the lighting rod for criticism. I guess my point is that I find them both pretty lousy, and that for all the glee associated with trying to tear Obama down never lose sight of the fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has always been viewed as being much further to the Left than her husband, is no one to root for either. I’ll leave it to others to decide which is worse, although the whole HRC candidacy is to me a sick joke with a candidate who doesn’t seem all that much more trsutworthy than Obama.
For the word on the Democratic Party’s need for rich liberals, you might look here
http://www.zombietime.com/obama_visits_billionaires_row/
…to see the venue in which Mr. Obama inadvertently let us all know, all of us religious gun nuts and bitter losers, what he thinks of us.
Well, the LA Times claims Hillary is losing traction.
An inexact science, this polling.