The outlines of President Obama’s political strategy are clear—to unleash, virtually on a daily basis, a series of dishonest and libelous attacks on Republicans while also coming across as likable, reasonable, a man who hovers above the political mud, a president ever in search of common ground.

Obama’s budget speech last week contained both elements. On the one hand, he portrayed the GOP vision as Hobbesian—crumbling roads and collapsing bridges, the elderly and children with autism and Down’s Syndrome left to fend for themselves. Having leveled those charges, Obama spoke at the end of his speech about the need to “come together,” insisting that we need to “bridge our differences” and “find common ground.”

As a political approach, this qualifies as bipolar. Obama’s slashing rhetoric is at war with his post-partisan, conciliatory, and civil image. The two are irreconcilable. And because they are, the two-direction course that Obama is pursuing can only reveal his extraordinary fraudulence. Obama has been president since January 2009; he has proven himself to be at his core prickly, arrogant, ideological, and prone to thuggish tactics. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t impressive—and for the sake of our politics, one can only hope it isn’t the path to reelection.

At a town-hall meeting at Facebook headquarters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asks Barack Obama to name the areas in which he is willing to cut spending in order to bring down debt.

During Obama’s uninterrupted eight-plus-minute In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida of an answer he specifies precisely one thing he’s ready to cut: You guessed it – the Pentagon budget.

With that out of the way, he’s off to the races on taxing the rich and enumerating the many things he plans to spend on: health-care schemes, sci-fi travel and energy, and expanding the social safety net.

When the litany of dreams and delusions winds down, the hall falls completely silent. “I didn’t mean to cut off the applause,” says Zuckerberg, in fact cutting off the absence of applause, “It’s a very thorough answer.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor warned Democrats that the GOP “will not grant their request for a debt limit increase” without major spending cuts or budget process reforms.

This strikes me as a wise strategy. Republicans are in a stronger position to get their way in the debt-limit debate than they were in government shutdown showdown. For one thing, a government shutdown would not be not nearly as damaging to the nation as the effects of not raising the debt ceiling. The president knows this; he cannot, and he will not, allow the country to default on its obligations. Doing so would imperil what Obama cares about most, his reelection. That is the central fact Republicans must bear in mind during negotiations.

In addition, much of the public is against raising the debt ceiling; if we have to do it, as we must, it certainly makes sense to link that act to major spending cuts or budget reforms. There’s an intuitive connection the public will make between Obama’s profligacy and having to raise the debt ceiling.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that in 2006 then-Senator Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling and blamed having to do so on a failure of presidential leadership. Obama’s recent mea culpa won’t work; what he said was a matter of public record. His own credibility on this matter is badly damaged.

If one believes, as most Republicans do, that our deficit and debt are survival-level threats caused by out-of-control spending, then it makes perfect sense to use the debt-limit moment to leverage spending cuts and budget process reforms. (Insisting on a vote on a balanced budget amendment would be a mistake; it’s a symbolic vote which doesn’t have a chance of becoming law any time soon. It’s much better to force concessions that can be put into effect immediately.)

The negotiations will be tough; the attacks on the GOP will be ferocious and demagogic. No matter; Republicans should hold shape. They have the arguments on their side and a president who knows, at the end of the day, he has to raise the debt limit. And he will. But he will do so on Republican terms. Because in 2010, Republicans won.

It was predictable that Obama wasn’t going to get grilled by anyone at his Facebook town hall meeting last night, but the degree of indulgence in the questions was plain embarrassing. Maybe the president can hold a town hall at an elementary school next time, or at a summit of Hollywood actors. They’d probably be a tougher crowd.

On the economy, Obama was asked what spending cuts his plan for the deficit might include, how he was going to balance spending cuts and the economic recovery, and whether he thought his deficit plan “demonstrated sufficient boldness.”

He was also asked how he could “assure the low to moderate homebuyers that they will have the opportunity to own their first home”; whether his administration would revisit the DREAM Act; whether he thought the education system needed an overhaul to “address the needs of modern students”; and which cost-saving health care policies he’d like to install in the future.

The only “tough” question of the night was the last one. Obama was asked, “If you had to do anything differently during your first four years, what would it be?” And as Byron York writes, the president wasn’t even able to give a straight answer.

At the Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway wonders how long this charade can continue. “I don’t know how much longer the president can hold out on asking the tough questions,” he wrote. “One hopes that the national press corps is as embarrassed by yesterday’s puffery and rightfully frustrated by the lack of specifics in Obama’s budget plan. The president owes it to the American people to start answering the tough questions.”

No doubt about it. The problem now is getting someone close enough to him to ask the question out loud.

An address to a joint session of Congress by a friendly foreign leader is a fairly common occurrence, but some liberals are treating the invitation extended by Speaker of the House John Boehner to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a partisan intrusion into American foreign policy. That’s the spin about the proposed Netanyahu speech in today’s front-page story in the New York Times. According to the Times’s Helene Cooper, by inviting Netanyahu to speak the GOP leadership seeks to preempt the administration’s possible plans for putting forward a detailed plan to solve the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.

With the ongoing battles over the federal budget and debt limits, it’s not likely that Speaker Boehner is devoting that much effort to thinking about the Middle East peace process. But there is no denying that GOP leaders have no qualms about offering a national platform to a foreign leader whom President Obama has gone out of his way to insult and marginalize over the past two years. The president’s distaste for Netanyahu and less than enthusiastic support for the U.S. alliance with Israel is not exactly a state secret. But given the strong bipartisan support for Israel in the country, the speaker understands there is no downside in associating himself and his party with Netanyahu.

Republicans have been frequently accused in recent years of trying to make Israel a “wedge” issue to peel away Jewish voters from the Democrats, a charge that is repeated in the Times piece. Cooper quotes Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress as trashing the invitation to Netanyahu as an attempt to make partisan hay, which the liberal think tank thinks is actually “bad for Israel.” But the assertion that this mild interference in Obama’s efforts to outmaneuver Netanyahu is bad for the Jewish state or foolishly partisan misunderstands what is at stake.

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Until now I have not been overly critical of the Obama administration’s response to the Arab Spring. Although the president has often been tardy and hesitant, he has generally done the right thing by backing the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen in their desire to be rid of hated dictators. What I find puzzling, even inexplicable, is his failure to speak out more forcefully on behalf of the Syrian people who are in open revolt against one of the most anti-American dictators in the entire region.

Bashar Assad is an integral part of the Iranian strategy to dominate the region; without Syrian help, the Iranians would be hard put to funnel support to Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist groups that are much closer to Damascus than they are to Tehran. The Assad regime has even gone so far as to connive in the murder and kidnapping of Americans, from Lebanon in the 1980s to Iraq more recently.

In the case of Egypt, it is not that hard to imagine that a future government will be a lot less friendly to Western interests than Hosni Mubarak was. In the case of Syria, it’s hard to imagine that any future regime could be more hostile to the West than the Assad regime.

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Recently, the conventional wisdom has been that Obama’s slipping job approval rating is offset by the fact that Americans still like him on a personal level. But at the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes that the president’s recent behavior has done a lot to undermine his likeability:

The Barack Obama we’ve been seeing lately is a different personality than the one that made a miracle run to the White House in 2008. Obama.2008 was engaging, patient, open, optimistic and a self-identified conciliator. Obama.2011 has been something else—testy, petulant, impatient, arrogant and increasingly a divider.

Henninger is referring to Obama’s recent blowup at a Dallas reporter and his overtly partisan deficit speech. This testiness isn’t exactly new. Remember that there were signs of it even during the 2008 election, when Obama kicked the Washington Times, the New York Post, and the Dallas Morning News off his campaign plane after the papers endorsed Sen. John McCain.

His irritability didn’t attract much attention at the time. But the fact that Americans are now increasingly unhappy with his job performance means that they’re more likely to notice his personal faults. We’re already beginning to see this, with ABC News reporting that the president’s personal popularity ratings are at a career low.

And while an infatuated media glossed over Obama’s petulant behavior during the 2008 campaign, we may see a very different response to his 2012 bid. One of Obama’s biggest mistakes during his time in office may be his abrasive treatment of the press. After years of getting FOIA requests stonewalled, being berated by reportedly hostile White House press officials, and dealing with an unprecedented lack of transparency, the media may not be as eager to act as Obama’s personal cheering section again.

In the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli masterfully summarizes more than 50 years of California politics in “The Tao of Jerry”:

By 2012 Democrats will have held simultaneous majorities in both chambers for 50 of the preceding 54 years. Even as the national GOP mounted a surprising comeback in the 2010 midterm elections . . . Democrats won all eight statewide offices, held a U.S. Senate seat, and increased their majority in the state legislature.

After half a century of Democratic rule, California faces a bleak financial future:

California faces years of austerity. According to a report issued in November 2010 by the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO)—California’s counterpart to the Congressional Budget Office—the state’s general fund is heading for a $20 billion shortfall every year until 2016, as far ahead as LAO cares to project. Since LAO does not expect general fund revenues to exceed $100 billion until 2015, these deficits would be more than one-fifth of the state’s budget for half a decade.

The long-term deficits are structural—the result of the “blue-state model of high taxes, big government, and strong public employee unions,” combined with a “severe practical defect” that makes the model unsustainable: it is “doomed if the people who live under it, accepting or even demanding its benefits with their votes, are unwilling to pay its bills.”

The Democratic solution to the private economy’s failure to cover the cost of government is always to raise the cost of government: levy more taxes. But withdrawing more funds from the private economy to turn them over to a government that cannot produce a balanced budget, even with some of the highest tax rates in the nation, is a solution that may have run its course. The golden goose may have finally been cooked just too many times.  

It sounds like even Donald Trump is getting tired of his “birther” routine. Today on CNN’s American Morning, the potential GOP candidate blew up when he was asked about Obama’s birth certificate.

You have to stop asking me about a birth certificate. . . . Every time I go on a show—like an example, this morning—the first question you ask me is about the birth certificate. . . . So I go on a show, I want to talk about how we’re gonna salvage ourselves from losing $300 billion this year from China. And the person always asks “Mr. Trump, let’s talk about the birth certificate.”

CNN’s Ali Velshi then pointed out that it was Trump himself who was keeping the birther issue in the spotlight. “If you don’t want it handled, let’s get it on the record right now that you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States. And I promise you, after this, nobody at CNN will ever ask you this question again,” said Velshi.

Trump responded, “I wish I could say that. I wish I could say that with certainty.”

Trump is a smart guy, and he has to realize that the birther issue is the only reason he’s getting much media attention in the first place. Does he really think CNN cares about his views on any serious subjects? Pretty clearly, they want him on the air so they can catch him saying something outlandish. It would be as if Charlie Sheen complained that he was getting asked too many questions about his personal life. What else would he expect reporters to be interested in?

No question Obama has been suffering in the polls recently, but The Hill sums up just how dire the situation is for him. Since Obama announced his candidacy for reelection on April 4, “the president’s numbers have gone down in every poll conducted during that period,” Sam Youngman reports. “Pollsters attribute the president’s dropping poll numbers to the rise of gasoline prices, which historically have taken a toll on the popularity of the White House.”

Although a gallon of gas has gone up in price by a national average of 14 cents in just two weeks, there are broader economic concerns, as well as the apparent military stalemate in Libya, which have likely added to the widespread disapproval. And tackling these sinking poll numbers will be tough for Obama. Spending more face-time with the American people hasn’t worked—his recent speech on the deficit and town hall meetings have made that clear. Obama will also be spending more time at fundraising events with wealthy donors as his reelection campaign gets underway, something that could make him appear out of touch with the growing concerns of the American people.

Political observers have been trying to figure out whether Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wants to run for president. It may be months or longer before this question is answered. In the meantime, it’s just as important to figure out whether he is up to the task.

On economic issues, Daniels seems like the perfect candidate. He is a successful GOP governor who has made fiscal sanity his personal crusade. But like it or not, foreign policy will always be a president’s main responsibility. And on that score, Daniels has been something of a blank slate.

Thus the news that Daniels is accepting an award from the Arab American Institute (AAI) is more than a little curious. The AAI is a left-leaning organization founded by onetime Democratic Party activist James Zogby. Although it is far more respectable than terrorist front groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), it has also been among the most consistent voices downplaying the threat from Islamist terror and opposing American efforts to fight back against Islamist enemies of freedom. And needless to say, like Zogby, it is no friend to the State of Israel.

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“We rushed into this [Libya] without a plan,” David Barno, a retired Army general who once commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, told the Los Angeles Times. “Now we’re out in the middle, going in circles.”

U.S. officials concede to the Times that some of their assumptions before they intervened in the Libyan conflict may have been “faulty.” Among them was (a) the notion that air power alone would degrade Muammar Qaddafi’s military to the point where he would be forced to halt his attacks and (b) the U.S. could leave the airstrikes primarily to warplanes from Britain, France, and other European countries.

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