posted September 06, 2011 06:54 AM            

What Democrats can do about Obama
By Matt Stoller

"From the debt ceiling fiasco to the recent rescheduling of a jobs speech at the behest of Speaker Boehner, it has not been a good summer for President Obama. Like Chinese water torture, Gallup's daily tracking poll has shown a steady and unrelenting drip of bad news. He has been in and out of the high 30s for his approval, and in the low to mid-50s for his disapproval.".......

"No one, not even the president's defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there's any way they can push him off the top of the ticket."......

"Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. The 2010 wipeout was an electoral catastrophe so bad you'd have to go back to 1894 to find comparable losses. From 2008 to 2010, according to Gallup, the fastest growing demographic party label was former Democrat. Obama took over the party in 2008 with 36 percent of Americans considering themselves Democrats. Within just two years, that number had dropped to 31 percent, which tied a 22-year low.".......

"If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repudiate the New Deal.".......

"The party, inflexible as it was in 1968, is perhaps even more rigid today. As a result, no candidate has stepped up to challenge Obama in a primary, even though 32 percent of Democratic voters want one.......

This is an institutional crisis for Democrats. The groups that fund and organize the party -- an uneasy alliance of financiers, conservative technology interests, the telecommunications industry, healthcare industries, labor unions, feminists, elite foundations, African-American church networks, academic elites, liberals at groups like MoveOn, the ACLU and the blogosphere -- are frustrated".......

posted September 17, 2011 02:15 PM            

did anyone think that ending iraq was going to happen in jan 09? having spent a decade there we were going to just vanish into thin air and leave our mess behind?

actually i think the republican party is in more disarray than the dems. they are progressively seen as the "party of NO" by more and more people.

posted September 18, 2011 12:50 AM            

Too late; they voted for O'BomberCare, voted for O'Bomber's phony stimulus and every other nutsy bill which came out of Pee-Lousy's House and Dirty Hairy's Senate.

posted September 18, 2011 02:39 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by jwhop:
demoscats up for reelection are attempting to put as much distance between themselves and O'Bomber as possible.

Too late; they voted for O'BomberCare, voted for O'Bomber's phony stimulus and every other nutsy bill which came out of Pee-Lousy's House and Dirty Hairy's Senate.

Now, those demoscats are being asked to vote for O'Bomber's "Son of Stimulus" and they're getting balky.

---

Yes, I think it is too late, too.If you dance with the devil, you can't just run away and pretend it never happened.

This is a truism

posted September 19, 2011 09:30 AM            

O'Bomber is the big fish head of the demoscat party.

posted September 19, 2011 10:08 AM            

Is there any sane person who believes federal tax money raised by O'Bomber's Plan would be used to reduce the deficits and national debt?

If you do, I've heard there's a really neat bridge in Brooklyn for sale cheap.

We have a federal spending problem. We are not taxed too little. We spend way too much.

All during the run-up to the November 2010 elections, people were saying....Stop Spending our money on loony-tunes federal nonsense.

67 demoscats from the House were involuntarily retired from Congress by voters and several demoscat Senators.

People said..."Can you hear us now?"

Obviously, O'Bomber and his Socialist demoscat pals in Congress didn't listen and still aren't listening.

November 2012 looms large on their horizons. Marxist class warfare rhetoric isn't going to save them. They have a record of abject failure in every area of government they won't be able to run away from.

posted September 19, 2011 07:54 PM            

It was written into the law- to allow them to expire that is-- after 10 years. Because, it was admitted that they were not paid for.

Characterizing the return to a more reasonable, and yes workable tax structure as Obama *raising* taxes is pure politics.

posted September 19, 2011 07:56 PM            

If any one faction is ruining a party... I vote for the baggers, they have given conservatism a very bad name.

________________

posted September 20, 2011 09:04 AM            

Who said...‘You Don’t Raise Taxes in a Recession’?

Oh yeah, now I remember. Barack Hussein O'Bomber said that!
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/video-obama-2009-you-don-t-raise-taxes-recession

September 19, 2011
Obama Puts His Foot Down
Richard N. Weltz

Today, President Barack Obama stamped his foot and threatened Congress in no uncertain terms that he'd take his signing pen and stalk off in a huff if his efforts to usurp the legislative function were not approved --and damn quickly, at that.

Demanding that the House and Senate "pass this bill," although there isn't actually any bill as such, the President made it clear that he wouldn't consent to cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits without an accompanying significant tax hike -- although nobody is proposing cutting back Medicare or Social Security benefits, merely restructuring the programs in future years to ensure fiscal viability when those now 55 or under reach eligibility age.

In addition, Obama proposed sweeping new "success penalty" tax laws, which he jokingly referred to as "the Buffett rule," designed to penalize those who become successful enough in a free-market economy to amass substantial amounts of capital and discourage them from liquidating any of their gains to reinvest in new enterprises and job-creating expansions.

Obama's nickname for this ideology is taken from the name of his good friend, multibillionaire Warren Buffett, also known as the "sage of Omaha," whose companies have been refusing to pay millions in taxes the IRS says they owe, while maintaining that folks like him, who take little of their income in ordinary salaries, aren't being penalized sufficiently on their success in accumulating wealth by other means.

Some conservative (read sensible) economists have noted that such measures, originally affecting a very small portion of the citizenry, à la the original income tax, eventually prove to yield insufficient revenue to satisfy the ever-growing demands of the ruling bureaucracies and, just as inevitably, broaden to the vast middle classes, where most of the nation's wealth is really earned.

Some pundits, understanding full well that the Republican-controlled House, along with many Democrats in both houses who fear for the re-election chances, will never enact either the straw-man "cuts" to Medicare and Social Security benefits or the sweeping tax hikes. They conclude that these propositions are merely a campaign tactic in which Obama hopes to stir up populist class-warfare sentiment by making impossible-to-pass propositions in order to cast Congress, as Harry Truman used to do, as a "do-nothing" group.

posted September 20, 2011 02:06 PM            

Let's review.

Were the cuts that the Bush2 admin made set to expire in 10 years? (after the door slamming on the #43 posterior)

Yes Node they were.

Were they in fact not paid for>?

Yes Node that is fact.

Are both the premise, and the title of this thread ridiculous?

Yes and Yes.

Quack on.

posted September 20, 2011 06:58 PM            

Last summer, then Minority Leader John Boehner decried President Obama's "job-killing tax hikes" and called the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich "a recipe for disaster - both for our economy and for the deficit." His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell told Fox News, "It would be a disaster." On Meet the Press, Dick Armey rejected the notion of returning the tax rates for the top 2% of earners back to their Clinton-era levels, mocking Obama's "new cockamamy ideas" and insisting the President "not raise taxes and take away the return on an investment" And as Newt Gingrich predicted in July:

"This economy will sink deeper into recession. There will be higher unemployment. The recovery will be longer."
If this all sounds familiar, it should.

With Democrats proposing to set the top two income tax rates at 36% and 39.6% respectively, Republican leaders waged a ferocious battle on behalf of the wealthiest American taxpayers. Former House Majority Leader and current Tea Party moneyman Dick Armey warned, "This program will not give you deficit reduction." Ohio's John Kasich cautioned, "It's our bet that this is a job killer." And for his part, 2012 White House hopeful Newt Gingrich promised, "This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable."
http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/002158.htm

As it turns out, the year was 1993, not 2011. At issue was President Bill Clinton's $496 billion program of stimulus and upper income tax increases. And what Republicans then decried as disaster ushered in the longest economic expansion in modern American history, a period which produced 23 million new jobs and a balanced budget.

But that hasn't stopped the GOP brain trust from resurrecting their 1993 predictions of gloom and doom, forecasts which were spectacularly wrong. After all, as ThinkProgress, Congress Matters and Andrew Tobias all documented, pretty much the same people said pretty much the same thing 18 years ago.

And if Barack Obama's experience with Republican obstructionism has been painful, Bill Clinton's was unprecedented. When Clinton's 1993 economic program scraped by without capturing the support of even one GOP lawmaker, the New York Times remarked at the time...

so WHO is doing the same thing that was a farce the first time? NOTE THE SAME PEOPLE ARE SAYING THE SAME THINGS THEY SAID IN 1993...i guess they hope no one noticed back then?

posted September 21, 2011 08:46 AM            

O'Bomber's so called Jobs Plan is just more Marxist Socialist Progressive nonsense and payoffs to his big money campaign doners. It will not create jobs; it's warmed over stimulus 1 and gimmicky spending reductions which will never take place in outer years. But, the tax increases will take place and the reductions in the Medicare budget will take place.

Oh wait, it's not going to take place. There's zero chance of O'Bomber's Son of Stimulus passing Congress. It's so flawed even demoscats won't support O'Bomber's Son of Stimulus.

In the meantime, Americans are lining up and tuning up to say..."O'Bomber, YOU'RE FIRED"!

posted September 21, 2011 08:56 AM            

The gentle currents of liberal discontent have now churned into a full-fledged vortex that threatens to further suck President Obama’s already dwindling support down to irrecoverable levels.

Consider:

Clinton strategist James Carville has sounded the red alert by declaring that President Obama must “Fire somebody. No—fire a lot of people. This may be news to you [Mr. President] but this is not going well.” Carville’s immediate advice to Mr. Obama: “Panic.” As Carville puts it: “For God's sake, why are we still looking at the same political and economic advisers that got us into this mess? It's not working. Furthermore, it's not going to work with the same team, the same strategy and the same excuses…It's time to show them the exit. Wake up—show us you are doing something.”

Similarly, liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs crushed Leftist hearts on Obama’s economic leadership (lack thereof) when he announced on MSNBC of all places that:

"We're almost three years into this administration, and there's never been a plan. And that's what everybody feels. And the president didn't lead. He waited. The quintessential image, sadly, of an administration that I supported and hoped for much better, is the president waiting by the phone to hear what Congress calls to tell him. It doesn't work in this country that way….We've been drifting down. And we had a short-term plan that failed. A short-term stimulus that was supposed to get the economy back on track, but it failed. And now we have nothing behind it. And we have no agreements, and we have no leadership. And, frankly, I do think it's pretty odd the president's on vacation right now. Normally I wouldn't care about such things, but the world markets are in deep crisis. It's no joke. This isn't just an up-and-down little blip. This is a very serious situation."

Adding power to the vortex is a new book by Ron Suskind​, Confidence Men, that quotes Obama’s former Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers as telling Obama’s former OMB Director Peter Orszag that “we’re really home alone. I mean it. We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”

Then there’s far Left economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who recently confessed that America is “already in something that is functionally a depression.”

Even Mr. Obama’s electoral stronghold—support among his African American base—has begun to add power to the whirlwind. Congressional Black Caucus member Congresswoman Maxine Waters has said that the Obama economy’s creation of “Depression Era levels” of black unemployment are “unconscionable” and that Mr. Obama must speak directly to black America’s present economic freefall and the disappearance of America’s black middle class.

Other Black Caucus members, like Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, are also at the end of their rope with Mr. Obama but have thus far withheld their fire for fear of emboldening the president’s opponents. Still, says Congressman Cleaver, “If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House.”

Black liberal discontent among those in academe has also joined the chorus of Democratic discontent. Princeton Professor Cornel West has dismissed Mr. Obama, whom he backed for president in 2008, as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

If Mr. Obama thought the announcement of his latest jobs bill was enough to still the roiling waters, he was wrong. Even as Mr. Obama stumps across America attempting to build support for his $447 billion stimulus plan and tries to use the plan as an electoral bludgeon against Republicans, members of his own party, not the opposition, are proving to be among his most vocal critics. “I think the American people are very skeptical of big pieces of legislation,” says Democratic Pennsylvania Senator Bill Casey. “For that reason alone I think we should break it up.”

Another Democrat, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, has taken issue with the bill’s tax on the oil industry, an interest vital to her state’s struggling economy. “I have said for months that I am not supporting a repeal of tax cuts for the oil industry unless there are other industries that contribute.”

The Democratic senator who once ran a campaign ad featuring him blasting a rifle at the Obamacare bill, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, is now verbally blasting away at Mr. Obama’s new jobs plan. “I have serious questions about the level of spending that President Obama proposed.”

On the House side, Mr. Obama is also drawing Democratic fire. Congressman Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon is against the plan because it offers tax cuts. Others, like North Carolina Congressman Heath Shuler, have been noncommittal.

Further pulling Mr. Obama into the whirlwind is a growing movement within his own base that wants to see him face a serious primary challenger.

And as if all that weren’t devastating enough, the editor of Mr. Obama’s hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, is now calling for Mr. Obama to withdraw from the 2012 entirely.

The velocity of the vortex Mr. Obama finds himself in will only strengthen as congressional Democrats draw nearer to the 2012 election; Democrats locked in tight races will increasingly need to distance themselves from—and in some cases outright reject—the president and his failed policies.