The Administration

President Obama isn’t the first to be struck with the malady that he finds himself in, but it seems to affect politicians more than any other group.

Part of the reason is that they are always beholden to their base and the interest groups that financially support them. This causes them to constantly overlook the ways policy harms the whole of society in favor of helping the small group.

Then there is the fact that politicians regularly get upset when the Congressional Budget Office and independent commissions call them on the detrimental consequences of the latest policy. The politicians then respond in one of two ways — they either tell the CBO/commissions that the findings are wrong and to come back with another answer more suited to that politician’s sensibilities, or they commit fraud and send inaccurate numbers (while hiding additional funding in other bills) in order to produce a more ... “pleasing” conclusion.

Jay Carney, the president’s new mouthpiece, gives the impression of the “man behind the curtain.” Little to say, as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post reports, few tools in the toolbox, tepid and inauthentic, like one of Don Draper’s paste-up artists, stylish and self-effacing. Who’s afraid of Jay Carney? Who’s afraid of Barack Obama? It is all smoke and mirrors. But the perfect spokesman as the president moves to use the Justice Department in a pure and unconscionable strategy of political revenge. It reveals the inner man. Sarko was right: Obama is a weakling.

In 1937 Franklin Roosevelt, under pressure from the "conservative coalition" at that time, severely cut back spending which caused a disastrous relapse during the Depression. 2011 is like 1937.  The Fed now projects joblessness near 9% by the end of 2011. The real jobless rate would still be over 16%. It would be a disaster to severely cut spending without a major jobs program, as I propose in this video.

Halfway through the course of my life I found myself in a dark woods. — The Divine Comedy

Jimmy Carter was president of the United States between 1977 and 1981. Exactly halfway through his tenure, starting Feb. 11, 1979, it began to unwind for him when (from Wiki): “guerrillas and rebel troops overwhelmed troops loyal to the Shah [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi] in armed street fighting. Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic Republic on April 1, 1979, and to approve a new theocratic constitution whereby [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini became Supreme Leader of the country, in December 1979.”

The parallels between Carter and President Obama have been startling, but the timing of the Egyptian uprising, exactly halfway through Obama’s term and rising on the same date, is, for those who follow historic cycles, striking. From Wiki: “On 11 February, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned as president and transferred authority to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces following 18 days of protests challenging his nearly 30 years of rule. On February 13, 2011, the Egyptian military, heeding protester demands, dissolved the Egyptian parliament.”

It’s been a family secret for a while, but the first lady let it out of the bag: The President has finally kicked the habit. It’s been almost a year, she told reporters, since he’s had a cigarette.

We knew he’d been working on it. He’d told us that. And, in December, Robert Gibbs told us White House reporters he hadn’t seen the president smoke in at least nine months. 

But this is the first time we’ve heard for sure that he’s quit for good — and, so far, is keeping the pledge. Good for him.

Now here comes the ubiquitous Sarah Palin claiming the mantle of Ronald Reagan's legacy. I have recently been minimizing the Sarah Palin commentary, and trying to emphasize more substantive matters, because I am bored to death by much liberal obsession with Palin and partisan hack jobs by the Dick Morris types on the right.

In this case, Sarah Palin has nothing in common with Ronald Reagan. Reagan would never have thought of quitting as governor of California, as Palin quit as governor of Alaska. Reagan treated opponents with civility and decency, no matter how much he disagreed with them.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak took to the airwaves to publicly state he will not seek the office of the presidency anymore, thus ending over three decades of rule. There is a reason Mubarak enjoyed such a lengthy tenure, and he has the United States to thank in some small measure.
 
Let’s not kid ourselves. It was in our national interest to have Mubarak in power. His government, no matter how flawed and sometimes oppressive, was predictable, which is a rare commodity in the Middle East. In many respects, Egypt was an oasis of calm in an otherwise tumultuous part of the world. And we have Mubarak to thank, in part, for that relative peace.

The pundits who analyzed the president’s last State of the Union speech missed the key insight. This wasn’t a speech purporting to prescribe substantive proposals, about electric cars or taxes for the top 2 percent of earners or tax reform. Oh, those words were used. But something else — something profound — was going on.
 
First, his frustrating two years of fighting partisanship — it’s still there — was used by this canny president to isolate himself as the one really striving for bipartisanship. Folks who loathe each other sat together to give the illusion of mature partisans. But the president captured and owns the mantle of bipartisanship, even shaking Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) hand (the one that barely clapped at his remarks) and repeating his pleas for friendly fighting. He is seen as being apart from the food fighters and naysayers, as a man really trying to move past the noise and negativism.

President Obama came, he spoke, and he conquered. We’ve all seen lots of State of the Union addresses, but we’ve never seen one like the one Obama delivered on Jan. 25.

It wasn’t a laundry list of legislative proposals. It wasn’t a wish list of presidential promises. And it didn’t turn into a high-school pep rally between Republicans and Democrats.

Instead, what we saw and heard was just what a State of the Union address should be: a serious, intelligent, visionary look at where we are today as a people and where we need to go, together, to make this country even greater than it is today.

In a brilliant political move, without even saying the words themselves, Obama took a favorite theme of conservatives and Tea Partiers — “American Exceptionalism” — and turned it against them.

President Obama did a good job last night in directing our attention to the future. We must take the steps as a country necessary to compete with China and other economic powers around the world. We must have the best-educated workforce or we will not be No. 1 on the world stage.

Also, he recommended some very positive steps in promoting job growth in the United States — lowering the corporate tax rate and streamlining our regulatory environment.

However, it is legitimate to ask: “Where is the rest?”

Specifically, the president appeared to reject virtually all of the major proposals his own deficit reduction commission made last December. The public is willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt on setting a bold path for the future, but ultimately they will look under the hood and ask what he’s really doing about deficit reduction.