The Administration

The president will be getting much advice now that he’s been reelected, including from those of us who wished he’d been more aggressive during his first term, but quietly hoped and prayed nonetheless that he’d be reelected.

First thing he must do, as I suggested in this blog on Oct. 29 (“Taking a leaf from Bill Clinton's playbook”), is convene top-level businessmen, congressmen, Simpson-Bowles-Gang-of-Whatever-the-Number, and personally highlight a wise bipartisan proposal for debt reduction and tax reform and jobs expansion. Make it very public and keep the pressure on. Don’t wait for the end-of-year fiscal cliff to push for a compromise.

Multimillionaire Mitt Romney clearly doesn’t need a job. He is, after all, one of the “1 percent.” But if President Obama wants to enlist his help in avoiding the fiscal cliff, he could do worse than to approach Romney about replacing Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary.

When you look at the composition of Congress, the incoming one is much the same as the outgoing one; in other words, a recipe for continued gridlock despite the suggestion from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that “we’re ready to be led.” Boehner has already ruled out new taxes, so that’s not going to encourage the markets about the chances of a deal anytime soon.

I thought that was a pretty effective and well-crafted speech that President Obama delivered just now to the U.N. General Assembly on the perils of political extremism.

In the middle of the presidential campaign, it wasn’t a campaign speech, apart from the strong words on Iran, whose leadership was warned that time is “not unlimited” and that the United States will “do what we must” to stop Iran gaining a nuclear weapon.

But on the “politics of anger,” it was an interesting plea for tolerance. He won’t have done himself any favors with his Republican rival for invoking Gandhi.

President Obama has acquiesced and has now agreed to received intelligence briefings in person, like President Bush and all of his predecessors, rather than reading them on his iPad, on his own.
 
Aside from the disturbing thought that a man with no foreign policy experience thinks he doesn't need to be briefed in person on intelligence issues that can mean the difference between life and death — as we saw earlier this month with the attacks on the American consulate in Libya — it's disturbing that Obama has had trouble operating his iPhone, yet claims to have read intel briefings on his iPad.

The history of President Obama is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

We no longer have a triple-A credit rating. That’s a historic first. Just last week, the United States of America received another downgrade that the media largely ignored. Egan Jones cut its rating of the United States credit from AA to AA-. Do any Democrats remember what Standard and Poor’s actually said when they downgraded us? They emphasized, not taxes on the wealthy, but reduction in spending, as gravely needed. Does the president think that this problem will magically go away? He has done nothing about this, and, sadly, I do not expect him to ever do anything about it.

Events have overtaken the news appeal of the Chicago teachers union strike as the public’s attention has rightfully moved on to Libya, Egypt and even perhaps the Federal Reserve’s QE3 announcement.
 
However, the Chicago public employee strike has the potential to be as damaging to Obama’s election campaign as anything else on the news horizon.

Many people regret electing President Obama because of the realization that his policies have led to the decline of our nation. However, it is quite possible that his election is the best thing that has happened to our nation in a very long time. The consequences of such an election have served to awaken the spirit of America and have helped us realize that this is a free nation of independent people who are not driven by government policy.

Hillary Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh, were often entertaining, sometimes alarming White House presences, but they had largely disappeared from public view as their brother-in-law left the White House and their older sister became U.S. senator and then secretary of State.

So I took note when I read Mark Leibovich’s admiring, even loving, profile of Bill Clinton’s best buddy, the irrepressible Terry McAuliffe. (The long profile of the former president’s fundraiser/rescuer extraordinaire appears in next Sunday’s New York Times magazine but is available online).

And now Michele Bachmann and several other House Republicans join the freak show that I harshly criticize in my new column. The attack against Huma Abedin, a good woman and powerfully loyal American, was a disgrace against the Congress. Thank goodness that John McCain put other Republicans to shame by standing for truth and honor and defending Abedin. It is good that the Republican Speaker, after no comment at first, spoke against this bigoted diatribe. Will the Speaker now condemn the Republican member who said the Democratic Progressive Caucus is full of communists?

Attorney General Eric Holder is on a special campaign against the state of Texas. Why? Because Texas now requires people to display photo identification when they head to the polls to vote. It is hard to understand why the attorney general opposes voter identification, unless the motive is to try any way possible to win the election. People must have an ID to borrow books from the library or drive a car; why should voting be any different? Giving someone the responsibility to choose who will lead one of the most powerful countries in the world should be valued just as much as having responsibility for a library book or driving a car.