IWV in the Wall Street Journal: Why Obama is Unhappy

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March 16, 2010
Posted in Articles, In the News by The Admin
 

The Wall Street Journal

By: James Taranto

The latest effort to psychoanalyze President Obama comes from Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post. Hiatt offers “a theory about why President Obama is having a tough political time right now: He doesn’t seem all that happy being president.”

But Hiatt gets it backward. Obama isn’t having political difficulty because he’s unhappy; he’s unhappy because he’s having political difficulty. Or, as the president himself put it in an Ohio ObamaCare speech yesterday:

The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I don’t know about the politics. But I know what’s right.

He knows what’s right. And he cares so much about the American people that he is determined to do what is right, whether we want it done to us or not. Yet he keeps coming up against delays and obstructions. Where’s the fairness in that? If he’s omniscient and benevolent, doesn’t he deserve to be omnipotent too?

You can see why this is frustrating for the president. No one doubts what needs to be done for the people–no one, that is, except the people. They tell anyone who’ll listen that ObamaCare scares them to death. They even voted a Republican into the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts!

An Independent Women’s Voice poll of voters in 35 “key swing districts,” all represented by Democrats, finds that 60% think Congress should scrap ObamaCare and either start over or give up entirely. A plurality say they’d be more likely to support their congressman if he voted for ObamaCare in November and against it now.

Obama knows what’s right, and he keeps telling us, but we refuse to get the message. As a result, Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, tells McClatchy Newspapers he’s not sure ObamaCare will come to the floor before Easter. That suggests that he and other Democratic leaders are having trouble rounding up the 216 votes they need to pass the legislation. You can see why they would be, if they listen to their poor deluded constituents.

That’s why President Obama is unhappy. The American people voted for change. Dammit, why won’t we change?

Bushism of the Day–I
“Well, a lot of those folks, your employer it’s estimated would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent [sic], which means they could give you a raise.”–President Obama in Strongville Ohio, March 15, as quoted on the White House Web site

Bushism of the Day–II
“And she upped her deductible last year to the minimum [sic], the highest possible deductible.”–President Obama, ibid.

Two Papers in One!

• “In a Feb. 26 editorial, we said Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) was ‘posturing’ during the Thursday health-care summit by stacking the voluminous Senate bill before him. Mr. Cantor says that he had the bill with him, well-tabbed, not for show but so that Republicans could respond if specific provisions of the bill came up for discussion. That makes sense, and we should not have characterized his purpose as we did.”–correction, Washington Post, Feb. 27
• “House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) used the legislation as a visual prop at last month’s health-care summit, stacking the pages until they stood nearly a foot high.”–news story, Washington Post, March 16

So Much for the Wealth of Nations
“Adam Smith Unswayed by Chamber Ad Blitz on Health Bill”–headline, Seattle Times, March 15

Accountability Journalism
The Associated Press’s Jennifer Loven hasn’t lost that Loven feeling:

Just back from a recent day trip to Georgia, President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office and told his senior staff to get a grip.

“We all rise and fall together,” he declared that afternoon, as Washington neared fever pitch over tensions on his team. Keep your eyes on the prize, Obama directed, not on the daily ups and downs.

It was classic Obama, again summoning one [of] his tenets: the Long View.

It’s a high-minded notion that elected leaders love to invoke, both privately and publicly. It makes politicians seem above the dirtiest aspects of campaigning and governing.

They rarely adhere to it. With all of the House and a third of the Senate going before the voters every two years, and a media environment that moves by the minute, the long view can get pretty short. Scoring a point – now – can itself feel like a do-or-die achievement in the long slog to pass prized legislation or survive re-election.

But for Obama, it’s been a crucial prescription he reaches for when times get tough . . .

You thought our lead item above was over the top? At least we were being sarcastic!

Tomorrow’s Forecast: Weather, With a 50% Chance of Climate
Saturday night found us braving rough weather in New York’s Meatpacking District. First the wind ripped our umbrella into pieces, then we got drenched in rain. While waiting to check our coat at the trendy night spot that was our destination, we looked out the door and saw a downpour so intense that it would have been described as biblical had it continued for another 40 days, 39 nights and change.

No wonder the weather was so bad! According to Al Gore, it wasn’t just weather, it was climate. As the Business and Media Institute reports:

Gore, the self-anointed climate change alarmist-in-chief, told supporters on a March 15 conference call that severe weather in certain regions of the country could be attributed to carbon in the atmosphere–including the recent rash of rainy weather.

“The odds have shifted toward much larger downpours,” Gore said. “And we have seen that happen in the Northeast, we’ve seen it happen in the Northwest–in both of those regions are among those that scientists have predicted for a long time would begin to experience much larger downpours.”

But wait. That seems inconsistent with this month-old report from the Hill:

A top Obama administration scientist on Monday struck back at climate skeptics who claim that record snowstorms this winter have undercut evidence of global warming.

“It is important that people recognize that weather is not the same thing as climate,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So weather isn’t the same thing as climate, except when it is. You can “prove” anything with such heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic. A decade ago, Gore almost managed to use it to become president.

On a related note, consider this report from London’s Guardian:

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to “green” type.

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.

The Guardian’s headline is “How Going Green May Make You Mean.” We’re inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way–that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony.

Does Not Compute
The Federal Communications Commission today unveils “its much-awaited ‘broadband plan,’ which, among other things, will explain how the government plans to get nine out of 10 Americans online by 2020,” CNN reports:

That’s no easy task, considering less than two-thirds of people in the country have high-speed Internet access at home today, according to a 5,005-person survey published by the FCC in February.

Considering that the number of households with broadband was zero a little over a decade ago, it’s hard to see why we need a “national plan” to go from 67% to 90% in the next 10 years. CNN builds its story around what is supposed to be a tear-jerking human-interest story:

Like a photographer without a camera, or a mechanic who doesn’t own a car, Kelli Fields is a webmaster without high-speed Internet access.

By day, the 42-year-old uses a broadband connection at work to update a university’s Web site, which she built and codes from scratch.

But when she goes home at night, the rural Oklahoman struggles with a dial-up Internet connection so slow, she does chores to pass the time while Web sites load.

When we were young, we hiked five miles through the driving snow in our bare feet to use a 300-baud modem. Well, OK, we made that up, except the part about the 300-baud modem.

If you bother to read all the way through the story, though, you find that the reason Fields doesn’t have high-speed Internet is she doesn’t want to pay for it:

Fields is considering scraping together the money to get satellite Internet at her house. But she doesn’t want to give up services like TV to free up money for an expensive Internet connection.

So if the FCC wants to make broadband more widely available, maybe it should try making television less available.