I couldn't vote for McCain although I secretly wanted him to win, for I knew damned good and well the GOP THREW election 2008 because of the economy going south. They figured--correctly, as it turned out--Obama, given his lack of experience, would screw things up and they could return back into power to screw things up even WORSE.
It seems VP Biden has been relegated to the sidelines on domestic policy. I don't believe a PRESIDENT Biden would do the things President OBAMA is doing now.
There is a storm of outrage over Obama's latest stunt, and that is a spending freeze. This is just nuts, for more money has to be infused into the economy, and it should have been ALL ALONG in the form of job creation.
Krugman:
A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?
It’s appalling on every level.
It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)
It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
The bloom is finally off the rose for somebody whose posts I have featured a few times on this blog. This guy is just about ready to throw the president overboard:
As a staunch Obama supporter and one who cheered almost like a teenage girl at a Beatles' concert when he was inaugurated, I find this "tough decision" regarding a three-year spending freeze to be highly disturbing. Indeed, it may for me be a final straw.
I have supported Obama in nearly everything he has done so far, albeit with a few caveats. I have, with a few exceptions (Geither and Summers stand out as exceptions here), tried my best to put the most positive inflection on his appointments. I have tried to explain away his lapses from what I consider effective, wise and prudent policies in these hard economic times and with the challenges we face in our foreign relations and national security. Where we have chiefly differed is in his extraordinary efforts to compromise with our political adversaries, but I have always held, and often expressed, the opinion, and indeed the hope, that he would quickly learn that this is a mistake, not only in its essence but in its chances to succeed.
But now, where he has been given a clear choice between trying to rehabilitate his approval ratings by returning to the advocacy for change that carried him to victory in 2008 or redoubling his futile efforts to receive opposition support, he has chosen the wrong path -- not just to compromise with the Republican right, but to be numbered among them in all matters of policy save for his publicly claimed party affiliation. This three-year spending freeze, exempting the utter waste in our defense expenditures, does not differ in any respect from what John McCain would have done, or indeed what Bush did. His policies in Afghanistan and Iraq do not differ in any respect from what John McCain would have advocated. His economic policies have been written on Wall Street, just as his predecessor's were. He had curtailed expenditures on alternative energy sources, just like Bush. He has made no effort to stop the outflow of jobs and industries overseas. He has failed to enact health care reform by compromising its benefits away to the point at which it lost popular support.
I know he has only been in the White House for one year, but these are failures and policy matters that are permanent in nature, and that are absolutely, 180 degrees away from why we voted for him and for such overwhelming Democratic Congressional majorities. In fact, the only differences I can discern between our victory in 2008 and the way things would have been had we been defeated by the Republicans are the admittedly major matters that we are not now also at war with Iran, something that was a very real possibility had John McCain become our Commander in Chief, it is likely that the heinous Bush tax cuts would have been made permanent, and if something had happened to the President we will have Joe Biden step in rather than Sarah Palin. Also, it is likely we would have permanently lost GM and Chrysler.
So is there no there THERE?
Is Obama really stupid?
He isn't stupid, but he isn't the genius the media had made him out to be. Mostly he is just a willing puppet politician for more powerful interests, kind of like our dearly departed former squatter, George W. Bush. In Bush's case, though, we KNEW who was really calling the shots--Dick Cheney--but in Obama's case, it is clear Biden is NOT calling the shots. Instead it is the special interests, specifically the Wall Street types who are running things. It is outrageous when a political party supposedly representing the people--the Democratic Party--is being hijacked by many of the same people who have made the Republican Party what it is.
In short, Obama is a puppet for the neoliberals, and he is a willing puppet on the virtue of his inexperience because he believes in the same things the neoliberals believe in. And that's bad, bad news for Main Street.
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