Britain's Financial Times - " This election is about disaffection in the centre – and the effort to tell Mr Obama, “Enough.”

The Brits are a prgamatic people and they like to speak " Truth to the Power" with the Queen's English...I say Old Boy, would you be kind enough to tell POTUS enough already??

To quote the Doctor who witnesses the destruction of "The Bridge over the River Kwai" at the end of the movie by the same title, " Madness ! Madness! "

Obama can blame the whining left
By Clive Crook

Published: October 31 2010 15:51

Polls can be wrong, but if they are right the Democrats will get their heads handed to them in Tuesday’s midterm election. If the party loses control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate too, President Barack Obama’s administration will be forced to change course or be stopped in its tracks. Two years after US liberals were celebrating the death of conservatism and the start of a new progressive era, a stunning reversal looks likely.

Tempting fate again, before this has even happened, let us ask where the blame – or credit, if you prefer – lies. Like the financial crisis, an event of this kind has more causes than are actually required to explain it.

First, of course, is the economy. In 2009 Mr Obama inherited an even worse mess than was realised at the time. Two years on, deleveraging has a long way to go; the housing market is not mended; consumers and investors are still anxious; growth in jobs is slow. Unemployment alone, more the fault of the previous administration, indicates a thrashing for the party in power. Right there, for some, you have the whole explanation.

Next is the president himself. Let me count the accusations. He was out of touch. He was too professorial. He was too condescending. He was too black. (Not black enough, thankfully, has gone from the list of defects.) He failed to lead. He deferred too much to Congress. He surrendered to the left. He surrendered to the right. He refused to fight for progressive ideas. He was only interested in progressive ideas.

Messaging and personality aside, critics insist, his policies were wrong. He was too timid, say liberals. He over-reached, say conservatives. Then again, he never really seemed in charge: his policies were not his policies.

Democratic leaders in Congress did him in, acting on a mandate they never had. Republicans did him in, opposing him reflexively and telling lies. The press did him in, reporting those lies as if they were true. Gutless conservative Democrats did him in, by watering down healthcare reform and other measures. The Tea Party did him in, to save the American way of life. The Tea Party did him in, out of pure stupid nativism.

Clive Crook’s blog
From Washington: Clive Crook on the intersection of US politics and economics

Nobody need feel, evidently, that a setback for the Democrats is an unfathomable mystery. My own preferred theories emphasise the economy – which the administration has handled tolerably well in appallingly difficult circumstances – combined with serial political miscalculation. Mr Obama often settled for untidy centrist compromises (on the stimulus, on healthcare), thus disappointing the left; but without ever championing those compromises, causing moderates to wonder where he would stop, given the chance to go further. Offending both segments was an avoidable mistake.

Partly, then, this election is about disaffection in the centre – and the effort to tell Mr Obama, “Enough.” But if this is correct, and the polls turn out to be true, one should pay special tribute to the role the left has played in its own downfall. It did not have to be this way.

Previously, I have argued that Mr Obama’s biggest mistake was to worry more about consoling morbidly dissatisfied Democrats than about keeping the centrists who voted for him in 2008 on side. Campaigning ahead of the midterms, he made it clearer than before that this was his priority. Every speech, every appearance, every meet and greet, leaned the same way.

His message to the centre has been: “You say you are worried about the country’s direction? Well, I know you have been under stress. Let’s talk again when I have finished discussing strategy with these public-sector unions, liberal commentators, left-leaning television personalities and progressive bloggers.”

The administration could plead it had no choice. It had to turn out the base. Pleasing swing voters, if this could even be done, would be no use if committed Democrats did not vote. Tactically, it was better to prioritise as he did. As a matter of electoral arithmetic, I disagree, but the dilemma was real enough.

In any event, suppose that the Democratic base had not been sulking. Suppose it saw, for example, that persisting with a historic healthcare reform was politically challenging in the middle of an economic crash. Suppose it granted that radically overhauling a health system – some 20 per cent of the US economy – that many Americans rather like was a lot to take on. Suppose it was impressed that Mr Obama did it anyway, and was ready to go further.

Supposing those hopelessly implausible things, Mr Obama’s midterm strategy could have been different. Sure of the loyalty of the base, he could have addressed himself to the anxious middle, defended his policies as centrist compromises (which they were), and told the country (as he did in 2008) that its concerns were his concerns. In this alternative universe, he would have had his base and at least a shot at bringing the centre back.

So credit please where it is due. The whining utopian left has a very full schedule of despising Republicans and the idiots and scoundrels (a little over half the country) who keep voting for them. Yet it can always find time to attack its own team, cry and complain, and demand to be patted on the head. The left’s role in Tuesday’s elections should not go unacknowledged.

clive.crook@gmail.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

“Elitist” and “out of touch”....No, Mr. President, you just don't get it.

Jeff Jacoby writes up the reason why we have seen POTUS' approval rating dip to an all-time low of 37 % - His article in the Boston Globe echoes what Hillary Clinton knew in April 2008.

Take a look at what was on the record in April 2008 as proof positive that Jeff Jacoby has hit the mark; From the UK Times -

Mrs Clinton was buoyed yesterday by Republican strategists who declared that Mr Obama’s remarks would become a general election “nightmare” for the Illinois senator if he became the Democratic nominee because they made him look like a liberal elitist.

Mrs Clinton activated the entire might of her campaign machine to exploit the remarks, which she called “demeaning”, “elitist” and “out of touch”. Aides handed out “I’m not bitter” stickers and surrogates took to the airwaves to fan the flames.

It emerged on Saturday that Mr Obama had, before an audience in the liberal bastion of San Francisco, tried to explain his trouble winning over white, working-class voters, the fabled “Reagan Democrats” who will be crucial in the general election.

He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This is the same Hillary Clinton that is his Secretary of State ! And POTUS wonders why the American Voters are not more in line with his view of things. It is his naivete' that causes Voters to worry and his elitist attitude that makes Voters shake their heads in disgust. Now he thinks we should give support ot those who look down on the average American as "bitter"....You would be bitter if you saw the President caring more about the Unions and his Elite buddies than those who are doing the work that makes America great.

5 days and counting to the reckoning. I'm hopeful that a message will be sent by the voters.


Smug Democrats
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / October 27, 2010

THE HILLS are alive with the sound of liberal Democratic contempt for the electorate. So are the valleys, the prairies, and the coasts. For months, voters have been signaling their discontent with the president, his party, and their priorities; in less than a week, they appear poised to deliver a stinging rebuke. Yet rather than address the voters’ concerns with seriousness and respect, too many Democrats and their allies on the left have chosen instead to slur those voters as stupid, extremist, or too scared to think straight.

At a Democratic fundraiser in Newton this month, offering what he called “a little bit of perspective from the Oval Office,’’ President Obama gave this diagnosis of the American political scene:

“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.’’

The smug condescension in this — we’re losing because voters are panicky and confused — is matched only by its apparent cluelessness. Does Obama really believe that demeaning ordinary Americans is the way to improve his party’s fortunes? Or that his dwindling job approval is due to the public’s weak grip on “facts and science’’ and not, say, to his own divisive and doctrinaire performance as president?

Perhaps he does. Or perhaps he just says such things when speaking to liberal donors. It was at a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008 that Obama described hard-pressed citizens in the small towns of Pennsylvania as “bitter’’ people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.’’

Obama is far from alone in looking down his nose at the great unwashed. Last month, Senator John Kerry explained that Democrats are facing such headwinds these days because voters are easily swayed dolts: “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on, so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth.’’

Meanwhile, the rise of the Tea Party movement, one of the most extraordinary waves of civic engagement in modern American politics and a major driver of the 2010 election season, has drawn no end of scorn from Democrats and their cheerleaders in the media.

Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray calls Tea Party members “nutcases,’’ while ABC’s Christiane Amanpour is aghast that the grassroots movement has “really gone to the extreme’’ and is “not conservatism as we knew it.’’ Rob Reiner even smears the Tea Party as Nazi-esque: “My fear is that the Tea Party gets a charismatic leader,’’ the Hollywood director said last week. “All they’re selling is fear and anger and that’s all Hitler sold.’’ And the crop of citizen-candidates running for Congress this year, many of them with Tea Party backing? A “myriad of wackos,’’ sneers the influential liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas.

Trashing conservatives as “nutcases’’ and “wackos’’ — or worse — is all too common among left-wing pundits and politicos. But the electorate isn’t buying it. “Likely voters in battleground districts,’’ reports The Hill in a recent story on a poll of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country, “see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.’’ Among likely voters, 44 percent think the Democratic Party is overpowered by its extremes (37 percent say that about the Republicans). Even among registered Democrats, 22 percent think their party is too beholden to its extremists.

Heading into next week’s elections, Americans remain a center-right nation, with solid majorities believing that the federal government is too intrusive and powerful, that it does not spend taxpayer’s money wisely or fairly, and that Americans would be better off having a smaller government with fewer services. Nearly halfway through the most left-wing, high-spending, grow-the-government presidential term most voters can remember, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many of them are rebelling. The coming Republican wave is an entirely rational response to two years of Democratic arrogance and overreach. As the president and his party are about to learn, treating voters as stupid, malevolent, or confused is not a strategy for victory.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company

A Devotion to the limited Government embodied in the US Constitution...

A wise man on TV once said that he wasn't there to tell you what you WANT to hear, he was paid to tell you what you NEEDED to hear.....The enclosed post falls into that category.

I am NOT a party guy and find some of what the Tea Party people put out as "edgy" BUT also state that the SHITE the Liberals are whining for and desire makes my skin crawl.....so I have to "observe & report" and hope that collectively, we are all smarter than the media.

So I'm just the messenger.....read the enclosed post and develop your own opinion....I say that I feel I would rather be with the Federalists myself.....Here's what one of them said,

" Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."

US President James Madison

OPINION- WSJ

OCTOBER 16, 2010

Why Liberals Don't Get the Tea Party Movement

Our universities haven't taught much political history for decades. No wonder so many progressives have disdain for the principles that animated the Federalist debates.

By PETER BERKOWITZ

Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and nod their heads in agreement. University educations and advanced degrees notwithstanding, they lack a basic understanding of the contours of American constitutional government.New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got the ball rolling in April 2009, just ahead of the first major tea party rallies on April 15, by falsely asserting that "the tea parties don't represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They're AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) events."

Having learned next to nothing in the intervening 16 months about one of the most spectacular grass-roots political movements in American history, fellow Times columnist Frank Rich denied in August of this year that the tea party movement is "spontaneous and leaderless," insisting instead that it is the instrument of billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch.Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne criticized the tea party as unrepresentative in two ways. It "constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers," he asserted last month. This was a step back from his rash prediction five months before that since it "represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics," the tea party movement "will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections."

In February, Mr. Dionne argued that the tea party was also unrepresentative because it reflected a political principle that lost out at America's founding and deserves to be permanently retired: "Anti-statism, a profound mistrust of power in Washington goes all the way back to the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution itself because they saw it concentrating too much authority in the central government."Mr. Dionne follows in the footsteps of progressive historian Richard Hofstadter, whose influential 1964 book "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" argued that Barry Goldwater and his supporters displayed a "style of mind" characterized by "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

Similarly, the "suspicion of government" that the tea party movement shares with the Anti-Federalists, Mr. Dionne maintained, "is not amenable to 'facts'" because "opposing government is a matter of principle."To be sure, the tea party sports its share of clowns, kooks and creeps. And some of its favored candidates and loudest voices have made embarrassing statements and embraced reckless policies. This, however, does not distinguish the tea party movement from the competition.Born in response to President Obama's self-declared desire to fundamentally change America, the tea party movement has made its central goals abundantly clear.

Activists and the sizeable swath of voters who sympathize with them want to reduce the massively ballooning national debt, cut runaway federal spending, keep taxes in check, reinvigorate the economy, and block the expansion of the state into citizens' lives. In other words, the tea party movement is inspired above all by a commitment to limited government. And that does distinguish it from the competition.But far from reflecting a recurring pathology in our politics or the losing side in the debate over the Constitution, the devotion to limited government lies at the heart of the American experiment in liberal democracy.

The Federalists who won ratification of the Constitution—most notably Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay—shared with their Anti-Federalist opponents the view that centralized power presented a formidable and abiding threat to the individual liberty that it was government's primary task to secure. They differed over how to deal with the threat.The Anti-Federalists—including Patrick Henry, Samuel Bryan and Robert Yates—adopted the traditional view that liberty depended on state power exercised in close proximity to the people.

The Federalists replied in Federalist 9 that the "science of politics," which had "received great improvement," showed that in an extended and properly structured republic liberty could be achieved and with greater security and stability.This improved science of politics was based not on abstract theory or complex calculations but on what is referred to in Federalist 51 as "inventions of prudence" grounded in the reading of classic and modern authors, broad experience of self-government in the colonies, and acute observations about the imperfections and finer points of human nature. It taught that constitutionally enumerated powers; a separation, balance, and blending of these powers among branches of the federal government; and a distribution of powers between the federal and state governments would operate to leave substantial authority to the states while both preventing abuses by the federal government and providing it with the energy needed to defend liberty.

Whether members have read much or little of The Federalist, the tea party movement's focus on keeping government within bounds and answerable to the people reflects the devotion to limited government embodied in the Constitution. One reason this is poorly understood among our best educated citizens is that American politics is poorly taught at the universities that credentialed them. Indeed, even as the tea party calls for the return to constitutional basics, our universities neglect The Federalist and its classic exposition of constitutional principles.For the better part of two generations, the best political science departments have concentrated on equipping students with skills for performing empirical research and teaching mathematical models that purport to describe political affairs. Meanwhile, leading history departments have emphasized social history and issues of race, class and gender at the expense of constitutional history, diplomatic history and military history.

Neither professors of political science nor of history have made a priority of instructing students in the founding principles of American constitutional government. Nor have they taught about the contest between the progressive vision and the conservative vision that has characterized American politics since Woodrow Wilson (then a political scientist at Princeton) helped launch the progressive movement in the late 19th century by arguing that the Constitution had become obsolete and hindered democratic reform.Then there are the proliferating classes in practical ethics and moral reasoning.

These expose students to hypothetical conundrums involving individuals in surreal circumstances suddenly facing life and death decisions, or present contentious public policy questions and explore the range of respectable progressive opinions for resolving them. Such exercises may sharpen students' ability to argue. They do little to teach about self-government.They certainly do not teach about the virtues, or qualities of mind and character, that enable citizens to shoulder their political responsibilities and prosper amidst the opportunities and uncertainties that freedom brings. Nor do they teach the beliefs, practices and associations that foster such virtues and those that endanger them.

Those who doubt that the failings of higher education in America have political consequences need only reflect on the quality of progressive commentary on the tea party movement. Our universities have produced two generations of highly educated people who seem unable to recognize the spirited defense of fundamental American principles, even when it takes place for more than a year and a half right in front of their noses.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution