Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back- By FRANK RICH

[kpete]

Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back
By FRANK RICH
NY Times
September 12, 2010

NO, he can't. President Obama can't reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can't get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.

And so the odds that Obama's party will survive the midterms seem less than Indiana Jones's in the Temple of Doom -- as we are reminded hourly by the Beltway herd flogging the latest polls. The Democrats are facing a "historic" rout, an earthquake, a tidal wave -- well, you know the drill. End of story.

Unless it’s not. On Labor Day, the fighting Obama abruptly re-emerged, a far cry from the man whose Oval Office address on Iraq days earlier was about as persuasive as a hostage video. Speaking to workers in Milwaukee, the president finally started giving voice to the anger of America’s battered middle class. And he even let loose with a little anger of his own. The unspecified “powerful interests” aligned against him, he said, “talk about me like a dog.”

.................

If Obama can speak lucidly about a subject as thorny as race, he can surely do a far more specific job of telling the story of how we got to this economic impasse. He must join the many who are talking about why the top 1 percent of American earners now take home nearly a quarter of Americans’ total income — perhaps the single most revealing indicator of how three decades of greed and free-market absolutism have eviscerated America’s fundamental ideals of fairness. It can’t all be reduced to the shorthand of “George W. Bush.”

much more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12rich.html?_r=1

[RC]

1. What Obama needs to do is announce a Jobs Program, with Living Wage jobs.

Tax the businesses that export our jobs over seas.

[Octafish]

2. And he needs a lot of Democrats* in the House and Senate to get it done.

* Real Democrats.

[RC]

3. There is only a half dozen or so of those.

The rest of the(D)'s are DINO's

[Edweird]

5. He needs the desire to do so. He's made it clear repeatedly that he is no FDR.

There will be no jobs program. The 'lack of Dems' is just a sorry excuse to cover the the lack of will.

[flamingdem]

4. electoral-vote.com has VERY EVEN ODDS, Nate is NOT going to be correct this time nt

[w8liftinglady]

6. and...those of us in RED states need to broadcast our representatives' actions.

I have made it my personal issue to simpoly display barton,Cornyn,and hutchison's voting records...they speak for themselves.(I am lucky that my local paper prints all my letters...or maybe not?)