Frank Rich: 'Barack Obama, Phone Home'

[Newsjock]

Source: New York Times

After his “shellacking,” President Obama had to do something. But who had the bright idea of scheduling his visit to India for right after this election? The Democrats’ failure to create jobs was at the heart of the shellacking. Nothing says “outsourcing” to the American public more succinctly than India. But the White House didn’t figure this out until the eve of Obama’s Friday departure, when it hastily rebranded his trip as a jobs mission. Perhaps the president should visit one of the Indian call centers policing Americans’ credit-card debts to feel our pain.

... The president’s travails are not merely a “communications problem.” They’re also a governance problem — which makes them a gift to opponents who prefer no governance at all. You can’t govern if you can’t tell the country where you are taking it. The plot of Obama’s presidency has been harder to follow than “Inception.”

Health care reform remains at the root of this chaos. Obama has never explained why a second-tier priority for him in the 2008 campaign leapt to the top of his must-do list in March 2009. For much of the subsequent year spent fighting over it, he still failed to pick up the narrative thread. He delayed so long in specifying his own priorities for the bill that his opponents filled the vacuum for him, making fictions like “death panels” stick while he waited naïvely for bipartisanship to prevail. In 2010, Obama and most Democrats completed their transformation of a victory into a defeat by running away from their signature achievement altogether.

... Obama has a huge opening here — should he take it. He could call the Republicans’ bluff by forcing them to fill in their own blanks. He could start by offering them what they want, the full Bush tax cuts, in exchange for a single caveat: G.O.P. leaders would be required to stand before a big Glenn Beck-style chalkboard — on C-Span, or, for that matter, Fox News — and list, with dollar amounts, exactly which budget cuts would pay for them. Once they hit the first trillion — or even $100 billion — step back and let the “adult conversation” begin!

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07rich.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[Owl]

1. Exactly agree with Frank Rich's' column.

[countrydad58]

2. Frank nails it!

[BzaDem]

3. Obama explained over and over again the importance of health reform. And I don't think it was a

"second-tier" priority in the campaign. I think it was at the top of the first tier.

[howaboutme]

4. More smoke screen about "free trade"

Obama goes to India claiming to create US jobs, which is pure smoke screen. You just can't make this stuff up. Our trade with India has always resulted in US jobs going one direction and imports in reverse.

History lesson: After all the outsourcing of US jobs to India, India had refused to allow Harley Davidson MCs to be imported without high tariffs until very recently because they claimed they were too big and didn't meet their emission requirements. Finally the US government caved in and with a quid pro quo and said OK we'll take your possibly diseased mangoes if you take our Harleys. BUT the catch is as we speak Harley Davidson is moving assy/production of some Harley Davidsons to India claiming they will be sold in India. Why is it that every country that accepts US products either restricts them or requires that they be manufactured there, while the USA allows any piece of contaminated trash to enter the USA and be sold to the suckers at Walmart?

The problem in America is that we no longer have any leaders that serve us as patriots. They are all NWO types beholden to the capitalists and Wall Street. Very few really give a damn about US workers retaining middle class status and I put many Democrats such as Bill Clinton and very likely Obama in that same category as the Republicans.

Our own Congress and Presidents have traded the USA economy and our nation's self sufficiency for Asian markets for the capitalists. Screw them all.

http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/2785.cfm#down

[WillyT]

5. K & R !!!

:kick:

[mdmc]

6. ..