Well, we're nearly a month into the Era of Hope, Unity and Change. How we doin'?* "The sense of disappointment in Obama is spreading, as are concerns about the consequences of a bait-and-switch presidency." (Michael Goodwin, "Where's the President Obama Who Promised to Unite Us?" in today's New York Daily News)
* "What accounts for this debacle? You could start with a lack of presidential leadership. Who would have thought the missing player in the first month of the administration would be Barack Obama? He let his signature economic legislation, the stimulus, be shaped by congressional Democrats. He let internal disputes over the difficult question of how to save the banking system result in a disastrous non-announcement of a non-plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week. Before that, he let Geithner become Treasury secretary after cheating on his income taxes, and waived his own ethics rules to appoint a lobbyist as deputy secretary of defense--undercutting his promises to clean up Washington. He allowed Rahm Emanuel to politicize the Census Bureau, losing as a result his commerce secretary-designee, Judd Gregg, an ornament of his professed hope for bipartisanship." (William Kristol, "Obama Levitates," The Weekly Standard)
* "Just a few weeks in office, and we already have the President enabling and encouraging one of the least transparent processes imaginable to muscle through an $800 billion spending bill. Does the administration think this amounts to change, or should I wait for them to get their new website, worsethanever.gov, up and running?" (Mark Hemingway, "So Much for Legislative Transparency," The Corner at National Review)
* "Like the hangover which inevitably follows the drinking binge, the realization is setting in that now we have to pay for the $787B just spent – which will really grow to more like $3 trillion with interest and a bank bailout thrown in..." (Jennifer Rubin, "You Mean We Have To Pay For It?", Commentary Magazine)
* "President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.
In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today's economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover. This fearmongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics..
Mr. Obama's analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup. Beyond that, fearmongering can trigger a political stampede to embrace a "recovery" package that delivers a lot less than it promises. (Bradley R. Schiller, "Obama's Rhetoric Is the Real 'Catastrophe'," Wall Street Journal)
* "Towards the end of an American tour last week to promote my new book Welcome to Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work, I began to feel ever so slightly guilty. Partly it was all those people I met still wearing their "Vote Obama" badges like religious talismans, still quite obviously brimming with audacious hope for their country's bright future under the new Obamessiah. Who was I to come from the other side of the pond and rain on their parade?
Mainly, though, it was because I'd never expected the Obama project to go pear-shaped quite so soon. Sure, it was nothing I hadn't predicted in the book: the cronyism, the corruption, the naivety, the incompetence, the wasting of taxpayers' money on pet, left-liberal causes. Even so, by the time I left Washington DC, I was feeling almost sorry for the guy. Couldn't he at least have had a honeymoon before the divorce papers came through?" (James Delingpole, "Sorry, America, I'm the Bearer of Bad News," Telegraph)
* "Few pieces of political “wisdom” are more tediously recycled than a well-retailed bon mot of British prime minister Harold Macmillan. Asked what he feared most in the months ahead, he gave an amused Edwardian response: “Events, dear boy, events.” In other words, you can plan all you want but next month, next year, some guy off the radar screen will launch a war, or there’ll be an earthquake, or something. Governments get thrown off course by “events.”
It suggests a perverse kind of genius that the 44th president did not wait for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?” (Congressional Quarterly); “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” (the Financial Times). Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence." (Mark Steyn, "The Obamateur Hour," National Review)
