POGO Had It Right - Woe Is Us and Gibberish!

Trying to turn a ship around while it is taking on water is quite demanding. (See 1 below.)

When Obama is not the face of his administration his pathetic press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is and Dana Milbank decides it is best to let Gibbs speak for himself. Gibbs does and what comes out continues to be sarcastic 'gibberish.' (See 2 below.)

I am posting brief commentary explaining today's Supreme Court Decision about public campaign financing and two different takes. The first by Obama and the second by George Will.

Constitutionally speaking The Supreme Court upheld free speech. Practically speaking it opens the political money floodgates. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)

Next week, President Obama will deliver his State of The Union Address. If he were intellectually honest he would tell us what we already know - the State of The Union is not well, he has proven to be out of tune with what Americans think and he made a further mistake turning over his radical agenda to even more radical Democrat leadership in the guise of Pelosi and Reid.

I do not believe Obama will say this but I do believe 'Mr. Cool' is no longer. He got buried in Massachusetts. What we will now see is a determined, more sober visage. A more serious presidential look.

Furthermore, I doubt we will hear words like audacious, hope, change, health care and cap and trade bantered about with frequency. Rather we will hear replacement words like fiscal responsibility, deficit control and job growth.

That said, I still believe our youthful and inexperienced president will continue to seek straw men to punch and he might go after five who wear Black Robes and occupy their seats for life.

Obama also seems to have decided to return to his Populist roots and to ride the anger bull that prowls the caverns of Wall Street and marbled halls of our banking institutions. John Edwards, the philandering lawyer, tried a Populist appeal and flopped but targeting enemies is a popular political past time particularly when you are sinking in the polls.

The markets also have not taking kindly to Obama's new attacks but politically speaking that seems to be Obama's chosen course. Deflect anger at all cost is the first sign of good leadership or so our youthful and inexperienced president seems to think. (See 4 below.)

I have often said and I repeat - POGO had it about right - WOE IS US!


Dick


1)Obama Trying to Turn Around His Presidency
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Chastened and bruised, President Obama on Wednesday began the daunting process of trying to turn around his presidency in a drastically altered political environment that will test his leadership, his instincts and his political dexterity as never before.

With the loss of his party’s unilateral control of the Senate, Mr. Obama pivoted to acknowledge the deep public anger on display in Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts, offering limited regrets for losing touch and signaling that he may scale back some of the sweeping ambitions he brought into office just one year ago to the day.

But he and his advisers were still reeling from the Republican victory in Massachusetts that cost them the filibuster-proof majority they had used to advance his priorities. Inside the White House, a debate ensued about what lessons to draw: Did the president try to enact too much change or not enough? Was he too liberal or too close to financial institutions? Should he tack to the center or more aggressively push a progressive agenda?

In an interview with ABC News, Mr. Obama indicated he would not give up his signature health care initiative but suggested paring it down to its “core elements.” He maintained that he heard the message of an election that handed the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s seat to a Republican but cast it as an echo of the public discontent that vaulted him to the White House.

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country — the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” Mr. Obama said. “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

That, of course, was a way of putting at least some of the blame on former President George W. Bush. For himself, Mr. Obama sided with those who saw a failure of communications rather than a flawed policy agenda.

“If there’s one thing that I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values,” he said. “And that I do think is a mistake of mine.”

The president alluded to his own reputation for emotional distance from voters suffering from a troubled economy. “What they’ve ended up seeing is this feeling of remoteness and detachment where, you know, there’s these technocrats up here, these folks who are making decisions,” he said.

That Mr. Obama made these observations to the ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos may have been fitting, given that Mr. Stephanopoulos was a White House adviser to President Bill Clinton when Democrats lost the Congress in 1994. The loss of a single Senate seat in Massachusetts does not quite match the political tectonic shift 15 years ago, but Clinton veterans in the Obama White House experienced an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

That defeat was followed by weeks of debate between some like Mr. Stephanopoulos who advocated more liberal populism and others like Rahm Emanuel (now Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff) who favored tacking to the political center. Ultimately, Mr. Clinton moved to the middle on issues like welfare and the deficit and declared “the era of big government is over.”

“Clinton took the ’94 results as an affirmation to govern the way he campaigned, to not being the president Congress wanted him to be but to be the president America had elected him to be,” said Bruce Reed, a Clinton adviser in the centrist camp. Mr. Obama, he said, can use this as an opportunity to focus on “results, not ideology,” and “make government better, not bigger.”

Indeed, administration officials, who did not want to be identified discussing internal strategy, said Mr. Obama would put more emphasis on issues like deficit reduction and job creation. He already was assembling a bipartisan budget commission and officials acknowledged that some proposals would probably take a back seat now, like a market-based cap on greenhouse gas emissions and liberalized immigration rules. (The White House, for the record, insisted it would keep pushing for the climate and immigration ideas. “We continue to work closely with members of both parties on these important issues to fashion proposals that can garner broad support,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman.)Still, Mr. Obama is loath to follow Mr. Clinton’s example too much. His senior adviser, David Axelrod, made clear in media appearances Wednesday that the president would eschew the incremental, small-bore initiatives Mr. Clinton favored in the 1990s. And Mr. Axelrod’s public rhetoric in recent days has favored populist language about standing up to banks and insurers.

But that too has its tradeoffs. Mr. Obama has proposed a tax on banks to recover taxpayer money from the bailout, but even some officials who support the policy worry that the rhetoric fuels the image of an antibusiness administration at a time when creating jobs is the top priority.

Mr. Obama has often confronted moments of challenge with a major speech, as he did during a race controversy in the 2008 primaries and again when health care seemed in trouble last fall. With the State of the Union now scheduled for Wednesday, he has another such opportunity. Aides said he will use it to reframe his record and aspirations.

“When these things hit, it’s like a football team that’s losing — you’ve got to get back to fundamentals — blocking and tackling and running the ball,” said Dan Bartlett, a top adviser to Mr. Bush, who lost control of the Senate when a Republican bolted from the party in the middle of 2001. “They have to hone in, be more disciplined, focus on one or two issues and be relentless in driving them home.”

2)White House's Gibbs has mastered art of speaking with his hand
By Dana Milbank


For Democrats, the only good thing to come from Tuesday's loss of the Senate election in Massachusetts is this: It could wipe the grin off Robert Gibbs's face.

The Democrats' failed struggle to hold onto Ted Kennedy's seat in the liberal state showed how badly the party's brand had been damaged over the past year. But as the White House press corps challenged President Obama's press secretary on Tuesday afternoon about the anticipated loss, Gibbs answered with his usual mix of wisecracks and insults.

"Broadly speaking, can you talk about the difference between 59 and 60 votes in the Senate and what that means for the president's agenda this year?"

"Broadly, it's one," Gibbs answered.

Will Obama hold a news conference Wednesday to discuss the results?

"Be here around 10 a.m. If we're not here, start without us."


"Is there something you could have done better," asked Sheryl Stolberg of the New York Times, so that "you wouldn't be in the situation that you're in right now?"

"Sheryl," Gibbs replied, "I'll read this transcript and think there's things that I could have done better." No doubt.

On Tuesday, he allowed that Obama was "angry" over Democrats' troubles in Massachusetts. "With whom is he angry?" a reporter asked.

"I didn't expand on that," the spokesman replied.

"Okay, can you now?"

"I won't now."

"But you might tomorrow?"

"There's always hope," Gibbs said, using a favorite Obama campaign word.

"Audacious," interjected CBS News's Mark Knoller, using another.

Gibbs acts as though he's playing himself in the movie version of his job. In this imaginary film, he is the smart-alecky press secretary, offering zippy comebacks and cracking jokes to make his questioners look ridiculous. It's no great feat to make reporters look bad, but this act also sends a televised image of a cocksure White House to ordinary Americans watching at home.

This is the most visible manifestation of a larger problem the Obama White House has. Many Obama loyalists from the 2008 race still seem, after a year on the job, to be having trouble exiting campaign mode. They sometimes appear to be running a taxpayer-funded rapid-response operation.

At Tuesday's briefing, Gibbs looked down and shuffled his papers as the Associated Press's Jennifer Loven began with two questions about the White House's role in the Massachusetts race. Gibbs gave her two dismissive waves of the hand and told her to wait for "the outcome of the election, which, as many people know, is ongoing."

The correspondent for Reuters asked two more Massachusetts questions. Gibbs treated him to two more dismissive waves. "We will schedule a briefing, not unlike this, at approximately the same time tomorrow," the spokesman said.

The line of questioning continued, and the press secretary assured his audience that "these are going to be all great questions tomorrow." "So you'll answer them tomorrow?" asked The Post's Mike Shear.

"I promise I'll be here tomorrow," Gibbs proposed.

Contrast the glib Gibbs gibes with a press briefing on the same topic a few hours earlier by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

"I don't need the Massachusetts race to tell me the psyche of the American people," the Maryland Democrat said. "People are angry, people are fearful. . . . Probably none of us in the room knew how deep the recession that confronted us was." He acknowledged that the Democrats' agenda "has not affected . . . change as quickly as all of us would like." He admitted that "we're all pretty unpopular." He assured the reporters that "I get it."

Gibbs didn't quite get it, though, as CBS's Chip Reid joked that he would try a question on "a different topic: the election in Massachusetts."

The press secretary drummed a bah-dum-bum on the lectern. Reid ignored the percussion and asked whether the "groundswell of support for a Republican in the blue state of Massachusetts for a candidate who's running against the president's agenda" meant that "the White House has simply lost touch with the American people."

Gibbs gave another dismissive wave and cited a CBS News poll that wasn't about Massachusetts.

"Good diversion," Reid replied.

"I hate to quote CBS to CBS," Gibbs continued with a grin.

About the closest the spokesman came to acknowledging fault in Massachusetts was to say that Obama "understands that frustration" among voters, but he then added that the president "heard it when he ran for the United States Senate, beginning in 2003." Unemployment, now at 10 percent, was 5.7 percent at the end of 2003.

Gibbs was so combative that when he turned to the Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler, he tried to predict her question. "There's a race near Connecticut," he guessed.


"I wasn't going to mention New England at all," Meckler said. "But feel free to answer your own question."

Don't give him any ideas.

3)In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court abruptly called a halt to encroachments on political speech in the name of campaign finance reform. It ruled that spending limits imposed on corporations and unions infringed on constitutional rights, ending decades of attempts to limit advertising on their behalf. It also overturned McCain-Feingold provisions barring some kinds of advertising in the weeks before an election :

The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

No word yet on language from the opinion, but the ruling shows both an impatience with a utilitarian argument for violating the First Amendment and the fault lines on the current court. I doubt anyone will fail to guess the concurs and the dissents in the 5-4 vote. Anthony Kennedy almost undoubtedly wound up as the swing vote.
In the first challenges to the BCRA (McCain-Feingold), the earlier court appeared to accept the notion that one has to break a few First Amendment eggs to get a clean-elections omelette. This court has apparently decided that Congress should amend the First Amendment if it has grown tired of it, rather than pass laws that contradict it. The fact that only five of the nine justices could reach that rather obvious conclusion shows how much judicial activism and Congressional overreach have in common — especially the sense that they can manipulate clear boundaries of power for whatever end they seek.

Will this open the floodgates to corporate and union money in elections? Well, it never really left. The restrictions in the BCRA and other campaign-finance “reforms” just forced the money into less-transparent channels, creating mini-industries of money laundering in politics. This ruling will just allow the money to be seen for what it is, rather than hiding behind PR-spin PAC names and shadowy contribution trails.

The best campaign finance reform is still transparency. If burning a flag in the street is free speech, then so are political contributions, especially when made in the open. If the reformers in Congress want to clean up elections, then force immediate reporting on the Internet of all contributions to all presidential, Senate, and Congressional races, and full weekly financial reports on expenditures. That will do more than all of the speech-restricting, unconstitutional efforts made since Watergate, and make the entire system a lot more honest.
Update: The opinion has been published here. No great shock to see Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy on one side with Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor on the other. Here’s what Stevens sees as the “real issue”:

The real issue in this case concerns how, not if, the appellant may finance its electioneering. Citizens United is a wealthy nonprofit corporation that runs a political action committee (PAC) with millions of dollars in assets. Under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), it could have used those assets to televise and promote Hillary: The Movie wherever and whenever it wanted to. It also could have spent unrestricted sums to broadcast Hillary at any time other than the 30 daysbefore the last primary election. Neither Citizens United’s nor any other corporation’s speech has been “banned,” ante, at 1. All that the parties dispute is whether CitizensUnited had a right to use the funds in its general treasury to pay for broadcasts during the 30-day period. The notion that the First Amendment dictates an affirmative answer to that question is, in my judgment, profoundly misguided.

This is, not to be too blunt, patently absurd. Free political speech is not free if the government can dictate when and where you exercise it. It’s true that CU could have run the movie earlier than 30 days before the election. They felt — not without reason — that their speech would be more effective using the same venues within 30 days of the election. Assuming they break no other laws, what gives government the right to dictate when on the calendar they can exercise free political speech? Apparently, being “rich” is a Constitutional exception through which the government can infringe on rights.

I’ll finish with Thomas’ final words on Citizens United v FEC:
I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruinedcareers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive andthreatening warning letters as the price for engaging in“core political speech, the ‘primary object of First Amendment protection.’”

3a)Obama Blasts Campaign Finance Decision

A strong statement from President Obama on today's Supreme Court ruling that frees corporations to spend unlimited sums on political campaigns:

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington--while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.
It's worth noting, of course, that as a candidate Obama broke a pledge to stay within the matching funds program for presidential candidates. Sen. John McCain (R) had this warning when he made that decision:

“Barack Obama is now the first presidential candidate since Watergate to run a campaign entirely on private funds. This decision will have far-reaching and extraordinary consequences that will weaken and undermine the public financing system.”

3b)The Supreme Court's radical defense of political speech
By George Will


For almost four decades now, what has been done in the name of “campaign finance reform” has constituted the most dangerous assault on freedom of speech since the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is because the government, by regulating what can be spent in order to disseminate political speech and when political speech may occur, has asserted the astonishing right to dictate the quantity, content and timing of speech about the government.

On Thursday, however, the Supreme Court, in a gratifyingly radical decision, substantially pushed back the encroachments that the political class has made on the sphere of free political speech. This was radical only because after nearly four decades of such “reform” the First Amendment has come to seem radical. Which, indeed, it is. The Supreme Court on Thursday restored First Amendment protection to the core speech that it was designed to protect -- political speech. There will be no more McCain-Feingold blackout periods before primary and general elections -- periods during which political advocacy was restricted, just as public attention was most intense.

The court’s decision will be predictably lamented by people alarmed by the prospect of more political money funding more political speech. The Supreme Court has now said to such people approximately this: The First Amendment does not permit government to decide the “proper” quantity of political speech.

4)Obama and Populism
By Victor Davis Hanson

I could believe President Obama’s postmortem take that the same populist sentiment that propelled Scott Brown to office also earlier sent him to the White House — if we saw fresh liberal Democrats winning seats in places like Alabama against entrenched Washington Republican insiders. But I don’t think that is happening quite yet.

The populist anger that, in sequential fashion, accounted for Bush’s drop in the polls, Republicans’ loss of majority status in Congress, and Obama’s winning the presidency, was predicated on unhappiness with the war, out-of-control federal spending and deficits, congressional corruption, and Wall Street.

Obama & Co., however, have trumped Bush on most of those counts: They have quadrupled the deficit; Geithner, Dodd, and Rangel have shown an even more cavalier attitude toward the law than certain congressional Republicans did; and Obama has surpassed Bush in bailouts and guarantees to the big banks.

In short, I don’t think those who are angry about out-of-control federal spending and the proposed government takeover of health care see Obama as a fellow traveler.