Patterico's Pontifications

6/5/2010

Hotline Looks at White House Politics

Filed under: 2010 Election,Obama,Politics — DRJ @ 11:12 pm



[Guest post by DRJ]

Hotline and some Democrats are not impressed with the White House political staff and some even say President Bush ran a better political shop than President Obama.

One of the problems with continually comparing himself to President Bush is that, ultimately, Obama runs the risk that people will decide Bush did a better job.

— DRJ

19 Responses to “Hotline Looks at White House Politics”

  1. that’s already a given: for better or worse, Bush made decisions.

    Ear Leader just eats waffles.

    redc1c4 (fb8750)

  2. Let the bastard play basketball and golf 24/7 and leave us the hell alone!

    krusher (7a5749)

  3. The fact is that Obama is not what was advertised–he is a poitical hack with a smooth tongue that fooled the country two years ago. While Bush had his faults (particularly on spending), he was far more worthy of the office.

    BillinChicago (b8f0d0)

  4. One of these days someone is gonna figure out that Iraq shipped its WMD to Syria before the US invasion…then W is going to turn into Harry Truman.

    Probably be 20 years though.

    VoteOutIncumbents (078434)

  5. Also remember we’re pretty at the apogee of the time in-between presidential campaigns right now, so it’s the most likely time for the media to be taking serious swipes at the Obama Administration without fear of it affecting his early-term agenda (2009) or his late-term re-election hopes (2012).

    You had something similar with Bill Clinton 16 years ago, though Democrats and their media supporters at the time couldn’t conceive of their party losing control of Congress in the ’94 midterms, so there was less of a sense of panic and more anger that the administration had stumbled on so many fronts a year-and-a-half into Clinton’s term. And the frustration venting got worse in the immediate aftermath of the midterms, before the “Protect the King” instinct took hold as the ’96 election neared. Expect the same scenario for Obama — more blunt criticism over the next 12 months or so, followed by a more defensive stance by the big media once they start feeling the sharp criticism might put the Republicans back in the White House.

    John (d4490d)

  6. Hotline and some Democrats are not impressed with the White House political staff:

    Well, neither am I.

    #4 VoteOutIncumbents:

    One of these days someone is gonna figure out that Iraq shipped its WMD to Syria before the US invasion

    Not all of them. There were enough chemical weapons found in Iraq to destroy NYC and Washington, a fact that was reported on the noon news here on one channel when the then chairmen of the Senate and House Joint Intelligence Committee announced it, but, it never even made it to the evening news on the same channel.

    That then Senator Rick Santorum was in a tight re-election race against a strong Dem challenger had nothing to do with it, I’m sure.

    #3 BillInChicago:While Bush had his faults (particularly on spending), he was far more worthy of the office.

    EW1(SG) (edc268)

  7. Oops, missed a blockquote tag there. Wasn’t supposed to run together like that, I wonder if actually putting my glasses on would help.

    EW1(SG) (edc268)

  8. @EW1(SG)…yes, I absolutely do miss President Bush!

    BillinChicago (b8f0d0)

  9. With respect to WMD, Insty points to this article in pajamas media. (oops, no preview, hope I did it right).

    Apparently, the view held by the DNI nominee agrees with this. Wonder if he’s already seeing “Bluebird” behind him.

    Red County Pete (6ce7c4)

  10. Liz Cheney takes flight
    Markos panders to Hamas
    weasel guts for brunch

    ColonelHaiku (749d6d)

  11. Bush is Ford to Obama’s Carter. Bush was below average but nothing compared to the utter incompetence of Obama. I mean, the guy was placing all fault and blame on BP while BP was the ones leading the clean up effort. Don’t slap around your employees and expect them to do a good job.

    JHE (9284aa)

  12. gold watch not taken
    mandatory retirement
    O-Care death panel

    ColonelHaiku (749d6d)

  13. wrong thread he screamed
    ancestors not amused
    must fall on sword now

    Colonelhaiku (749d6d)

  14. Bush II (and Bush I, for that matter) showed a lapse in good judgment when he leaned left. So he was squishy about bloated budgets or illegal immigration, just as his father was squishy about raising taxes or choosing Supreme Court nominees like David Souter. For that matter, Ronald Reagan’s biggest blunder was when he allowed do-gooder, big-hugs sentiments to get the better of him and decided to go against his publicly stated policy by secretly negotiating with hostage-taking Iran. (Going back even further, Republican Herbert Hoover allowed income taxes to soar not long after the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929).

    Now we have an ultra-liberal in the White House, so the faults of Bush (etc) are magnified a thousand times over.

    Mark (411533)

  15. Ultimately DRJ? Heck, most thinking persons knew that before the 2008 election, LONG before!

    GM Roper (6afe02)

  16. ________________________________________________

    Hotline and some Democrats are not impressed with the White House political staff:

    As a tribute to most (not “some”) of the people in the Democrat Party and current White House, I post the following snippets of an article. It’s also a salute to those places where the mindset of the left, and all its wonderful ramifications, has been in full bloom for decades.

    Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2010:

    DETROIT — This shrinking city needs to hang on to people like Johnette Barham: taxpaying, middle-class professionals who invest in local real estate, work and play downtown, and make their home here.

    Ms. Barham just left. And she’s not coming back.

    In seven years as a homeowner in Detroit, she endured more than 10 burglaries and break-ins at her house and a nearby rental property she owned. Still, she defied friends’ pleas to leave as she fortified her home with locks, bars, alarms and a dog. Then, a week before Christmas, someone torched the house and destroyed almost everything she owned.

    In March, police arrested a suspect in connection with the case, someone who turned out to be remarkably easy to find. For Ms. Barham, the arrest came one crime too late. “I was constantly being targeted in a way I couldn’t predict, in a way that couldn’t be controlled by the police,” she says. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

    Ms. Barham’s journey from diehard to defector illustrates the precarious state of Detroit today. The city — which has shed roughly 1 million residents since the 1950s — is now losing the African-American professionals who had stayed steadfastly, almost defiantly, loyal.

    Through decades of white flight and economic distress, these diehards have sustained the city’s cultural institutions and allowed prime neighborhoods such as Indian Village and Palmer Woods to stave off the blight that infects large swaths of Detroit.

    Today, frustrated by plummeting property values and high crime, many diehards have hit their breaking point. Their exodus is consigning borderline neighborhoods to full-blown blight and putting prime residential areas at risk. By some estimates, this year’s Census will show a population drop of 150,000 people from the 951,000 people who lived within city limits in 2000. That would be roughly double the population loss in the 1990s, when black, middle-class flight began replacing white flight as the prevailing dynamic.

    There are other signs the middle class is throwing in the towel. From 1999 to 2008, median household income in Detroit dropped nearly 25% to $28,730, after growing 17% in the 1990s, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that analyzes Census data for the city. Over that period, the proportion of owner-occupied homes fell to 39% from 49%, while the proportion of vacant homes nearly tripled to 28%

    .

    Mark (411533)

  17. wow , this site is still broken. page 2 still goes to May 20th.

    Anyway, which person in particular are the ‘Dems’ blaming to the WH political message problems? I have not seen that mentioned.

    seaPea (38ffcc)

  18. Obama urges his party to stay united in message through the midterms.

    That certainly isn’t what they did in PA-12. The Democrat ran as a Republican in all aspects except the ballot

    Neo (7830e6)

  19. GM,

    Most Texans knew it, didn’t they?

    DRJ (d43dcd)


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