Posted by
Bill Crawford on Thursday, July 01, 2010 10:15:33 PM
Politics ain't beanball, goes the old saying. Yesterday's genius turns into today's dunce.
Well, here we are, kibbitzing still over the immigration problem. The "secure the border" group is larger than ever, thanks to the horror stories emanating from the actions of the Mexican drug cartels on our border- an extention of their even more aggressive behavior in Mexico itself. Obama refuses to pay anything more than lip service to this, sending a few thousand National Guard types down there, while directly challenging Arizona's efforts in every way he can think of.
His address to the nation on this subject was a call for more immigration "reform", which I agree is needed, but (unlike 2006), I have long since placed as priority two on the subject, for the same reasons as the great majority of the country that is presently supporting Arizona.
This is a week after he was trying to get the other members of the G-20 summit to not dry up the Keynesian rivers yet, and worry first about government stimulus and not so much the debt they are all piling up. The public debt is clearly scaring the willies out of Europeans as much as it is here, but he is leaving that for his blue ribbon commission later this year.
Hell, Ross Perot pulled one fifth of the Presidential vote in '92 talking forcefully about a deficit problem that was small by today's standards. Obama is clearly not only missing this groundswell, but is also still not directly focusing on America's number one worry- the continued unemployment problem.
He seems to think his best shot this November is to take the 35% of the country who hold his priorities, and get them so jacked up that they will raise the money and get the vote out for him to hold Congress.
The present line is that it is quite likely that there will be a republican House Speaker next year. The Senate is more of an uphill battle, but even if the Democrats hold it, they will have a new Majority leader, as Reid is dead meat in Nevada. This is all supported by Zogby and Rasmussen, two of the most responsible handicappers out there.
Whoever is giving Obama his political advice should be fired. The problem there, though, is that Obama is a narcissist, and holds to little advice beyond his own. I don't know what a rational Democrat could do about that.