You don’t have to be an economist to know our economy is in bad shape

The message from Washington is that we’ve turned the corner on the recession and any day now, our lives will improve. No one is buying it however, except maybe a few folks that just don’t want to admit that what’s being done for the vast majority living in America has been close to nothing. A new AP Poll shows that people don’t think the economy is on the mend. Not a good omen for the fall elections.

Eleven weeks before the Nov. 2 balloting, just 41 percent of those surveyed approve of the president’s performance on the economy, down from 44 percent in April, while 56 percent disapprove. And 61 percent say the economy has gotten worse or stayed the same on Obama’s watch.

Still, three-quarters also say it’s unrealistic to expect noticeable economic improvements in the first 18 months of the president’s term. And Obama’s overall approval rating was unaffected; it remained at 49 percent, in part because most Americans still like him personally.

Americans’ dim view of the economy grew even more pessimistic this summer as the nation’s unemployment rate stubbornly hovered near 10 percent. That’s been a drag on both Obama and Democrats, who control Congress.

Meanwhile, one of the obvious results of the bad employment situation and consumer demand accompanied by low tax revenues to states and municipalities is that nearly every municipality is laying off teachers. School districts aren’t acting to rehire any despite a recent stimulus program aimed to bring some back into the classroom.

As schools handed out pink slips to teachers this spring, states made a beeline to Washington to plead for money for their ravaged education budgets. But now that the federal government has come through with $10 billion, some of the nation’s biggest school districts are balking at using their share of the money to hire teachers right away.

With the economic outlook weakening, they argue that big deficits are looming for the next academic year and that they need to preserve the funds to prevent future layoffs. Los Angeles, for example, is projecting a $280 million budget shortfall next year that could threaten more jobs.

“You’ve got this herculean task to deal with next year’s deficit,” said Lydia L. Ramos, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest after New York City.

“So if there’s a way that you can lessen the blow for next year,” she said, “we feel like it would be responsible to try to do that.”

Two bright spots sit on the horizon in policy but the President needs to be firm to ensure they happen. Lobbyist-in-training Chris Dodd says that Elizabeth Warren is unconfirmable but Congressman Barney Frank is lobbying the president for her. Warren has been a strong advocate for consumers.

Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who leads the House Financial Services Committee, joined 41 other lawmakers in urging “no further delay” on nominating Warren, 61, as the bureau’s first leader in a letter to Obama dated yesterday.

“You have an opportunity to appoint to head this body a true visionary — not the usual Washington practice of a careerist,” the House Democrats wrote in the letter released today by New York Representative Carolyn Maloney.

Dodd says he will support her if the President decides to appoint her and says he won’t derail her nomination.

So far, the Obama administration hasn’t made a nomination, but there has been a groundswell of support for Warren from consumer advocates, labor unions, academics and a broad cross-section of Democratic lawmakers.

Endorsements have come from The New York Times and MoveOn.org, the political action group. This week, the campaign crossed over into a rap music video by Main Street Brigade, a group that pushes a consumer agenda, posted on YouTube.

“Sheriff Warren Wrap” (http://bit.ly/bzRz9l) has a western theme, mentioning Oklahoma, where Warren grew up. Comedian Ryan Anthony Lumas builds up Warren as a person who will protect consumers against the big banks.

“Elizabeth Warren, we’ve got your back,” Lumas sings. “Wall Street, you’d better watch out.”

The Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection is a key component of the financial services reform bill, signed into law by the president last month. Dodd was a key proponent of the reform and the consumer protection agency, in particular.

The idea for the bureau came primarily from Warren herself. The new director will be the first new banking regulator in decades and the first focused solely on consumers.

The President is pushing a plan to make it easier for small businesses to get loans. That would be heaven-sent down here in the Gulf Coast because many are hurting from the oil spill and the recession. Small businesses are usually a good source of stimulus because they don’t ship their jobs abroad and many buy and source locally. I’m hoping President Milquetoast develops some fight on this one. It’s been difficult to bet banks to lend to anyone despite all the TARP and public funding to them.

The legislation Obama is promoting would ease the terms for loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration, providing $12 billion in tax breaks and issuing grants to states to provide business loans.

It would also provide $30 billion to banks with less than $10 billion in assets to encourage lending to small businesses. The cost of paying back those capital infusions would decline based on the level of small-business lending by the bank. The aid would spur $300 billion in lending, according to the administration.

Here’s something to protest about …

LEGO's sexist minifigures are not something to cheer about.

(h/t to a tweet from Shira Tarrant)

I was always a really fussy mom about the kinds of toys I bought for my girls. They got baby dolls but I never did the Barbie route with them. I always asked myself this question: If this was a son would I feel comfortable giving this toy to him or would his grandparents complain that it wasn’t appropriate for a boy? That was my acid test question. If most people wouldn’t give it to a boy, I wouldn’t give it to my girls.

I gave my oldest a microscope with a bunch of slides for her first grade birthday. Her room looked typically Montessori. There were small, low books shelves (that used to hold my dad’s law books from Missouri) lined with baskets and different activities. We had a family membership to the Henry Doorly Zoo (the only good thing in Omaha to do) and when I took her for strolls, that’s where we would go. We’d pick a loop to walk that day and which animals we wanted to see. Then, I’d buy her a book on the animal she liked best and her dad would read it to her that night. If we saw it again she’d get an action figure. She could build her own little zoo and frequently did. She said she wanted to be a Vet up until fifth grade when she switched to wanting to be a doctor for people instead. Because of my cancer experience, she wanted to cure cancer.

I took her to Yellowstone the year she developed a thing for bears, deers and elk. When she went through a dinosaur phase, we visited a dinosaur exhibit in St. Paul and we drove to Dinosaur National Monument which was one of my favorite trips as a kid. Unfortunately, she had plenty hands on experiences with hospitals because I had a very difficult second pregnancy followed by inoperable cancer. It went for two years so she really got to see the ins and outs of hospitals.

A lot of the toys I bought were actually wooden ones from Sweden that I had to mail order. They included puzzles with knobs, lots of wooden blocks. I had her godfather Jim make her a huge set of blocks so she could build herself into a castle if she wanted. She went through an intense My Little Pony stage so I bought her a kiddie medical kit and let her play vet on them.

She’s a doctor now delivering babies and pushing 30.

The younger one is a finance major at LSU. She’s my soccer dakini. Both play piano. Both draw and paint really well because we did endless art and craft projects at my house. It was easier to do that with their friends then clean up the mess and chaos later of unsupervised non-Montessori trained neighborhood kids.We also cooked and baked a of personalized pizzas, cupcakes, snacks, and cookies.

Neither complain that they lived a childhood without guns or sexist toys. (Although I do get yelled at about not giving them ballet lessons which both later did on their own.) We’d get the usual stockpile of them when they had birthday parties,but I always ensured I gave them something more exciting than a Barbie. For the youngest, it was usually something she could bang on like a drum or a bunch of rhythm instruments. (For mom, it was a bottle of Tylenol, a box of Calgon, and some earplugs.) The other thing she loved were trains so I bought plenty of them over the years in appropriate sizes shapes and types. We visited the aviation museum at Offutt AFB and the train station museum a lot. She liked things that moved as much as she did. (She used to scare the boys at her Montessori because she was very physical and assertive. She never hit any one but she knew how to stand her ground.)

Again, building blocks were a staple in my home because they were the one toy that I used to love. You could do anything with them. My cousins were of the Lincoln Logs generation so I did get some hand me downs of those things too. But what I really liked were the early versions of LEGOS so they pretty much hit the top of my list when I had the girls.

One of the toys that I always gave the girls were LEGOs. Well, evidently a lot has changed about LEGOS these days. They’ve just introduced fourteen new minifigures that are all yellow. Two are female. One is a nurse and the other is a cheerleader. Go check out the adventuresome kinds of things that the males do … including circus clown, spaceman, and zombie.

Sigh, some things never change. Some things change for the worse.

I intend to contact LEGO here and pitch a fit. Where is NOW when you really need them?

update: I’m not sure you read the ad accompanying said cheerleader, but here it is:

The Cheerleader is perpetually filled to bursting with energy, excitement and enthusiasm. She prefers cartwheels and handsprings to plain old ordinary walking, and she waves her pom-poms around wildly whenever she talks, which is pretty much all of the time.

compare that to the spaceman …

Greetings, strange creatures. I come in peace!”

This brave and intrepid space traveler doesn’t quite realize that he’s not out exploring the cosmos. The Spaceman walks in long, slow bounds across the landscape, somehow ignoring the fact that gravity is perfectly normal for everything else around him. He’s friendly and fearless, always happy to investigate a strange new place or salute a stranger with a universal-greeting hand gesture, but his unshakeable belief that he’s dealing with alien creatures and worlds can lead to a lot of confusion for everyone involved.

Why They Must Act

You know me with my love of nifty graphs. Well, this depressing one–with an even more depressing title–comes from this week’s issue of The Economist. I don’t know if you remember that I told you one of the sayings for a short unsustainable uptick in a market is that even a dead cat bounces if you throw it. So, a small market rally that falls apart is called a dead cat market. Well, think about that appellation in association with the idea that “Dead cats do better”. Then, be truly horrified because this is not just any market, this one reflects our job market.

HERE’S the way these things typically work. A deep recession is usually followed by a rapid recovery. From 1934 to 1936, the American economy grew by 10.9%, 8.9%, and 13.0% per year, respectively. From 1983 to 1985, annual growth came in at 4.5%, 7.2%, and 4.1%. For now, it seems the American economy will struggle to grow by 3% in the first full calendar year after the recession. Still, growth of any sort typically ends up producing some employment growth, and so rapid recoveries from deep recessions usually produce a lot of employment growth:

Employment sprang back by 3.5% in the 12 months following the end of the deep 1981-82 downturn. When the economy started growing again in March 1933 the employment bounceback was springier still. No such turnaround has emerged this time. The American economy has seen downturns this severe and recoveries this jobless but never the one on top of the other.

I’m bringing this up again because there was an Obama apologist who myiq2xu let out of spam last night talking about how you could blame Clinton for all kinds of things–while still not giving him credit for anything like a good recovery–including losing the House of Representatives back then. Another Obama apologist I read at FDL was saying that Clinton had it easy because he didn’t come in during a recession. It’s amazing to me how history gets so rewritten. These kinds of comments must come from children that lived through the 80s in Montessori preschool with their parents footing the bill. This election will be lost on lack of action, vision, discussion, and leadership on the overwhelming problem of joblessness. After 18 months, it’s Obama’s jobless recovery.

First, you can see in that graph that there was a recession in 1990-91. We recovered nicely from it during the first Clinton term. We even recovered strongly from the monetary policy led recession of the early 1980s. Once interest rates settled down and Reagan spent a lot of money rebuilding assets in the military, the job market recovered nicely. Better yet, take a look at the recovery of jobs during the Great Depression. Rather impressive isn’t it?

Usually, when you see a very bad recession, you see very strong job growth as we recover. This has not happened with the last two recession which started under the Dubya terms. We’ve had two jobless recessions in a row and very close together. As a matter of fact, the number of people employed right now are the same number of people employed in 1999. We’ve completely erased a decade.

So, what’s lacking? Well, that’s easy. That would be a strong and forceful demand side stimulus package specifically targeted to job creation. At all those times there was no huge tax breaks to the upper class so they can speculate in the markets with their monies and create the next bubble. Bush 41 wasn’t stupid.

Reagan and Clinton both raised taxes after the recoveries had taken hold. Reagan actually increased taxes by more than any other president. It was the one addressed to fixing the baby boomer problem that was upcoming in Social Security. But, he did that after a strong batch of fiscal spending; again focused on rebuilding the navy which brought about shipyard jobs. (They’ve just announced this year in Louisiana, that one of those huge ship builders–including the one that just built the USS New York–is closing its shipyards that are scattered through out the state. Not good.) It also helped when the Fed went back to normal interest rate levels. If you haven’t heard my story about my first home purchase in 1982, then you should. My interest rate at the time was just under 17% on a thirty year fixed mortgage. Luckily, by 1985, I got a new one at 9%. Yes, that’s still high by today’s standards, isn’t it?

The difference back then was that I was getting good raises and I was not alone.. I haven’t seen a good raise in 10 years. In fact, I’ve been furloughed recently (which means they don’t pay you for days you work) and now–along with half of the tenured senior faculty in my department– I’ve been laid off. I’m about 7 years out from cashing in on the retirement plan. Most of them are with a few years, but, now, they’ve lost that. That, mind you, is in a college that’s a profit center. Remember, teaching MBAs is a university cash cow. That’s why there are so many of them.

The deal is there is a tremendous amount of ground to make up right now in the labor market which worries me to no end because no one in Washington DC appears to get it. The Atlantic calls this the era of joblessness. They get it.

There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.

The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

This is not a time for complacency or silly season politics. This is a time for a brave approach to solving our jobless problem. The Republicans are brain dead on the issue so there’s absolutely no hope of anything coming from them. What I don’t understand is this new Democratic party. Look at the graph and tell me that your eyes are lying to you about the impact of FDR’s bold vision and action for the US during the Great Depression. Why can’t we get similar initiative and leadership now that we’re suffering from the Great Recession?

We don’t need an extension of capital gains preferential treatment. That just brings on more bubbles. We don’t need an extension of a tax break to the wealthiest inheritance babies. That doesn’t do anything but fund a donor class. We certainly don’t need to focus on the ever growing budget deficit because that’s not going to change unless we end this joblessness. Mr. President, tear down the wall that is stopping Democrats from being Democrats.

What Obama Said BUT with Conviction (no waffles)

Without the emergence of a genuine spirit of religious pluralism, there is no hope for the development of harmony based on true interreligious understanding.

From: “The Challenge of Other Religions” By His Holiness the Dali Lama

I’m sure this post is going to irritate a lot of people. I know this tends to be Myiq2xu’s job here but I’m going to do it because I’ve never backed away from talking about what is right even though it might not be particularly emotionally palatable. Whenever we mention any thing that remotely associated with Islam or Israel or Palestine, people become unhinged. (In fact, we’ve had people leave and we’ve had to ban people over the issue. So, please be civil. I expect many folks to disagree with me.) The entire area is almost by definition one big morass of hard and complex issues wrapped up in emotional diatribes and in many cases, family histories.

We lost Helen Thomas’ voice to irrational discourse on the issue. We lost Octavia Nasr also. I am speaking up because we can’t afford to lose important voices and stop important dialogues.

The headlines today are full of what Obama did or didn’t say about the potential Mosque to be built near Ground Zero. I still haven’t figure out why all Muslims are to blame for the few that flew those airplanes into the Twin Towers. Timothy McVeigh blew up a building with a day care and killed innocent government workers and babies. He barely gets a mention in the news these days. We don’t feel the same thing about right wing nut militias or paint all veterans with the McVeigh brush. Some how, just being a Muslim or talking about Islam as a viable religious choice makes some folks crazy. I know part of this links to the history of Israel and I know that there’s historical issues in India with Pakistan. There’s also parts of the tribal practices that are anathema; like genital mutilation of women in some parts of Africa that are now Muslim and the entire cult of covering women completely up which is linked a lot to Arabic culture. There are many places where Islam is practiced that have not adopted any of these rituals because they are a cultural thing and some cultural things get codified in the religious practice of a particular area.

There’s a lot of violent craziness in extreme Islamic fascism. There’s also been Christian fascists that blow up abortion clinics and kill abortion providers. For the most part, in the Western World, we’ve educated some of the barbarian practices out of the majority of people. This is not the case in the third world, but again, they’ve got poor access to everything from food to health to schools to every benefit that comes from living in an open society. That’s why there’s larger numbers of them.

We do live–at least I thought we did–in an open society. We also live in a country where our basic principals and commitments to each other are stated in The Constitution. That’s because the founders came from a time when religious fundamentalism and closed societies were still a norm in Europe. They remembered the days of being slaughtered when you were a protestant or Jew in a catholic country (that’s how my protestant and Jewish ancestors made it here) or when you were a catholic or a Jew in a protestant country. They put up laws to protect every one because they knew how quickly a political coup can put a favored group into a persecuted position really quickly. As recently as the Northern Ireland terrorism, we still saw that come into play.

For the reasons of 9/11 and the continued yammering by some people with access to media, we’ve forgotten all that history. A terrorist is a terrorist and a fanatic is a fanatic. They come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. Open societies and rules of laws, however, teach us how to deal with these people without resulting to bigotry. For example, Christian proselytizing offends me to no end. Frankly, if I were acting on my primal instincts, I’d pull out a gun and shoot every one of them. It’s irritating, insulting, patronizing, and obnoxious behavior. However, I live in an open society with laws that protect that and as a civilized human being, I know to smile and walk away. (Although, I was known to turn the garden hose and water my plants “over actively” when they were acting up around Mardi Gras.) The only time I enter a church is when it’s historically relevant and I’m interested in the architecture. The same would go for a mosque, a synagogue, or a Hindu Temple. But, every one has a right to build them, worship in them, and avoid taxes with them in this country. PERIOD.

Also, it’s not about some perceived insensitivity to an aggrieved majority. It’s about the rights of minorities as outlined in OUR Constitution. If they start plotting terrorist activities in there, then by all means send in the FBI, arrest people, and close it down. Until then it’s protected speech and religious activities. Again, I was perfectly miserable when a bunch of big barn churches set up in my neighborhood in Omaha. One was southern baptist and the other some Evangelical cult attached to a minister who moved his daughter and family within a block of mine. They’re always out and about protesting anything having to do with ‘gay’ culture and independent women. It was terrifically annoying, but it’s their right and nothing I could do was going to stop these people from building their behemoth buildings to shake, quake, and annoyingly, knock on my door to ask me if I’d been saved. (Now, I live in gay enclaves and bohemian neighborhoods where they are unlikely to set foot.) Again, I treat them like any door-to-door sales person, I say no thank you, and close the door in their face because, in an open society, with rule of law, that’s what we’re taught to do. It’s not what you’re taught to do in places in countries that can’t even get electricity and clean water. That’s the root of all these issues.

So, what Obama said last night before he triangulated this morning was this:

White House officials said earlier in the day that Mr. Obama was not trying to promote the project, but rather sought more broadly to make a statement about freedom of religion and American values. “In this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion,” Mr. Obama said at the Coast Guard station. “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.

“And I think it’s very important as difficult as some of these issues are that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.”

At the dinner on Friday night, Mr. Obama had proclaimed that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

That’s absolutely the correct thing to say.

Now, maybe it’s because in my area of finance and economics I am more surrounded by Hindus and Muslims than most people, but I’ve been exposed to practitioners of Islam since the 1970s. I’ve found more differences between me and the Southern Baptists on Dodge Street in Omaha who wouldn’t condemn violence in abortion clinics and murdering of Doctors than I’ve found with my Islamic colleagues and mentors. I frequently sit and wait while my colleagues do their prayers in their office so we can return to work together. They attend mosques and they need them just as much as those Southern Baptists on Dodge Street in Omaha need their megachurch. It’s not for me but again, it’s not for me to tell them not to build them or go there. If I’m offended by either, tough toenails, because it’s an open society with rule of law and The Constitution and it’s their right to do it and my right to complain about it.

President Obama waffled on this this morning and, as usual, he’s not made any of these statements with any intonation of commitment. Let’s look at a contrast here.

Last week, New York City removed the final construction hurdle for the project, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke forcefully in favor of it.

Here’s his speech and part of it that’s just damned right.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

“For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right.”

Of course it’s not popular, of course right wing nuts will use this to stir up the emotions of people who still hurt from that horrible day of 9/11. But again, this is an open society, with rule of law, and a Constitution that protects religious activity.

President Milquetoast said the right thing. Leave it to me, to piss you all off, and write it forcefully with commitment.

And again, I’d live in a religion free zone if I could have my own way.

Now is the Summer of our Discontent

Nile Gardiner isn’t one of those people I’d exactly pal around with, but he’d make for an interesting dinner guest on the odd occasion. After all, Dr. Gardiner is associated with the dread Heritage Foundation which puts out a lot of propaganda under the heading of research and is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher “Center for Freedom”. Try saying that with a straight face. Well, he did work for her at one time.

Any way, he’s written an interesting article for The Telegraph called “The stunning decline of Barack Obama: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown”. It’s worth some consideration albeit it needs a warning label before consumption. The opening statement alone has me questioning his grasp on reality. I’m not sure still how any one can say that there’s any ruling liberal elite right now. It’s more like the best working example of corporate cronyism I’ve ever read about since the Gilded Age. But then his job is that of a right wing meme maker. Ideologues have that act down pretty well.

The last few weeks have been a nightmare for President Obama, in a summer of discontent in the United States which has deeply unsettled the ruling liberal elites, so much so that even the Left has begun to turn against the White House.

However, here are some points worthy of consideration. His discussion of dismal poll numbers for Obama are astonishing.

The RealClearPolitics average of polls now has President Obama at over 50 per cent disapproval, a remarkably high figure for a president just 18 months into his first term. Strikingly, the latest USA Today/Gallup survey has the President on just 41 per cent approval, with 53 per cent disapproving.

There are an array of reasons behind the stunning decline and political fall of President Obama, chief among them fears over the current state of the US economy, with widespread concern over high levels of unemployment, the unstable housing market, and above all the towering budget deficit. Americans are increasingly rejecting President Obama’s big government solutions to America’s economic woes, which many fear will lead to the United States sharing the same fate as Greece.

Growing disillusionment with the Obama administration’s handling of the economy as well as health care and immigration has gone hand in hand with mounting unhappiness with the President’s aloof and imperial style of leadership, and a growing perception that he is out of touch with ordinary Americans, especially at a time of significant economic pain. Barack Obama’s striking absence of natural leadership ability (and blatant lack of experience) has played a big part in undermining his credibility with the US public, with his lacklustre handling of the Gulf oil spill coming under particularly intense fire.

I’m not sure I’d consider Obama’s approach to be a big government solution as much as I would call it a putting the criminals in charge of the crime scene approach but I do agree with him about the “striking absence of natural leadership ability (and blatant lack of experience)” part. His tours around the country to plants and businesses in trouble seem in line with Prince Charles going around the UK trying to experience what life is like outside the Palace. I just don’t see Obama as having the least bit of empathy or feel for what it takes to make ends meet. Even though he and Dubya both were legacies for Harvard, for some reason Dubya managed to shake the prep school cheerleader title for as much as some of the press wanted to hang it on him. Obama just has never left that persona and when cornered, he appears to take what some folks consider a ‘professorial’ posture. He gets more cold and aloof and displays lack of passion for even his policies. This is just weirdish behavior to me. I mean, if he truly believes that his health care and finance reform is good for the country, why doesn’t he just say it in a meaningful way?

This is evidenced in two points of Gardiner’s diatribe.

Again, now with the polls.

This deficit of trust in Obama’s leadership is central to his decline. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, “nearly six in ten voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country”, and two thirds “say they are disillusioned with or angry about the way the federal government is working.” The poll showed that a staggering 58 per cent of Americans say they do not have confidence in the president’s decision-making, with just 42 per cent saying they do.

For some one who inspired so much about generic change, he’s pathetically dull in the support of whatever change the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team have wrought.

Also, this point is germane.

In contrast to the soaring rhetoric of his 2006 Convention speech in Chicago which succeeded in impressing millions of television viewers at the time, America is no longer inspired by Barack Obama’s flat, monotonous and often dull presidential speeches and statements delivered via teleprompter. From his extraordinarily uninspiring Afghanistan speech at West Point to his flat State of the Union address, President Obama has failed to touch the heart of America. Even Jimmy Carter was more moving.

We’ve spoke about this before, but I fail to see any fire coming out of Obama’s belly except when he’s all wee weed up about himself or his campaign. When actually talking about the details of governance or the country, he’s a total Milford Milquetoast. I was actually disturbed by his complete lack of caring and empathy when he signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. He was giving the speech with the two families right there and he really read the accompanying speech like he was just waiting to get it over so he could go back to the links. It was an important piece of legislation for those interested in Civil Rights. You think he’d act more involved with it.

Watch this. Does he sound like he’s really thrilled with this event?

Again, many of the points in the article are typical right wing memes like we’re “drowning in debt” which again, is due to the bad economy mostly and a lot of war expenditures, but hold your nose on that and read some of the more salient points. Some are off mark although they do point to issues. For example, when was the last time you heard the President actually give some kind of vision on what our foreign policy is about these days? It’s like he’s left the conversation and let Hillary work on details rather than talking about any kind of cohesive policy with a world view. If we’ve put the Bush doctrine behind us, I’d certainly like to hear about an Obama doctrine. The McChyrstal flap showed us that even the central foreign policy issue Obama is concerned with is in complete disarray. He seems content with leaving every thing–including the overall structure for policy–to bureaucrats in charge of the details. There is no overarching strategy to any thing that’s shown up on the national scene these days including the Oil Spill.

If Dubya/Cheney had the country’s rudder headed the wrong direction, than Obama’s leading us rudderless. This vacuum is why so many ridiculous right wing memes are taking hold.

If the Gardiner line does anything, it successfully takes the appearance of not really caring about issues and frames them successfully. Look at some of the recent things like the “Michelle Antoinette” story. We have the Obama family switching their vacation plans this month from Martha’s Vineyard to Panama City Florida but only after that story wouldn’t die. There’s this feeling about Obama that he just doesn’t care about what the people think about things until he’s told to care. That’s a dangerous character flaw.

Then, there’s Gibbs going rogue this week by calling the base out on actually expecting the policy change to match the campaign rhetoric. I can understand the need to pummel the ‘elite’–that now being a mainstay of election season politics–but really, to suggest that people that care about policy and substance that you were manipulated when useful are a bunch of drug addicted whiners is something that even I find symptomatic of the tin ear character of this entire administration. It’s like they only wake up to what people say when it might impact them personally. Gibbsy is just the face on that entire attitude.

Again, I’m personally all wee weed up about this because I don’t really want to see the bat shit crazy Republican party back in office for another two decades because the current batch of Dinocrats won’t deliver on all the promises they made. Republicans may not have the policy answers down at all, but they’ve now got the wind at the backs. Who would think we’d see Gingrich back in the saddle thinking he’s got a shot at the presidency? All this two years after Dubya basically destoyed the party.

Right wing meme-makers like Gardiner can gain traction because we have a president and an administration with a tin ear. They’ve mistaken their mandate for change for the people with a mandate for just being there and doing whatever. I only wish he’d show as much passion about governance and policy as he did for himself and his campaign back then.

But, it ain’t gonna happen.

It’s almost two years since Obama basically destroyed the party. What now? Are we going to see a little passion about something other than campaign themes out of this presidency before we go back to the compassion of conservatives once again?