Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
- 70,230
- 10,864
- 2,040
How true
links in article at site
SNIP:
By Clarice Feldman
This has not been a good week for President Obama. I think it will not be the worst week of this year or this term, which I predict will get worse as his own personality flaws and patently partisan strategies make his lame-duck term even more impotent than is usually the case.
To begin with, he bet the farm on the passage of new gun-control legislation. Albeit the vote this week in the Senate was only on amendments to the main bill -- something his Majority Leader Reid (who won his last race as the NRA choice) insisted on, though it made passage more difficult, requiring 60, not 51 votes -- all the amendments went down in flames with numbers of his own party members abandoning him. By week's end Reid had withdrawn the main bill without even bringing it to a vote.
In defiance of reality, Obama held a petulant, unpresidential press conference, ending the effort as he began it with demagogic, partisan rhetoric. ...and a threat to accomplish by executive orders what he cannot achieve by legislation
The Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley captured my thoughts on the defeat of these proposed bills:
Barack Obama is a lame duck president. Nobody listens to what he says anymore, nobody is interested in winning his approval and nobody much cares if he thinks they have "let the country down". This is typical for a second-term president who has lost all their leverage because they're no longer running for office and everybody is patiently waiting for the day when he quits the White House. But Obama's difficult personality has doubled the size of the challenge. Gloating in victory, adolescent in defeat -- the Prez doesn't make it easy to work with him. Why should conservative senators give him a legislative victory after he has spent four years painting them as knuckle-dragging rednecks who hate women and the poor?
Whatever your position on gun control, yesterday's events are a damning indictment of Obama's presidency -- a flash of style, lots of soaring rhetoric and, when the votes are actually counted, little [to] show for any of it. America has four more years of this lame-duck president telling them that it has let him down. If only he could tear up the Constitution and rule by diktat he might save himself a little disappointment. Alas, American democracy is a stickler for rules.
Aside from the loss of face, it's clear that much more than gun control was behind his strategic miscalculation. I believe it was directed at retaking the House so that he could once again control the levers of government which had earlier permitted the ramming through of Obamacare, a piece of legislation so outrageously unworkable that recently, Senators Baucus and Rockefeller, whose efforts made it possible, are now warning its implementation will be a disaster.
Powerline's John Hinderaker touched on the reason for the president's rage:
But why was Obama so angry? I wrote here that it was odd for Obama to make gun control the signature issue of his second term, since there has never been any chance of significant gun control legislation being enacted. It couldn't possibly get through the House. So why, today, was he so irate about its failure in the Senate?
As we have noted more than once, pretty much everything Obama does is intended to stir up the Democratic Party's base to drive turnout in 2014. Obama knows he can't do much of anything as long as the GOP holds the House, so his primary goal is to stoke outrage on the left, in hopes that 2014 will look like 2008 and 2012, and not like 2010. So no doubt he hoped that some gun control measure -- any gun control measure! -- could get through the Senate, so that pressure, probably irresistible, could be brought to force a vote on the same proposal in the House. Not so that it might pass, but so that House Republicans would be on record voting against gun control. Obama could have raised countless millions from his fervently anti-gun base to go after the more vulnerable such Republicans. Now, the issue won't even come up in the House, and Obama and the Democrats will have to find something else.
But I think it was more than stirring the base. The Daily Caller pegged it -- the president hoped that this wedge issue would deliver a Democratic House next year:
SNIP:
all of it here
http://www.americanthinker.com/prin...2013/04/i_know_why_the_lame_duck_squawks.html
links in article at site
SNIP:
By Clarice Feldman
This has not been a good week for President Obama. I think it will not be the worst week of this year or this term, which I predict will get worse as his own personality flaws and patently partisan strategies make his lame-duck term even more impotent than is usually the case.
To begin with, he bet the farm on the passage of new gun-control legislation. Albeit the vote this week in the Senate was only on amendments to the main bill -- something his Majority Leader Reid (who won his last race as the NRA choice) insisted on, though it made passage more difficult, requiring 60, not 51 votes -- all the amendments went down in flames with numbers of his own party members abandoning him. By week's end Reid had withdrawn the main bill without even bringing it to a vote.
In defiance of reality, Obama held a petulant, unpresidential press conference, ending the effort as he began it with demagogic, partisan rhetoric. ...and a threat to accomplish by executive orders what he cannot achieve by legislation
The Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley captured my thoughts on the defeat of these proposed bills:
Barack Obama is a lame duck president. Nobody listens to what he says anymore, nobody is interested in winning his approval and nobody much cares if he thinks they have "let the country down". This is typical for a second-term president who has lost all their leverage because they're no longer running for office and everybody is patiently waiting for the day when he quits the White House. But Obama's difficult personality has doubled the size of the challenge. Gloating in victory, adolescent in defeat -- the Prez doesn't make it easy to work with him. Why should conservative senators give him a legislative victory after he has spent four years painting them as knuckle-dragging rednecks who hate women and the poor?
Whatever your position on gun control, yesterday's events are a damning indictment of Obama's presidency -- a flash of style, lots of soaring rhetoric and, when the votes are actually counted, little [to] show for any of it. America has four more years of this lame-duck president telling them that it has let him down. If only he could tear up the Constitution and rule by diktat he might save himself a little disappointment. Alas, American democracy is a stickler for rules.
Aside from the loss of face, it's clear that much more than gun control was behind his strategic miscalculation. I believe it was directed at retaking the House so that he could once again control the levers of government which had earlier permitted the ramming through of Obamacare, a piece of legislation so outrageously unworkable that recently, Senators Baucus and Rockefeller, whose efforts made it possible, are now warning its implementation will be a disaster.
Powerline's John Hinderaker touched on the reason for the president's rage:
But why was Obama so angry? I wrote here that it was odd for Obama to make gun control the signature issue of his second term, since there has never been any chance of significant gun control legislation being enacted. It couldn't possibly get through the House. So why, today, was he so irate about its failure in the Senate?
As we have noted more than once, pretty much everything Obama does is intended to stir up the Democratic Party's base to drive turnout in 2014. Obama knows he can't do much of anything as long as the GOP holds the House, so his primary goal is to stoke outrage on the left, in hopes that 2014 will look like 2008 and 2012, and not like 2010. So no doubt he hoped that some gun control measure -- any gun control measure! -- could get through the Senate, so that pressure, probably irresistible, could be brought to force a vote on the same proposal in the House. Not so that it might pass, but so that House Republicans would be on record voting against gun control. Obama could have raised countless millions from his fervently anti-gun base to go after the more vulnerable such Republicans. Now, the issue won't even come up in the House, and Obama and the Democrats will have to find something else.
But I think it was more than stirring the base. The Daily Caller pegged it -- the president hoped that this wedge issue would deliver a Democratic House next year:
SNIP:
all of it here
http://www.americanthinker.com/prin...2013/04/i_know_why_the_lame_duck_squawks.html
Last edited:
