IS ANYONE SURPRISED BY THIS?  A FORMER PRESIDENT GREETS OUR TROOPS RETURNING FROM IRAQ AND PRESIDENT FREQUENT FLIER DOES WHAT?  YOU KNOW, THE GUY BORES ME TO TEARS AND TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, I AM NOT SURE WHAT OBAMA IS DOING THIS WEEKEND.  I THINK HE IS ON HIS 6TH VACATION OF THE SUMMER, THIS TIME AT MARTHA’S VINEYARD, BUT I COULD BE WRONG.  THIS ADMINISTRATION IS A NATIONAL DISGRACE!

~~John Cronin~~

By Nile Gardiner

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. While the anti-establishment Tea Party movement has gained significant ground and is now a rising and powerful political force to be reckoned with, many of the president’s own supporters as well as independents are rapidly losing faith in Barack Obama, with open warfare breaking out between the White House and the left-wing of the Democratic Party. While conservatism in America grows stronger by the day, the forces of liberalism are growing increasingly weaker and divided.

Against this backdrop, the president’s approval ratings have been sliding dramatically all summer, with the latest Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll of US voters dropping to minus 22 points, the lowest point so far for Barack Obama since taking office. While just 24 per cent of American voters strongly approve of the president’s job performance, almost twice that number, 46 per cent, strongly disapprove. According to Rasmussen, 65 per cent of voters believe the United States is going down the wrong track, including 70 per cent of independents.

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.

 The Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime

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.

On the national security and foreign policy front, President Obama has not fared any better. His leadership on the war in Afghanistan has been confused and at times lacking in conviction, and seemingly dictated by domestic political priorities rather than military and strategic goals. His overall foreign policy has been an appalling mess, with his flawed strategy of engagement of hostile regimes spectacularly backfiring. And as for the War on Terror, his administration has not even acknowledged it is fighting one.

Can it get any worse for President Obama? Undoubtedly yes. Here are 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in serious trouble, and why its prospects are unlikely to improve between now and the November mid-terms.

1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people

In a previous post I noted how the Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime, extravagant, decaying and out of touch with ordinary Americans. The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Spain at a time of widespread economic hardship was symbolic of a White House that barely gives a second thought to public opinion on many issues, and frequently projects a distinctly elitist image. The “let them eat cake” approach didn’t play well over two centuries ago, and it won’t succeed today.

2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership

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.

3. Obama fails to inspire

In contrast to the soaring rhetoric of his 2004 Convention speech in Boston 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.

4. The United States is drowning in debt

The Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget Outlook offers a frightening picture of the scale of America’s national debt. Under its alternative fiscal scenario, the CBO projects that US debt could rise to 87 percent of GDP by 2020, 109 percent by 2025, and 185 percent in 2035. While much of Europe, led by Britain and Germany, are aggressively cutting their deficits, the Obama administration is actively growing America’s debt, and has no plan in place to avert a looming Greek-style financial crisis.

5. Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat

The relentless emphasis on bailouts and stimulus spending has done little to spur economic growth or create jobs, but has greatly advanced the power of the federal government in America. This is not an approach that is proving popular with the American public, and even most European governments have long ditched this tax and spend approach to saving their own economies.

6. Obama’s support for socialised health care is a huge political mistake

In an extraordinary act of political Harakiri, President Obama leant his full support to the hugely controversial, unpopular and divisive health care reform bill, with a monstrous price tag of $940 billion, whose repeal is now supported by 55 per cent of likely US voters. As I wrote at the time of its passing, the legislation is “a great leap forward by the United States towards a European-style vision of universal health care, which will only lead to soaring costs, higher taxes, and a surge in red tape for small businesses. This reckless legislation dramatically expands the power of the state over the lives of individuals, and could not be further from the vision of America’s founding fathers.”

7. Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill has been weak-kneed and indecisive

While much of the spilled oil in the Gulf has now been thankfully cleared up, the political damage for the White House will be long-lasting. Instead of showing real leadership on the matter by acing decisively and drawing upon offers of international support, the Obama administration settled on a more convenient strategy of relentlessly bashing an Anglo-American company while largely sitting on its hands. Significantly, a poll of Louisiana voters gave George W. Bush higher marks for his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with 62 percent disapproving of Obama’s performance on the Gulf oil spill.

8. US foreign policy is an embarrassing mess under the Obama administration

It is hard to think of a single foreign policy success for the Obama administration, but there have been plenty of missteps which have weakened American global power as well as the standing of the United States. The surrender to Moscow on Third Site missile defence, the failure to aggressively stand up to Iran’s nuclear programme, the decision to side with ousted Marxists in Honduras, the slap in the face for Great Britain over the Falklands, have all contributed to the image of a US administration completely out of its depth in international affairs. The Obama administration’s high risk strategy of appeasing America’s enemies while kicking traditional US allies has only succeeded in weakening the United States while strengthening her adversaries.

9. President Obama is muddled and confused on national security

From the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the War on Terror, President Obama’s leadership has often been muddled and confused. On Afghanistan he rightly sent tens of thousands of additional troops to the battlefield. At the same time however he bizarrely announced a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces beginning in July 2011, handing the initiative to the Taliban. On Iraq he has announced an end to combat operations and the withdrawal of all but 50,000 troops despite a recent upsurge in terrorist violence and political instability, and without the Iraqi military and police ready to take over. In addition he has ditched the concept of a War on Terror, replacing it with an Overseas Contingency Operation, hardly the right message to send in the midst of a long-war against Al-Qaeda.

10. Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness

Barack Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, and has made apologising for his country into an art form. In a speech to the United Nations last September he stated that “no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” It is difficult to see how a US president who holds these views and does not even accept America’s greatness in history can actually lead the world’s only superpower with force and conviction.

There is a distinctly Titanic-like feel to the Obama presidency and it’s not hard to see why. The most left-wing president in modern American history has tried to force a highly interventionist, government-driven agenda that runs counter to the principles of free enterprise, individual freedom, and limited government that have made the United States the greatest power in the world, and the freest nation on earth.

This, combined with weak leadership both at home and abroad against the backdrop of tremendous economic uncertainty in an increasingly dangerous world, has contributed to a spectacular political collapse for a president once thought to be invincible. America at its core remains a deeply conservative nation, which cherishes its traditions and founding principles. President Obama is increasingly out of step with the American people, by advancing policies that undermine the United States as a global power, while undercutting America’s deep-seated love for freedom.

Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100050412/the-stunning-decline-of-barack-obama-10-key-reasons-why-the-obama-presidency-is-in-meltdown/

Economy: As the “recovery summer” turns into a nightmare, one thing has become painfully clear: This is the most economically incompetent administration since the Great Depression.

Two years into the Obama era, when the U.S. should be enjoying a booming recovery from the 2007-08 meltdown, with millions of new jobs and higher incomes for all, all we see is economic wreckage from the unbelievably foolish policies pursued by the White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress.

Whether it’s the $862 billion “stimulus” that turned into a welfare program for bankrupt states and public unions, or the $700 billion TARP program that became a giant dish of pork for Democrats and their supporters, or the job-killing duo of health care and financial reform, Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al. seem oblivious to the deep and lasting damage they’re doing to America’s economy.

Friday’s frightening jobs report was only the latest in a series of releases indicating the “recovery” is faltering. Unemployment in July was unchanged at 9.5%, but a net 131,000 jobs were lost on top of 97,000 more than first accounted for in May and June.

“Recovery summer”? Time for another sobriquet.

The White House response? On Friday, after release of the jobs report, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis touted the economy’s “turnaround” and credited “strong and immediate action” President Obama took after entering office. The only real problem, she hinted, was Republicans who refuse to support a $26 billion bailout for state and local governments and their pampered unions.

“There is no room for partisan roadblocks when Americans are depending on their government’s action and the stakes are so high,” Solis said. In this White House, economic recovery is always just one massive stimulus or bailout bill away.

Solis also repeated — with the stock market selling off 100 points as she spoke — the bogus claim made by the White House and uncritically parroted by its media pals that timely action “saved or created more than 2.5 million American jobs.”

As we’ve said, this is utter nonsense. Completely made up. And, by the way, the official who made it up — Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman Christina Romer — quit on Friday to return to academia, her reputation for accuracy in tatters.

Here’s the real record: America has lost 4.1 million jobs since Obama took office and 7.7 million since the recession began in December 2007. So most of the jobs lost have been under this administration. Whatever else you might call Obamanomics, “successful” isn’t it.

Doing more arithmetic, since the start of 2010 we’ve averaged 93,000 new jobs a month. That’s below the 120,000 we need just to soak up new job-market entrants. At this rate, it will take nearly seven years just to get back to 2007′s number of jobs .

Despite all this, Obama has resorted to blaming — who else? — President Bush for his own mistakes. And by name.

You’d never know that Democrats controlled Congress for Bush’s last two years, or that policies they enacted during their many decades in power — in particular, using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to issue trillions of dollars of mortgages to unqualified borrowers — are the root cause of our crisis.

We’ve watched in amazement as the ruling Democrats continue to repeat their mistakes from the 1990s that caused our crisis, including leaving Fannie and Freddie untouched and raising spending by an incredible $17 trillion over the next 10 years.

Instead of slashing spending, as common sense and economic reality would dictate, some want to let Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire. Those cuts were responsible for the economy’s recovery from the triple whammy of the 1999-2000 stock market meltdown, the Y2K debacle and the 2001 recession.

At the same time, Americans will be hit with a blizzard of new regulations and higher taxes from this year’s health-care and financial reform laws. That could sink the economy again.

The regulatory and tax siege has sent America’s entrepreneurial, job and wealth-creating class reeling. The so-called progressive left now in charge of government has used class warfare to divide us — always blaming the “rich” (anyone who earns more than $200,000), entrepreneurs and businesses for not doing enough.

Virtually no one in Obama’s cabinet has any experience of note in business or the private sector. As with most progressives, they believe bigger government is always the solution to our problems, which explains their egregious incompetence.

One example: White House spokesman David Axelrod and some in the media have questioned why businesses, which have a record $1.8 trillion in the bank, refuse to expand and hire new workers. The implication, of course, is that they’re somehow subverting Obama and showing a lack of patriotism.

But the fact is, they’re alarmed at the gross incompetence and sheer lack of economic understanding of this administration. With so much uncertainty hanging over the future, only a fool would commit huge sums of money to expand a business right now.

Don’t believe it? Listen to what key U.S. business groups said Friday after July’s disastrous jobs data were released.

“The current of employment is too slow to replace the more than 8 million jobs lost in the recession — not in the next year or two, perhaps even not in the next five years,” said Bart van Ark, chief economist of the Conference Board.

“Policies that have increased taxes, increased regulation and increased uncertainty have clearly not been a prescription for returning America to work,” said Martin Regalia, chief economist for the Chamber of Commerce. That about sums it up.

The light is going on over the heads of Obama’s own advisers. In addition to Romer, who foolishly forecast in 2009 that unemployment wouldn’t go above 8% if the $862 billion stimulus was passed, Budget Director Peter Orszag, his reputation damaged after gilding the data in Obama’s budget for two years, also is leaving.

Sorry, but changing personnel won’t help. Unless and until the policies change, the economy will only muddle along at best — and at worst, tumble back into recession.

Mr. Romney said the so-called New Start treaty could be Mr. Obama’s “worst foreign policy mistake yet” in an op-ed column in The Washington Post and argued that “as currently drafted, New Start is a nonstarter.” He wrote that “the Obama administration has been badly outnegotiated” and gave away too much to Russia.

The column is significant for two reasons. First, Mr. Romney, not known for his foreign policy prowess, is clearly trying to burnish his credentials as a plausible commander in chief should he run against Mr. Obama in 2012. And second, it could embolden conservatives who have been tentative in deciding how strongly to push against ratification of the treaty.

Mr. Romney predicated his opposition on the notion that the treaty would impede American missile defense plans. He argued that even before signing the treaty, Mr. Obama had already agreed to “the abandonment of our Europe-based missile defense program,” which is not precisely true; Mr. Obama did abandon President George W. Bush’s architecture for missile defense but substituted another version using a different set of interceptors designed to knock down short- and medium-term missiles that Iran has or is developing rather than the long-range missiles it doesn’t have.

Mr. Romney also criticized the treaty because “its preamble links strategic defense with strategic arsenal” and the text of the accord “explicitly forbids the United States from converting intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos into missile defense sites.” He also noted that Russia “has expressly reserved the right to walk away from the treaty” if the United States expands its missile defense capacity.

He is correct that the preamble notes the relationship between offensive and defensive weapons, but it is a general, nonbinding statement and imposes no limits on either party. The treaty does ban the conversion of ICBM silos, but the Pentagon general overseeing missile defense has said he does not want to convert them, so that is not a problem. And Russia can withdraw, just as the United States can, which is normal for treaties.

The treaty requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate to go into effect, and so the White House needs at least eight Republican votes. Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, has signaled support, as have  Republicans like the former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz and former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger.

Other Republicans, like Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, have expressed more opposition to the treaty, arguing that it could be risky to national security. The administration had hoped the Senate would vote by the end of summer, but it may be postponed.

Read more at……http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com

To become the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama not only won heavy percentages of the black and Hispanic vote but also managed to trim the Democratic Party’s traditional deficit among white voters.

Four years after Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) lost the white vote by 17 percentage points, Obama lost it by 12, according to exit polls. While the 2008 gains were generally attributed to Obama’s strength with young voters — he won by 10 points among whites 18 to 29 years old — he managed to improve on Kerry’s showing with white voters across every age demographic.

Fast-forward to today. With the November midterm elections less than four months away, Obama’s standing among white voters has sunk — leading some party strategists to fret that the president’s erosion — and the party’s — could adversely affect Democrats’ chances of holding on to their House and Senate majorities.

“Since in the past House elections white voters tended to represent the independent vote, [the midterms] will surely be devastating for Democrats running in an election that will be a referendum on the Obama agenda,” predicted one senior Democratic operative who closely tracks House races.

In Washington Post-ABC polling, Obama’s approval rating among white voters has dropped from better than 60 percent to just above 40 percent. In a June poll, 46 percent of white voters under age 40 approved of how Obama was doing, compared with just 39 percent of whites 65 and older.

The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reveals that Obama’s standing among white voters is remarkably similar to that of President George W. Bush at this same time two years ago.

In the June 2008 NBC-WSJ survey, 37 percent of white men and 26 percent of white women approved of the job Bush was doing. In the June 2010 poll, an identical 37 percent of white men approved of Obama’s handling of his job, as did 35 percent of white women.

Those numbers are all the more striking when viewed against overall perceptions of the two presidents. In June 2008, just 28 percent approved of the job Bush was doing while a whopping 66 percent disapproved. Obama, by contrast, is running far stronger with the nation as a whole, with ratings of 45 percent approval and 48 percent disapproval in last month’s NBC-WSJ survey.

Context, as always in politics, matters here. First, as noted above, Republican presidents tend to far outperform Democratic ones among white voters. Second, Obama’s sweeping win — his 365 electoral votes represented victories even in Republican-friendly states such as Indiana — meant that his numbers were bound to fall among whites (and nearly everyone else) once he began the task of governing. Third, Bush’s numbers were bolstered by whites in the South (42 percent approval in the 2008 NBC-WSJ survey) while Obama’s is hurt by them (29 percent approval).

Still, Obama’s numbers among white voters have some Democratic strategists with an eye on the fall elections decidedly nervous.

Read more……..http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/