Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Focus on the Underclass, Not the Upper Class
Jan23
By John Feehery
Reflecting his political upbringing, Barack Obama spends an inordinate amount of his time worrying about how the rich are getting richer.
He practices envy politics. The poor are poor not because of their own pathologies, but because the rich are getting richer.
It’s all bullshit. The rich get rich, by and large, by making smart investments, by going to school and getting a good education, by keeping their families together, by not getting addicted to drugs or alcohol, or by having a parent who did all of those things and who passed the wealth down.
The poor stay poor because they make dumb investments (spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need), they drop out of school, they have kids out of wedlock, they get addicted to drugs or alcohol, and they usually have a parent who passes on all of those bad habits.
Barack Obama has focused almost exclusively on the rich getting richer. He has ignored completely what often makes the poor poorer.
Obama spent his early political years as a community organizer, so he knows how poverty happens in the big city. It is the same poverty that infects rural America.
People don’t get jobs if they can’t keep jobs. They can’t seize opportunities if they don’t understand what they are. They can’t get the most out of education if their parents are addicted to crack or meth or crank or pot or booze.
Single motherhood is probably the greatest predictor if a child is going to end up poor. Single motherhood doesn’t work as a social experiment. The government should figure out a way to discourage it from happening.
A kid can’t learn in school if he or she is worried about the gang-banger down the street. The President has said nothing about fighting crime in crime-ridden neighborhoods. He has said nothing about the killing spree that has infected his hometown. Nothing. It is stunning.
The President talks a lot about education reform and many of his ideas are good ones. But the biggest problem facing our schools is not the teachers. The biggest problem facing our worst schools is the students and what the students learn from their parents (or in most cases, parent). This is not a resource problem. This is a habits problem.
Obesity is not the biggest problem facing America. It is a symptom of the biggest problem facing America, which is the passing down of bad habits.
Obama likes to talk about how the rich are screwing America, and how they need to be punished with higher taxes. There are some bad actors in the upper classes, some rip-off artists, some scammers, some greedy S.O.B.’s. But rich people, by and large, got rich because they did it the right way.
There are some poor people who have bad luck. But most have bad habits. And we need to teach them good habits if we want them to advance to the middle class.
Obama The Great?
Jan21
By John Feehery
Historians will rate President Barack Obama as one our nation’s greatest Presidents.
The question is: Was he any good?
That the history profession is dominated by a liberal elite comes as no surprise. Robert Dallek, Arthur Schleschinger, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss would all rank both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson towards the top of the list and Ronald Reagan towards the bottom. George W. Bush will never ever get his due for how he handled 9/11 attacks as he passed landmark education and Medicare legislation or for his remarkable commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa.
Mr. Obama broke the Presidential color-line, which is an impressive and historic feat. He did it by building a world-class campaign apparatus, one that will forever be a model for political campaigns to come. Historians will note that Mr. Obama came to office amid a financial crisis, and will bend over backwards to give him credit for the fact that the nation survived it. They will say that he successfully bailed out the struggling auto industry. They will call him a war-time President and give him credit for killing Osama Bin Laden.
All of that is true. But any historian worth his (or her) salt, should analyze the entire record.
It was George Bush who got the Congress to pass TARP, a controversial but indispensable government program that kept the financial industry solvent. The auto bailout, also controversial, was also initiated by Bush in the last days of his Presidency.
Obama took the Bush programs in both cases and perverted them, making them less effective. He took the TARP program and made it a government spending program. He took the auto bailout and made sure the unions were bailed out.
When it comes to the wars, Obama made exactly the wrong call. He went all in on Afghanistan and pulled critical support for the Iraq regime. We have wasted billions in a never-ending effort to bring the Afghani people into the 19th century, while opening the door for greater Iranian influence in Iraq.
The President has taken a small Bush drone program and made it the chief way to we battle terrorists, all over the world. Liberal historians who supposedly care about the big moral questions surrounding state-sanctioned assassination should not let Obama off the hook on this one, but my guess is that they will.
On the domestic front, Obama’s spending policies should go down as the most irresponsible in our nation’s history, but my guess is that the historians themselves will give the President a pass. He created a brand new health care entitlement by raiding from another entitlement, knowing that the Medicare cuts would in all likelihood not be enacted. His initial spending program, dubbed a stimulus by the White House, was a trillion dollar pork-fest, which included every single spending hope and aspiration of every Democrat that had gotten elected to the Congress in the last decade. The efficacy of that spending was best demonstrated by Solndra going bankrupt.
As the first African American President, Obama has done precious little to help that beleaguered community increase its chances of advancing into the middle class. Black unemployment is worse than it was during the Bush or Reagan Administrations. Black on black violence in Chicago, the President’s home town, is reaching catastrophic numbers. Thankfully, for those who live in Washington D.C., the murder rate is down significantly, but the unemployment rate is still much worse than for every other ethnic group.
It is hard to say that racial polarization has improved during the Obama years, and you can make the case it is much worse. That’s not Obama’s fault, but he hasn’t done much to make it better.
A President usually makes his bones internationally. Obama is more popular than George W. Bush in places outside the Untied States. But does that mean he is more effective? How is he pushing our national agenda forward?
Well, let’s see.
The Middle East is a complete mess. We have exchanged a pro-American regime for a pro-Islamist regime in Egypt. We pushed out a secular regime in Libya, and now an Islamist regime that may or may not have been complicit in the murder of our Ambassador is in power. We are pushing out another secular regime in Syria, and will likely have another Islamist Republic on our hands.
In Asia, we owe the Chinese a shit load more money than we did at the start of the Obama years, and that limits our options. The North Koreans now have a nuclear weapon and a missile capable of reaching the United States. They have a new dictator there, a younger, pudgier version, but it is not clear how he will use his weaponry. The Japanese has elected the most nationalistic Prime Minister in the last 50 years, and tensions between Japan and China are as high as they have been in decades.
Now, this is not Obama’s fault. I get that. But the President has been absent when it comes to the region, and, as I pointed out, we owe the Chinese a shit load more money than we did four years ago. That limits our options about what we can realistically do there.
The President likes to compare himself to a combination of the Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Ike left us a highway system and a budget surplus. FDR left us Social Security and a vanquished Nazi regime.
Obama is going to leave us with a huge national debt, a more fractured political landscape and a confusing mess called Obamacare. That’s not much of a legacy, in my view.
