Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
The low water mark is the Senate, this year, who has seen fit to only show up one-half of the weekdays available to it. They took an astonishing twenty-eight workdays off, in under three months' time. That is taking almost six weeks off, to put it another way.
Anyone who sits in the Oval Office -- no matter what their name or political party -- is going to have detractors. As they should, since disagreeing with political leaders is almost the national sport in America, and always has been (sorry, baseball, but political bickering has been around a lot longer). Sometimes criticism of the president is for very principled and deeply-held beliefs. Sometimes, it is just knee-jerk-ism of the first order.
So, the big question is: what are the odds? What chance does each of these three scenarios -- win, lose, or stalemate -- have of actually becoming reality in a short stretch of time (one month, perhaps two at the outside)?
Here's a quick test for whether you are being fed speculation and fluff, or whether you are being told real information: Are there numbers involved? If so, then thank a scientist (and the editor or producer who allows such science on the air, I guess).
Are Democrats starting to play some offense? Three reports seem to lead to this conclusion, although at this point it is too early to tell what sort of effect this will have on the political landscape, for both the near future and for the 2012 election season. For now, it is refreshing to see Democrats pushing back on a few key issues, whatever their chances of legislative (or political) success happen to be. And the Democrats have picked three pretty good issues with which to launch this particular offensive -- the mortgage crisis, gay marriage, and taxing millionaires.
To be fair, Democrats and Republicans alike are prone to doing this sort of thing. Both using political tactics such as these, and decrying them as being somehow "unfair." There's no monopoly by either party on this type of political hypocrisy. Yes, hypocrisy is the right word to use. Unless you'd prefer "political moral relativism of the worst kind," which is slightly more accurate but a little wordy. Either way, the equation reads: "This sort of thing is just fine when our side uses it, but downright evil when the other side does the same thing."
While technically true ("job growth" is not the same thing as the unemployment rate), but that last sentence could also have been written as: "the unemployment rate fell at the fastest rate in over fifty years -- since 1958, to be exact." Both are true, and yet they tell very different stories -- "a grim nine percent" versus "fell at the fastest rate in over fifty years."
In January, President Obama had the biggest improvement in his public approval rating of his entire presidency. In February, Obama consolidated and built on his January "bump," by posting his second-most-improved month ever. This turnaround has set the clock back for Obama over a full year (in terms of his overall polling numbers), to roughly where he was in December, 2009. All in all, not a bad month for the president.
We are now roughly twenty months away from the next presidential election. But, rather surprisingly, only one Republican has announced he's running for president -- and he's not exactly a "top tier" candidate. So one has to wonder, where are all the Republicans?
Now, obviously, events have changed the situation on the ground dramatically since Obama gave this speech over a year and a half ago. In the last two months, two governments have fallen -- including Egypt's, where Obama gave his speech -- and many more are in danger of falling (to some degree or another). Libya is currently in the midst of what can only be termed a civil war, as a result of the wave of "people power" spreading throughout the region. Leaders even of countries that have not yet had mass demonstrations are scrambling to make political reforms happen as fast as they possibly can, in the hopes of keeping their populace happy enough that these leaders may remain in power.