{"id":246764,"date":"2010-01-29T12:48:24","date_gmt":"2010-01-29T17:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/james-pethokoukis\/?p=3315"},"modified":"2010-01-29T12:48:24","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T17:48:24","slug":"the-real-message-of-the-scott-brown-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/246764","title":{"rendered":"The real message of the Scott Brown victory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via John Ellis<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The answer, I think, is that whatever pivot is made will be irrelevant. The fact is President Obama doesn’t have the luxury of proposing an agenda. Agendas (or at least, agendas as we have come to think of them) are for people who have money. The United States is broke. And the debt<\/a> gets worse by the day.<\/p>\n

Therefore, President Obama’s job is to get us out of debt (or start us down the path toward that end). This job would be difficult in the best of times. President Obama has to do it in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s. He has to do it in the midst of two wars in regions perpetually hostile to foreign influence. And he has to do it in the midst of a global recession so severe that it now threatens what erudite commentators call the “social cohesion”<\/a> of our allies and trading partners around the world.<\/p>\n

That being the case, and I think it is inarguably the case, President Obama will never be successful until he accepts the assignment that history has given him. No one (anywhere) believes for one moment that he can add 30-35 million people to the health insurance rolls and not increase (sharply) the cost of health insurance. President Obama has been peddling this fable for months now and it has only served to make him look either (a) naive, or (b) utterly cynical. No one believes that “cap and trade” legislation is anything like an urgent priority at this time. No one believes that securing the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 is an urgent use of the President’s time. No one believes that President Obama deserved or should have accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. The reason that Obama has seen his approval rating fall sharply is that people think he’s not doing his job.<\/p>\n

His job is to get the country on a path to fiscal sustainability and to defeat (as much as humanly possible) those who seek to put nuclear weapons in our cities and detonate them in time for the evening news. His job, more accurately, is to cut costs, delay benefits, right-size government programs, rethink military and diplomatic strategies, re-focus our war efforts, all while rebuilding (or expanding) intellectual and physical infrastructure for the years ahead. And he must do all this while devising new strategies for jump-starting wealth creation. It’s more than enough agenda for anyone, even someone with President Obama’s admirable self-confidence and perhaps grandiose self-esteem.<\/p>\n

“Stop spending money you don’t have” was the real message of the Massachusetts Senate election that vaulted Senator-elect Brown from the back benches of one of the most useless political institutions in America (the Massachusetts State Senate) onto the front page of The New York Times. “Do your job,” was the other, direct message to President Obama.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via John Ellis: The answer, I think, is that whatever pivot is made will be irrelevant. The fact is President Obama doesn’t have the luxury of proposing an agenda. Agendas (or at least, agendas as we have come to think of them) are for people who have money. The United States is broke. And the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1063,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1063"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}