Reince Priebus (Chairman of the RNC): [Obama is] the king of golf and vacations!
Sad Reality: Obama would have to take off the next 2.5 years in order to catch up with President George W. Bush’s vacation record. By this time, Bush had taken 349 days off, Obama has taken 96. Even Saint Reagan took 180 days off, about twice Obama’s current tally. The GOP controlled House is out for 5 weeks. Obama is taking 8 days. Move over Jimmy Carter, we’ve truly found History’s Greatest Monster.
Tag: carter
The 51%
Bloomberg is reporting that Obama is the first President since Ike to win two elections by a 51%+ popular vote margin. Yes, not even Saint Reagan, he of stayin’ up late and workin’ cross the aisle with ole Tip, managed the feat. And if we hear anything about that era, we hear about Reagan crushing History’s Greatest Monster and Son of History’s Greatest Monster. Steve Benen at the Maddow blog points out that Obama now joins a list of six Presidents with 51% or more in two elections: Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the aforementioned Eisenhower, and now, Barack Obama.
But, of course, the GOP in the House must be allowed to set policy for the country. Obama has achieved no mandate; not in 2008, not in 2012. Whatever in the hell it is that happened in November is certainly not a mandate to govern. Any serious person realizes this implicitly. If anything, he should look for GOP goodwill by moving quickly to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Then I’m sure they’ll come right around to his way of thinking.
Here’s how it works- Obama says something, Republicans completely lie about it, the media notes the lie is catching on without ever actually calling it a lie, the Democrats have to waste resources and respond to the lie, Republicans double down, this sucks the life out of everything else for a couple week, and in ten years this will be conventional wisdom that Obama called Americans lazy, just like Al Gore claimed to invent the internet and the rest of the bullshit that wingnuts have adopted as received truths (snow in November refutes climate change, the more you cut taxes the more government revenue you raise, if a bombing campaign does not make people like you it means you didn’t bomb hard enough or your targeting was off, liberals lost Viet Nam, waterboarding isn’t torture, etc).
We’re so fucked as a nation.
John Cole, to whom I’d only add that, should Obama fail to win reelection in 2012, his decision to nationally televise the “Lazy Speech” from the Oval Office while wearing an overly earth-toned, almost certainly focus group chosen sweater will be held out as a prime reason American opinion crystallized against him.
That these are easily proven to be lies and utter fabrications does not matter. Recall Cokie’s Law: if it’s out there, it must be treated as fact, uncritically and forever. Anything else smacks of journalistic bias.
And yes, we are so fucked as a nation.
That these are easily proven to be lies and utter fabrications does not matter. Recall Cokie’s Law: if it’s out there, it must be treated as fact, uncritically and forever. Anything else smacks of journalistic bias.
And yes, we are so fucked as a nation.
Since all the evidence says that elections depend on the rate of change of unemployment, not its level, this is actually bad news for Obama: he’s setting himself up for an economic stall in the months leading into the 2012 election.
Paul Krugman, caught in the act of being exactly right. Couple this with the decision to let these Bush tax cuts expire in an election year again, and you’ve got recipe for disaster.
On what planet do these (so called) Democrats live? Do they expect to learn from the messaging disaster they perpetrated in the ten year leadup to this battle? Nothing I’ve seen from anybody, dog catcher up to President, has shown me that they have any chance of even budging the conversation, much less crafting a winning electoral message on this in the face of a still-stagnant economy and ~10% unemployment come 2012.
Obama’s determination to be the “next Carter” is really remarkably strong. I’d say he’s one killer rabbit away from being little more than a punch-line.
Get out there and fight for something, anything. What is so hard to understand about that? Why is it so terrifying for them? This is why they fail.
On what planet do these (so called) Democrats live? Do they expect to learn from the messaging disaster they perpetrated in the ten year leadup to this battle? Nothing I’ve seen from anybody, dog catcher up to President, has shown me that they have any chance of even budging the conversation, much less crafting a winning electoral message on this in the face of a still-stagnant economy and ~10% unemployment come 2012.
Obama’s determination to be the “next Carter” is really remarkably strong. I’d say he’s one killer rabbit away from being little more than a punch-line.
Get out there and fight for something, anything. What is so hard to understand about that? Why is it so terrifying for them? This is why they fail.
The “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Effect
Plotted in what is, perhaps, my favorite graph ever.
Jimmy “History’s Greatest Monster” Carter recalls it a little differently:
“I dropped 15 percentage points, and I almost lost the election. It was the most copies of Playboy ever sold.”
Wikipedia informs us:
The best-selling Playboy edition was the November 1972 edition, which sold 7,161,561 copies
Jimmy Carter: WRONG on his pre-election tracking polls and WRONG on Playboy circulation. We can’t trust Jimmy Carter in 2012. This message paid for by the Campaign to Reelect Barack Obama President.
Lemkin 