I wasn’t out of touch with the world during our time away, just off the ‘Net for most of that time—but reading mediocre newspapers (which most of them are) and catching the occasional cable news show (sometimes with the sound off) doesn’t exactly give one a full-orbed view of current events; and then the first part of this week, I’ve been busy and occupied with other things, so it’s only been today that I’ve started to catch up a bit with the political news.
It’s interesting to see that Gov. Palin has pretty much gone mano a mano with President Obama over health care, defining the terms of the debate with her Facebook posts—to such an extent that even non-Palinites within the GOP are acknowledging that she’s taken the leadership of the party—and judging by the poll numbers, the Obama administration’s fixation on her, the recent market gains made by health insurers, and the decision of the Senate Finance Committee to drop consultations on end-of-life care from its version of the bill, it seems clear that she’s winning. Given that her op-ed on the cap-and-tax bill was a hammer blow to its political prospects, it would seem that Gov. Palin’s leadership has had a significant effect on the Obama administration’s legislative agenda.
Perhaps the most unnerving thing to happen during the last week or two was the White House’s decision to invite people to report on friends and neighbors who are opposed to Obamacare—something which doesn’t surprise me all that much, given the pattern of behaviorshown by Barack Obama and his coterie, but which is nevertheless concerning; on the bright side, at least it inspired a vintage effort from the redoubtable Mark Steyn in response.
As a result of all this, the polls aren’t being very kind to the president or his party. New Jersey is turning on his policies (and seems likely to put a Republican in the statehouse this fall), while Rasmussen is showing voters favoring the GOP on health care (and in fact on nearly every other issue as well) and the president’s approval ratings continuing to drop (just 47% approve, only 29% strongly, while 52% disapprove, including 65% of independents; on the bright side, only 37% strongly disapprove).
On a brighter note, it looks like our government has lost some of the bank bailout money:
Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation’s financial sector, it’s still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.
Nice job, guys. That’s definitely the sort of thing to make people think twice about giving the feds even more money to play with. And in the meantime, as the government’s left trying to clean up the mess made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, here comes their cousin Ginnie Mae to make a whole new one. Startlingly, Congress doesn’t see anything wrong with this (though if Ginnie Mae does indeed crash, they will no doubt look for some way to blame it on George W. Bush).
On the foreign policy front, the Marines have launched a major assault in Afghanistan; the incomparable Michael Yon reports (if you can get the video to work; I always have trouble with PJTV). I wish them well, but no foreign power has ever really won in Afghanistan, and I’m not confident we’ll be the first. (This, btw, was the problem with Senator Obama’s insistence that Iraq was the wrong war, that we should have been fighting in Afghanistan; fighting in Iraq drew al’Qaeda down from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts and streets of Iraq, where we could actually get at them.)
All this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of everything the president has to keep track of; and all we expect of our presidents is that they keep track of all of it and know what to do about all of it. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them . . . if it weren’t for the fact that they did everything possible to put themselves in that position.