ConservativeHome's Big Ideas blog

Americans are increasingly tuning Obama out

Matt Mackowiak is a Washington and Austin-based Republican consultant and president of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC. He has advised two U.S. senators and one governor, and has worked on two winning campaigns.

Someone needs to let President Obama in on a very big secret: the American people are not listening to him anymore.

Thursday’s address to a Joint Session of Congress, as the Washington Examiner reported, “received the lowest ratings he’s (ever) received for any address to a joint sessions of Congress of his presidency.”

That address included no new ideas, no bipartisan consensus (except for trade deals, which have languished due to unnecessary presidential intransigence) and felt like a campaign speech that was not worthy of national air time and the setting of the historic House chamber.

The public is tuning President Obama out for one very specific reason: while they like him personally, they do not like him professionally.

President Obama has proven that he was not ready to be President of the United States and his economic agenda has simply failed by anyone’s standard.

How does he turn it around?

Giving another teleprompter speech won’t do it.

President Clinton co-opted the Republican agenda in 1995 and triangulated between the parties to rise above politics.

President Obama needs a Sister Souljah moment.  He needs to surprise the silent majority of Americans who have stopped paying attention to him by doing what all good leaders do: take responsibility.

President Harry S. Truman once famously had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read “The Buck Stops Here.”  President Barack Obama has no such sign.

Americans want honesty and accountability in their Presidents.  Over time, without such personal characteristics on regular display, the public begins to tune out when a President speaks.

Mort Zuckerman recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The President appears to consider himself immune from error and asserts the fault always lies elsewhere.”

After more than 960 days since President Obama’s stimulus bill became law, it is appropriate to review the rhetoric and promises of the Obama administration and the economic reality.

First, according to research by the Republican National Committee, President Obama and his Democratic allies promised the creation of more than 15 million jobs through his various policies:

• 3.5 million jobs “saved or created” from the stimulus (more than 90% “in the private sector”)
• 5 million jobs from the “Green Energy Economy”
• 4 million jobs, promised by President Obama’s top legislative enforcer, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), by passing the health care reform bill, “almost 400,000 immediately”
• 2 million jobs from infrastructure spending
• 600,000 jobs in 2011 by extending unemployment benefits through the end of 2011

According to the ADP National Employment Report statistics, at the end of President Obama’s first month in office (February 2009), 110,299,000 Americans were employed (nonfarm private payrolls, seasonally adjusted).  Fully 30 months later, a net of 1.45 million fewer Americans are employed than when President Obama took over, according to the same statistics.

Just one year ago, President Obama said, “I want all Americans to remind themselves there are better days ahead.”

But there have not been better days.  Has he taken any responsibility whatsoever?  No.

The August national employment report found that, as CNBC reported, for the first time since World War II the economy had a net of zero jobs created for a month.  Economic analysts had predicted a net increase of 75,000 jobs.

Did President Obama speak to America to admit that this report was disappointing and unacceptable and that he was taking responsibility for 9.1 percent unemployment and 24 million Americans out of work, underemployed or who have stopped looking for work altogether?  No.

As Politico reported on the day the jobs report was issued, “It’s rare that President Obama doesn’t make some sort of statement on the one day each month that the jobs report comes out, but that’s what happened today.”

Better days are not coming.

But you don’t have to take my word for it – the White House made continued high unemployment their official prediction for the next 16 months.  The White House Office of Management and Budget recently predicted national unemployment will remain at nine percent through 2012 and be at 8.5 percent in 2013 and 7.8 percent in 2014.  No incumbent President has won reelection with unemployment above 7.2 percent since FDR.

The White House also decreased the predicted national gross domestic product growth for 2011 to 1.7 percent, a full point lower than their prediction earlier this year.  The U.S. economy grew by a paltry 0.7 percent in the first six months of the year, which the Associated Press reported was the slowest rate of growth since the recession ended two years ago.

As Kevin Bacon’s character in the film A Few Good Men concluded in his opening argument, “These are the facts of the case, and they are undisputed.”

Given the dramatic gulf between the administration’s lofty rhetoric and empty promises, and the persistently high unemployment expected through the end of President Obama’s first term, many Americans may wonder if anyone will take responsibility.

A recent CNN-ORD national survey found that 65 percent of respondents disapproved of President Obama’s handling of the economy.

But President Obama has a seemingly infinite string of excuses for the economic difficulty, offering at least 11 different reasons for why the economic recovery has been so slow.

In spite of his “jobs speech”, President Obama is facing a point of no return on the economy.  The blame game has not worked and a majority of Americans believe his policies have failed.

Whether he has the humility, leadership, courage and determination to admit mistakes, accept responsibility, and correct his course will likely determine whether he will be able to achieve a second term in office.

Mr. Obama: 'It's the unemployment, stupid'

By Lowman S. Henry

Barack Obama’s presidency is in deep trouble because he neglected to heed the maxim ineloquently stated by Clinton campaign manager Jim Carville in the 1992 Presidential campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.”  In this case the saying might be refined a bit to: “Its unemployment, stupid.”

The nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate threatens to become President Obama’s version of the Iran hostage crisis that brought down our last hapless chief executive, Jimmy Carter.  A group of Islamic militants stormed the embassy of the United States in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and took 52 Americans hostage. The regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spent the next 444 days taunting the United States and frustrating the Carter administration’s ineffective efforts to free the prisoners. 

Fast forward to 2011 and we have the economic equivalent of the hostage crisis with the nation’s economy bound and gagged by massive federal government over-spending, an abundance of job-killing regulations, and historic levels of uncertainty created in no small part by the passage of the Obama health care “reforms.”

 At various points during the first three years of his presidency Barack Obama has given lip service to dealing with unemployment.  The situation is virtually all the policies he has implemented have made the problem worse and driven the American economy to the cusp of a double dip recession.  The so-called economic stimulus package proved to be little more than a pay-off to Democratic constituencies with even the president himself admitting there were no “shovel ready” projects to fund.  The administration’s signature legislative achievement – passage of Obamacare – is so complex businesses cannot figure out what they are required to do and what it will eventually cost.

Against this backdrop he appeared before a joint session of Congress to announce what was billed as a comprehensive new jobs program.  During that speech, as he often does, President Obama summoned the memory of Abraham Lincoln.  But Lincoln also once observed: “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?  Four.  Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”  Likewise, calling another stimulus package a jobs bill doesn’t make it a jobs bill.

The President’s “new” jobs package is little more than a rehash of tactics that have been tried and failed, and others that may have some long-term impact but would fail to create jobs in the short term.  In what was a highly partisan speech the President essentially challenged Republicans in congress to yield to his will, or he would make them the issue in the upcoming Presidential campaign.

The day after the president’s speech the financial markets tanked. 

By failing to admit to past mistakes, craft a new plan in cooperation with both parties in congress, and put forth a new set of initiatives President Obama fed the one factor that is most responsible for the reluctance of businesses to create jobs: uncertainty.

 As a result of uncertainty, and a failure to attend to the core problems affecting job creators trillions of dollars in capital are going to remain on the economic sidelines.  This was evidenced by statements last July from Las Vegas casino tycoon Steve Wynn who called Obama “The Greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime.”  He went on to say: “Those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President.”

Steve Wynn is not alone.  Businesses large and small cannot risk their capital on the soft socialism promoted by the Obama administration.  Essentially their capital is being held hostage by his policies.  And that capital is not going to be released while Barack Obama sits in the Oval office.  If job creators won’t create jobs, the unemployment rate will not drop.  Thus joblessness will remain high through next year’s Presidential election.

On a clear January morning in 1981 Ronald Wilson Reagan raised his right hand and took the oath of office becoming the 40^th President of the United States. Half a world away the 52 Americans held hostage were put on a plane and sent home by an Iranian regime that wasn’t willing to risk a confrontation with the new leader of the free world.

A comparable scene will unfold in January of 2013 as the inauguration of America’s next president releases the shackles now stifling the nation’s economy setting free trillions of dollars in capital that will lift the clouds of recession now hovering over us.

 (Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the Lincoln Radio Journal.  His e-mail address is [email protected].)

 

Anthony Dalke and Dustin Siggins: The Debt-Paying Generation has the most to lose if America doesn't start creating jobs; here is a list of proposals Washington should consider

Anthony Dalke is the Social Media Director for www.Race42012.com, and is also a regular contributor to Race42012.

Dustin Siggins is formerly a policy and politics blogger for numerous sites, including Race42012, and is co-authoring a book on the “Debt-Paying Generation” with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation.

With President Obama making a major speech about jobs this week, and the House GOP, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman putting forth their own plans in response, it appears employment will finally be on the forefront of the public debate. This year’s often vitriol-filled discussions of the United States’ bleak fiscal future, despite their intensive media coverage, have overlooked a stark reality: millions of Americans still sit out of work. Paul Krugman gets a rare cheer for a recent column in which he hammered Washington for replacing leadership with gamesmanship.

Let’s be clear: the national debt is the greatest issue facing America. However, to achieve long-lasting success, any plan to balance the budget must encourage job growth. A growing economy will do a great deal to shrink the deficit as it increases tax revenues, and it will enable more Americans to provide for themselves, control their own financial destinies and avoid government dependency. This especially matters to the 115 million Americans aged 5-30, who will become the Debt-Paying Generation (DPG) if our national debt continues to skyrocket.

With some ideas already on the table, and others still being hammered into actual plans, here are some proposals our leadership and potential leaders should embrace:

• Eliminate all tax loopholes and simplify the tax structure. Americans spent 6.1 billion hours and over $160 billion (equivalent to about 40 hours and over $1,000 per working American) complying with just the personal and corporate income tax code in 2010. Certainly, under a flat tax or the FairTax, taxpayers could redeploy these resources in productive activities that would expand the economic pie and thus increase tax revenues. Furthermore, such reforms would eliminate or at least shrink the IRS, taking up to a $13 billion dollar bite out of the deficit.

• Eliminate all subsidies from the government to private companies. The energy industries, for example, received direct subsidies of $37.2 billion in 2010, all at the expense of the American taxpayer— and some at the expense of the poor in this and other countries. Total corporate welfare totaled $92 billion in 2009. These and other subsidies only distort markets, essentially taking productive dollars out of the private sector and redistributing them at the whims of politicians and government bureaucrats.

• Utilize all of America’s energy resources without prejudice. Essentially, get the government out of the way and let each form of energy- from nuclear to oil to hydro to ethanol- stand on its own merits. This will create hundreds of thousands of new high-skill, well-paying, long-lasting jobs in the nuclear and oil industries alone. Additionally, allowing equal competition would create a smaller regulatory bureaucracy in Washington, and eliminate many of the above-mentioned subsidies. This would save the taxpayers money and increase tax revenues, creating a two-fold deficit reduction effect.

• Cut regulations with an axe. The size of the Federal Register, the official record of federal regulations, swelled to nearly 80,000 pages during the Bush administration. To name but a few egregious current examples:

o The infamous light bulb law, which effectively bans standard incandescent bulbs, has already begun to drive jobs and capital overseas. It also restricts the choices free, law-abiding Americans can make regarding their energy options. 

o According to a 30-year veteran of business ownership interviewed for this piece, the minimum wage is a significant job-killer. Instead of helping low-skill workers, it actually crowds them out of the job market by making their cost to an employer more expensive than the benefit to an employer.

o “Richard Gale,” a general contractor and member of the Debt-Paying Generation, told us a series of 2010 EPA lead regulations impose significant costs on his business. Formal estimates of the impact on businesses vary, but according to “Richard,” the “cost of training, licensing, lead testing and extensive precautionary measures make the cost of contracting services prohibitive to the customer,” and thus deprive “Richard” of approximately $20,000 in lost annual revenue.

o Myriad rules and restrictions on energy projects caused a natural gas pipeline, which stretches from Opal, Wyoming to Malin, Oregon, to finish four months late and 23% over budget.

Ours is the longest-lasting recession in several generations, and it is likely to continue for some time— despite the influx of government debt over the last 4 years. At the current pace of job creation vs. debt creation, the Debt-Paying Generation is in serious trouble: according to August 2010 Bureau of Labor Studies statistics, 16-24 year olds have an unemployment rate of over 20%. An entire subsection of young people is losing the opportunities necessary to garner job skills, grow their retirement savings and purchase their first home. And while the spending cuts we recommend won’t balance the budget, they represent a serious down payment that will grant politicians a little more time to tackle the “big four” expenses of our federal government: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and national defense.

It heartens us to see influential public figures finally returning their collective focus to unemployment. Now, we challenge them to take matters one step further and offer credible proposals on how to get America back on the path to recovery.