Mr. Curmudgeon
Former White Hose communications director Anita Dunn, for whom Mao Tse Tung is a favorite philosopher, has advice for her old boss, “What the president needs to do is go explain to the people exactly why what has been done is going to get us on a better path for the future,” Dunn told the Washington Post. “What the president is doing now to create jobs, to build a better economic future – that is something that contrasts very well with the Republicans’ refusal to do anything.” Tell that to Scott Brown. He got elected on the strength of his promise to say no to ObamaCare. As the fictional detective Nero Wolf says, “It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust to inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.”
Today, the Labor Department reported that Chairman Obama’s stimulus “great leap forward” is nothing more than a pratfall, “…initial claims for unemployment insurance rose by 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 482,000…” reports the Associated Press, “but the so-called continuing claims do not include millions of people who have used up the regular 26 weeks of benefits customarily provided by states and are now receiving extended benefits for up to 73 additional weeks, paid for by the federal government. More than 5.9 million are receiving extended benefits in the week ending Jan. 2, the latest data available, an increase of more than 600,000 from the previous week.”
It’s difficult to see how Dunn or any other White House flack is going to sell this as a positive. If anything, jobless figures prove the damaging effect Obama’s stimulus is having on the engine of real job creation – the private sector. Misdirecting trillions of dollars away from the real economy has even awakened the sleepy and hopelessly utopian people of Massachusetts.
President Obama hoped to use health care and his stimulus as major props to showcase in his upcoming State of the Union address. With Obama’s agenda sinking like the Titanic, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters the president has only one bright bit of news to report to a joint session of Congress – Republican Scott Brown’s election to Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. “He will undoubtedly address the results and what they mean in the State of the Union,” said Gibbs.
Democratic Party pollster Celinda Lake, who helped craft Martha Coakley’s doomed campaign strategy, leaned nothing – like most Democrats – from last Tuesday’s stunning defeat. “We should pass it,” Lake said of the president’s unpopular health care bill, “and then we have to go sell it.” Every used car salesmen knows that you first hit the rubes with a sincere-sounding sales pitch before selling them a lemon.
Like Mao, the assumption on the part of many utopians is that government is a “great leap forward” perpetual-motion machine. It requires lots of oil (taxpayer dollars) to maintain peak inefficiency. Under Chairman Obama, that machine has never been larger or better oiled. Until the Massachusetts vote, it never occurred to Obama or his fellow Democrats that they might get caught in the gears.
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