There Is No Plan

Obama was forceful enough tonight to make it clear that the GOP has to make a choice. Putting aside the details of the plan – which could have been more focused – If the GOP in Congress block the Obama jobs plan, Obama will do his best to tar them with ownership of the crisis. If they don’t, they’re handing the President a victory, and an election boost next year. What they’ll probably do is to employ a version of their standard “accept with unacceptable conditions”. That could muddy the waters just enough to parry Obama’s otherwise quality political move.

There’s one other problem here. The President is going head to head with a GOP House majority that revels in its lack of national popularity, whereas the President requires national popularity to be reelected. It’s an unfair fight in that respect, because the GOP’s Presidential candidates escape with little if any collateral damage.

Sarah Palin had plenty of opportunity to jump into the ring, and make hay in Iowa at the expense of her lookalike Michelle Bachmann. But with the Iowa Straw Poll this Sunday in Ames, IA, it looks like she’s gonna continue to be a no-show in this race, despite the fact that poor Barack just can’t seem to catch a break, and Sarah is running second without running at all. It’s beginning to look like she’s not stepping up.

Thereisnoplan is surprised. Not because she’s missing a golden opportunity to show us the ‘real’ Sarah Palin, but because this campaign was a great big BP fastball for a rampant egotist like Palin, and the consequences of not running might seem to be too horrific to imagine for someone like the ‘cuda. A retreat to post-celebrity status for an ego like that would seem to be fate worse than death.

We’re going to have to make do with Bachmann, it seems. But at least we have her outrageously not gay husband to keep us all amused in the coming months.

Obama is all about popularity. But he forgets that popularity is least important after you’ve just won an election. He went out of his way to court the GOP on his stimulus bill, and despite an awful lot of bipartisan BS, not one voted knuckle-dragger for it.

For a President apparently more politically savvy than most on arrival in the White House, he let himself down badly. He forgot that Bipartisanship BS is only meant to be trotted out for winning elections. After they’re over, you kick the losers when they’re down. But Obama’s flaw is that he hates the idea of being hated. So instead, the President got an earful of whining from the GOP who had ample opportunity to diss the plan, and Obama ends up looking like an unconvincin blowhard, after only a week on the job.

The lesson of the day is pretty simple. The GOP is more right-wing, doctrinaire and disagreeable than ever. They’re MO is very simple. If the President had ignored them they would have bleated on that nobody listens. If the President gives them the time of day, they give him the finger. Neither apporach is without costs, but the former is a far better alternative, considering that right now Republicans are more discredited than at virtually any time since Roosevelt.

Politics is not a pretty business. It never was and it never will be. The sooner Obama realizes that the better, because right now he’s at risk of becoming a victim of his own magnanimity. Most kids learn it in the school yard. There are certain people that are just dangerous to be friends with. Obama apparently missed that memo.

me very smart

With her celebrity dwindling by the hour, Sarah Palin must be auditioning for a talk show.. There really is no other explanation for why Alaska’s Number One lightweight would be prancing around the media. Or is the media prancing around her. One media outlet called it “The Sarah Show”. I know the average GOP Governor is a serious non-entity, but still that seems just a tad unfair. A lot of these guys might even be called competent on a good day. Of course the reason that it was her show is that without her ‘celebrity’ the event would have been as much fun as a country club fundraiser for John McCain.

Palin’s pronouncements at the GOP Governor’s Conference had all the newsworthiness of the Conference hotel lunch menu but that didn’t stop her every vacuous word being splashed on every news outlet. Parsing her statements is a like panning for gold on the town beach. There ain’t nothing there, but in the interregnum before Obama’s inauguration, this is what I suppose passes for news. One only wishes that there was at least a little irony left in the world.

Tim Pawlenty, the put upon Governor of Minnesota called Palin’s speech “interesting”. The media seemed to agree – albeit in a slightly different way – by jamming into the conference to get close to last week’s political celebrity. What they got was no-thing, except empty headlines.

The media’s ability to understand a story is dwindling to the point of absurdity. She’s history. She’s yesterday’s news. What she thinks does not matter. Enough already.