U.S. 2012 Election

[Edward Campbell]

President Obama is a gifted orator but he must, still, "hit" some issues. Here, in an article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, is one reporter's assessment of the issues he needs to address:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-election/5-things-obama-must-achieve-in-tonights-dnc-speech/article4523497/

5 things Obama must achieve in tonight’s DNC speech

KONRAD YAKABUSKI
Charlotte, North Carolina — The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Sep. 06 2012

Four years ago, Barack Obama strode through faux-Greek columns at Denver’s Mile High stadium, before 84,000 ecstatic fans in the stands and millions more watching on television around the globe, to accept the Democratic nomination.

In Joe Biden-speak, it was a big (expletive) deal.

On Thursday night, Mr. Obama will speak before fewer than 20,000 people at Charlotte’s Time Warner Cable Arena. The TV audience is likely to be down sharply from the modern record of 38.4 million Americans who watched in 2008. And there will be no Greek columns.

Just a man and his teleprompter.

That makes Mr. Obama’s task on Thursday both easier and harder. If expectations for the speech are much lower than in 2008, Mr. Obama must also address the disappointment his presidency has brought to all those voters who believed that, yes, he could.

While he must reignite enthusiasm among the Democratic base, Mr. Obama’s biggest challenge on Thursday is getting all those swing voters in swing states who placed a bet on his presidency in 2008 to believe it will pay off if they vote for him again.

So, here are five things (among many others) Mr. Obama must do when he takes the stage tonight:

He must ace the “better off” argument

With unemployment above 8 per cent, median income down $4,000 (U.S.), the federal debt surpassing $16-trillion and house prices still in the trough, Mr. Obama cannot tell Americans they are objectively better off than they were four years ago. Few of them believe it. But he can make a credible case that they are better off than they would otherwise be had it not been for his swift action to deal with the financial crisis and the measures he has taken to lay the foundation for future growth.

He must explain the “long game” he is playing

Americans will not feel the full effect of Mr. Obama’s health-care reform law, education policies and investments in research and renewable energy for years to come. That has made it harder for many voters who are struggling now to buy into those policies. Republicans argue that this is money down the drain and that Washington should cut taxes instead. Mr. Obama must counter that claim.

He must show he is serious about the debt

This won’t make the Democratic base happy – since it considers the deficit largely irrelevant – but Mr. Obama must show that he considers reducing the federal debt a top priority. Whether the analogy is accurate or not, the suburban voters who will decide the election know what happens when their household budgets get out of whack. Bill Clinton summed it up on Wednesday: “We’ve got to deal with this big long-term debt problem or it will deal with us.”

He must promise to compromise

The base won’t like this either. They think Mr. Obama has spent far too much of his first term doing just that. Yet, Mr. Obama’s biggest selling point with swing voters in 2008 was his promise of post-partisanship. If he is re-elected, Mr. Obama will in all likelihood face a Republican House of Representatives and possibly Senate. He gave up on trying to work with Congress after his proposed “grand bargain” on the debt fell apart a year ago. The GOP argues he gave up long before that, and was never really interested in doing a deal to reform Medicare and Social Security. Can he persuade voters that he is now?

He must remind Americans why they like him so much

This should be the easy part. But for a guy who once responded to a girlfriend’s “I love you” with a “Thank you,” it is obviously harder than he made it look in 2008. It has been a while since Mr. Obama gave a speech that brought down the house. You can bet that he will summon all his charm to do so on Thursday. But after Mr. Clinton had many murmuring “I wish he were running,” the President needs voters to have forgotten about Bubba by the end of his speech.

Seems to me like good advice ... I wonder if he can manage?

 

[a_majoor]

"Spread the wealth around", "You didn't build that", and now another very revealing statement on how the Democrat party really sees things. Contrast "We all belong to the government" to how Alexis de Tocqueville described America: a nation of associations, or iconic descriptions like President Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people":

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2012/09/05/Democrats-We-All-Belong-to-the-Government.aspx#page1

Democrats: ‘We All Belong to the Government'

By EDWARD MORRISSEY, The Fiscal Times
September 5, 2012

When major political parties hold conventions, they usually try to craft their messages to reach the broadest possible audience. The parties make the case that they stand for true American values and represent the best hope for freedom and liberty – within their definition of the priorities involved. But even with the acknowledgment that those meanings can shift depending on the issues, the Democratic Party and their convention got off to a very strange and very revealing start this week in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The host committee started off the festivities with avideo presentation that defended the use of government as a medium to address social ills and as a unifying presence in American lives. That’s not exactly a novel argument coming from Democrats and progressives. However, this statement was: “Government’s the only thing we all belong to,” the narrator intoned. “We have different churches, different clubs, but we’re together as a part of our city, or our county, or our state – and our nation.”

We all belong to the government? That’s not how most Americans think of themselves. As Mitt Romney tweeted almost immediately afterward, Americans usually labor under the concept that government belongs to the people, and not the other way around. Abraham Lincoln famously referred to American government as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” in the Gettysburg address. He didn’t refer to America as a people of, by, and for the government.

The American Revolution occurred in no small part over the rejection of ownership by the government. For more than a century, the colonists had enjoyed a large measure of autonomy while still retaining the status of subjects to the Crown. When the British had to fight wars on behalf of the colonists, they put that ownership paradigm to greater use by imposing taxes without consent and restricting trade in order to recoup those costs. The presumption of the time that people belonged to the Crown and its government made those kinds of policies rational and even understandable – but the American experience had produced a populace that finally demanded a government owned by the people instead of the other way around.

One could shrug this off as a badly-formed argument for American unity, but that explanation doesn’t meet the smell test, either.  Government is the one area where our system was specifically designed for disunity – on all levels. Even within the structure of government at nearly every level, checks and balances were created to keep one small group from seizing power. The founders did not create co-equal branches of government as a means to promote unity, but to preserve effective dissent and limit the reach of each branch. Those structures exist in every state government and in most municipal governments as well.

The Bill of Rights extended that effort to the nation as a whole. The First Amendment protected the right to free speech not so that Americans could unify in government, but specifically so that government could not demand and enforce unity. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments specifically limited the powers of the federal government and protected the ability of the states to operate independently, and the people to retain their own choices.  If the founders intended for government to produce unity, they would have never have provided these restrictions.

Americans don’t look to government for unity, and certainly don’t see government as something to which we belong. However, that concept is consistent with the Obama administration’s policies and arguments for a second term, which is another reason to see this as a revelation rather than an aberration.

First, recall what President Obama said about the American economy at the beginning of the summer. “The private sector is doing fine,” he told the White House press corps just after a poor jobs report for May. “Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.”  Unemployment at that time had ticked up to 8.2 percent, and civilian participation rate in the workforce had just hit a 30-year low in April of 63.6 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employment in May was at the same level as in May 2006 (21.9 million), while private-sector employment was almost 3 million jobs lower than in May 2006 (111.1 million compared to 113.9 million).

Later this summer, Obama notoriously argued that government created the environment for success through infrastructure spending. “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that,” Obama told a crowd in Oakland.  Obama later claimed he meant that businesses didn’t build the infrastructure that allowed them to be successful, and that government deserves the credit. But where did government get the capital to build the infrastructure in the first place? From the successful businesses that produced that capital, not from the Progressive Sunshine Forest.

The reference to churches in the video is another interesting point, although not one that Democrats want voters to notice. This administration imposed a mandate on employers to provide free birth control and sterilization to employees, even those employers whose religious values prohibit them from facilitating such access. Explicitly religious organizations such as schools, health care providers, and charities did not get an exemption, either. The message was very similar to what the video argued: you can join a church, but you belong to the government.

Finally, the convention has offered explicit defenses of the expansion of food-stamp programs and ObamaCare. The former now subsidizes a record number of Americans (around 47 million), a program whose enrollment has been amplified by three years of stagnation on jobs and economic growth. ObamaCare, however, creates an entirely new avenue for federal subsidies to Americans who shop individually for their health insurance.

The cutoff for federal subsidies to pay for insurance now mandated by federal law is 400 percent  of the poverty line, which is an income level of more than $88,000. That is far above the median household income in the US, which is now at $51,000, almost 5 percent lower than at the start of the recovery in June 2009. As more employers dump health insurance and force employees to buy coverage individually, we’ll see more and more Americans “belonging” to the government through reliance on welfare, even those who have solidly middle-class incomes.

That’s why this convention video is no gaffe, no matter how much the Obama campaign and the DNC try to distance themselves from it. It represents their vision of America, which puts government first – ahead of property, church, liberty. George Bush once talked about an “ownership society” where Americans owned their own property and assets. Democrats want government to be the real ownership society, with themselves in charge of the serfs. Let’s hope that they’ve badly miscalculated the true spirit of the American electorate.

Read more at http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2012/09/05/Democrats-We-All-Belong-to-the-Government.aspx#URMdkjQ9TlofHVoE.99

 

[Edward Campbell]

I know I'm repeating myself, but ...

We, Canadians, have vital interests at stake in this and every US election - probably more than any other country. But: the outcome of this or any other election is unimportant; it is the drift in American culture and policy that maters. We have, over the past 150 years watched and reacted to a drift from Manifest Destiny to isolationism to constructive/cooperative internationalism to unilateralism and now to ... well, I'm not sure about the direction in which America is drifting but we must adapt.

The immediate issue is economic ... for us. But the economic issue is more complex for Americans - it touches on their sense of themselves. The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson understands this (even if he is weak on economics) and he explains part of it in a column in the Globe and Mail headlined America’s flight from fiscal reality. He explains that:

The flight from reality of so many Americans into the nether worlds of ideology is discouraging when it’s not frightening ... The flight from reality is easy to diagnose. Neither party wants to axe the sacred military budget. Neither wants to raise taxes. By definition, therefore, the restoration of fiscal health has to come exclusively from spending cuts to domestic programs ... Today, Republican candidates for the Senate and the House are campaigning on not making any compromises if they’re elected. Even if Mr. Obama is re-elected, the gridlock and ideological entrenchment that define contemporary American politics will continue, and one key to solving the country’s fiscal dilemma – tax increases – will remain as remote as ever.

Tax increases, in and of themselves, are useless unless they are part of a bigger, better fiscal reform package - which must include cuts to the Pentagon and to entitlements. The broad outlines of those necessary fiscal reforms are pretty clear to most (just many?) people but they are hostages in the US culture wars which are, mostly, not about economics.

The current US culture wars are not new; they are just a continuation of disputes that have been ongoing in Euro-American society for about 500 years. The issue is (real) liberal vs conservative - between the rights of the sovereign individual and the needs of the community or collective. These battles have been waged in religious, political, social and economic terms. In fact, my 500 years figure is 'off' by 500 years - we can see the origins of the problems in the structure of European society 1,000 years ago. The distribution of serfs (broadly anyone 'bound' to someone else by formal rules) and freemen was vastly different in Scandinavia, Britain and some North German states, with fewer serfs and more freemen, on one hand, and the French, South German, Spanish and Italian states, with an almost reverse distribution - many serfs and few freemen,  on the other. That difference may be rooted, but only in part, in disputes between the Irish and Roman churches that go back hundreds of years earlier - the Romans 'won' the liturgical battles but, perhaps, lost the cultural war. Anyhow, it's not new and it's not unique to America but it is both destructive and wasteful and, despite Americans' well known propensity to solve problems, unlikely to be 'finished.'

Our vital interests in America are so many, so varied, so broad and so deep that we, as a country, as enterprises and even as individuals, must take American politics into account. But we must do so with a cold, clear eye on our own interests. In my opinion:

1. We are, already, far ahead of the Americans in the culture wars ~ not all of us like the outcomes but most Canadians (and e.g. Australians and Singaporeans) are unwilling to revisit the issue, the status quo is good enough and, as in other areas, "the best is often the bitter enemy of the good enough."

2. Neither President Obama nor Governor Romney is likely to make any important changes to America.

3. No single electoral result, not president, not, congressman, not governor, not state senator, not mayor, matters very much at all but the overall drift is very, very important.

4. The drift appears, now, to be towards the neo-conservatives (a variant but not close relative of the classical liberal) but that is, relatively, new, since the 1980s.

5. Americans self perception matters as much as does real (military and economic) power. America's soft power has been wasting since the 1970s, now its hard power is harder and harder to afford. We must be conscious of America's pain as it adjusts to the reality that it might not be the "new Jerusalem."

6. America needs some time to let the current culture wars die down and to return to political and economic sanity - that will happen; Americans are neither foolish nor self destructive; their culture, even when at war with itself, is strong and well balanced. In stock trading terms, despite all of its current problems, America is a "buy," and we, Canada, should be doing just that.

BUT ... ​

7. Obama vs Romney? Pffft .... the outcome means little to America and less, far less, to Canada and the world. And the campaign? It's nonsense, nothing more, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" and all that sort of thing.

 

[GAP]

It would seem the US's biggest problem is......It Does Not have a Leader.

The current incumbent  and his challenger not withstanding, there has not been for at least 20 years, nor in the for-seeable future anyone who can motivate the country as a whole.....until that happens, not much will happen....

 

[Jed]

Just who would be capable of being a leader? Even Lincoln whose leadership was shaped in the crucible of the Civil War had his difficulties and issues during his tenure.

 

[vonGarvin]

Just who would be capable of being a leader? Even Lincoln whose leadership was shaped in the crucible of the Civil War had his difficulties and issues during his tenure.

Yep.  Difficulties indeed:

 

[cupper]

Dems should have left the "God" and "Jerusalem" issues alone.

They could have made a great turn about on the Conservative punditry by pointing to the fact that the GOP is focusing on not having God in Democratic platform, while the Dems are focusing on what really matters to voters, like jobs, education, blah blah.

or

Do you really think Joe Six-pack is lying awake at night worrying about recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, when he has no job, no health insurance, and is about to lose his home?


And would someone give Antonio Villaraigosa a good swift kick in the nuts? The optics of reopening the platform for the amendments was bad enough, but to call for a voice vote three times, when it was clear that the split was never more than 50/50 was just pathetic. :facepalm:

As Jon Stewart pointed out, he should have just read the prompter, and closed it out the first time.

 

[cupper]

Picked up an interesting read at Chapters yesterday.

"America, But Better" by Brian Calvert and Chris Cannon.

http://www.dmpibooks.com/book/america-but-better

Only half way through, but takes a humourous look at the 2012 Campaign, through the Canada Party Manifesto, where all of Canada runs for the US Presidency.

Although it is written as tongue in cheek, there is some very insightful commentary, wrapped up in satire.

One thing I found very interesting is that Chris Cannon is a former US Marine Sgt. Maj. who was involved in intelligence and counter terrorism, and is now teaching comparative culture at a BC university.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>Tax increases, in and of themselves, are useless unless they are part of a bigger, better fiscal reform package

In 2007, just dropping the extra appropriations for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars would have come close to balancing the budget, and removal of those expenses is relatively imminent.  Fiscal reform is needed to deal with growth in programs which exceeds customary growth in GDP (ie. primarily health care entitlements), but the foremost problems the US faces are primarily that the recession shrunk the pie and secondarily that a number of new expenses were added.  The Democratic argument is that the size of the slice needs to increase; the Republican argument is that the size of the pie needs to increase.

US federal income tax rates are already comfortably higher than Canadian federal income tax rates; it isn't that middle class and "rich" Americans don't have high enough rates.

Democratic policies are militating against increasing the size of the pie.  However people feel bound to their ideology, it's a fact (not an opinion or interpretation) that revenues are nowhere near what they must be to reach the dotted line one might extrapolate from pre-2008, and it's virtually impossible to convincingly argue that the additional rules that accumulate with every successive year are not synonymous with an ever-expanding burden of costs that slowly strangle economic growth by diverting resources away from investment into compliance. What needs "reform" are US policies - legislation and regulation - that create an uncertain environment in which businesses have to make economic decisions.  Bluntly, businesses need stability.  Entrepreneurs can make a go on small margins under all sorts of impediments and hassles and bureaucratic "squeeze" designed to raise money for all levels of government, but the impediments and hassles have to be predictable and relatively invariant, and not bound up in fvcked-up legislation that no one could possibly analyze before signing it into law.

 

[cupper]

In 2007, just dropping the extra appropriations for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars would have come close to balancing the budget, and removal of those expenses is relatively imminent.

Problem with that is the appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan were done outside the normal budget process, and were never incorporated into the deficit. It was only after Obama took office, and took the step of including them in normal Defense expenditures, and thus they became part of the deficit did the effect become apparent.

 

[Brad Sallows]

The figures I use are the _net_ deficit and debt which include all of the _on budget_ and _off budget_ expenditures.  Which column in the great "General Accounting Ledger" particular amounts belong to is irrelevant to my assessment and conclusion.

When I say "balancing the budget", I mean "no net deficit" (that thing Democrats like to attribute to the tireless heroism of Bill Clinton, despite the spendthrift "Contract with America" Congress and the struggle to grow revenues during the dot-com boom).  When I mean "operating balance", "on-budget expenditures", "off-budget expenditures", "regular appropriations",  "special appropriations", or some other lesser piece of the whole, I generally make that explicit.  And the president's "budget request" is just a forecast.

Funny fact: for years, and still, "off-budget" revenues have exceeded "off-budget" expenses for the US federal government.  The wars are paid for after all!

[Edit: remove abject error; "primary" is synonymous with "operating", not "net" as the latter is generally understood.]

 

[a_majoor]

Staggering jobs report, which the President was probably briefed on before he gave his speech at the DNC. The updated figures are truly horrifying, particularly when they are corrected for labour force participation; 11% means more than one in ten Americans is unemployed, so virtually everyone in the United States has family, friends or neighbours in that category. Coupled with declining incomes (-7% since 2008, with -5% coming after the 2009 "recovery") and escalating inflation in food and fuel prices and the American people are being subject to a "misery index" similar to the end of the Carter Administration. NJo wonder Demoicrat politicans try to avoid the question "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Multiple graphs at link:

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/the-awful-awful-august-jobs-report/

The awful, awful August jobs report
James Pethokoukis | September 7, 2012, 9:28 am
RomerBernsteinAugust

This was not the employment report either American workers or the Obama campaign were hoping for. A huge miss. It shows the U.S. labor market remains in a deep depression, generating few jobs and little if no income growth. As IHS Global Insight puts it:

    All cylinders are not yet firing … manufacturing has at least temporarily run out of steam, and overall growth in output and employment is likely to remain at only a modest pace. … We expect second-half 2012 GDP growth to average 1.5%, slightly slower than the first half. Slower growth in exports and business capital spending will keep growth subdued.

   

And here is Citigroup’s take:

    The unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% from 8.3%, but in this case with declines in both the labor force (-368,000) and the household-survey measure of employment (-119,000). With labor force participation falling back to a new cycle low of 63.5%, the drop in the unemployment rate should not be reported as good news.

Now the depressing details of the jobs report:

– Nonfarm payrolls increased by only 96,000 in August, the Labor Department said, versus expectations of 125,000 jobs or more. The manufacturing sector, much touted by the president in his convention speech, lost 15,000 jobs.

– Since the start of the year, job growth has averaged 139,000 per month vs. an average monthly gain of 153,000 in 2011.

– As the chart at the top shows, the unemployment rate remains far above the rate predicted by Team Obama if Congress passed the stimulus. (This is the Romer-Bernstein chart.)

– While the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% from 8.3% in July, it was due to a big drop in the labor force participation rate (the share of Americans with a job or looking for one). If fewer Americans hadn’t given up looking for work, the unemployment rate would have risen.

– Reuters notes that the participation rate is now at its lowest level since September 1981.

– If the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 11.2%.

– If the participation rate had just stayed the same as last month, the unemployment rate would be 8.4%.



– The Labor Department also said that 41,000 fewer jobs were created in June and July than previously reported. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from 64,000 to 45,000, and the change for July was revised from 163,000 to 141,000.

– The broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes part-time workers who want full-time work, is at 14.7%.

– The employment-population ratio is perhaps the broadest measure of the health of the labor market. It just shows how many Americans — not in the military or in prison — as a share of the population actually have some sort of a job. That number fell last month to 58.3%, just off its Great Recession lows.

– Each month, The Hamilton Project examines the “jobs gap” — the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month. If we added 96,000 jobs every month, we would not close the jobs gap until after 2025, as this chart shows.



– The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 34.4 hours in August. The manufacturing workweek declined by 0.2 hour to 40.5 hours, and factory overtime was unchanged at 3.2 hours.

– The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 33.7 hours.

– In August, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls edged down by 1 cent to $23.52. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings rose by just 1.7 percent.

– In August, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees edged down by 1 cent to $19.75.

Again, a terribly anemic report that shows a stagnant economy — not one ready to boom.

Edit to add WSJ article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444273704577635681206305056.html

Mortimer Zuckerman: Those Jobless Numbers Are Even Worse Than They Look
Still above 8%—and closer to 19% in a truer accounting. Here's a plan for improvement.

By MORTIMER ZUCKERMAN

Don't be fooled by the headline unemployment number of 8.1% announced on Friday. The reason the number dropped to 8.1% from 8.3% in July was not because more jobs were created, but because more people quit looking for work.

The number for August reflects only people who have actively applied for a job in the past four weeks, either by interview or by filling an application form. But when the average period of unemployment is nearly 40 weeks, it is unrealistic to expect everyone who needs a job to keep seeking work consistently for months on end. You don't have to be lazy to recoil from the heartbreaking futility of knocking, week after week, on closed doors.

How many people are out of work but not counted as unemployed because they hadn't sought work in the past four weeks? Eight million. This is the sort of distressing number that turns up when you look beyond the headline number.

Here's another one: 96,000—that's how many new jobs were added last month, well short of the anemic 125,000 predicted by analysts, and dramatically less than the (still paltry) 139,000 the economy had been averaging in 2012.

The alarming numbers proliferate the deeper you look: 40.7% of the people counted as unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more—that's 5.2 million "long-term" unemployed. Fewer Americans are at work today than in April 2000, even though the population since then has grown by 31 million.

We are still almost five million payrolls shy of where we were at the end of 2007, when the recession began. Think about that when you hear the Obama administration's talk of an economic recovery.

The key indicator of our employment health, in all the statistics, is what the government calls U-6. This is the number who have applied for work in the past six months and includes people who are involuntary part-time workers—government-speak for those individuals whose jobs have been cut back to two or three days a week.

They are working part-time only because they've been unable to find full-time work. This involuntary army of what's called "underutilized labor" has been hovering for months at about 15% of the workforce. Include the eight million who have simply given up looking, and the real unemployment rate is closer to 19%.

In short, the president's ill-designed stimulus program was a failure. For all our other national concerns, and the red herrings that typically swim in electoral waters, American voters refuse to be distracted from the No. 1 issue: the economy. And even many of those who have jobs are hurting, because annual wage increases have dropped to an average of 1.6%, the lowest in the past 30 years. Adjusting for inflation, wages are contracting.

The best single indicator of how confident workers are about their jobs is reflected in how they cling to them. The so-called quit rate has sagged to the lowest in years.

Older Americans can't afford to quit. Ironically, since the recession began, employment in the age group of 55 and older is up 3.9 million, even as total employment is down by five million. These citizens hope to retire with dignity, but they feel the need to bolster savings as a salve for the stomach-churning decline in their net worth, 75% of which has come from the fall in the value of their home equity.

The baby-boomer population postponing its exit from the workforce in a recession creates a huge bottleneck that blocks youth employment. Displaced young workers now face double-digit unemployment and more life at home with their parents.

Many young couples decide that they can't afford to start a family, and as a consequence the birthrate has just hit a 25-year low of 1.87%. Nor are young workers' prospects very good. Layoff announcements have risen from year-ago levels and hiring plans have dropped sharply. People are not going to swallow talk of recovery until hiring is occurring at a pace to bring at least 300,000 more hires per month than the economy has been averaging for the past two years.

Furthermore, the jobs that are available are mostly not good ones. More than 40% of the new private-sector jobs are in low-paying categories such as health care, leisure activities, bars and restaurants.

We are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression. Consider two indicators: First, food stamps: More than 45 million Americans are in the program! An almost incredible record. It's 15% of the population compared with the 7.9% participation from 1970-2000. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at a rate of 400,000 per month over the past four years.

Second, Social Security disability—another record. More than 11 million Americans are collecting federal disability checks. Half of these beneficiaries have signed on since President Obama took office more than three years ago.

These dependent millions are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s, invisible because they get their checks in the mail. But it doesn't take away from the fact that millions of people who had good private-sector jobs now have to rely on welfare for life support.

This shameful situation, intolerable for a nation as wealthy as the United States, is not going to go away on Nov. 7. No matter who wins, the next president will betray the country if he doesn't swiftly fashion policies to address the specific needs of the unemployed, especially the long-term unemployed.

Five actions are critical:

1. Find the money to spur an expansion of public and private training programs with proven track records.

2. Increase access to financing for small businesses and thus expand entrepreneurial opportunities.

3. Lower government hurdles to the formation of new businesses.

4. Explore special subsidies for private employers who hire the long-term unemployed.

5. Get serious about the long decay in public works and infrastructure, which poses a dramatic national threat. Infrastructure projects should be tolled so that the users ultimately pay for them.

It's zero hour. Policy makers need to understand that the most important family program, the most important social program and the most important economic program in America all go by the same name: jobs.

Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.

 

[tomahawk6]

When the President gave himself an incomplete maybe it was because so many folks still had jobs.

 

[a_majoor]

WRM suggests the deeper issue of this election is the transition from the "Blue model" of society towards a still undefined post progressive society. Highlighted section is the payoff:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/09/08/noise-vs-knowledge-americas-longest-presidential-campaign/

Noise vs. Knowledge: America’s Longest Presidential Campaign
Walter Russell Mead

Following American presidential elections intelligently is a tricky thing to do. No spectacle anywhere in the world gets as much attention as the world’s longest and most grueling marathon. After all, the US president is the most powerful office holder in the world, commander in chief of the greatest military forces ever assembled, and the lead policy maker for the largest economy any nation has ever constructed. At the same time, the America election process is a window into the soul of the public opinion of a society that by turns attracts, alarms and repulses — but always fascinates — the rest of the world. And with the world’s largest, best capitalized and most globally influential media assemblage fixated on the American election cycle, the spectacle has long since become, quite literally, the Greatest Show on Earth.

Nobody interested in the affairs of the contemporary world will want — or be able — to ignore an American presidential campaign. But at the same time, it must be clear to any serious observer of the contemporary scene that to follow the spectacle too closely involves a colossal waste of energy and time that could be more usefully expended on other pursuits. The media fixation with the minutiae of the campaign, the endless gaffe quest and mindless herd behavior by the journalistic pack, the bootless but inevitable speculation concerning the various coming landmarks and events from the Iowa State Fair through Election Night: all this is a necessary and unavoidable part of the process, and while the serious student of the contemporary world needs to keep an eye on the carnival, to be swallowed up in it and to spend undue time and mental energy on the meaningless and the trivial is to become less effective and less well informed.

Now as an amusement there’s nothing wrong with tunneling into the the delicious minutiae of the presidential campaign and feasting on all the thrills and spills that it provides. Why shouldn’t we enjoy what politics provides? If people want to amuse themselves by reading blow by blow Veep speculation or disputes over crowd size at summertime political events, that’s a legitimate personal choice and a harmless hobby. Some people build model airplanes, some people follow rock bands, some people obsess about presidential campaigns. Humanity was not made to work all the time; innocent amusements are part of what life is about.

But following politics in this sense isn’t a serious pursuit, anymore than being a fanatical hockey fan or a Civil War re-enactor is a serious pursuit. And while most hobbyists and sports fans are realistic about the value of their fixations, politics fans often labor under the delusion that they are being serious and engaged when they are in fact goofing off. Election coverage often feeds this delusion, both because it is good business for the media to flatter its customers and because many pundits and reporters themselves get so caught up in the chase that they lose perspective on the inconsequential nature of so much of what they cover and write.

I hate to be the cranky voice of dissent here, but cluttering ones memory with ephemeral trivia while basking in the adrenalin rush caused by meaningless events is not the characteristic activity of a superior mind. People who follow politics incessantly and argue heatedly about it at every opportunity may and often do think they are more intelligent and more public spirited than people who have that kind of interest in baseball or quilting; that belief marks a failure to understand how politics and power work. (Like so many vices it is excusable in the young and can even be a sign of budding promise; but like most vices it grows progressively less attractive as the years advance.)

Let me emphasize again that political fandom is OK and harmless as far as it goes — you just need to remember that fandom is all it is and it is no more part of the serious business of life than attending Star Trek conventions.  But the wise politics fan like the wise Star Trekker, knows that following a favorite hobby horse doesn’t make you a better citizen or even a more informed voter.

This kind of obsession isn’t necessarily worthless. All knowledge, even the knowledge of trivia is good in and of itself, and the exercise of acquiring, organizing and retaining knowledge of any kind can be good for the brain. It is difficult to think of a kind of knowledge that doesn’t have some kind of usefulness. Nevertheless, to be a politics fan doesn’t primarily make you more powerful, better tuned into what matters or anything: it just keeps you busy and entertained. (Partial exception alert: Some people turn hobbies into professions. A baseball fanatic might grow up into a sports journalist or work for a baseball team in some way, just as young politics buffs sometimes get work in campaigns or as journalists. The sportswriter and the campaign reporter are mostly in the same infotainment business; the difference is that the sportswriter usually has a more realistic and balanced understanding of the nature and limits of the work.)

Thankfully, I was out of the country during the so-called “height” of the Veepstakes, a quadrennial guessing game among the chattering classes during which a lot of bright people pass a lot of time in idle and pointless speculation. No talking head analyzing a presidential candidate’s Veep selections ever added value in the sense of making the world a happier or safer place. Any value added comes under the infotainment category: they made the world seem more interesting and they engaged in an entertaining performance with other talking heads who had different ideas about who the Veep pick would be.

Before the Veep announcement is made, nobody’s speculation counts for much. Once the announcement is made, not a single living soul on Planet Earth gives a rat’s patootie about the speculations that so consumed the “intelligentsia” a short 24 hours before. The press is at its least significant during rituals of this kind; these are the times when people who aspire to gain a significant understanding of world and national affairs and have some kind of meaningful impact on the world around them should tune out the chit chat and go read a good book or do a good deed. I recommend travel to India as one way to keep yourself from getting sucked in by nothingness during these periods; monastic retreats might also help.

Learning how to tune out the buzz and the drivel, and learning how to develop a focus on events which will not be distracted by media hype of pseudo-events is one of the most difficult yet necessary skills for young Americans who aspire to play a significant role in national life. It’s not just because close following of political minutiae under the impression that this matters wastes your time and fills your head with fluff. The time lost in this way should have been used for learning the stuff you really need to know — and honing your skills of distinguishing between vapid knowledge and useful knowledge. This is one of the most important of all skills for young Americans to learn and it is one that our society and educational system does more to conceal than to teach.

America is a kind of open puzzle. The “secrets” about how things work for the most part aren’t carefully hidden away in government vaults or in exclusive private organizations. The Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission aren’t sending the hidden truths to the Illuminati in black helicopters.

In America, we do things differently. The facts of power are out there for anybody to discover, but they are hidden in vast piles of shlock. The needles aren’t locked up in vaults, but they are scattered through a vast number of haystacks. You can learn a lot about how the world works by taking good courses in high school and college — but many places don’t teach the right courses and almost everywhere the stuff that will help you understand the world is tucked away in course catalogs full of fluff.

In our country, we conceal in full view. The important news is mostly on the web and in at least some of the papers, rather than passed as handwritten notes between Henry Kissinger and Goldman Sachs. However the best newspapers often mix a few sprinkles of the good stuff in a vast tub of swill.  That’s often because the reporters and editors aren’t well trained to carry out a smart sorting process, but it’s also because the business model of the legacy media requires a lot of infotainment in the mix to keep a mass audience. Veep buzz however intellectually trivial and politically pointless sells, and what sells, runs.

So the media battle space fills up with Veep buzz and poll chat. There’s a constant tug toward speculation as opposed to analysis: who will win in November versus what is going on in the country. Large numbers of people get sidelined by the flash and the noise; they immerse themselves in the media coverage of politics without ever getting closer to an understanding of how power really works in America. Minds filled with infotainment, they not only lack much of the basic information that would allow them to get out of the spectator seats and down onto the field of play; they also lack — because no one ever teaches it — the ability to discriminate between trivia and real news.

Campaign coverage is one the things in which the legacy media is most heavily invested (figuratively as well as literally) and as a result the intellectual weakness of the foundations of the modern media’s approach to news is painfully evident.  The legacy press is frequently attacked for being biased, which it often is, but the real problem is lack of discrimination: so much money and space go to what people used to call vanity (by which they meant emptiness and pointlessness rather than pride and conceit) that mainstream coverage is more like cotton candy than anything else: bright, sweet, evanescent and insubstantial — but hard to see through or keep clear of.

I don’t say this in the spirit of Savonarola. A lot of people like cotton candy and trips to the State Fair. And the media, legacy or otherwise, must operate within the framework of a competitive marketplace. The circus will go on because people like circuses and there is money to be made in producing them.

But there are, I think, people in this country who want something more substantial. There are people who want to know what’s going on because they are trying to act effectively in this world and they need critical information and useful insights. They may be political leaders and policy makers trying to make the right decisions in tumultuous times. They may be professionals steering careers and social institutions in a changing environment. They may be investors who want to think more clearly about where opportunity really lies. They may be students and young people who really want to make their lives count. They may be parents or teachers trying to prepare the next generation for life in a confusing and dangerous world.

Anybody can have some cotton candy and a corn dog once in a while without ill effects, but Olympic athletes in training need better nutrition than that. Anybody can waste a few hours chewing over Veep speculations or trying to predict something that nobody can really know today but that everybody will know tomorrow.

But for people who are more interested in shaping the future, it’s important to grasp that this is one of those times when politics feels more important than usual but in fact matters less. The status quo doesn’t fit well and doesn’t work well so we look toward politics for answers, but the politicians don’t have what we need.

This is not anybody’s fault. As regular readers know, our view is that the US stands at an uncomfortable transition point between eras. We are between social models. The blue model of twentieth century mass production, mass consumption society based on stable corporate oligopoly, bloc voting and government regulation in a relatively closed national economy has foundered and it cannot, so far as we can see here, be restored. But we have at best only a very dim and incomplete sense of what could replace it.
This means that we are at a moment of maximum discomfort nationally, and we want our politicians and leaders to fix things — but that neither party really knows what to do. On the whole, the Democrats stand for restoring the blue model and Republicans oppose that and so far, so good. The choices between the parties seem to be growing more clear as the problems resulting from the decay of the blue model take a larger toll.

Yet neither party can offer the smooth path to a stable and affluent future that voters want. The Democrats know what they want but can’t deliver it because it is undeliverable. The Republicans know what they don’t want but are not able to describe the future they would like to see — much less show how they can manage the transition fairly and kindly because they don’t really know what the goal looks like.

Our problem is that the time isn’t ripe: the real work of our society right now isn’t about political competition. It is about re-imagining, reinventing and restructuring core institutions and professions. Our health care system is wasteful and poorly organized and if in the next generation we don’t fundamentally reorganize it the country will go broke. Our educational system from kindergarten through grad school needs a variety of upgrades and innovations. Mass employment through manufacturing cannot support the kind of middle class society it once did; conventional big box retail cannot do it; government employment and subsidies can’t do it. Americans must find new ways to organize themselves for work and production, and we must learn to produce different (better and more interesting) goods. We must complete the transition from a late stage industrial society to an early stage information society and it’s something that nobody has ever done before in the history of the world.

Neither party, it must be emphasized, knows what to do about these issues. To a very large degree the solutions are outside politics. Policy and therefore politics will play a significant role ultimately in either furthering or retarding the changes we need, but so much of the shape of the future is still unknown that nobody can really tell us what should be done and in what order to create the best possible conditions in which a brighter future most quickly and most stably emerge.

The legacy media are going to have a tough job shifting from noisy political pseudo-drama (much of which has more in common with professional wrestling than real politics) to the kind of substance based reporting that people actually need. Covering the revolutions in higher ed, medicine, state and municipal governance (including things like the pension crisis) is much more important than having talking heads gas about potential Veep picks or speculate about debate strategies and poll trends. But it’s hard for legacy organizations with their heavy fixed costs, pension overhangs and creaking business models to pull away from campaign infotainment and invest in real news.

Among the American institutions in need of reinvention is the serious press; the intellectual framework of the legacy media is as broken as its business model. At Via Meadia we are trying to explore new ways of thinking about news as well as new ways of covering it. This almost infinitely prolonged presidential campaign, the world’s largest and longest running State Fair, has us thinking hard about what serious people really need to know about American politics, and how that essential information can be provided without the cotton candy.

 

[a_majoor]

Reality derailed the "narrative". It will be interesting to see how this plays out:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/09/12/the-day-the-roof-fell-in/

The Day The Roof Fell In
Walter Russell Mead

Sometimes trouble blows up out of a clear blue sky. That’s what happened to the White House yesterday.

Coming out of the Democratic Convention, despite an uninspiring speech, President Obama had a united party and a comfortable bounce. While the economy was no great shakes, the President’s stewardship of foreign affairs helped give his administration an air of competence and professionalism. At a time when war-weary and terror-wary Americans, buffeted by storms at home and upheavals abroad, want nothing more than a quiet life, “no drama” Obama was ready to campaign as a safe and experienced steward of the national interest against a gaffe-prone challenger.

But that was before 9/11/12, the day the roof fell in. The Chicago teacher strike raised doubts about the President’s domestic leadership, the publication of Bob Woodward’s new book raised questions about his economic management and political skills, and 11 years to the day after the 9/11 attack, radical America-hating Islamists stormed the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Benghazi, assassinated the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others even as U.S. and Israeli relations sank to another low point.

“No drama” Obama is in it now: his ex-chief of staff is locked in a high profile cage fight with one of the most important unions and donors in the Democratic stable in his home town; his humanitarian intervention in Libya has created yet another bloody Middle East imbroglio for the United States; his efforts to reconcile the U.S. and moderate Islamism—in part by distancing the U.S. from Israel—have angered Israel without reducing Islamist bitterness against the United States.

And in the middle of all this, a misguided U.S. embassy employee in Egypt issued a groveling “apology tweet” condemning a privately made film whose unflattering portrayal of the Prophet of Islam was stoking mob violence. Even as pictures of the U.S. flag being torn down at the Cairo embassy flashed across the world, Secretary Clinton was disavowing the ill-conceived tweet—and critics were jumping on the incident as a sign of confusion and appeasement in the administration’s approach to Middle East radicalism.

The Middle East mess calls President Obama’s policy of engagement with democratic forces in the region (much more similar to his predecessor’s approach than either President Obama or anybody else is willing to acknowledge) into question. The events in Libya and Egypt—combined with the bloody chaos in Syria—make Americans more eager to wash their hands of this tormented region. They don’t want to bomb, they don’t want to build; they want to get out. Getting out of Iraq was popular; getting in to Libya was not—and going in to Syria looks, politically, about as smart as sticking your hand into a wood chipper.

The politics of this are at one level quite tricky for Republicans. It is not as if there was some magically effective Middle Eastern policy that the Obama administration is obstinately refusing to employ. Many American voters are likely to support whichever candidate they think will be less likely to get the country more deeply embroiled in the Middle East. “Apology tours” are unpopular, but after eleven years of unsatisfactory results, so are wars. Denouncing President Obama for insufficient hawkishness will stir some people up, but it may quietly reinforce the determination of many others to keep executive power out of the hands of a party which looks to be just a little bit too quick on the draw.

The order and competence dimension of a presidential election should not be underestimated. Voters generally don’t want presidents who drive the U.S. government like it was a Ferrari. They want a comfortable, safe ride; their kids are in the back seat of the car. Yesterday’s events damage President Obama because they call into question the story the campaign wants to tell—that President Obama is a calm and laid-back, though ultimately decisive person who brings order to a dangerous world and can be trusted with the car keys. But if Republicans respond by looking wild eyed and excitable (remember John McCain’s response to the financial crisis in 2008?), bad times will actually rally people to stick with the devil they know.

Yesterday rocked President Obama’s world and gave Governor Romney’s campaign some new openings. But one day in a long campaign is just one day. We still don’t know how these events will reverberate across the Middle East or how the U.S. response will develop. In some ways, trouble overseas distracts attention from the White House’s current domestic problems—the Woodward book and the Chicago strike. And the President can thank his stars that the German Constitutional Court decided not to plunge the world economy into crisis this morning and allowed the German government to complete the ratification of the most recent European bailout agreements.

As the dust settles, there will be more to say — about the politics of Egypt, the chaos in Libya, the President’s leadership, the strike in Chicago, the nature of blasphemy, the pitfalls of public diplomacy in the age of social media, the Israeli-Iranian confrontation and the state of the campaign. And there will be time to remind readers again about the courage and patriotism of so many American diplomats around the world like Christopher Stevens, the ambassador we are mourning today. But yesterday’s events should remind us that all the models and all the “laws” of politics that political scientists labor to uncover are really just rules of thumb and probability calculations. Presidential elections are driven by events as well as by “forces”, and many of the most important events are inherently unpredictable until, quite suddenly, they occur.

November is still a very long way off, and the world remains a radically unpredictable place.

 

[cupper]

It is very interesting that Romney himself appears to be the only one who has decided to go on the attack. His own running mate seems to be fairly subdued in his response, and Congressional GOP leaders have been just as muted in their comments over the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi.

Romney's response claiming that the Egyptian Embassy issued an apology for "American Values" was patently wrong. The Embassy issued a statement before the protests began condemning the anti-islamic film, but did not apologize for any actions. Even after the protesters left the embassy grounds, the Embassy issued a tweet stating that the invasion of the grounds would not deter form their promotion of free speech or criticizing bigotry.

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=161025953&m=161025924

The money quote of this day goes to President Obama:

"Governor Romney has a tendency to shoot first and aim later, and as President one of the things I've learned is that you can't do that."

Romney made a gamble to try and take away from the President's advantage in Foreign Policy and National Security, and lost. And it only proves the point that he lacks a sense of realpolitik, and needs to work on gaining the skills needed in the Foreign policy realm. His statements may have cost some independent votes from concerns that he may lead the country into another military foray.

 

[a_majoor]

As if you really didn't know the Legacy media is in the tank, transcript and video on this link here of media coordinating prior to a press conference by Governor Romney. The tone on the video is pretty illustrative. OF course, after the discovery of  the "Journolist" emails, this should come as no surprise, but the brazen nature and lack of caution when doing this is. The repeated "Governor, Governor" souonds a lot like the press heckling during Governor Romney's European trip; after which the press declared "victory" although a close reading of the events (and watching non Americna coverage) woudl suggest otherwise:


http://www.therightscoop.com/exclusive-open-mic-captures-press-coordinating-questions-for-romney-no-matter-who-he-calls-on-were-covered/

EXCLUSIVE: Open mic captures press coordinating questions for Romney “no matter who he calls on we’re covered”
Posted by The Right Scoop The Right Scoop on September 12th, 2012 in Politics | 660 Comments
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Before Romney issued his statement today, an open mic capture the press coordinating questions to ask Romney, with one saying “no matter who he calls on we’re covered on the one question”. I’ve transcribed it to the best of my ability but the audio is below for verification:

I’ve labeled one as the CBS News reporter as I believe it is Nancy Cordes who works for CBS News. If I’ve gotten that wrong I apologize and will correct.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: …pointing out that the Republicans… *unintelligible* …Obama….

    CBS REPORTER: That’s the question.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: *unintelligible*

    CBS REPORTER: Yeah that’s the question. I would just say do you regret your question.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Your question? Your statement?

    CBS REPORTER: I mean your statement. Not even the tone, because then he can go off on…

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: And then if he does, if we can just follow up and say ‘but this morning your answer is continuing to sound…’ – *becomes unintelligble*

    CBS REPORTER: You can’t say that..

    **Later**

    CBS REPORTER: I’m just trying to make sure that we’re just talking about, no matter who he calls on we’re covered on the one question.

    UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Do you stand by your statement or regret your statement?

UPDATE: Newsbusters says the the CBS News reporter is Jan Crawford and she was discussing this with the NPR reporter Ari Shapiro

 

[Brad Sallows]

"Governor Romney has a tendency to shoot first and aim later, and as President one of the things I've learned is that you can't do that."

I guess the two sides will see it differently.  The other view is that Romney is comfortable making decisions based on principles and incomplete information - wouldn't we all like to have complete information - and that Obama can't take a position on anything without taking time to calculate his personal political advantage.

 

[Haletown]

So for months Obama has been bragging and boasting about getting Obama. He even has made a central theme in his reelection efforts . .  . "Osama is dead, GM is alive" or "We came. We saw.  He died". Laugh, laugh laugh.


So after rubbing their noses in it for months for domestic political maybe it was really a catastrophic foreign policy gaff to make fun of passionate people well versed in terrorism and getting even.


Afterall, the mobs in Egypt & Libya were changing "Osama, Obama"

 

[tomahawk6]

The Presidents policies are fair game. I remembered after 9-11 the democrats tried to make political hay out of the tragedy. During much of OIF and OEF it was all doom and gloom - until they get into office.