Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius raised eyebrows today during her Senate testimony about H1N1 readiness. A Washington Post blog explained that Kansas’ former governor had an outpatient procedure Tuesday to remove a basal cell carcinoma from her forehead.
“President Obama’s brief display of drive-by compassion Thursday in New Orleans was, for me, by far the worst outing of his presidency thus far — and the biggest disappointment,” columnist Eugene Robinson wrote. He said that “it was strange and disheartening that Obama would wait nine months to make his first visit to New Orleans as president. It was stunning that he would spend only a few hours on the ground and that he wouldn’t set foot in Mississippi or Alabama at all. But worst of all was the way he seemed to dismiss the idea that his administration could and should be doing much more.”
“Run? I can’t hardly walk.” — Former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, asked if he might run for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat next year
“Your Cash for Clunkers was the very last card. Now what’s a redneck like me gonna block up in my yard?” — Rep. Bill Otto, R-LeRoy, in an anti-Obama “RedNeck Rap” YouTube video some saw as racist
“It’s not lost on me that we’re both African-American and under 9 feet tall.” — Patrick Woods, Kansas SRS legislative liaison, on an incident in which Otto confused Woods with the much-older Health and Environment Secretary Rod Bremby
“The Obama administration really needs to get over itself.” So wrote John Nichols of the Nation, having had his fill of the White House’s official criticism of Fox News (for being too partisan and unfairly critical) and unofficial criticism of left-wing bloggers (for being insufficiently supportive). Nichols offered three facts to consider:
– “Since the founding of the republic, media outlets (the founders dismissed them as ‘damnable periodicals’) have been partisan.”
– “Presidents are supposed to rise above their own partisanship and engage with a wide range of media — even outlets that are hard on their administrations.”
– “The worst mistake a president or his administration can make is to try and ‘whip’ relatively like-minded writers and reporters into line.”
Nichols concluded: “Nothing — no attack by Glenn Beck, no blogger busting about Guantanamo — does more damage to Obama’s credibility or authority than the sense that a popular president is becoming the whiner-in-chief.”
President Obama vowed last weekend to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military. Much of the reporting about this policy in recent years has focused on soldiers who were outed. But Joseph Rocha wrote that the policy is sometimes used as a threat to keep people silent about abuse. He claims that he was hazed and physically assaulted by other soldiers who suspected that he was gay, but that he was afraid to report the abuse because it could lead to an investigation into his sexuality. “My leaders and fellow sailors were punishing me for keeping my sexuality to myself, punishing me because I wouldn’t ‘tell.’” He also claimed that some superiors threatened women to keep quiet about sexual assaults by suggesting that they were lesbians.
From Eugene Robinson’s column: “The president of the United States wins the Nobel Peace Prize and Rush Limbaugh joins with the Taliban in bitterly denouncing the award? Glenn Beck has a conniption fit and demands that the president not accept what may be the world’s most prestigious honor? The Republican National Committee issues a statement sarcastically mocking our nation’s leader — elected, you will recall, by a healthy majority — as unworthy of such recognition? Why, oh why, do conservatives hate America so?”
Reps. Jerry Moran, R-Hays, and Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, have been trying to out-conservative each other in their GOP primary contest next year for the U.S. Senate. Nearly every week, one or the other issues a press release aimed at appealing to some right-wing concern, real or imagined. Last week Moran introduced a resolution calling on President Obama to stop appointing “czars.” But as experts told a Senate panel last week, “czar” is a made-up media term, and such advisers have been common among past presidents. FactCheck.org determined that President George W. Bush had more such advisers than President Obama does. That caused Kenny Johnston, executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, to observe: “For eight years Jerry Moran said nothing as Bush made a record number of executive appointments. To speak up now is nothing more than an attempt to court far-right primary voters.”
Much of the reaction to the news that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize has been surprise that he was awarded the prize so soon in his presidency. Obama has made some significant efforts to improve diplomacy and to reach out to the Muslim world, and he has called for a world free of nuclear weapons. But he hasn’t accomplished much yet, other than improving the world’s opinion of the United States.
Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, wants to revoke ACORN’s tax-exempt status. But in making that case, Tiahrt doesn’t need to follow the example of talk-radio hosts and exaggerate the link between ACORN and President Obama. In a statement Tiahrt read recently on the House floor, he claimed that ACORN was “the political machine of President Obama” and said that Obama paid ACORN more than $800,000 to “help him win the White House.” But as FactCheck.org determined, Obama has had minimal association with ACORN since he helped represent the group and other plaintiffs in a “motor-voter” case in 1995. Obama’s campaign did pay ACORN $800,000 during the Democratic primary as part of a “get out the vote” effort. But that’s 0.1 percent of the more than $700 million Obama spent during the 2008 campaign.
September was a rough month for President Obama in Kansas, judging from the latest SurveyUSA poll co-sponsored by KWCH, Channel 12. Only 39 percent of Kansans surveyed approve of the job he’s doing, down six percentage points in a month and down 23 points since he took office. The month ended with approval ratings for Sens. Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback slipping a few percentage points to 54 and 48 percent, respectively. Gov. Mark Parkinson saw his approval number rise four points to 53 percent, the highest in his five months in office.
By a large margin, Barack Obama is the most overexposed president in our nation’s history. It is impossible to get away from his image and voice. A study by Towson University professor Martha Joynt Kumar showed that Obama had done 114 media interviews after his first seven months in office, about three times more than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at the same point in their tenures. It seems that the president believes that the more he appears on television and says the same thing, the more support he will generate for his health care plan. Unfortunately for Obama, just the opposite is occurring. People are not swayed by Obama. The president should forgo governing and pursue his real dream, starring on his own television channel, the Obama Channel, all Barack, all the time. — Jeff Crouere, BayouBuzz.com
Because he is the object of unceasing criticism, Barack Obama is also the object of unceasing attention. Day after day and night after night, his is the face we see and the voice we hear. Like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he bestrides the political landscape like a colossus. And his opponents? Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, Fox News host Glenn Beck, and GOP lawmakers John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint and Joe Wilson. As these pygmies shoot their little arrows, Obama stands there shaking them off and accepting apologies. He takes shot after shot, and not only is he still standing, he’s still smiling. If health care reform is achieved, Obama will get the credit. If it is not, the blame will be distributed among all those whose exertions he encouraged by appearing to do nothing. And when it is all over, it will still be all Obama, all of the time. — Stanley Fish, NYTimes.com
“Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president ‘41,’ will be remembered as our last ‘legitimate’ president,” columnist Thomas Friedman wrote. He noted how the right hounded Bill Clinton from day one with the bogus Whitewater scandal, and how the left never let George W. Bush forget about the disputed 2000 election. And now, Friedman wrote, the right wing is trying to delegitimize President Obama “using everything from smears that he is a closet ‘socialist’ to calling him a ‘liar’ in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen.”
Friedman argued that it is OK to criticize Obama’s policies or even his character. “But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble,” Friedman wrote. “We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.”
An article by the conservative Hudson Institute concludes that President Obama has a “policy approach” to governing. Rather than focusing on incremental changes and fixes, Obama prefers comprehensive policies aimed at making systems more rational and coherent. While that may be admirable, columnist David Broder warns that such an approach usually isn’t very successful because of the messy legislative process. Congress has 535 members, all with their own agendas or parochial interests. Add in the influence of special interests, and it makes large changes difficult. For example, Broder said, the energy bill started out in the House as a “reasonably coherent set of trade-offs that would reduce carbon emissions and help the atmosphere” and ended up as “a grab bag of subsidies and payoffs to various industries and groups.” Broder wrote: “Democracy and representative government are a lot messier than the progressives and their heirs, including Obama, want to admit. No wonder they are so often frustrated.”
Many of those complaining about President Obama’s “unelected and unaccountable czars” seem to have a bad case of amnesia — or at least selective outrage. After all, President Bush had more such “czars” than President Obama supposedly has. Yet during the Bush years, columnist Dick Polman noted, “there was nary a cry about imperial Russia from the president’s congressional cheerleaders, nor from his fans on Fox.”
Despite President Obama’s assurances today at the United Nations that the United States understands “the gravity of the climate threat ” and is “determined to act,” world leaders are justified in being skeptical. The fact is that many Americans, including most GOP members of Congress, are unconvinced of this threat and are unsupportive of actions that would cost much money or require significant lifestyle changes. For example, the cap-and-trade bill in Congress faces strong opposition, and its Senate passage seems doubtful. Yet as Obama also argued: “Our generation’s response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it — boldly, swiftly and together — we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe.”
Eyebrows have been raised at President Obama’s decision to let Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius lead his inquiry into how best to reduce costly medical malpractice lawsuits. That’s because before Sebelius was HHS secretary, Kansas governor or Kansas insurance commissioner, she was director of the then-Kansas Trial Lawyers Association. On Thursday the Obama administration announced that states and health care systems would receive $25 million in grants to begin a national experiment on alternatives to malpractice suits. Asked about her tort reform assignment by the Washington Post, Sebelius said: “I think I’m just the person to do it because I think I understand the system of litigation very well. I understand that we want to, as the president has always said, compensate injured victims, but the defensive medicine is not helpful to the overall cost in the system. The best opportunity is to raise the quality of care and lower medical errors, so there are lots of strategies we can put in place.” Many are skeptical, including Weekly Standard blogger Mary Katharine Ham, who translated Sebelius’ answer as: “The fox is uniquely qualified to guard the henhouse, because he understands the delicious taste of poultry very well.”
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/VxKIcrDsJAs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Here’s a short YouTube video that mixes Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst with Kanye West’s interruption during the MTV Video Music Awards. President Obama reportedly called West a “jackass” in an off-the-record comment this week.
Was the heckling of President Obama by Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., motivated by racism? More broadly, is race at the core of much of the passionate opposition to Obama and his proposals? New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd thinks so. When Wilson yelled “You lie!” Dowd heard “You lie, boy!” She wrote: “Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted ‘liar’ at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson also suspects “that Obama’s race leads some of his critics to feel they have permission to deny him the legitimacy, stature and common courtesy that are any president’s due. I can’t prove this, however. And if I’m right, what’s anybody supposed to do about it? There’s no way to compel people to search their souls for traces of conscious or unconscious racial bias. We could have an interesting discussion about the historical image of the black man in American society, but that wouldn’t get us any closer to universal health care.”
When asked on “Fox News Sunday” whether Obama’s race was an issue for him, Wilson said, “No, no. Hey, I respect the president.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs also downplayed the role of race in protests. “I don’t think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin,” he said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., wants to have it both ways. He issued a statement last week saying that his yelling “You lie!” at President Obama was “inappropriate.” But then he let it be known that he issued the apology because House GOP leaders told him to, and he has been happy to receive campaign donations from people who applauded his outburst. Over the weekend, Wilson tried to play the victim, refusing to apologize to the House for violating its rules of conduct. “The American people are fed up with the political games in Washington,” he said in a statement.
Meanwhile, columnist Michael Kinsley noted the foolishness of House members for demanding that Wilson apologize. “The more times he is required to write ‘I will not call the president a liar’ on a special blackboard set up in the well of the House, the bigger hero he will become to a large chunk of the population,” Kinsley wrote. “And, of course, forcing him to grovel will not help to convince him or his supporters that the president is not a liar.”
“The political center looks like the white line running down the middle of a busy street — a foolish place to stand and an excellent place to get run over,” columnist Eugene Robinson wrote in urging President Obama not to compromise too much on health care reform or the rest of his agenda. Though he said that it is a core belief in Washington that “meeting in the middle” is the way to gain and keep the support of the vast political center in this country, Robinson argued that “many of the big decisions that have to be made are binary: yes or no. The terrain in the middle consists only of ‘maybe’ or ‘kind of,’ and I see no evidence that the country is in a ‘maybe’ or ‘kind of’ mood.”
On the Daily Beast, Conor Friedersdorf suggested that presidents, whatever their politics, stay out of classrooms. “I object to the automatic elevation of presidents generally to the role of ‘trusted moral leader,’” he wrote, “so I wish President Obama and all his successors would eschew that role, rather than entrenching its precedent more deeply. America requires constitutional officers and moral leaders. We’d save ourselves a lot of unnecessary trouble if we established a bright line between those roles, rather than blurring them in accordance with our ideological affection for the person who happens to be in power.”
Columnist David Brooks noted how President Obama “threw out enough rhetorical chum to keep the liberals happy” during his speech to Congress. But Brooks also noted how Obama staked out ground in the center on nearly every substantive issue, including the deficit. Brooks wrote: “Obama rested the credibility of his presidency on what you might call the Dime Standard. He was flexible about many things, but not this: ‘I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. Period.’ This sound bite kills the House health care bill. That bill would add $220 billion (that’s 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion (10 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the next 10 years. There is no way to get from the House bill to deficit neutrality. The president’s speech guarantees that the more moderate Senate Finance Committee bill will be the basis for the negotiations to come.”
Some GOP lawmakers apparently learned something from the August town hall meetings: how to be disrespectful and disruptive. During President Obama’s speech to Congress on health care Wednesday night, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., yelled “You lie” when Obama refuted the false claim that the reform proposals would provide benefits to illegal immigrants. Such an outburst could draw a formal reprimand if delivered at a routine session of the House, let alone a joint session with the president. Other lawmakers yelled “not true” and hissed or laughed during Obama’s address, which, ironically, called for civil conversations and made significant policy concessions to Republicans.
Despite all the noise, 60 percent of Kansans surveyed thought it was appropriate for President Obama to speak to schoolchildren Tuesday on the importance of taking responsibility for their own education, according to a SurveyUSA poll co-sponsored by KWCH, Channel 12. However, among self-identified Kansas conservatives, 55 percent thought the speech was inappropriate, and 32 percent of conservatives said they would choose to keep their children at home rather than have them hear the speech at school.
Two conservative columnists known for choosing their words with care are wearying of President Obama:
“He has been inordinately in the country’s face. He is ubiquitous. He is elevator music in our life. We can’t get away from him.” — George Will, on ABC’s “This Week”
“Mr. Obama has grown boring. And it’s not Solid Boring, which is fine in a president and may be good. It’s sort of Faux Eloquent Boring, especially on health care. . . . Mr. Obama always has the same sound, approach, logic, tone, modulation. He always has the same stance. There’s no humor or humility in it. News is surprise, and he never makes news.” — Peggy Noonan, Reagan speechwriter, in her Wall Street Journal column
