Well, not yet …

Unfortunately for Obama, the adviser had it right. When the President travels abroad and gives a speech, it is not a domestic, electoral political speech, but that’s because the President actually has the office already.  Barack Obama hasn’t yet even officially won his party’s nomination, let alone be elected as our head of state.  The adviser explained rather neatly why holding big rallies in Berlin is inappropriate for a candidate running for the US presidency.  It’s obviously a political rally, made so by the fact that Obama is running for the White House.

They want to have this both ways.  As Brown reports, the Obama campaign has framed this trip as a means for Obama to get to know the people with whom he’ll deal if he wins the election.  That’s political in and of itself, and that doesn’t account for the massive rally at the Siegessäule monument.  If all Obama wanted was a listening tour, he would have confined himself to diplomatic meetings and fact-finding events.  Instead, he wants to have a massive rally, which is on its face a political event and a political speech, unless Obama does nothing but talk about the World Cup.

Gergen: We only have one president at a time

In one of those front-page editorials disguised as "news" stories, the New York Times blames "the lucrative lending practices"...

Read Full Article

Blaming the lenders is the party line of congressional Democrats as well. What we need is more government regulation of lenders, they say, to protect the innocent borrowers from "predatory" lending practices.

Before going further down that road, it may be useful to look back at what got us into this mess in the first place.

It was not that many years ago when there was moral outrage ringing throughout the media because lenders were reluctant to lend in certain neighborhoods and because banks did not approve mortgage loan applications from blacks as often as they approved mortgage loan applications from whites.

All this was an opening salvo in a campaign to get Congress to pass laws forcing lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to and in places where they would not otherwise put their money.

Shocking as it may be to some, lenders are in the business of making money, and they don't much care whose money it is, so long as they get paid. Politicians, on the other hand, are in the business of getting votes, and they don't much care whose votes it is — or what they have to say or do in order to get those votes.

It was government intervention in the financial markets, which is now supposed to save the situation, that created the problem in the first place.

Laws and regulations pressured lending institutions to lend to people that they were not lending to, given the economic realities.

The Community Reinvestment Act forced them to lend in places where they didn't want to send money, and where neither they nor politicians wanted to walk.

Now that this whole situation has blown up in everybody's face, the government intervention that brought on this disaster in is supposed to save the day.

Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others — regardless of what the facts may be. Politicians get away with this to the extent that we gullibly accept their words and look to them as political messiahs.

Obama: If I had it to do over again, I’d still oppose the surge; Update: “Clearly there’s been an enormous improvement”

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.

We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade, according to Treasury Department studies of actual tax returns. It's hard to stay king of the hill in America for long.

This is the week that the Democratic party ran up the white flag when it comes to the surge in Iraq. Leading the surrender was none other than Barack Obama, the Democratic party's presumptive nominee for president and among the most vocal critics of the counterinsurgency plan that has transformed the Iraq war from a potentially catastrophic loss to what may turn out to be a historically significant victory.

On Monday, Obama wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he acknowledged the success of the surge. "In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge," Obama wrote, "our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda--greatly weakening its effectiveness." A day later, Obama gave a speech in which he declared for the first time that "true success" and "victory in Iraq" were possible. In addition, the Obama campaign scrubbed its presidential website to remove criticism of the surge.

Obama, in typical fashion, is trying to use the success of the surge he opposed to justify his long-held commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq as quickly as possible. But turning Iraq into a winning political issue won't be nearly as easy as Obama once thought. He has stepped into a trap of his own making.

The trap was set when Obama repeatedly insisted that his superior "judgment" on Iraq is more important than experience in national security affairs. Judgment, according to Obama, is what qualifies him to be commander in chief. So what can we discern about Obama's judgment on the surge, easily the most important national security decision since the Iraq war began in March 2003?

To answer that question, we need to revisit what Obama said about the surge around the time it was announced. In October 2006--three months before the president's new strategy was unveiled--Obama said, "It is clear at this point that we cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve, and we have to do something significant to break the pattern that we've been in right now."

. . . Democrats, rather than welcoming the progress, grew agitated. They embraced with religious zeal the belief that the Iraq war was lost; they therefore viewed the success of the surge as a terribly inconvenient development, one they sought to deny to the point that they looked silly and out of touch. Worse, Democrats acted as if they had a vested interest in an American defeat.

Rarely has a political party been so uniformly wrong, in such an obvious way, on such an important matter. And when Americans cast their vote on November 4, they should carefully consider how Barack Obama and the entire Democratic party fought ferociously and relentlessly to undermine a policy that has worked extraordinarily well and may yet prove to be among the most successful military plans in modern times.

This is all true. You could look it up: A recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, and the economy didn't contract last quarter. But Gramm was pilloried for his factual statement. Before his interview with the Times, it was assumed (by professional assumers) that Gramm would be offered a high-ranking economic-policymaking job in a McCain administration, maybe even secretary of the Treasury; now assumers are assuming he'll never get such a cool job--especially after he made matters worse by insisting a day later that the fact he had asserted was, in fact, a fact: "Every word I said was true."

True, true, all offensively true: but not as unmentionable as the truths that Geraldine Ferraro let slip. "In 1984," Ferraro said a few months ago, "if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would not have been chosen as a vice presidential candidate." True! In the same way, Ferraro said, referring to Obama's amazing rise in presidential politics, "If Obama were a white man, he would not be in this position." Double true! Obama called her statement "absurd" and an example of "slice and dice politics"--a charge that would have stung if anyone had known what "slice and dice politics" meant.

Ferraro flailed away in protest at the resulting controversy, growing so desperate that she even agreed to appear with Bill O'Reilly. But she was doomed, and she probably knew it. One voice was raised in defense of her truth telling, though: that of Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television. He's black too.

"Geraldine Ferraro said it right," said Johnson: Obama wouldn't be leading the presidential race if he were a white politician from Illinois with four years' experience in the U.S. Senate.

Then Johnson lamented the quality of talk in the presidential campaign. "It's almost impossible for anybody to say anything."