American Way: Barack Obama, 2008 man of hope and change, becomes 2012 candidate of fear and status quo

[Geee]

UK Telegraph:


So how much trouble is Barack Obama in? Well, it doesn’t get much worse.

His approval rating is hovering just above 40 per cent. Unemployment is stuck at 9.1 per cent; the White House forecast that it would be about 6.5 per cent by now if its economic stimulus plan was passed. Essentially, the American economy is grinding to a halt.

More importantly, what is Obama going to do about it? In terms of policy, the White House has run out of whatever ideas it ever had.
Obama, who declined even to comment on the latest jobless figures on Friday, is like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

Having squandered the first two years of his presidency ramming through a healthcare reform that could not win the support of a single Republican on Capitol Hill and is now mired in the courts, he finds himself confronting a divided Congress.

So the only thing that matters to the people around Obama, who are eager for another four years of employment, is his re-election. I’ve long thought that Obama himself is lukewarm about continuing in a job where the adulation he is used to is in short supply. For Democratic powerbrokers, however, maintaining their grasp of the White House is everything.

That was what last week’s debacle over Obama’s forthcoming speech to Congress was about. Obama knows that since the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in last November’s Tea Party wave, there has been no chance of passing bipartisan legislation.
His request to speak on Wednesday night at the exact moment the Republicans vying to replace him were due to debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California was a blatant, if botched, political power play.

White House aides seemed to think that Republicans would meekly allow him to eclipse the debate or appear petty and partisan by rebuffing him. In fact, Washington’s political establishment immediately recognised that the breach in protocol was by Obama, not John Boehner, the House Speaker, and the White House swiftly climbed down and agreed to Thursday.

The rhetoric afterwards gave a foretaste of the scorched earth re-election campaign Obama will run. While Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, gave an impression of a choirboy who would not let butter melt in his mouth, the hardball anonymous briefings were taking place.