It Burns! It Burns!
We have reached the half-way point of the magical “First 100 Days” of any Administration — informally called the “First 50 Days” — a key moment to assess how a new Administration is making progress in the First 100 Days. And if you think that’s ridiculous, google “First 50 Days” and you’ll see that — yes, news sources referred to Obama “marking” his “First 50 Days” with, say, the Education Speech. Look further around and you’ll see that Fox News pundits made a big hooley hoo in looking at the adminstration’s “First 50 Days”.
Not directly related to the “First 50 Days” but in the same genus, Fred Barnes wrote a fairly tedious little essay. But, I don’t know that Fred Barnes is capable of writing a not tedious essay. But even if we give him the allowance to write boiler-plate Republican propaganda, the basic planks for this are just kind of off. He offers the judgement that Obama’s “don’t follow the gyrations of the stock market” is a gaffe, and plugs into the basic assumptions that overrate that as a measure of the Economy. And then he names two “Obamaphiles” who have turned on him. Who are these two “Obamaphiles”? Well, one of them Jon Stewart is currently engaged in a feud with, the other is the truest exemplier of the “Chattering Class” in column writing, I’d guage just a few pegs less banal than your Maureen Dowd.
Obama hasn’t failed. He’s been in office less than two months. But he is sowing the seeds of failure, both economically and politically. He doesn’t quite own the economy yet, but he does own the stock market. It’s a bet on the future. And so far the stock market has registered a resounding vote of no confidence in Obama’s economic policies. Nor has Obama helped matters with his seeming indifference to the uninterrupted decline in equities since his inauguration.
The budget scared prominent Obamaphiles like David Brooks of the New York Times and Jim Cramer, the boisterous financial broadcaster. Brooks wrote that Obama “is not who we thought he was.” Cramer said Obama is causing “the greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president.” Criticized for his comment by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, Cramer responded: “If that makes me an enemy of the White House, then call me a general of an army that Obama may not even know exists–tens of millions of people who live in fear of having no money saved when they need it and get poorer by the day.” Moderate Democrats and Republicans were also shaken and said so publicly. The business community, which has tried to appease Obama, is growing fearful.
Here’s the point: These are the people who drive centrist opinion. And the key to building a center-right coalition is drawing them away from Obama. The right is already in full anti-Obama mode. But attracting centrists and independents is something Republicans can’t pull off on their own. Now they are getting help.
And then his take on how the White House played Rush Limbaugh, similarly … off-ish.
Democratic anxiety over the possibility of losing centrists–what there is of it–was reflected in the White House campaign to identify talk show superstar Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican party. He’s not. Parties in the minority seldom have leaders except in parliamentary systems. But Limbaugh, though he may not appeal to centrists, is important. He and his followers are an indispensable part of an effective center-right coalition–a simple fact of political life that appears to have been lost on Republican snobs who would ostracize Limbaugh.
The second half of this paragraph may or may be true, but the first sentence — about this egging on from the Obama Administration to fill the current void of the opposition party with Rush Limbaugh is simply laughable. But going back to the “Conventional Wisdom” Center — expressed by Barnes with Brooks and… Cramer … and, while I can offer a partial defense of Cramer’s very bad record if pressed (but only a partial), if Cramer is indeed Bullish on Obama, that appears to mean that it is time for you to BUY your Obama.  Fred Barnes is missing something key here:
CNBC’s audience is not a demographic cross section of America. If it was a cross section, the network wouldn’t make any money; CNBC attracts advertisers not with the size of its audience but with its maleness and its affluence. The network gets about a quarter million viewers a day, a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, but those viewers have a median household net worth of more than $1.2 million. Still, the financial pundits flatter viewers into thinking, as Rick Santelli put it during his famous trading floor rant, that they are “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America.” For these guys, investors are America. Jim Cramer asked at one point, of the Obama administration, “Who do they think owns stocks?” As if the obvious answer is, “Everybody!” Obama, Cramer complained, “seemed proud that he ignored the [market] averages, as if they’re some sort of distraction, and not a precursor of the economy.”
The next sentence explains better the problem with the infatuation with the Stock Market than I’d be able to formulate:
I’m not going to argue that the Dow Jones is irrelevant to the economy, but the fundamental problem of the bubble years was that the Dow Jones was growing and our actual assets were not. We weren’t really getting richer. We were just pretending to get richer.
The matter of the stock market is that the problem arises when it does not correlate to reality. Hence its sour performance as of late is better than its previous — well, still tepid performance, for that reason.
While the Republican Fred Barnes fixates on supposed “opinion setters” of the Oracle that is Jim Cramer and the wonderer of the Simple People out of his Coastal climate David Brooks, Howard Fineman shows us the larger flickering from his fellow Chattering Classers:
Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK‘s.But, in ways both large and small, what’s left of the American establishment is taking his measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking.
They have some reasons to be concerned. I trace them to a central trait of the president’s character: he’s not really an in-your-face guy. By recent standards—and that includes Bill Clinton as well as George Bush—Obama for the most part is seeking to govern from the left, looking to solidify and rely on his own party more than woo Republicans. And yet he is by temperament judicious, even judicial. He’d have made a fine judge. But we don’t need a judge. We need a blunt-spoken coach.
Contradictorily with the “seeking to govern from the left and not woo Republican” line (largely a falsehood, not entirely as the Limbaugh fiasco shows, but give me a break) — a list of items, which he prefaces by saying is “contradictory”. This is a good sign of a complicated picture, and in these terms simply a matter that Obama Just Can’t Win. I’m forced to say that Howard Fineman’s column is a bit of chattering nittery.
Incidentally, a useful response to a common sentiment as of late, since your Howard Fineman brought it up:
That is what a “Greatest Fiscal Crisis Since the Great Depression, but Nowhere near as Dire — probably not worth the comparison in the grand scheme of things” looks like.