Obama just finished his first year as President, a young newcomer without a lot of experience who promised change.  How did his first year stack up against the previous guy, a youngish newcomer without a lot of experience who promised change?  You can score it yourself, and you can accuse me of partisanship, but I don’t see the argument that Bush’s first year in office was a bell ringer.

Financial Highlights

Obama

Dow at the beginning of the year: 8,281.22
Dow at the end of the year: 10,428.05

Bush

Dow at the beginning of the year: 10,887.36
Dow at the end of the year: 9,920

Advantage Obama

Obama inherited an economy that had incinerated on the previous guy’s watch.
Bush inherited a massive budget surplus.  9/11 didn’t help the market, but hey, it happened on his watch. [Read more →]

With great care I draw your attention to an article by Lee Siegel called The Zero-Sacrifice Presidency.

Obama tells us that we can have quality, universal health care without increasing the deficit. He tells us that he intends to have the 9/11 detainees given a fair trial in a civilian court but assures us that the trials will end in convictions. He declares that he will wage war in Afghanistan, but pledges to start bringing the troops home in 18 months. And everybody nevertheless takes these contradictory, irreconcilable statements seriously, as they parse, analyze, scrutinize Obama’s every word for some kind of coherent meaning. The president is like the character Chance in the novel and movie Being There, whose every fatuous utterance was celebrated for its profundity.

Some of Obama’s defenders chastise his exasperated listeners for their inability to detect the president’s “complexity.” But a fantasy of universal popularity that panders to every conflicting interest simultaneously is not the same thing as “complexity.” It is complexity if I tell my wife that I have to move to another state where I know I can find work, but that I realize the strain it will put on our marriage, and that I know the effect it will have on our child, and that I am aware of the consequences of such an attempt if I don’t find a job, having spent so much money on moving and establishing myself in a new place. It is not complexity if I tell my wife that I have to move to another state where I know I can find work, but that I will be back next week, and with lots of money.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my caution is based on two points.  The first is that I was and largely still am an Obama supporter (though I fully admit my reasons may not be rational).  The second is that I made a promise to myself that I would stop writing political screeds. So why this? [Read more →]