She's Running

And, after last week's jobs report, don't think for a minute that she can't win.

Be afraid. Be very afraid:

Pundits speak of [Sarah Palin's] lack of professional organization. What they don't speak of so often is her willingness to say and do things very few politicians will. She will play the race card powerfully, often and repeatedly. She will run a campaign against Obama as an un-American. She will run on hatred of elites, will turn every sad gaffe, lie or untruth into "truth", she will deploy religious motifs more effectively than any Republican candidate in modern times. In the last campaign she accused Obama of being a friend of terrorists, and was prevented from using Jeremiah Wright in the last few weeks of the campaign. She will make the Willie Horton ad look like happytalk.

Most responsible politicians do not throw gasoline on a cultural tinderwood. But remember Tucson. Even then, she could show no restraint, no regret, no responsibility. Even when a politician was shot in the head, she tried to divide and conquer. And the [mainstream media] have no idea how to handle her, how to cope with her, how to expose her. She destroyed them last time and somehow perpetuated the meme that they destroyed her. This is a dangerous, dangerous person.

Do yourself a favor. If you want to know what America Amerika might look like under a Palin presidency, read Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America." It will send chills.

Very Bad News on the Jobs Front

Preliminary figures show only 54,000 jobs were created last month, much lower than the 160,000 economists predicted, extremely lower than the 200,000 jobs per month needed just to keep up with population growth, and devastatingly lower than the 400,000+ needed to recoup the jobs lost since the economic collapse started in 2007.

Yet the tea-bagger led House of Representatives' idea of a jobs growth program consists of a 10 page pamphlet containing large font and lots of pretty pictures, yet no solid, workable ideas of how to get businesses to start hiring again.

The Democratic-led Senate seems to be paralyzed on any issues that come before it, let alone a jobs bill, as they are shivering at the possibility of losing their slim majority there next year.

And President Obama, despite this unexpected upward tick in unemployment, continues to keep his economic team in place; an economic team that, as Bill Clinton's underlings, helped draft laws, signed by Mr. Clinton and abused by George W. Bush, that drove us over the proverbial cliff.

It is plainly obvious that previous economic policies aren't working, and that new, bold leadership is needed, both at the United States Treasury and on the economic side of the President's cabinet.

Mark my words, if unemployment remains stuck in the 9% area all the way to November of 2012, or if, ugh, it climbs higher, then Mr. Obama is ripe for the picking.  And if you think things are bad now, today's economy will be a cakewalk compared to the Bush-redux policies of a "President Romney" or a "President Palin."

UPDATE: Nate Silver suggests the unemployment rate isn't necessarily a sure fire predictor of presidential re-election (with re-election defined as either incumbent candidate or incumbent party).  His argument is solid, and one hopes beyond hope that Americans will remember that it was the previous administration's policies that drove us into the abyss, and that if weren't for President Obama's policies, we'd be smack dab in the middle of a second Great Depression.  Voters did, after all, re-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, and a third time in 1940, despite unemployment numbers well above 10% because they remembered vividly that 12 years of Republican rule prior to FDR left the entire country in ruins.

But...

Barack Obama, while pushing through policies that staunched the bleeding, had his hands tied by a rather unscrupulous Republican minority in the U.S. Senate, with the hapless Harry Reid allowing them to filibuster every piece of proposed economic growth legislation.  Had the President made a strong, loud push for such a jobs bill - had he gone to-to-toe with the Boner and McConnell - Americans might be more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt next year.

But the President has been largely silent on the issue, refusing time and again to explain to the American people (a la Reagan in 1981) that the mess left on his desk by the previous Republican-led administration was a mountainous pile of diarrhea, and that it will take very slow growth over a period of ten years to get us back on track.  It is my sincere belief that because of that refusal to explain things to the American people, if unemployment isn't at 8% and trending downward in November, 2012, the only thing American voters in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will see at the end of a brutal campaign by the Republican ticket, is a black Democrat who was unable to right the economic ship of state; and, despite their reservations of Republican economics, enough people in those states could easily hand the Electoral College to the GOP ticket.

She's Running

Be afraid. Be. Very. Afraid.

At This Point In 2007 and 1991

Over the weekend, Political Wire asked, "Do early polls mean anything?"

The answer is a solid, unequivocal "no."

At this point in 2007, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were on their way to cakewalk wins in their respective primaries, with Giuliani beating the former first lady by a small margin in 2008 general election polling.

Over Memorial Day weekend in 1991, President George H. W. Bush enjoyed approval ratings up near 70% following the successful completion of the Persian Gulf War. He seemed so invincible for reelection that the heavy guns on the Democratic side sat out the 1992 presidential race. A year and a half later, with the economy in recession, Mr. Bush received only 37% of the national vote, the lowest tally for a sitting president since 1912.

So, no, the polls at this point mean nothing. The Republican field is still very fluid and lackluster, and, despite that, unless unemployment makes it way down to 8% or lower, the President should be considered vulnerable for re-election.

She's Running

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Daniels Will Not Run

Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana has announced he will not run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.


Many old-school conservatives and right-leaning independents were hoping Daniels would join the circus, heaping praise on his fiscal acumen. 

Many forget, however, that Daniels, as the head of the White House budget office from 2001 to 2003, was the architect of the Bush economic program that buried the United States under a tremendous pile of shit in 2008, and from which we are still digging out.
  
If he was the Republicans best hope for 2012, then I must say...I like Obama's chances.

Flaming Republicans

Quote of the Day:

So the question is, will 2012 be the Republican version of [the Democrats'] 1972 or the Republican version of [the Democrats'] 1984? They could nominate a base hero like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich and go down in epic flames [1972 - McGovern]. Or they could nominate a worthy timeserver like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty and go down in flames [1984 - Mondale].

Or, of course, they could pray for some kind of gigantic global disaster — maybe an economic collapse, an oil spike, or a drawn-out hostage crisis — in which case they can win with anybody. That seems like a pretty weak hope, but right now the fever dreams of the GOP base are so debilitating that it's hard to see them coming together and beating Barack Obama any other way.

-Kevin Drum, on the despair the Republicans seem to be suffering over their 2012 presidential prospects.