Morning Jolt - Oh Really, Barney?

NRO Newsletters . . .

Morning Jolt

. . . with Jim Geraghty

April 17, 2012

In This Issue . . .

1. The Meaningless Buzzwords of 2012: 'Fairness' and 'Trust'

2. Oh Really, Barney?

3. Hilary Rosen, Bill Maher, Who's Next?

4. Addendum

Here's your Tuesday Morning Jolt!

Enjoy.

Jim

1. The Meaningless Buzzwords of 2012: 'Fairness' and 'Trust'

The millionaire golfer who is known for his promises' having expiration dates thinks he can win the presidential election if it is all about "trust." Really. Alexis Simendinger at RealClearPolitics reports:

If the White House gets its political way, "trust" will be a word President Obama and his surrogates use in the next few weeks as often as Obama has talked about "fairness," and Mitt Romney, once dubbed as hollow to the core, will increasingly be ID'd as a card-carrying ultra-conservative who bobbles into Etch A Sketch moments because his core is causing him problems.

There are six words at the end of that last sentence that cry out for quote marks, but the deep-background rules imposed Monday at the White House preclude the use of direct quotes or identifying the three "senior administration officials" who sought to lead reporters into the next phase of the campaign as well as strategy for Congress' return to Washington.

Romney's core has been filling in with far-right positions on education, gay marriage, immigration, Afghanistan, Iraq, taxes, the economy, energy and the environment, one of the officials asserted. Those policies, together with Romney's remarkable degree of secrecy (imagine more quote marks) when it comes to his personal and professional approaches to problem-solving, will poison voters' trust in the governance Romney would bring to the White House, the officials added.

Simendinger quietly twists the knife a few paragraphs later:

If voters select the next president based on the state of the economy since 2009, the senior officials conceded that continued high unemployment and a slow recovery could complicate Obama's plea that middle-class voters trust his vision for the economy in a second term.

As long as Obama can get voters to ignore the state of the economy, he's golden!

2. Oh Really, Barney?

Now he tells us:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) thought President Obama was making a "mistake" in pressing for healthcare reform in 2010 and urged the White House to back off after Democrats lost their 60-seat majority in the Senate, the congressman tells New York magazine.

"I think we paid a terrible price for healthcare," Frank told the magazine in a lengthy interview as he prepares to retire at the end of his 16th term. "I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after [Sen.] Scott Brown [R-Mass.] won [in January 2010], I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform, but certainly not healthcare."

Democrats lost 66 House seats in the 2010 midterm elections. One political science paper estimated that about 25 of those losses could be linked directly to voting in favor of the healthcare reform law.

Frank, who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008, said Obama made the same mistake the Clintons did in the early 1990s by underestimating the concerns of people who already had healthcare coverage.

I can't remember who said it, but someone once argued that the unwritten subtitle of every Washington memoir was "If Only They Had Listened to Me." It looks as if Frank is eager to say how wise he was -- and how much more he knew than every other Democratic leader.

But William Jacobson writes at Legal Insurrection that in this case, it's actually true: Democrats really should have listened to Frank on this.

Barney has it pretty much correct here. There could have been health care reform if Obama started with points of agreement, accepted small gains, and worked with Republicans.

Instead, Obama flush with victory in 2008 and nursing a massive ego and misplaced sense of history, took an "I won" attitude just like on the Stimulus Plan. Except that on Obamacare, he couldn't even pick up the Republican stragglers he picked up on Stimulus ([Arlen] Specter defected shortly after Stimulus).

It was a trap of Obama's and the Democrat's own making. I noted just over two weeks before Obamacare passed in March 2010:

The health care fight has drained the Obama administration and agenda, and the entire Democratic Party. Right now, the Democrats are pushing forward only because they are in too deep. Having continued the battle despite the lack of popular support, Democrats have left themselves no way out.

There is no path to victory for Democrats in this battle. To fail to pass "something" will be a mortal blow to Obama's prestige; to pass "something" will be a mortal blow to Democrats in Congress in the November elections.

For Democrats, health care defeat has become defeat, and health care victory has become defeat.

If only the Democrats had listened to the voters of Massachusetts in January 2010. And to Barney Frank.

Doug Powers notices:

Barney didn't think it was a big enough mistake to vote against, however.

Frank went on to claim that it isn't Obamacare per se that is unpopular, but instead blamed opposition to the law on the selfishness of people who already have health care. . . .

To Barney Frank, no such thing as bad or incompetent legislation emerges from the left side of the aisle -- it's just that the public is too stupid and greedy to allow themselves to comprehend the genius.

As the law is implemented, those who pushed Obamacare are forced to ask "are you going to believe us or your lying eyes?" The public to a great degree is believing the latter, which to the left means it's well past time for a government takeover of the ophthalmology industry.

3. Hilary Rosen, Bill Maher, Who's Next?

I refer you to my Twitter feed, April 12, 5:45 p.m.:"So, who's going to go after Ann Romney next? Bill Maher? Ed Schultz? Rosie O'Donnell? Lawrence O'Donnell? Randi Rhodes? Alan Grayson?"

Then this weekend:

Former adviser to President Obama Melody Barnes said Sunday that talk show host Bill Maher's comments about the Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney controversy were "problematic" for the administration.

"I listened to those comments, and my grandmother's voice came in my head. I thought about the phrase, 'Home training.' You know, the language, the sentiment are problematic," Barnes said.

Maher was discussing the controversy surrounding Democratic strategist Rosen's remark last week that GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney's wife has "never worked a day in her life" on his HBO show "Real Time" Friday night, describing the uproar as "stupid" and "non-consequential."

"But what she meant to say, I think, was that Ann Romney has never gotten her ass out of the house to work," he joked. "No one is denying that being a mother is a tough job, I remember that I was a handful. OK, but there is a big difference in being a mother, and that tough job, and getting your ass out of the door at 7 a.m. when it's cold, having to deal with the boss, being in a workplace, where even if you're unhappy you can't show it for 8 hours."

The commentator and comedian has been a public supporter of Obama, donating $1 million to the super-PAC supporting the president's reelection. Republicans have slammed Maher for earlier comments and called on Obama to reject his political donation.

Barnes, former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, added that the president and the Obama campaign have said that civility "matters."

"'The way we talk to each other matters.' And they're going to have to, as you said, make a decision," she said.

The Romney campaign shouldn't overplay this hand, but it is good that Barack Obama is finally being asked to hold his allies accountable. And it's easy to imagine the Obama campaign getting regular headaches from its allies, a murderer's row of folks who have found blurting out their first, nastiest reaction to be quite lucrative: Maher, Schultz, O'Donnell, Rhodes, Grayson. Throw in Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, Margaret Cho, David Schuster, and perhaps Chris Matthews's mouth running away from him. I'd throw in Keith Olbermann, but no one knows where to watch him anymore.

If you're pulling for Romney, you've got to be tempted to put the catnip out there. Ask these folks -- and other big-time Obama donors -- about Ann Romney. See if they can resist their instincts. (As the parable ends, "What did you expect? I'm a snake.") Chances are, at least once a week, some liberal with more rage than sense will feel the compulsion that years of anti-Bush, anti-Palin, anti-Tea Party, and now anti-Romney fury fuels, and he will go on to attack charming, nice Ann Romney.

And now, thanks to Rosen and Maher, the precedent is set: Every time some liberal goes off and attacks Ann Romney, the Obama campaign will be obligated to issue a pro forma statement that such comments are inappropriate and declare the language problematic.

Heck, we just might end up with a new tone after all.

Moe Lane observes, "Consider: they've said everything possible about Mitt, and we've yawned. ONE impolite thing said about Ann, and out came the knives."

4. Addendum

My friend Cam Edwards informed me that attendance at this year's National Rifle Association convention was 73,740, a new record. He also noticed that the record attendance was, as far as he could tell, not mentioned in any article that covered the convention.

The 73,740 did not include me this year, but this week I'll be heading to BlogCon, a gathering of conservative bloggers exchanging ideas on everything from data visualization to podcasting to using video and everything else Internet- and journalism-related.