http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2014/02/17/gop-commemorates-five-years-of-failed-stimulus/The GOP, the right, and most of the other Obama haters keep claiming that after 5 1/2 years, Obama is the one responsible for our less than great economy. They claim that any excuses do not matter, because the 5 1/2 years has been more than enough to fix everything with the right plans.
I can only point out that if a long time as president is the only factor we need to consider in evaluating a president's performance, then Obama cannot yet be considered our worst president on the economy. Bush II had 8 years to give us a great economy. How were things after his 8 years? Let's see how it compares after Obama's 8 years.
To be clear, I believe a president cannot be judged solely by how things are going after X number of years. You need to consider the entire hand he was dealt. At a minimum, one must recognize that economies do have cycles, some with bigger swings than others.
Obamacare has proved so disastrous to President Barack Obama that he’s going to begin the New Year by shooting political nails into his head.
He’ll try to distract the public from his painful Obamacare takeover by doing something even more painful — showing how he has mismanaged the economy and left 20 million Americans unemployed or underemployed amid a Wall Street boom.
Of course, in the run-up to the 2014 election, he’ll try to blame his mismanagement on the GOP’s post-2010, partly-effective opposition to his post-2008 regulations and policies.
The daring “you’re-responsible-for-my-failed-policies” strategy, however, depends utterly on cooperation from the establishment media. So it is being pitched as a noble campaign against unfairness, or “economic inequality.”
“I believe this is the defining challenge of our time,” Obama declared in a December speech, which was delivered while Obamcare sank his poll ratings below 40 percent. “It drives everything I do in this office,” he announced Dec. 4, two week before he jetted off for a two week golfing vacation in Hawaii.
“There is no greater challenge this country has than income inequality, and we must do something about it,” Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid also said in December.
The “something” Obama and Reid are offering consists of two small steps.
The first supposed fix is an $25 billion extension of unemployment benefits for people who have been jobless for at lest six months. The second supposed fix is a boost in the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour.
Obama doesn’t have much else to distract Americans before they go to the polls and — if current polls were to hold steady — elect GOP majorities in the House and the Senate.
Obamacare has delivered commercial health-care policies to 2 million customers out of a population of 310 million, but also cancelled policies held by 5 million Americans. The network is expected to spur more public opposition in 2014 as Americans recognize the limits on their increasingly expensive Obama-approved insurance policies.
Foreign policy doesn’t bear mentioning. Al-Qaida is overrunning cities in Iraq that were guarded until Obama pulled U.S. forces out a more peaceful Iraq in 2010. The Arab world is sucked into the merciless civil war in Syria, and the supposed nuclear deal with Iran has stalled.
Immigration policies could spur increased Latino turnout if Democrats can paint the GOP as racist for opposing the Senate’s very unpopular immigration bill that would double the inflow of immigrants and guest workers into a stalled economy.
But economic inequality is also a tough sell when Obama has been in the White House for five years, and the Democrats have controlled the Senate on each and every day of his tenure.
He’s overseen the “Quantitative Easing” policy that spiked Wall Street stocks owned by wealthy Americans, and touted the various economic and immigration policies that have frozen poorer Americans’ income.
“Top 1 percent incomes grew by 31.4 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes grew only by 0.4 percent from 2009 to 2012,” said a September report by Emmanuel Saez, a left-wing economist at the University of California’s Berkeley campus.
Read more:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/06/analysis-obamas-2014-strategy-my-economy-sucks/#ixzz34pw59Sxb
