Harry Reid’s Desk
A year ago President Obama said, “If you don’t like a particular policy, if you don’t like a particular president, go out there and argue your position, win an election.”
And so it came to pass.
Now that his party has lost the Senate, Obama says he’s willing to listen to Republican ideas – if they have any. Whether he is or they do remains to be seen. But they have had some ideas in the past. Those ideas were packaged into about 350 House Resolutions and passed on to the Senate where they sit in Harry Reid’s desk.
The way Mitch McConnell sees it Reid protected the president from legislation he didn’t like by not bringing bills to his desk.
The New York Times, in January, called Harry a brute.
Politifact, however, says some of those bills are simply caught up in committee. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post says it’s not at all unusual for Harry Reid to have 300 bills to be stuffed in his drawers.
Tom Steyer Campaign Spending
The Koch brothers got a nice return on their big spending ways in Tuesday’s wave election. Tom Steyer, not so much.
Steyer is a billionaire hedge fund guy. He wants to save the climate from change. The Koch brothers are billionaire energy tycoons.They spend millions promoting a conservative/libertarian agenda and irritating Harry Reid. Harry thinks that’s un-American.
Tom Steyer
Steyer spent $74 million on this election. Climate change rated dead last among voter concerns in the Gallup poll. Tom Steyer’s candidates didn’t rate much higher with them.
Not About Him
Well, it’s finally not about him. That was President Obama’s reaction to the Republican wave that swept Democratic governors and senators out to sea.
He said the voters’ message is that they want to “get stuff done” and “make Washington work”.
Daniel Henninger sees it differently. He thinks the “labor force participation rate” killed the Dems:
Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election:
“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”
Henninger says the average economic growth rate since WWII is 3.3%:
Here are the growth rates for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):
2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%
You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats.
About Him
Before the election Obama said it would be about him, his policies, actually. Now he says it was about Republicans working with him. My friend Steve Kelly nailed the Obamian Attitude with this cartoon. Click the thumbnail.
Obama Policies Lose Senate
Hog-castrator, and Taylor Swift-look-alike, Joni Earnst put Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate with her victory in Iowa last night.
Six years ago first term senator Barack Obama accepted his party’s presidential nomination in front of fake Greek columns and 70,000 true believers in Denver. Two weeks ago he said that he’s not on the ballot in this election but his policies are. And so they were.
Obama Policies
The Washington Post said yesterday this election was all about Obama.
Even the president’s Illinois home state governor, Pat Quinn, went down in flames. (By the way that’s Valerie Jarrett in the picture, not Joni Ernst.)
Panic Attack
Even hysteria is politically polarizing these days. Ann Coulter has a column claiming the media, usually purveyors of panic , now want everyone to chill about Ebola. It doesn’t appear that an epidemic is imminent. “The Science” is predicting an additional 1-130 new Ebola cases in the U.S. by the end of the year.
