President takes a pass til next election

With President Obama's latest budget-cutting suggestion he seems to have taken the easy and resigned way out: He's putting forth ideas he already has in the past, taking on hard-core Republican antitax positions, but not really putting forth the answer to our problems. He is not fixing entitlements longterm. He is making campaign moves.

This, in my opinion, is the president resigning himself to not solving serious problems in the remainder of his term. He's given up. But he's hoping to point out the insanity going on in the Republican Party and win another election.

And he's giving Congress a chance to tackle the harder issues.

But he won't take full blame for whatever they come up with.

Obama's jobs speech

President Obama gave the American people and Congress a politically calculated call to action last night that was many things: just non-controversial enough to put real pressure on Republicans to go along, just concrete enough to forestall major criticism, and workable on the margin to improve the economy in a minor way.

This was a successful speech for the president. In some respects it was the same old rehashed proposals, but they went a bit further in areas such as hiring the long-term unemployed and offering more payroll tax cuts than we've seen before.

And Republicans are feeling the pressure to go along. So I do expect the payroll taxes to pass in some similar form.

Let's talk about what was more controversial: paying for the plan. The president promised to offset the expense with savings that the congressional supercommittee on the debt could identify. This is a half measure that really does not quite pay for itself yet, but it's enough for the American people to accept, and in this sense, the president will get a pass for this approach. Obama promised a more concrete proposal later in September. I heard a lot of questioning about why he didn't provide the specifics last night, but it seems like a shrewd move to me.

By parsing the specifics out Obama does a few things. He calls for immediate action on the non-controversial payroll tax, which has a chance for passing. He also puts immediate pressure on Congress while buying time for more specifics. And he guarantees his proposals can not just be rejected out of hand - the country and Congress must tune in for weeks into where Obama wants to lead this country. And we were all just about to start tuning out.

These are campaign moves. But if it takes a campaign to get real proposals from our politicians, than I guess campaigns are a good thing.

Why Obama is unpopular

Besides the obvious reason that the economy is lousy and the country is going down the tubes, this independent thinks the reason President Obama's poll numbers are falling lately comes basically down to this: he has increasingly and even somewhat suddenly become ineffective.

I know conservatives might disagree here. They might think that the country wants him to be ineffective; after all, when he's effective, he's passing legislation on health care and stimulus and regulations for business. They probably do prefer his inability to get things through Congress these days.

But I think many, many Americans are realizing that this is an intolerable situation. We need something to be done. And if Obama can't do it, then we'll need somebody else who can.

So President Obama now gives us nothing. No stimulus, no fixes, nothing that can pass Congress at all. Washington is broken. And Obama can't fix it.

And it's now quite obvious. There was a chance for a grand deal that helped solve some of our longterm problems, but conservatives shot it down. This works for them. It doesn't work for the president. Hence the plunging poll numbers.