Recently in Barack Obama Category

Bob Herbert -- Bob Herbert! -- is concerned that Obama is blowing it by betting everything on health care reform,, and by taking such good care of Wall Street. Excerpt:

Voters are being told that the recession is over, but what they see in their daily lives are continuing job losses, an epidemic of foreclosures, families going bankrupt, homelessness rising and so on.

The disenchantment among people who wholeheartedly supported Obama is palpable and growing. These are issues tailor-made for the Democrats. But the president and his party, rather than making the bread-and-butter issues of the American family their top domestic priority, have focused on reforming the health care system. As important as health care is (and our system is a disgrace), it was not the issue at the top of the agenda for most Americans when Barack Obama was elected president.

The widespread feeling among people I've talked to over the past few weeks is that the only ones benefiting from deficits being driven to the moon are the big banks and Wall Street. Folks are not opposed to a health care overhaul, but they're understandably wary. They fear it will drive the deficits higher and they're not sure that this big, complicated, very difficult to understand system is the best thing for their families. There is genuine worry about what might happen if the new system -- whatever its final contours -- turns out to be unaffordable.

I bet there are a lot of conservatives who can identify with almost everything the very liberal pundit Herbert has written here.

Understand that I do not in any way fault President Obama for the Nobel committee's decision to award him the Nobel Peace prize today. I'm sure nobody was more shocked than he by the news. It is absurd, though, that after less than a year in office, a year in which he hasn't accomplished much of anything on the international front (does any president in their first year?), Obama would win the Peace prize over human rights activists, environmental campaigners, and others. Was there really no other man or woman on the planet who did more for the cause of peace this past year than the U.S. president? Really?

The Nobel committee has awarded Obama its Peace prize for the grand achievement of not being George W. Bush. I don't see any other way to explain this decision. Again, it doesn't reflect poorly on Obama, but rather on the Nobel committee, which looks petty and political. On the other hand, none of us are George W. Bush either, so maybe we can dare to dream that the Norwegians will gift us with the Nobel Peace prize next year. Personally, I would use the prize money to foster understanding between peoples, and to buy silken slankets for the whole family. Then again, with the Nobel having now awarded its third Peace prize to a top U.S. Democratic politician in seven years, maybe John Edwards has something to look forward to, for once.

UPDATE: A friend who is an international correspondent, and who is very much on the left, writes this morning to say: "The Norwegian academy may yet succeed in moving me right."

HuffPo's Michael Russnow, after identifying himself as an Obama supporter:

Whatever one might feel about Obama, he has not earned this singular award. Few American presidents have received it and of those who have it was bestowed after they'd been engaged in something special. Theodore Roosevelt had helped to negotiate peace in the Russo-Japanese War. Woodrow Wilson had tirelessly worked for the creation of the League of Nations -- a struggle that was blamed for causing the serious stroke he suffered, which left him disengaged in the last years of his presidency.

Jimmy Carter received the Peace Prize after he left office, but in the wake of huge achievements monitoring worldwide elections and in his efforts with Habitat for Humanity, building homes for the poor.

Former Vice President Al Gore got the prize after years of working for the environment. And whether you appreciated Henry Kissinger's getting the award it was in response to his efforts to effect a peace in the Vietnam War.

So, at the moment, I believe it is enormously premature for Obama to be getting this great tribute, which to a certain extent cheapens the prior recipients and the work all of them performed over so many years.

Exactly right.

UPDATE.2: Time magazine says it could embarrass him and hurt him more than it will help. Excerpt:

No doubt the Nobel Committee want this prize to add momentum to those plans. But the award also risks adding to the huge burden of expectations that Obama carried when he entered office. The reality of governing has already proved how ridiculous many of those expectations were.

And now Obama is the Nobel Peace Prize winner. "Frankly it seems premature when he hasn't been in office even a year yet, and has not yet actually achieved the goals he set out -- although he certainly has made some very noteworthy efforts," says Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow for Non-proliferation at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies. "I think he will be embarrassed by it and it will be unhelpful in the domestic milieu."

And Time's Mark Halperin has a snarky line: "It isn't quite as inexplicable as Marisa Tomei's Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but it seems pretty close."

UPDATE.3: Steve Sailer on the SWPL Nobel.

UPDATE.4: CC blog commenter Crustacean made me snicker with this line: "If Obama gives one of his daughters ginger ale when she has a tummy ache, does that mean he gets the Nobel Prize for Chemistry?"

Breaking: the Windy City was stunningly eliminated in the first round of voting. Epic FAIL, Mr. President -- though if you ask me, it's a win for Chicago.

Big embarrassment for Obama -- but do you think it's really going to hurt him politically?

The pretext many defenders of the more extreme racial statements of Limbaugh and others on the right use for racializing their criticism of Obama is that liberals started it. That is (they say), liberals have been calling any and all criticism of Obama racist, so nobody should be surprised when the right makes fun of them.

I don't believe this is true. Seriously, I don't. I remember blogging here or somewhere else last year, during the Jeremiah Wright controversy, that if Obama got elected, the left would racialize all policy differences with Obama, making any criticism of him out to be racism.

That has not happened. At least until very recently, I haven't seen that in the mainstream of commentary. Which surprises, me, actually. Maureen Dowd wrote her column last week calling some of the Tea Partiers racist, and now Jimmy Carter has said he sees racism behind the protests. Suddenly it seems on the right, there's a powerful meme holding that the left has been doing this since the Inaugural, and the right has finally, finally started to fight back.

Again, I don't think this is true, but I don't know for sure. Can you provide me meaningful examples of liberals characterizing non-racist criticism of Obama's policies as racist? By "meaningful examples," I don't mean some fringe nut on Daily Kos, or a blogger few people have heard of. I mean well-known pundits, politicians or widely read bloggers. There may well be a goodly number of such people that I've simply overlooked, as I don't read nearly as widely on the left as on the right. So I'm making an honest request here.

It should be said that to discern racism as an animating force in the anti-Obama protests is not automatically an unfair charge. To say that it is always unjust to accuse Obama critics of racism is a form of political correctness that is in its own way as hostile to the truth as people who say that criticism of Obama can only be motivated by race hatred. If racism isn't behind at least some of the hostility to Obama, how do you explain this image making the rounds on the right?

CNBC's Charlie Gasparino duns Obama for his wimpy speech about Wall Street regulation yesterday. The fix is in for those guys, apparently. Excerpt:

I know what you're saying: Isn't the president calling for more regulation, and not less? It's been my experience that regulation, even the kind of massive overhaul the president is talking about (the Fed monitoring risk, a separate agency monitoring the Fed and Obama presumably monitoring them all) isn't something that really scares Wall Street.

Because the president's plans are so nebulous, the big firms will hire teams of lobbyists to shape legislation and whittle down proposals with the most teeth. In his speech, the president all but admitted as such, bragging that "we have sought ideas and input from industry leaders" and "the broader public."

He didn't say who in the broader public has been consulting with his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. But I can't imagine they'll have much input in this new regulatory agenda, primarily because the president is also working "closely with leaders in the Senate and the House," including House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, one of Wall Street's favorite liberals, and his counterpart in the Senate, Chris Dodd, who feasted off of the largesse of subprime lender CountryWide Financial.

If the president really wanted to scare Wall Street to change its evil ways, he would have made one simple declarative statement: There will be no more bailouts. The concept of too big to fail is over, and what's left of Wall Street will be obliterated if it once again engages in the behavior that boiled over this time last year.

He didn't. In fact, the closest he came to a warning along those lines was his meek admonition that firms that engage in excessive risk "do so not just at their own peril, but at our nation's."

What that peril is, the president didn't say. But what he did say, loud and clear in my opinion, is that Wall Street's free lunch is bigger and better than ever, particularly when he remarked, "that instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we are still recovering," some on Wall Street "are choosing to ignore them." He then went on to discuss how the government will regulate the miscreants with "strong rules of the road."

Scary stuff? I'm sure the traders at Goldman who just cranked $3 billion in profits trading bonds as if the financial crisis never happened are quaking in their shoes.

When Obama got elected, I thought that one good thing that was going to come out of having a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in charge of Congress was that Wall Street was going to have to get its house in order. Surprise! They're no better than Republicans when it comes to this stuff. There really is one party in this country when it comes to coddling the financial sector, isn't there?