Moe Lane

The thirty-second clip (via Erick* over at RedState) is funny:

(more…)

More accurately, as I noted privately the other day, Rush Limbaugh served up a combined “Sorry if you were offended” and “It was a joke.” David Axelrod should be familiar with these species of non-apology apologies, seeing as the Democrats are quite fond of both.  Not that any of this is particularly my problem, since the last time I checked Limbaugh wasn’t running the Republican party, Axelr0d et al‘s tired rhetoric to the contrary.

That includes, pretty specifically, me not caring if anybody else has a problem with this not being particularly my problem.  Take it up with Rush Limbaugh, assuming that you can even get his attention…

Moe Lane (more…)

Hard to say which is the better line in this Mona Charen article about an increasingly-nervous Obama re-election team, and their planned one-note symphony:

For the record, there has never been a time in the past 50 years that the Democrats have not claimed to detect a frightening rightward tilt in the GOP — even as the party has nominated such wild-eyed radicals as George H.W. Bush, John McCain and George W. (“compassionate conservative”) Bush.

or

The economy today is in some respects worse than it was in 1980. Barring a catastrophe, little else will matter in 2012. Any credible Republican can defeat Obama — which is why Axelrod is already smearing as “extremist” a person whose name he does not know.

This should be fun.

The Platonic Ideal of Burying the Lede.

(Fair warning: while the original H/T is via RCP, there are a lot of links to Left-publications and sites in this post. This was essentially unavoidable)

It was the funniest thing: I was flipping through this Michael Scherer article on the resumption of the Obama 2012 campaign (short version: “Getting re-elected is hard!” Particularly when the Democrats have to run on an actual record, instead of the record that they breezily assured people was waiting just over the electoral horizon*), when I came across this passage:

Some on the left have argued that the President dropped the ball by failing to keep his network of supporters engaged and by following his transformational campaign with a transactional governing style. “Fighting to make something happen is different than sitting back and trying to mediate something,” says Marshall Ganz, a supporter turned critic of Obama, who teaches at Harvard. “People can’t organize around that.”

I don’t know why that triggered something in my head; it just seemed a bit… off, somehow. Maybe it was because whoever this Ganz guy was, it was enough to make David Axelrod bristle in the next paragraph. Which means that Scherer must have gotten that Ganz quote first. Which meant that Marshall Ganz may have been important.

So I decided to look Marshall Ganz up. (more…)

Oh, Davey.  I know that it’s all mean and stuff that his man-god is going to have to run as a mere mortal in ’12, but that doesn’t excuse amateur tactics on David Axelrod’s part, right?  If he wants the line-item veto so badly in order to combat all that nasty pork that the President supposedly doesn’t want to approve, then Obama should dust off H.R.4890, have it resubmitted to the House, and tell the Senate to pass it this time.  The Democrats have huge majorities in Congress -

- at least, for the next two months -

…so they’d have plenty of time to get the bill passed.  They could do it in a week.  If they really wanted to; which they don’t, which is why they’re trying to foist this off on Republicans.  Of course, as Ed Morrissey notes, this is all really about how President Obama is panicking over the thought of us getting our hands on the budget that the Democrats were too gutless to pass in an election year.  Much better to get one last session at the trough before the grownups take charge in January.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I’m putting both of those terms in quotes for different reasons. To begin with (and in reverse order), they’re not ‘tax cuts.’ The tax cuts were done years ago. What the administration is flirting with doing is raising tax rates to pre-Bush levels, in the middle of a sour economy and looming inflation.  I know that the Democrats would like to pretend otherwise, but I’m not obliged to help them.  And ‘temporary’ is one of those fascinating political terms of art that mean their opposite: there is nothing so permanent as an officially ‘temporary’ policy, as we’re starting to see now.

Moving along, David Axelrod today confirmed to the National Journal that the administration was caving on raising taxes.  Admittedly, he was trying to make it sound like the administration was not caving, but that strategy only works when your target audience lacks the mother-wit to click through on links*.  Here’s what HuffPo reported: (more…)

Because you ain’t so tough.

And this ain’t 2008.

Confident Axelrod challenges GOP: ‘Make my day’

One of the president’s top advisers confidently predicted Sunday that Congress will pass healthcare reform and dared Republicans to advocate repealing it during the 2010 elections.

We ran a Republican in Massachusetts on the explicit promise that he’d do everything in his power to spoke the wheels of your party’s disaster of a health care bill – and he won in a walk.  We’ve got states like New Jersey calling for junking the current mess and starting over.  And the ‘debate’ so far consists of a lot of people trumpeting their ‘no’ votes, almost nobody bragging about their ‘yes’ votes – and nobody brave enough to admit yet that they plan to go from ‘no’ to ‘yes.’  And you still want to dance?  OK, then: let’s dance.

Davey.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Probably not.  Although it’s as good an answer as any, I guess*.

…Mr. Axelrod was as bothered by the words and her discussion of “the Obama brand” and her role in promoting it, according to people informed about the conversation.

“The president is a person, not a product,” he was said to tell her. “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”

Via Ann Althouse, via Glenn Reynolds. You can understand why Axelrod was so ticked, though: his entire career and reputation from now on rises and falls on his ability to promote the “Obama brand” – a key feature of which is, of course, the flat denial that there could ever be any sort of thing as an “Obama brand.”  Having people actually talk about the “Obama brand” in public was just one more thing that Axelrod didn’t need happening.  Particularly when it’s the White House social secretary; normally, they’re about the only people who can get away with calling an “Obama brand” an “Obama brand.”  Of course, normally the sentiments that lurk behind the concept of an “Obama brand” aren’t the building blocks of the primary governing strategy of a Presidential administration.

Moe Lane

*Read the whole thing only if you haven’t hit your ‘whining stories about people getting shafted by Washington’ quota for the day.  I’m really glad that we have modern medicine, but by God having it has completely redefined our definition of “tragedy.”

He isn’t very happy with the administration right now:

Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.

Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.

The sources said Franken was the most outspoken senator in the meeting, which followed President Barack Obama’s question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats at the Newseum on Wednesday. But they also said the Minnesotan wasn’t the only angry Democrat in the room.

Absent from the article was any indication that Axelrod particularly cares, probably because he doesn’t. Franken’s relevance to the administration began on July 7, 2009 – and it ended on January 19, 2010. That was the window that Congress had to pass their health care rationing bill, and Congress failed to exploit that window. From the administration’s point of view, Axelrod should be raking Franken over the coals, not the other way around; but the Senate gets tiresome when the executive branch does not show proper deference to its members. Which – to everyone’s embarrassment – these days includes Senator Franken.

So I suppose that they have to let him yap.

Moe Lane

PS: One of the most exciting things about the thought of next year’s Senate makeup – from a Republican’s point of view – is the thought that Al Franken can only have a higher profile in the Senate.  Even if we don’t completely flip it.

Crossposted to RedState.

Or, the bloom is off the rose.

So, Axelrod’s trying his best to convince people that the fact that independent voters in two states won by Obama broke heavily for the Republican gubernatorial candidates is much less important than a three-point win in a district where conservatives made it clear that they’d rather lose than not be listened to by GOP party leadership.  His best is actually not all that great, given that he’s suggesting (of all things) that candidates next year embrace the President – just like Bill Owens did!  Yes, and just like Jon Corzine did, and just like Creigh Deeds did; so this was sufficiently eyebrow-raising that the Politico was nigh-forced to editorialize:

The cheerful public line from the White House carried an echo of Obama’s immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, another president whose political operation reported sunny skies no matter the weather.

It’s bad when they compare you to Bush.  Although it’s also unfair: the previous administration did things.  This one just whines about how hard it is to do them.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

here’s not much to say about the NEA propaganda scandal that hasn’t been said by others, but a link round-up will be hopefully useful for those getting up to speed.

• We begin here with the Big Government articles themselves.  Summary: transcripts and audio reveal that the conference call of August 10th involving the federal agencies NEA, United We Serve, and the Office of Public Engagement; and various artist groups‘ involved the explicit recruitment of said artists’ groups to assist in pushing the administration’s legislative agenda.
• This despite claims by the NEA that said call did not pursue any legislative agenda.
• Note also that OPE Deputy Director (and Valerie Jarrett crony) Buffy Wicks has long-standing ties with ACORN.
• Patterico points out the obvious: that both the NEA and the administration lied when they claimed that no legislative agenda was addressed.  Despite the fact that this call was ostensibly hosted by Michael Skolnik, Skolnik explicitly stated that he was working on the behest of the NEA and the White House – a claim that was not refuted either by Deputy Director Wicks or at-the-time NEA Director of Communications Yosi Sergant (both of whom were on the call).  For that matter, the primary interest of Nell Abernathy, director of outreach for United We Serve (also on the call) is to make clear that Skolnik is the cutout between the artists’ groups and the government.
• I should point out at this point that Sergant is, of course, linked with Shepard Fairey, who had his own representative on the call.
• Ace of Spades notes that Winner & Associates were on the conference call as well.  You may remember them; they were a Axelrod-affiliated PR group that got traced back as being behind some rather nasty anti-Palin fake grassroots astroturf during the election last year.  They were apparently on the call at the invitation of OPE Director Wicks.
• You can refresh your memory of the Winner Incident here at The Jawa Report.  How interesting that they were there, and invited by an administration official, no less.
• Ace of Spades, again, quotes Slublog on the Hatch Act.  As in, this is actually technically forbidden by federal statute (I personally note ‘technically’ because Hatch Act prosecutions are few and far between).
• Ed Morrissey has what is probably the line of the day (“We do not fund the NEA for it to produce Leni Riefenstahl-type art”), and notes that the Washington Times would like help tracking down some of the call participants.
• And finally, I would like to remind everybody reading this that groups involved in pushing the administration’s health care agenda had racked up roughly 2 million dollars in grants from the NEA prior to it.

So… the administration lied about their role in a conference call that was nakedly about using NEA client groups to pursue an explicitly pro-administration agenda – a call that, when revealed, resulted in an immediate reassignment of an NEA staffer and an attempt to scrub the record.  Of the groups involved, at least one was not an actual artist organization, and it was made clear throughout the call that the goal was to create partisan political materials, not nonpartisan art.  And, of course, the players involved were all of them affiliated with each other in various, sundry, and in some cases non-artistic ways.

But sure, other than all of that we have nothing to worry about.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

This is actually from September 9th – you can tell, because they’re hyping the President’s speech as being a game-changer – but it’s instructive nonetheless. In this clip, Axelrod was asked, point-blank, why the administration isn’t trying to change the rules to let insurance companies compete across straight[*] lines, and his refusal to give a straight answer is almost as funny as is watching Wolf Blitzer pushing him to give one.

Mind you, the actual answer – “There isn’t anything in that scheme that benefits a Democratic client group, and interstate competition is part of the Republican plan that we keep lying about not existing, so we won’t support it” – is politically… fraught.  Nonetheless, it’s instructive to remember that this administration has no interest in a bipartisan solution to health care reform, and even less interest in getting the Democrats in Congress under control.  All the President wants is a bill to sign and the opportunity to declaim that he’s reformed health care.  Anything will do at this point.

(Via Below the Beltway, via The Other McCain)

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[*As RS commenter NightTwister guessed: this is a Freudian slip, but I'm not going to fix it. On reflection, I like it better this way.- ML]