Obama’s Big Lie is destroying his credibility

 Obama’s Big Lie is destroying his credibility

By Michael Goodwin

November 13, 2013

When I first saw the headline saying Bill Clinton was advising President Obama to “honor his commitment,” I had to laugh. The idea of Monica Lewinsky’s boyfriend as moral referee always cracks me up.
Then I got to wondering. Which commitment was Clinton talking about?
Is it the one Obama made to the Israeli people, that he had their backs and would never let Iran get a nuclear weapon? Or was it his promise to enforce a “red line” in Syria?
Or maybe it was Obama’s promise to “never rest” until we caught the terrorists who killed our ambassador and three other Americans in Libya?
Or was Clinton talking about the many times the president said he would “never rest” until every American who wanted a job had one?
Or maybe he was talking about the pledge to change the tone in Washington? Or to go through the budget “line by line” and cross out the waste driving up the deficit?
You get the picture — any of those whoppers would qualify. But, of course, Clinton was talking about the broken promise of the moment, the one where Obama vowed that “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.”
It ranks as one of the biggest presidential lies of modern times, all the more so because Obama repeated it 30 times. The fallout of millions being forced from their policies, an experience exacerbated by the hapless Web site, has created a crisis of confidence so vast, it threatens to swallow the second term.
So Clinton, who falsely swore he never had sex with that woman, spoke from experience when he told an interviewer, “The president should honor his commitment to those people and let them keep what they got.”
He knows the Big Lie is shredding Obama’s ace in the hole — his personal credibility. The key to Obama’s political success is that his job-approval ratings generally have been higher than the public’s view of his policies.
From the economy to health care to foreign policy, voters were mostly negative on the policies. But when it came to Obama himself, more Americans, often a majority, said they liked him, trusted him and believed he had their interests at heart.
ObamaCare is breaking that bond — and creating a domino effect. The public is turning ever harder against his policies, with only 31 percent now supporting him on the economy and 32 percent on immigration in the latest Pew poll.
Most important, they are also giving a thumbs-down on his overall performance. Pew finds that only 41 percent approve of his handling of the presidency, down 14 points since December, while 53 percent disapprove. And Quinnipiac late Tuesday found he’s hit a new low with 39 percent approval, while a majority said he’s not honest.
No president can lead from such a deep, discredited hole. And his ratings are likely to keep sinking because, once the Web site is fixed, millions more “shoppers” will get sticker shocks from the new policies ObamaCare requires. And next year comes the employer mandate, which will shake up the policies and prices of millions of others.
So Clinton’s advice that Obama “let them keep what they got,” is, in a vacuum, a perfectly logical escape route.
But even if it were possible, the reversal would be a dagger in the heart of ObamaCare. The whole Rube Goldberg scheme depends on using insurance policies to distribute wealth from healthy young Americans to older, sicker ones. Letting people keep the policies they have effectively repeals the president’s signature achievement.
Clinton’s advice, then, won’t fly. But if he, or anybody else, has another idea about how Obama can wriggle out of the mess he created, they should speak up very quickly. Otherwise, it will be too late to make a difference.
Source: http://nypost.com/2013/11/13/obamas-latest-broken-promise-is-destroying-his-credibility/

This is what absolutely blows my freaking mind.
"The key to Obama’s political success is that his job-approval ratings generally have been higher than the public’s view of his policies.
From the economy to health care to foreign policy, voters were mostly negative on the policies. But when it came to Obama himself, more Americans, often a majority, said they liked him, trusted him and believed he had their interests at heart."

So, for most voters, it's not a person's policies that are the deciding factor, but the persons likeability? Really?, Really!?! Holy Sh*t! No wonder this country is in so much trouble.


The man is a talented illusionist. His art of misdirection is really impressive, if not also so insulting. This purported "fix" does nothing except allow him to blame insurance companies and state insurance officials. This latest tactic was done only after the other false excuses he offered failed to convince. But in truth, (as many will soon discover) the actuarial tables for cancellations required by ObamaCare are already in place and in play. Renewal of policies are highly unlikely. Mr. Obama understands this perfectly well.

The apparent sincerity with which he delivers these seemingly contrite messages and "royal decrees" tells us that he is a practiced and comfortable deceiver. He counts on his media friends to back him up, not question the legality of violating his own law unilaterally (again and again) or question his sincerity. We are ill-served by such a person and the non-skeptical media who will make this all about the politics of his policy opponents, instead of the substance of his actions.

Now that the law mandates that all U.S. citizens purchase health insurance or face a tax penalty, why would a private insurance company continue to offer me an inexpensive plan, knowing that if I don’t sign up for a more expensive option and forgo insurance, I’ll be penalized by the government?

Private insurance companies may or may not have the best interests of consumers in mind. They are after all made up of individual human beings, with all their inherent faults. But, Free Market Forces have always, can and do keep these companies honest. As could competition from a Medicare-like public insurance entity not governed by the profit motive.

There is a simpler and eaiser way to cover those not covered without blowing up the entire system. They could have gone the route of Medicaid, or restructured Medicare. There are a lot of simple ways it could have been done. But, it was all about power over people, not empowering people.

 

Shame on those who didn’t have the moral courage or common sense to call him out way before now. The damage is incalculable. 

 To further my points: 

Fouad Ajami: When the Obama Magic Died

There were no economic or cultural bonds among his coalition. He was all things to all people. Charisma ruled.

The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama's policies—and, more significantly, in the man himself. Charisma is like that. Crowds come together and they project their needs onto an imagined redeemer. The redeemer leaves the crowd to its imagination: For as long as the charismatic moment lasts—a year, an era—the redeemer is above and beyond judgment. He glides through crises, he knits together groups of varied, often clashing, interests. Always there is that magical moment, and its beauty, as a reference point.

Mr. Obama gave voice to this sentiment in a speech on Nov. 6 in Dallas: "Sometimes I worry because everybody had such a fun experience in '08, at least that's how it seemed in retrospect. And, 'yes we can,' and the slogans and the posters, et cetera, sometimes I worry that people forget change in this country has always been hard." It's a pity we can't stay in that moment, says the redeemer: The fault lies in the country itself—everywhere, that is, except in the magician's performance.

Forgive the personal reference, but from the very beginning of Mr. Obama's astonishing rise, I felt that I was witnessing something old and familiar. My advantage owed nothing to any mastery of American political history. I was guided by my immersion in the political history of the Arab world and of a life studying Third World societies.

In 2008, seeing the Obama crowds in Portland, Denver and St. Louis spurred memories of the spectacles that had attended the rise and fall of Arab political pretenders. I had lived through the era of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. He had emerged from a military cabal to become a demigod, immune to judgment. His followers clung to him even as he led the Arabs to a catastrophic military defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. He issued a kind of apology for his performance. But his reign was never about policies and performance. It was about political magic.

In trying to grapple with, and write about, the Obama phenomenon, I found guidance in a book of breathtaking erudition, "Crowds and Power" (1962) by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. Born in Bulgaria in 1905 and educated in Vienna and Britain, Canetti was unmatched in his understanding of the passions, and the delusions, of crowds. The crowd is a "mysterious and universal phenomenon," he writes. It forms where there was nothing before. There comes a moment when "all who belong to the crowd get rid of their difference and feel equal." Density gives the illusion of equality, a blessed moment when "no one is greater or better than another." But the crowd also has a presentiment of its own disintegration, a time when those who belong to the crowd "creep back under their private burdens."

Five years on, we can still recall how the Obama coalition was formed. There were the African-Americans justifiably proud of one of their own. There were upper-class white professionals who were drawn to the candidate's "cool." There were Latinos swayed by the promise of immigration reform. The white working class in the Rust Belt was the last bloc to embrace Mr. Obama—he wasn't one of them, but they put their reservations aside during an economic storm and voted for the redistributive state and its protections. There were no economic or cultural bonds among this coalition. There was the new leader, all things to all people.

A nemesis awaited the promise of this new presidency: Mr. Obama would turn out to be among the most polarizing of American leaders. No, it wasn't his race, as Harry Reid would contend, that stirred up the opposition to him. It was his exalted views of himself, and his mission. The sharp lines were sharp between those who raised his banners and those who objected to his policies.

America holds presidential elections, we know. But Mr. Obama took his victory as a plebiscite on his reading of the American social contract. A president who constantly reminded his critics that he had won at the ballot box was bound to deepen the opposition of his critics.

A leader who set out to remake the health-care system in the country, a sixth of the national economy, on a razor-thin majority with no support whatsoever from the opposition party, misunderstood the nature of democratic politics. An election victory is the beginning of things, not the culmination. With Air Force One and the other prerogatives of office come the need for compromise, and for the disputations of democracy. A president who sought consensus would have never left his agenda on Capitol Hill in the hands of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. Obama has shown scant regard for precedent in American history. To him, and to the coterie around him, his presidency was a radical discontinuity in American politics. There is no evidence in the record that Mr. Obama read, with discernment and appreciation, of the ordeal and struggles of his predecessors. At best there was a willful reading of that history. Early on, he was Abraham Lincoln resurrected (the new president, who hailed from Illinois, took the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible). He had been sworn in during an economic crisis, and thus he was FDR restored to the White House. He was stylish with two young children, so the Kennedy precedent was on offer.

In the oddest of twists, Mr. Obama claimed that his foreign policy was in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower's . But Eisenhower knew war and peace, and the foreign world held him in high regard.

During his first campaign, Mr. Obama had paid tribute to Ronald Reagan as a "transformational" president and hinted that he aspired to a presidency of that kind. But the Reagan presidency was about America, and never about Ronald Reagan. Reagan was never a scold or a narcissist. He stood in awe of America, and of its capacity for renewal. There was forgiveness in Reagan, right alongside the belief in the things that mattered about America—free people charting their own path.

If Barack Obama seems like a man alone, with nervous Democrats up for re-election next year running for cover, and away from him, this was the world he made. No advisers of stature can question his policies; the price of access in the Obama court is quiescence before the leader's will. The imperial presidency is in full bloom.

There are no stars in the Obama cabinet today, men and women of independent stature and outlook. It was after a walk on the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, that Mr. Obama called off the attacks on the Syrian regime that he had threatened. If he had taken that walk with Henry Kissinger or George Shultz, one of those skilled statesmen might have explained to him the consequences of so abject a retreat. But Mr. Obama needs no sage advice, he rules through political handlers.

Valerie Jarrett, the president's most trusted, probably most powerful, aide, once said in admiration that Mr. Obama has been bored his whole life. The implication was that he is above things, a man alone, and anointed. Perhaps this moment—a presidency coming apart, the incompetent social engineering of an entire health-care system—will now claim Mr. Obama's attention.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304243904579196440800552408

Finally, five famous quotations that are so applicable and resonate: 

“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” ~ Sir Winston Churchill

“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.” ~ JFK
 

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

― Isaac Asimov