Another Big Mouth Black Fascist Joins the Leftwing Political Market….TOURE

Piers Morgan interviews a black fascist of the future….Toure, he calls himself.   Big mouth, no listen, Big brain, no think.     Such an animal would never be a today’s American conservative.  

It is the fashion these days, it seems, that the louder and  more threatening and more shrill these racist voices are,  the prouder will be the broader black community.   

Shame on those who remain silent while these violent  hoodlums contaminate the air.

The death of Trayvon Martin is tragic.    No American community can be proud of the black fascists headed by Al Sharpton,   the New Black Panthers, and now….which should have been expected, Toure.

Click below to review Toure’s performance on CNN:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/03/30/piers_morgan_takes_down_toure_over_trayvon_martin_case.html

Paul Ryan’s Budget offered to the House of Representatives

A Further Perspective

Ryan’s Budget Is Better Than You Know

By Peter Ferrara      at the American Spectator                           article sent by Mark Waldeland

“There is no alternative to its long-term perspective and the squawkers know it.

 Both the Left and the Right are grousing about House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget. Both are factually wrong.

For conservatives, there are two amazing fundamentals in Ryan’s budget. First is how quickly it gets spending, deficits, and debt under manageable control. Emphasis on the word manageable, not completely solved.

Ryan’s budget actually cuts the total level of federal spending in nominal dollars for each of the first two years. Total federal spending actually declines from 2012 to 2013, and then declines again from 2013 to 2014. That would be the first and only time that has happened since the beginning of the Eisenhower Administration 60 years ago, when we were still climbing down from runaway wartime spending. Total federal spending under Ryan’s budget does not rise above the 2012 level until 2016. The total increase in federal spending over those four first years of Ryan’s budget is 1.8 percent. Those would be the four most tight-fisted years in federal spending growth since the Eisenhower Administration as well.

By 2015, after just three years under Ryan’s budget, federal spending would be nearly back to its long-term, historical average since World War II as a percent of GDP, at 20.1 percent, down from 24.3 percent today. That is a cut in federal spending of 4.2 percent of GDP in just 3 years. Even with Ryan’s proposed reductions in individual and corporate tax rates, federal revenues would be restored to their long-term postwar average as a percent of GDP as well. That would leave the deficit in 2015 at a quite manageable 1.7 percent of GDP, compared to roughly 9 percent on average under President Obama.

Balancing the Budget
Most amazingly, even under CBO’s static scoring, the federal deficit in actual nominal dollars would be reduced to $182 billion by 2017, the fifth year of the budget. That compares to $1,327 billion, or $1.327 trillion, today. So in just five years, even under CBO’s static scoring, the deficit is reduced by 86 percent. The deficit is less than 1 percent of GDP by that year, at 0.9 percent, where it stabilizes for 6 years to the end of the 10-year budget window.

Given the sharp income tax rate cuts in Ryan’s budget, with dynamic scoring the budget would probably be balanced by that fifth year, 2017. Club for Growth President Chris Chocola should pay Fiscal Associates the $10,000 that would be needed to do a real dynamic score of Ryan’s budget to find out. That would be a major contribution to public policy.

But even under CBO’s horse and buggy static scoring, Ryan’s budget does solve America’s debt crisis. Federal debt held by the public is reduced from 77 percent of GDP in 2013 to 62 percent by 2022, reducing it by a third from the nearly 100 percent it would be by then on our current course. That averts the crisis, assuring that the credit markets will not abandon us as they did in Greece.

Moreover, under Ryan’s budget, federal debt held by the public continues on a sharp decline from there, as the long-term effects of Ryan’s structural entitlement reforms phase in. Debt held by the public is reduced to 53 percent of GDP by 2030, 38 percent by 2040, and 10 percent by 2050. That means the national debt is all but paid off by 2050, and would be soon thereafter. In fact, under dynamic scoring it probably would be paid off by then.

By contrast, on our current course, under CBO’s Alternative Fiscal Scenario, that federal debt rockets to 128 percent of GDP by 2030 (so Ryan cuts that by more than half by then), 194 percent by 2040, and 320 percent by 2050, on its way to over 700 percent by 2080. That is a clear path to bankruptcy, which Ryan transforms into paying off the entire national debt soon after 2050.

You can’t discount these longer term projections as meaningless, for two reasons. First, that is how the crisis is defined, by projecting current debt trends long term. You can’t define the problem as long-term federal debt projections, and then disdain a long-term solution that transforms those long-term projections. Secondly, the solution is careful, long-term, structural entitlement reform that produces enormous changes over the long run. Under those careful Ryan entitlement reforms, no one gets hurt, contrary to the hysterics of the infantile left (which encompasses today’s Democrat party and its media allies). To discount the long-term effects of those careful structural reforms as too far into the future to take seriously is to deny the possibility and opportunity of such fundamental, structural long-term reforms that are politically viable, to embrace draconian, peremptory, entitlement cuts that would be validly subject to the hysterics of infants. That rejects a long-term solution that is viable, for a shorter term solution that is not viable and is never going to see the light of day.

Federal spending as a percent of GDP is reduced to 16 percent by 2050 under Ryan’s budget, one fifth lower than the long-term, historical, postwar average. That is not the promise of future spending cuts that will never happen. That is the long-term effect of the entitlement reforms that would be adopted today under Ryan’s budget. That is consequently a huge achievement that conservatives should embrace and fight for, not discount. Moreover, that 16 percent would actually be significantly lower under dynamic scoring, because the GDP will be so much bigger by 2050 under Ryan’s pro-growth tax reforms.

Reframing the Debate
During the Bush Administration, the President and congressional Republicans did lose control of federal spending, letting it rise by one seventh as a percent of GDP. That reversed a very successful reduction in government spending by the Republican Congress before then, with federal spending declining by one seventh as a percent of GDP from 1994 to 2000, which was accomplished under Newt Gingrich’s leadership.

But President Obama is following the Bush apostasy by increasing federal spending as a percent of GDP in four years by one third more than President Bush did in eight years. In his 2013 budget, Obama proposes to increase federal spending by $2 trillion a year by 2022, $9 trillion more over the next 10 years as compared to this year’s level of spending over those 10 years.

President Obama’s budget actually proposes to spend $47 trillion over the next 10 years, actually increasing spending above the current CBO baseline, ridiculously heedless of America’s fiscal crisis. Ryan’s budget proposes to cut that by $6.8 trillion. By 2022, Ryan’s budget would be spending nearly a trillion dollars less per year than President Obama’s budget. That reflects the long-term fix in Ryan’s budget.

Here is the bottom line between the two budgets. Ryan returns federal spending to its long-term, historical, postwar average at 20 percent of GDP for the next 20 years. Under the budget proposed by President Obama and the Democrats, federal spending soars to 30 percent of GDP by 2027, 40 percent by 2040, 50 percent by 2060, and 80 percent by 2080. Actually, it is much higher than that, as GDP would collapse under that burden. Add in another 15 percent of GDP for state and local spending, and we are at full blown communism.”

Click below to read further:

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/03/28/ryans-budget-is-better-than-yo

Don’t Miss Operation Hot Mike!

The following advertisement about Barack Hussein Obama is based on recent and perhaps future events:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/03/30/american_crossroads_ad_operation_hot_mic.html

Communists and the Obama Administration

 

 

Obama’s Ship of Fools at U.S. Embassy in Jamaica

By David Paulin        at the American Thinker:In a ceremony befitting President Obama’s vision of a repentant postmodern America, a section of the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica has been named after a propagandist for Stalinist Russia and darling of the international left — the controversial African-American stage actor and social activist

Paul Robeson.

 

The Embassy’s Information Resource Center that boasts housing “the definitive collection of Americana” in Jamaica is now named the “Paul Robeson Information Resource Center.” During the renaming ceremony, U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica Pamela E. Bridgewater called Robeson a patriotic American.

 

Her remarks surely pleased Jamaica’s left-leaning government and its many anti-American elites.

 

They regard Robeson as a kindred spirit — a famous ideologue of the old left who blazed a trail for them. In recent years, they have pushed for slave reparations from Britain, promoted a chummy relationship with Cuba, and proven problematic partners in the war on Islam-inspired terrorism.

 

Ultimately, the renaming appears to be part of President Obama’s reset of America’s foreign policy — and how a postmodern America ought to interact with the world and be perceived by it.

 

It’s not that Robeson’s résumé lacks some stellar achievements, a fact that Bridgewater — an African-American whose father was a jazz trumpeter — surely had in mind. A famous stage actor and singer in the 1920s and ’30s, Robeson was an all-American athlete and the class valedictorian at Rutgers University. He subsequently earned a law degree from Columbia University, and though he briefly practiced law, it’s said he ended his legal career because of limited opportunities for black lawyers and an alleged incident in which a white legal secretary refused to take dictation from him.

 

Many regard Robeson as a 20^th-century Renaissance man. Yet like many among the morally confused left during the 1940s and ’50s, Robeson embraced communism. And while most black Americans stood by their country, Robeson stood against it by serving as a high-profile propagandist for Stalinist Russia — a dangerous existential enemy of America and the West. In 1949, when Robeson declared that African-Americans should refuse to take up arms against Stalinist Russia, American boxer Sugar Ray Robinson was quoted as saying that if he and Robesen ever met, he would “punch him in the mouth.”

 

Like Hollywood’s outspoken leftist celebrities, Robeson traveled the world to promote his odious political views. This included high-profile trips behind the Iron Curtain, to Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, to demonstrate solidarity with Joseph Stalin and the communist cause.

 

He spoke and sang at large rallies and gatherings — high-visibility events generating newspaper headlines and featured on Pathe’s newsreels.

 

Robeson fashioned himself as a man of the people. Yet when Hungarians revolted against their Soviet masters, he likened them to fascists. Referring to politically motivated killings in Stalinist Russia, he observed: “From what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot!”

 

When Stalin died in 1953, Robeson — winner of the Stalin Peace Prize a year earlier — praised him in a glowing eulogy as a great man: “One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin – the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future.”

 

Many of Robeson’s fellow leftists were horrified at Stalin’s crimes in Russia and aggression abroad. They publicly condemned what was happening — even to the point of renouncing communism. But not Robeson. Appearing in 1956 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he refused to condemn Russia’s labor camps, where millions perished — yet in the same breath, he bitterly condemned his own country’s legacy of slavery. He was enraged by every lynching that ever occurred in the Jim Crow South — yet he never raised his voice against millions of state-sponsored lynchings in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe. He regarded these places as colorblind societies where social justice and egalitarianism prevailed.

 

Rewriting History

 

Robeson’s outspoken political views were repugnant, a fact acknowledged today even by some leftists. “Yes, Paul Robeson Was an Unrepentant Stalinist,” declared a Robeson-bashing article in the left-wing Daily Kos. Yet U.S. Ambassador Bridgewater nevertheless praised Robeson as a great American during the embassy’s renaming ceremony, which coincided with the 36^th anniversary of his death on January 23, 1976, at age 77. “Paul Robeson faced many challenges throughout his life, but he remained a sterling and shining example of patriotism, pride, elegance and humility,” said Bridgewater, 64, a 32-year veteran of the foreign service.

 

The renaming generated much positive publicity in Jamaica, a country with a love-hate relationship with the United States. Robeson’s granddaughter Susan Robeson, a filmmaker and activist, was among more than 150 visitors on hand, including a number of students. One newspaper headline declared: “Robeson’s Shining Example Lights Up U.S. Embassy.” Now, many young Jamaicans are no doubt learning a narrative that’s popular among Jamaica’s influential leftist political circles: Paul Robeson was a black man who sought social justice for America’s oppressed blacks, and as a result, he was blacklisted and persecuted by America’s racist and reactionary government. Jamaica, a former British colony of 2.7 million, is overwhelmingly of African descent.

 

The story behind the Robeson renaming is purely Obamaesque, and it is perhaps an indication of what’s been quietly happening at U.S. Embassies around the globe. Early last year, in observance of Black History Month, the U.S. Embassy in Kingston launched an essay contest for high school students, asking them to propose a historical figure after which the embassy’s popular Information Resource Center should be named.

 

The winning essay by Kathy Smith, “The Soul of a Continent,” put forth Paul Robeson, with whom Smith identified, in part, out of a sense of racial solidarity. “Robeson sung [sic] songs of equality and anti-hate, as if spurred by the soul of a continent,” Smith wrote — with her reference to “continent” being a reference to Africa. “His baritone voice told the truths of a man desperate to retain his thought-soul, his identity and African spirit.”

 

Smith, now a law student at the University of West Indies in Jamaica, is correct about one thing: Robeson’s rich baritone voice is indeed associated with a number of memorable American songs, including “Old Man River,” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” and “Let My People Go.” Yet Robeson also is famous for singing an English-language version of the Soviet National Anthem — a powerful and heartfelt rendition that may be heard on the YouTube clip here.

 

The U.S. Embassy in Jamaica failed to respond to an e-mail query regarding the renaming — and who approved it. But Ambassador Bridgewater certainly had a major role in it. So did whoever in the State Department gave her a green light — an approval no doubt reflecting President Obama’s reset of U.S. foreign policy. In this reset, America no longer defines who it is to the world. That would be arrogant. Instead, the world is allowed to decide who America’s heroes ought to be.

 

How times change. During the Bush years, when I was a journalist based in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, the U.S. Embassy sought to counter the island’s anti-Americanism, which went into a chest-thumping rage over Bush’s post-9/11 war on terrorism and invasion of Iraq. Those efforts were described in an article of mine for the Washington Times, “Answering Anti-Americanism.” Now, Ambassador Bridgewater and her State Department facilitators appear to be throwing a bone to Jamaica’s left-leaning People’s National Party and its anti-American cheerleaders — people, to be sure, who don’t represent the views of most ordinary Jamaicans.

 

Anti-Americanism

 

Words and deeds matter. By honoring Paul Robeson, the U.S Embassy may be giving a boost to anti-Americanism and in turn Jamaica’s potential for Islam-inspired terrorism by young men attracted to jihad’s anti-Western message. It’s a strange fact: Jamaica has only a tiny Muslim population, yet it has links to an unusually large number of Islam-inspired terror outrages and plots. These include the London subway bombings, Washington’s Beltway sniper shootings, and “shoe bomber” Richard Reed’s aborted attempt to blow up an American Airlines jet.

 

Could the anti-Western worldview propagated by Jamaica’s leftist elites be serving as an incubator for Islam-inspired terrorism? That possibility was discussed in my personal blog in 2007, and lo and behold, the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica on February 25, 2010 issued a secret diplomatic cable — “Jamaica: Fertile Soil for Terrorism?” — that was released by anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.

 

Written by Deputy Chief of Mission Isiah Parnell, the cable attributed Jamaica’s potential for Islam-inspired terrorism to the island’s large number of disaffected youths and unstable families with absent fathers. There was no mention of my main points: that Jamaica’s grievance-mongering elites may be providing a worldview from which Islam-inspired terrorists could emerge in an overwhelming Christian culture. The cable was sent to the CIA, FBI, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security, among others. Why it was classified as “secret” is perplexing. Perhaps it was to avoid embarrassing Jamaica’s government.

 

In 1950, the State Department declined to renew Robeson’s passport unless he signed an affidavit stating that he wasn’t a Communist Party member and was loyal citizen. Robeson refused. Rightly or wrongly, the State Department’s actions reflected the realities of the era — a dangerous cold war pitting Stalinist Russia against America and the West, and a conflict in which Robeson sided with the enemy with considerable gusto. U.S. authorities decided they’d had enough of Robeson’s antics on the international stage during a perilous period of nuclear brinkmanship between America and the U.S.S.R.

 

Robeson sued to regain his passport, and in 1956, in connection with that lawsuit, he appeared before the bipartisan House Committee of Un-American Activities. The confrontation featured some memorable exchanges between Robeson and committee members, including Robeson’s incredible assertion that the Soviet Union was a colorblind society (which was undoubtedly the case for high-profile useful idiots visiting there). Here are some excerpts from the hearing:

Mr. ROBESON: In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being. Where I did not feel the pressure of color as I feel [it] in this Committee today.

 

Rep. GORDON H. SCHERER : Why do you not stay in Russia?

 

Mr. ROBESON: Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear? I am for peace with the Soviet Union, and I am for peace with China, and I am not for peace or friendship with the Fascist Franco, and I am not for peace with Fascist Nazi Germans. I am for peace with decent people.

 

Rep. SCHERER: You are here because you are promoting the Communist cause.

 

Mr. ROBESON: I am here because I am opposing the neo-Fascist cause which I see arising in these committees. You are like the Alien [and] Sedition Act, and Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be here.

…

 

Rep. FRANCIS E. WALTER: Now, what prejudice are you talking about? You were graduated from Rutgers and you were graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. I remember seeing you play football at Lehigh.

 

Mr. ROBESON: We beat Lehigh.

 

Rep. WALTER: And we had a lot of trouble with you.

 

Mr. ROBESON: That is right. DeWysocki was playing in my team.

 

Rep. WALTER: There was no prejudice against you. Why did you not send your son to Rutgers?

 

Mr. ROBESON: Just a moment. This is something that I challenge very deeply, and very sincerely: that the success of a few Negroes, including myself or Jackie Robinson can make up — and here is a study from Columbia University — for seven hundred dollars a year for thousands of Negro families in the South. My father was a slave, and I have cousins who are sharecroppers, and I do not see my success in terms of myself. That is the reason my own success has not meant what it should mean: I have sacrificed literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for what I believe in.

 

STAFF DIRECTOR RICHARD ARENS: While you were in Moscow, did you make a speech lauding Stalin?

 

Mr. ROBESON: I do not know.

 

Mr. ARENS: Did you say, in effect, that Stalin was a great man, and Stalin had done much for the Russian people, for all of the nations of the world, for all working people of the earth? Did you say something to that effect about Stalin when you were in Moscow?

 

Mr. ROBESON: I cannot remember.

 

Mr. ARENS: Do you have a recollection of praising Stalin?

 

Mr. ROBESON: I said a lot about Soviet people, fighting for the peoples of the earth.

 

Mr. ARENS: Did you praise Stalin?

 

Mr. ROBESON: I do not remember.

 

Mr. ARENS: Have you recently changed your mind about Stalin?

 

Mr. ROBESON: Whatever has happened to Stalin, gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union, and I would not argue with a representative of the people who, in building America, wasted sixty to a hundred million lives of my people, black people drawn from Africa on the plantations. You are responsible, and your forebears, for sixty million to one hundred million black people dying in the slave ships and on the plantations, and don’t ask me about anybody, please.

 

Mr. ARENS: I am glad you called our attention to that slave problem. While you were in Soviet Russia, did you ask them there to show you the slave labor camps?

 

Rep. WALTER: You have been so greatly interested in slaves, I should think that you would want to see that.

 

Mr. ROBESON: The slaves I see are still in a kind of semi-serfdom. I am interested in the place I am, and in the country that can do something about it. As far as I know, about the slave camps, they were fascist prisoners who had murdered millions of the Jewish people, and who would have wiped out millions of the Negro people, could they have gotten a hold of them. That is all I know about that.

 

Mr. ARENS: Tell us whether or not you have changed your opinion in the recent past about Stalin.

 

Mr. ROBESON: I have told you, mister, that I would not discuss anything with the people who have murdered sixty million of my people, and I will not discuss Stalin with you.

 

Mr. ARENS: You would not, of course, discuss with us the slave labor camps in Soviet Russia.

 

Mr. ROBESON: I will discuss Stalin when I may be among the Russian people some day, singing for them, I will discuss it there. It is their problem.

At one point, Robeson attacked the patriotism of the committee members, saying that “you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

 

Comment:   It is highly unlikely even ten percent of the American college student, both black and white, know anything about the USSR, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Dung,  and the essentials of the Cold War and Marxist imperialist threats to the world  from 1920 to 1990.     Marxist regimes, like Obama in their determination to enforce and maintain citizen equality, murdered  over 140,000,000 at whims of  ruthless cheats and liars determined  to create the perfect society.  

 

Never before the advent of the Barack Hussein Obama Administration has America been so threatened by such a plague which has gained so much power;  power based on deception, lies, and subterfuge, perhaps even  political sabotage.

 

One should never forget that the foreign policy of the USSR was to destroy nonMarxist governments by whatever means possible.    If funded countless organizations within the free world to sabotage, to propagandize, to cause discontent among labor unions, teachers, politicans, racial groups and other minorities.

Peggy Noonan: The Increasingly Dishonest, Devious Barack Obama

Not-So-Smooth Operator

Obama increasingly comes across as devious and dishonest.

by Peggy Noonan   at  the Wall Street Journal:

Something’s happening to President Obama’s relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, “Nothing new there,” but actually I think there is. I’m referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It’s not due to the election, and it’s not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn’t happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it’s his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it’s a big fault.

The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide birth-control services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? “You’re kidding me. That’s not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it’s not even constitutional!” Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest—not wrongheaded, dishonest—charges that those who defend the church’s religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

What a sour taste this all left. How shocking it was, including for those in the church who’d been in touch with the administration and were murmuring about having been misled.

Events of just the past 10 days have contributed to the shift. There was the open-mic conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Mr. Obama pleaded for “space” and said he will have “more flexibility” in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done their thing. On tape it looked so bush-league, so faux-sophisticated. When he knew he’d been caught, the president tried to laugh it off by comically covering a mic in a following meeting. It was all so . . . creepy.

Next, a boy of 17 is shot and killed under disputed and unclear circumstances. The whole issue is racially charged, emotions are high, and the only memorable words from the president’s response were, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon.” At first it seemed OK—not great, but all right—but as the story continued and suddenly there were death threats and tweeted addresses and congressmen in hoodies, it seemed insufficient to the moment. At the end of the day, the public reaction seemed to be: “Hey buddy, we don’t need you to personalize what is already too dramatic, it’s not about you.”

Now this week the Supreme Court arguments on ObamaCare, which have made that law look so hollow, so careless, that it amounts to a characterological indictment of the administration. The constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago didn’t notice the centerpiece of his agenda was not constitutional? How did that happen?

Maybe a stinging decision is coming, maybe not, but in a purely political sense this is how it looks: We were in crisis in 2009—we still are—and instead of doing something strong and pertinent about our economic woes, the president wasted history’s time. He wasted time that was precious—the debt clock is still ticking!—by following an imaginary bunny that disappeared down a rabbit hole.

The high court’s hearings gave off an overall air not of political misfeasance but malfeasance.

All these things have hardened lines of opposition, and left opponents with an aversion that will not go away.

I am not saying that the president has a terrible relationship with the American people. I’m only saying he’s made his relationship with those who oppose him worse.

In terms of the broad electorate, I’m not sure he really has a relationship. A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.

From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?

That’s what the American people were thinking about.

But the new president wasn’t thinking about that. All the books written about the creation of economic policy within his administration make clear the president and his aides didn’t know it was so bad, didn’t understand the depth of the crisis, didn’t have a sense of how long it would last. They didn’t have their mind on what the American people had their mind on.

The president had his mind on health care. And, to be fair-minded, health care was part of the economic story. But only a part! And not the most urgent part. Not the most frightening, distressing, immediate part. Not the “Is America over?” part.

And so the relationship the president wanted never really knitted together. Health care was like the birth-control mandate: It came from his hermetically sealed inner circle, which operates with what seems an almost entirely abstract sense of America. They know Chicago, the machine, the ethnic realities. They know Democratic Party politics. They know the books they’ve read, largely written by people like them—bright, credentialed, intellectually cloistered. But there always seems a lack of lived experience among them, which is why they were so surprised by the town hall uprisings of August 2009 and the 2010 midterm elections.

If you jumped into a time machine to the day after the election, in November, 2012, and saw a headline saying “Obama Loses,” do you imagine that would be followed by widespread sadness, pain and a rending of garments? You do not. Even his own supporters will not be that sad. It’s hard to imagine people running around in 2014 saying, “If only Obama were president!” Including Mr. Obama, who is said by all who know him to be deeply competitive, but who doesn’t seem to like his job that much. As a former president he’d be quiet, detached, aloof. He’d make speeches and write a memoir laced with a certain high-toned bitterness. It was the Republicans’ fault. They didn’t want to work with him.

He will likely not see even then that an American president has to make the other side work with him. You think Tip O’Neill liked Ronald Reagan? You think he wanted to give him the gift of compromise? He was a mean, tough partisan who went to work every day to defeat Ronald Reagan. But forced by facts and numbers to deal, he dealt. So did Reagan.

An American president has to make cooperation happen.

But we’ve strayed from the point. Mr. Obama has a largely nonexistent relationship with many, and a worsening relationship with some.

Really, he cannot win the coming election. But the Republicans, still, can lose it. At this point in the column we usually sigh.