Somebody said that Obama sounds like a college professor. Exactly. Which is why in the end I kinda had to stop listening. I find it quite difficult to find anything approaching much more than good sounding ideas that get squashed like bugs when they meet the real world and so he grabs sledgehammer style armtwisting power and makes a hash of what might have been good policy. Then like Spence says, he compromises his way out, cursing the devil in his loyal opposition and saying the best that could possibly be done has been done. That's the pattern.
I didn't hear a bad idea, not one, in all the time I listened. I just don't believe he can really do much very well. And what characterizes it for me were two things. 1. He wants to get rid of loopholes in the corporate tax code and reduce to a flatter lower corporate tax. 2. He went to some obscure place in the midwest to say he was going to spend a couple hundred million on some worthy cause. The second is obviously pandering, and with no real money to speak of. The first is impossible to do in two years without more of the same, professor.
I'm starting to think that at long last we have got our William Jennings Bryan / Adlai Stevenson President. All the leadership of a college town department egghead. All his drama is gone. He talked about high speed trains, fer chrissake. Didn't we hear that Donald Fagen song in 1982?
(Sigh)
It's a good thing I don't care about politics much. I'd be pretty bummed out right about now. I'm just waiting for the drama of chance. Did you hear there might be cold fusion? Did you hear Yemen and Tunisia might collapse? And why doesn't somebody just shoot Hosni Mubarak? I'm sick of his old ass. Meh. I'm listening to Hardcore History again, Rome, Nazis. Nothing contemporary has the shock and awe. Maybe Rand Paul is actually worth listening to.
OK I promised I'd be serious. But if the President is serious about taking loopholes out of the tax code, how does he expect to incent businesses to do anything? Is he just going to write executive order-style regulation like he tried with Wall Street compensation? Rule by fiat instead of incent with tax breaks? Really?
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