Recommendations for the President

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has gone on record, saying that God is displeased at America's spending habits and “we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

 

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is making noises about attaching spending cut measures to disaster-relief bill.

 

The good news is that Obama's debt-ceiling deal was politically, a catastrophe. 46% to 32%, the public thought it was a lousy deal that would hurt the economy.

 

Obama signed the bill all alone.

 

Absolutely no one wanted to be visually associated with the deal, even though Speaker of the House John Boehner said "We got 98 percent of what we wanted," he said adding that the framework cuts more spending than it raises the debt limit. It also caps future spending to limits in the growth of government.

 

The problem for the President is not that lefty bloggers are critical of him and his performance (They are), but that they're the canaries in the coal mine who are warning him that he's really starting to slip in the estimation of the voters. The President's embrace of austerity was a really bad move that he really needs to pivot away from.

 

My recommendations are two: Obama needs to demand a clean bill for disaster relief. No cuts or the bill gets vetoed. He can't let himself get rolled again by giving in to blackmail as he did in the debt-ceiling deal. Two: He needs to cancel Cat Food Commission II, or as Senator Pat Toomey calls it, the super-committee to cut spending. He can do it by quietly telling all the Democrats on the Commission to simply not show up for meetings, Republicans will then complain, Obama can then come out and say the Commission was a lousy idea to start with and he supports Democrats who stay away from it. He should then stand with the public and say that he's opposed to any further cuts.

 

Failure to do this could very easily result in a President Romney/Perry/Bachmann.

 

Update: Progressive Keynesian economist Dean Baker examines Obama's proposed job creation schemes and finds them most underwhelming. If this is the best he can do, it means he hasn't learned anything and is probably doomed to be a one-term president.

 

Further update: Good! Looks like that's just what he's doing.