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Perry came prepared to exchange barbs with Mitt Romney but not to defend Texas against the stereotypical complaints against Texas relayed by Brian Williams. He accepted Williams’s invitation to pummel Romney on Massachusetts’s low rate of job creation during Romney’s single term as governor and managed to note that it created fewer jobs then than during Michael Dukakis’s governorship in the 1980s (Romney didn’t think to note that Perry was a Democrat during most of that time and backed Al Gore for the 1988 Democratic nomination which Dukakis won). He was less adroit in explaining why Texas has relatively high levels of people without health insurance (one obvious reason: it has higher percentages of young people and immigrants, legal and illegal, than the national average).He did manage to make the point that, although Texas spends less money on education than many other states and—horror of horrors to Brian Williams, cut education spending from projected levels this year—that its black and Latino students tend to have higher test scores than in many high-spending teacher-union-dominated states. He was, I think, suitably presidential in going out of his way to give Barack Obama and the Navy SEALs credit for killing Osama bin Laden, and he was steadfast in defending Texas’s record on capital punishment. (Note to Brian Williams: You may be against capital punishment, as I am, but most Americans favor it in appropriate circumstances, and every American president including Barack Obama has supported it; it’s not un-American to execute the most heinous criminals.)Perry was also interestingly passionate in defending his decision to require hpv inoculations and he accepted the invitation to attack Ron Paul for his 1987 renunciation of Ronald Reagan; he was strong in maintaining that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” for Americans now in their twenties. His call for predator drones to police the border with Mexico precluded any attacks on him for opposing the border fence in Texas (where, as he has pointed out before, it’s impractical since the border runs along a river). His statements that Keynesian economics was now dead.
As Jimmy Carter can tell you, for a president to become an object of disdain and apathy is a very dangerous place to find himself.It has been a stunning fall from grace for Obama, a man who, upon taking office, was routinely compared to Kennedy, to FDR, and even to Lincoln. One is tempted to say those comparisons were unfair to Obama, except that he did so much to invite them.By now, the cult-like effect Obama had on his supporters is a distant, fading memory. The Greek columns built for his convention speech now look simply silly, as does Obama’s promise to heal the earth and reverse the ocean tide. His core appeal was aesthetic, and hence fleeting. It turns out Obama really was best equipped to be a community organizer and a state senator and perhaps not very much more than that. But Obama, a man of extraordinary self-regard, decided he was the world-historical person we had been waiting for. (What can one say about a person who surrounded himself with aides who referred to him as “Black Jesus” during the campaign?)
And, noting Milbank's column, this is from Commentary:QuoteAs Jimmy Carter can tell you, for a president to become an object of disdain and apathy is a very dangerous place to find himself.It has been a stunning fall from grace for Obama, a man who, upon taking office, was routinely compared to Kennedy, to FDR, and even to Lincoln. One is tempted to say those comparisons were unfair to Obama, except that he did so much to invite them.By now, the cult-like effect Obama had on his supporters is a distant, fading memory. The Greek columns built for his convention speech now look simply silly, as does Obama’s promise to heal the earth and reverse the ocean tide. His core appeal was aesthetic, and hence fleeting. It turns out Obama really was best equipped to be a community organizer and a state senator and perhaps not very much more than that. But Obama, a man of extraordinary self-regard, decided he was the world-historical person we had been waiting for. (What can one say about a person who surrounded himself with aides who referred to him as “Black Jesus” during the campaign?)
We can revel in Obama's apparent fall from grace all we want, but until the damage he has wrought is undone, he is the one who will revel last.Obamacare must be undone, or Obama - and Socialism - have won.
