As of now, I am in control here, in the White House

Tag Archives: hope and change

Tom Donilon, The Four Million Dollar Man

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President Obama today announced that National Security Adviser James L. Jones, disliked in Obama circles, is leaving earlier than expected, to be replaced by his deputy Tom Donilon, who is liked in Obama circles.

Well, he didn’t announce it exactly like that, but that’s what’s happening.

Some may find this comforting. It was nice back in the Seventies when the United States was protected by none other than the Six Million Dollar Man. In Donilon, Obama has something almost as good: The Four Million Dollar Man.

Chinese President Hu Jintao congratulates Tom Donilon on making $325,000 a month in 2008

Because that’s what he earned in 2008. It’s time to start spreading the wealth around, for goodness sakes.

Donilon has been steadily accumulating wealth for years. He lobbied from 1999-2005 for Fannie Mae, trying to keep regulators at bay while Fannie Mae self-destructed amid accounting irregularities and loans to people who couldn’t afford them, driving the housing market and the economy off a cliff and into a ravine so deep that NO ONE CAN FIND THEM.

Having done his share to wreck the economy, Donilon went on to assist some of the financial fat cats Obama is always complaining about. From an April 5, 2009 Wall Street Journal article on some of the Obamaites 2008 earnings.

Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon earned $3.9 million as a partner at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers LLP, where his clients include Citigroup, Inc., Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Obama fundraiser and heiress Penny Pritzker.

Four million bucks in one year. Where’s the Hope and Change? NO HOPE!

I’ll bet Donilon can afford a flat screen TV.

Donilon has been trying to seize power for years, and now he’s finally got it. In his pursuit of power, he’s worked for the following people: Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Barack Obama. Pretty good pickings.

He’s basically a good political operative who works very hard, and Obama likes him.

But, where’s the change? NO CHANGE! Come on! This guy’s a bigger insider than Henry Kissinger, without, so far as I can tell, much experience in national security before joining the Obama White House. He rose to become former Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s chief of staff in the 1990s, but does this qualify for him for his current position?

Oh, and the brass doesn’t seem to respect him. According to Bob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars,” Defense Secretary Gates thought he would be a “disaster” as National Security Adviser.

It’s OK that the nation’s foreign policy is being run by a Secretary of State without foreign policy experience and a National Security adviser without a long history of national security experience. I DON’T MIND AT ALL!!!!

I do mind.

A good rundown of Donilon’s bio – and those of the other members of the Donilon Washington clan –  can be found on the Washington Post’s Who Runs Gov.

Partisan Obama Playing Poorly in Peoria

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The verdict of the American people on Obama’s new Republican-bashing strategy is in, and it’s not pretty for the cynical White House strategists who put it together.

Obama this summer placed Hope and Change into a time capsule, to be unearthed for use during his 2012 reelection campaign or, more likely, by historians years hence looking to perform an autopsy. With the Chicago pol that had been cloaked under the Man of Inspiration now free to stick in the knife, Obama has been regularly describing Republicans as not just wrong – that would be far too gentle – but as a gang of unprincipled thugs enlisted by Corporate America to pulverize the middle class.

In a striking moment of clarity, Obama Aug. 9  actually announced the decision he had made to shed his higher self, at least until Election Day. Here’s what he said at a DNC fundraiser in Austin, Texas.

We have spent the last 20 months governing. They spent the last 20 months politicking.  Now we’ve got three months to go, and so we’ve decided, well, we can politick for three months.

But the sight of an unpopular president bludgeoning Republicans with false rhetoric is either fueling a GOP rise in the polls and at least not hindering it. According to an averaging of national polls by Pollster.com, Republicans are starting to pull away from Democrats, leading on the generic ballot by more than five points.

The chart shows a steady progression toward Republicans that if anything has accelerated since Mean Obama revealed himself. And for the president, the new persona he has adopted, and the clear suggestion that the old one was just that – a persona – appears to be worsening his own standing. The trend lines don’t look good.

And the revulsion is not limited to Republicans.

According to Pollster.com’s averaging, Democrats have been steadily souring on the president, to the point that now almost one in five disapprove of his performance. Nearly 90 percent of Republicans disapprove, which seems unsurprising until you realize that only about 40 percent gave him the thumbs down when he took office. Seems even Republicans bought the Hopey Changey stuff and were willing to give him a shot.

Ominously for the Dems, Obama’s numbers are almost exactly where Bill Clinton’s were at this point in 1994, just before the Republicans swept the Congressional Democrats out of power in an election that was widely seen as a repudiation of the president.

The White House decision to send Obama in for remodeling was a bad one. The presupposition operating here, perhaps subconsciously among his advisers, is that dumb Americans won’t notice.

Well, Americans are not dumb. They know hypocrisy and phoniness when they see it. A man of high principle does not suddenly become a snarling partisan. The political hacks in the White House would have done better to stick to their original script.

Obama Officially Suspends Hope and Change

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President Obama today suspended hope and change, declaring a moratorium on his 2008 campaign promise until after Election Day.

Speaking at a DNC fundraiser in Austin, Obama made clear he was tired of being so good while the Republicans were being so bad. And so, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

We have spent the last 20 months governing. They spent the last 20 months politicking.  Now we’ve got three months to go, and so we’ve decided, well, we can politick for three months.

In a sign that he is serious about being unserious, Obama chastised Republicans for failing to perform self-criticism and called on them to admit they suck.

It would be one thing if having run the economy into the ground, having taken record surpluses and turned them into record deficits, if having presided over the meltdown of our financial system, that they had gone off into the desert for a while and reflected — (laughter) — and said, boy, we really screwed up.  What we were selling didn’t work.  It badly damaged the American economy, and now we’re going to come back with a whole new set of ideas.

With his speechwriters apparently on vacation in Monaco, Obama appears to have lifted a paragraph from a recent essay by one of Speaker Pelosi’s elementary school-age grandchildren titled, “This Is What a Republican Does.”

You cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, you cut back rules and enforcement when it comes to special interests, and then you cut the middle class loose to fend for themselves.

So if you’re a young person who couldn’t afford to go to college, tough luck, you’re on your own.  If you’re a child here in Texas that doesn’t have health insurance, them’s the breaks, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.  If you’re a worker who had been laid off, maybe short of retirement, and couldn’t find anything that would allow you to pay the bills or pay the mortgage, that’s too bad, you’re on your own.  Now, on the other hand, if you’re a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, then you (get) to write your own ticket.

Contacted by White House Dossier, House Minority Leader John Boehner was disconsolate.

“He’s right, he’s right, we’re bad people,” Boehner wailed, as tears sailed down his cheeks. “We want to stop but we’re bought and paid for by Fat Cats. We just want to hurt people. Why, why, why do we do it?”

A senior White House official showed no pity for the hapless Boehner.

“We offered them every opportunity to agree with us,” he said. “Instead, they agreed with themselves. And they have body odor – have you noticed?”