Adele Ferguson

Hue and cry will not derail Obama’s second term

USING THE EXCUSE of presenting a long promised jobs plan, President Barack Obama tried last week to launch a political comeback “amid the lowest approval rating of his presidency.”

Plus “a growing sense of economic foreboding here and across the country among voters who are increasingly questioning their president’s skills and priorities.” So says the Wall Street Journal on the basis of a poll it jointly took with NBC News Aug. 27 -31 that found only 44 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, taking the disapproval over half to 51 percent for the first time since his inauguration.

Some 73 percent of people surveyed said the country was headed in the wrong direction.

Yet, thanks to the Save Obama arm of the mainstream media, most Americans still say the president inherited the nation’s economic woes from President Bush.

That protective arm , however, appears to be faltering on the editorial pages.

Examples: Columnist Peggy Noonan, “He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist.

He is a loser.

And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.”

FOUAD AJAMI, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, “The crippling truth of the Obama presidency is the pessimism of the man, the low expectations he has for this republic.”

Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, “H is for Hillary Clinton who—I can’t believe I’m writing this—would have made a better president than Mr. Obama.”

NORMAN PODHORETZ, former editor of Commentary, “The question on every lip is what happened to Obama? The answer is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.”

SHELBY STEELE, author, “If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times; President Obama is destroying the country. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.”

Robert J. Barro, Harvard economics professor, “One obstacle to reaching a sound agreement on fiscal policy is Mr. Obama’s recurring Robin Hood obsession. No matter what is at stake in terms of fiscal stability, economic growth and even unemployment, he always returns to his desire to take more from our nation’s famously odious millionaires and billionaires.”

BRET STEPHENS, WSJ, “How many times have we heard it said that Mr. Obama is the smartest president ever? I don’t buy it. I just think the president isn’t very bright.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Indiana, “The president is not in over his head; he knows precisely what he is doing, rushing America down the path toward socialism.”

MORT ZUCKERMAN, editor U.S. News & World Report, “Mr. Obama seems unable to get a firm grip on the toughest issue facing his presidency and the country—the economy.”

There are more, but I’ll stop there because no matter how loud the hue and cry predicting Obama’s defeat in 2012, I disagree. Remember all the fuss over the first black sheriff, first black mayor, first black congressman, first black Supreme Court justice, etc? The first black president was the piece de resistance, the one first black achievement most desired, and they finally got him and there is no way in the world he’s going to be dumped after one term when a second term is possible in which he could redeem himself.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)