Alligator Alley

President Obama spoke to his Latino base yesterday in El Paso, Texas and mocked the Republicans for asking for greater border security before tackling immigration reform.  In what has become a typical Obama rhetorical twist he chided his opponents by saying, "Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat [to stop illegal immigration]."  Now, I could be wrong (as I have occasionally been in the past), but being snide does not come across as being presidential.  Jibing your opponents may be a self-satisfying strategy when you are way ahead on the scoreboard.  But, if Obama wants to work with these same people sometime to get reasonable immigration reform accomplished, I doubt that such banal tactics will work when the game is tied.

Ditch the Republicans?

Yesterday at a Democrat fundraiser, our august prexy, Barack Obama, gave his partisan argument as to why a Democrat Congress deserves to win the elections in November. Basically, he said that Bush and the rest of the Republicans drove our economy into the ditch in 2008. Obama was subsequently elected and thus he [sigh] was required to patch up this accident. With that sly grin of his, he went on to say that the Democrats have gotten the car (our economy) out of the ditch and back on the asphalt. And he added with a snide guffaw … now the Republicans want the keys back. In his best sophomoric manner, he said, “No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”

Perhaps what he said has a modicum of metaphoric truth to it, however please allow me to modify and extend his remarks with the following observations:

- The Republicans were not alone in driving our economy into the ditch. Clearly, by insisting on the irrational expansion of sub-prime mortgages, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and their cronies in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did their share of reckless driving. The major sin that Bush and his Republican compatriots in Congress can be accused of is not pushing back hard enough.

- Yes, the Democrats have stopped our economy from sliding further into the ditch. But to say that we are back on the asphalt is, at best, political hyperbole. At worst, it is demagoguery. Economic growth is clearly anemic and unemployment still hovers around 10%. In fact, we are in serious jeopardy of slipping back into negative GNP growth. And this is occurring after monstrous government deficit spending that cannot be sustained. Such a Keynesian economic experiment has once again been proven misguided … and if the Bush tax cuts are left to expire this coming January, it is quite likely that Obama’s stretch limo will also end up back in the economic ditch.

- Even public opinion has now decided that it is Obama’s recession. See: Obama's Fault. After 18 months in office, Obama needs to stop pushing his ultra-liberal agenda at the expense of job seekers and economic growth. He is rapidly losing Bush as a scapegoat and would be advised to start accepting responsibility for our economic malaise. Perhaps, as Obama was decrying at the fundraiser, the Republicans might make an equivalent mess of things if they win back majorities in Congress this fall, but then we would still have some hope that things will finally change. I kind of suspect that if the tea partiers have anything to say about it, things will.