The President's Increasingly Desperate Rhetoric

The President has been going around the country in an increasingly desperate line of rhetoric which is based on the notion of a car - D goes forward and R goes backward. I listened to his speech to a crowd in Nevada where he was trying to rescue Sleazy Harry.    Just how dumb does he think voters are?   His false cadence of populism strings together a series of cliches which basically argue that without government helping - he argues that the negative ads against democrats are paid for by "oil companies, insurance, speculators."   Presumably he does not mind the millions (more) dollars coming from the public employee unions.  He looks increasingly pathetic.  Although he was educated at Ivy League institutions his accent tries to sound like he came from somewhere south of the Mason Dixon.

A recent WSJ poll finds the American people divided between about a third who want to send a message that the President has been pretty good and a slightly larger group who want to send a message that he has gone too far.  What the poll also suggests is that the larger group is more motivated to express their opinion.

As I thought about the D and R analogy I came up with a similar one based on economic principles.  D equals depression or demagogue.  R equals resurgence.

In the election the choice, which seems to being made, is either continuing the massive move to more and more government or coming back to a more realistic assessment of what government should and can do.

The real test of Obama will not be whether he is successful in changing the direction of what seems increasingly like a wave election but in whether he can learn from the huge mistakes he made in the first two years of his very insulated administration.  If he can he could recover as well as Bill Clinton did.  If not he will be a one term president.