PERRspectives: November 2008 Archives

November 2008 Archives

	Bush, Obama United Against GOP War on Dogs Harry Truman once famously said, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog." For all of his faults, President Bush followed Truman's advice and like his father welcomed man's best friend to the White House. In his interview with Barbara Walters Wednesday, Barack Obama signaled that he, too, wanted a "big rambunctious dog" in his administration. As it turns out, this rare moment of bipartisanship is a welcome relief from the extreme anti-dog agenda of the Republicans who... more Posted on November 27, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	Five More Signs of the Deepening Bush Recession On Wednesday, President-Elect Obama and President Bush provided a study in contrasts in their respective responses to the American economic crisis. In Chicago, Obama unveiled a new economic recovery advisory board to be led by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. Back in Washington, George W. Bush pardoned a Thanksgiving turkey. But as the lame duck poses with a turkey at the White House, a cascade of foul economic indicators provided five more signs of the deepening Bush recession. The bad... more Posted on November 26, 2008 \| Comments (0)

	Bush Recession, Not Jawbone, Drives Down Oil Prices In the pantheon of his presidential failures, the utter inability of former Texas oilman George W. Bush to influence OPEC and the price of oil stands out among the most predictable - and ironic. While gas has dipped below $2 a gallon and a barrel of oil has plummeted almost $100 since its record high in July, those developments owe nothing to George W. Bush's famous 1999 boast that he would "jawbone" his friends in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia into... more Posted on November 25, 2008 \| Comments (0)

	History Repeating as GOP Looks to Block Health Care Reform When it comes to blocking Barack Obama's health care plan, what is old is new for the conservative movement. Fearing a permanent Democratic majority if Bill Clinton succeeded in passing his health care reform package, Bill Kristol in 1993 famously authored a memo urging Republicans to halt it at all costs. Now in the wake of the GOP's latest blowout at the ballot box, its water carriers in right-wing think-tanks and media are calling for history to repeat itself. In... more Posted on November 24, 2008 \| Comments (2)

	The Decline and Fall of the First MBA President If nothing else, George W. Bush is an irony-producing machine. After all, the collapse of the American economy, perhaps the enduring legacy of Bush's tenure in the White House, was presided over by the man many once lauded as the nation's "first MBA President." Now with the Bush recession deepening into a crisis of historic proportions, "MBA President" has joined expressions like "mission to Mars", "weapons of mass destruction" and "we do not torture" among the cruel jokes of the... more Posted on November 23, 2008 \| Comments (2)

	Grim New GDP Forecasts Show Deepening Bush Recession In his sober column today decrying President Bush's lame-duck abdication of leadership, Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman fretted, "The prospects for the economy look much grimmer now than they did as little as a week or two ago." Make that 24 hours. Just one day after I compiled the dismal numbers for the mushrooming Bush recession, startling new forecasts for gross domestic product (GDP) show the economic crisis will be even longer and deeper than initially feared. U.S. GDP... more Posted on November 21, 2008 \| Comments (4)

	Measuring the Bush Recession As the American economy plunges deeper into crisis, the conservative chattering classes are hoping for a replay of their 2001 blame game. Having successfully perpetuated the myth that President Bush "inherited a recession" from Bill Clinton, right-wing mouthpieces from Rush Limbaugh to Fred Barnes began blaming Barack Obama for the Bush recession literally within hours of his election. But as a quick glance at the data shows, across virtually economic indicator from GDP, unemployment and consumer confidence to home prices,... more Posted on November 20, 2008 \| Comments (2)

	Romney to Detroit: Drop Dead During the Michigan primary in January, former Massachusetts Governor and son of auto magnate Mitt Romney blasted John McCain for saying he didn't want to raise "false hopes that somehow we can bring back lost jobs." Now as the American auto industry teeters on the brink of collapse, Romney in a New York Times op-ed Wednesday has a much different message for Detroit: drop dead. In January, Romney was singing a different tune about the need to save Michigan's car... more Posted on November 19, 2008 \| Comments (2)

	John McCain, This Bud's for You While John McCain's awkward appearance Monday with President-elect Barack Obama was a reminder of what he had lost, he and wife Cindy nonetheless received a consolation prize. Belgian beverage giant In Bev completed its acquisition of Anheuser-Busch, the beer company in which Mrs. McCain holds millions of dollars of stock. As it turns out, John McCain left the presidential campaign trail with quite the parting gift. The $52 billion acquisition of Anheuser-Busch means the McCains will be adding to their... more Posted on November 18, 2008 \| Comments (0)

	New Huckabee Book Adds GOP Blame Game to Culture War In this the season of their discontent, Republican leaders are pointing the finger of blame, all the while positioning themselves to take over their battered and bruised party in 2012. So it is with Mike Huckabee. In his new book, the former Arkansas Governor, Baptist minister and Fox News host skewers presidential rival Mitt Romney and castigates leaders of the religious right who cast their lot with someone else. But while Huckabee looks forward to the future battle for the... more Posted on November 17, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	The National Review's Nazi Self-Parody As Georgia Congressman Paul Broun learned last week, politicians and pundits of all stripes should resist the temptation to compare their opponents to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Apparently, the staunch conservatives at the National Review didn't get the memo. Facing both conservative calamity at the polls and defections in its own ranks, the Review's Deroy Murdock suggested that a 1930's Nazi-style purge is just what the doctor ordered for the Republican Party. As the New York Times detailed Monday,... more Posted on November 17, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	Lieberman Won't Get the Jeffords Treatment from Obama On Tuesday, Senate Democrats will decide the turncoat Joe Lieberman's fate as the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. But whether Lieberman retains his chairmanship or even his place in the Democratic caucus, President-elect Barack Obama will apparently play little to no role. It's just another stark contrast with George W. Bush, whose campaign of retribution against Jim Jeffords in 2001 drove the Vermont Senator out of the Republican Party. That some of Joe Lieberman's former colleagues... more Posted on November 16, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	How the GOP Learned to Love the Judicial Filibuster Nothing focuses the mind, the expression goes, like the sight of the gallows. And so it is for beaten and battered Senate Republicans when it comes to the use of the filibuster to block the judicial nominees of President Barack Obama. After years of insisting President Bush's picks for the bench deserved an "up or down vote," Arizona Senator Jon Kyl and his allies in the GOP minority are now threatening to turn to the judicial filibuster. Of course, after... more Posted on November 14, 2008 \| Comments (0)

	To GOP's Dismay, Obama Won Affluent Voters Among the lowlights of the presidential campaign was the bogus charge from John McCain and his Republican allies that Barack Obama's tax plan was "socialist." Ending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans while providing tax relief for most working families, the GOP's amen corner shrieked, verged on communism. But as the election returns showed, voters were having none of it, including those making over $200,000 year. To the consternation of some on the right, the affluent in 2008... more Posted on November 11, 2008 \| Comments (2)

	Election Day Victories for Americans' Reproductive Rights Overlooked perhaps in the historic vote that made Barack Obama the nation's first African-American president is something that didn't happen. With the defeat of the McCain/Palin ticket and its extremist anti-abortion platform, Americans voted against an abrogation of women's reproductive rights that might have taken a generation to undo. And by rejecting draconian ballot measures in Colorado, South Dakota and California, voters protected a woman's right to choose - at least for now. To be sure, Obama's victory prevented the... more Posted on November 10, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	Lincoln, King and Obama's New American Dream That the election of Barack Obama as the United States' first African-American president was historic is an understatement. But perhaps lost in the excitement and emotion of Obama's victory speech Tuesday was just how truly American it was. Weaving into his address the words of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama tapped into the noblest tradition of American national unity. And in so doing, President-elect Obama traced the historical arc of the United States as a work in... more Posted on November 10, 2008 \| Comments (8)

	Complaining Now, Palin Called Hillary Clinton a Whiner If nothing else, Sarah Palin has a short memory. Literally days after branding Barack Obama a "socialist" who "pals around with terrorists," Palin responded to her ticket's crushing defeat by announcing, "God bless Barack Obama and his beautiful family." And as she returned to Alaska to complain about the media's accurate reflection of her jaw-dropping ignorance and campaign profligacy, Sarah Palin conveniently forgot having called Hillary Clinton a whiner when it comes to the press. During a Women and Leadership... more Posted on November 9, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	Conservatives Blame Bush Recession on Obama Unsurprisingly, it took less than 24 hours for the conservative chattering classes to blame the Bush recession on President-elect Barack Obama. The usual suspects, including Rush Limbaugh, Fred Barnes and Dick Morris, pinned two days of steep stock market declines on Obama's election. Of course, the recent bloodbath on Wall Street has nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with what John McCain deemed "the fundamentals of our economy" being weak. And as history shows time and again,... more Posted on November 7, 2008 \| Comments (2)

	The Republican War on Religious Freedom No doubt, Senator Elizabeth Dole's attack on Democrat and Sunday school teacher Kay Hagan as "godless" was one of the low points of the 2008 campaign. Dole's subsequent smiting by the voters of North Carolina was fitting electoral, if not divine, retribution. But as it turned out, Dole's slander against atheist Americans was hardly an isolated case of religious bigotry on the part of the Republican Party. From John McCain and Mitt Romney on down, the GOP waged a war... more Posted on November 6, 2008 \| Comments (2)

	Five Lessons Learned on Election Day 2008 No doubt, the sweeping victory of Barack Obama was a historic milestone for the American people. But while Obama defied the odds and shattered stereotypes, the exit polls suggest his election confirmed as much conventional wisdom as it upended. Here, then, are five lessons learned from the 2008 election: Taxation with Representation. During the campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly stated, "if you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down." Apparently, voters making more than $200,000 were just... more Posted on November 5, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	The Two Speeches That Defined McCain and Obama On this Election Day, the fates of John McCain and Barack Obama are now - finally - in the hands of Americans voters. But their respective destinies may have been determined by speeches each gave years ago. At the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama introduced himself to the American people with a message of national unity and transformational change that has hardly changed since. But in May 2006, John McCain took to the stage of Reverend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University... more Posted on November 4, 2008 \| Comments (0)

	Palin, Like Bush, Slanders Democrats on Terrorism With each passing day, Sarah Palin resembles more and more "George Bush in lipstick." Two days ago, she like George W. Bush in 2000 was duped by Canadian pranksters posing as foreign leaders. And today, Palin like President Bush in 2006 essentially accused her Democratic opponents of being terrorist sympathizers. Palin's slander came during a speech in Missouri. Claiming that Democrats want to slash defense spending, John McCain's running mate picked up his earlier treason charge and amplified it: "What... more Posted on November 3, 2008 \| Comments (0)

	Will Obama Win the Character War? Back in May, I argued that with the American electorate's across-the-board preference for Democratic policies and a historically unpopular Republican president, John McCain's campaign would turn the November election into a "character war." In September, campaign chairman Rick Davis confirmed the GOP would follow its tried and true strategy from 2000 and 2004 when he announced "this election is not about issues" but instead about "a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." On Tuesday night, Americans... more Posted on November 3, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	New Keating Revelations Dog McCain As he launched his first presidential run in 2000, John McCain said of the Keating Five scandal that nearly ended his career, "it was the wrong thing to do, and it will be on my tombstone and deservedly so." But on the eve of his final bid for the White House, McCain is still being buffeted by new revelations from his involvement with the convicted S&L villain in the late 1980's. As it turns out, his wife Cindy continued her... more Posted on November 3, 2008 \| Comments (0)

	Palin, Like Bush in 2000, Duped by Canadian Pranksters Given her Neanderthal social views and staggering ignorance of foreign affairs, it's no surprise that many have dubbed Sarah Palin "George Bush in Lipstick." Now, eight years after a Canadian comic duped then-Governor Bush into accepting the endorsement of a mythical prime minister in Ottawa, John McCain's running mate has suffered a similar fate. In even more spectacularly embarrassing fashion, as it turns out, Sarah Palin was punked by a prank call from a Montreal radio host posing as French... more Posted on November 1, 2008 \| Comments (1)

	Bush's Final Campaign '08 Disappearing Act Zero and 26. Those two numbers tell the tale when it comes to the toxic effects of President Bush on the candidacies of John McCain and his Republican colleagues. Zero is the number of public appearances Bush has made on behalf of GOP candidates this election cycle. 26 is the number of seconds George W. Bush and John McCain have been seen together in public since McCain earned the President's endorsement in March. And as the New York Times and... more Posted on November 1, 2008 \| Comments (0)