Obama's "rush to failure" leaves his backers with buyer's remorse.By JAMES TARANTO
Blogress Megan McArdle was a strong supporter of Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, but now she is having doubts:
Having defended Obama's candidacy largely on his economic team, I'm having serious buyer's remorse. [Timothy] Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. Meanwhile, the administration is clearly prioritized a stimulus package that will not work without fixing the banks over, um, fixing the banking system. Unlike most fiscal conservatives, I'm not mad at him for trying to increase the size of the government; that's, after all, what he got elected promising to do. But he also promised to be non-partisan and accountable, and the size and composition stimulus package looks like just one more attempt to ram through his ideological agenda without much scrutiny, with the heaviest focus on programs that will be especially hard to cut.
Nearly 60 million Americans might respond, "Don't blame me, I voted for McCain." But they don't, because honestly, no one really thinks America made the wrong decision in voting against John McCain.
No one??? Think again, Sunshine!
(Similarly, no matter how unhappy people got with George W. Bush, no one ever said, "Things would be better if only John Kerry were president.")
What would be a good slogan to capture the disappointment people like McArdle--who either supported Obama or gave him the benefit of the doubt on the theory that he was calm and competent and would deal well with the current crises--are now feeling? Here's an idea: "America didn't vote for a rush to failure."
We can't take credit for that slogan; it actually comes from a political organization that is raising money to put it on billboards. "It's time to leave behind partisan attack politics and stand behind the policies that will strengthen and renew America's economy," explains the Web site.
Is President Obama listening? Almost certainly not. The slogan actually is not aimed at the president but at Rush Limbaugh, part of the Democratic National Committee's partisan attack on Limbaugh for being a harsh critic of Obama's policies. "Rush" in the slogan is a pun on Limbaugh's first name, though the Web site's rendition of the billboard has the slogan in all caps, so it's not clear if it is meant to be a proper or common noun.
How did the DNC end up choosing an anti-Limbaugh slogan that sounds like an anti-Obama (or at least disappointed-with-Obama) one? Crazily enough, according to an email we received from the DNC's Jen O'Malley Dillon, it was the winner of a contest. It was submitted by William C. of Camden, N.J., who apparently was forced to pawn his last name because he was so hard-hit by the Bush recession. Couldn't Jen O'Malley Dillon let him use one of hers?
But we digress. The whole Limbaugh kerfuffle makes both parties look silly. Democrats are attacking Limbaugh instead of actual Republican politicians not because the latter are so popular that it would backfire but because, for the moment at least, they're so marginal that they aren't worth attacking.
But when Democrats have big majorities of Congress and a president who came to office promising a whole new kind of politics, they too look pathetic for resorting to petty attack politics against someone who isn't even a politician. And they aren't even competent enough to come up with a slogan that makes clear which side they're on.