Telegraph UK: Barack Obama seems unable to face up to America’s problems
March 8, 2010
The End of the Road for Barack Obama?
By Simon Heffer
[dramatic illustration here of a train plunged off its tracks, resulting in a huge wreck. The train lies irreparable by the wayside.]
"It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama’s regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.
Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth – a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable – and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off.
Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands.
The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama’s own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent....
Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity.
...The Senate is trying to approve a Bill that would provide a further $150 billion of tax incentives to employers.
Yet there is a sense of desperation in the Administration, a sense that nothing can be as efficacious at the moment as a sticking plaster [my note: British term for a Band-Aid].
Edward B Montgomery, deputy labour secretary in the Clinton administration, now spends his time on day trips to decaying towns that used to have a car industry, not so much advising them on how to do something else
as facilitating those communities’ access to federal funds.
For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one.
This massive state spending gives rise to accusations by Republicans, and people too angry even to be Republicans, that America is now controlled by “Leftists” and being turned into a socialist state."