Monday, February 23, 2009

People I know

Marshall:

I was just watching Chris Matthews explaining how the Dow is President Obama's "scoreboard" and how people are going to start getting angry at him soon if he's not able to get the Dow to stabilized and start going up soon:



It is of course an entirely separate matter whether that is actually true -- as to public response -- and whether it makes any logical sense at all.

There does seem to be a certain lack of comprehension of the fact that there are economic realities, actual losses, underlying the steep stock market decline.


The left is going to continue laying this off on Bush, and because most people have no idea what is going on, they will largely get away with it. But people who are a little more sophisticated see the continuing, historic slide of the markets as a referendum on Obama's disorganized handling of the ongoing crisis -- particularly his astonishingly incoherent non-plan for the banking system. Nothing he or Geithner says has made sense, and that is devastating for the markets. For months, the markets waited to be rid of one hapless fool, only to see him replaced by what looks like another one. People expected better and they aren't getting it -- if anything, Obama/Geithner have been worse than Bush/Paulson, who at least sounded like they had a grasp on things every once in awhile.


Obama won the election on November 4th. He had ~10 weeks from then until inauguration. The crisis had been winding up for months -- even before the election, he had plenty of time to prepare. He gets into office, and it soon becomes clear he has no detailed plan to deal with things, that he's winging it. The phrase "What the fuck" comes to mind. So does the phrase, "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

It gets better. Now, when the country is suffering from Depression-like conditions, he's talking about halving the deficit in three years. Maybe it's just some of that Zen chess that Obama excels at to a degree we mere mortals can't comprehend, but it looks to me like the Obama Variation of the Hoover Attack. I thought that had been refuted way back in the '30s.