White House press secretary Josh Earnest answers a question about whether President Obama wants Vice President Biden to enter the race by saying Obama thinks picking Biden for VP was one of the smartest decisions he ever made.
Some people find it surprising that the Obama administration is moving to take down Hillary’s campaign (as, of course, it did in 2008), but it’s just part and parcel of Obama’s fundamental transformation of America.
Obama seeks to centralize and control the political process just as he has centralized and controlled the economy.
So far Obama has succeeded in placing record numbers of Americans on food stamps and disability. Record numbers are unemployed and underemployed. Record numbers are dependent on one central paymaster, the federal government, i.e., Barack Obama.
Obama’s policies have also aimed to reduce the number of people in the private sector who create jobs. Specific industries that led themselves to independent contractors and small and mid-sized business owners have been under regulatory attack from Obama policies.
Among the first to feel it were automobile dealerships and then doctors and healthcare providers. This October mortgage brokers will join them and feel the hit when Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and its complete overhaul of the real estate settlement process and the settlement sheets (formerly called “HUD-1s”) that buyers and sellers sign in transferring property becomes mandatory.
Implementation of the new CFPB regulations has been delayed for several months – in the original version the CFPB bureaucrats had forgotten to design forms with signatures lines for both buyers and sellers, among other ridiculous lapses.
In the new version, individual loan officers bear legal liability and can be sued if a buyer’s job situation or the wider economy changes and the loan they made to a home buyer is no longer affordable for them. And aside from that, increased regulatory costs mean the loan industry will become concentrated to fewer and fewer large firms that can afford lawyers and compliance departments. Exactly what has already happened in the health insurance industry under Obamacare.
But Obama isn’t just redesigning the American economy to a more concentrated corporatist future. He’s also redesigning American politics to increase barriers to entry and reduce competition. As with the economy, he aims to be in control.
Many have noted how Obama has harmed the Democratic Party. Under Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats lost Senate and House seats as well as Governors, in 2010 and then again in 2014.
Like an illusionist performing sleight of hand tricks, Democrat media have been yukking it up for months about the “GOP clown car,” the spectacle of 17 people running for the Republican presidential nomination. This snarking point, and all the coverage of Donald Trump and the other 16 candidates is not about the Republicans. It’s not even about the Democrats running or that there are so few of them.
It keeps us from noticing how few Democrats could run for president. Who is left who could run for President as a Democrat? John Edwards and Harry Reid are both disgraced. Al Gore seems to have scandals in his closet as well as being viewed, like several other once top Democrats, as a figure of fun.
The Democrats are down to Hillary Clinton and … Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? The Democratic Party is remarkable for its absences. As Monica Crowley and others have argued, the Obama regime is clearly behind the attacks on Hillary, since its the FBI and the Department of Justice investigating her misuse of classified emails. Obama wants to control whom, from the dwindling possibilities, becomes the next Democratic nominee.
Another noticeable Democratic absence – no one significant is defending Hillary. (Is someone telling them not to do so? Or has her baggage simply become Augean, requiring a PR Hercules?) This weekend she was defended by relative unknowns Ellen Tauscher and Brian Fallon.
Tauscher is a former Congresswoman and Democratic fundraiser who served under Hillary in the State Department. Ms. Tauscher had a clownish performance on Fox News Sunday, sweating, looking like she was about to cry, pale, with a face so taut it looked like she had just had an overly severe lift.
More importantly, she evaded Shannon Bream’s questions about why Mrs. Clinton had a private server by instead replying that other Secretaries of State had private email accounts. I’m sure she’s right about precedents. If email had been more widely used back during the first Clinton administration, Clinton National Security adviser Sandy Berger would have erased emails too instead of shredding classified documents embarrassing to Bill Clinton or hiding them down his pants.
Likewise Fallon, a former Schumer and Holder flak, evaded the issues of a Secretary of State conducting business with classified documents on a private email account on a private server (or now, it may be two private servers) and concentrated on showing his YouTube audience a few specific emails marked unclassified, a performance as lame as Hillary’s miming wiping a server with a cleaning rag. The campaign would be better off just cracking jokes, telling voters that she didn’t get the question when she said she wasn’t involved with “classified” material because she thought people were asking about Bill’s “casual connections” Craigslist ads.
Hillary and Obama have the same vice, what the classical Greek ethical theorists called pleonexia, grasping for too much so that you lose it all. Best illustrated in the Aesop’s fable of the boy who reaches into a jar of nuts and grabs such a large handful he cannot get his hand back out.
Hillary has been wheeling and dealing, selling uranium to Putin flunkies etc., all evidence of which must be wiped from her internet records. The result is that she may not be President, or even the nominee of her party.
Obama’s grasping is broader and more ambitious. He is willing to risk electoral Armageddon for the Democratic Party, leaving it with fewer and fewer elected officials and weaker and less mainstream presidential candidates, as long as the nominees who emerge are loyal to him and his legacy and ideology. In seeking to permanently bankrupt and degrade America, will he have overplayed his too full hand?
Bruce Majors is a former major donor to the Human Rights Campaign, Al Gore, and other candidates he is ashamed to mention.
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