“The Price of Politics”

Bob Woodward’s new book, “The Price of Politics”  may do more to threaten President Obama’s reelection than the anemic jobs reports.

Obama may be a great orator with a clever campaign, but Woodward’s book depicts his White House as dysfunctional and disorganized.  The president himself is depicted as aloof and unable to develop the relationships necessary to lead the nation.  Congressional leaders of his own party, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, have little regard for Obama’s leadership abilities.

The book focuses on the debt ceiling crisis that the nation face during the summer of 2011.  A crisis that was so serious that “they wouldn’t tell the world how bad in was at the time,” according to Woodward in a interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer that will be aired Monday night.

As I was reading several reviews of the book I was reminded of Governor Chris Christie’s frequent criticism of Obama’s lack of leadership and inability to work across the aisle.  It’s worse than Chrisite imagined.  Harry Reid asked Obama to leave the room, at a meeting Obama called of congressional leaders at the White House, so that the congressional leaders could hammer out a deal to avert our nation defaulting on its debt that Obama would have no choice but to sign.  Earlier in the Obama administration, Nancy Pelosi muted  a conference call from Obama while she and Reid were together working on details of the stimulus package so that the president wouldn’t know that he did not have their undivided attention for his pontification.  Clint Eastwood was right.  The chair is empty and even the national Democratic congressional leaders know it.

The mainstream media’s coverage of the book may be more damaging to Obama’s reelection chances than the content of the book itself.

Reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post read like the reviewers compared notes before publication.  They are trying to suppress sales by depicting the book as boring and a rehash of previous reporting.  Yet they have enough integrity to report Woodward’s conclusion:

“It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition.

“But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on the important matters of national business. There is occasional discussion in this book about Presidents Reagan and Clinton, what they did or would have done. Open as both are to serious criticism, they nonetheless largely worked their will.

“Obama has not. The mission of stabilizing and improving the economy is incomplete.”

But ABC is giving Woodward  prime coverage of the book on Monday night in a intervew with Sawyer during “World News Tonight” and “Nightline.”  Woodward will sit down with George Stephanopolous live on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, September 11, the day the book is release.

The early coverage does not look good for Obama.

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Obama Circle ‘Shaking with Laughter’ Over Hillary Rosen Distraction

By Ann Kane

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Obama’s Effort To Build Support Among Women

The Obama campaign will intensify its efforts to boost the President’s standing with women this week with a mailing to over 1 million female voters in more than a dozen battleground states, according to The New York Times.

The campaign’s effort to rally women around the health care law had been long planned, to coincide with the second anniversary of Mr. Obama signing it on March 23, campaign officials said. But the effort has gained intensity, they added, because of recent controversies over contraception, abortion and education in Washington and in state capitals that have energized people in the campaign’s far-flung field offices who are essential to putting any national strategy into action.

Late last year, two and a half months ago, the chatter was that Obama was in trouble with his liberal base as well as the rest of the electorate.  The economy was the majority’s concern.

In the last two months, George Stephanopoulos introduced contraception into the GOP primary debate, Rick Santorum and the left stream media kept that chatter alive.  Obama announced that contraception will be covered under ObamaCare and Rush Limbaugh called a law student a slut and a prostitute.

Now, instead of focusing on the economy, energy prices and the emergent inflation that hasn’t caught the media’s attention yet, we are engaged in a culture war designed by the Obama campaign to shore up the President’s support with his base and scare women about the evil white men who run the Republican party.

How easily manipulated we are.

The general election campaign is well underway.  However the GOP is still fighting over minor differences between it’s potential candidates and is not yet engaged against Obama.

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Contraception Debate Is No Fluke

“Contraception is working just fine.  Leave it alone.” ~Mitt Romney answering George Stephanopoulos’s questions regarding States having the right to ban contraception during the New Hampshire GOP presidential debate

President Obama and his allies in the mainstream media completely fabricated the recent contraception controversy in order to distract America from its real problems which are likely to get worse between now and November 6.

Rather than talk about almost 25 million working age Americans without jobs, Obama wants America to be afraid that his Republican challenger would ban birth control if elected.

George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, formerly President Bill Clinton’s Communications Director, went to great lengths during the New Hampshire GOP presidential debate to get a sound bite of Mitt Romney saying that States have the right to ban birth control in early January. 

In November of last year, Obama told then Archbishop, now Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the leader of the Catholic Church in the United States, that he “get most of what he wanted” regarding contraception as the White House was hashing out the implentation of ObamaCare.

By early February, Obama changed his mind,betrayed Dolan and shifted the national debate away from the economy and on to issues that were “working just fine” —  birth control and religious freedom — when he announced the ObamaCare regulations that requires all employers, including those affiliated with religious institutions, to provide health care that includes the cost of contraceptives.

Romney avoided the trap in January, but Rick Santorum jumped into it with both feet in February, as did Republicans in the House and Senate.

Rush Limbaugh did the congressional Republicans a favor by drawing attention to himself, and away from the Blunt Amendment which was never going to pass, with his crass remarks about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law School student  who is as much a part of this Obama change the subject gambit as Stephanopoulos is.

But Limbaugh did Obama a bigger favor. The President called Fluke yesterday to thank her for speaking out for women’s rights.  Now he’s framing the contraception debate as a women’s right’s issue.

Fluke is not a 23 year old coed who can’t afford birth control as originally reported in the media.  She’s a 30 year old women’s rights activist.  It was no fluke that the Democrats wanted her to testify before congress.  She’s likely to be the President’s 2012 Obama girl.

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