Rats Are Deserting Obama's Ship

Rats Are Deserting Obama's Ship

One by one, former supporters of The Won, from both the commentariat and the business world, are writing columns and making public statements expressing their frustration that the chameleon is of a single color after all, and that color is not to their liking. Even as stalwart an Obama fan as Paul Krugman has had it with the latest beaut - Geithner's plan to subsidize the purchase of toxic assets. The Nobel laureate in economics does not see the economic sense in this plan, and sums his feelings about it thus:

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.

Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

Maureen Dowd, who may not be particularly serious, but is definitely quite popular and until quite recently a full throated Obama supporter, channels Shakespeare in her anger at Obama, here discussing the Porkulus bill:

“He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath,” the Fool told Lear.

And he’s truly mad that trusts in the promise of a presidential candidate to quell earmarks.

Even as solid a leftist as William Greider has written

Barack Obama can resist all this, if he chooses, but he seems conflicted. Obama's approach so far is devoted to restoring Wall Street's famous names, and his economic advisers tell him this is the "responsible" imperative, no matter that it might offend the unwashed public. Obama evidently agrees. He does not seem to grasp that the tone-deaf technocrats are leading him into a dead-end.

All these rats are deserting the ship just as Zogby has downgraded Obama's approval rating to 50-50. So a good question would be, why? Why has a president who was elected to such gushing praise from his supporters losing his support from so many opinion leaders? One good guess would be the disparate expectations Obama's fraudulent campaign promised.

This man was elected by perfecting a technique which enabled him to cause voters to project their own hopes and dreams onto him. He thus made himself the deliverer of so many disparate policy prescriptions, so many that there is no possible way to accommodate them all. He will continue to lose support, that is certain. The only question is whether or not he can pick up additional support from other quarters, mostly those quarters which did not vote in the last election - the ones who do not vote at all.