Motley Moose – Archive

President Obama was sworn in to start his second term in the Blue Room by Chief Justice Roberts who used a notecard this time to avoid any errors.  Just a bit of trivia: once POTUS is sworn in again tomorrow today at the public ceremony he will be only the second president to be sworn in four times.

It was all over the news this morning. Obama’s second term cabinet lacks diversity, it’s rocky, it’s shaping up to be a boys club.  

Game on: as the Romney campaign shifts gears from the battering and often baffling GOP primaries to a kinder and more moderate friendly (lulz) general election campaign, I’ve been beginning to pay more attention. While watching a candidate who’s held more positions than the unabridged Kama Sutra try to move toward some semblance of sanity is the height of political entertainment for me, I’ve got to say this ‘bracket and prebuttal‘ strategy they’re employing gives me a robust chuckle.

To beat a sitting president, you first have to chase him around the country.

At least that’s the operating theory at Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters, where aides are unleashing a new strategy to combat President Obama at his campaign stops and to even adopt Obama’s itinerary as their own.

With the general election campaign in full swing, the presumptive Republican nominee plans to stage “prebuttal” and “rebuttal” speeches to Obama designed to try to force the president on the defensive.

Prebuttal? SRSLY?

When Romney’s staff moved out of its office in Iowa after a virtual tie in the caucuses in January, the Obama campaign opened an office in Romney’s vacant headquarters.

Now, that’s how you prebut. Welcome to the Big Leagues, Mitt.

Partly as a welcome to new members, and partly because the article is now behind a paywall and I’ve never posted it here, I’ll post below a piece I wrote about the collective origins of the Moose during the 2008 primaries.

It was written for a non-blogging UK audience, so most of it will be quite obvious to a lot of Meese. But worth a bit of reflection three years on.

Flaming for Obama

This year’s Democratic primaries weren’t just fought on the hustings and in the television studios. Some of the fiercest battles took place in the blogosphere

At 7:00 PM Eastern (4:00 PM Pacific), President Obama will address a joint session of Congress to deliver his plan to create jobs and grow the economy. Senior Advisor, David Plouffe, who has been a key figure in crafting the strategy, says we can expect to hear the President detail a plan that will rebuild our economy, and further, issue a challenge to Congress to meet their responsibilities. All indications are that the address will be part policy, and part politics:

Barack Obama is to throw down the gauntlet to Republicans, demanding they back his $300 billion jobs plan or face the wrath of voters blaming them for refusing to help revive the American economy.

The stakes are high, and so are expectations. This just might be the President’s last, best chance to jumpstart the economy and bring some semblance of balance to the debate in Washington, where The H2tN (Hell to the NO!) Party have been dry-humping the agenda since the midterms. The challenges are immense: Can he appeal to D.C.-weary independents? Appease liberals? We’ll find out soon enough.

So it’s happened. Despite protests from the Pentagon, Obama has announced his intention of making the surge of two years ago truly a surge, and to draw down 33,000 US troops from Afghanistan by September next year.

The current Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just welcomed the news.

“The Afghan people’s trust in the Afghan army and police is growing every day and preservation of this land is the job of Afghans…. I welcome the decision of the US president today on pulling out [some of] … its troops from Afghanistan and I consider this a right decision for the interest of both countries.”

The news has created an unusual consensus and been welcome by the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as well as NATO, and the governments in London, Paris and Berlin.

The evolution of events that has led up to the past few days has been hard to put into perspective. More than the events of the weekend, large parts of the population are swinging inside their own heads in their view of Barack Obama in the context of their entire time with him. For many it may be hard not to  experience it similar to the moment when you realize that your quiet card partner hasn’t been just sitting there but has actually lined things up to win the game. He laid his trump out for all to see, and when someone has them all there isn’t anything anyone can say about it.

Everyone has a 9/11 story. I won’t bore you with mine. But I’ll just remind you all of the hundreds of non Americans who died at ground zero including 69 Brits, more than have ever been killed in any other terrorist atrocity, more than the 7/7 London tube bombings in 2005

NYC is a capital of the world. It belongs to the world. And our whole lifestyle, liberalism and internationalism were under attack. It was literally an attack on modern western secular values – and we all have a stake in them.

But while I can’t forget those 3,000 victims, the spiral of reaction and counter reaction has amplified those deaths many times over, all the victims of other Al Qaeda atrocities in Bali, Madrid, Baghdad, Lahore, Tanzania. And of course the civilians caught in the cross fire of counter-insurgency and invasion, hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’m happy this morning, but I don’t feel like partying. I feel like breathing again…

It feels like a ten year nightmare might finally be over…

So now that Obama has finally released his long form birth certificate, after a suspicious delay that might have fooled those 9 doddering black-robed ivy-league intellectual elitists on the Supreme Court but certainly couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of salt-of-the-earth, heartland-loving, small-town-fantasizing ordinary Americans, the patriots are satisfied.  Right?  

Thank God. Finally. Having come to office with a promise of healing divisions, and being faced with an obstructionist opposition veering increasingly to the zero tax anarchy of the Libertarian Right, your President finally came clean. No he isn’t a corporate tool. (Hell, if he was, wouldn’t he have taken those Wall St job offers rather than a meagre community organisers job?). Yes, he went there, and picked on that 1% which Joseph Steiglitz has so graphically depicted as enriching themselves in the last two decades. For those who haven’t read it: here’s his opening premise:

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided.

While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous-12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades-and more-has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

My emphases