Voter Political Blog

2008 was quite a year.  I found myself glued to the news more-so than probably any previous year.  Not because this race was terribly different form all those in the past, but because there was so much humor involved in this race.  Also with the huge impact and participation of people on the internet, it made a tremendous difference because everyone had a voice.

VotesMustCount has a great collection of the best videos that came out of the 08 race.  I think the younger, more diverse crowd that supported Obama had far more internet and technical prowess than the voters supporting McCain, and therefore there’s a clear bias in the quantity of funnies the Obama supporters produced vs the McCain ones.

If you find yourself with 10 minutes of spare time, and want a good laugh, head over and take a look at those videos.

It was the government’s poor reaction to the Katrina disaster that ended their ability to get anything done. The Associated Press reports on an upcoming Vanity Fair article that reports part of an oral history on the bush administration due to be distributed nationally January 6.

Staff AP News Dec 29, 2008 21:41 EST

Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government’s poor handling of the natural disaster.

“Katrina to me was the tipping point,” said Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. “The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter.”

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: “Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.” [Snip]

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs. When Bush first came into office, he was surrounded by experienced advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell, who Wilkerson said ended up playing damage control for the president.

“It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president — because, let’s face it, that’s what he was — was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire,” Wilkerson said, adding that he considered Cheney probably the “most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur” he’d ever met.

“He became vice president well before George Bush picked him,” Wilkerson said of Cheney. “And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.”

Wilkerson’s comment on Cheney confirms what was written about Cheney in Barton Gellman’s excellent book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

But it was the Bush administration’s blundered reaction to the Katrina disaster that exposed its incompetence and passiveness in the similarly passive media. Once it became clear in the media that the government handling of Katrina was incompetent, it reflected back on their failure to prevent 9/11 as well as their failed occupation of Iraq and the unacknowledged rise of the Iraqi insurgency. The Bush administration’s current passiveness and failed reactions to the economic crisis simply demonstrate that the problem is inherent in the Bush administration and not a one time screw up.

Source: http://politicsplusstuff.blogspot.com/2008/12/katrian-reaction-ended-bush.html

Reporting from Washington — President-elect Barack Obama’s top advisors said Sunday that they wouldn’t back away from a promise to cut taxes on the middle class and raise them for the wealthiest Americans, as they made the case for a massive new stimulus package geared toward reviving the slumping economy.

Speaking on Sunday talk shows and in a newspaper opinion piece, Obama aides stepped up a drive to build a broad political consensus behind Obama’s core economic proposals: a two-year spending package that could exceed $775 billion, coupled with tax policies weighted in favor of the middle class.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Axelrod, a senior advisor to Obama, said, “We have to act. Every economist from left to right agrees that we have to do something big in terms of job creation, but we want to do it in a way that will leave a lasting footprint.”

Obama wants lawmakers to give him a stimulus bill to sign soon after he is sworn in Jan. 20.

Writing Sunday in the Washington Post, Lawrence H. Summers, Obama’s incoming director of the White House National Economic Council, said the bleak economic climate called for substantial new spending.

“Economic forecasts have been revised significantly downward over the past several months; today, many experts believe that unemployment could reach 10% by the end of next year,” Summers wrote. As of November, unemployment stood at 6.7%.

Summers added: “In this crisis, doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”

Since his Nov. 4 victory, Obama has been confronted with signs that the economy is worsening: rising unemployment, sinking home values and a contracting gross domestic product. Last week there were reports of a dismal holiday shopping season. Retail sales dropped 5.5% in November and 8% in December through Christmas Eve, compared with a year earlier.

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-obama-stimulus29-2008dec29,0,3089511.story

Only 29 percent of Americans approve of the job Dick Cheney is doing as Vice President. In an interview with his hometown Wyoming newspaper, The Caspar Star-Tribune, Cheney expressed his bewilderment over his low approval numbers:

QUESTION: How do you explain your low approval rating?

CHENEY: I don’t have any idea. I don’t follow the polls.

My experience has been over the years that if you govern based upon poll numbers, upon trying to improve your overall poll ratings, people I’ve encountered who do that are people who won’t make tough decisions. And the job the president has and those who advise him is to make those basic fundamental decisions for the nation that nobody else is authorized or able to make.

In addition to his well-documented abuse of power and disregard for the rule of law, Cheney’s public disapproval ratings might be explained in part by his own personal disregard for the public. When told that two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the Iraq war, Cheney responded “so?,” adding that he didn’t care what the American people thought.

While he says he doesn’t follow the polls, Cheney was all too proud to state shortly after the 2004 elections: “President George W. Bush won the greatest number of popular votes of any presidential candidate in history.” (That’s no longer true.)

Cheney is still holding out hope, however, that the polls will turn his way. He said recently, “I’m personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road in light of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/28/cheney-low-polls-dont-know/