RUSH: Paul Krugman in his blog at the New York Times — I mean the liberals are coming out of the dark places that they hide to agree with me that Obama has been a failure. They just cannot give up on health care. There was a great piece yesterday. It was by James Taranto, Beat of the Web, Wall Street Journal, Opinion Journal online, saying: (paraphrasing) ‘Don’t listen to the media. They’re the last to give it up. There’s no way health care in its present form is going to see the light of day,’ and Pelosi confirmed that by saying she doesn’t have the votes in the House to pass the Senate bill. And the Senate bill is what they were trying to ram down the House’s throat.
But here’s Paul Krugman: ‘He Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For — Health care reform — which is crucial for millions of Americans — hangs in the balance. Progressives are desperately in need of leadership; more specifically, House Democrats need to be told to pass the Senate bill, which isn’t what they wanted but is vastly better than nothing. And what we get from the great progressive hope, the man who was offering hope and change, is this:’ He quotes Obama. ‘I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on,’ basically Obama giving up saying, well, whatever we can get we’ll take. Krugman says, ”Run away, run away!’ Maybe House Democrats can pull this out, even with a gaping hole in White House leadership. Barney Frank seems to have thought better of his initial defeatism. But I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.’ He is not the one we’ve been waiting for.
And we have Mort Zuckerman who owns the New York Daily News and US News & World Report: ‘He’s Done Everything Wrong.’ Mort Zuckerman saying Obama has failed. ‘Obama punted on the economy and reversed the fortunes of the Democrats in 365 days. He’s misjudged the character of the country in his whole approach. There’s the saying, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ He didn’t get it. He was determined somehow or other to adopt a whole new agenda. He didn’t address the main issue.’ Mort, he did. What do you think the slush fund stimulus bill is? They did. They didn’t do it over a long period of time, they rammed it down in two weeks but he thought he dealt with it and he’s had jobs summits. When are you going to figure this out? When are you going to start listening to me? You leftists who are unhappy with Obama, I predicted all this. And now everybody joining in line, everybody joining the chorus, he’s not the one we were waiting for, Obama’s failed, they’re all disappointed.
Here’s more from Mort Zuckerman: ‘This health-care plan is going to be a fiscal disaster for the country. Most of the country wanted to deal with costs, not expansion of coverage. This is going to raise costs dramatically.’ Mort, he doesn’t care about the health care bill. He doesn’t care about health care. He doesn’t care about health insurance. He cares about control, Mort. He wants to socialize one-sixth of the economy. Mort, you coulda written this a year ago, you knew it. Instinctively you knew it but your hopes and dreams and your cultlike devotion forced reason out of your cranium.
‘In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting. Five states got deals on health care — one of them was Harry Reid’s. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I’ve never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics.’ Daniel Henninger has a great piece on just that today in the Wall Street Journal.
‘Even that is not the worst part. He could have said, ‘I know. I promised these things, but let me try to do them one at a time.’ You want to deal with health care? Fine. Issue No. 1 with health care was the cost. You know I think it was 37 percent or 33 who were worried about coverage. Fine, I wrote an editorial to this effect. Focus on cost-containment first. But he’s trying to boil the ocean, trying to do too much. This is not leadership. … I don’t consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster. … I can’t predict things two years from now, but if he continues on the downward spiral he is on, he won’t be reelected. In the meantime, the Democrats have recreated the Republican Party. And when I say Democrats, I mean the Obama administration. In the generic vote, the Democrats were ahead something like 52 to 30. They are now behind the Republicans 48 to 44 in the last poll. Nobody has ever seen anything that dramatic.’
Mort Zuckerman is livid. Paul Krugman is lived. They’re all over the place on the leftist blogs, they are livid, especially that health care’s gone down the tubes. And yet here’s Obama out announcing today that he’s really gonna get tougher on the banks, he’s not gonna put up with this anymore, he’s not going to put up with them using depositors’ money to make financial risky investments like hedge funds and so forth and so on. They gotta stick to the business of banking and he’s going to see to it that they do that. So he’s still trying to capitalize on what he thinks is a universal hatred for bankers and banking, just like he proceeds on the belief that there’s a universal hatred of insurance companies and Big Oil and Big Pharmaceutical.