West Wing vs Engine Room

'The one leading policy wonk on health care, Budget Director Peter Orszag, has either missed signals of danger or has failed to communicate their seriousness to his colleagues. On Feb. 25, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf, a Democratic appointee, signaled in testimony to the Senate Finance Committee that the CBO would not credit health care bills with the budget savings the administration was promising.

Orszag, as a former CBO director himself, should have realized what this meant, which is that Democrats would have to shape their bills accordingly. They didn't, and were stunned when the CBO came out in June and this month with estimates of little or no savings.'

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama-has-aura-but-doesn_t-know-how-to-legislate-8032142-51922177.html

You may have seen "The West Wing", a beautifully-filmed fantasy of how spectacularly thoughtful, humane, sophisticated, urbane, witty and effective a Democrat President and his acolytes would have been if they'd actually won; and that dim-wit Bush hadn't spoiled the party. Time after time, the fictional protagonists razor-sharp wits and deeply moral underpinnings led America away from evil and towards the light.

Then Barack Obama won the Presidency. Now we can measure "The West Wing" against an actual, blood-and-bone Democrat presidency. Oooops!

Can you say 'amateur'? This was the line that caught my eye - 'He created the impression on the campaign trail that he was familiar with major issues and readily ticked off his positions on them.' How many of the people occupying chairs in the White House are at the level of a tick-list when it comes to understanding the problems and difficulties of the United States? You know, they've read the bullet points. They've read the handy synopses of the issues printed up for distribution at demos. They've discussed Americas problems in the bar, and at BBQ's and over dinner. What more does a Democrat politician need?

And of course the answer is NOTHING. Sadly, though, the people in the White House are meant to be executive personnel not politicians. Canny politics, those arts of misdirection, vagueness and lying got them into the White House. But now they have to run the country. Oooops again.

Five out of Obamas twelve years as a 'legislator' were spent running for some other more senior office. He had written two books about himself by the time he was twenty eight. Obamas major, perhaps only, subject is Barack Obama. You can see why he might not have had time to bone up on dusty, boring subjects like the Health Care industry in the United States. I mean, where is the Barack Obama angle?

Obama is still wedded to all his sophomoric marxist fantasies and fundamentally they are what guide his opinions and behaviour on legislation. He doesn't care about the details, he wants that huge chunk of human life comprised in health care under the aegis of government. Details are for lesser mortals- the Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis of this world. All the difficult policy work on Obamas agenda has so far been outsourced to the dimwits on Capitol Hill. At least Billary had the nous and the work-ethic to produce their own Health Care Reform bill, although it never got out of the starting blocks.

I'm going to make a prediction: by the end of his term in office, Obama will be the least-respected, most-reviled President ever. The pathetic platitudes, lordly hauteur and pseudo-intellectualism that got him into office will metastasize in the publics minds and become terrible jokes. Walter Mitty will get laughed out of town. He had better hope the Dems don't pass a terrible, ignorant Health care reform bill. Doing nothing won't get you in as much trouble as doing something terrible.