Thursday night’s Republican Presidential debate in Iowa appropriately started out with questions about one of the biggest political events of the year: the downgrading of our nation’s credit rating for the first time in history. While all the GOP candidates snapped at that “red meat,” and blamed liberal policies, the guy who as President presided over this great fiscal embarrassment, Barack Obama, probably sat in his home office in the White House mulling over his press conference on the same day, where he blamed conservatives in the GOP for the downgrade instead.
The national debt downgrade last week was bracketed by topsy-turvey financial markets. This week, billions have been lost by average investors’ retirement plans while billions were made by opportunistic professional traders on the drastic, day-by-day swings in the stock market. Respected economists are making dire predictions that the United States will sink into a second recession, that the real estate market will not recover for years, that unemployment will rise perhaps above 10%.
So all that said, as our economy is demolished, is California just going to continue to be Barack Obama’s campaign’s Automated Teller Machine?
Late last April, Obama made a two-day, six stop tour of our Golden State that purportedly raised him $7 million for his 2012 re-election campaign. Liberal political analyst Sherri Bebitch Jeffe said that California had become “Obama’s ATM”, regardless of sinking polls outside California.
That was then.
Since April, and after the Administration’s deserved “high” for getting bin Laden, a national economy that was already in the tank has come terribly close to completely imploading. Politicians in Washington hardly were able to cobble a last minute plan together to deal with our country’s terrible spending problem, as Obama pestered them, pushing more taxes on them, and on a sick economy, as a road to economic recovery. It is a miracle they got a compromise that didn’t include Obama’s new taxes – yet. His debt plan is the moral equivalent of “bleeding” as a remedy for anemia.
I wonder how much money those big donors to Obama in California have lost in the last few days with him as President. What good is an invitation to a White House dinner if your corporate jet is in receivership?
I also wonder whether the majority of the 9.4% of unemployed people in our state, whom research shows were Obama voters in 2008, will be showing up again at the polls in 2012 for him with the same enthusiasm, assuming they still have cars, auto insurance and gas money to get to the voting booths.
Jeffe predicts that Obama will still win California, no matter. It will be a sad statement of self-deprecation of Cailfornians if that happens. But I’ll bet Obama won’t raise $7 million from rich liberals the next time he comes here, because even rich liberals lose money on the stock market.