Remember when the left was up in arms over the Bush Administration’s “invasions of privacy?”

Either does the left:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

So let’s take stock here:

The Obama Administration has amplified all of the Bush Administration’s worst traits – spending four times as fast, worthless on immigration and outstripping even the worst and mostly false allegations against Bush at civil liberties – and given up on all the good traits, the tax cuts and America-first philosophy.

I’m hoping for change.

Not just the funniest political vid of the season so far…

…but one of very few David Byrne impressions better than mine.

The Tic-controlled Congress has the  confidence of 11% of the American people:

Gallup’s 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.

To put this in perspective, used car salesmen got 24%, Lindsay Lohan got 18%, and the Snooki from Jersey Shore clocked 14%

The part that should have gotten the headline?  The Presidency dropped from 51 to 39% over the past year.

Let’s see if we can get it into single digits!

Obama’s “financial reform bill”  is full of paybacks to Obama constituencies

Principal among them is a measure to make it easier for unions, environmental groups and other activist organizations that hold shares to put their representatives on the boards of directors of every corporation in the United States.

The so-called “proxy access” provision, which activist groups say they will use to try to improve oversight of corporate financial practices, has provoked a backlash from the Business Roundtable, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other major non-Wall Street business groups.

This is one of the “reforms” that threw Britain into a tailspin in the fifties through the seventies; institutionalizing the control of unions and other pressure groups over other aspects of British society; it ensured the acceleration of Britain’s decline.

Other provisions of the financial legislation, which goes before the full Senate on Thursday for a vote and likely passage, favor Democratic constituencies directly by requiring banks and federal agencies to hire and do more business with them.

The bill would create more than 20 “offices of minority and women inclusion” at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other government agencies, to ensure they employ more women and minorities and grant more federal contracts to more women- and minority-owned businesses.

The agencies also would apply “fair employment tests” to the banks and other financial institutions they regulate, though their hiring and contracting practices had little or nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis.

“The interjection of racial and gender preferences into America’s financial sector deserves greater media exposure” before Congress debates and passes the massive 2,400-page bill, said Kevin Mooney, a contributing editor for Americans for Limited Government’s daily newsletter.

Right – but to “expose” it would “expose” them to the same charges of “racism” that greets every voice of dissent.

Our liberal elites in action:  liberal talk host Bill Press says Obama’s polls are collapsing because  Americans are a bunch of spoiled brats; Brian Maloney transcribes:

I think this says more about the American people than it does about President Obama. I think it just shows once again that the American people are spoiled. Basically, spoiled– as a people, we are too critical. We are quick to rush to judgment, we are too negative, we are too impatient. Especially impatient. We want it all solved yesterday, and if you don’t, I don’t care who you are — get out of the way.

And again, basically spoiled. To the point where it makes me wonder if it’s even possible to govern today. I gotta tell you, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln — who certainly didn’t get everything right the first time — could govern today. I’m not sure Franklin Roosevelt could govern today, the way we are again. Just about like spoiled children. And it’s Americans, and it’s the media, and if we don’t get instant gratification, then screw you is basically our attitude.

Bill Press:  Get a grip.

You think Ronald Reagan got carried to success on the shoulders of the entire American people right after his election?  Please – the media certainly sniped at him nonstep (then as now).

And yet he succeeded (not that you can tell that to people like Bill Press).

Competence helps.

Democratic Governors tell the President that bucking the beliefs of 70% of the American people might not work so well for them:

At the Democrats’ meeting on Saturday, some governors bemoaned the timing of the Justice Department lawsuit, according to two governors who spoke anonymously because the discussion was private.

“Universally the governors are saying, ‘We’ve got to talk about jobs,’ ” Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, said in an interview. “And all of a sudden we have immigration going on.”

He added, “It is such a toxic subject, such an important time for Democrats.”

Note to any Democrats who actually have to deal with the American people; it’s all about the ideology.

Suddenly, this song – admittedly wrenched out of original context – seems to be merely dumb, rather than crushingly stupid:

It’s as if a lightbulb switched on sometime since 2006!

via YouTube – Let’s Impeach the President – Neil Young.

After nearly a decade of demanding that the rest of America never ever call them unpatriotic, Gallup and Pew pollsboth show that, in fact, Democrats are:

Gallup found 58% of GOPer’s calling themselves “extremely patriotic,” as opposed to only 20% of Democrats so identifying. The numbers were a bit closer in the Pew poll, where 69% of Republicans called themselves “extremely proud” to be an American, and 43% of Democrats answered the same.

On one level, the general results should not be surprising. After all, the Right more likely to view America in terms of preserving the core principles that make it great, while the Left is more likely to be fixated on its foibles and failures (both real and imagined).

It’s yet another change Obama has brought us:

But what explains the increase in patriotism on the Right, particularly from 2006 to the present, when Democrats and progressivism has been on the rise? My hypothesis would be that the current version of the Democratic party, and the Obama administration in particular, has transformed big government into a cultural issue.

Don’t be hating.  It’s science.

Last week, in his video tongue-kiss to Obama before his (disastrous) “We Have Nothing To Fear But Oil Itself” speech, Fast Eddie Schultz wrote:

“Mr. PresIdent, I want to see the boot on the neck of BP tonight… it’s OK tonight to act kind of like a dictator and call the shots saying this is the way it’s going to be.”

Granted, Schultz is one of very few talk show hosts who actually is as stupid as conservative talk radio is supposed to be.

But according to Thomas Sowell, who daily excretes more intelligence than Ed Schultz ever had, Schultz may be  getting his tingly-legged wish:

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In other words, the Republicans who “apologized” to BP – over the perversion of US law, as opposed to over accountability – were right?  Hmm.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP’s oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.

But our government is supposed to be “a government of laws and not of men.”

If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion — or $50 billion or $100 billion — then so be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without “due process of law.”

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

Because the problem is the next victim of government overreach won’t be a big bad capitalist like a BP.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in constitutional government.

Of course, many liberals don’t.

The Coast Guard shuts down sixteen oil-vacuum barges commissioned by the state of Louisiana…:

“We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Er, if the Coast Guard shares the same mission as Louisiana does, why couldn’t they have lent them the damn life jackets?  I’m told they own a few.

In addition to the story, I want  you to listen to two things in the following video:

1. Bobby Jindal – who is kicking as much butt as federal regulations will allow him to in this crisis, and who would seem to have redeemed himself from his flop of a speech last year, and I think it’s fair to say will be going back on the short list for GOP Presidential hopefuls shortly here.  He’s doing a great job with this catastrophe in a way that his buck-passing predecessor did not with Katrina.  Side note:  Hearing a man of Indian descent talking in a fluent Louisiana accent is a kick for this language geek.

2. Do you hear that other sound?  That wobbly sound in the background?  That’s the sound of the wheels coming off Barack Obama’s presidency.

The chirping of the bird outside your window sounds like a scrap-metal shredder.  Your eyes wrench themselves open into the searing early-morning sun blazing through your window. 

Your body does a silent status check.  Head:  a searing toxic void.  Esophagus: Making room for expansion.  Stomach:  Calling out “Outoing!”.

You shamble to your feet, and lurch for your door as you dimly remember yelling “Yes, we CAN…play quarters with Windsor!”.  You half-stagger down the hall, bouncing off the wall twice, as you race the impending stream of toxic heat racing up from the stomach to the bathroom.

You slap the door aside with your forehead and fall to your hands and knees in front of the throne, barely in time for the high-pressure jet of toxic spew blast forth from your mouth, nostrils and, near as you can tell, ears.   As your stomach spasms and your mouth curdles from the acid and your brain tries to hammer its way out the back of your head, you dimly remember telling a sternly disapproving-looking Macalester Womyn’s Stydies major “I hope you change your mind” and trying to remember what “extended middle finger” meant before everything went all cloudy.  You will your eyes to stay closed even as they roll open to see a roiling toilet bowl full of things you remember the nuns warning you about.

You crawl downstairs and lay on the couch, and lie in the fetal position as the air conditioner roars like a Stuka on its attack run, a stack of bills staring at you accusingly, mocking you for the fun you had the night before.

It’s morning in America.

Andrew Malcolm in the LATimes h notes for the benefit of his audience…

…exactly what all of us were telling the nation two years ago; that legislators’ experience is lousy preparation for the Presidency:

American voters have taken many zigs and zags over the years when choosing their country’s chief executive.

But one of the amazing consistencies is: They prefer chief executives in the executive office. Five of the last six presidents have been executives — four governors and one sitting vice president.

The only exception is the current incumbent, Barack Obama, who as his bipartisan critics tried to point out in 2007-08, had never even run a candy store, let alone a country.

Huh.  Do tell, L. A. freaking Times?  Do you finally think so?

He was a law lecturer

…which was put out there as a key qualification.  “Constitutional Law is great background for a president!”, they say.  To which I, and a growing plurality of the American people, respond the President doesn’t need to litigate the constitution; he just needs to follow it.  The President needs to know the Constitution exactly as well as a fairly competent policeman to do his job.

a state senator and, briefly, a U.S. senator.

And it looks like the American people are finally starting to catch up with the GOP:

Overall, a new Rasmussen Reports poll indicated Wednesday, only 42% of Americans currently approve of Obama’s job, while 57% disapprove. Or compare Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s 66% state approval for his hands-on spill work vs 60% disapproval for the presidential visits, all four of them now.

Jindal is a great comparison of the difference between a real executive – someone on whose desk the buck stops, someone who makes decisions and gets things done – and a fake one like Obama, who is seemingly more into

Fact is, the two main political parties didn’t give American voters a….

… choice in 2008, nominating legislators for three of the tickets’ four spots — Obama, Joe Biden and John McCain. The fourth — gee, her name escapes us right now — was an elected top state executive, who seemed to gather more public attention than any of the others.

Pity it was the wrong kind.

Speed Gibson has a question that hadn’t occurred to me yet:

A name popped into my head today: Bob Woodward. I wonder if he’s still working. If he’s working, I wonder what he’s working on. I wonder if he’s working on … President Barack Obama, much as he did President George W. Bush, multiple times. Woodward’s “Bush at War” was published in November of 2002, recounting the first few months after the 9/11 attack. So, will there be a Woodward book this fall of 2010 on some aspect of the historic Presidency of Barack Obama?

It’s not like there’s not material:

The problem is, of course, where to start. The Stimulus that didn’t. National socialist health care? The Gulf oil spill? His mess of a foreign policy? The bailouts? Where to start? Maybe it won’t be Woodward, but I have to believe some Obama perspectives will be appearing in time for Christmas.

Well, no.  Writing about Obama would be racist.

Is it possible that Obama is losing his most cherished constituency?

The BBC reports of Barack Obama’s speech last night are about as derisive as it would be possible to be about someone you were describing only a few months ago as the incarnation of Hope and Optimism. Yes indeed, the romance is over. The British media have decided that it was all a cruel deception: Obama is just one more ranting populist president who will do anything to divert attention from his own failure to get a grip. And this is not just about BP and the fate of all those pension funds.

And his polls in Muslim countries are collapsing, too.

After watching a huge national disaster on the Gulf Coast, a propensity to golf while the world falls apart, a dearth of press conferences, a slew of risible verbal faux pas, a year of ramming unpopular legislation down the peoples’ throats, adopting and accelerating all of the aspects of the current War on Terror Man-Caused Disaster that were considered so noxious three years ago (including every single element of the Patriot Act), and watched epic corruption up to the White House Door, I thought  “When will our media – which was so punctual about “investigating” each of these things before 2009, get on the stick.

Victor Davis Hanson says have no fear!

Somewhere around the millennium, a new style of aggressive, public-interested, and astute reporter began sermonizing in print, advising on the Internet, and lecturing us on television. At the time I mistakenly assumed that reporters were too often partisans who were creating new, almost impossible standards of probity in order to embarrass conservative opponents: they wanted Republican scandal first, news second. But now, I see that they were simply laying nonpartisan new ground rules for the Bush administration so that they could later prove their integrity and professionalism when a member of their own faith would come into the new crucible of public examination. There was never, you see, a hate-Bush media. So we will shortly see that now as they unrelentingly turn their scrutiny on Barack Obama and his legion of ethical and competency lapses.

Onward and upward!

President Obama has more important things to do than go to the oil spill site:

This morning, President Obama will meet with the NCAA men’s basketball champion Duke Blue Devils at the White House to honor their 2009-2010 championship season in the Rose Garden.

Keeping up the sports theme, the president and the vice president will take a photo with the U.S. World Cup soccer team and former President Bill Clinton, who is chairing the 2018 World Cup bid, on the North Portico. The White House has previously announced that Vice President Biden and Jill Biden will attend the World Cup in South Africa next month.

Afterward, the president will a private have lunch with President Clinton in the Private Dining Room.

The answer is obvious, if you’re a respected social theorist: Barack Obama hates bayou people.

In the afternoon, the President will deliver remarks on the BP oil spill and the conclusions of his ordered 30-day safety review and hold a press conference in the East Room.

“Thirty Day Safety review?”

I’m thinking it flunked.

…dissent was the highest form of patriotism?

Either does Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who compares the opposition he receives as head of a lobotomized blue state with what happens in Washington:

“It seems like child’s play compared to what is going on in Washington, where it is almost at the level of sedition, it feels to like me,” Patrick said.

Merriam-Webster.com, the dictionary site, defines sedition as “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

But for goodness’ sake, don’t question his patriotism!

After the forum, Patrick explained his remarks.

“I think that the number of people in the Grand Old Party who seem to be absolutely committed to saying ‘no,’ whenever he says ‘yes,’ no matter what it is, even if it’s an idea that they came up with, is just extraordinary,” the governor told reporters after the forum.

If everything he says and does wrong (and everything he takes from us is used to soften things up for something equally loathsome), then why should we say “yes”?  For the sake of Deval Patrick?

But did the opposition really border on sedition?

“That was a rhetorical flourish,” Patrick said.

Deval Patrick’s mother swims after troop ships.

That’s a rhetorical flourish.

As long as I can remember, American Jews have regarded Israel about the same way as northeastern Catholics look at abortion; something that’s supposed to be of overriding importance, but doesn’t really affect their voting patterns.

But Obama’s radical dissociation from Israel, and his shameless treatment of Prime Minister Netanyahu, seems to be provoking a change.  I heard these numbers over the weekend, while interviewing Mark Miller of the Republican Jewish Coalition; for the first time,   American Jews are souring on Obama and the Democrats:

United States President Barack Obama has lost nearly half of his support among American Jews, a poll by the McLaughlin Group has shown.

The US Jews polled were asked whether they would: (a) vote to re-elect Obama, or (b) consider voting for someone else. 42% said they would vote for Obama and 46%, a plurality, preferred the second answer. 12% said they did not know or refused to answer.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll go to the GOP endorsee; that’s the GOP’s job to take care of.

Still, you don’t see these kinds of numbers every day:

In the Presidential elections of 2008, 78% of Jewish voters, or close to 8 out of 10, chose Obama. The McLaughlin poll held nearly 18 months later, in April 2010, appears to show that support is down to around 4 out of 10.

The poll showed that key voter segments including Orthodox/Hassidic voters, Conservative voters, voters who have friends and family in Israel and those who have been to Israel, are all more likely to consider voting for someone other than Obama.

Among Orthodox/Hassidic voters, 69% marked ‘someone else’ vs. 17% who marked ‘re-elect.’ Among Conservative-affiliated voters the proportion was 50% to 38%. Among Reform Jews, a slim majority of 52% still supported Obama while 36% indicated they would consider someone else. Among Jews with family in Israel and those who had been to Israel, about 50% said they would consider someone else…

It’s still two and a half years ’til the election, so nobody needs to get excited.  But not since Reagan have we seen such an erosion among Jewish support for the Democrats.

President refers to Tea Partiers as “Tea-Baggers”:

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Tea Party activists loath the term “tea baggers,” which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.

I guess this means calling half of America “bitter gun-clinging Jesus Freaks” wasn’t an out-of-context mis-step?

Question for my liberal readers:  Does that fact that I’m writing about this make me racist, seditionary, or merely extremist?

Our father in heaven:

In the past year you took away my favorite b-list cheesecake actress, Britney Murphy.  You took away my favorite libertarian-conservative columnist, William Safire.  And you took away the inventor of one of my favorite guitars, Les Paul.

I just want you to know that Barack Obama is…

…still the worst president of my lifetime.  Don’t take him.

I wanna kick his ass at the ballot box in two years.

I humbly beseech thee, your deeply imperfect servant Mitch.

So why are the Democrats seeing militiamen under every rock, and Oklahoma City comparisons around every corner?

Not because of any evidence, of course; the rallies themselves are so peaceful that some police departments hold them to a looser standard than the loopier anti-war demonstrations.  And the fact remains that every known act of actual political violence in the past several years has been left-on-right.

No – as with anything else Bill Clinton does, it’s about a poll:

Dig past the headline of the Pew study and one discovers why Bill Clinton is insinuating that “demonizing” government could cause another Oklahoma City bombing. If these numbers are at all close to reality, something one can hardly doubt just now, the American people have issued a no-confidence vote in government, at both the national and state level. To the extent one believes in the “consent of the governed,” consent is being eroded.

This report isn’t bad news for the Democrats. It’s Armageddon.

Remember – the Democratic Party’s big platform is “Government Brings Good Things To Life”.

The survey compares views sampled in 1997 with now. The “now” is the Democrats’ problem. The survey took place this mid-March. After one year of the charismatic, ever-present Barack Obama, after passage of the party’s totemic health-care bill, after spending zillions on Keynesian pump-priming, the American people—well beyond the tea partiers—have the lowest opinion ever of national government.

A year ago, 54% said government should exert more control over the economy; a year later it’s 40%.

Some 58% say Uncle Sam is interfering too much in state and local affairs; 53% want “very major reform” of the federal government. After health care passed in March, Pew re-sampled in early April: Trust in government rose—to 25% from 22%. Inspector Clouseau would call that a “bmp.”

Barack Obama’s speeches are filled with the Democrats’ core claim to legitimacy: Government must and will do good. It must “act.” But in a crucial period when voters across the political spectrum were losing faith in that core claim, the Democrats lost any self-protective sense of what they were doing with public budgets. Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party (62% said they liked the Democrats in January 2009), and emptied it. Since he took office, the percentage of people who want smaller government and fewer services has risen, to 50% from 42%.

Better late than never – although be watching for the pundits to start scolding the American people about “Schizophrenia” for voting for a statist one cycle and a bunch neo-libertarians the next.

If that doesn’t help, start looking for pieces on how “the American people don’t deserve Barack Obama!” shortly after.

I’m thinking about the time I went to the Al Franken Obamacare rally.  And as they came out of the rally, and engaged in the odd debate or argument with us protesters, many of them duly parrotted the Obama party line; “he’s cutting your taxes”!

They’re not, anyway – and now, Obama wants to switch to switch on the tax afterburner:

President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.

VAT Taxes are a money machine.  They also sap money from every stage of the economy.

I was enjoying an all-too-rare hour of listening to Jason Lewis the other day.

Years ago, when I ran an annual “State of Twin Cities Talk Radio” feature, a solid year before the Northern Alliance Radio Network went on the air (I discontinued the series when the show started, due to my obvious bias); in it, I noted at least once that “Jason Lewis is the host I’d like to be when I grow up”.  And that day was one of the broadcasts where I realized exactly why.

I’m not one of those people who bays “politics is the worst it’s ever been”; it’s not.  1928 was bad; 1828 was worse (albeit for many of the same reasons it’s bad today, only on steroids).   But it is getting pretty bad these days.

And not because people aren’t “bipartisan”.  “Bipartisanship” is a chimera; taken to an illogical extreme, it is antidemocratic. 

And in a multipolar political world, people are going to disagree – on issues, and on lesser things.

To paraphrase Lewis, we need to avoid bagging on the lesser things – especially personalities and personal attacks. 

Conservatives: Barack Obama was born a US Citizens.  Even if he wasn’t, it’s really too late to do anything about it; but it’s a moot point, because he is.  Get a grip.  And he’s not a Marxist or a communist, and won’t be until he opens re-education camps somewhere in Utah.  He’s a cut-rate Richard Daley, not Josef Stalin.   He’s a fabian statist, all right – and he got elected President.  He’s doing the job that 52% of your most gullible neighbors sent him to Washington to do, for now.  Let’s see if we can fix that in 2012.

And yeah, the left is doing it, too.  Unable to fight the Tea Party and the resurgent grassroots right on the issues, they’re going for the ad-homina, the name-calling, the fearmongering and slander, and the yellow hackery – all standard drills for people who are running on intellectual empty, and need to count on their opponents to react to an ofay provocation to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve dug.

Americans need to be smarter.  Conservatives, in particular, need to be smarter than the opposition; we’re fighting against a full-court media press that is at present fully in the bag for the President.

And this president is so easy to attack on the issues; he’s really been an incompetent disaster, so far, except inasmuch as he’s copied Bush’s policies that worked.  There is no need to barber on about his birth certificate, his religion or his labels; he is so weak on the issues that there’s no excuse for it.

Because when he’s essentially destroying, in the long run, everything that ever made this nation great, who really cares where he worshipped as a child?

One of the reasons Senator, professors, academics and “intellectuals” make such lousy presidents is that they feel the need to micromanage everything. 

One of Jimmy Carter’s great failings – among many – was his need to have his fingers stuck deeply into everything his government did, from noodling with the specifics of the various farm bills to directly interacting with the commanders of the Desert One raid as the mission progressed.  A president is supposed to delegate.

Micromanaging is bad.

Especially when the president gets down to trying to  micromanage people’s opinions, as with last week’s 17 minute answer to a Town Hall question:

His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

I’m getting a headache just reading about it.

Always fond of lists, Obama ticked off his approach to health care — twice. “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,” he said.

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. “Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,” he said, then carried on explaining further still.

“Point number three is that the way insurance companies have been operating, even if you’ve got health insurance you don’t always know what you got, because what has been increasingly the practice is that if you’re not lucky enough to work for a big company that is a big pool, that essentially is almost a self-insurer, then what’s happening is, is you’re going out on the marketplace, you may be buying insurance, you think you’re covered, but then when you get sick they decide to drop the insurance right when you need it,” Obama continued, winding on with the answer.

Leaving aside that it’s lousy oratory – running off at the mouth like that is rude; it’s the prerogative of someone who believes his time is worth much, much more than yours.

It was 1952.  In the lifetimes of the Americans who were of prime voting, earning and thinking ages, the 25-50 year olds who make up the Great American Middle, there’d been a great Depression, one (or for the older ones, two ) world wars plus a nasty “police action” in Korea, and more turmoil in general than people today can comrehend.

And as popular as Franklin D. Roosevelt had been, and as tightly as his administration’s policies had wound themselves into the lives of everyday Americans, the thought of extending his legacy to six terms was too much for many Americans.

And so when the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, the GOP responded with Dwight Eisenhower – war hero and, by today’s standards, a moderate.  And whatever you can say about the next eight years (baby boomers made a great show of rebelling against the era’s staid placidity; their parents, who’d come home from World War II having had a lifetime’s worth of excitement by age 25, didn’t have a problem with placid), it was a great time for America.

So could the GOP do it again with General Petraeus?

Americans have never been so disgusted with their politicians. More than three-quarters of Americans disapprove of Congress. President Barack Obama’s favourability ratings have slumped to below 50 per cent and he is no longer trusted or believed by many who voted for him…Many voters yearn for an outsider, someone with authenticity, integrity and proven accomplishment. Someone who has not spent their life plotting how to ascend the greasy pole, adjusting every utterance for maximum political advantage.

Say what you will about Barack Obama, but he, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, is the consummate professional politician; it’s hard to see what he’s done in his entire life that hasn’t played into preparing for a career in politics.

In this toxic climate, perhaps the only public institution that has increased in prestige in recent years is the American military. Its officers are looked upon, as General George Patton once noted, as “the modern representatives of the demi-gods and heroes of antiquity”.

Or at least people of integrity who’ve had to prove their worth with more than just school rankings and voting records.

Where better to look for Obama’s successor, therefore, than in the uniformed ranks? Not since 1952, when a certain Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, was elected President, have the chances of a military man winning the White House been more propitious.

Within those ranks, no one stands out like General David Petraeus, head of United States Central Command, leader of 230,000 troops and commander of United States forces in two wars. Having masterminded the Iraq surge, the stunning military gambit that seized victory from the jaws of defeat, he is now directing an equally daunting undertaking in Afghanistan.

The story doesn’t end there, of course – it barely begins there.  Nobody knows if Petraeus is interested in running, or much of what he’d stand for, policy-wise.  Which was, of course, Ike’s story as well.

Still, the possibilities are intrigueing.