Democrats in office have stopped asking if this will be a bad year for their party. At this point, it’s almost a foregone conclusion. The question they are asking now is: “Just how disastrous will the election be?” Republicans have made significant progress in Democrat-held territory, so much so that the party is poised to pick up at least 39 seats. Overall, up to 80 House seats are at risk, and Republicans hold fewer than a dozen of those.

Forecasters are saying it is likely that Democrats will lose the majority in the Senate as well, which is fitting since 1930 was the last time control of the House shifted without the same shift occurring in the Senate.

This is an incredible turn of events. President Obama won the 2008 election after receiving the most votes for a presidential candidate in history. Inspired by Obama’s pledge to bring change to the White House (both symbolically and literally), America’s electorate rushed to support his campaign; the Bush years left a rotten taste in the mouths of many Americans.

So why are the President’s approval ratings so low (currently minus 18)? Some of it has to do with the illogical and dangerous positions presented by the right-wing antics of FoxNews and affiliates. For example, a recent Pew poll reported that “nearly one in five Americans (18 percent) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009.”

Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, reports that “…yet another poll revealed that 24 percent of Americans don’t think Obama was born in the United States. An earlier poll showed that 10 percent of Americans think he was born in Indonesia, where he lived as a boy, 7 percent believe he is Kenyan and still others say (correctly) that he was born in Hawaii but do not know, a notable Elvis movie notwithstanding, that Hawaii is an American state.“

It’s hard to say if this is the cause or the effect of Obama’s current unpopularity. Despite the misguided and flat-out wrong opinions of a quarter of Americans, there are real concerns with Obama’s policies. Obama’s solutions for a bleeding economy are essentially more of the same. His plan to restore manufacturing to America focuses on specific industries that he deems vital, not on the macroeconomic forces that led to outsourcing in the first place. Furthermore, not only has Obama broken his pledge to redo NAFTA, he has done a complete 180 and now supports KAFTA, a free trade agreement that will spell just as much doom for America as NAFTA did.

Over Labor Day weekend, Obama announced a proposed $50 billion stimulus plan to upgrade railways and other infrastructure, saying this would boost the economy and provide citizens with jobs. Unfortunately, additional infrastructure spending will not do anything for at least several years to come. Furthermore, despite promises and legal mandates that money from the 2009 stimulus bill be directed at “shovel ready” projects, even the government’s own statistics show that less than half of the “contracts, grants and loans”–mostly infrastructure projects–created have even been awarded. And much of the money awarded has yet to be spent.

Putting the flawed idea that infrastructure spending accounts for stimulus aside, states already have funding to provide for their own infrastructure repairs, or in many cases do not need the repairs the money is directed towards. The stimulus was in large part a means for politicians to accomplish that which they could not outside of emergency conditions.

David Walker, former Comptroller General under President Clinton and President G.W. Bush, was featured in the documentary “Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis”. He spoke regarding the stimulus:

“We had a $787 billion stimulus bill. But only about one-third of it was truly stimulus. By that I mean, timely, targeted and temporary. The other two-thirds were things that people wanted to do, have wanted to do for a long time, but they didn’t want to have to pay for it. They wanted to do it as part of emergency legislation and charge it to the national credit card.”

The new bill is just more postured waste meant to trick Americans into thinking something is being done, but it’s really a tool to garner support for a flailing presidency. The President’s solutions, and past policies like them, are the problem.

“All of the measures that we have taken to save the economy – the low interest rates, the massive debt, the safety net for the financial industry – these are the very things that led us into a crisis in the first place. We’ve been saved from the consequences of one burst bubble by inflating a hundred new ones all over the world. “ -Gerald Celente, trend forecaster and predictor of 2008 recession.

Print PDF