Don’t get too distracted by the Republicans’ road-tour version of the 2012 presidential election as it hits theaters in the likes of Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii and Illinois. The best show in town still plays daily at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If maestro Barack Obama wins re-election this fall, we will have watched one of the greatest magic acts in American history.
The new Obama magic show debuted in the State of the Union speech. Standing before Congress, Mr. Obama brought forth “An Economy Built to Last.” Not the real one we have now, but the one he’s going to conjure after he’s re-elected.
The way this works is the president breaks economic history into two parts. In his right hand are the awful policy mistakes someone else made before January 2009. In his left hand is the economy he’ll bring to life after November. In between is nothing. You think you’re looking at the Obama years from 2009 to 2012—8% unemployment, low growth, low investment—when whoa, it’s gone! Never happened.
The best was yet to come. The president of the United States is making the world itself and all its troubles . . . vanish. Read more….http://online.wsj.com/public/search?article-doc-type=%7BWonder+Land%7D&HEADER_TEXT=wonder+land
Chad Crowe
Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea—one by one, Mr. Obama and his lovely assistants have methodically taken them all off the table. If he can make the world’s problems seem to go away until he gets re-elected, it will constitute his presidency’s greatest illusion.
Iraq went away in October, when Mr. Obama announced that all U.S. troops would be out of there by year’s end. Not most of them; all of them. This would be the first major war theater in modern times that the U.S. departed without leaving behind any presence. The argument in defense of this total troop wipeout is that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded the U.S. waive prosecution immunity for any of our forces still there. The counter-argument is that the U.S. lost all leverage with Iraq’s government because of Mr. Obama’s passivity toward the place and its problems. Iraq fell to next to nothing. Remarkable.
