Nonsense question of the day: "Does Obama have a second-term strategy?"

Sometimes it's hard not to suspect that Politico reporters don't believe their own bullshit when they spin out narratives about who's up, who's down, how A perceives B, what C's prospects are, etc.

Today's nonsense question, posed by Glenn Thrush, is Does President Obama have a second-term strategy? Of course the implied answer is no. But the argument is self-cancelling from the get-go.

The implicit premise is that because Obama said during the campaign that his victory might break the GOP's fever of no-compromise opposition, and that fever has not in fact broken, the president is at loose ends. But that premise must be hedged, because of an inconvenient truth that Thrush acknowledges at the outset: Obam never expected that his reelection would end partisan gridlock:

Uggh, my money is on McConnell

Yesterday, I wondered where Obama thinks he's going to get the leverage to insist that any future spending cuts be paired with further tax hikes. As reflected in today's Politico reporting, Obama and the GOP leadership are living in alternate universes. Obama thinks he's broken a psychological threshold along with the Republican no-new-taxes-taboo and that he can wield public opinion to make his all-spending-cuts-to-be-balanced-with-more revenue rule stick. McConnell & co. think they have Obama over a barrel with the debt ceiling and sequester cuts looming.

My money is on McConnell. Reid might have been a match for him. Obama and Biden weren't.  Agreeing to only a two-month postponement of the sequester cuts, McConnell's main demand, looks like a disaster -- unless Obama is ready to finally go over a cliff. The only precedent for that: he did let the sequester become law in the first place in late 2011, rather than intervene and strike another all-cuts-no-revenue bargain. That's a thin reed of hope.

What I can't see is Republicans agreeing to further tax hikes, e.g., through Obama's proposed 28% deduction cap for wealthy taxpayers.  They acceded to a very limited tax increase only under extreme duress -- when the only alternative was larger tax hikes. Their "principles" are therefore intact. The notion that a taboo was broken is nonsense.

I am tired of this game...

That is, the breathless monthly elephant-groping over the unemployment numbers. Here's Politico, via email alert:

The unemployment rate fell to 9 percent in October from 9.1 percent in September, but the country added a disappointing 80,000 jobs, well below expectations that as many as 100,000 jobs would be created last month, according to data released by the Labor Department on Friday.

"Well below"? Twenty percent is well within the range of the typical revision of prior month's numbers. September's number, for example, was revised up today from 103,000 to to 158,000 -- almost triple the "disappointment" triggered by the margin below consensus for this month, while August was revised up from 0 to 57,000. Those upward revisions exceed the alleged job growth this month.

There's plenty of intelligent deep diving, of course.  Those who follow these numbers closely understand their ambiguities and uncertainties, and the cumulative nature of the light they shed.  But the headline snapshots, the insta-hardening of snap perceptions, are not helpful.

Another war, another presidential 'terms sheet'

Well, Obama's approach to launching a police action is really singular, It seems that flying off to Brazil at the outset of Operation Odyssey Dawn was a feature, not a bug. He is signaling that Libya is not going to dominate his agenda.  He seems also to think that he can shape reality (i.e.,' lead'?) with such signals.

Yesterday, I noted that Obama seems to be trying to wish away, or command away, the specter of quagmire.  "Days, not weeks" is his watchword -- repeated, this time in public, today. But today he fleshed out why he thinks he's able to say that -- and showed the architecture of what he's tried to construct as a limited United States engagement.

Asked how he "can 'square' the assertion that Muammar Qadhafi is killing people but that he doesn't have to leave power," Obama unraveled his own riddle of the sphinx as it's emerged over three weeks. He asserted three paradoxes or anomalies:

• The U.N. mandate is limited to stopping civilian deaths, but U.S. policy is to force Qadhafi out.
• The U.S is exerting military leadership, but only in phase 1 of U.N.-authorized coalition action (notwithstanding that its policy goals are more expansive than the U.N's). 
• The U.S. is committed to driving Qadhafi out, but not to driving him out militarily. 

Behold as presidential logic, live-blogged by Politico, doth unfold:

Who Says Cheney isn't Pole-Driven?

A relaxed Dick Cheney in shirtsleeves, “his big chair swiveled” toward the target, took quite a stick to his Democratic opponents in a testosterone-charged pas de deux with Politico this week.

The lede gets all-to-quickly to the upshot:

Vice President Cheney warned in an interview Wednesday that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would invite “further attacks” against the United States and said he has been surprised by the weakness of the Democratic Congress.

Cheney fingers Dingell and Murtha as representatives (d) of this ‘weakness’:

[Dingell] and Murtha “and the other senior leaders … march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.”

...When asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”

Hmm...weaklings with small sticks, at least one of whom would force a premature withdrawal if he were more potent. That would be a pity, with consummation nigh:

We’re sort of halfway through the surge, in a sense. We’ll be going back to pre-surge levels over the course of the next year.”

Fortunately, the would-be withdrawers need not be stymied for long. Our premature-predictor-in-chief assures us that a “self-governing democracy [will] be firmly established in Iraq” by January 2009.

And if the U.S. can’t surge to that swift and satisfying conclusion, other enemies are poised to stick it to us. Take Iran, with its hot pursuit of superpower status:

“The long pole in the tent in terms of developing nuclear weapons, traditionally, historically, has been developing fissile material.”

It'll take a big stick to keep that long pole out of the nuclear end zone.

In any case, it’s reassuring to know that our avuncular veep does not demand perfection, or absolute power. Counterinsurgent NIEs, images of soldiers holding naked prisoners on leashes, news of destroyed torture videos—it’s alll in term’s work:

“Everything leaks,” he said with a chuckle.

That's why there's no safety in premature withdrawal.