President Barack Obama

In my last post, I wrote:  “With 2012 a presidential election year in America, expect the Obama administration to spin economic data seven ways to Sunday in an effort to make things look more rosy. Thus, an unprecedented reduction in the total size of the American work force is twisted into a lowering of the unemployment rate.” Right on cue, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued an rose-tinted jobs report, showing a decline in the U.S. unemployment rate while the private sector was creating 200,000 new jobs in the last month.

No doubt, President Barack Obama would like nothing more than to reverse the disastrous employment picture in the United States. But he is caught in a trap, one only partially of his making. The American economic  order he inherited, and which Obama is unable to transform beyond minor cosmetic alternations, is a de-industrialized, financialized monstrosity. No wonder his minions are reduced to creative bookkeeping to show that jobs are in fact being created and an economic recovery is truly underway. The reality is that the percentage of Americans of working age participating in the workforce is at a record low, overall labor wages are stagnant or declining and there are no indications that this is being changed.

And what about Barack Obama’s Republican would-be challengers? GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney may boast of his “business experience,” though in reality the man from Bain Capital is nothing more than a poster child for the domination of financialization over the manufacturing sector in the United States. Other Republicans seeking the GOP presidential nomination such as Newt Gingrich are offering the same old mantra of infinite tax cuts for the mega-wealthy of America and trickle-down economics for everyone else.

Between President Obama and his GOP rivals, I see no one with the transcending vision and leadership skills to undertake the massive economic changes required to restore America’s economic and fiscal health.

With the announcement by Sarah Palin that she will not seek  the GOP presidential nomination, it is most likely that President Barack Obama’s challenger in the 2012 general election will come from a group of three top-tier Republican candidates. These are Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. On paper, with a weak economy, Obama’s reelection chances look dim. However, he may be helped by a weak opponent.

None of the current GOP contenders are charismatic figures who excite the conservative base. Romney may be the most electable, but is the least liked among the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party. Rick Perry may alienate moderate Republicans and independents. Furthermore, Obama will raise a vast amount of money, and has the advantage of being an incumbent. So, despite economic discontent in America. President Barack Obama remains a strong candidate for remaining in the White House for another term.

As I predicted in my book, “Global Economic Forecast 2010-2015: Recession Into Depression,” President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package has been a conspicuous failure in positively impacting the staggeringly high rate of unemployment in the United States. As is well known, massive job losses occurred in rapid order after the financial calamities of mid and late 2008. I projected in my book that at a vast price in expanded public debt, at best the Obama administration would stabilize unemployment rates at an historically high level.

Now we have the drumbeat of the 2012 presidential campaign sounding louder. Barack Obama is an astute politician, and knows his chances of being reelected to a second term are dismal unless he can tackle, or seem to be tackling America’s jobs crisis. In that connection, Obama has announced he will make a speech to a joint session of Congress on September 7. The speculation is that he will propose tax credits for companies that add workers to their payrolls, and stimulus spending on infrastructure. With the Republicans controlling the House of Representatives, there is no chance he will get any serious legislation passed involving additional spending. At best, the Obama speech that is pending is an electioneering gimmick, and will prove as effective as the administration’s overall economic crisis policy. In the meantime, while the president drafts his speech and the political establishment engages in its usual partisan games, a growing group of leading economists are forecasting a double dip recession in most advanced economies, including the United States. That increasingly likely development will have more impact on the jobs crisis than even one thousand presidential speeches.

In a stunning Sunday night address to the nation, U.S. president Obama told the American people and the world that Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden had been killed as a result of a special U.S. military operation in Pakistan. President Obama indicated that killing or capturing bin Laden was his highest priority since he assumed office, and that last August intelligence information first pinpointed the location of the Al-Qaida leader. Several months of planning and intelligence work was required to prepare the operatio,n which Barack Obama indicated he ordered be conducted on Sunday, May 1, 2011, almost ten years after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

What President Barack Obama suggested in his White House speech to the nation is that the action was conducted by elite U.S. special forces on an Al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan, unilaterally, without prior involvement by the Pakistani authorities. President Obama also mentioned in his remarks that the United  States has possession of the body of Osama bin Laden.

The killing of Al-Qaeda’s iconic founder, Osama bin Laden, will undoubted be ranked in the history books as one of the most important actions of the Obama presidency.

As the United States national debt reaches parity with total annual GDP, President Barack Obama continues to preside over a record level of deficit spending by the federal government. He has just sent to Congress a proposed $3.73 trillion budget for FY 2012, while forecasting a record $1.65 trillion deficit for the current fiscal year. Earlier, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the current deficit would reach at least $1.5 trillion. These figures mean that America remains trapped with unsustainable structural mega-deficits,  and that more than 40 percent of everything the U.S. federal government spends is financed with borrowed money.

As I have commented on before, this level of government indebtedness just cannot be sustained, and will lead to catastrophic repercussions. While the politicians in Washington, particularly in the Obama administration, pay lip service to the need to “rein in” this profligate public spending, nobody believes that they are serious. The president’s claim that he “plans” to reduce the deficit cumulatively over ten years by just over a trillion dollars is an utter farce, since even by the most optimistic forecasts this would leave a combined deficit over the decade of more than ten trillion dollars.

The problem, however, is not uniquely one of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. The Republicans, who left for Obama as an inaugural present in 2009 a first-ever annual deficit to exceed a trillion dollars, are as intellectually bankrupt as are their adversaries on the other side of the aisle. The GOP is equally bereft of ideas on how to control this raging fiscal train wreck, offering little more than worn-out cliches such as reducing taxes, as though that would not further exacerbate the federal government’s structural mega-deficit.

What we are witnessing is not only an economic and fiscal calamity in the making. It is as much a display of political dysfunctionality and moral cowardice as it is of inept fiscal policy. Which leads to the melancholy conclusion that it will not be the political echelon in Washington that ultimately  imposes budgetary discipline on public spending. Increasingly likely is a doomsday scenario, in which the bond vigilantes, well practiced already with their punishing assaults on the credit ratings of Greece, Ireland and now Portugal, unleash the full fury of the market place on Uncle Sam. When that fiscally apocalyptic moment arrives, not even the impressive weight of political inertia that resides in Washington DC will be able to impede a sovereign debt crisis in the United States that will not only cripple the nation’s economy with devastating effect; it will likely dispossess the next generation of Americans  of their future.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin became the first possible 2012 contender for the GOP presidential nomination to comment about the unrest that has paralyzed Egypt. In a caustic reference to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Democratic Primary commercial that suggested Obama was not ready to handle a presidential crisis, Palin told CBN, “this is that 3.00 AM White House phone call and it seems for many of us trying to get that information from our leader in the White House, it seems that that call went right to the answering machine.”

Palin was also skeptical regarding the motivations of the Egyptian protest movement, suggesting that those behind the unrest in Cairo and other major cities in Egypt may have objectives that are not consistent with democracy. “We need to find out who was behind all of the turmoil and the revolt and the protests so that good decisions can be made in terms of who we will stand by and support,” Sarah Palin indicated during her interview with CBN.

Regarding the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Sarah Palin said, “Mubarak, he’s gone, one way or the other you know, he is not going to be the leader of Egypt, that that’s a given, so now the information needs to be gathered and understood as to who it will be that fills now the void in the government. Is it going to be the Muslim Brotherhood? We should not stand for that, or with that or by that.”

Palin’s interview with CBN and the views expressed by her on a current foreign policy crisis may be a sign that Sarah Palin, described by her critics as uninformed and inarticulate on foreign policy questions, is ready to take on those aspersions in a presidential race.

Over that past century, only four elected U.S. presidents have failed to win a second term in office. America’s 27th president, William Taft, succumbed to an insurgent challenge from his White House predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, whose third party candidacy  doomed Taft to defeat at the hands of Woodrow Wilson. The three other single term elected presidents of the past 100 years were victims of economic crises; Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H. Bush. Gerald Ford, the unelected successor to Richard Nixon, is an anomaly in U.S.. political history, being in effect Nixon’s surrogate and taking the heat for the Watergate scandal.

Will Barack Obama be fated to join the ranks of the one-timers? Though there remain nearly two years until the next presidential election, the prognosis on Obama is becoming increasingly guarded. Absent a severe economic or political crisis, an incumbent president seeking a second term normally enjoys an unassailable advantage over his opponent. Even amid the unpopularity of the Iraq war, George W. Bush was still able to convincingly defeat his Democratic Party challenger in the 2004 presidential contest, Senator John Kerry. However, unless a miraculous economic turnaround occurs, President Obama is likely to enter the 2012 presidential campaign  with baggage which may leave him highly vulnerable to a strong challenger from the GOP.

Almost all serious economic forecasts project that America will still be experiencing historically high levels of unemployment in 2012. The Republican Party’s midterm election triumph, in particular regaining control of the House of Representatives, points to the acute vulnerability Obama’s reelection campaign will face. In addition, the themes that generated excitement  in 2008 for Obama’s candidacy, such as “change you can believe in,” will not be credible factors in 2012, leaving him as the incumbent forced to defend a questionable record in managing the economy, and any defensive posture is unlikely to elicit a memorable theme that will excite the Democratic Party’s base and attract independent voters, the latter category crucial for any presidential candidate. In contrast, we are already seeing convincing evidence that the GOP will have an effective grass-roots movement that is excited and motivated by the prospect of ending  the Obama presidency in 2012, as evidenced by the phenomenon of the Tea Party.

As dismal a factor as the economy is likely to be in calculating the odds of Barack Obama winning a second term, there are other elements that weaken the prospects of his winning a second term. The unending war in Afghanistan  is rapidly being transformed into Obama’s version of the Iraq debacle, with a growing proportion of the electorate losing faith in this costly overseas commitment that has become the center of gravity for Obama’s war on terror. The continuing war and perception that President Obama has compromised too easily with his Republican congressional opponents has estranged  some of his supporters within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. It is not inconceivable that Obama will face a Democratic challenger when he seeks re-nomination  as the Party’s presidential candidate in 2012.  Should that happen, the odds still favor Obama being the Democratic presidential nominee in 2012, however a divisive primary battle would further weaken the 44th president’s odds of winning a second term in the White House.

Increasingly, there is talk within Democratic Party circles regarding the steep challenge and mounting obstacles Barack Obama will face in campaigning in 2012 for a second term as president. Among these doomsayers there remains one hope; that the Republican Party will nominate Sarah Palin as its presidential candidate in 2012.  Looking at Palin’s current level of high negative poll numbers, they see her as a potential gift from Saint Jude, the patron saint of desperate causes. However, as former Labor Secretary  Robert Reich pointed out in a recent blog in the Huffington Post ( “Sarah Palin’s Presidential Strategy, and the Economy She Depends On”  ), Palin may be a far more formidable challenger to Barack Obama than Democratic strategists  recognize, especially if America’s economic woes persist.

Though undoubtedly campaigning in 2008 with the noblest of intentions, it is looking increasingly likely that Barack Obama will enter the history books as not only a one-term president, but also a valiant but deeply flawed failure.

The last time members of the political establishment and media commentators seriously grappled with the question posed by my title occurred in the weeks following Senator John McCain’s seemingly mercurial and impulsive selection of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. Many would say that doubts about the intellectual and leadership fortitude of Ms. Palin as a possible successor to an elderly and illness-prone Senator McCain, had he prevailed in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, was a leading factor in persuading many independent voters, and even some Republicans, to cast their votes for Barack Obama.

Despite the continued doubts about her intellectual acumen among many powerbrokers within the Republican Party, echoed by the intuitive feeling among Democrats that if the GOP selected Sarah Palin as their 2012 presidential nominee this would be the best guarantor of a second term in office for President Obama, an objective assessment of Palin’s political viability leads to a different conclusion. No doubt, Sarah Palin (along with many other figures within America’s political establishment) is profoundly ignorant  in matters of foreign policy and macroeconomics. However, as the election of George W. Bush to the presidency demonstrated, the intellectual capacity of the commander-in-chief is not a priority among the majority of the American electorate. In a national edifice dominated by corporate media and ten-second sound bites, Palin has demonstrated that she is highly accomplished in the attributes that tend to attract interest and support among the electorate. With Sarah Palin having emerged from the midterm elections as the most visible and potent political brand in the GOP, and likely to further enhance her political rock-star status with her recent television series, <em>Sarah Palin’s Alaska</em> and forthcoming promotional tour in connection with her new book, <em>America By Heart</em>, there is little doubt that should she enter the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Palin would prove to be a formidable competitor.

If Sarah Palin were to be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2012, those who might be praying for such an outcome within the leadership circles of the Democratic National Committee better be careful what they wish for. If the economy were to miraculously recover and the current calamitous joblessness rate significantly recede, the power of incumbency would normally be sufficient to assure Obama would prevail over any Republican challenger in 2012. However, what if the American heartland remains devastated by an unrelenting Great Recession? In a time of economic crisis compounded by never-ending wars abroad against an elusive and ill-defined enemy, Americans like other peoples throughout history may clutch at the charismatic alternative with easy answers and inspiring patriotic slogans. In addition, there is the Tea Party movement, already anointing Sarah Palin as its principle icon, which may prove to be a decisive force in mobilizing alienated Americans on behalf of Palin in a presidential contest with Obama.

The possibility of a Palin presidency cannot be dismissed as logically impossible under the circumstances I have described, and it behooves serious thinkers to reflect on the implications for America and the world if in fact Sarah Palin were to run for president, and prevail over Barack Obama on November 6, 2012. I have <a href=”http://www.eSarahPalin.com” target=”_hplink”>done so</a> in my novel, <em>Sarah Palin Apocalypse Americana</em>, which presents a scenario for the first few months in office of a hypothetical Palin presidential administration. There are elements in Palin’s background, past statements on the public record and demonstrated proclivities that offer much to speculate on.

In her role as the toastmaster of the Tea Party movement and most right-wing corner of the Republican Party, Ms. Palin has demonstrated an intolerance of Americans who harbor views that are contrary to those of Palin and her followers. She has frequently used extreme rhetoric in describing those who do not follow her brand of conservatism as not being merely “liberal,” but “socialists” as well, the implication being that they are somehow un-American. On domestic policy, it is highly likely that Sarah Palin in the White House would contribute to further polarization among the American people.

It is in the arena of foreign policy, however, where I believe a Palin presidency would prove to be a nightmare for America and the world. As far back as the 2008 presidential campaign, then vice presidential candidate Palin told reporters that she supported the Republic of Georgia acceding to full NATO membership while the South Ossetia war was raging between that country and Russia (a war instigated by Georgia) even if that meant an eventual military conflict between Russia and the United States. Palin may lack in-depth knowledge on the Northern Caucasus, but that did not inhibit her from supporting policy prescriptions that could very well lead to global war between the two leading nuclear powers. The impulsive naivete Palin demonstrated at that time is a clear marker of the potential dangers that lurk for world peace, if such an individual were to become America’s next commander-in-chief. The neoconservatives who advise her on foreign policy cannot be expected to be a restraining influence; on the contrary, the neocons are likely to exploit a President Palin to further advance their theories on employing American military power on behalf of their desire to impose “American values” on other countries through force.

Rather than ridicule and seek to belittle Sarah Palin, who continues to advance her political brand despite the arrows of skepticism that have been thrown at her since 2008, those who recognize the acute dangers that would flow from a future Palin presidency should find ways of clearly articulating those dangers so that the electorate will be informed, before it is too late. (information on “Sarah Palin Apocalypse Americana” at http://www.eSarahPalin.com )

Within the past  few days, two of the four most important economic advisors and policymakers within the Obama administration have resigned.. They are Peter R. Orszag, budget director at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, otherwise known as OMB, and Christina Romer, who chairs the Council of Economic Advisers. Remaining on the economics team is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, Director of the White House National Economic Council. Supposedly, Romer and Orszag are leaving of their own accord, to pursue “other opportunities.” Some speculate that policy differences with Larry Summers and even President Barack Obama were a factor. My own sense is that the worsening economic crisis in the U.S. as well as the overall global economic crisis, and the increasing evidence that massive increases in public debt by Washington has not only failed to end the recession and restore robust economic growth; the risk of a sovereign debt crisis in the United States is now a reality.

The resignations of Romer and Orszag are the first ramifications of a failed economic policy. The more tangible result will be the upcoming midterm congressional elections in the U.S., which will almost certainly witness the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives. From there, things will get worse, as America enters a double-dip recession, while Congress is mired in gridlock and imposes paralysis on the remaining two years of Obama’s presidential term.

As the economic clouds darken in America, it is likely that the resignations of Orszag and Romer are the crest of a wave.