Someone had to say it. I just didn’t think it would be

Howard Fineman! The editorial director for the Huffington Post has this:

Like his boxing hero Ali, Obama is floating like a butterfly -- essentially untouched -- thus far in his presidential prizefight with Mitt Romney.

And that is not good for anybody: for the country, for the voters, for the political parties or even for Obama and his administration.

What, exactly, does Fineman mean by "untouched"?

Look at the numbers. A year ago, the president's job approval rating was an abysmal 42.1 percent, his disapproval rating at 51.3. Today, his approval rating is 50 percent, his disapproval 46.3 -- an upward swing of more than 12 points…

And of course the president is well ahead on the Electoral College trends.

He has managed to do all of this without having to seriously and substantively defend his first-term failed promises or shortcomings, and without having to say much, if anything. about what, if anything, he might do substantially differently if he is fortunate enough to win again.

Unless I missed it, the president has yet to give a detailed answer to why he has failed to meet or even come close to his promises about reducing the unemployment rate. Saying that the task was harder than he initially thought isn't (or shouldn't be) a convincing explanation.

Fineman provides a long list of obvious and important questions that the President has not had to answer. Those first two are rather important. Besides blaming George W., what went wrong in your first term? Why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high? Why have incomes dropped more in the recovery than in the recession itself? Was there nothing you might have done that would have resulted in a better outcome?

More importantly, is there nothing you might do in the next four years that will work better? While we are on the subject, what exactly do you intend to do with four more years? Does anyone have a clue as to what the President's agenda will be if he does win?

Fineman fixes blame on a number of culprits, three of them being Mitt Romney. Fair enough. He also recognizes that the press shares a lot of the blame.

Obama was such a cool and uplifting story to so many in the media in 2008 that they essentially ceded ground to him that they have yet to reclaim. He ran a tightly controlled message campaign then, and has run an even more tightly controlled White House, with few press conferences and deep access only to those most likely to write positive stories.

Of course, it wasn't just the President's cool or his inspiring story that corrupts the press. It is the fact that they want him to win a lot more than they want answers to any of the questions that Fineman asks.

Fineman's original point is important. It's bad for everyone, including both parties, the next President, and the American people, that so many questions are swept under the rug now. Of course, Fineman himself seems to be in the perfect position to remedy the problem he alerts us to. Surely an editorial director could direct his writers to start doing their jobs. Could he not, starting now, arrange for a series of hard hitting pieces raising just these questions? If the Obama campaign fails to answer, then the HuffPo could bring attention again and again to that silence. Of course he can't do that. If he did, he wouldn't be editorial director for another day. The election still might be close. Obama might not win.

Comments

[larry kurtz]

You'd enjoy my agreement if you applied South Dakota's executive to the same scrutiny, Ken. Are you so removed from the politics of your own state out of embarrassment for its opacity?

[Donald Pay]

I think it's clear why Obama couldn't meet his promises on jobs, and getting the economy to bounce back. Anyone who has been paying attention knows this stuff. I guess you and Fineman don't.

First, the economy turned out to be in far worse shape from the Bush recession than any economist had forecast. The result was a stimulus package that was far too small. Second, this was meltdown of the financial system, not a normal business cycle recession. Even with record low interest rates, borrowing for expansion has been slow to return. Third, manufacturing and housing usually leads the economy out of recessions, but both of these sectors were devastated. Manufacturing has been declining for thirty years, and the construction sector was devastated in this recession. Fourth, the middle class has been in decline for decades and most of the wealth is now perched in the Cayman Islands and other offshore havens favored by the Romney-level rich. When the wealth was more equally distributed, the middle class had the ability to spend or take risks to get the economy moving. A devastated middle class means slower recovery. Fifth, there are a lot of Beta-rich folks whose wealth got wiped out. (These are the rich folks who actually use new wealth for conspicuous consumption that does lift the economy, mostly in luxury goods and some service industries.)

The problem is that the corporate and wealthy elite really don't want to have these questions asked and answered because they lead us into discussions of how the last thirty years of economic policies have not been good for the vast majority of American, and what policies must change in order to put the economy on the right track. We could all benefit from these discussions, but they all tend to favor Obama and the Democrats and not Romney and the Republicans.

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[Raulgonzales]

This pisses me off as a NJ Republican and I do not think that I am alone. I feel coemtplely disconnected from my party now.We want a real conservative running in 2012 not some flip flopping closet massachusetts liberal!Since Christie basically rules the NJGOP with an iron fist, I now see the direction the plan on taking. I will be sitting this 2011 election out for sure. Clearly none of the NJGOP supported Republicans are the types of conservatives that we should have running our government.And to think, if the Governor had just worried about staying home and working on NJ issues for the next month I would have come out and voted for the GOP in the 2011 election. Now I don't have to waste my time.