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Townhall...
Bin Laden’s Half-Life
By Rich Galen
I watched the first 45 seconds of the scheduled debate among people who
are pretending to be GOP candidates on the Fox News Channel last night.
Bret Bair, the moderator, said the word “Fox” at least 15 times in
those 45 seconds and I clicked over to an NCIS rerun.
The BIG QUESTION in Your Nation’s Capital this week was: What will be
the effect of whacking bin Laden on Obama’s re-election chances 550
days from today?
My general answer has been: “This will have a half-life of maybe three
weeks.”
My backdoor neighbor here in Northern Virginia, James Carville, made it
perfectly clear in the election of 1992 that the state of the domestic
economy trumps all else. I’m not sure he put it exactly that way, but
you know what I mean.
The old saying goes, “All politics is local.” The Carvellian Tangent
would be “All Economic Data is Local.”
What the Dow is doing doesn’t matter if your brother-in-law hasn’t been
able to find a job in two years.
Where the S&P is won’t help if the value of your house continues to
drift down and foreclosures in your neighborhood continue to drift up.
The Dollar versus the Euro only matters to people who are not spending
somewhere in the vicinity of $4.00 for a gallon of regular gasoline,
because the people for whom it does matter drive cars which use premium.
The price of an ounce of gold is of no interest to a woman struggling
to buy a couple of boxes of Kraft Dinner and a pound of ground beef to
feed her family of five.
A national debt of Fourteen Trillion Dollars is meaningless to a
working man who is $14 short of being able to pay the rent after having
paid for everything else this month.
If, in August 2012 Main Street America believes the economy is getting
stronger, and unemployment is on a downward curve then Barak Obama will
be re-elected. If they believe the economy is still barely bumping
along, prices are rising, and jobs are still too hard to find, then he
will be a one-term President.
If yesterday morning’s jobless claims numbers were any indication, this
is going to be a rough patch for President Obama.
The Reuters lead was: “The number of Americans filing for jobless aid
rose to an eight-month high last week and productivity growth slowed in
the first quarter, clouding the outlook for an economy that is
struggling to gain speed.”
This was on the heels of a report earlier this week that the U.S.
economy “slowed to a 1.8 percent annual rate [of growth] in the first
quarter after a 3.1 percent expansion in the final three months of
2010.”
According to the Clear Capital Housing Index website: “U.S. home prices
nationwide have dipped below the low recorded in March 2009. A
combination of foreclosures and short sales attracted bargain-conscious
buyers in recent months, many paying in cash and making low-ball
offers.”
In an inflationary period, people buy things today because they believe
they will be more expensive next month. It appears that people thinking
about buying a home are holding back because they believe prices will
be lower next month, next quarter, or next year.
With all that depressing economic news in the hopper, President Obama
will not be able to ride on the shoulders of a gallant group of brave
U.S. Navy Seals for very long.
On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to the jobless claims story, to
a site showing the growth of the national debt in real time, and the
website about housing prices.
Also a license plate Mullfoto and a Catchy Caption of the Day.
Read it with links at Townhall
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