Valerie Jarrett to Obama in 2012: How Are You Not ‘Getting 85 Percent of the Vote’?
The competition for dumbest quote I have been able to find by a leftist tonight just heated up.
Earlier this evening, I noted that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Thursday called President Obama “perhaps the least political president in modern U.S. history.” One might think that nothing could possibly top that. Actually, I have found two which belong in the running in one long writeup at NewRepublic.com (HT to emailer “Just the Tip HQ”) about Obama’s chief adviser, Valerie Jarrett.
The first statement noted in New Republic Senior Editor Noam Scheiber’s article came from Jarrett herself just over two years ago (in bold):
(Jarrett’s detractors) complain that she has too much control over who sees the president. That she skews his decision-making with her after-hours visits. That she is an incorrigible yes-woman. That she has, in effect, become the chief architect of his very prominent and occasionally suffocating bubble.
There is an element of truth to this critique. While aboard Air Force One at the end of the 2012 campaign, Jarrett turned to Obama and told him, “Mr. President, I don’t understand how you’re not getting eighty-five percent of the vote.” The other Obama aides in the cabin looked around in disbelief before concluding that she’d been earnest.
Well, Val, one reason he wasn’t getting 85 percent of the vote is that no president has achieved any such degree of unanimity or near-unanimity since George Washington was named on the ballot of every Electoral College elector in both 1789 and 1792. In the three most recent “landslide” presidential elections, Ronald Reagan won 58.8 percent of the vote in 1984, Richard Nixon won 60.7 percent in 1972, and Lyndon Johnson won 60.6 percent in 1964. James Monroe also won almost 98% percent of the popular vote for actual named candidates in 1820.
The second quote comes from Scheiber at the piece’s end:
It’s no surprise that Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett would govern as reasonable people. It’s who they are. The tragedy is that we live in surpassingly unreasonable times.
Scheiber is referring to the guy who thinks that running trillion-dollar annual deficits for four years, followed by annual $500 billion-plus shortfalls as far as the eye can see, is “reasonable.”
Scheiber is also referring to the “reasonable” guy who believes that Tuesday’s elections really didn’t mean much, and who said, as paraphrased at the Hill, that “two-thirds of voters didn’t participate in the midterms — suggesting Republicans lack a mandate.” Well then, no president, including Reagan and LBJ, let alone Obama, has ever had a mandate either.
I guess that the fact that a majority of people don’t vote in off-year elections means that a President can do whatver he wants, and the heck with everyone else. Yeah, that is so “reasonable,” Noam.
The left obsessed over Karl Rove’s degree of influence in the Bush 43 White House, to the point of fantasizing about his indictment during the Valerie Plame non-event. But Valerie Jarrett’s clearly outsized role in the Obama White House, while annoying to the left at times, presents no fundamental problems.
So that’s three nuggets of nuttiness in one night. Determining a winner between the three identified is awfully tough, but I’d go with Jarrett’s “85 percent” comment.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
This is the problem when you surround yourself with “yes”men. The group think takes over and you don’t see it coming until it’s upon you. I hope Obama NEVER learns… Never interfere when your enemy is destroying himself.
You know there are two ways to look at Valerie Jarrett. Either she is nutjob liberal on a major ego trip being the “Presidents” advisor to the point of irrationality OR she is an Iranian double agent. You could connect the dots either way to make sense of her involvement in the really poor advice Obama has been getting.
Is it any accident that for 6 years the US and Iran have been negotiating on nuclear issues and yet nothing has emerged to curb Iran’s march to a nuclear bomb? Why is Obama literally inviting the Iranians to march into Iraq to fight ISIS? Doesn’t Obama realize what an Iranian victory over ISIS would look like? An Iranian Shiite Theocratic State stretching from Lebanon on the Med. through Syria, Iraq and Iran on the Strait of Hormuz. The entire Sunni M.E. would erupt in violence creating 100′s of thousands of Jahidists off to fight the Shiites in a bloodbath. It would by the Shiite’s interpretation of Islam bring forth the Mahdi, the bloodbath is something they want, i.e. NOT what they want to avoid. IF Jarrett is an Iranian double agent, Obama’s policies causing turmoil in the Sunni countries is exactly what furthers the Shiite end game. Why else engage in an unprovoked attack on Libya and attempted overthrow of the Egyptian government installing the Muslim Brotherhood?
Though I am still leaning on the view that Obama is a greedy liberal looking to enrich himself regardless of the cost to others. Obama is working to the payoff by the Profiteering Green Lobby on his retirement. Another major solar thermal project is going bust just like Solyndra and they are trying to get a government grant to pay off their loans.
Comment by dscott — November 10, 2014 @ 12:40 pm
Also note the arrogance of Obama assuming those two-thirds who didn’t vote support him. Yeah, if they are so taken with your policies, why didn’t they vote to make it easier for you to continue them by getting more/keeping more liberals in office? What a jerk. Typical Obama attitude, “I didn’t get what I want, so voters bleep you.”
I;m guessing many didn’t vote because of disgust of how corrupt the process has become, which is largely due to Obama. Both those who voted for the GOP and stayed home basically both actually gave a big “bleep you” to you Mr. Obama.
Comment by zf — November 10, 2014 @ 2:11 pm
Greedy Liberals:
World’s largest solar plant applying for federal grant to pay off federal loan
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/08/world-largest-solar-plant-applying-for-federal-grant-to-pay-off-its-federal/
After already receiving a controversial $1.6 billion construction loan from U.S. taxpayers, the wealthy investors of a California solar power plant now want a $539 million federal grant to pay off their federal loan.
“This is an attempt by very large cash generating companies that have billions on their balance sheet to get a federal bailout, i.e. a bailout from us – the taxpayer for their pet project,” said Reason Foundation VP of Research Julian Morris. “It’s actually rather obscene.”
This is the liberal business model: Mandate the use of a product or service, give government guaranteed loans to the company, hand the business a tax credit for creating the product or service, subsidize the public use of the over priced product or service and when all of these are not enough bail out the company and its investors. This is Obamanomics.
Comment by dscott — November 10, 2014 @ 2:47 pm