By Joe Guzzardi
03/20/2009
These are dark nights for "Obama Zombies".
Who are they, you ask?
Pick from several definitions. Zombies — all of whom profess to have keen political insights — are Obama devotees whose beliefs are motivated by social image, who refuse to make decisions independent of the media, or, the loftiest zombie level, those who waste any part of their discretionary income on useless memorabilia like presidential coins, plates or t-shirts.
My position on Obama has been clear from the moment he announced his candidacy in early February 2007.
If you voted for Obama to protest two disastrous Republican terms, I understand. Or if you cast your ballot for Obama because you think that America should have an African-American commander-in-chief, I won’t argue.
But if you voted for Obama because you believed his campaign rhetoric about being an agent for change, or because you gobbled up the media’s embarrassing Obama drivel or because you wanted to boast you voted for an African-American, then you are — like it or not — a zombie.
Of course, Lodi isn’t a very likely place to find zombies, rib-rock Republican town that it is.
Immediately after the November election, I pledged to News-Sentinel readers that I would be as hard on Obama as I had been for eight years on Bush.
Today, I'll deliver.
Just as the nation shifted into recovery mode from its precipitous Dow Jones Industrial Average plunge, AIG resurfaced to remind us how over his head Obama is in dealing with America’s economic woes.
Assuming that the DJIA is the nation’s most trustworthy barometer of confidence, Obama’s presidency to date — and his administration is not out of its 100-day honeymoon period — is an unmitigated failure.
According to data compiled by financial experts at Bloomberg.com, the DJIA fell 20 percent since Inauguration Day through March 6, the fastest drop under a newly elected president in at least 90 years.
Obama may break the long-standing pattern in which the Dow has rallied 9.8 percent on average in the 12-months after a Democrat captured the White House. Only twice since 1900 has the benchmark gauge slipped in the 12 months after the election of a Democratic president, once after Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 victory and again following Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory.
As one financial analyst said: "Obama is to financial markets as George W. Bush is to New Orleans after Katrina."
But another wag replied: "Good analogy. But that wrongly presumes that Bush physically made Katrina worse before it hit New Orleans. Obama, on the other hand has definitely created Wall Street’s equivalent to a financial Katrina since his inauguration."
Now Obama, whose administration butchered the AIG bailout and allowed for its $165 million executive bonus payouts, has to again face a furious public.
A key AIG bailout architect, Connecticut’s Christopher Dodd, committee Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, has the dubious distinction of uttering one the all time dumbest comments.
According to Dodd, he allowed language permitting the AIG bonuses into the legislation because he feared that executives would sue the federal government if they didn’t get their payday.
Think of it.
Dodd wants you to believe that the federal government is afraid that unemployed individuals who work for a company it essentially owns might file lawsuits. Even if they did, decades would pass before any ruling would be rendered.
The hard truth is that on the economy Americans via the Dow Jones have given Obama an early no confidence vote.
Even allowing that Obama inherited a shaky market from Bush that was doomed to drop further, it doesn’t change the stinging reality. The nation has no faith in Obama or his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. On Wall Street, where it matters most, Obama is viewed as strictly ornamental.
If Obama is as smart as he thinks he is, he'll listen to what the market tells him instead of lecturing to it.
I've been too polite to ask my zombie friends, and I have several of them, what they think of Obama lately.
Obama’s honeymoon isn’t over. But the zombie’s free ride is. I'd like a realistic evaluation regarding Obama’s presidency from them without further ado.
Joe Guzzardi is a California native who recently fled the state because of over-immigration, over-population and a rapidly deteriorating quality of life. He has moved to Pittsburgh, PA where the air is clean and the growth rate stable. A long-time instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School, Guzzardi has been writing a weekly column since 1988. It currently appears in the Lodi News-Sentinel.
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