BrandonGreife's blog

As college students, people always assume we're Democrats. You’ve probably heard the old political saw (often misattributed to Winston Churchill), “”If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” There are numerous theories as to why. Democrats have a more optimistic, open-hearted vision for America. Young adults tend to be socially liberal. They saw a lot of themselves in Barack Obama. Liberal indoctrination by college professors. The list could stretch for miles. But today’s young adults may not be pigeonholed the same way. This year Democrats’ cannot take their votes for granted.

That doesn’t mean Democrats aren’t trying. President Obama is kicking off a series of rallies on college campuses, designed to reinvigorate the young adults who carried him into the White House two years earlier.

But the message has drastically changed. Rather than ignite young adults with his hopeful brand of politics, the President is reduced to groveling. As the Washington Post reported today,

When Obama steps onto a grass quad at the University of Wisconsin on Tuesday, he will deliver a newly tailored, more personalized campaign appeal aimed at ginning up enthusiasm, according to White House and senior Democratic officials. Plouffe said Obama will remind students of the work they put into his 2008 campaign and warn them that if they don’t reengage now, “all that could be jeopardized.”

In 2008 he advocated for change. In 2010 he’s advocating for things to stay the same? Not exactly a winning message.

But it is made even more unpalatable given the general lack of change we have actually seen from Obama. It is easy to promise change, it is much more difficult to actually deliver it. And this has been Obama’s failing. As one previous Obama supporter said in a town hall recently,

“I’m one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I’m exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for. And deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people and I’m waiting sir.

Substitute “middle class” for “young adults” and you’ll understand the frustration that is being seen on many college campuses. We wanted something different. We were promised something different. We got more of the same.

More politics. More backdoor dealings. More big government. More spending. More wars. For young adults there really wasn’t much difference between the Obama administration and the Bush administration from which they were so disenchanted.

All told, Democrats have a much tougher sell this time around if they want to recapture magic with young people. Meanwhile, Republicans are beginning to find traction on college campuses. Take college sophomore Edward Dooley, who told ABC News that just two years ago he was a “Kennedy-worshipping, stereotypical Massachusetts liberal.” But now Dooley, like so many other young adults, finds that his political ideology has shifted to the right after being turned off by Obama’s “glossy ideals” and “lack of concrete policies.”

Beyond a failure to live up to promises, Obama’s support among the youth vote has been eroded by his failed attempts to jump start the economy. The recession has been especially hard on young people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics youth unemployment was at 19.1 percent in July – the highest July rate since statistics were first kept in 1948.

Unfortunately for the unemployed the Democrats’ stimulus policies have done little to budge the unemployment needle. In fact, the only thing they have really accomplished is trillions of dollars of additional government debt, money that younger generations will be responsible for paying back.

As College Republican Chair Bob Kosek told ABC News for their story Republicans Rising on College Campuses,

“Hope and change doesn’t put money in your bank account to buy textbooks or pay off your student loans. It doesn’t help you get a job after you graduate either, and I think a lot of students are realizing that now.”

The rampant unemployment and dismal economy that is the Democrats’ legacy of the past two years is perhaps no clearer than on the University of Wisconsin campus where Obama is beginning his college tour. As the Washington Post reports,

The students on this leafy, generally liberal campus once constituted one of the strongest battalions in Obama’s grass-roots army. Two years later, the political dynamic has changed. Across campus, stickers, signs or chalkings for any politician are scarce. The laundromat where Obama’s young volunteers once staged late-night phone banks and planned bus trips to neighboring Iowa has gone out of business.”

A one-time hub for pro-Obama students now out of business. What a fitting, if sad metaphor for this administration.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/09/27/obamas-campus-tour-finding-college-conservatism-on-the-rise/

Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” By that definition President Obama has gone insane. Or perhaps he’s not so much insane as he is just suffering from a bout of memory loss. Does he not remember how badly his previous effort at pumping money into the economy went? Nevertheless, here we are, a year and a half later and creeping unemployment remains undeterred by the federal government’s intervention and the President is pitching another stimulus.

By politically necessity this one is much smaller. He’s decided to take a piecemeal approach, breaking the approach into three prongs: (1) $50 billion in infrastructure improvements, (2) a R&D tax credit extension, and (3) an investment tax rebate. Nevermind that President Obama attempted to sell his $800 billion stimulus plan last February by listing previous “failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis” including “that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures.” Sounds to me like he’s embraced the piecemeal approach. Must be that memory loss.

The worst of the plan is President Obama’s decision to throw $50 billion at infrastructure improvements. After all, what happened to all those “shovel-ready” infrastructure jobs that the first stimulus was supposed to contain? An even better question was posed in this Investor’s Business Daily editorial,

But why in the world do we need another stimulus when we’re not even close to exhausting the funds allocated for the last one?

This when $275 billion of the original $838 billion has still yet to be doled out. More specifically, less than a third of the $230 billion allocated to infrastructure projects has been spent. So with literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure investment still pending, why are we tacking on an additional $50 billion?

Well, because it sounds good. 150,000 miles of roads will be rebuilt. 4,000 miles of rail will be constructed or maintained. 150 miles of runways will be rehabilitated.

But while Obama was clear about how many miles of pavement or tracks would be laid, there was never a hint of how many jobs would be created. Apparently, the government is finally getting out of the “jobs created or saved” business. What it should be getting out of is the stimulus business altogether. The first one was an utter failure. In the last quarter the economy grew at 1.6 percent – not even fast enough to keep unemployment stable, much less than the speed necessary to actually create jobs. In fact the economy shed 54,000 jobs in August, a depressing finale to what was billed as the “Recovery Summer.”

The only true history made by the stimulus bill was the record levels of debt and deficits it has wrought upon America’s balance sheet. As the CBO wrote in their latest Budget and Economic Outlook, “relative to the size of the economy, this year’s deficit is expected to be the second largest shortfall in the past 65 years.” I’m betting you could guess what year had the largest. Things are not projected to get much better. As the CBO explains, “Beyond the 10-year budget window, the nation will face daunting long-term fiscal challenges . . . Continued large deficits and the resulting increases in federal debt over time would reduce long-term economic growth.”

$50 billion is not the cure to our problems, it only adds to them. The economic multiplier effect of Keynesian economics only works in theory. In the harsh reality we live in businesses care little for economic theory. They care about their bottom lines. They care about an uncertain policy environment clouded by an activist government. They care about how much taxes they are going to have to pay now, and in the future, as we are forced to pay for this unprecedented spending binge.

Democrats have already gone “all in” on their original stimulus package. They gambled with taxpayer money and lost. Now they want to ante up another $50 billion. But they’ve tried spending us out of this recession over and over again. Can we really expect different results this time around? A sane question likely to be ignored by an out-of-touch Washington.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/09/08/trying-the-same-thing-but-expecting-different-results/

We’re heading into the home stretch. We’ve rounded the final corner and are now speeding towards the November finish line. If you haven’t figured it out I’m talking about the upcoming elections where Democrats are trying their best to stay ahead of the Republicans in the race for Congressional control. But Democrats appear to be running out of fuel, the result of a failed “Recovery Summer” and the consistent lack of results from their tax-and-spend policies. Republican’s on the other hand have filled up their gas tank, fueled by voter response to their vision of change.

Voter’s desire for a new perspective in Washington is most clear when there is money on the line. In this cash-strapped, job-hunting society, the only thing we care about more than money is what diet Kim and Khloe Kardashian are on this week (or, if you’re a guy, the fact that the NFL starts next week). But still, money is king. It is what gives us the roof over our heads, puts food on the table, and puts the kids through college. Without Mr. Franklin and Mr. Grant backing up our country (for me its more like Mr. Washington and Mr. Lincoln) it will be impossible for us to remain an economic superpower.

This importance is evidence in the polls. According to Gallup, 93 percent of those polled believe that the economy is at least “very important” in determining their vote in the fall. That is trailed only slightly by job (92 percent) and federal spending (81 percent). That means three of the top four voting cues all have one thing in common – money – either the ability to earn it or the concern that Congress is mishandling it.

Saying an issue is important doesn’t necessarily tell you very much, so let’s dig a little deeper into the numbers. Now that we know everyone is anxious to have a few more greenback’s in their pockets, the key question is which party do you believe can help you do that?

Of those polled by Gallup, 49 percent believe that Republicans would do a better job at fixing the economy while 38 percent believed Democrats would do a better job. That’s a +11 for the GOP. Americans also said they trust Republicans more than Democrats on the issue of jobs, albeit by a slimmer 5 percent margin. But rather than analyze issue by issue, there is a greater trend at play here. Of the nine issues asked about in the polls Americans trusted Republicans more than Democrats on seven of them (and healthcare was essentially a tie).

Democrats have squandered our trust. In October of 2006, just prior to Democrats’ making major gains following George Bush’s reelection, Democrats led on all eight issues polled at the time. Americans reward trust and punish any breach of it. We were given reason to hope that the “Washington way “would be changed. Promise after promise was thrown at us. Everything from a promise to “drain the swamp,” to a promise to pay for “every dime” of their plans, to a promise that if the stimulus passed unemployment would fall below 8 percent. But none of it came true. Promises of change were dashed against the rocks of the same old Washington. Nothing is different, except for now things are worse.

The economy is comatose, largely the result of uncertainty caused by overregulation and the necessity of tax hikes to pay off our crushing debts. Unemployment remains high because no companies are willing to make the commitment to hire unless the government makes a commitment to back off. And federal spending has soared with years of historic deficits still ahead. For better or worse Americans care a lot about money, and the government hasn’t given us much reason to trust what they are doing with it. Their seeming addiction to the “spend, spend, and spend some more” mindset is leading us into serious trouble. They spend on stimulus, they spend on bailouts, they spend for healthcare reform. I can’t even list all their spending bills because I just don’t have the room.

Americans live within a budget. We are forced to balance our checkbooks, keep our accounts in the positive, and make regular payments on any debts we have. Why should we trust a Democratic Party who thinks they play by different rules? We shouldn’t. Or given the recent poll results perhaps it would be more appropriate to say – we don’t. Fortunately, with November right around the corner we’ll soon have an opportunity to show them just how much we appreciate their breach of trust.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Commitee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/09/02/democrats-breach-of-trust-could-lead-to-big-november-losses/

Immigration is a problem longing for a fix. Unfortunately, it has been accorded leper status in Washington. Too broken to leave alone but too politically perilous to touch with a ten-foot pole. One need look no further than Arizona to realize the incendiary nature of attempting to come up with an immigration solution. Where there is much to lose, there is also much to gain. That is why Republicans must take the initiative, outflank their political opponents, and craft an immigration reform plan that not only preserves conservative values but potentially captures a new bloc of conservative voters.

Republicans have long been labeled as xenophobes when it comes to immigration. It is largely the result of a debate that has been couched in between two equally unattractive views. The word “immigrant” at its worst conjures up images of people who are stealing American jobs and living off our social welfare system without paying a dime in taxes to support it. At its best, they are unskilled laborers, doing the jobs Americans won’t do while living off our social welfare system without paying a dime in taxes to support it. Either way, not exactly a rosy picture. With this mindset, Republicans are doomed to forever fight an uphill battle when it comes to standing behind a viable, working option for immigration reform.

Sadly, without such reform Republicans will be doomed to wander the political wilderness. The fact is Hispanics will be a majority in this country by as soon as 2050. To remain a viable political party you will eventually have to capture this growing voting pool. Fortunately, and many Republicans don’t understand this, Hispanic-Americans tend to be conservative. In 2006 pollster David Winston asked registered voters to rate themselves on a 1 to 9 scale from very liberal to very conservative. Winston found that Hispanic Americans viewed themselves were more conservative than the rest of an already center-right country.

They are a natural source of votes but we’ve got to wise up to capture them.

This is where I’m going to lose some of you. But let me go ahead and say, wising up does not equal selling out. I understand that a party is about more than politics, it is about principle. Fortunately, reforming our stance on immigration isn’t just good politics, it meshes perfectly with conservative principles. But, it will require a change in mindset.

We’ve all heard the melting pot argument. That the United States is a nation of immigrants, melting together to form the essential fabric that binds us to this nation. All true, but very blah. Even with this argument immigration bas become a convoluted issue, existing as the enormous elephant in the room. Grasping the “melting pot” argument relies on a sense of history and fairness – concepts that are intangible and don’t really come with any personal benefits. Today, with unemployment staying stubbornly high and deficits clouding our fiscal future, it is a much easier to argue that illegal immigrants are taking our jobs and eating up our taxes. So what can we do to reframe the debate?

Republicans should put forward an immigration reform package that promises to increase jobs, lower the number of unskilled immigrants, and boosts the number of taxpayers. Sounds conservative. Now, what if I told you it could be done in a way palatable to Hispanic voters.

The first step is to change the make-up of our immigrant population. “Unskilled” and “immigrant” are too often viewed as inseparable. It needn’t be this way. After all you wouldn’t view Albert Einstein this way. But imagine how many fewer jobs America would have without people like these:

• Jerry Yang – Taiwanese founder of Yahoo
• Sergey Brin – Russian founder of Google
• Andrew Grove – Hungarian founder of Intel
• Andrew Carnegie – Scottish business mogul
• Levi Strauss – German inventor of blue Jeans
• John Kluge – German owner of Metromedia – one of largest privately held companies in the US

Immigrants success extends much deeper. A study by Harvard researcher Vivek Wawha found that “one in four engineering and technology companies founded between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder. We found that these companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006.” Moreover, foreign nationals residing in the United States represented 25.6 percent of all patent applications. In Silicon Valley, one of the primary entrepreneurial centers in the United States, 52 percent of tech and engineering companies were founded by an immigrant.

Immigrants do not have to be the job takers. They can be the job creators. But first we have to create an immigration policy capable of attracting and harnessing their talents. One way to do that would be to change the H-1B visa system. The visa, which is provided for immigrants that want to work in the U.S., has helped draw the top talent in the international work force. Unfortunately, as Darrel West argues in the Wall Street Journal,

“[O]nly 15% of our annual visas are now set aside for employment purposes. Of these, some go to seasonal agricultural workers, while a small number of H-1B visas (65,000) are reserved for “specialty occupations” such as scientists, engineers, and technological experts.”

65,000. That’s it. Applications for this type of visa are normally gone within the first two days of the application period. In other words, while the H-1B visa should be luring the best and the brightest international talent, we are shutting off the tap. The Cato Institute argues that such a low cap “is hampering output, especially in high-technology sectors, and forcing companies to consider moving production offshore.” The expansion should not be limited to H-1Bs. Other skilled worker visas such as the L-1, which allows foreign workers to relocate to a multi-national corporation’s US office, and O-1, which allows aliens with “extraordinary abilities” in a particular field, should also be emphasized and revised.

Given the inherent power of these visas to actually create jobs why has the government been so slow to change it? Partially because of the misperception of so many voters who believe that increasing quotas will take away jobs from Americans. This logic doesn’t have a basis in fact. As Cato explains:

“Fears that H-1B workers cause unemployment and depress wages are unfounded. H-1B workers create jobs for Americans by enabling the creation of new products and spurring innovation. High-tech industry executives estimate that a new H-1B engineer will typically create demand for an additional 3-5 American workers.”

This is the chance for Republicans to take the lead on immigration. Republicans have long been thought to have lost the debate – and have the lack of minority support to prove it.  The key to winning the support and turning the debate around is to focus on immigrants as realistic and viable solution to the economic trouble. Immigration reform could be the jobs bill we’ve all been waiting for and with a price-tag much cheaper than the so-called stimulus.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/07/26/republicans-must-outflank-democrats-on-immigration-reform/

I try to read all of Princeton economist and New York Times’ contributor Paul Krugman’s columns. Call it a nerdy form of masochism. By the end of each article I’m often left ripping at my hair and gouging at my eyes, screaming madly, “how did this guy win a Nobel?!?” Then I’m reminded that Yasser Arafat and Al Gore are also Nobel laureates and that maybe I shouldn’t make such a big deal out of the award.

Regardless of my disdain for his ideology I simply cannot stop reading. His seemingly religious belief that spending for the sake of spending is the solution to any economic crisis is admirable in its consistency.

Then again, it’s also fun to watch him run in rhetorical circles when he’s wrong. Remember this gem?

“[Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issues to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.”

Oops, got that one wrong. Must’ve missed the $4.3 trillion in subprime mortgages.

Well in his latest column he gets it wrong again. But in all his economic vanity he can’t admit it. Quite the contrary, he predicts the future for us, the conservative fools, who seek to deter the government from spending us into bankruptcy. In true doom and gloom fashion he argues “[F]uture historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression.”

Fortunately, we, the conservative fools, have good company. The G-20 Summit, composed of leaders from the world’s largest economies, have decided that trimming deficits is the best way to achieve long term stability in the world economy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been one of the most vocal advocates of putting government spending on a sustainable path. In a response to President Obama’s call for more stimulus, her government said,

“Nobody can seriously dispute that excessive public debts, not only in Europe, are one of the main causes of this crisis. That’s why they have to be reduced.”

Nobody? Is that a challenge? Apparently Paul Krugman took it as one. In his latest column Krguman explains why the silly know-nothings at the G-20 summit, with their commitment to fiscal sanity rather than spiraling deficits, will inevitably lead to the “Third Depression.” He writes:

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

Gasp! Inadequate spending. Only in the wonderland that exists inside Krugman’s head could trillions of dollars in new government debt be considered “inadequate spending.” If the United States escaped the Great Depression by building tanks for World War II, Krugman wants us to escape this recession by building presses to print all the money we’ll need for his “stimulus.”

The problem is that Paul Krugman thinks myopically. We must spend, spend, spend and do it now, now, now. Forget the fact that we have no plan to solve these deficits in the long term, beyond inflating our currency to the point where deficits won’t matter. The rest of us have a more nuanced understanding. We actually possess the ability to assess the long-term. Moreover, the ability to think in future terms necessarily colors the way we act in the present.

As Shawn Tully of Forbes explains,

“[I]f investors are convinced that Washington has a plan to restore fiscal balance, they’ll be content with lower returns on their stocks, bonds and buildings for a simple reason: those returns will prove more stable and predictable. That comfort level, in turn, lowers risk premiums and raises the prices of equities, corporate bonds, houses, and office towers.

Right now, many investors and managers are simply terrified by the absence of a roadmap to avoid ruinous debt. “We need to know that Washington can make tough choices, that our leaders are willing to do things that are unpopular,” says Paul Willen, an economics professor at MIT. “More than anything, people need to feel that this is not out of control.”

Frankly we’re scared, not just of today’s economic downturn, but because of a future made cloudy by insurmountable government deficits. In the face of a frightening future, Americans are saving rather than spending, companies are shunning risk and entrepreneurialism, and foreign lenders may soon ask for higher interest rates to hedge against inflation.

Keynes once said, “in the end we are all dead.” Krugman seems to base his entire economic philosophy on this one sentence. There is little other explanation for why he puts so much emphasis on spending now regardless of whether we can pay for it later. Our generation deserves better than that. Solving today’s crisis should not come with the caveat that we have doomed ourselves to another one.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/06/28/krugmans-keynesiasm-dooms-us-to-future-downturns/

Asinine. It is a word I don’t get to break out nearly enough. But there is simply no other way to describe this…

Liberal House Democrats say they’ ve been betrayed by their conservative Blue Dog colleagues.

Months after shelving their doubts and helping Blue Dog Democrats get their signature issue of statutory pay-as-you-go language signed into law, some liberals say conservative Democrats have reneged on their side of the agreement.

Counting all the stupid things in just those two sentences is like trying to pick the worst hair band from the 1980s – it’s hard, but only because there is so many of them. Nevertheless, I shall press on and do my best to point how utterly ridiculous Democrats’ latest calls for more spending are.

First off, betrayed. Strong word. Typically used in association with traitors, turncoats, and other scum. In this case, “betray,” is being used to describe someone who is actually sticking up for the good of the nation. It is commonly accepted that our lack of fiscal frugality is leading us down an unsustainable economic path. Unless, we hold Greece to be a role model we’ve got to cut down on cutting checks. So “betray” is really in the eyes of the beholder here. The fiscally conservative Democrats, a rare breed in this day in age, may have been disloyal to their free-spending liberal brethren, but in the end, their devotion to sanity may save our nation’s bottom line.

Second, Democrats had to “shelve their doubts” about pay-as-you-go. Translation: we really want to spend a lot of taxpayer (and Chinese) money this term and we’re more than a little skeptical about having to find savings elsewhere. Their apparent detest for saving (or their simple inability to do math) tells me that many liberal Democrats left the task of balancing their personal checkbooks to their spouse. Did they forget the words of their fearless leader, who made it a point to say,

“[F]amilies across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.”

The camera didn’t catch it but Liberal Democrats in the room could likely be seen shaking their heads whispering “not true.”

Third, Democrats are saying that the Blue Dogs reneged on their side of the agreement. In this instance “their side of the agreement” can be substituted with “the Democrats’ plan to label everything as an ‘emergency measure’ so they can get around pay-as-you-go laws.” The subtle change in definition is backed up by a Rep. Paul Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus, who told The Hill

“In my mind, disappointment is a good word, because there was indeed, I thought, an understanding. . . I think the understanding was that once pay-go was in place, we’d be moving on to making proper investments in things like healthcare and education, and that we’d be given the benefit of the doubt when it came to making investments in those priorities.”

So lemme get this straight. Blue Dogs negotiated a deal where they would push for a Paygo language. In return liberal Democrats wanted a promise that they wouldn’t follow that language. Now both sides are upset. Only in Washington.

Fortunately, Blue Dogs appear to be holding their ground. Whether it is an actual concern over the deficit, or merely just a politically astute judgment of a debt-wary electorate, is up for debate. Nevertheless, the spend-happy elements of the Democratic Party had better take note. Pay-as-you-go means what it says. If you want to make one of your spending provisions a budgetary priority, find somewhere to cut. In this regard Republicans are even giving you a leg up. Just take a look at our YouCut proposals. They’re like a weekly Saving Taxpayer Money for Dummies manual.

Better yet. How about we drop the Paygo farce altogether. Drop the notion of spending and making cutting a priority until we get the deficit down to manageable levels. “What, no spending!,” I heard the Democrats yell. Ok. Ok. I know it seems a little crazy. I know you’d be left twiddling your thumbs. But hey, at least your hands would be out of my wallet.

I know this has all fallen on deaf ears, so by all means return to your internal squabbling and finger pointing. Don’t mind us, we’ll be over here working on solutions to the mess you’re creating.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/06/10/progressive-dems-please-let-us-...

You want to talk about deficit under the Obama Administration?

Deficit of experience. Deficit of responsibility. Deficit of trustworthiness. Deficit of accountability.

There is, however, a surplus of blame coming from Washington. If we have learned anything from the failed leadership of Barack Obama, it’s that he sure does know how to point the finger. Rather than assume responsibility the President’s favorite trick has been to blame his White House predecessor.

Consider his response to the Gulf oil crisis. In the same speech in which he showed genuine anger over the “ridiculous spectacle” of companies “falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else,” he blamed former President Bush! The hypocrisy is astounding. Doing a little finger pointing himself Obama said,

“For too long, for a decade or more, there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill.”

His administration on the other hand deserves no share of the blame.

“Now, from the day he took office as Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar has recognized these problems and he’s worked to solve them.”

Just another example of President Obama working tirelessly to uphold his image of virtuosity and innocence while doing very little to get our economy back on track. Should be clear what his priorities are. But leering beyond the echoes of helplessness are cries of “not guilty, wasn’t me, didn’t do it.” From day one the President has vehemently insisted that the mess he intercepted in Washington was not one of his creation.

For instance:

“When I showed up after inauguration, they had left a big mess on the floor. So I got a mop, and I started cleaning up their mess.” – 10/27/09

“Now, if we had taken office in ordinary times, I would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficit. But we took office amid a crisis.”—1/27/10

“When Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took office, for example, he found a Minerals and Management Services Agency that had been plagued by corruption for years.” – 6/1/10

All of this superfluous talk about the horror that came before him has one thing in common: no solution. Obama constantly condemns prior administrations (including Bill Clinton’s) for their response to the deficit, the economy, or the oil spill. If there’s a problem you can pretty much guarantee he’s got an excuse. A solution, not so much. But an excuse, definitely.

Far from simply passing blame, Barack Obama’s hypocrisy is a defining trait. In Michigan this past Monday the President gave a commencement speech to a graduating high school class.

He proclaimed:

“Don’t make excuses. Take responsibility not just for your successes, but for your failures as well,” he told the graduates. “The truth is, no matter how hard you work, you won’t necessarily ace every class or succeed in every job. There will be times when you screw up, when you hurt the people you love, when you stray from your most deeply held values”.

I’m sorry Mr. President, did you just say don’t make excuses? Those words may have resonated throughout a starry-eyed audience in Kalamazoo, but they aren’t fooling me. And you can bet they aren’t fooling the rest of the country. When was the last time you heard the President apologize for anything? He has screwed up countless times. From a scandal plagued and fraud-ridden stimulus, to the politics as usual spoils-system uncovered in the Sestak scandal, the President refuses to say “sorry.” And frankly, his inability to apologize is the primary thing he should apologize for.

Mr. President, take your own advice; take responsibility for your successes and failures. If something didn’t go as planned, say so. If you didn’t handle something properly, say so. If the end product didn’t live up to the promises you made, say so. Such candor will be refreshing. We don’t expect you to be right all the time. We’ve entrusted you with the most difficult job in the world and although we expect you to be better than us, we don’t demand perfection. Replace humanity with hubris. You’ll find we’ll like you a lot more.

by Brandon Greife and Samantha Cohen

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2010/06/09/washingtons-biggest-deficits-re...

One of these things is not like the other…..One of these things just isn’t the same!

Take a look at Gallup’s latest weekly presidential approval survey.

Did you catch it? Gallup’s weekly presidential approval survey indicates that Obama approval ratings have plummeted amongst most age groups this month. In just the week of May 17th his approval among the 50-64 demographic fell from 49% to 42%. That is a 1% drop per day.

All told his approval percentage fell to 46% – the lowest week-long average of his entire presidency. The ratings are likely the result of the bad press the president has been receiving for his ill-handling of the Gulf oil crisis, continual increases in the expected cost of Obamacare, and the questionable ethics behind offering jobs to Democratic candidates in return for dropping out of the race. While most people over 30 are seriously reconsidering supporting Obama, Millennials (a.k.a. Generation Y) continue to give him the benefit of the doubt. The question is, WHY?

A report sent out by the Pew Research Center comments on the main characteristics of Millennials that set them apart from the rest:

“Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”

Back in 2008, Obama used these characteristics to gain the trust and support of Generation Y that helped give him the presidency. He gave them a reason to be enthusiastic because his message was based on “hope.” Hope that we could turn around a sinking ship and remain amongst the world elite. He challenged us with a promise of “change” that we could be the generation and he could be the president that ended business as usual. He was the king of upbeat. Chants of “yes, we can!” filled every auditorium he went to. On the strength of the message he coasted to an almost 2-1 victory.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The president has failed to live up to his promises to young adults. Rather than a culture of change we have gotten the same crony Washington we came to expect. Whether it be backroom deals to pass legislation or offers to candidates to pave the way for his preferred nominee, this is hardly change.

Worse, President Obama has given us no reason to hope. The historic debt and deficits being amassed by a spend-crazy Washington are creating an immense burden on our future. We are the first generation in history where a majority are worried about achieving the American dream – being better off than our parents. What hope can there be when we are staring more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities in the face? Austerity measures, similar to those of Europe, coupled with higher taxes and fewer government benefits are our future unless something is done to change the fiscal policy in Washington.

Again we ask why? Why are young adults still enthralled by a president who given our generation little other than lip service. He is confident, young, and good looking. But I implore young Americans to dig deeper. To peel back the few good things he has done for our generation in the short term and realize that he is quite literally spending away our future.

The Pew analysis of our generation says we have a lot of traits that play well for Obama, but it also says we are “open to change.” We made one in 2008. I think it’s time for another.

by Brandon Greife and Adam Welsh of the College Republican National Committee

A machine is a device that uses energy to perform a set of tasks or activities; a political machine is a disciplined, political organization in which an authoritative boss or small group commands the loyalty of a base of supporters, who receive rewards in exchange for their efforts.

A boss is someone who makes decisions and exercises authority; a party boss is a leader in a political party who controls votes and dictates appointments, and often has a reputation for corruption.

Party bosses and political machines played a major role in controlling politics and the outcomes of elections from the late 1800’s to the 1950’s in the United States.  The Democratic Party machine was most infamous for their corrupt operations that dictated politics in Chicago, Illinois for nearly half a century.  At the same time Tammany Hall, the headquarters of the New York Democratic Party was the foremost center of power and financing in the Democratic Party, stealing obscene amounts of dollars in taxpayer funds.

Sound familiar?  Well, it should. Except this time it isn’t in Chicago, it’s in Washington.  Under the leadership of Barack Obama we have adopted a ‘politics as usual’ mentality, reminiscent of the Democratic Party machine.  Coincidentally, BHO is the former Senator of Illinois and once called Chicago home.

The last two weeks have been embarrassing for the White House.  Well, more embarrassing than usual.  Two separate Democratic candidates revealed the current administration offered them a job in exchange for withdrawing from their respective races.

It came to light last week that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel attempted to get Rep. Joe Sestak to drop out of a primary race against infamous party-switcher (and White House buddy) Arlen Specter. Even worse, he used former president-turned fix-it-man Bill Clinton to do the dirty work. Sestak, who may have an axe to grind with the White House openly admitted that he was offered a job to bow out. The President and his team attempted to sweep the matter under the rug with a simple, “nothing improper took place.”

Today the story deepens. The White House acknowledged that Obama’s deputy chief of staff Jim Messina reached out to Colorado Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff under similar circumstances.  Having already endorsed incumbent Senator Michael Bennet and hopeful of eliminating the competition, the White House approached Romanoff in an attempt to avoid a “costly battle between the two supporters.” They use a rather attractive lure. Knowing that Romanoff previously applied for a position at USAID, Messina called to see if he was still interested in the job.

Digging deeper into the rabbit hole, Politico now reports that “a high end donor to President Barack Obama holds one of the jobs…dangled in front of Andrew Romanoff to dissuade him from running.” Apparently, if he can’t use a job to advance his political agenda, he’s more than willing to sell it to the highest bidder.

Fortunately, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has committed himself to revealing this type of corruption.  Following the Romanoff story he said,

“How deep does the Obama White House’s effort to invoke Chicago-style politics for the purpose of manipulating elections really go?” Issa continued, “clearly, Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff aren’t isolated incidents and are indicative of a culture that embraces the politics-as-usual mentality that the American people are sick and tired of.”

‘Politics as usual’ are anything but unusual under the current administration. The Obama Administration is not a well-oiled machine.  Democratic Party leaders, who advocate for backdoor job offers and get-out-of-jail-free cards in exchange for a victory at the polls, are what we call corrupt politicians.  They are people who are willing to jeopardize whatever credibility they have left, in hopes of furthering President Obama’s agenda.

My friends, it is time to shut down the Democratic Party machine.

by Samantha Cohen and Brandon Greife of the College Republican National Committee

I’ll try not to be as “doom and gloom” as I want to be. But I’ll allow myself one uber-pessimistic sentence to vent. Here we go: The shortsighted dummies in Washington now seem dead-set on sticking their dirty little hands into my wallet once again, this time to nationalize 401(k) plans as a quick cash grab to fund their agenda, and we’ll all suffer because of it. Ok. Technically it was a run-on sentence, but I had a lot to say and only one sentence to say it!

Our generation has witnessed an unprecedented growth in the size of government. It’s tentacles now touch every part of our lives. From regulation of traditionally private enterprises to administering and funding health care, we’re left to wonder where will the growth stop. Well apparently the Democrats in Washington want to keep pushing the envelope. Their latest grab is 401(k) retirement plans.

For all you young adults out there – just because I said retirement doesn’t mean you get to stop reading. This affects us now.

First, some explanation. In February the White House released its “Annual Report on the Middle Class” in Obama’s new Middle Class Task Force laid out ways to improve retirement security. Currently most workers join a 401(k) in which they pay a certain amount of their salary into a tax deferred investment vehicle that allows them to save for retirement. Advantages include: the employee gets to choose the type of investment and risk level, the money is contributed before it is taxed so you save on taxes, and many employers will match what you put in.

Enter the Democrats governing mantra: “Anything the private sector can do we can do better. We can do anything better than you.” To that end the Middle Class Task Force recommended:

“The creation of Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs), which would give workers a simple way to invest a portion of their retirement savings in an account that was free of inflation and market risk, and in some versions under discussion, would guarantee a specified real return above the rate of inflation.”

Sounds wonderfully benign when you describe it like that. It’s kind of like saying, the public option would have provided patients with more health care choices. Unfortunately, the reality is much different.

Supporters of the GRA have already testified before Congress with proposals to eliminate the favorable tax treatment afforded to 401(k) plans. Government run GRAs would be there to pick up the slack. How they would do that is explained in another government document – a “Request for Information” regarding the “annuitization” of 401(k) plans issued by the Department of the Treasury.

The problem with Americans, as suggested by the Treasury document, is that they aren’t good at saving. They complain that the vast majority of people take their 401(k) earnings in a lump sum once they reach retirement age. Democrats don’t like this idea. Apparently they disapprove of how people spend their money. They say that the only way to make sure people spend wisely is to convince/force them into an annuity providing monthly payments rather than a lump sum. Paternalism at its worst.

All this is bad, but why should young adults be concerned? The answer…just take a look at Social Security. Social Security is a government run retirement plan which everyone pays into. Just take a look at your last paycheck (if you’re lucky enough to have one in this economy) and you’ll notice that you were forced to contribute a substantial amount to Social Security. You’d like to think that this money would be going to a trust fund saved up for when you retire. You’d be wrong. In actuality the Social Security trust fund is a drawer full of IOUs from the federal government.

In a slick budgetary move, designed to make their bottom line look better, the government takes the money paid into Social Security, spends the funds on government programs, while not counting the borrowed money against the deficit. Brilliant! Until you realize that our generation is going to be on the hook for all of this mismanagement.

If GRAs are passed we should expect to see the same thing. The government is seriously hard up for cash. If they were a college student they would be living off ramen and Busch Light. To alleviate this money problem in the short term the government could spend the money currently sitting in retirement accounts, toss out some more IOUs, and defer payment for the GRA annuities for a few decades.

This is the culture that young adults must fight against. The idea that anything goes in the effort to boost today’s bottom line – even if it may cost the next generation trillions. Such short-sightedness must come to an end. Politicians must be made to understand that what matters is what benefits us in the long term not them in the short term. And frankly, our generation already has enough on its plate. Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. A national debt that doubles in five years and triples in ten. $76 trillion in unfunded government entitlement liabilities. We simply cannot afford to pay for the nation’s retirement as well.

Alright I know I promised I wouldn’t be “doom and gloom.” There really wasn’t a way around it. We’re faced with problems that Washington is refusing to acknowledge even exist. It’s enough to make me want to move, to try and run away from our government’s profligacy. I’ve always wanted to spend some time in Europe!…oh wait.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee