| Morning Jolt - 09/28/12 By Jim Geraghty Happy Friday! Here's your Morning Jolt. Jim Our Score So Far: Justice Department 1, First Amendment 0. This is one of those moments where you don't really recognize your country anymore. The California man behind a crudely produced anti-Islamic video posted to YouTube that has inflamed parts of the Middle East was arrested for violating terms of his probation, authorities said Thursday. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, was convicted in 2010 for federal check and sentenced to 21 months in prison. Under terms of his probation, he was not allowed to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer. Nakoula was arrested after federal probation officials determined he violated the terms of his supervised release, said Thomas Mrozek U.S. Attorney's spokesman in Los Angeles. Totally coincidental, right? Allahpundit: "No word yet on what the violation was, but I assume it must be far more serious than using an alias or a computer. Given the insanity of the past two weeks, replete with the White House nudging Google to pull the video off of YouTube and the State Department running ads on Pakistani TV to apologize for a movie they had nothing to do with, I can't quite believe the DOJ would risk the perception that they're punishing this guy for a thoughtcrime unless something serious was involved. There has to be a real crime underlying this. Right?" Exurban Jon: "It'll be neat when Obama starts locking up reporters who insult Islam, right MSM?" Two Obama Voters Who Aren't . . . Completely Representative of His Base Two Obama voters to contemplate: First, the cheerful "Obama phone" user, incapable of speaking in anything besides an indignant, gravelly shriek . . . And then the fierce Romney critic who thinks our ambassador in Libya "probably had it coming." Alexa Shrugged accurately depicted my incoherent mix of disbelief, shock, rage, and incredulousness that there are Americans who think like this, and whose vote counts as much as yours and mine. Four More Years of This? Does anyone have any reason to think the next four years under Obama would be significantly different from the past two to four years? (I say two to four since he'll probably be dealing with Speaker Boehner and not Speaker Pelosi. So a second term of Obama would probably look and feel more like 2011–2012 than 2009–2010.) Think we'll see anything different in how the president approaches the economy? We never generated much of a real recovery from the 2008 crash, and look at where we are, four years later: I've frequently written about research from the Fed which finds that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2%, recession follows within a year 48% of the time. And when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2%, recession follows within a year 70% of the time… Growth the past two quarters has averaged about 1.6%. Not only does this mean the economy is growing more slowly than last year's 1.8%, it is also slow enough to signal about a 50% chance of a recession within a year. And the third quarter also looks weak. The anemic, three-year-old U.S. recovery is already running out of steam. And if it does, it may be several more years before we see unemployment below 8%. Except if Obama's reelected, there's a chance he may strong-arm depressed Republicans in Congress into acquiescing on tax increases. So imagine the already gloomy economic outlook, with tax increases dolloped on top of that. Think we'll see anything different in our approach to Iran? I'm glad Obama realizes that on his approach to Iran in his first year, he was wrong and his Republican critics were right. I just don't know how much his approach has changed, considering the periodic snubs, brush-offs, and other antagonism toward Israel's concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. We know we'll see . . . "more flexibility" in our dealings with Putin. We're going to be "more flexible" in negotiations with a leader characterized as cruel, paranoid, and "venomously anti-Western." Can't wait, huh? Obama went to the United Nations, made a pretty good defense of the First Amendment and how the best response to offensive speech is more speech, not attempts to ban it . . . and the leaders of the Muslim world pretty much ignored him. Remember, Obama is on record as saying that he thinks Republicans will be more willing to compromise after his reelection: "Given how stark the choices are, I do think that should I be fortunate enough to have another four years, the American people will have made a decision. And hopefully, that will impact how Republicans think about these problems . . . My expectation is that there will be some popping of the blister after this election, because it will have been such a stark choice." And you thought he was naïve about the Middle East! I mention all this because our friend Jonah has put the magnifying glass to a remarkably un-discussed aspect of the 2012 election. Despite four years of results that only his most loyal defenders would call satisfactory, Obama is largely the same guy he was when he walked into the job on January 20, 2009. He doesn't think he's made any major mistakes of substance or policy. He thinks his lone problem is insufficient storytelling. Jonah observes: In the 2008 primaries, Obama and Hillary Clinton had an intense argument over the nature of the presidency. Clinton argued that real change came when skillful politicians moved the machinery of Washington toward progressive ends. The president was a "chief executive officer" who is "able to manage and run the bureaucracy," she explained. No, no, replied Obama. The presidency "involves having a vision for where the country needs to go . . . and then being able to mobilize and inspire the American people to get behind that agenda for change." So, after four years on the job, Obama has learned that he was right all along! How humble. Except that's not the story of Obama's presidency. Contrary to popular myth, Obama has not rallied public opinion to his side on a single major domestic issue. The idea that health-care reform was an "outsider-driven" affair is especially otherworldly. Unpopular from the get-go, it passed with ugly horse trades and legislative bribes that helped spur an outsider movement to defeat it, i.e., the Tea Parties. His claim that he was too busy "getting the policy right" to tell the people a story is doubly creepy in its lack of self-awareness. All the reporting about Obama's first term suggests that he outsourced the heavy lifting on the stimulus, "Obamacare," and Wall Street reform to the Democratic leadership while he indulged his logorrheic platitudinousness. According to Bob Woodward's new book, even Nancy Pelosi hit mute on the speakerphone (which she's denied) during one of Obama's perorations, and she and Harry Reid went on with their meeting. In his first year, Obama barely stopped talking to the American people, who unfortunately didn't always have a mute button handy. According to CBS's Mark Knoller, Obama gave 411 speeches or statements (52 addresses solely on health-care reform), 42 news conferences, 158 interviews, 23 town-hall meetings, and 28 fundraisers. And what did Obama learn from all of this? Nothing, nothing at all. If second-term Obama is going to be different in any way, it's that he's probably going to be even more pleased with himself, even less inclined to do interviews where he might get hard questions, even more ubiquitous on our television in pop-culture venues (The View, cooking shows, late-night comedy shows, Entertainment Tonight, sports commentary, interviews with radio hosts like "The Pimp With the Limp" and so on). After all, reelection will be the ultimate vindication. He offered up results that his critics declared to be a buffet table of failure . . . and a majority of Americans said, "More, please." Punch Sequestration Quicker and Harder, Mitt! Here's Romney's message in Northern Virginia yesterday: Mitt Romney on Thursday cast the president as a weak commander-in-chief who is willing to compromise the country's military strength even though the world remains a dangerous place. At a "Veterans for Romney" event in northern Virginia, the Republican presidential nominee offered assurances that he would avert military spending cuts and protect services for veterans. Mr. Romney continued to blame Barack Obama for deep cuts to defense that are scheduled to take effect next year. The planned spending reductions, known as sequestration, are the result of a bipartisan deal that was supported by many Republicans in Congress. Mr. Romney, though, told the veterans in Springfield that "the White House proposed this sequestration, kind of a gun-to-your-head opportunity." In case you doubt that point . . . The Wall Street Journal reports that on page 326, Woodward describes how sequestration was pitched by Obama budget director Jack Lew and legislative affairs chief Rob Nabors, and initially was not well received by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) who said, "Get the hell out of here. . . . That's insane. The White House surely will come up with a plan that will save the day. And you come to me with sequestration?" The book reports that the White House won Reid over on the matter after hearing that "they would design it so that half the threatened cuts would be from the Defense Department," with far less coming from entitlements. Romney's remarks strike me as the right notion, but perhaps one not quite perfectly expressed. I feel like Romney doesn't "connect the dots" enough, and I wish he could almost lay it out with bullet points. - Last summer, with our gargantuan debt approaching its legal limit, the debt ceiling, Congress and the president needed to reach a deal.
- Because this president wouldn't budge upon his desire to raise taxes, the only compromise that could be reached was this "sequestration" nonsense.
- Sequestration is a terrible patchwork of a compromise, because it cuts defense so deeply it endangers the country, and what's worse is that it was deliberately designed to be a terrible compromise, because the theory would be that it was so bad, it would force Congress and the president to get serious and come up with a better deal.
- Yet here we are, nearly a year and a half later, and there's no better deal on the table. Obama's been too busy golfing, going to fundraisers, and hanging around the couch with the ladies of The View, apparently.
- Sequestration could go away anytime this president got serious about cutting spending. It can also go away anytime a president-elect gets serious about cutting spending, too.
- Obama always says we can't balance the budget by just cutting spending — but we've never even tried that option. Let's see how much of the deficit we can cut by getting rid of redundant and ineffective programs. Once we have a smaller deficit, once we feel we've really cut out the spending we don't need, then we can reexamine the tax code!
ADDENDUM: Laura of Princess Politics: "2008: 'Obama's gonna pay my mortgage.' 2012: 'I got me an ObamaPhone.' #PresidentDowngrade" To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com National Review, Inc. | 
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