Obama: Time to fire his inner circle?

last updated 8 January 2015

I have one word of advice for President Obama, said James Carville in CNN.com: “Panic.” Democrats just lost two special congressional elections that were clearly referendums on the president, unemployment is stuck at a stubborn 9 percent, and polls show Obama’s job-approval numbers sinking into dangerous territory. It’s time for the president to “fire someone. No—fire a lot of people.” The administration needs “a complete change of direction” and a staff shake-up, like the one Bill Clinton ordered when he was in trouble in 1994. “For God’s sake, why are we still looking at the same political and economic advisers who got us into this mess?” Actually, firing a few people “couldn’t hurt,” said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com. Especially if you’re talking about Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has engineered the White House’s failed economic policy, and Chief of Staff Bill Daley, who has ruinously pushed for compromise with a GOP bent on Obama’s destruction. Obama needs to bring in aides who will “tell him things he doesn’t want to hear.”

Panicky Democrats are misdiagnosing the cause of Obama’s malaise, said Victor Davis Hanson in RealClearPolitics.com. His approval numbers have sunk not because he has lousy aides, but because the public has rejected the left-wing medicine he prescribed for a battered economy: more spending, bigger government, bigger deficits. Obama’s presidency is failing because “almost everything he has done has made things worse, not better,” said Peter Wehner in Commentaryâ€‹Magazine.com. Obama combines “very bad policies with rare incompetence,” and the only fix for that is to send him packing in 2012.

If Obama wants any chance of keeping his job, said Matt Bai in The New York Times, he’d better not panic. He’s insisted that he inherited this terrible economy, and that it will take time to climb out of it. If Obama fires Daley and/or Geithner, it would imply that they—and this White House—are responsible for the country’s “prolonged economic misery.” That message would be catastrophic. Democrats ought not panic, either, said the Fort Wayne, Ind., News-Sentinel.com in an editorial. Clinton and Ronald Reagan both had dismal approval ratings in their first terms, yet they were re-elected. And right now, Republican voters are “less than thrilled” with their presidential candidates, all of whom currently trail Obama in head-to-head polls. The 2012 elections are still 14 months away, and in politics, long-range predictions “often look foolish.”