Obama adm thuggishly threatening polling company with Dept of Justice Suit?

Does this remind people of what happened with GM?  From Fox News:

Employees at the venerable Gallup polling firm suggested they felt threatened by Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod when he questioned the methodology of a mid-April poll showing Mitt Romney leading the president – according to internal emails published Thursday. . . . 

According to the email chain titled “Axelrod vs. Gallup,” the White House in addition asked that a Gallup staffer “come over and explain our methodology,” which was apparently perceived as a subtle threat. 

A Gallup official said in an email he thought Axelrod’s pressure “sounds a little like a Godfather situation.” . . .   

However, when Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, the Obama administration’s Justice Department revived a 2009 whistle-blower lawsuit against the firm by joining the suit, a senior Gallup official alleges. 

The suit was filed by former Gallup employee Michael Lindley, who claims the firm violated the False Claims Act by overcharging the federal government for its services. . . . .

Pat Caddell: Obama "has been the most negative personal campaigner in the oval office -- ever, ever"

On Sean Hannity's show Pat Caddell, a pollster for Jimmy Carter, had this to say:

Let me tell you what's really bad, Sean. The president is running the real risk, every time you keep lowering the standard, breaking tradition -- this is Chicago politics. We don't care, we are going to disrupt your convention. For all the times we have had conventions, we have honored the idea in politics, you have yours, we have ours; then we engage a campaign. They're taking down all of this, just like the president's campaign; he has been the most negative personal campaigner in the oval office -- ever, ever.  You know what?  Winning matters more and that's what he is risking.

Meanwhile Obama defends Biden's comment to a group of mainly blacks that Republicans want to put them back in chains

Biden's remarks are available here:



Fox News provides the remarks some context by mentioning in more detail than other reports the racial composition of the audience.

The nation's first elected black governor, Doug Wilder of Virginia, has lambasted Vice President Joe Biden on national television for his comment Tuesday about banks keeping people "in chains."
Wilder, a Democrat and a grandson of slaves, echoed indignant Republican claims that Biden's remarks before a largely black crowd in Danville, Va., brought racism into the presidential race. . . .

Politico (citing a segment on CNN) has this discussion by Former Democratic Rep. and 2008 cochair of the Obama campaign Artur Davis:

"I know what Joe Biden was doing yesterday and every black person in the room knew who the y’all was, they knew what the chains were about, knew what the metaphor was. And I will give that audience credit... It’s a divisive tactic that’s insulting to African-Americans, it’s insulting to the American people, it’s an insult to the legacy that he used to build up as an orator that used to inspire people … and it ought to embarrass President Obama."

It has recently been announced that Mr. Davis will speak at the Republican National Convention so his comments might be dismissed as someone who has already left the tent as an important Obama supporter, but the same cannot be said of Mr. Wilder.  The People Magazine (via Politico) reports this:

Biden's comment sparked Romney to call the Obama campaign one of "division and hate and anger." But Obama, speaking to PEOPLE in Dubuque, Iowa, seemed unrattled by the controversy. He said Biden's words needed to be considered in context; that he was only saying "you, consumers, the American people, will be a lot worse off if we repeal these [Wall Street reform] laws as the other side is suggesting."
"In no sense was he trying to connote something other than that," Obama added. . . .

CNN has this discussion.


 You can see ABC News' has a discussion available here, but the report doesn't mention in any way the composition of the audience, which is extremely important.

My summary: I am happy to give Mr. Biden the benefit of the doubt if he says that he simply misspoke, but it is very clear that Obama and Democrats have long been playing up racism issues to motivate black voters.  Take this example:

Angela Rye, Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus, argued that President Obama has struggled during his first term due to racially-motivated opposition from conservatives who dislike having a black president.
"This is probably the toughest presidential term in my lifetime," Rye said during CSPAN's Q&A yesterday. "I think that a lot of what the president has experienced is because he's black. You know, whether it's questioning his intellect or whether or not he's Ivy League. It's always either he's not educated enough or he's too educated; or he's too black or he's not black enough; he's too Christian or not Christian enough. There are all these things where he has to walk this very fine line to even be successful." . . .

 Of course, Obama claims that he has always tried to bring the country together.

"We're going around the country, talking about, ‘How do we put people back to work? How do we improve our schools? How do we make sure that we're producing American energy? How do we lower our debt in a responsible way?' And I don't think you or anybody who's been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country. We've always tried to bring the country together," President Obama said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight.

UPDATE:

From Fox News:

New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, a Democrat and Congressional Black Caucus member, says Vice President Biden’s recent "chains" gaffe was indeed a reference to slavery despite the Obama campaign's denial.
Rangel told the The Perez Notes radio show: “Was he talking about slavery? You bet your ass he was. Was he using the vernacular? Yes, he was. Did he think it was cute? Yes, he did. Was it something stupid to say? You bet your life it was stupid.” . . .

Obama excludes Romney supporter from getting a free beer

So much for Obama's claimed like-ability.  This is the type of thing that I remember about the Obama that I knew in Chicago.

. . . A revealing moment came Monday, when Obama told a tent of drinkers at the Iowa State Fair that he’d buy a round of beers for 10 people, but not for one person carrying a sign of support for Romney.
At the beer tent, the drinkers “started chanting, ‘four more beers!’” according to the pool report.
“Potus said, ‘I’ll tell you what, except for Romney sign, I’ll buy beers for ten people,’” the report added. . . .

Romney is raising some important issues about Obama's personality.

Mitt Romney slammed Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday for making what Romney called an "outrageous charge" -- evidence, he said, of "an angry and desperate presidency." 

Romney, using some of his most pointed language to date on the campaign trail, accused Obama of running a "campaign of division and anger and hate," and specifically objected to comments Biden had made earlier Tuesday to a crowd in Virginia.
The vice president suggested that Romney and the Republicans intend to roll back Wall Street regulations and "put y'all back in chains." 

That remark drew a sharp response from Romney's campaign, which called it a "new low." Romney picked up on that line of attack at the campaign stop in Ohio, rolling out a speech he had spent  the last two days writing. In it, he pilloried the president’s record and accused him of being “intellectually exhausted.” 

“His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency,” Romney told a crowd of thousands gathered here at the final stop on his five-state bus tour. “Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower. This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like." . . . 

Hecklers at Romney events are getting paid to heckle him

With all the discussion over the last week about someone heckling Obama (really a reporter saying that he thought that Obama was finished and who tried to ask a question), it was interesting to see this claim.

The protesters popping up at Mitt Romney's rallies throughout Michigan Tuesday look like run-of-the-mill grassroots liberals — they wave signs about "the 99 percent," they chant about the Republican's greed, and they describe themselves as a loosely organized coalition of "concerned citizens."
They're also getting paid, two of the protesters and an Obama campaign official told BuzzFeed.
At the candidate's afternoon stop outside a bakery in DeWitt, a group of about 15 protesters stood behind a police barricade, a few of them chanting in support of Obama. Asked why he was protesting, a man dressed in a grim reaper costume pointed a reporter to a pair of "designated representatives" standing in the shade.
"I can't talk, you gotta get one of those people over there to talk to y'all," he said. "They're the ones who can talk to reporters."
Neither of the representatives agreed to give their names, but two protesters said they were getting paid to stand outside of the rally, though their wage is unclear: one said she was getting $7.25 per hour, while another man said they were being paid $17 per hour.
Meanwhile, about 50 feet away, another protest had been organized by local Democrats in conjunction with the Obama campaign. A campaign official told BuzzFeed they had nothing to do with the other group — which he said he believed they had been sent by the labor-backed "Good Jobs Now" — and confirmed that they were being paid. . . .

So given how upset Obama was with the reporter from the Daily Caller, will Obama call on unions to stop paying these people to heckle Romney? 

CNN reports a call from David Axelrod for Obama supporters to stop heckling Romney.  Do you think that if he was serious, that unions would really stop paying people to heckle Romney?  A tape of the CNN broadcast discussion starts at 9:55 into this segment of the Jon Stewart show.

Obama and bin Laden

With Obama claiming that Romney wouldn't have made the call to take out bin Laden, there is a very useful piece in the Washington Post.  The whole piece is interesting, but this is important to remember:

With some trying to turn bin Laden’s death into a campaign talking point for Obama’s reelection, it is useful to remember that the trail to bin Laden started in a CIA black site — all of which Obama ordered closed, forever, on the second full day of his administration — and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods. Obama banned those methods on Jan. 22, 2009. . . .

Obama attacks and completely misquotes two Republican congressmen

Democrats object strongly to the Republicans paying for the lower student loan interest rates with cuts to Obamacare and Republicans object to imposing new payroll taxes on some small businesses earning more than $250,000.  But even the Washington Post had a hard time with Obama's claims of what the Republicans were arguing:

Two Republican members of Congress are striking back at President Obama for personally targeting them in recent speeches about keeping student loan rates low.
Both claim Obama misrepresented them in citing comments suggesting they oppose keeping student loan rates at 3.4 percent, rather than allowing them to revert to 6.8 percent on July 1.
It is somewhat unusual for a sitting president to single out individual rank-and-file members of the opposition party for criticism and scorn in public speeches, and both rejected his comments Thursday. . . .
On Monday, Obama mocked Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) . . . for saying that those with student debt are sitting on their butts having opportunity dumped in their lap.
“I’m going to quote this because I know you guys will think I’m making it up,” Obama said at the University of North Carolina. “She said she had ‘very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt because there’s no reason for that.’”
But Obama dropped a few words from Foxx’s comment on the G. Gordon Liddy radio show. Foxx told Liddy she had “very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that” — apparently limiting her comments to those who take on large amounts of debt for school. . . .

 Obama also went after Missouri's Todd Akin:

At the University of Iowa, Obama said, “You’ve got one member of Congress who compared these student loans — I’m not kidding here — to a ‘stage-three cancer of socialism.’”
“Stage-three cancer? I don’t know where to start. What do you mean? What are you talking about? Come on. Just when you think you’ve heard it all in Washington, somebody comes up with a new way to go off the deep end,” he said.
. . . [In fact] Asked about the student loan issue, Akin slammed the government for taking over college loans in a 2009 bill.
“America has got the equivalent of the stage-three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” he said. “So first, to answer your question precisely, what the Democrats did to get rid of the private student loans and take it all over by the government was wrong. It was a lousy bill. That’s why I voted no. The government needs to get its nose out of the education business.” . . .

Akin objected this way to the misquote:

“With all due respect, the President misquoted me.  I was not saying that student loans are a cancer.  I referred to the policies where there is a government takeover of private industries.

“This is most evident in the government takeover of U.S. healthcare, the government takeover of student loans and the government’s attempts to shut down U.S. energy.

“I suspect the President was given a misquotation of what I actually said, but I am sure we have a fundamental disagreement on the role of government and what constitutes socialism regarding current public policy.” . . . 

The mean Obama, again

Does Obama come off as a mean person? I think that more people are hopefully finally getting to see this less appealing side of him. How about this interview with a reporter from Texas?

President Obama has troubles with voters in Texas, and, apparently, with interviewers from the Lone Star State as well.

"Let me finish my answers the next time we do an interview, all right?" Obama told reporter Brad Watson after an interview with WFAA-TV of Dallas, one of four interviews with local television stations at the White House on Monday.

The exchange is toward the end of the video.

At one point, Watson asked the president: "Why do you think you're so unpopular in Texas?"

After some jousting about the size of his loss in Texas in 2008 -- the president said it was "a few percentage points," but it was more like 11.8% -- Obama told his interviewer: "If what you're telling me is that Texas is a conservative state, you're absolutely right." . . .

UPDATE: Politico headlines this "The outburst heard 'round the world'"

When the even-keeled and cool President Obama gets prickly in public, it never goes unnoticed.

For Obama, who has carefully cultivated a reputation of easily managing confrontations with people who disagree with him, these moments are as rare as they are revealing of the person behind the presidency.

So it’s no surprise that Washington took notice when after a tense interview with a Texas TV reporter on Monday, Obama unclipped his microphone with no smile in sight, and tersely warned, “Let me finish my answers next time we do an interview, all right?”

The president of the United States was not happy. Obama had been corrected (he lost Texas by 12 points, not “a few,” in 2008), he was accused of punishing the state for political reasons (he denied that the White House had any part in the decision not to award a space shuttle to Houston), and he was challenged with the most basic of political questions: Why are you so unpopular in Texas? . . .

The problem: The reporter’s questions weren’t particularly difficult, but they were clearly not what Obama was expecting. The result was a viral video that depicted Obama as angry when faced with tough questioning. And it unveiled some of the degree to which the White House would like to control its message. . . .

Pfeiffer was asked by Time reporter Michael Scherer, “So will WFAA's Brad Watson get another interview one day?”

Instead of quickly taking the high road, Pfeiffer suggested that Watson may truly be out in the cold after irritating the president. And he did it by revealing yet another trick of Washington communications: playing one news outlet against its rival. . . .

This isn't the only problem that Obama has had with local reporters going off the approved script.

The mean Obama

I never thought that Obama was a nice guy when I knew him at the University of Chicago Law School. Possibly other Americans are beginning to see the same person that I knew. Some points:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin accepted Obama's offer to attend Obama's budget speech at George Washington University last Wednesday.
With Ryan in the audience, Obama made "false claims [that will] poison the debate and make serious budget cutting very difficult to accomplish." Obama attacked George Bush, congressional Republicans, and businesses and taxpayers.
On Thursday, Obama attacked Ryan personally this way: "When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure he's just being America's accountant, that he's being responsible, I mean this is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill -- but wasn't paid for. So it's not on the level."
Of course, all of Obama's claims here were false. The deficit during 2007, the last year that Republicans had control of the Congress and the presidency was less than $170 billion. The prescription drug plan Ryan supported cost half as much as the Democratic alternative then on the table. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars under President Bush were regularly funded by Congress.