The headlines about this morning’s Pew Research survey are likely to focus on how President Obama has a much higher approval rating than Congressional Republican leaders — 51 percent to 25 percent. But there’s a bit more to find in the numbers, results that challenge the Beltway narrative of a masterful president with a huge advantage over his hapless congressional opposition.

First of all, what is the public’s top priority, by a wide margin? Deficit reduction. Well ahead of immigration, gun control, and climate change:

What’s more, the vast majority of Americans want the deficit to be brought down by spending cuts or mostly spending cuts (73 percent) rather than tax increases or mostly tax increases (19 percent). Folks, that is a consensus that reaches across the partisan divide.

While respondents say they trust the president more than congressional Republicans on a host of issues . . .

. . . they don’t actually approve of how Obama is handling most issues.

With Obama at a 51 percent job approval but in the low to mid 40s in his handling of most issues, discussion of the president should note that a certain segment of the population likes him, personally, a lot more than his policies.

Chalk it up to his appearances in non-political programming like The View, The Tonight Show, and ESPN, or chalk it up to the happy images of him spending time with Michelle and his daughters. Obama is a lot more effective at getting people to like him than at persuading them.

The last Morning Jolt of the week (no Friday edition this week) features a potential lifetime ban for a prominent Democrat, why the perception of a Establishment vs. Grassroots fight gets so much media attention, and then the key question of how to think about the sequestration in the coming days:

Is the GOP Botching the Sequester?

Our old friend Byron York makes some good points here, but I don’t think the GOP’s argument is quite as garbled as he suggests.

In a& Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner describes the upcoming sequester as a policy “that threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more.”

Which leads to the question: Why would Republicans support a measure that threatens national security and thousands of jobs? Boehner and the GOP are determined to allow the $1.2 trillion sequester go into effect unless President Obama and Democrats agree to replacement cuts, of an equal amount, that target entitlement spending. If that doesn’t happen — and it seems entirely unlikely — the sequester goes into effect, with the GOP’s blessing.

In addition, Boehner calls the cuts “deep,” when most conservatives emphasize that for the next year they amount to about $85 billion out of a $3,600 billion budget. Which leads to another question: Why would Boehner adopt the Democratic description of the cuts as “deep” when they would touch such a relatively small part of federal spending?

The effect of Boehner’s argument is to make Obama seem reasonable in comparison. After all, the president certainly agrees with Boehner that the sequester cuts threaten national security and jobs. The difference is that Obama wants to avoid them. At the same time, Boehner is contributing to Republican confusion on the question of whether the cuts are in fact “deep” or whether they are relatively minor.

Here’s the 3-by-5-index-card version of what the GOP’s message on sequestration ought to be:

• Our current level of spending is unsustainable. Spending must go down. Period.
• This is a 2 percent cut.
• Sure, if we in the Republican Party had complete control of the government, we would be implementing the cuts differently. But we don’t.
• Congress can only appropriate funds; it doesn’t run the departments and agencies that spend the money. That’s the power and responsibility of the executive branch.
• If the Obama administration’s response to a 2 percent cut is really to let all the criminals out of the jails and end food-safety inspections, then it is no longer disputable that he’s a Stuttering Cluster-you-know-what of a Miserable Failure.

I’m not exaggerating on Obama’s doomsday talk:

President Obama on Tuesday painted a dire picture of federal government operations across the United States should automatic budget cuts hit on March 1: F.B.I. agents furloughed, criminals released, flights delayed, teachers and police officers laid off and parents frantic to find a place for children locked out of day care centers.

“Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go,” Mr. Obama said, flanked by law enforcement officers at the White House. “Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids.”

While the effects may ultimately be significant, many are unlikely to be felt immediately, officials said Tuesday after the president’s remarks. Rather, they will ripple gradually across the federal government as agencies come to grips in the months ahead with across-the-board cuts to all their programs.

. . . But officials conceded that day care centers are almost certainly not going to be padlocked on March 1. Border patrols will be staffed throughout that day and the days to come. Federal agents will continue to conduct investigations, and criminals will not immediately be “let go,” as Mr. Obama suggested.

This is the Washington Monument strategy:

Named after a tactic used by the National Park Service to threaten closure of the popular Washington Monument when lawmakers proposed serious cuts in spending on parks.

Roll Call calls it “an old legislative ploy where an agency threatens to close popular services first.”

The strategy is used at all levels of government in an attempt to get the public to rally around government services they take pride in or find useful. Closing libraries on certain days of the week or reducing days of trash pick up appears to have the same effect.

Will some of these cuts stink? Yes. I dread 800,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense working four days a week.

The GOP message is, and should continue to be, “Hate these cuts? Then let’s take on the biggest issue, entitlement spending.”

As Yuval Levin recently spotlighted, one tweak to the cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security effectively saves that program for the foreseeable future:

We might pay wealthier individuals with higher Social Security benefits lower annual cost-of-living adjustments than those receiving lower benefits. A progressive COLA could reduce high-end benefits by reasonable amounts in the near term while generating incentives — not disincentives — to work or save. A policy in which the highest third of beneficiaries received no COLA, the lowest third received a full COLA, and the middle third received half the current COLA would reduce Social Security outlays by around 12 percent over the first ten years. In fact, the savings from this measure alone would be enough to balance the program’s finances over the long term.

From the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt:

The Sequester Pester

It’s kind of fascinating to see President Obama pursue a strategy of rallying the public in opposition to the sequester, because I think most observers would agree that the American people have a severe case of Washington Crisis Fatigue.

The president’s rallying cry is, “Rise up and call Congress to stop this!” And the American people look at what seems like a rerun of previous spending fights, shrug, and say, “meh.”

I’ll turn to an unexpected source, Megan Carpentier of Raw Story, to set the stage of our national exhaustion and cynicism:

The latest fight — over what is termed “sequester” inside the Beltway and which politicos and reporters alike have repeated ad infinitum without much explanation to their constituents and readers — is in fact just another continuation of the ongoing budget fights over which Republicans and Democrats have threatened government shutdowns for more than two years.

Eighteen months ago, after months of threats and posturing, President Obama suggested and Congressional Republicans and Democrats agreed to create a magical deadline to get their [stuff] together or else be forced to explain a rash of immediate spending cuts to the American people. Both sides agreed to the deal, figuring that the other would face a humiliating defeat in the 2012 elections; instead, the elections insured a continuation of the dysfunctional status quo and the continued unwillingness of anyone to behave like a political leader rather than a political brawler.

And yet, somehow, very few people outside the echo chamber can be forced to care. Why? Because we’ve all seen this little one-act play out before, enough times that it’s hard to take it seriously. There’s no dramatic filibuster where a Senator stands for hours reading from a cookbook or The Federalist Papers, no video footage of GSA workers being locked out of their offices or postal sorting machines sitting idle, no actual effect on anyone’s day-to-day life, the political rhetoric on the Hill or the situation of the federal budget. We all assume that they’ll sit around pointing fingers and calling one another names like a bunch of school kids until the very last minute, when they’ll hammer out another reasonably foolish compromise that keeps the government open for another six months without solving the fundamental dispute, pat themselves on the back and go back to naming post offices and arguing about gun control and trying to land tortured one-liners on the Sunday talk shows until they’re forced to repeat the posturing all over again.

It’s tiresome, it’s foolish, it’s (deliberately, one starts to assume) difficult for most Americans to follow, let alone care about, and it does nothing to solve any of the varying problems identified as such for either side. And the more they do it, they more they’ll earn the disapproval and disrespect of Americans on all sides of the political spectrum.

One wonders if we’ll get another Chris Christie tirade in the coming days, when you see the fact that Sandy relief funding may be cut as a result of this:

In a statement, Rep. Michael Grimm said, “President Obama has no one to blame but himself for the consequences of sequestration. He proposed it and he insisted on it. As a result, we are faced with reckless, across-the-board cuts that will hurt important local programs, cost us jobs and decrease the amount of Sandy relief funding we fought hard to move through Congress.”

“Shifting the blame to Congress is a shameless political tactic,” added Grimm (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn). “The House has twice passed legislation to replace the president’s job-killing sequester with targeted, common-sense cuts. I voted for both proposals; however, the Senate refused to act on them. If the president is serious about finding a solution, he will reach out to Congress to identify responsible ways to cut $85 billion, something the House has already done … No one should be talking about another round of tax hikes, when sequestration can be easily avoided through responsible cuts.”

By the way, one reason nobody believes the “CRISIS!” rhetoric can be found in the sentence that immediately follows Grimm’s remarks: “Obama’s remarks came a day after he returned to Washington from a three-day golfing weekend in Florida.”

The sequester must be stopped… but only after 18 holes with Tiger!

Charlie Spiering reminds  us that back in November 2011, Obama was pledging, “I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending.  There will be no easy off ramps on this one.”

Here’s projection of the economic fallout of the sequester: GDP growth in 2013 shrinking from 2.6 percent to 2 percent, cost roughly 700,000 jobs (including reductions in armed forces), pushing the civilian unemployment rate up ¼ percentage point, to 7.4 percent. The MacroAdvisers urge, “By far the preferable policy is a credible long-term plan to shrink the deficit more slowly through some combination of revenue increases within broad tax reform, more carefully considered cuts in discretionary spending, and fundamental reform of entitlement programs.”

After a tough three-day weekend of golfing with the boys away from Michelle and the girls, President Obama returns to work today with a press statement standing beside “a group of emergency responders who might have to absorb some of the sequestration cuts.”

Of course, as Bob Woodward reported, Obama is denouncing his own idea: “First, it was the White House. It was Obama and Jack Lew and Rob Nabors who went to the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, and said, ‘this is the solution.’ But everyone has their fingerprints on this.”

Sequestration was put together as part of the budget deal in 2011. The administration had more than a year to work out an alternative; you’ll recall that the day after the 2012 election, House Speaker John Boehner declared, “we’re willing to accept new revenue, under the right conditions.”

On February 5, President Obama urged Congress to “pass a smaller package of spending cuts and tax reforms that would delay the economically damaging effects of the sequester for a few more months,” roughly three weeks before the deadline.

There’s a similar dynamic to all of the fights between Obama and Republican leaders in Congress. He claims to be adamantly opposed to the status quo, but his actions suggest otherwise. He wants a long-term budget deal, but won’t pressure the Senate to pass its own budget and only offers broad guidelines. He says he wants to ensure the long-term viability of entitlements, but won’t propose any bold reforms of his own.

He did propose – well, leak – his own immigration reform plan, but that appears more likely to blow up the delicate balance of support for the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” bill. After all, he’s basically telling Democrats that if they don’t like the Rubio-Schumer deal, they can hold out and push the president’s.

His rallying cry on guns is that the proposals… “deserve a vote”, not that they must pass.

What has Obama spent much of the past years campaigning against? The horror of budget cuts, the heartless cruelty of entitlement reform, the failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform, and the callousness of the “gun lobby.” Getting a bill passed in any of these areas would take away his ability to campaign on these issues as he aims to help Congressional Democrats in the 2014 midterms.

A point about last night’s allegedly stirring moment, when Obama listed “background checks that make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun” (already illegal), banning guns for resale to criminals (already illegal), banning “massive ammunition magazines” (define “massive”) . . .

. . .  and then in the emotional climax, he declared, “Each of these proposals deserves a vote in Congress . . . Gabby Giffords deserves a vote! The families of Newtown deserve a vote! The families of Aurora deserve a vote!”

Notice Obama says the proposals “deserve a vote” — not that they must be passed.

If you genuinely believe that, say, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s renewed assault-weapons ban will save innocent lives — that, literally, lives hang in the balance — doesn’t that make Democrats who oppose it, like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, heartless monsters who would rather see American children die than cross their allies?

And wouldn’t that apply to the other red-state Senate Democrats who are iffy on the legislation? Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Independent Angus King of Maine?

How can Obama deem it morally imperative that the legislation be voted upon, but not morally imperative that it pass?

And by the way, who would be holding up the vote in that chamber? Not the Republicans. Nope. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, sets the floor schedule.

Of course, Obama is trying to thread the needle of demonizing the NRA, most anti-gun-control Republicans, and most gun owners, without actually demonizing any of the Democrats who he knows (or strongly suspects) will vote against those proposals.

And you thought the Pope stepped on Obama’s State of the Union address.

Today’s Morning Jolt notes the loud BOOM out of North Korea from another nuclear test, Debbie Wasserman Schultz getting caught cheating, and then this contemplation of why the State of the Union Address doesn’t serve its purpose anymore:

The State of the Union Address: Our National Pro Bowl

If you said to me, “let’s end the NFL Pro Bowl,” I’d probably disagree. Because while I haven’t watched a Pro Bowl in its entirety in decades, I’d hate to see a tradition end. But as any football fan will acknowledge, the Pro Bowl is a quasi-necessary event that is executed in a fundamentally flawed fashion. For starters, it occurs at the end of the season, instead of at the halfway point of the season like in other sports. This is because of players’ legitimate fear of injury in a game that has only pride on the line; as a result, everybody plays at about half-speed. Selected players decline to go, so you get the second, third, and sometimes fourth-best players at each position. The NFL moved it to the week before the Super Bowl, to make it less of an afterthought to the season, but now the players on teams in the Super Bowl skip the game.

My friends, the president’s State of the Union Address is our national pro bowl — a simulation of the art of persuasion and politics featuring all the big stars, played at about half speed, with no real consequence.

Really, quick, name one line from any of Obama’s previous addresses. No, the Joe Wilson “You lie!” cry came at a mid-year address to Congress making his pitch for Obamacare, not the State of the Union address. The only moment I could remember was Justice Alito shaking his head and quietly saying, “not true” when Obama claimed that “the Supreme Court reversed a century of law” in the Citizens United decision.

When the Washington Post assembled the “10 most memorable State of the Union addresses,” the only moment from the Obama years was Alito’s reaction; the only one from the Bush years was the “Axis of Evil” line.

CNN’s Tom Foreman — you know, the guy who wrote a letter to the president every day for four years — says the State of the Union Address “is a report card, and a prognostication.”

No, actually, it’s not, and the SOTUA would be better if it were indeed either of those, perhaps in chart form. Companies give annual reports, students get grades, employees get evaluations. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of the usual happy talk — “my fellow Americans, the state of our union is strong” — the president and Congress went over all of the usual metric of our national performance — everything from GDP to unemployment to high school graduation rates to mortality rates to quality-of-life polling — and evaluated where American life had been going well and not so well?

In theory, this could be enormously useful. Of course, part of the problem is the format of the “address,” and the thankless job of offering the response, which inevitably is declared to appear “smaller” than the president’s speech. Thank you, pundit world, we hadn’t noticed that the politician giving the response hadn’t delivered the speech in a large, historic chamber and been interrupted for applause after every sentence.

You’ll recall Matt Welch’s discovery from last year about just how interchangeable the rhetoric is:

Starting with John F. Kennedy’s address to a joint session of Congress in 1961, you could take one sentence from each SOTU since, in chronological order, and cobble together a speech that will likely resemble much of what you’ll hear tonight. So that’s precisely what I’ve done.

Every president uses the event as just another speech, and avoids anything resembling a hard-nosed assessment of where they’ve made progress and where they need to improve their performance. What’s fascinating is the ritual news articles about drafts of the speech and previews, as if you or I couldn’t predict a half dozen points and themes. This is why we have State of the Union drinking games — because people can often predict the precise phrases, never mind the topics or arguments. We’ll hear some variation of all of these:

• “I am totally focused upon those who are still hurting in our economy that I said was in recovery, and that my staffers are now carefully insisting is ‘poised on the brink of recovery,’ whatever that means. To ensure we get off the brink of the recovery, and into the actual, you know, recovery part of the recovery, I will propose investments in infrastructure and education and green jobs and winning the future and solar panels and all of the usual stuff. It’s like that red-hot Recovery Summer we all enjoyed, even bigger and better. I will now reuse a line that was tired by the end of the 2008 campaign, that ‘some say we can’t afford to make these investments. I say we can’t afford to NOT make these investments.’ Now I will stop to bask in the applause of the remaining House Democrats who voted for the stimulus.”
• “Look, up in those seats over there. A family connected with the Newtown shooting. Surely we can all agree that whatever your view on guns, opposition to my proposals means you don’t care about kindergartners.”
• “Congress must act on my immigration plan that I have not written down. It is really important that we not give the illegal immigrants what they actually say they are seeking — the right to work here and send money back to their families in their own countries, with hopes of perhaps returning someday much wealthier — but to make them become full citizens, as quickly as possible, with instructions on how to vote Democrat in November.”
• “Confirm my cabinet without delay. Chuck Hagel was great in that hearing, wasn’t he?”
• “Partisanship is destroying America’s faith in Washington, and it is the fault of those blasted Republicans.”

And as with most of the previous addresses, they’ll be forgotten by Wednesday afternoon.

For a different view, here’s Clinton speechwriter (and once funny cartoonist) Jeff Shesol in 2010, seeming to suggest the address is resistant to reform or reinvention, because those within believe the format works:

It’s easy to kick this speech around. I’ve done so myself — even as I was helping draft one. In late 1998, as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, I wrote a memo complaining that “The Four (or Six or Sixteen) Challenges of the New Century” was not, in and of itself, a theme. I made the case instead for a compact, tightly thematic address — one that might be written by committee, but didn’t sound like it.

I lost that argument, and learned something in the process. Though Clinton’s 1999 State of the Union is not destined to be recited by schoolchildren a generation hence, it accomplished exactly what these speeches aim to accomplish. It rallied his supporters, spelled out his priorities for the year, gave direction to his party in Congress, and provided a certain shape and coherence to the national narrative.

The fact that Shesol could be brought around to believe Clinton’s 1999 address represents a triumph of the genre — quick, name anything you can remember about it — suggests how deep-rooted the laundry-list mentality is among White House speechwriters, past and present. The speech is background music to most Americans — the president recites parts of the federal government doing good things, pledges to continue to expand it, and members of his party leap out of their seats every time he pauses too long, lest the public believe that any utterance or clearing of a throat wasn’t worth a standing ovation.

This is a good thing:

President Barack Obama will visit Chicago on Friday, when he will discuss gun violence as he focuses on his economic message from Tuesday’s State of the Union address, according to the White House.

Obama will “talk about the gun violence that has tragically affected too many families in communities across Chicago and across the country,” a White House official said in a statement.

The president’s visit answers calls from Chicago anti-violence activists that Obama talk about the recent spate of gun violence in the city, several of the activists said.

“This is an important issue,” said Cathy Cohen, founder of the Black Youth Project, which attracted about 45,000 signatures by Sunday night in an online petition that urges Obama to speak up. “We think of this as a victory for all of us.”

The cover story of National Review is currently Kevin Williamson’s “Gangsterville,” about the violence plaguing the city.

The question is, will President Obama address how Chicago and Illinois have adopted the president’s preferred policy solution to this problem — some of the strictest state and local gun-control laws in the United States — only to see the violence worsen?

The traditional argument from the gun-control groups is that their laws work just fine, as long as they’re adopted everywhere on earth, or at least the country. Our Robert VerBruggen examined the “guns come from surrounding areas” theory a week ago:

. . . the communities these guns come from typically have much lower crime rates than Chicago does.

If we were to spread Chicago’s gun control outward, the city’s gangs would need to get weapons that were originally sold farther away. But would fewer guns actually make it into the city? Given that America has something like 300 million guns, and that guns are easy to conceal and transport, I rather doubt it.

Frankly, I don’t think gun control has much to do with Chicago’s murder problem. It seems to be mostly gang-related, which means that (A) any guns that can’t be bought legally will be bought illegally and (B) arming the law-abiding won’t make much difference either, because the violence is taking place between criminals. We still should arm the law-abiding, so that they may defend themselves against burglaries and the like, but they are rarely the victims of gang murders.

The horrific violence in cities is oftentimes a gang problem, and a sentencing problem as repeat offenders get off with short prison sentences. One study of 35 years’ worth of crime data in Ohio “found that about 69 percent of weapons offenses appeared to be dismissed before reaching a court for a decision. Another 28.5 percent of weapons charges that reached the prosecution stage were dismissed, likely because of plea bargains to other crimes.”

The first Morning Jolt of the week features the shocking news of Pope Benedict’s resignation, a discussion of whether our culture is even capable of the earnest valorization depicted in the Paul Harvey ad, and then these two developments that will shape the political news in the week ahead:

Lindsey Graham: Until the Benghazi Truth Is Told, Your Nominees I Will Hold

A slogan that Johnny Cochran could approve:

Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Sunday he’ll block President Barack Obama’s nominees for Defense secretary and CIA director if the White House isn’t more forthcoming about its response to the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“No confirmation without information,” the South Carolina Republican said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Graham said he wants to know if Obama himself phoned his Libyan counterparts during the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi and what the results of such a call might have been. Without cooperation, Graham said he’ll try to put a hold on Chuck Hagel, the Defense nominee, and John Brennan for CIA.

“I don’t think we should allow Brennan to go forward to the CIA directorship, Hagel to be confirmed for secretary of Defense, until the White House gives us an accounting,” Graham said. “Did the president ever pick up the phone and call anyone in the Libyan government to help these folks?”

Rick Moran points out this is something of a symbolic maneuver, and one that isn’t likely to work, as long as Senate Democrats remain unified:

The hold is a senatorial courtesy, and threatening to use it is just about all the Republicans have left when it comes to leverage on the White House to get more information about Benghazi. It would be unprecedented to place a hold on a cabinet nomination, and it is likely that Majority Leader Harry Reid would demand a cloture vote in order to lift the hold and bring the nominations to the floor. Several Republicans would probably join the 55 Democrats in voting for cloture, and the president would get his up or down vote on both nominees.

Graham would probably not go along with a filibuster. Hagel and Brennan’s other major critics in the Senate would be equally reluctant. And what he’s asking for from the White House, he is not likely to get. The administration has successfully stonewalled, obfuscated, and brushed off requests for information until Benghazi now seems a distant memory — a bad dream that the president would like the American people to forget.

Obama: Did I Say the Economy Recovered? I Meant I’m Still Working on It!

Our old friend Byron York is a pretty even-keeled guy, but I think he finds it pretty audacious for the president to spend his State of the Union address insisting that he’s relentlessly focused on the economy and job creation, after his lone reference to the economy in his inaugural address was the declaration “an economic recovery has begun.”

You know, somewhere, just not here.

York:

White House spinners are working furiously in the final 72 hours before President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Their job: Convince the recession-scarred American public that economic recovery is Obama’s top priority — after everything he has said and done to suggest otherwise.

The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009. But the true toll of joblessness is far higher. The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent. And a new study, by Rutgers University scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job. That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn.

Elsewhere, Byron points out that the president has “pivoted back” to the economy at least six times since taking office.

Actually, back in 2011, the RNC identified at least nine times the White House was telling reporters that their energies would be “pivoting” back to jobs.

When the administration recycles its talking points, you’ll forgive me for recycling my reaction:

Keep in mind that inherent in the pivot-point talking point is an inherent excuse: the reason the administration hasn’t seen much success in bringing down the unemployment rate, or is perceived to be useless in bringing down the unemployment rate, or hasn’t communicated its message about its efforts, is always a lack of time and focus. I think most of us would argue the problem isn’t really an administrative attention deficit disorder or chronic focus on other issues; the problem is the policies stink . . . “Alright, now we’re really going to pivot to jobs, just you wait and see” sounds like the oft-heard pledges of dieting and exercise and saving money and cleaning out the basement and flossing; the idea that all it’s going to take is a bit more attention to the problem and it’s going to be solved.

A busy Morning Jolt today, looking at Marco Rubio giving the response to the president’s State of the Union Address, some bad reviews for Chuck Hagel, some messaging issues on the president and skeet shooting, and then this point about the increase in cries to intervene in Syria:

No, World, We’re Never Going to Militarily Intervene in Syria.

This column, by Roger Cohen of the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, has garnered a bit of attention in recent days:

The United States does not want to get dragged into another intractable Middle Eastern conflict. Americans are tired of war. My colleagues Michael Gordon and Mark Landler have revealed how Obama blocked an attempt last summer by Hillary Clinton to train and supply weapons to selected Syrian rebel groups.

Nor does Obama want to find himself in the business of helping Islamist extremists inherit a Syrian vacuum. The opposition coalition is divided and lacks credibility. But the net result of these concerns cannot be feckless drift as Syria burns. Senator John McCain was right to say here that, “We should be ashamed of our collective failure to come to the aid of the Syrian people” and to answer a question about how to break the impasse with two words: “American leadership.”

An inflection point has been reached. Inaction spurs the progressive radicalization of Syria, the further disintegration of the state, the intensification of Assad’s mass killings, and the chances of the conflict spilling out of Syria in sectarian mayhem. It squanders an opportunity to weaken Iran. This is not in the West’s interest. The agreement that Assad has to go is broad; a tacit understanding that it is inevitable exists in Moscow. The Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, spluttered in justified incredulity at the notion the opposition would sit down with a regime that has slaughtered its own.

It is time to alter the Syrian balance of power enough to give political compromise a chance and Assad no option but departure. That means an aggressive program to train and arm the Free Syrian Army. It also means McCain’s call to use U.S. cruise missiles to destroy Assad’s aircraft on the runway is daily more persuasive.

Everybody knows we’re not going to intervene in Syria, right?

Part of this is because we have Obama as president, part of this is because Americans consumed with our own domestic issues right now — a consistently floundering economy, immigration — but mostly it’s because of Iraq.

Dear world . . . do you remember how you greeted the invasion of Iraq?

The invasion of Iraq was treated as the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world, denounced far more frequently and loudly than any act by Saddam Hussein, Bashir Assad, the Iranian regime, or North Korea.

Giant protests in lots of American cities. Giant protests in every foreign capital. The 2004 Guinness Book of Records described the anti-war movement around the globe as the largest mass protest movement in history — eclipsing any popular opposition to any act of the Soviet Union or any other totalitarian regime around the globe, ever. Among the elites in Paris, Berlin, and most corners of London, the Iraq War was the single-most important issue, and denouncing the evil of George W. Bush was the most important goal, not building a stable and peaceful Iraq. You recall Kofi Annan denouncing it, and the United Nations delegates scoffing when Hugo Chavez called our president the devil.

You recall the cries of “Bushitler,” the ubiquitous Code Pink interrupting every event in Washington, as if some ninny shouting during a press conference ever spurred sudden reversals in U.S. national security policy. You recall Hollywood’s relentless cavalcade of movies demonizing the war and those fighting it: “In the Valley of Elah,” “Stop Loss”, “Green Zone,” “Redacted,”  “Grace is Gone,” “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Hey, my Turkish friends so upset by a bloody civil war across the border and a flood of refugees, remember “Valley of the Wolves: Iraq”? Remember when that film suggested that Jewish U.S. army doctors in Iraq were harvesting organs from Iraqi civilians to be sold in Israeli, and that U.S. soldiers use Iraqi children as human shields? Yeah, remember that? Well, go solve your #*%&^ border problems yourself.

The Davos set is horrified to learn that after spending the better part of a decade screaming at the top of their lungs that an American intervention to topple a bloodthirsty Arab dictator is the absolute worst thing imaginable, suddenly Americans are no longer interested in toppling bloodthirsty Arab dictators.

(Slap, slap) Wake up, anti-war movement! You’ve got what you wanted! The United States is out of the armed intervention business, besides the occasional “leading from behind” in Libya, or the occasional covert mission in Pakistan.

And this is what you get:

The United Nations said earlier this month that more than 60,000 people had been killed during the 22-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad. This figure was based on 59,648 individuals reported killed in Syria between March 15, 2011 and November 30, 2012.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Monday that the number of Syrian refugees and individuals awaiting registration is 714,118. This includes 5,417 Syrian refugees registered in North Africa.

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated in a report on January 17 that 4 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance across all 14 governorates in Syria. Of the total, 3 million lacked food and 2 million were internally displaced.

But wait, there’s more!

Outbreaks of hepatitis A and other diseases spread by poor hygiene are now becoming problems among Syrians displaced by the civil war, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. It is one of at least four United Nations agencies seeking to add a new sense of urgency to the humanitarian crisis afflicting the country.

Further aggravating the health of Syrians, the organization said, is a breakdown in the delivery of safe water throughout the country; the closing of at least one-third of Syria’s public hospitals; an exodus of doctors; and an acute shortage of ambulances, many of them damaged by fighting or impounded by the military or insurgent forces for use in combat.

But don’t worry, world. We may not be using our military force to influence the events in Syria, but we are taking action:

President Barack Obama released a video statement to the Syrian people attesting to the U.S. commitment to their humanitarian needs amid fresh reports of civilian killings by the Assad regime.

The three-minute video with Arabic subtitles was circulated today by the White House in connection with a U.S. announcement of $155 million in new humanitarian assistance to Syria. The move comes days after Obama indicated in an interview no move toward U.S. military intervention.

“The relief we send doesn’t say ‘made in America’ but make no mistake, our aid reflects the commitment of the American people,” Obama says in the statement.

I’m sure everyone in the civil war zone will appreciate that video statement.

Hate our quasi-isolationist policy, world elites, but don’t be surprised by it. We’re just giving you what you demanded. Maybe in a generation, we’ll be interested in intervening abroad again.

It’s a special Morning Jolt today. First, a genuinely surprising development, as there seems to be almost-bipartisan objections to the Obama administration’s assertion that they can kill a U.S. citizen with a drone, as long as an executive branch official is pretty sure they’re involved with terrorism.

Double-O-bama: Self-Licensed to Kill

Let me throw you a curveball by quoting Adam Serwer of Mother Jones, reacting to the administration’s release of its legal justification to kill Americans believed to be involved with terror without a trial, by drone:

The Obama administration claims that the secret judgment of a single ”well-informed high level administration official” meets the demands of due process and is sufficient justification to kill an American citizen suspected of working with terrorists. That procedure is entirely secret. Thus it’s impossible to know which rules the administration has established to protect due process and to determine how closely those rules are followed. The government needs the approval of a judge to detain a suspected terrorist. To kill one, it need only give itself permission. 

Of course, the hypocrisy of most liberals doesn’t get us off the hook on the need to have a coherent view on this. Okay, conservatives, big question now:  If this were President Romney, would we be shrugging, concerned, complaining or screaming? I think “concerned.” At the very least, you would want another set of eyes – the House or Senate intelligence committees, or some independent judges – taking a look at the presidential “kill list,” right? At least for the American citizens?

Our Charles C.W. Cooke: “In case my position isn’t obvious: I am appalled by any president possessing the unilateral power to kill American citizens extrajudicially.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, puts it rather bluntly: “Every American has the right to know when their government believes that it is allowed to kill them.”

That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

Howard Kurtz notices that no matter how much President Obama and his allies and friends win elections, pass legislation, or win news cycles, they always complain about the power of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News:

Now it’s true that Fox or Rush can boost or batter any lawmaker, and that they can help drive a controversy into the broader mainstream media. But we’re talking here about the president of the United States. He has an army, a navy and a bunch of nuclear weapons, not to mention an ability to command the airwaves at a moment’s notice. And he’s complaining about a cable channel and a radio talk show host?

Gee, it’s almost as if the complaints about Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. are not really based on how much power these media entities have, and instead driven by an outrage that they dissent from the narrative of other media, that Obama, Al Gore, and the rest of the progressives are right and virtuous and wonderful and the greatest in every way…

The unemployment rate is up to 7.9 percent again.

The new year started off with an old story: Employment grew again in January but not at a pace able to lower the jobless rate.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 157,000 for the first month of 2013 while the unemployment rate edged higher to 7.9 percent, news unlikely to alter the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy or instill confidence that the recovery is gaining steam.

BusinessWeek looks ahead:

Higher Social Security taxes are reducing take-home pay for most Americans. A person earning $50,000 a year will have about $1,000 less to spend in 2013. A household with two high-paid workers will have up to $4,500 less. Taxes rose after a 2 percent cut, in place for two years, expired Jan. 1.

Analysts expect the Social Security tax increase to shave about a half-point off economic growth in 2013, since consumers drive about 70 percent of economic activity.

Today President Obama will awards medals to scientists and inventors; on Monday he travels to Minneapolis for an event to discuss gun control.

In the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt, a look at Obama tipping his hand on what he really wants out of the immigration debate out in Nevada, Massachusetts Democrats get ready to replace John Kerry, and then this bit of thinking about the GOP’s image . . .

Adding New Cultural Indicators to the Republican Brand Image

Since Election Night, the cry on the Right has been, “culture, culture, culture.” And we’re probably going to get a bunch of good ideas and a bunch of bad ideas coming out of this new focus.

I’ve talked in the past about Obama as a ubiquitous pop-cultural phenomenon, and looking back to Obama’s rise in 2007-2008, perhaps we ought to look closer at his coverage in the non-political media than in the political media. Because we’ve had a lot of black politicians before, a lot of liberal politicians before, and a lot of charismatic politicians before, but clearly Obama managed to achieve a level of public adoration (deification?) unique in modern political history.

In the end, maybe the institutions that we consider the MSM were less relevant to Obama’s rise than the glowing coverage of him in places like Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Men’s Vogue, Fast Company, Men’s Health and so on. (We can put put Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, and the New Yorker in the quasi-political magazine category.)

Think about Obama’s embrace of Jay-Z and Beyoncé. There are a lot of Americans, particularly young Americans, who have no real interest in, say, how federal stimulus money gets spent. But they’re sure as heck interested in Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Almost every politician before Obama wouldn’t have touched Jay-Z with a ten-foot pole. One look at the lyrics of “Girls, Girls, Girls” (you’ve been warned, it depicts the rapper assessing and categorizing his harem by ethnic stereotype) and they would run screaming from any stage with Jay-Z. But Obama assessed, correctly, that the “cool” factor of having an association with Jay-Z would overwhelm any complaints about Obama’s de facto association with or approval of the seedier side of the life depicted by the hip-hop star.

So along comes Obama, and he’s worlds apart even from what we had seen nominated by the Democrats in recent cycles, like Al Gore and John Kerry. He’s black, he’s urban, he’s young, he’s only recently wealthy and tells tales of financial woes as recent as 2000. He can sound like a preacher when he needs to (listening to Jeremiah Wright all those years) but also is the kind of politician your average outspoken atheist could warmly embrace. As a result, you have large swaths of a not-usually-terribly-engaged, not-usually-terribly-interested voting public gravitating to him: African-Americans, obviously, but also young voters, urban voters . . . they look at him and see a cultural figure who reflects themselves, not merely a political figure.

What cultural markers is the Republican brand associated with? Two things come to mind, the aspects of life that Obama said rural Pennsylvanians cling to, guns and religion. And those are pretty good ones; the country is full of people who take religion seriously and there are a lot of people who enjoy their right to own a firearm, for reasons ranging from hunting to sport shooting to collecting to self-defense. But as we’ve seen, that’s not enough to get a majority of the popular vote or 270 electoral votes, and there are some pretty big swaths of the country – mostly the West Coast and Northeast – where those indicators either don’t help us or work against us.

So, thinking of new cultural traits the GOP could attempt to adopt as some of their trademarks, just off the top of my head…

Foodies? There are a lot of folks who are passionately interested in food, in a way they just weren’t a generation ago. (See Vic Matus’ great article from a while back on the rise of celebrity chefs.) Why can’t the GOP be the Foodie Party, the one that fights moronic dietary laws like Bloomberg’s ban on 32 ounce sodas, California’s idiotic foie gras ban, the ludicrous talk of the Food and Drug Administration putting even more stringent regulations on raw milk cheeses on top of the existing ones. (For Pete’s sake, slap a warning label on it letting people know about the risk of raw milk cheeses.) We ought to be standing up to the Nanny State, and making the case that grown adults who we entrust with a right to vote, a right to own a gun, and a right to speak their minds ought to have the right to eat whatever they want.

College-Age Drinkers: Propose lowering the drinking age to 18, on the argument that you’ll see less binge drinking on college campuses if 18, 19 and 20-year-olds can just go into a bar or restaurant and order a beer. If you’re really worried about lowering the drinking age across the board, make it legal for those between 18 and 21 to consume alcohol in a licensed establishment, so that a bartender or server could cut them off if there are signs of dangerous intoxication.

I guarantee this would make the College Republicans a heck of a lot more popular on campus. Speaking of which…

Wasteful college spending: Turn the highest-paid university presidents in America into the new villains of our economy, hiking tuition and letting standards slide while they take home ever-bigger paychecks and wildly generous payouts upon retirement. How soft are the Democrats on this issue? They ran the highest-paid university president in America (more than $3 million in a year) for Senate in Nebraska last year. At least the companies run by greedy CEOs are forced to compete in the marketplace; universities can keep going under bad management by sucking up government aid, forced tuition hikes, and alumni donations for a long while.

Isn’t it time to bring a salary cap to university administrators?

Also in today’s Morning Jolt . . .

Stealing From the Obama-Axelrod Narrative Management Playbook

So, a few quick thoughts on the “reinvention of the GOP” topic . . .

One of the things the Democrats do well is identify something that a wide swath of people think is a problem — some nut job shot up a kindergarten class! — and then quickly propose some legislation to “do something about it.” Now, we’re left to point out that the legislation in question won’t really solve the problem it’s supposed to, and it will create its own problems, but by that point we’re following a familiar media playbook; they’re the ones who care and who are trying to DO SOMETHING and we’re the carping obstructionists who get all wrapped up in the details.

The upside of our annoying focus on details and pesky wariness about unforeseen consequences is that we’re much less likely to end up passing legislation that accidentally bans police officers from carrying guns with more than seven rounds, as Democrats in New York recently did.

So, why can’t we find something broadly recognized as a problem and offer our own this-must-pass-immediately-or-you-don’t-care-about-the-problem ultimatum?

Here’s one of the first examples that comes to mind: What is the single least popular bit of federal spending? Whatever it is, introduce and vote on a bill to zero it out immediately.

Alternatively, what is the federal agency with the single worst rate of waste and inefficiency? Introduce and pass a bill to cut its budget in half. Turn those into crusades, hold press conferences, get the lawmakers out on the Sunday shows to invoke it as a “basic first step to getting our fiscal house in order”, and so on. It doesn’t matter if the actual dollar amount involved is minuscule in comparison to the debt and this year’s deficit; the point is to A) get Americans used to the idea that government spending can be cut, B) persuade Americans that cracking down on wasteful spending is worthwhile, and C) test the Democrats to see if they’re dumb enough to go out and defend the worst offenders.

The worst-case scenario is that the Democrats go along with it, like when they quickly capitulated over ACORN funding. But in that case, we’ve managed to actually cut a little government waste — not such a bad outcome.

Let the Democrats dismiss this maneuver as a stunt; what exactly would we call Dianne Feinstein displaying 10 assault rifles during her press conference on the assault-weapons ban?

My nomination? All of the U.S. Department of Agriculture grants to various industries to promote American products. Looking at examples like this one . . .

Leo Ray, owner of Fish Processors of Idaho, learned Friday that his business won a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to promote his caviar nationwide. Ray received a Value-Added Producer Grant, designed to help farmers advertise new products and build economies in rural communities.

Various industries can promote their own darn products; there’s no reason for U.S. taxpayers to pick up the tab.

Looking through Tom Coburn’s catalogue of wasteful spending . . . Okay, Democrats, we will raise taxes. Let’s declare that professional sports leagues do not qualify as “nonprofits.” That’s $91 million in new tax revenue right there.

Could you imagine if GOP lawmakers in Congress suddenly started pounding the table and insisting that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell* and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman pay their fair share? You would see the GOP suddenly the hero of the world of sports talk radio, that’s for sure.

Keep in mind, the Obama agenda for the coming year is to bring up issue after issue that either divides Republicans or leaves them defending an unpopular position: on all the spending fights, he’s going to paint the opposition as misers who want to toss old people into the cold and cut off help for families with disabled children. On climate change, we’re flat-earth types who defend polluters and don’t want to stop natural disasters. On immigration, we’ll be painted as xenophobic racists who fly into paranoid rages when Mexican restaurants don’t immediately offer us the mild salsa with our chips. On every issue, the theme is the same: “We all agree that X is a problem [even though not all of us really do], and we have a solution, and the GOP is being obstructionist.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to interrupt this parade of Axelrod focus-group-tested wedge issues with some issues of our own? Kurt Schlichter had the right approach:

Obama is now talking about taxing the successful even more by eliminating deductions. Hand him another big goose egg. He got his tax increases — you need to be out of the revenue increase business. How about the House pass a payroll tax cut, paid for by slashing corporate welfare to Obama’s Hollywood buddies and his green energy scam cronies?

Spending cuts? Obama doesn’t get a say. Sequestration is going to happen unless the GOP agrees to change it. That’s a $1.2 trillion cut. Let it happen, and let Secretary Hagel deal with the defense cuts. Obama loses again unless you save him.

And guns — talk about a golden opportunity to defeat Obama while also helping set the stage for a Democrat wipe-out in 2014! Obama and his progressive pals are giddy with the idea that Newtown will let them jam through a whole slew of Second Amendment-trashing measures before everyone starts thinking again. If Obama’s actually foolish enough to proceed — and I am not sure he is — he’s setting himself up for a huge loss.

GOP, remember Napoleon’s admonition to never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. Let Obama try and force the red state Democrat senators to come out against guns. Let the Democrats tear themselves up while we watch and gobble popcorn.

UPDATE: In the original version, I stepped into the time machine and referred to “NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.” Hey, be glad I didn’t say “Pete Rozelle”!

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Righty Bloggers Wish to Deport Latest Bipartisan Immigration Reform Proposal

So, what are the early reviews for that immigration-reform package introduced by eight senators?

Mark Krikorian:

I can at least respect the Democrat members of this cabal — Schumer, Durbin, Menendez, and Bennet — because the Left has never hidden its disdain for America’s sovereignty. But the Republicans — McCain, Graham, Flake, and Rubio — want to achieve the Left’s objectives while appearing tough.

His debating partner from the weekend, Hugh Hewitt, wants to see details:

Unfortunately the “framework” isn’t legislative language and it was the language about “Z Visas” that sank the last attempt to deal with the issue. At first glance is there up-to-date-information about the border fence or its proposed extensions, no specifics on how many years — 10, 15, 20? — a regularized resident would have to wait until becoming eligible for benefits and voting and whether that regularized resident would have to return home to wait for citizenship in line with other would-be immigrants as opposed to staying here as a permanent resident but without voting rights, and no details on how the broken visa system or the not-yet-mandatory E-Verify programs would work.

It is a speech outline, and a not very good one at that. What is needed is a bill. An actual honest-to-goodness bill that free people can read and debate. Will the sharpies inside the Beltway ever figure out that those of us who can read don’t have the highest opinions of their drafting ability or a great deal of trust that that which they say they will do they will do.

Thoroughly opposed, Michelle Malkin:

Hey, did someone set the clock back six years in Washington? Because today looks a hell of a lot like the dawn of the Bush-Kennedy-McCain 2007 illegal alien amnesty. Deja vu all over again.

Starring in the role of John McCain this time around? Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio . . .

Don’t believe the hype from Rubio supporters that this warmed-over shamnesty proposal — another recipe for more illegal immigration, a bigger welfare state, and undermined sovereignty — is somehow new, improved and more enlightened.

Neo-Neocon expresses what will be the core of the opposition to the path to citizenship:

There’s a principle here, among other things, which is that coming here illegally should not be further rewarded. I write “further” because it already is rewarded.

Rick Moran also wonders how much of what’s written in the law would ultimately get enforced:

It also remains to be seen what kind of enhanced border security measures would be passed. We have seen immigration bureaucrats undermine or even ignore measures that have passed Congress (like the virtual fence).

It remains to be seen whether any immigration reform proposal can get through the GOP House. It might come down to how many Republican House members tie immigration reform to the improvement in relations with Hispanics.

For the pro-open borders perspective, there’s Nick Gillespie over at Reason:

The government doesn’t want to admit it, but except in totalitarian countries, they don’t run the border. People come and go based on large-scale dynamics that simply overwhelm most nations’ ability to control in-flows and out-flows of people. E-verify systems are a nightmare filled either with error rates that will harass thousands of innocent people and businesses or else be so porous all they will do is add a drag on hiring legally. If the senators start really working the Sunday shows and their constituents about how immigration benefits our economy and is the right thing to do from a historical and moral perspective, that will be the sign that they’re meaning to take this across the finish line.

The thing is, I don’t think a bunch of senators going on Sunday shows talking about the joys of immigration will actually change people’s minds about this issue.

The discussion about illegal immigrants is allegedly talking about the same 11 million people, but the two sides describe them in diametrically opposite terms. On one side, we have a bunch of lawbreakers, who have come here and taken our jobs, driven down our wages, and worsened the crime problem, sucking away at our public benefits, being treated in our emergency rooms, driving recklessly and traveling ten to a van and facilitating the creation of a permanent underclass and black-market economy; gangs and the drug trade have flourished in their impoverished, lawless shadow communities. The other side says we’re dealing with aspiring Americans just like the ancestors of most of us, hardworking dreamers who are valedictorians and volunteers and folks who would come to epitomize the greatness of America, just like the Ellis Island-era immigrants, if we would just give them the chance; they point out that they’re around us without us noticing, as we enjoy the services of the busboys, waiters, cooks, construction workers and nannies around us.

In our guts, most of us know that some of the 11 million are as bad as the critics say, and some are as good as their defenders say . . . and that our government has proven an absolute failure at sorting out the good ones from the bad ones.

By the way, what does it say about Obama’s well-proven ability to louse up bipartisan negotiations that this occurs?

Some senior Democratic members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus used a private White House meeting Friday to urge President Obama not to unveil his own immigration legislation, for fear of blowing up delicate bipartisan talks, Democratic sources tell CNN…

Sources familiar with the bipartisan Senate framework announced Monday tell CNN one of the main reasons they chose to unveil their framework one day before the president’s planned Tuesday speech on the subject, was to start the national dialogue on their bipartisan terrain. Politically, CNN is told the senators felt it was crucial for it to be known that there has been a real bipartisan process ongoing that is independent from the president.

“It would be a sabotage of the process,” said one immigration reform advocate familiar with internal discussions but not able to speak freely on the record.

“Everybody is fine with him announcing principles, using bully pulpit, etc. But what nobody who actually wants to see this passed wants, is an ‘Obama White House’ branded bill getting introduced,” said the source.

Well, there’s the secret words there — “nobody who actually wants to see this passed” wants to see Obama grabbing the glory and having his staff determine the details of the legislation . . . but it’s not so clear that the president actually wants to see this passed, when he thinks he could get another bite at the apple after the 2014 midterms. Demagoguing the Republicans as racist, xenophobic and viscerally anti-immigrant has been a key part of their messaging . . . why would they want a bipartisan immigration reform bill to louse up that convenient narrative?

The global elites who relentlessly cheered and applauded Barack Obama from the moment he appeared on the national stage suddenly realize the leader of the free world and arsenal of democracy is now managed by a quasi-isolationist:

As President Barack Obama starts his second term, the world’s business and political elite pines for greater American engagement to tackle a thicket of security challenges.

From Syria to Mali, from Iran to the South China Sea, the United States’ reluctance to be drawn into conflicts far from its shores was a leitmotiv of geopolitical debate at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.

The absence of top Obama administration officials from the annual brainstorming and networking event in the Swiss mountains symbolized to some a perceived pullback from global leadership, even though it was Inauguration Week in Washington.

In the Washington Post this morning, Bob Woodward writes about the philosophy that defense-secretary nominee Chuck Hagel and President Obama share:

So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like Afghanistan should be avoided.

So those who are expecting the U.S. to take a leadership role from Syria to Mali, from Iran to the South China Sea . . . well, it appears that thinking is “out of date.”

Also in today’s Jolt, a rather skeptical look at the national impetus to “do something” after the Newtown massacre:

A Tragedy Spurs Us to Take Actions That Wouldn’t Have Stopped That Tragedy

So I realize I should be outraged by Obama introducing 23 executive actions on gun violence, but . . . this is pretty much what we all expected, isn’t it?

A friend who’s more gun-control minded asked me what I thought of the various proposals being put forth. I pointed out that almost none of the proposals would have made one bit of difference had they been in effect when the Newtown shooting occurred, suggesting that the purpose of the proposals was to make lawmakers and the public feel good about themselves, not to actually make it impossible for such a horrific event to occur again. In the end, there’s not really a law that can prevent a woman from having such terrible judgment that she keeps dangerous weapons and a deeply disturbed son in the same house, short of absolute and total national confiscation of all firearms in private hands — a draconian step that the gun control crowd insists they don’t really want.

Among his “executive actions”: “Nominate an ATF director.” That’s not an executive action, that’s a reminder you write to yourself on a Post-It note.

Assault Weapons Ban? It was in effect during the Columbine massacre.

Extended magazine ban? You’ll recall my brief flirtation with the idea. I’m now pretty dissuaded that it would have much of an impact on future mass shootings, since A) a shooter can reload within a few seconds, with just a bit of practice; B) most shooters in these cases carry more than one gun, so they’ll be able to inflict quite a bit of mayhem before needing to reload; C) there are already plenty of these magazines out on the market, and no one’s seriously called for confiscating them all; and D) you can manufacture them yourselves with 3-D printers, so you’ll never be able to really shut down production of them.

Would smaller-capacity clips mean fewer fired shots before someone was able to intervene? Maybe, on the margins. But let’s not fool ourselves about the impact we’re talking about with this change. A gunman who brings two guns with the 10-round magazines the president wants to require can still fire 20 shots before that first several-second reloading pause; in a school, park, college campus, shopping mall, or other public place with a lot of unarmed potential victims, that’s a lot of potential death and injury.

On Obama’s list is “Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.” Note that the Newtown gunman had no criminal record and had not been ruled mentally ill by a judge, meaning he would not have shown up in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. (He did try to purchase a rifle before the massacre but left the store without purchasing because he did not want to wait the two weeks required under Connecticut law.) Remember, despite a considerable history of odd behavior, the Tucson gunman was never legally declared mentally ill or a threat to himself or others. (After he was suspended from Pima Community College, the school said he could not be readmitted without “clearance from a mental health official.”)

I will be surprised if the “tighten our mental-health records” talk doesn’t lead to a much lower threshold to be declared “mentally ill” and unfit to own a firearm. And whatever that new, lower, more vague and arbitrary threshold is, I’ll bet it makes troubled individuals — or even not-so-troubled individuals — even more reticent to see a therapist, psychologist, or other mental health professional.

But hey, at least the politicians get to say that they “did something.”

This morning, I’ll spotlight two sections from today’s Morning Jolt. First, thoughts on what to do when it seems like the electorate just won’t listen to us, and isn’t interested in the solutions we know work best:

The Difficulty of Selling Grown-Up Policies to an Adolescent-Minded Electorate

There’s a lot of wisdom in what Drew M. writes over at Ace of Spades:

How many people who voted for Mitt Romney or actual conservatives for Senate and the House want their Social Security and Medicare left untouched? How many of them give lip service to a flat tax proposal but would freak if their various tax credits and deductions were eliminated? How many of them talk a good game about getting rid of the Department of Education but would freak if aid to their kid’s district were cut?

Of course Republicans are going to respond to these people. But these people who support all sorts of government spending while talking about “the damn government” and taxes are the problem.

It’s simply too much to expect a political party to stand up to voters and say, “no”. Politics is a market and voters have become consumers. If the GOP as a whole or an individual candidate won’t give the customer what they want, they will find someone else to do business with. Consumers don’t care about the health of the places they shop, they care that they get what they want. If Brand A doesn’t have it but Brand B does, who cares so long as their needs are met.

What America needs is a movement that will not just tell people “no” but also convince them to stop being a consumer of government and look at themselves as they were meant to . . . an owner of the government. Once you own something your value set shifts. Owners care about efficiency, quality and the long term survival of the organization. Owners invest not simply take out. No political party is set up to do this. It’s irrational for someone selling a product to ask their customers to take on the responsibilities of ownership. Selling is about making things easier, ownership is about hard work.

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days. A slim majority of the voting public doesn’t want what we’re selling, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the solutions we’re offering are wrong. That slim majority of the voting public may think they’re wrong, but a large portion of their assessment is driven by a dedication to ignoring the problems that we want addressed.

We’re attempting to sell them policies of limited or reduced spending, but many Americans don’t really see why spending has to be cut, or why the particular spending that they like has to be cut. This doesn’t make our concerns any less valid; it just means that a large swath of the voting public would like to pretend that adding roughly a trillion to the debt each year is not that big a deal.

We’re attempting to sell them various efforts at entitlement reform, but Americans again would prefer to believe the problem isn’t that bad and can be taken care of later. We’re right, and they’re wrong, but it’s particularly difficult to persuade someone to undertake a painful remedy when they’re not convinced that the problem exists.

I think you can argue that what constitutes “socially conservative policies” has gotten fuzzy beyond opposition to abortion and gay marriage. But broadly speaking, conservatives have wanted to see strong families, children in stable families, husbands and wives trying to work it out through tough times, making sure every child has a mom and a dad who loves them and hopefully a strong network of support from the rest of the family and the community beyond. We’re attempting to sell the public a lifestyle of responsibility and putting others’ needs first — particularly children’s needs first — and it cuts against a culture of instant gratification and irresponsibility and perpetual adolescence.

We’re (in part) attempting to sell them a foreign policy/national security stance that is variously strong/hawkish/interventionist, when they’re exhausted from Iraq and Afghanistan and feeling pretty isolationist. Now, I’m sure within our own ranks we have a lot of folks who are seeing the appeal of isolationism right now.

So let’s take Syria for example. I know the place is a pit of vipers, and that we’re not even sure if there are many folks in the Syrian resistance who count as good guys. But when the U.S. doesn’t intervene, or we use the Obama administration’s approach of sorta-kinda intervention, giving the resistance some sorts of aid but not others, well . . . we see what we get: 60,000 deaths so far, perhaps 100,000 deaths in the year to come, millions of refugees, violence spilling into neighboring countries, and the risk of the country collapsing into anarchic bands of warlords and bands struggling to control the rubble.

I can hear the argument, “we can’t save everybody, it’s the Syrians’ issue to work out, it’s not our problem.” But how many deaths does it take before it becomes our problem? Does anybody feel confident that at no point this won’t become a major problem to our interests? How about if Assad starts tossing around chemical weapons? I’m not saying we have to invade tomorrow, but the administration’s policy is by and large, leave the place alone and hope for the best.

The opposition’s policies lead to crushing debt, sluggish and anemic economic growth, miserable lives of dependency upon government, and a chaotic world beyond our borders. They can coast along on luck for a while – help for the economy from a fracking boom they haven’t managed to regulate to death yet, our enemies preferring low-level antagonism to direct confrontation – but sooner or later reality gets a vote, and it gets the biggest vote. The problem is that a lot of damage can be done while we wait for the electorate to start absorbing the lessons from the School of Hard Knocks.

I suppose any second-term inauguration faces the issue of diminished enthusiasm and excitement, but the contrast between the upcoming inauguration festivities and 2009 is pretty striking. Campaign Spot reader Bruce notices this passage in an Ad Age article about Audi’s lack of interest in sponsoring events this time:

Today, though, “it’s just a different climate,” [Loren] Angelo, [general manager-brand marketing at Audi] said. For one thing, there’s not as much excitement around the promise of change as there was the first time, and for another the economic environment is such that there’s not. “We see Obama pulling back on elements of the inauguration,” he noted, pointing out that even the president himself isn’t indulging in much of the celebration there was the last time around. The President is expected to hold one consolidated ball Jan. 21 that replaces nearly a dozen separate events held in the past.

Audi doesn’t seem to be alone in feeling like Monday will bring less excitement with it than the event did four years ago. Hotels are still trying to unload the many open rooms in the city, and it’s not a good sign that tickets to the Green Inaugural Ball, a black-tie event with will.i.am and the EPA, are being hawked for a discounted price on Groupon. So far the majority of marketing tied to the event is around bar specials, such as Cityscape’s “O-Bama-Tini” cocktails, and travel packages, like the Madison Hotel’s push that partners with Brooks Brothers for a shopping spree and offers a “social-media butler” to document the event.

I understand the “O-Bama-Tini” costs more than you think and leaves you with a really intense hangover.

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Breaking: Obama Declares Nothing Is Ever His Fault, Especially the Debt Since 2009

Obama’s press conferences, rare as they are, are going to be even more unbearable in the second term.

It’s not like his rhetorical sleight-of-hand is all that complicated, and at this point, it feels like watching a magician perform very predictable and boring tricks. He insists that whatever he wants at that moment is “sensible” and insists that any cuts, of any program, be they discretionary spending or entitlement programs, fail to represent a “balanced approach” and “balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable.” The spending he wants is always characterized as “investments we need to make.”

He says he’s open to “making modest adjustments to programs like Medicare to protect them for future generations” without going into much detail about what they are; usually they amount to declaring the federal government will pay doctors less and hoping those doctors don’t stop seeing Medicare patients, the way the Mayo Clinic did. Less than a month after getting the income-tax increases he started demanding the moment the GOP took over the House of Representatives, he’s at it again, declaring, “We need more revenue, through tax reform, by closing loopholes in our tax code for the wealthiest Americans.” He still complains about “a multimillionaire investor can pay less in tax rates than a secretary” and “tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans” as if nothing had changed on January 1.

Four years into his presidency, the problem is not of his making; he spoke about “spending that Congress has already committed to” and “debate with this Congress about whether or not they should pay the bills they’ve already racked up” as if he had nothing to do with the rate of federal spending since January 20, 2009.

Bruce McQuain:

The more I see politics of today the more I think George Orwell simply listed by about 30 years. Imagine a politician a few decades ago trying to make this argument and then calling the other guy’s argument “absurd”.

“While I’m willing to compromise and find common ground over how to reduce our deficit, America cannot afford another debate with this Congress over how to pay the bills they’ve already racked up,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House at what aides have billed as the final news conference of his first term. “To even entertain the idea of this happening, of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It’s absurd.”

But the problem is, thanks to both Congress and this administration, we are not paying our bills. We’re borrowing money that we don’t have and have been spending it. I find it ironic, that the president who has run up the largest deficit in history is talking about being irresponsible.

Conn Carroll:

As this American Action Forum table going back to 1993 shows, the debt limit is almost always raised in the context of some other deficit reduction/budget process legislation. No one likes to sign off on borrowing more money without getting at least some measure of fiscal responsibility in return. In 2010, for example, Blue Dog Democrats forced then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass PAYGO rules in exchange for their votes to raise the debt limit. Demanding a price for a debt limit hike vote is absolutely business as normal in Washington.

Which is why it is virtually guaranteed that Speaker John Boehner will get at least something in return for moving a debt hike through the House.

Paul Mirengoff:

Plainly, Obama cannot reconcile his votes as a Senator with his present position that the debt ceiling must be raised no matter what. Instead, he creates a straw man — the notion that the Republicans won’t raise the debt ceiling unless they get “100 percent” of what they want.

To my knowledge, that is not the Republicans position. In any case, Obama has made an argument only for not giving Republicans 100 percent of what they want, not for refusing to negotiate.

The president’s apparent confidence that he’s holding a winning hand politically may be justified. But given the public’s desire (abstract though it is) for debt reduction and given Obama’s votes on this issue as Senator, it’s also possible that he is over-confident.

Sometimes it feels like Obama is dodging questions from the press. Then every few months we watch him filibuster and get persnickety about having any of his positions challenged, and then we wonder why we wanted to see more of this.

This morning, the editors of NR declare:

The House should pass a bill to redefine the debt limit so that it constrains primary spending but not debt service. Under this reform, a Treasury that had hit the statutory borrowing limit could continue to borrow what it needed exclusively for paying interest on the national debt and to roll over existing debt obligations, but it could not borrow for any other government spending until the limit had been increased. This would take default entirely off the table.”