Barack Obama surrounding himself with spivs and chancers
Article from: HeraldSun (Australia)
Andrew Bolt
February 27, 2009 12:00am

GOOD thing for Barack Obama that he isn't George Bush. He'd have been slaughtered for starting so badly that he's picking a Cabinet of tax cheats.
But a month since he was sworn in as President, Obama has lost not a fleck off his golden tongue.
Nor has he stopped entrancing opinion makers as America's first African-American leader.
So for those impressed more by words and racial symbols than performance, the most unqualified president since before even John F. Kennedy remains above the kind of vicious media criticism routinely heaped on Bush.
But how loudly would the people who cheer Obama have screamed if Bush had, for instance, surrounded himself with this extraordinarily long list of spivs and chiselers?
There's Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader whom Obama picked as Health secretary, but was forced to quit for having failed to pay more than $150,000 in taxes - and for pulling a mysterious $1.5 million a year as an influence-peddler to a law firm.
Nancy Killefer, Obama's choice as the government's chief performance officer, also had to quit, having failed to pay unemployment taxes for her household help.
Timothy Geithner, on the other hand, still got appointed Treasury secretary despite having also failed to pay taxes - more than $60,000 in his case. Hilda Solis likewise survived, becoming Labor secretary even though her husband owed $10,000 in taxes.
Hmm. What is it about Big Government Democrats that they so hate paying the taxes they impose on others? And we haven't finished with that list, either.
Obama's first choice as Commerce Secretary, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, had to quit to fight grand jury charges of selling favors.
His second choice, Republican Judd Gregg, then walked out saying he couldn't accept Obama's $1.2 trillion stimulus package.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, was sacked for trying to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bigger.
And now helping Obama run the economy are two powerful Democratic Congressmen he's inherited from his party - Charlie Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing House ways and means Committee, who failed to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from his luxury Caribbean villa, and Chris Dodd, who as chair of the Senate banking committee received $200,000 in donations from the now collapsed Fannie Mae, plus sweetheart loans from Countrywide Financial, another business he was supposed to be regulating.
Not being able even to pick a clean team would be embarrassing enough - proof that the neophyte in the White House has run nothing in his life but an election campaign - but worse is that Obama actually promised to transform Washington with "the most sweeping ethics reform in history . . ."
He would take on "the issue of money in politics", ensure that lobbyists "will not work in my White House", and never let influence-peddlers "build relationships with members of my administration based on how much they can spend".
Ah, who you are going to believe: Obama's smooth tongue or his list of new appointees?
Check that list: among the some 150 staff assigned by Obama to government agencies before Inauguration Day were dozens of former lobbyists.
NOW the President has appointed as US ambassador in London one of his biggest campaign fundraisers - Louis Susman, aka The Vacuum Cleaner, who also personally donated $300,000 to Obama's inauguration fund.
Worse, Obama has proved incapable so far of reining in the Democrats in Congress, who have seized on these panicky spend-spend-spend times to snaffle all the cash they could find.
This week in his address to Congress, Obama said he hoped to make next year's budget free of earmarks -- the pork-barrel projects stuffed as a line item into unrelated legislation to pay individual politicians for their vote.
Fine words. Yet the day after he spoke, his fellow Democrats pushed through Congress a $630 billion spending bill that is bloated with a record 8500 earmarks, steering $12 billion into favours-for-votes.
Obama is now tipped to sign off on that bill without vetoing a single one of those earmarks - some inserted by members of his own Cabinet.
Nor is that the only time when you must choose between what Obama says and what he actually does.
This week Obama vowed to halve the $1.6 trillion debt he'd inherited within the next four years -- just days after he'd in fact authorised another $1.2 trillion in spending for his stimulus package, which was loaded with yet more vote-buying favors for special interest groups.
And a day later he told Congress he'd spend more billions still on his economic plans, and vowed also to push on with big-spending health insurance reform.
None of this extraordinary spending, or contradictory signals, or will-he-won't-he dithering over bank nationalisations, has much impressed the people with money at stake.
US stocks this week fell to their lowest level in seven years, while consumer confidence sank to record lows. Polls show only a third of Americans now believe Obama's stimulus package will help.
As Al Goldman of Wachovia Securities explained: "The stimulus package itself has hurt confidence as it represents tremendous spending but in some eyes, little economic stimulation." Ditto for Kevin Rudd's stimulus package, incidentally.
But how hard does anyone want to be yet on a president just finding his feet? On a symbol of such hope? On a man who sounds so noble and plausible, even when he this week claimed America "invented the automobile"?
WHO wants to get tough on America's first black president?
And, true, Obama does indeed deserve many more months of grace.
Maybe he can indeed close Guantanamo Bay without letting loose terrorists. Maybe he can indeed pull combat troops out of Iraq without leaving it to collapse. Maybe he will indeed show Russia, now pulling his chain, he is not the pushover it thinks.
So the criticism of him so far is very muted, even if the dollars seem to be banking quietly on a fail. And maybe that's why his poll numbers have not fallen as far as they should, given his performance.
His approval rating, as measured by Gallup, dropped over the past month from 69 per cent to 59, but that's no lower than you'd expect from any new president.
Gary Langer, poll analyst for America's ABC, has compared Obama's ratings to those of the previous eight presidents after their first month in office and concludes: "His initial rating, then, is strong but it's also generally typical for a new guy."
George Bush Sr had far better figures, true, but his son was 13 points behind at the same time in his own presidency.
Then again, Bush jr was already getting such a savaging from a Left-leaning media for allegedly stealing the election (a claim comprehensively debunked) it's no wonder he suffered.
Obama, on the other hand, has had little such media criticism, and certainly none of that vitriol.
He can bank on more media goodwill for some time yet.
HE has undoubted intelligence and continues to speak eloquently - more so than any president since Ronald Reagan. He also has that aura of goodness, and that skin colour of such potent symbolism.
He may, therefore, quickly recover from this messy start. But even symbols must, in the end, be judged by what they do, rather than what they promise.
And by that standard, there is already reason to wonder if this president of no experience is just a pilchard in a tank of sharks.