Obama! Obama! Obam...Wait A Second...

Rounding the reality bend just a few months late, we finally have some mainstreamers realizing that Barack Obama isn't quite what he promised he would be:

A month after the Generational Theft Act was rushed through Congress and signed into law, the news service tells us that the jobs projections were basically pulled out of thin air.

The title of the AP’s penetrating, belated analysis: “Bold claims of stimulus jobs can’t be measured.”

Now, they tell us:

If space exploration were conducted like the job forecasts under the government’s new stimulus law, man surely would have missed the moon. But this isn’t rocket science.

No promise from President Barack Obama is more important to the wounded economy than his vow to save or create some 3.5 million jobs in two years. In support of that bottom line, the government even tells states how many jobs they can expect to see from the spending and tax cuts.

But precise trajectories are impossible to plot and even approximations can be wildly off, as the authors of these forecasts acknowledge, usually more readily than the policymakers who use them to promote the plan.

Flip through the stacks of economic analyses underpinning the stimulus plan and you find a lot of throat-clearing qualifications and angst:

_”Very uncertain.”

_”Difficult to distinguish among alternative estimates.”

_”We confess to considerable uncertainty.”

_”Subject to substantial margins of error.”

In other words, who really knows?

Economic modeling may prove to be a haywire navigational device in this crisis.
“Large fiscal stimulus is rarely attempted,” Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, told lawmakers. “For those reasons, some economists remain skeptical that there will be any significant effects, while others expect very large ones.” Zero to nirvana? Even for economists, who routinely differ among themselves, that’s a range beyond the norm.

The disconnect between theory and real life became evident when Obama pitched his plan at a Caterpillar factory before its passage and held out hope the federal stimulus money would let the heavy equipment maker rehire some of the thousands being let go. Although that might be the eventual result when money courses through the pipeline, Caterpillar last week announced 2,400 more layoffs.

Even some normally reputable outlets got suckered by Hope-n-Change:

His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped. Many of his strongest supporters—liberal columnists, prominent donors, Democratic Party stalwarts—have started to question him. As for those not so beholden, polls show that independent voters again prefer Republicans to Democrats, a startling reversal of fortune in just a few weeks. Mr Obama’s once-celestial approval ratings are about where George Bush’s were at this stage in his awful presidency. Despite his resounding electoral victory, his solid majorities in both chambers of Congress and the obvious goodwill of the bulk of the electorate, Mr Obama has seemed curiously feeble.

Hot Air points out the obvious rebuttal to that last comment, saying that it's no surprise Obama has been feeble since he had precisely zero executive experience before taking the Oval Office.

Visit the link for a whole lot more 'Oops'-ing and 'Duh'-ing. Bottom line: America got what they voted for, they just didn't realize what they would be getting. It's two very different things.

Unfortunately, this is one instance in which 'better late than never' really doesn't apply. So what if people figure out in 2009 that Obama is going to wreck the country? He's got the votes in Congress to do it even if he has a 0% approval rating.

Welcome to the United States of soon-to-be-socialist America!

There's my two cents.