Multiple choice: The Obama administration’s plan to reduce the never-ending deficit, released Monday, is:

1. Obama’s latest attempt to appeal to his base.
2. Obama’s latest attempt to stick it to Congressional Republicans.
3. Dead on arrival at the House of Representatives.
4. A serious effort to deal with the budget deficit and the debt and improve the economy.

Of those four choices, the wrong answer is option 4. Obama admitted himself Sept. 8 that raising taxes in the midst of a recession is crazy. So in a recession, Obama proposes to, yes, raise taxes and fees. There is no evidence — none, ever — that raising taxes will improve the economy.

Option 1, appealing to his base, and its corollary, option 2, are the  result of his own increasingly bad poll numbers. Obama’s poll numbers are much more meaningful than Congress’ poll numbers because voters can vote for only one member of Congress, not all of them, so voters’ opinion of Congress is approximately 0.2299 percent meaningful. Control of the House has not switched parties in consecutive elections since 1954, so Democrats’ dreams of taking back the House one term after losing the House are not supported by history. Moreover, the demographics of the 2012 Senate elections (that is, the six Democrats elected to the Senate in 2006, and the five Democrats retiring, including Wisconsin’s Herb Kohl),  mean that Republican capture of the Senate has a better than even chance.

Vodkapundit has some math questions for the administration:

The promise is to generate $3 trillion in savings. One third of that, $1T, comes from defense spending in Iraq and Afghanistan that isn’t going to happen anyway. The drawdowns are already in place. You can’t “save” money you were never going to spend. So already we’re down to $2T in deficit reduction.

Next, the President wants to wring $580 billion out of entitlements, by finding that many dollars worth of “waste and inefficiency.” Of course, we were already granted a boon of $500 billion in cost-free savings in Medicare when ObamaCare passed. If we pretend, like the President does, that those $500 billions were really saved, it’s hard to see where we’ll find another imaginary $580 billion. So now we’re down to a mere $1.42 trillion in deficit reduction — over the next ten years.

But don’t worry because Obama says we’re going to get $1.5T in deficit reduction from tax hikes on “the rich.” What’s the real number? Let’s use a little something I call the “Clinton Rule of Thumb.” When President Clinton and the Democratic Congress jacked up taxes in 1993, revenues only increased by about two-thirds of the expected amount — and that was in a booming economy. So using the CROT, we can expect Obama’s tax hikes to generate $1T in new revenues.

However, this economy is, shall we say, not booming. So let’s cut the number in half again: $500 billion dollars in new revenues. And unlike the rest of the malarky in the President’s plan, I expect the tax hikes to be as real (and as serious) as a hemorrhagic fever. Which leaves us with a deficit plan that “saves” half a trillion dollars over the next ten years — or by a little more than one-third of our deficit spending from just last year.

This isn’t a credible plan. This is yet another soak-the-rich/class-warfare scheme aimed solely at securing Obama’s reelection.

Obama’s reelection strategy, such as it is, increasingly appears to emulate the 1948 Harry Truman reelection campaign. Independent of the dubious wisdom of emulating a campaign strategy that is more than 60 years old when, to put it mildly, this country is different from 1948,

Forbes.com’s Janet Novack shows that the Obama administration’s definition of “millionaire” is someone with more than $250,000:

Indeed, most of Obama’s tax proposals will apparently repeat those he has made before. For example, $800 billion would come from letting the Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 expire at the end of 2012, meaning the top rate on ordinary income such as salary would rise from 35% to 39.6%. Last month, in a New York Times op-ed, [Warren] Buffett called for two higher tax rates—one on income over $1 million and the other on income over $10 million. Published reports over the weekend variously suggested Obama would endorse a new millionaire’s rate or release some sort of proposal for a minimum tax on millionaires—say to replace the current convoluted alternative minimum tax.  But Sunday night, the Administration official said the Buffett rule was simply a principle for tax reform.

Most people earning more than $1 million are already taxed at a higher effective rate than their secretaries. In 2008, for example, taxpayers with adjusted gross income between $1 million and $10 million paid an average of 24.5% of their adjusted gross in federal income tax, compared with an average of 12.6% for those earning $100,000 to $200,000, and 8.4%  for those earning $50,000 to $100,000. But the 400 highest income taxpayers do pay a lower effective rate  than mere millionaires—an average of just 18.1% in 2008. That’s because the top 400 get the bulk of their income from capital gains, which are taxed at a top rate of 15%, scheduled to rise to 20% when the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012. If tax reform is to insure that billionaires pay a higher effective rate than the upper middle and middle class it would have to reduce or eliminate the break for capital gains—something that was done in Reagan’s 1986 tax reform but that doesn’t sit well with most Republicans today.

National Review’s Kevin Williamson back in March identified the biggest problem with a soak-the-“rich” tax plan:

There are lots of liberal definitions of “rich.” When Pres. Barack Obama talks about the rich, he’s talking about people living in households with income of more than $250,000 or more, the rarefied caviar-shoveling stratum occupied by the likes of second-tier public-broadcasting executives,Boston cops, nurses, and the city manager of Lubbock, Texas (assuming somebody in her household earns the last $25,000 to carry her over the line). Club 250K isn’t all that exclusive, and most of its members aren’t the yachts-and-expensive-mistresses types.

Nonetheless, there aren’t that many of them. In fact, in 2006, the Census Bureau found only 2.2 million households earning more than $250,000. And most of those are closer to the Lubbock city manager than to Carlos Slim, income-wise. To jump from the 50th to the 51st percentile isn’t that tough; jumping from the 96th to the 97th takes a lot of schmundo. It’s lonely at the top.

But say we wanted to balance the budget by jacking up taxes on Club 250K. That’s a problem: The 2012 deficit is forecast to hit $1.1 trillion under Obama’s budget. (Thanks, Mr. President!) Spread that deficit over all the households in Club 250K and you have to jack up their taxes by an average of $500,000. Which you simply can’t do, since a lot of them don’t have $500,000 in income to seize: Most of them are making $250,000 to $450,000 and paying about half in taxes already. You can squeeze that goose all day, but that’s not going to make it push out a golden egg.

But like certain other exclusive clubs, Club 250K has an inner sanctum, a special club within the club, the champagne room of socioeconomic status. And that is Club 1: the million-dollar-a-year club. Not the millionaires’ club — lots of the people earning $1 million in any given year do not have $1 million in assets — but, still, a million a year, even in rapidly depreciating U.S. dollars, is not too shabby. But the trouble for liberals is, Club 1 is really, really exclusive: Only 0.2 percent of U.S. households have incomesthat high, meaning that there’s only about 200,000 of them. And like Club 250K, Club 1 is bottom-heavy: There are a lot more $1 million men than there are $6 million men. And there are a whole heck of a lot more $6 million men than there are $60 million men.

You want to tax Club 1 to get rid of the deficit, you have to hit each of those 200,000 households with an average tax hike — not an average tax bill, but tax increase — of $6 million. And a lot of those Club 1 households don’t have $6 million in income to start with, much less $6 million left after the taxes they’re already paying. …

Capital is sensitive — it just wants to be loved! — and it will go where the love is, where it can be fruitful and multiply. Setting trillions of dollars’ worth of it ablaze on the altar of Washington’s self-importance every year is not going to get it done, and there simply aren’t enough rich people for us to pillage or enough loot to make it all work. We have finally, as the lady predicted, run out of other people’s money.

If Obama was really interested in a centrist deficit and debt plan, it might look something like what David Frum posits:

The next presidential election occurs in less than 14 months.

What? You don’t care? Wake me when the GOP primaries are over, you say?

Well, I have a way to wake up your somnolence. The GOP primaries would be much more interesting if the ultimate winner was running for an open office chair at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., wouldn’t they?

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal posits this scenario, explained by Allahpundit:

Three months ago this would have been a zero-probability event. Today, with the economy comatose and the world on the precipice of a new European-driven financial crisis? One-percent chance, minimum. Note that Fund’s not talking about a primary challenge here; that would alienate black Democrats and the party would fracture before the general election, so it’s not an option. The only way to dump him and hold the base together would be if he agreed to step down after Democratic chieftains privately appealed to him to do so.  …

You can imagine the announcement speech: “I’ve said many times that I’d rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer. I think I’ve achieved that in the passage of our landmark new health-care law and our many successes against Al Qaeda. But I promised you after I was sworn in that this economy would recover within three years and, for various reasons, that hasn’t happened. Therefore, I’m announcing tonight…” etc. He goes out on a high note, he sets Hillary up for another historic presidency, and suddenly Democrats are on strong (or stronger) footing for the election — especially given the Clinton legacy of economic boom times. In return, he gets basically whatever he wants from the party leadership. A guarantee, maybe, that he’ll be appointed to the Supreme Court at the first available vacancy? Not the first time that idea’s been floated.

Ace of Spades adds:

No, Obama can’t be primaried out, not really, because if you win, you lose, because no way do the 1/3rd of the blacks that make up the Democratic primary voting community welcome that. (In this scenario, Obama would be such a sure loser (only way it could happen in the first place) that many blacks would support the switch, but too many more would view it as the Democrats betraying the first black president, rather than sticking by him.)

The only way it happens if it’s voluntary; Obama declines to seek reelection.

Maybe after it was strongly suggested he do so.

Kind of silly, but not really so silly: We are probably in a recession now, and the scary thing is, a recession might be the best case scenario.

Is this all Obama’s fault? No. Europe is coming apart at the seams; Obama didn’t do that. But he’s been pushing us towards a European model. He just wouldn’t be viable after that. Especially because it’s pretty clear he’s married to his One Big Idea (European social-democratic welfare statism) and this Rara Avis will not reinvent himself under any circumstances.

Historically Obama and Democrats are guaranteed ultimate losers if another Democrat runs against him. Not because Democratic voters would prefer the unnamed alternative to Obama. But consider what happened to the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford (beat Ronald Reagan in the primary, but lost to Jimmy Carter in the general election), Jimmy Carter (beat Ted Kennedy but lost to Reagan) and George H.W. Bush (beat Pat Buchanan but lost to Bill Clinton). Before them, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in the face of a primary challenge from Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune added to this Sunday:

When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, his slogan was “Morning in America.” For Barack Obama, it’s more like midnight in a coal mine.

The sputtering economy is about to stall out, unemployment is high, his jobs program may not pass, foreclosures are rampant and the poor guy can’t even sneak a cigarette.

His approval rating is at its lowest level ever. His party just lost two House elections — one in a district it had held for 88 consecutive years. He’s staked his future on the jobs bill, which most Americans don’t think would work.

The vultures are starting to circle. Former White House spokesman Bill Burton said that unless Obama can rally the Democratic base, which is disillusioned with him, “it’s going to be impossible for the president to win.” Democratic consultant James Carville had one word of advice for Obama: “Panic.”

But there is good news for the president. I checked the Constitution, and he is under no compulsion to run for re-election. He can scrap the campaign, bag the fundraising calls and never watch another Republican debate as long as he’s willing to vacate the premises by Jan. 20, 2013.

That might be the sensible thing to do. It’s hard for a president to win a second term when unemployment is painfully high. If the economy were in full rebound mode, Obama might win anyway. But it isn’t, and it may fall into a second recession — in which case voters will decide his middle name is Hoover, not Hussein. Why not leave of his own volition instead of waiting to get the ax?

It’s not as though there is much enticement to stick around. Presidents who win re-election have generally found, wrote John Fortier and Norman Ornstein in their 2007 book, “Second-Term Blues,” that “their second terms did not measure up to their first.”

Presidential encores are generally a bog of frustration, exhaustion and embarrassment. They are famous for lowest moments rather than finest hours. Richard Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal, and Bill Clinton made the unfortunate acquaintance of Monica Lewinsky.

My first reaction to this is skepticism. Back in the mid-1990s, I went to a speech by Fred Barnes, then of the New Republic. Barnes talked about Clinton’s political adventures after the disastrous-for-Democrats 1994 elections, including the late 1995 government shutdown. I asked Barnes if Democrats were secretly not fans of Clinton because they thought he wasn’t liberal enough. And Barnes replied that no, that wasn’t the case, because Clinton had proven success at defeating Republicans legislatively. (That was where I formulated my zero-sum theory of politics: In politics, to quote former UCLA football coach Red Sanders — not Vince Lombardi — winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.)

This, remember, was after the failure of Hillarycare. Obama succeeded (for now) in getting ObamaCare through Congress. Clinton as The Great Compromiser was just starting to reveal himself; his first two years included the North American Free Trade Agreement, which most Democrats opposed. Clinton had his bimbo eruptions, but Obama now has the Solyndra and Fast and Furious scandals-in-progress, which haven’t gotten wide notice yet.

The other difference, and the most important difference to voters, is that the economy was going gangbusters in the mid-’90s. No one with a brain thinks the economy is going gangbusters now, and only the excessively optimistic think the economy will be noticeably better by November 2012. Making yet another petulant speech about those evil Republicans in Congress stopping progress in its tracks will neither improve the economy nor impress voters, even those who voted for Obama in 2008.

James Carville believes Obama has to do something dramatic:

We are far past sending out talking points. Do not attempt to dumb it down. We cannot stand any more explanations. Have you talked to any Democratic senators lately? I have. It’s pretty damn clear they are not happy campers.

This is what I would say to President Barack Obama: The time has come to demand a plan of action that requires a complete change from the direction you are headed.

I don’t know how else to break this down. Simply put:

1. Fire somebody. No — fire a lot of people. This may be news to you but this is not going well. For precedent, see Russian Army 64th division at Stalingrad.  …

Mr. President, your hinge of fate must turn. Bill Clinton fired many people in 1994 and took a lot of heat for it. Reagan fired most of his campaign staff in 1980. Republicans historically fired their own speaker, Newt Gingrich. Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. For God’s sake, why are we still looking at the same political and economic advisers that got us into this mess? It’s not working.

Furthermore, it’s not going to work with the same team, the same strategy and the same excuses. I know economic analysts are smart — some work 17-hour days. It’s time to show them the exit. Wake up — show us you are doing something.

Those who enjoy conspiracy theories envision some kind of grand bargain where Obama gets, say, a Supreme Court seat in exchange for deciding not to run, assuming, of course, that Hillary Clinton is elected president in 2012. She is, of course, denying interest in the White House, and, of course, the way you know it’s a conspiracy is that those involved deny its existence. (Or something like that.)

So you can see for yourself how silly this speculation is. Of course, you would have been laughed out of the room had you suggested in late 1967 that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t going to run for reelection.