Forbes
November 22, 2011
President Obama seems frustrated these days – lashing out emotionally, intensifying his rhetoric against money-makers, doubling down on his demagoguery, and claiming that heartless GOP rivals want dirty air, unsafe water, poisoned food, and no health care. Mr. Obama blames Congress for not enacting yet more of his destructive “stimulus” schemes, even as the CBO this week reiterated its prior estimate that Obama’s first stimulus scheme ($787 billion, February 2009) will have a net negative impact on GDP over the coming decade.
Mr. Obama says he’ll spend $1 billion on his coming campaign for re-election – gathered, no doubt, from the corporate “fat cats” he likes to denounce – and that thematically he’ll be running against a “do nothing” Congress. In fact, if Congress did nothing for Obama over the coming year, it would be doing him a favor.
More pathetic still has been Mr. Obama’s recent resort to blaming others – as usual, the innocents among us – for the abject failure of his own policies. For some inexplicable reason, he said in Orlando last September, Americans have “gotten a little soft” and “didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.” In late October he told a gathering inSan Francisco that “we’ve lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Finally, at the APEC meeting last weekend Obama complained to an audience of American CEOs that “we’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades . . . We aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.” Mr. Obama’s use of the collective “we” is an attempt to soften what’s really a bullying, despicable insult – equivalent to this: “You much-vaunted money-makers, those I demonize, you aren’t working very hard, aren’t hiring enough, or earning enough to render to me the tax revenues I need.”
In just three years Mr. Obama has been such an inspiring leader, confidence-builder, political organizer, and policy-maker that he simultaneously faces a do-nothing Congress, a do-nothing business community, and a do-nothing economy. No wonder most Americans these days tell pollsters they’re dissatisfied with his presidency.
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