At what point do you recognize that you’ve been supporting an incompetent ninny?
At another point in Obama’s presidency, such a minor skirmish would not have mattered all that much. But this is, in fact, a key point in Obama’s presidency. As I explain in this week’s issue of TIME magazine, now available online to subscribers, the Obama White House is preparing a major shift in tone and substance in the hopes of reasserting Obama’s leadership abilities heading into the next election. Recent months, of course, have not been kind to Obama’s polls, which have registered roughly 10-point declines in Obama’s reputation for being a “strong leader” and for being “able to get things done.”
You don’t say.
The nation is of course fortunate in that the president with the most leftist agenda in decades, if not in history, is incompetent at implementing it.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related somehow:
It’s reported that the new jobs plan that you will unveil next week will, once again, focus in substantial measure on “green job” creation.
What, specifically, are “green jobs” and why do their creation merit more of your attention than other jobs?
Precisely how many “green jobs” have been created in the last two and a half years? At what price per job?
How many “green jobs” need to be created over the next 14 months to fulfill your promise of lowering the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent by November 2012?
What qualifies you, or any other politician, to determine which jobs are worthy of creating?
What evidence do you have that government can create jobs for which there is little or no current market demand?
Why do you believe your government-command approach to job creation will be any more successful than had been that of, say, the Industry Secretariat of the Odessa oblast?
We have a president who knows nothing about business, nothing about economics, nothing about technology, yet deludes himself (and many of his followers) that he’s a genius at all of the above. It’s a devastating combination for the nation.
[Update a while later]
“There is no secret, brilliant strategy. This White House is in a bubble.” Considering the personnel involved, how could there be a brilliant strategy?
[Update a few minuts later]
The Obama-thon continues:
Two years ago this week, President Obama came back from his summer vacation and asked to speak to a joint session of Congress. It was the fifth prime-time sales pitch for ObamaCare in his seven-month-old presidency. ObamaCare eventually passed, but the address did essentially nothing to make the plan more popular. Indeed, it remains unpopular.
Why? Surely the substance of the legislation amounts to its essential flaw. But it’s also worth noting that, measured by effectiveness, President Obama (unlike candidate Obama) simply isn’t a very good speaker. Indeed, with the possible exception of his post-Arizona shooting speech, it’s very difficult to think of a single instance where Obama has delivered a politically successful address on domestic issues during his presidency.
Such statements stun some of his biggest fans — though fewer and fewer these days — because they think he talks the way a president should. It seems they pay little heed to the possibility that they like what they hear because the president tells them what they want to hear, or because their fondness for Obama clouds their judgment. The fact remains that the president is very bad at persuading people who don’t already agree with him.
It’s not 2008 any more.