A ‘State Of The Failure’ Speech State Of The Union: President Obama made a confession to the American people Tuesday. His call for “a year of action” admits that he’d prefer we forget his five years of failed actions and inaction. Confession may be good for the soul, but it can’t be good for the country when a president admits failure by talking as if somebody else has been in charge for the past five years. “As president, I’m committed to making Washington work better and rebuilding the trust of the people who sent us here,” Obama said several minutes into Tuesday’s annual Joint Session speech. Make Washington work better? Five years in? As Obama’s former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quipped Tuesday morning on MSNBC: “The ability to change Washington, I think, is something that long ago the White House sort of stopped trying to do.” Rebuilding the public’s trust? Who took a wrecking ball to that trust, most infamously by traveling the country falsely promising that “if you like your health plan you can keep it”? Other presidents tout their record at this point in their second term, But this one is running against himself, complaining that under him “those at the top have never done better, but average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.” After five years of his stewardship, Obama gripes that “too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by — let alone get ahead. And too many still aren’t working at all.” Let’s not forget that for his first two years this Democratic president had a Democratic House and a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate. He got the trillion-dollar Keynesian stimulus he promised would make the private economy come roaring back, but a Fox News poll last week found that 74% of voters believe we’re still in recession. He got the health reform he promised everyone would love once they saw it in action. Fox now finds a record 59% of voters oppose ObamaCare. This president on Tuesday night had the audacity to hope he could get away with harrumphing that “this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.” It is he who irresponsibly promised to close Gitmo within his first year, an action he’s always had executive authority to do without congressional approval. Don’t believe Obamanomics has reached a dead end? Imagine the reaction if one of his re-election campaign proposals had been to use the bully pulpit to ask “America’s business leaders to . . . do what you can to raise your employees’ wages,” as he did Tuesday. “Say yes. Give America a raise!” said a president whose “Change We Need” rhetoric is now reduced to beggary. Can these five years’ worth of excuses and finger-pointing really be coming from the mouth of the same man who in 2008 said, “I decided to run because of what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now’ ”?
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:55:40 +0000
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