US President Barack Obama is all smiles here after winning universal health care, but he’d better hope he’s not Caesar giving himself the thumbs-down on everything else in his presidency so far – or that voters do eitherApril 11, 2010
He gives pretty speeches, but One-Term Obama can’t hear what people are saying
What a difference a year makes. Excepting his first 100-day honeymoon after taking office in January last year, Barack Obama, the guy who was going to change everything and the first Half-African American to become President of the United States, has one of the grandest achievements of any US leader in history – universal health care after a 100-year battle in the Congress – but still is a victim of his own instilled myopia. He still can’t see that all people really care about is jobs, jobs, jobs, advice he won’t get from his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the unemployment rate is 9.7%. Instead, the administration points out that 162,000 new jobs were added in March, without really telling you that it was mostly driven by government jobs as a stimuli that doesn’t reach down to Main Street where people live and work, so it’s an artificial gain that can’t be sustained and neither can his Democratic party, headed for what seems like a sure sea change with a disastrous defeat looming in mid-term elections later this year unless he can turn it around. Even after winning health care, he’s driven the party down to 41% favorability, its lowest rating in 18 years and his has fallen to 46%.
Are you a Democrat or a Republican if you support Wall Street, War, and Big Oil, because Obama is on the side of all of them and his complacency helped lead to the defeat of the US Senate seat in Massachusetts held by the Kennedy Dynasty for half a century. While he was busy defining his image of America as egalitarian – except for the Wall Street Golden Boys and big banks and corporations in whose pocket he now resides – Obama didn’t hear the fury on Main Street or the hollow echoes of empty hearts resigned to the defeat he didn’t create, but helped perpetuate, because the number one Big Ticket item for all people – besides health – is a job, and he still doesn’t know it.
Obama has a job and so does his coterie of cozy buddies so insulated from the real world that they couldn’t tell you what a can or corn costs in a discount supermarket, or even where to find one, because they travel first-class free, dine in five-star restaurants and stay in five-star hotels, while most Americans have checked into the flop house. That’s the last stop for millions who lost their homes to foreclosure by greedy banks who jacked up interest rates when all Obama had to do was convince the Democratic Congress he used to control to ban adjustable rate mortgages and force the banks who got $2 trillion in taxpayer bail-out money to freeze what homeowners pay so they could keep their homes. And while he was at it, put a rider on a requiring those banks to lend money to small businesses, the real engine of the economy, and consumers, who would then use it to create new jobs and spend and keep businesses alive. It’s small-and-medium sized businesses who are the real economic engine of the US, not big corporations, and no economy can recover unless people have jobs and money to spend.
Since winning the Nobel War Prize he has showed little signs of really withdrawing US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and obscured the promise he brought to the office and the achievements he undeniably earned, chief among them the initial sense of both he gave disenfranchised and disappointed Americans who looked to him to be a leader and live up to his mantra of change. But he’s become almost as much of a Republican as the sorry bumbler who preceded him, George Bush, who’s settled into the dustbin of history. But then so much more was expected of Obama, and nothing pains idol-worshippers more than to discover their heroes have feet of clay, although in Obama’s case it seems to be his head and he can now be accused of the greatest crime: wasted potential. He didn’t end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as promised, but expanded them. He blew into the Copenhagen Climate Change because it was on his way home from Oslo and the Nobel Prize and promptly agreed to a diluted deal that ignored the European Union and did nothing – zero – to force a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but the world won’t have to worry about that until his children have grandchildren so he didn’t care.
Is Europe a country?
He snubbed the EU by declaring he wouldn’t come to the annual EU-US Summit, this one scheduled for Madrid, because he doesn’t need Europe now, or so he thinks, and you still can’t get the egg off the face of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Manuel Zapatero, whose country holds the rotating EU Presidency, and who was dismissed as a baggage-handler by Bush. But this is about Obama and the reason Americans are angry, and Europeans are disappointed, is because he was supposed to be the anti-Bush. It’s so bad for Obama now that when his arch-enemy, Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney, who liked sending men to die in combat as an armchair commander, said, Obama is a one-term President, it was laughed at because of the source.
Now some Obama supporters are saying it. Left-wing documentary film maker Michael Moore, who skewered Bush, said Obama has become a war president, and a former staunch Obama ally, US News and World Report publisher Mort Zuckerman, told noted New York syndicated radio show host Don Imus that he’s never been more disappointed in anyone and described Obama as a “speechifier” who talks the talk but can’t walk the walk and may already be becoming a lame duck one-term President, so it’s not just the lunatic fringe of Sarah Palin Stepford Wives and toothless illiterates and the nutcakes who call Republican talk show hosts who are the enemy for him: it’s his friends.
There’s no denying Obama’s intelligence and desire to fulfill his own vision of making people’s lives better and showing the world that the US is a nation of peoples with values and tolerance, which should be imported to other countries, not the jingoistic imperialism of Bush he has now embraced, and he still has time to resurrect his Presidency, but people are turning on him because he hasn’t delivered that vision and isn’t a leader or the kind of guy you’d want in a foxhole with you when the bullets are flying because he’d try to talk the enemy to death. But maybe he can change.
He gives pretty speeches, but One-Term Obama can’t hear what people are saying
What a difference a year makes. Excepting his first 100-day honeymoon after taking office in January last year, Barack Obama, the guy who was going to change everything and the first Half-African American to become President of the United States, has one of the grandest achievements of any US leader in history – universal health care after a 100-year battle in the Congress – but still is a victim of his own instilled myopia. He still can’t see that all people really care about is jobs, jobs, jobs, advice he won’t get from his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the unemployment rate is 9.7%. Instead, the administration points out that 162,000 new jobs were added in March, without really telling you that it was mostly driven by government jobs as a stimuli that doesn’t reach down to Main Street where people live and work, so it’s an artificial gain that can’t be sustained and neither can his Democratic party, headed for what seems like a sure sea change with a disastrous defeat looming in mid-term elections later this year unless he can turn it around. Even after winning health care, he’s driven the party down to 41% favorability, its lowest rating in 18 years and his has fallen to 46%.
Are you a Democrat or a Republican if you support Wall Street, War, and Big Oil, because Obama is on the side of all of them and his complacency helped lead to the defeat of the US Senate seat in Massachusetts held by the Kennedy Dynasty for half a century. While he was busy defining his image of America as egalitarian – except for the Wall Street Golden Boys and big banks and corporations in whose pocket he now resides – Obama didn’t hear the fury on Main Street or the hollow echoes of empty hearts resigned to the defeat he didn’t create, but helped perpetuate, because the number one Big Ticket item for all people – besides health – is a job, and he still doesn’t know it.
Obama has a job and so does his coterie of cozy buddies so insulated from the real world that they couldn’t tell you what a can or corn costs in a discount supermarket, or even where to find one, because they travel first-class free, dine in five-star restaurants and stay in five-star hotels, while most Americans have checked into the flop house. That’s the last stop for millions who lost their homes to foreclosure by greedy banks who jacked up interest rates when all Obama had to do was convince the Democratic Congress he used to control to ban adjustable rate mortgages and force the banks who got $2 trillion in taxpayer bail-out money to freeze what homeowners pay so they could keep their homes. And while he was at it, put a rider on a requiring those banks to lend money to small businesses, the real engine of the economy, and consumers, who would then use it to create new jobs and spend and keep businesses alive. It’s small-and-medium sized businesses who are the real economic engine of the US, not big corporations, and no economy can recover unless people have jobs and money to spend.
Since winning the Nobel War Prize he has showed little signs of really withdrawing US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and obscured the promise he brought to the office and the achievements he undeniably earned, chief among them the initial sense of both he gave disenfranchised and disappointed Americans who looked to him to be a leader and live up to his mantra of change. But he’s become almost as much of a Republican as the sorry bumbler who preceded him, George Bush, who’s settled into the dustbin of history. But then so much more was expected of Obama, and nothing pains idol-worshippers more than to discover their heroes have feet of clay, although in Obama’s case it seems to be his head and he can now be accused of the greatest crime: wasted potential. He didn’t end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as promised, but expanded them. He blew into the Copenhagen Climate Change because it was on his way home from Oslo and the Nobel Prize and promptly agreed to a diluted deal that ignored the European Union and did nothing – zero – to force a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but the world won’t have to worry about that until his children have grandchildren so he didn’t care.
Is Europe a country?
He snubbed the EU by declaring he wouldn’t come to the annual EU-US Summit, this one scheduled for Madrid, because he doesn’t need Europe now, or so he thinks, and you still can’t get the egg off the face of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Manuel Zapatero, whose country holds the rotating EU Presidency, and who was dismissed as a baggage-handler by Bush. But this is about Obama and the reason Americans are angry, and Europeans are disappointed, is because he was supposed to be the anti-Bush. It’s so bad for Obama now that when his arch-enemy, Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney, who liked sending men to die in combat as an armchair commander, said, Obama is a one-term President, it was laughed at because of the source.
Now some Obama supporters are saying it. Left-wing documentary film maker Michael Moore, who skewered Bush, said Obama has become a war president, and a former staunch Obama ally, US News and World Report publisher Mort Zuckerman, told noted New York syndicated radio show host Don Imus that he’s never been more disappointed in anyone and described Obama as a “speechifier” who talks the talk but can’t walk the walk and may already be becoming a lame duck one-term President, so it’s not just the lunatic fringe of Sarah Palin Stepford Wives and toothless illiterates and the nutcakes who call Republican talk show hosts who are the enemy for him: it’s his friends.
There’s no denying Obama’s intelligence and desire to fulfill his own vision of making people’s lives better and showing the world that the US is a nation of peoples with values and tolerance, which should be imported to other countries, not the jingoistic imperialism of Bush he has now embraced, and he still has time to resurrect his Presidency, but people are turning on him because he hasn’t delivered that vision and isn’t a leader or the kind of guy you’d want in a foxhole with you when the bullets are flying because he’d try to talk the enemy to death. But maybe he can change.
