I watched President Obama today make a scathing speech in which he was alternatively cynical, deprecating, preachy and downright demagogical. It was class warfare elevated to a fine art. Tax those “millionaires and billionaires.” Tax those people “who own private planes” (used that one 5-6 times) and tax those oil companies who are “making too much money” (doing what businesses are supposed to do—make money, create jobs and economic growth)...
Mr. President, you need to admit you don’t know how to fix America, and what you thought would work, didn’t, isn’t working and won’t work. You were wrong, and still are. Mr. President, you need to stop going to fund raisers to reach $1 billion you can spend on your reelection campaign and do your job. You need to retire your golf clubs and roll up your sleeves and live up to some of that soaring rhetoric that got you into this job—you know, the one you have learned you were woefully underprepared to do.
Remember the speech about not being “red states and blue states, but being the United States of America?” Well, somewhere between that convention speech in which you leaped from anonymity to fame, you forgot about that line, that great message, and fell into the traps of power—pride, narcissism and arrogance. Your glorious teleprompters from which flow the golden words will not tell you how to fix America. All you know for certain, in your heart as you go to sleep each night is that you have tried everything you thought was right and it didn’t and doesn’t work, and the American people are figuring that out.
I hope enough figure it out by November 2012.
I think there's a reason that the WH staff keeps Obama from making press conferences. He is so ill at ease. I think the unwillingness to admit that something is wrong or he doesnt' know grates on his last nerve. Compare that to Bush pressers even at the height of the rhetoric against him, and he was personable, he would admit if he didn't know answers and promise to get back to the reporters. In short, Bush ran the press conferences like a board meeting and Obama runs them like a college lecture. He doesn't LIKE questions that challenge his views and indeed dodges several. At the same time the press seems to be letting him get away with some rhetoric like the claim he was in Washington for the entirety of the economic conferences. Excuse me, but didn't he travel to Europe and then to South American recently? Hasn't he been in Texas and Iowa just in the last two weeks? How in anyone's definition is that being there unless to paraphrase Clinton "we first have to know what the definition of there is."
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