Out of Touch

President Obama’s repeated insistence that Congress pass Stimulus #2, his “Jobs Bill,” demonstrates a lack of interest in jobs or in strengthening the economy. However, to be reelected in 2012 he must appear to be interested in those things.

Obama must know that taxing producers and investors doesn’t create jobs. Obama certainly knows that taxing the rich at 100% wouldn’t make even a dent in the deficit. But as Joe Hicks points out on PJTV, fixing the economy isn’t what Obama is about. He is about imposing equality. The Affordable Health Care Act is the government mandating that no one’s health insurance is better than anyone else’s. Well, not exactly no one. There are wavers to dispense to the politically deserving: To union members and to the elites who make the rules by which the rest of us must live.

Obama hasn’t had a new idea since his days as a Socialist/Marxist college student. He is simply unable to think outside the ideological box of his own construction. The president does understand that most Americans won’t buy what he is really selling, and since he can’t use his record to justify a second term he resorts to instigating class warfare and making additional promises he can’t keep. He said that if Stimulus 1 passed, the unemployment rate would not exceed 8%. We are closing on 10%. He now claims that he saved over a million jobs, a number that conveniently defies verification. As he flails about looking for a message that will resonate with voters, he appears increasingly weak and clueless.

It is telling that the president empathized with members of the union supported mob in New York, despite vows by some to “take down the capitalist system.” Considering that the unions are the president’s strongest constituency one has to wonder what exactly is going on. It should be noted that Obama also did not chastise Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. for advising union members to “take these sons of bitches out” meaning the Tea Party, and that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was invited to sit beside First Lady Michelle Obama during the President’s jobs speech, while union members destroyed private property at the Port of Longview.  Rahm Emanuel may no longer be a member of the Obama administration, but his advice about not letting a good crisis go to waste, lives on.

If Obama’s falling approval ratings are to be believed, his outlook for reelection is grim. All else having so far failed, the president has turned to the Truman playbook. Running against the “do-nothing (Republican) Congress” helped Truman get re-elected in 1948 when all the smart money was on Thomas Dewey. However, Obama’s effort to portray the Republican House as the “do nothing Congress” is unlikely to be persuasive. The problem that won’t go away is that congressional Republicans presented a serious budget to bring entitlements under control while Obama’s one attempt at a budget was so divorced from reality that even Democrats refused to vote for it.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s 1988 debate remark to Dan Quayle, “Mr. President, we remember Harry Truman and you, Sir, are no Harry Truman.”

Or as Waylon Jennings famously sang:

“You think you can say some words and take away the hurt

And I’ll still be your number 1  

But when it ain’t working out we have a saying down South

Baby that dog won’t hunt.”