Friday, October 15, 2010

Obama Admits Shovel-Ready Projects Hoax

In The NYT's magazine's slobbering kiss to President Obama, an interesting admission emerges: In the magazine article, Mr. Obama reflects on his presidency, admitting that he let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat,” realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” and perhaps should have “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” in the stimulus.

How about that? The man who proclaimed that by simply electing him as President of the United States the ocean levels would improve and the earth would heal itself, reflects that he was wrong about the economic path he chose to mend the economy. Maybe if he actually fulfilled some campaign blathering promises - like be post-partisan and not concerned about the red state/blue state divides - he would have had a better outcome with his agenda.

The real question is - does he deliberately lie to America or is he really that ignorant of the job creation process? And, who believed these shovel-ready jobs were anything other than short term, WPA style jobs created with money from the government? Thus, the job creation process would be further prolonged with bureaucracy and red tape. Perhaps it is too much to ask that a man who has never held a private sector job or created a job in the private sector to know the process. Or to even truly understand the process.

This is where the complete absence of executive experience comes into play. Though Obama and his team were so proud to tout the community organizer aspect of his resume, the fact is that the man has solely sought political office as his career. Community organization was his port of entrance into the Chicago political machine. Once in, he was set. Between his wife and her connections and his abilities as a pithy speechifier, he was good to go.

Now Obama, facing devastating losses in the mid-term elections, feels the need to purge a bit in this interview. He would like the reader to believe it is the GOP who will be more cooperative with him as they attain more seats in Congress in November. It is he, however, who will have to learn to work with the other side of the aisle. Though he wanted voters to believe he was all about listening to all sides of an argument, he has governed in the exact opposite way. He and his Democratic leaders in Congress used closed door meetings and exclusion of any argumentative voices as their way to passing legislation. It has backfired mightily. And, to say he simply didn't sell his policies strongly enough, or not articulate enough, is laughable. The American public does not support the agenda of the far left. Obama, deluded with electoral victory, assumed this was the time to live out the dreams of the far left from forty years back.

He was wrong.

On Fox's Special Report, Charles Krauthammer said: “Well, that is quite an admission. You know, a year and a half and half a trillion dollars later he says these things that I talked about endlessly don’t exist. It’s not actually surprising that he doesn’t know what a shovel ready project is. Having never worked in the private sector he wouldn’t be sure what a project is and there isn’t a lot of shoveling at Harvard Law School.” So I can understand that this was one of the greatest “Oops” in American history. And it’s going to be hard for a democrat when you show one tape against another. They’re goint to say, “So you supported a trillion dollars offered by a president who didn’t even know that this stuff that this stuff is not going to happen?”

Experience matters.

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