Where is your fight, Mr. President? Me thinks you have none thus we have no further need of you, Sir.

Well Good Morning to you avid readers of the gospel of the NY Times but I am liking Ms Dowd more and more for she, like her WSJ colleague, are two excellent writers with an iron fist with the silk glove in their opinions and I find both refreshing, to the point and very on-target. This president is parallized by self infliction I believe and finds himself totally over his head which is sad, truly sad but all the evidence is blatant.

As this Presidency has painfally dragged on I can only speak for myself but I have watched a nation so rallied and adrenalined up that the million or so on the inauguration grounds got me sort of excited. Having grown up in the racial ravages of the Southern 50's and 60's, I had this sense I was given a chance in my 60's to see a super star rise from the ashes of the Civil Rights scars to a place of real leadership. While I did not vote for him I was frankly proud of him and shared the hopes of many.

But, much like capitalism, this president has self destructed on so many fronts with jobs being the current tip of the poisoned spearhead. Each time I read that the government must create more jobs,I take a deep pause for it is NOT THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT TO CREATE JOBS for that is the private sector that actually makes stuff  for a profit or loss. Just yesteday I was reminded that business, generally is pretty good but BUT for the government bureaucracy that now exists in attaining capital loans being slowed to snail pace due to government red tape. How sad but how true! And this revelation is from a CEO friend of an excellent local company.  Government must clear out the impediments to the sourcing of investment capital and not try siphone more tax dollars or borrowed dollars from foreign govenments taking on more US influence via the debt load of our future we are selling the Piper for the US rats will, by definition, have to dance to their tune ... and we are dancing in high steps!

I keep having this sense that this president, as we all have faced in our lives, has come to that place where all leaders do that this thing they aspired to is really so much biggier than he that it is just too big and too ugly and too fraught with difficulty to climb out of the ever deepening hole.  This is seasoned terribly with the continuing press of the lavish lifestyle of his wife, inordinate costs to support the First Family on visits when we the common folks are struggling. Leaders should be forced to struggle for that therefore feeds the tabloid view of this president really staying above the swamp, remaining aloof and elitist in gut level actions which only serves to feed the angst of the public and world is feeling.

The Bible speaks at great length in the Old Testament that kings are successful by the advisors the puts around him assuming that means he listens. I am pretty much convinced he calls them toegther, gets the photo ops, drinks a coffee and thanks them and departs on his own agenda; an agenda even his party has apparently stepped back from.  As tis article points out, it is pretty telling when the Wus of the Decade in Harry Reid states the president needs to be more aggressive. that is a sad testimony!

Yes, I am very disappointed in this president for so many great hopes for so many people be dashed on the rocks of uncaring, elitism, a sense of aloofness form the common man.  I want a president to focus on the needs of ME and not synonymed by descriptors of knucking, duck and weave and simply not taking on the fight.  FIGHT MR PRESDENT. Show the world you can rise about being so presidential ands do something to mark your tenure. Right now your marks are pocks markets after a long winter. You sir have disappointed me on a scale with Carter and honestly I thought that an impossible new low to be attained but you have!

September 3, 2011

One and Done?

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON
ONE day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.”
On the razor’s edge of another recession; blocked at every turn by Republicans determined to slice him up at any cost; starting an unexpectedly daunting re-election bid; and puzzling over how to make a prime-time speech about infrastructure and payroll taxes soar, maybe President Obama is wishing that he had thrown the game.
The leader who was once a luminescent, inspirational force is now just a guy in a really bad spot.
His Republican rivals for 2012 have gone to town on the Labor Day weekend news of zero job growth, using the same line of attack Hillary used in 2008: Enough with the big speeches! What about some action?
Polls show that most Americans still like and trust the president; but they may no longer have faith that he’s a smarty-pants who can fix the economy.
Just as Obama miscalculated in 2009 when Democrats had total control of Congress, holding out hope that G.O.P. lawmakers would come around on health care after all but three senators had refused to vote for the stimulus bill; just as he misread John Boehner this summer, clinging like a scorned lover to a dream that the speaker would drop his demanding new inamorata, the Tea Party, to strike a “grand” budget bargain, so the president once more set a trap for himself and gave Boehner the opportunity to dis him on the timing of his jobs speech this week.
Obama’s re-election chances depend on painting the Republicans as disrespectful. So why would the White House act disrespectful by scheduling a speech to a joint session of Congress at the exact time when the Republicans already had a debate planned?
And why is the White House so cocky about Obama as a TV draw against quick-draw Rick Perry? As James Carville acerbically noted, given a choice between watching an Obama speech and a G.O.P. debate, “I’d watch the debate, and I’m
The White House caved, of course, and moved to Thursday, because there’s nothing the Republicans say that he won’t eagerly meet halfway.
No. 2 on David Letterman’s Top Ten List of the president’s plans for Labor Day: “Pretty much whatever the Republicans tell him he can do.”
On MSNBC, the anchors were wistfully listening to old F.D.R. speeches, wishing that this president had some of that fight. But Obama can’t turn into F.D.R. for the campaign because he aspires to the class that F.D.R. was a traitor to; and he can’t turn into Harry Truman because he lacks the common touch. He has an acquired elitism.
MSNBC’s Matt Miller offered “a public service” to journalists talking about Obama — a list of synonyms for cave: “Buckle, fold, concede, bend, defer, submit, give in, knuckle under, kowtow, surrender, yield, comply, capitulate.”
And it wasn’t exactly Morning in America when Obama sent out a mass e-mail to supporters Wednesday under the heading “Frustrated.”
It unfortunately echoed a November 2010 parody in The Onion with the headline, “Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail.”
“Throughout,” The Onion teased, “the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China’s undervalued currency, Boston’s Logan Airport, and tort reform.”
You know you’re in trouble when Harry Reid says you should be more aggressive.
If the languid Obama had not done his usual irritating fourth-quarter play, if he had presented a jobs plan a year ago and fought for it, he wouldn’t have needed to elevate the setting. How will he up the ante next time? A speech from the space station?
Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech.
Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.
The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.
The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.
After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.
“The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”
The arc of justice is stuck at the top of a mountain. Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.