Sunday, June 5, 2011

Obama Declares Victory!

This graph from the Calculated Risk blog shows you why Obama's "cool indifference" to horrible economic performance has gotten the Republican party so excited. They smell blood in the water and are now closing in for a 2012 kill...

Click to Enlarge

I'm amazed that Obama failed to learn the lesson of 1992 when Clinton astutely used the magic "open sesame" to winning the presidency: "it's the economy, stupid".

Obama has consistently, stupidly, obstinately claimed since Spring 2009 that his stimulus bill has "done the job" and was "what was needed" and "saved the country". If FDR behaved the way Obama does, then in April 1942 after the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, he would have declared "victory" over Japan and brought all the troops home.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

RY;

Military actions aren't treated the same as social economic policies.. We don't pull out or quit pouring money into war or arms build up..

but the point is still made.. This should have been treated like war.. Just as Roosevelt declared in his inaugural address. Obama should have acted as if he were fighting a war and it should have been treated as if the enemy were on our soil already destroying our country and lives.

RYviewpoint said...

Thomas:

I so badly wanted Obama to be a great leader. I read his books Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope and thought, this guy is intelligent, articulate, and has his heart in the right place. I heard during the 2008 campaign that he was reading about Lincoln because he felt his own presidency would be pivotal in American history. Again my hopes soared.

But early on I started being disappointed. The guy kept falling short of delivering on his promises, of acting with vision and decisiveness, and living up to the hype. Sure he can give a great speech. But where is the heart and dedication for helping "the little people" that he claimed to have. I've seen him make sure the business and the Wall Street types get their bread buttered, but I've seen precious little for ordinary people.

His stimulus was too small, he negotiates by giving away all his chips, his mortgage foreclosure program was a disaster, and he has done next to nothing for jobs.

You and I agree that he should have done a WPA-style program to get people earning a wage back in early 2009. That would have given a real boost to the economy. Keynes joked that in this kind of situation you can hire people to dig holes and others to fill them in. The job & the pay cheque are what is important. That's the way to get money flowing. But Obama chose to go with Bush-style tax cuts (mostly to the rich) and lots of money dumped on Wall Street while several hundred small banks have gone bankrupt over the last 2.5 years and nearly 1,000 others are tottering on bankruptcy. He saved the idiots whose crimes created the disaster, but he is "reluctant" to save the victims! Nutty!