8/17/2011

The Neverending Campaign

What is it about President Obama that he cannot stop campaigning? You would think that once he won the election in 2008 that he would be able to switch from campaign mode to governing mode, but no, it appears he was never able to make that transition.

Maybe it's because all he's done since he ran for office in Illinois is campaign, starting at the state level and working his way all the to the White House. He's been in the office of the highest elected official in the country, the pinnacle of any political career, and he can't stop campaigning.

From the day of his inauguration all his speeches have sounded more like stump speeches rather than Presidential speeches.

The very first speech he gave as President – his inaugural speech – sounded like a campaign speech, slamming his predecessor for 'everything that had gone wrong'. Never mind that no newly inaugurated president has ever done that before, particularly when his predecessor was standing nearby.

His State of the Union addresses have been anything but, being more about him and what he was going to do rather than being about he state of our nation. (His first SOTU speech used the word “I” 96 times and “me” 8 times. George Bush's last SOTU speech used “I” 39 times and “me” 2 times.) It was yet another campaign speech, meaningless noise quickly forgotten.

Now he's out on the stump again, this time in a $1 million+ tour bus (built in Canada), telling us yet again what he's going to to. Not that he's telling anyone how he'll do what he's promised (he never does), but he'll place the blame on the GOP for his failures, past, present, and future. It's interesting that he blames the GOP for his failures in 2009 ans 2010 even though for both of those years he had a solid Democrat majority in both the House and the Senate. His failures are his and his alone because he's incapable of leading.

He has not shown one iota of leadership, leaving all the heavy lifting to Congress, his czars, and his advisers. He has not presented an acceptable budget since he took office. He let Nancy and Harry put together that odious piece of legislation known derisively as ObamaCare and signed the bill even though it would do nothing more than destroy one of the greatest health care systems in the world, all in the name of “fairness”. (One has to wonder what the word actually means to Obama, because I doubt it means the same thing to him and his progressive cronies as it does to the other 300 million+ Americans.)

And so the Neverending Campaign continues.