The Failure of an American President

I have no desire at all for a president to fail. But when a president does in fact fail, I think it is all too imperative that the American people recognize this, despite any party affliliations one may have, or any other biases for that matter. To do anything else is to the detriment of the institution of the presidency of the United States, and to the country itself.

I think in the case of president Barack Obama, his failure to the American people is all too obvious, and on many levels. But also obvious is that part of the reason that the president has managed to escape his own failures is that a large population of Americans are simply disengaged from the issues that rule the day. Even worse, I think the pool of these disengaged Americans, whom are otherwise often referred to as the uninformed voter, is a growing pool.

How else could president Barack Obama have been reelected but without the support of uninformed voters?

During his presidency gas prices doubled, and median household income was slashed by a whopping $4,000 a year. Not only that, but unemployment rates were sustained above 8% for a stubborn 40 months or so. And something I find interesting that doesn't seem to get a lot of attention is a statement made by Congressman Betty Sutton that in 2010, on average, 23 manufacturing facilities were permanently shuttered every single day.

The latter I find particularly interesting considering democrats have always been on the side of American labor and jobs. Moreover, manufacturing jobs are the bread and butter of the middle class, and provide good paying jobs to people who perhaps have less opportunity to go to college—in other words, the working class that democrats have always touted being on the side of obviously received no benefit whatsoever from the Obama administration during his first term in office when so many promises were made that he would fix a broken economy, and put hard working middle class America back to work.

Back to work where would be a good question since few businesses were hiring, and any new businesses in the green economy that Barack Obama claimed would provide new jobs with great pay for struggling American workers mostly have all gone bankrupt.

The green economy has produced no real new jobs for anyone, and while unemployment numbers may be showing some indication of improving, we are not even close to replacing the total of lost jobs since the beginning and end of the Great Recession.

And then of course, there was Benghazi, which I think would have been a terrible blow to any president on any side of the aisle seeking reelection. Four Americans died. And it is clear that the Obama administration lied to the American people about what happened. Moreover, the failure by the Administration to keep Americans safe in regions where there were obvious threats to safety, was all but ignored by the people who helped to keep president Obama in the White House.

My point in all of this is that it is okay to give a shot to the new kid in town. Barack Obama came onto the scene almost out of nowhere and was able to connect with the American people, and brought great messages of hope and change, and made a promise to the American people that he would be the great leader in restoring the faith of the American people in their government. He was going to fix things and make life better for everyone. But he did none of these things. And it is not okay to fail to recognize this. It is not okay to overlook failures.

The people did not overlook the failures of Richard Nixon. Nor did they overlook the failures of Jimmy Carter. The American people got it. Something was wrong, and the American people were paying focused attention to the details. The American people on both sides of the aisle did not allow for excuses to be made.

Richard Nixon resigned, in part, because he knew that to do otherwise would damage the country, and he knew that to continue to serve in the office of the president was not in the best interest of the American people. And Jimmy Carter was not reelected because clearly no one was better off than they were when he took office.

As a result of uninformed voters and disengaged Americans, a president was allowed to slide past the radar, and allowed to perpetuate the course of failure, and this may prove a very difficult course to reverse. The impact on the American people and the American way of life has been severely compromised in my opinion, and while I am not suggesting doomsday has arrived, I think it can only get worse.

Now we have the IRS scandal, the AP scandal, and we still don't know what happened in Benghazi. Of course there was Fast and Furious. And the economy is still in the slowest recovery mode in history. Worst of all, the president has only increased his belief in the policies that have yet to be proven to have helped in any way.

Failure is not something to hope for at all. But it is also not something to be ignored.

WHO'S GOT THE AMERICAN WORKER'S BACK?

Partisanship is something that really gets under my skin. To me, you can be a republican and agree with a democrat and vice versa. You can be against 99 out of 100 policies that Barack Obama supports, but still support one. Granted, partisanship is played out in exactly the same way on both sides of the aisle, so if George Bush were still the president you could put his name in place of Barack Obama's name and have the same argument. Democrats can support one out of 100 policies that Bush supports.

It's not even a tall order.

The latest debacle comes out of this whole debate as to whether or not we (the republicans) should allow more pork barrell spending by already out of control spending democrats in order to ensure that the hard working Americans who are currently unemployed—thanks to the still high rate of unemployment, which is thanks to the anti-business Obama administration and all of his democratic cronies—don't have their unemployment insurance benefits stopped.

Sure. Spending is a serious issue. It's way out of control. At some point in the very near future we are going to have to take drastic and serious measures to curtail spending at every turn. Even democrat Erskine Bowles, on the debt commission, has said we will have grave consequences if we do not do something soon. But not this very moment. Not on the backs of the American worker who is in need of his benefits right now. We can play politics later. But now is the time to give the unemployed worker at least his benefits.

The thing here is that of course the democrats want to make the republicans look bad by blaming them for the lack of benefits arriving in the mail. Even my democrat cousin snidely told me on the phone, "Yeah, how about your republicans on the workers?" So, the blame is landing squarely on the republicans so long as no benefits are coming. And yes. I don't think there is any disputing that there are things the democrats included in this bill that would turn republicans heads on the real underyling issue.

But the republicans are essentially doing exactly the same thing. That is, they are trying to make the democrats look bad by saying, "It's not our fault your benefits have stopped. The democrats are to blame for putting too much pork into the bill that would have allowed your benefits."

We have to put this all into the proper perspective. This is posturing. Spending is an issue now? After we've dished out trillions of dollars in bailout monies to AIG? To Citibank? To General Motors? We want to talk about reigning in spending now? Let me just point out that the amount of money, pork included, we're talking about literally pales in comparison to the amount of money we've already laid out. And, add in the thought that there is still hundreds of billions of dollars of already approved, unspent stimulus dollars the president said we could spend any way we want to—we could get this done. We could get these benefits done.

It's all partisan politics. It's game playing. It's setting the stage for issues to come to the fore for the mid-term elections. It's a game that aims to shift anger at the democrats to anger at the republicans.

The republicans are letting the democrats get away with it.

The fact is that these folks who recieve unemployment benefits are the very same people who worked and paid taxes to pay for the bailout. They paid taxes into the federal system that will pay for the extension of benefits. They paid the taxes which paid for people to get a credit to buy a new car, or buy their first home. They are out of work largely not by their own design, but rather as a result of the shenanigans of their government and some of the largest corporations in the world.

The last people that should be left out are them. The hard-working, tax paying American worker who is right now out of work. The last people who should be allowing this are the republican party—truly the party of the American worker thanks to its pro-business stance. Voting against this bill is a vote against the American worker for whatever reason.

As for the partisanship? Well, it's just one more example that on either side, democrat or republican, they really have no clue what the average American is having to go through right now. And besides that, think about how much debate went into deciding over the last pay raises that went through Congress and the Senate. It was a very quick vote with not much debate at all, if any at all. Spending wasn't an issue there, was it?

At every turn the American worker is simply being told, "You're going to have to suck it up." It looks to me right now that there is no one who has the American worker's back. Not the democrats. And sadly, not the republicans either.

More great reading:

American Workers Should Not Get The Shaft
It happens now and again that I find myself on the opposite side of the fence of fellow republicans. In the case of the question of whether or not we should be extending unemployment benefits, I'm on the side of the fence that says we most certainly should. With unemployment numbers still around 9.5%, there are a lot of people who are looking for work. In the meantime, getting a small pittance, which is essentially what unemployment benefits are, is helpful to simply stay above water as much as possible...
Our Liar-in-Chief is at it Again!
I just watched King Teleprompter's latest Rose Garden speech in which he continued to show his ignorance and he spewed even more of his all-too-common lies. In fact, he was accompanied by three "average" Americans who are unemployed and have been searching, fruitlessly, for a new job...

25,000 More People Out of Work Last Week

I think it's terrible that the jobless numbers rose by the largest amount in over 3 months. Still, I think we have to get it into our mindsets that this is going to happen. We're letting these numbers rip the stock market to shreds, and we're acting surprised when we see that people are still having difficulty finding and keeping work. Companies are not hiring, in fact they are firing.

This is the reality. No news here.

We're not out of the woods yet. We're not going to be out of the woods for a long time to come. Things simply don't happen lickity-split. We have to have patience and sensibility with regard to this situation. Until people have a sense of security about where their next dollar is going to come from, there is going to be a holding back from spending. That's going to curtail demand. And that curtailed demand is going to put pressure on companies who may want to hire more workers.

You can't do it, and they are not going to do it (that is, hire workers) if customers aren't buying their products or services.

Unemployment numbers are abysmal. I don't like them anymore than the next guy. But patience, I think, is in order here. And again, sensibility. We can't keep reacting to the news like it's news. And by the way, the only reason the numbers improved over the last three months or so was because of the hired census workers. That was at least a large part of it.

So, weren't we simply ripe for a little setback? Like what's going on in the stock market right now. Weren't we simply ripe for that too?