Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Obama's Elephant in the Room...

...is the GOP Congress as the President does a deft job of trying to reboot his final year with small unilateral steps to get around the pachyderm squatting on the path to economic recovery, leading up to a plea for bipartisan cooperation on larger issues that hits a blank wall in the faces of McConnell, Boehner, Cantor and their Tea Party obstructionists.

Without explicit blame, Barack Obama (the man knows how to work a room) acts out a psychodrama of the leader who killed bin Laden and saved Detroit but could not overcome the intransigence of Republicans who say no to everything.

Only at the end, does he allude to the elephant in the room: “The greatest blow to our confidence in our economy last year didn’t come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco? I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad--and it seems to get worse every year.”

For a rebuttal, Republicans send out smooth Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who asserts, “It’s not fair and it’s not true for the president to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down nearly time and again by the president and his Democrat Senate allies.

“No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others.”

Say what? Daniels, who would have been crushed in 18 Obama-bashing debates if he had sought the presidential nomination, offers no evidence for these bizarre claims but Mitt Romney, taking time out from explaining away his 14 percent tax rate on last year’s income of $21.7 million, reacts to the State of the Union with puzzlement.

“What he says and what he does are so dramatically different. Where was he during his first two years? Why didn’t he get these things done during his first two years?”

In watching the President’s speech, Romney was looking right at the reason, his own party’s elephant in the room. If he can get past Newt Gingrich in the primaries, the President no doubt will explain it all to him on the campaign trail later in the year.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What an idiotic interpretation of events. There was no Republican obstruction for the first two years of this presidency. And oddly, the only results were ridiculous and expensive "accomplishments" like GM, Solyndra, schip, Obamacare and a boondoggle $790 BILLION stimulus - none of which the people paying the bills want now or then. Obama's and the Democrat's social & socialist spending is the problem; when are you clowns going to understand that?

And throughout it all, Obama has blamed Bush policy for the economy yet has no difficulty taking all credit for the 9 1/2 years of intelligence work that led to 'getting' OBL and the fact we have not been attacked again. This guy needs to GO.

Anonymous said...

"There was no Republican obstruction for the first two years of this presidency." That is possibly the most delusional piece of history revision that I have ever heard. Please do a quick search on Senate Filibusters in 2009 and 2010, and then please justify this statement. The ONLY reason that I can see that most of these policies were because they were so watered down in order to get just one "group thinking" Republican Senator to break the filibuster.

Also, I am a native of Detroit, and I would like to personally thank the President for the LOAN to GM (which they have paid back). It is better to still have them as an American owned company (unlike Fiat - Chrysler). Would you really have rather that they went into bankruptcy, and we ended up with General Toyota or General Honda? No thanks.