PrintMay 12, 2011
'The Least Important Person in Washington'
Apparently our campaigner-in-chief didn't get the memo. He seems to think that jetting around the country giving veiled campaign speeches and fundraising appearances is more important than dealing with the real problems the country is facing.
Yesterday he was in Texas looking over the millions of acres of scorched land destroyed by wildfires. Oh, that's right. He didn't have time for that.
He did have time for a speech on immigration reform that was more an attack against the Republicans than a serious call for meaningful change. It lacked any specifics or a plan but was full of partisan attacks:
"We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we've done. But even though we've answered these concerns, I gotta say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time.
You know, they said we needed to triple the Border Patrol. Or now they're going to say we need to quadruple the Border Patrol. Or they'll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat."
In a creative stretch he even tried to tie job creation to immigration reform.
"Look at Intel, look at Google, look at Yahoo, look at eBay. All those great American companies, all the jobs they've created, everything that has helped us take leadership in the high-tech industry, every one of those was founded by, guess who, an immigrant."
Never mind that comparing these educated, LEGAL immigrants to poor, uneducated illegal aliens is like comparing apples and cumquats.
Interestingly, the official White House transcript of the speech even includes call outs by the hand-picked audience. Comments like "We love you!" and "They're racist!" You would almost think these people were planted in the audience. Surprisingly, there was no mention of anybody yelling "You lie!" or mumbling "That's not true."
Similarly, Obama's recent speeches on deficit reduction and oil prices have contained the same lack of substance but were loaded with rhetoric.
They had to pull the guy off the golf course last week and drag him to the situation room for a photo op before claiming full credit for murdering OBL.
You would think that our community-organizer-in-chief would have more important things to do. Even Jimmy Carter understood that the problems of the country had to come before campaigning.
The deficit, the debt ceiling, jobs, chronic unemployment, underemployment, fuel prices, floods, hurricane ravaged towns, the economy, monetary policy, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, trade deficits, illegal immigration, al-Qaida backlash, Obamacare, Medicare, Social Security, drilling moratoriums, over-regulation, housing and foreclosures, etc., etc., etc. Somebody has to take the lead on these things and unfortunately we'll have to wait a couple years for that person to step up since our current leader is too busy trying to raise a billion dollar campaign war chest.
For the time being, Obama has earned the title - Least Important Person in Washington.
