Obama’s “Major” Economic Speech A Dud

Obama gave an address in Cleveland which was billed as a major economic speech. The President droned on for 54 minutes, boring even his adoring press. He offered nothing new at all, which makes one wonder why this was billed as a major speech. He has no new policies, no new ideas and no new pieces of legislation to introduce. It makes you wonder why he thinks people will vote for him in November. This is a President completely devoid of ideas whose best argument seems to be that Republicans hate clean water, children, grandma and the middle class. During the address you were waiting for him to get out the Alpo can and accuse Republicans of wanting grandma to eat dog food.

Obama seems utterly convinced that the stalemate between the House and White House and Senate is the cause of all of our problems. That is when the cause of all our problems isn’t Bush. Does anyone believe that if Obama is re-elected the stalemate that currently exists in DC will go away? Few are predicting that the Democrats will win the House and it seems almost inevitable that the Republicans will win the Senate considering several high profile Dems are retiring in historic Republican states. If Obama is re-elected, the country will be asking for more stalemate, not less. Surely Obama knows this or does he really believe 2012 will be a 2008 repeat?

Part of the problem is that Obama is spending his time blaming politics in DC as though he isn’t part of the problem. He isn’t the President who told Republicans “I won” and therefore won’t be listening to any of your proposals. He isn’t the guy who refused to even attempt to get a single Republican to vote for Obamacare, even though there were two liberal Senators willing to listen and negotiate. That even liberal Sen. Olympia Snowe can’t be dealt with by Obama suggests the real problem in DC isn’t dastardly Republicans who hate Obama. The problem is Obama. Yet he seems to live in this fantasy world where he isn’t part of DC politics.

Even if there wasn’t a stalemate, Obama would still be blaming Bush. We’re three and a half years into Obama’s Presidency and he’s still blaming the last guy for all his problems. He simply refuses to take ownership for the economy, which is currently floundering thanks to his policies. The economy was on the down swing when Bush left office but Obama has done nothing to make it better. We had 389,000 new unemployment claims last week, which will no doubt be revised up by next weeks report. Our unemployment rate is 8.2% but if we counted the same number of people in the workforce as we did when Obama took office the unemployment rate would be around 11%.

Obama may have taken office during a downturn but he has completely failed to create government policies that will turn things around. Instead he spent a year on Obamacare, which no one wants. Since Republicans took control of the House, Obama has largely taken an all or nothing approach. Either the GOP does what he wants or he’ll do nothing at all. He won’t even negotiate with them. At some point it doesn’t matter what Bush left Obama, it’s up to the current President to fix things. He hasn’t done it. Yet his re-election sales pitch seems to be that we should give him four more years just to see if his plans, which haven’t worked so far, will eventually work.

Romney must be loving every second of this. Obama’s delivering meaningless “major” speeches that don’t include any new proposals or even the slightest outlook for a second term. His scare tactics are almost laughable at this point. The mainstream press is bored to tears and only the most ardent Obama ideologue is excited about his speech. He would have been better off keeping his mouth shut in Cleveland and instead enjoying a pastrami sandwich with the gang at Corky & Lenny’s. Romney has a real opening if this sort of economic speech is what Obama will be relying on for the next five months.