By Dale Glading | The Save Jersey Blog
I have a favor to ask of President Obama. As an American citizen, I assume I have that right because as a taxpayer, I pay his salary. So here goes…
Mr. President, please stop campaigning!
I will readily admit that I didn’t vote for then Senator Obama in 2008 because I disagreed with his positions, and found him to be both too shallow and too inexperienced to serve as president. And after his disastrous first term, I sure didn’t vote for him in 2012.
But the point remains that he is our duly-elected president. Unless fraud was committed on a grand and unprecedented scale, Mr. Obama won fairly and squarely both times.
Which is why I scratch my head every time I see President Obama out on the campaign trail, delivering one canned stump speech after another.
Unless I am misreading or misinterpreting the 22nd amendment, President Obama is ineligible to run for a third term in office. The undeniable truth is that – whether it is Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Martin O’Malley, Elizabeth Warren or someone else – there will be a name other than Barack Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2016.
But you wouldn’t know it by Mr. Obama’s actions.
Pitting the rich against the poor – or the middle class against both – President Obama sounds more like a candidate trying to win the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary than a sitting president seeking to unify a fractured nation.
Maybe his campaign-style rhetoric is aimed at diverting attention from the failed rollout of Obamacare, his recent foreign policy debacles, or the still stagnant economy.
I know that sounds a bit cynical, but I think it is also a fairly accurate assessment. And honestly, I would hate to consider the alternative.
Could it be that our campaigner-in-chief simply doesn’t know how to govern, let alone lead? And so, every time he faces a situation for which he is ill-prepared and for which he lacks the necessary skill set, he pushes the reset button and returns to his default setting – which is campaigning ad nauseam.
The unseemly pattern goes like this. President Obama leaves Washington after almost seven years – two as a senator and five as president – and returns to the campaign trail, where he feels most comfortable and where he can better orchestrate events filled with photo-ops and sound bites.
Safely back in campaign mode, he feebly and disingenuously tries to portray himself as an outsider, fearlessly taking on the Washington elite despite the fact that he is a card-carrying member. He is equally adept at pointing fingers at everyone but himself for our nation’s woes, conveniently laying all the blame at the feet of the opposition party.
The problem is that Americans have seen this tired Vaudeville act before. These days, President Obama more closely resembles an aging actor, vainly and futilely trying to recapture his former glory in some off-Broadway production. Sadly, his theatrics that used to pack the house are now playing to a sparse audience.
Thankfully, the traveling Obama road show is slated to close in just three more years.
It's the only thing he's good at.
“If you wonder why the House must use the debt limit to force the President to focus on deficit reduction, you need look no further than the President’s speech this morning. The President said that the work fixing the debt and deficit is already more than halfway done and signed into law. Do any of you believe that is true? Of course not. Not only is the work not halfway done, but it has really just barely begun. I would love to work with the President on reducing deficits, but he doesn't want to work with me. He could have done it through the Joint Select Committee in 2011, but he refused. He could have done it in the Fiscal Cliff debate, but he refused. He doesn’t believe that debt and deficits are the catastrophic problems that I believe that they are. President Obama's record-high deficits will destroy our economy and thus our freedoms. So, no, Mr. President, you will not get my vote on increasing the debt limit until you agree to limit the spending that is driving the debt ceiling higher.”
He is equally adept at pointing fingers at everyone but himself for our nation’s woes, conveniently laying all the blame at the feet of the opposition party.glory in some off-Broadway production. Sadly, his theatrics that used to pack the house are now playing to a sparse audience.thanks