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Last night President Obama convinced the television networks to give him twenty prime-time minutes to address the nation. The only surprising thing about his speech is that there were no surprises.
Obama said what he had said last Friday. He must have know that his Friday press conference did not work. His solution was to say the same thing again.
He must have thought that the problem was not with the message or the messenger, but with the listeners.
I conclude that Obama feels misunderstood.
Of course, the speech was demagogic. What did you expect from a demagogue? Yet, the more a demagogue gives the same speech the more he starts sounding like a political hack.
Last night Obama was so unpersuasive, so tone deaf to the popular mood, that he ended up sounding like a pundit.
He also sounded detached from the negotiating process. Neither Congressional Republicans nor Congressional Democrats are now asking for tax hikes. Yet, Obama stuck to his class warfare playbook, attacked the rich, and asked for more new taxes.
This shows that he has succeeded in marginalizing himself.
Think of it: the President of the United States has made himself a bit player in the debt ceiling negotiations. None dare call it leadership.
Worse yet, Obama seems to be going out of his way to prove my point, namely, that he does not know how to negotiate. Last night he gave us a master class in how not to do it.
He kept repeating words like “balanced” and “compromise,” as though he believed that the words themselves would gull the nation into thinking that he favors balanced compromise.
Unsurprisingly, he did dupe the editorial board of the New York Times, but that is not very much of a challenge.
For all the references to balance and compromise, Obama never bothered to offer a single olive branch to Congressional Republicans.
Harshly, he framed issue in us-vs.-them terms. The Republicans were bad guys; they borrowed too much, they taxed too little, they would bear sole responsibility for any economic calamities that befell the nation henceforth.
It was as though Obama had not been president for the past twenty-nine months. You start asking yourself whether he knows who he is.
Candidate Obama then declared the Democrats to be the good guys. They were the party of Ronald Reagan. They balance budgets, and produce budget surpluses. They are the party of fiscal sanity.
As I’ve been saying, you cannot engage a negotiation when you adopt a starkly adversarial posture. No opponent is going to agree with you when agreeing will look and feel like an unconditional surrender.
Coming from someone who was supposed to bring the country together, from someone who was supposed to be a master of oratory, it was a thoroughly embarrassing performance.
Unfortunately, we have been inured to expect as much from Barack Obama.
Obama said what he had said last Friday. He must have know that his Friday press conference did not work. His solution was to say the same thing again.
He must have thought that the problem was not with the message or the messenger, but with the listeners.
I conclude that Obama feels misunderstood.
Of course, the speech was demagogic. What did you expect from a demagogue? Yet, the more a demagogue gives the same speech the more he starts sounding like a political hack.
Last night Obama was so unpersuasive, so tone deaf to the popular mood, that he ended up sounding like a pundit.
He also sounded detached from the negotiating process. Neither Congressional Republicans nor Congressional Democrats are now asking for tax hikes. Yet, Obama stuck to his class warfare playbook, attacked the rich, and asked for more new taxes.
This shows that he has succeeded in marginalizing himself.
Think of it: the President of the United States has made himself a bit player in the debt ceiling negotiations. None dare call it leadership.
Worse yet, Obama seems to be going out of his way to prove my point, namely, that he does not know how to negotiate. Last night he gave us a master class in how not to do it.
He kept repeating words like “balanced” and “compromise,” as though he believed that the words themselves would gull the nation into thinking that he favors balanced compromise.
Unsurprisingly, he did dupe the editorial board of the New York Times, but that is not very much of a challenge.
For all the references to balance and compromise, Obama never bothered to offer a single olive branch to Congressional Republicans.
Harshly, he framed issue in us-vs.-them terms. The Republicans were bad guys; they borrowed too much, they taxed too little, they would bear sole responsibility for any economic calamities that befell the nation henceforth.
It was as though Obama had not been president for the past twenty-nine months. You start asking yourself whether he knows who he is.
Candidate Obama then declared the Democrats to be the good guys. They were the party of Ronald Reagan. They balance budgets, and produce budget surpluses. They are the party of fiscal sanity.
As I’ve been saying, you cannot engage a negotiation when you adopt a starkly adversarial posture. No opponent is going to agree with you when agreeing will look and feel like an unconditional surrender.
Coming from someone who was supposed to bring the country together, from someone who was supposed to be a master of oratory, it was a thoroughly embarrassing performance.
Unfortunately, we have been inured to expect as much from Barack Obama.
5 comments:
notice his use of the word "ask" ... he says we should "ask" the rich to pay their fair share ...
the IRS doesn't ask you to pay your taxes, they tell you to or else ...
How about we "ask" 45+% of working Americans to pay some income tax ?
I would add that nobody is forcing wealthy liberals like Obama from taking all of those deductions. And as has often been noted, nothing is preventing any of the rich liberals from sending more money to the IRS.
Unfortunately, if they are like Warren Buffett they are too busy sheltering their income from taxes by giving it to non-profits. And they are also trying to convince their billionaire friends to shelter their wealth the same way.
Why don't we ask the 50 percent plus who don't pay taxes to pay taxes. Nothing good can come from a tax system that over 50 percent do not pay taxes. If you don't pay them you don't care about the minority that does.
My favorite line, especially after Obama's "Excellent Adventure" tour apologizing to every dictator or tyrant in the world about America, is "America is a great nation......."(SIC) I am beginning to believe Obama should give a lot of speeches because every time he does he marginalizes himself that much more and demonstrates how incompetent he is as President. Strange that one of his supposed "strengths" is what is doing the most damage to him.
Where is his budget ideas? For once lets see him put something in print that he can be held accountable. The time has come to take responsibility and to be accountable, not for voting present as he has done in the past.
Is there a person with a brain that contains active brain cells that believes the NYTimes is actually a newspaper and not a "Viewpaper?" One only has to check the history of the NYTimes glaring errors in logic. They have propped up more dictators, terrorist, and "Fear Societies, than the American government did through "Detente." If one believed the NYTimes about the USSR and how its people just loved being ruled by the Communist Party, one would "unexpectedly" be surprise by its downfall. The NYTimes has been on the wrong side of History so much that I wonder about the people who read it and don't ask questions about what they have just read.
Just check the history of the NYTimes !
And it would seem that The NYTimes knowingly lied about the maid in the DSK affair. How many other articles that appear in the NYTimes are known lies?Now there are enough fact checkers and/or other news outlets that point those lies out and this does not cover the dissembling.
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