| August 09, 2012 The speech by President Barack Hussein Obama in Roanoke, Virginia – where he made known his feelings about the free enterprise system and entrepreneurs – was significant for those remarks and for how they were made.
Obama was speaking without a teleprompter. In other words, the familiar sing-song and head nodding back and forth as if he were watching an ultra-slow motion Ping-Pong match were gone, but so was someone else putting words in his mouth.
President Abraham Lincoln may have actually written the Gettysburg Address on the train going to the speech – that was before my time – but in modern times presidents do not write speeches. Most of the time they spend working on speeches is spent working with speechwriters. But this was a more informal speech for Obama, where he was not reading it word for word from the teleprompters.
Once he gets up there in front of the cameras he can say anything he wants and his handlers can't stop him. Certainly they could have worded his statements differently – if he didn't actually say what he meant to say – which is what his supporters are claiming. You would think a great speaker like Obama has been promoted to be would be able to say what he meant to say.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a great writer and a great speaker. When he said, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning," his people were not running around saying he didn't say, "This is not the end." Or what he meant to say was, "This is the end." No, people understood what Churchill had so eloquently said and took it for what it was worth. Of course, Obama has such animosity for Churchill that he couldn't stand to sit in the Oval Office one day with Churchill's bust.
Since there were no teleprompters and it didn't appear that Obama was reading it word for word as he did before an audience of elementary school children earlier in his presidency, one might think that this speech was more from the heart.
The Democrats have been very critical of Republicans including Mitt Romney, for quoting the Roanoke speech. It is incredible, but according to the mainstream media in some twisted way it is unfair to quote Obama word for word, or to actually show him giving the speech because that misrepresents his ideas.
But he did say, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." This is coming from someone who has never had a business or even worked for a business, unless you consider the couple of months that Obama worked in New York before becoming a community organizer in Chicago.
Obama gives all the credit for business success, not to the individual, not to being smart or working hard, but to the government that provided teachers and built bridges and roads.
Imagine if Obama had said, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. Because you have friends and family who have helped you, who have listened to you complain and offered advice. You have pastors who have comforted you and doctors who have kept you well. But no business of any size is a success without employees who work hard with you, to help make your business a success." That would have been a statement that showed Obama understood something about business because he is right in that no one makes it entirely on their own. But he is so entirely wrong to say that the credit for success goes to the government.
But that is how Obama sees the world: More government is the solution to problems. Health care is a problem, then the solution is to have the government take it over. The economy is in trouble? The solution is to spend $1 trillion to make certain that the government doesn't suffer the same level of cutbacks as the private sector.
People according to Obama need to be taxed more, not less, and the government needs to grow to provide more services for more people.
, , ,
The presidential campaign is still not officially underway – since neither candidate is the official candidate of their party until after the party conventions – and it is already ugly and is going to get worse. Obama, with an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent, cannot run on his record. He spent the $1 trillion in stimulus money to get the unemployment rate down and it didn't work. If Obama talks about the $1 trillion in stimulus he opens the door for a mistake that he has admitted to making – there is no such thing as a shovel-ready project. So the $1 trillion that was for shovel-ready projects was for fantasy projects. It reminds voters how little Obama knows about how the government works, how business works or, really, how anything other than a political campaign works. And the indications are that he really doesn't understand political campaigns either.
Four years ago Obama ran what appeared to be a flawless political campaign, but in retrospect it appears that he was running against a Republican that all the other Republicans had beaten when he ran in his campaign mode. It was only when he ran as Sen. John McCain that anyone could tolerate him. When McCain went back to being the Republican presidential candidate, instead of himself, he had already lost. Also Obama could have been caught in the act with a creature from outer space and the media would not have reported it. How many photos did you see of Obama smoking? Do you think the media would have run photos of Sarah Palin smoking if they had them? The media was only going to report good things about Obama and they did. It is why we still know so little about Obama.
The only real source of information we had about Obama was his own book, and then we found out that it is far from a memoir in that he has a composite girlfriend. If the press vetted Obama at all we would know whether or not he was really Rev. Jeremiah Wright's protégé as he once said, or was he just someone who attended that church on occasion because of its political clout in the black community in Chicago. If he was a protégé then Obama needs to explain when he realized that Wright's racist rants against white people in general and Jews in particular went too far and he decided not to be a follower.
If the truth is that he was never really a follower of Wright's, and that is the only church he has ever been a member of according to his book, is he really a Christian? He wasn't raised as Christian. Neither of his parents were Christians. If Wright did not bring him to Christ, who did? And why did he decide not to practice his religion in a formal manner while president.
These are the kinds of questions that you would expect to have answers to about the president of the United States, but evidently asking any question about Obama that he has not already answered is wrong.
, , ,
Along those same lines, it is no surprise, but worth noting, that the mainstream media have become even more liberal and partisan. Back in 2010 and even 2011, with the election at least a year away, the mainstream media were willing to be critical of Obama and to admit that whoever the Republican nominee was that he or she might have some redeeming qualities.
Now that the election is less than three months away, the mainstream media pundits are back to proclaiming Obama the messiah, and Mitt Romney is just some rich guy who inherited a bunch of money, has never really done anything and now wants to buy the presidency. Four years ago when Obama raised more money than any presidential candidate ever had it was because he had the support of the people. Now that Romney is raising more money month after month than Obama it is because Romney is rich. It's amazing how things get reported.
, , ,
One thing that has changed in this election is that no one can argue that Obama doesn't have the experience to be president. He now has more experience than anyone still in the game. He will soon be tied with both George Herbert Walker Bush, and James Earl Carter Jr., but it is unlikely that either one of them will decide to run for another term.
Experience was a good issue for Republicans in 2008, since Obama had not completed a full term in the US Senate and had never been the chief executive of anything other than the Harvard Law Review and his own political campaigns, both of which are a little different from being president. But this time around Romney's experience running a business, running a state and running the Olympics are all good preparation but Obama has him beat when it comes to experience being president.
Now it is easy to argue that Obama's experience as president proves that he shouldn't serve another term, because he hasn't been able to get the economy back on track. It will be interesting to see what the real numbers are for the economy when the election is over. It will be a real surprise if the figures released by the government are not revised in November after the election.
I have no doubt that the government in late November will reveal that the economy is in worse shape than the figures released earlier would indicate. Unemployment will turn out to be higher and economic growth will turn out to be lower, and not reporting it earlier was simply due to an unfortunate mathematical error.
|
Print
Email Link
Feedback
Share
Advanced Search