Obama’s rhetoric has been fodder for young voters who don’t know any better and for the ignorant voters among us. Unfortunately, unless the economy continues to tank in 2012, his siren songs together with the prospect of a flawed Republican opponent are likely to get him reelected.
YOU’RE FIRED
By Monica Crowley
politicalmavens.com
July 13, 2011
A thought after watching President Obama’s class warfare extravaganza rehash today:
The president is supposed to be America’s CEO. He is supposed to lead, set the agenda, persuade, and manage. Obama has done none of this. In his two and a half years as CEO, he has pushed everything of note on Congress: writing the “stimulus,” writing ObamaCare, writing Dodd-Frank financial regulation, offering budget proposals and deficit reduction ideas. He’s never led. He has let Congress run wild and do all of the heavy lifting, and then he steps in at the midnight hour to scold everyone over the lack of progress.
Think of his failure to lead this way: Under the Constitution, Congress holds the purse strings. So Congress is more like a bank, setting laws and conditions for authorizing credit and money. Sometimes, when a borrower has little or no revenue coming in, he is able to bully the bank with the threat of bankruptcy in which the bank loses much or all of the underlying source of repayment. But in this case, the government is an overleveraged borrower who still has plenty of revenue coming in to support the debt…and the CEO of the business is saying it’s the bank’s problem.
Making congress responsible for what should be the execution of the economy is ridiculous. Congress sets laws and approves money for budgets and rules around that money. It is the president as CEO who is responsible for then “managing.” His own budget, which proposed trillions in new spending, was laughed out of the Senate, voted down 97-0. Meanwhile, instead of fixing that situation with a budget Congress would approve, he punted onto them again. That’s like telling a bank “well, if you won’t lend to me then it’s your problem, and I’m going to keep spending all your money until you freak out.”
No CEO could or would do this. And the fact that some of the bankers support him and some don’t is nothing unusual either. Most companies borrow from syndicates and CEOs must do something that gets all (or a significant number) of the syndicate banks to approve. You can cry all you want that there are opposing banks, but it doesn’t get you the loan.
This is no different. Obama is a CEO dealing with his banks and is not doing what a prudent CEO would do. He would be fired elsewhere.
If you run a business and are overleveraged and the bank says “no more,” you go into “fix it” mode and set plans for how to adjust. Obama sends out Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to play the “threat of bankruptcy” card in a situation in which it doesn’t apply.
So not only is he playing games with our country, but he now seems primarily preoccupied with setting up the post-mortem crisis-management PR, in which he will try to switch the blame for all that is wrong with the economy on to the Republicans who wouldn’t raise the debt ceiling.
It is a game to manipulate the unaware younger voters and the ignorant to create a new bogeyman now that evoking President Bush no longer works. In the meantime, Obama is truly mismanaging our economy and ought to be fired.
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