Obama presidency total disaster
If, sometime prior to the Gulf oil spill you had heard the word “boom,” you might have thought of a drum being banged or an economy taking off. And if the word “skimmer” had been uttered nearby, you might have thought of a certain kind of spoon or particular sorts of birds. Those words have different meanings to many of us now, and they could be words that sink the presidency of Barack Obama.
What we have been learning is that “boom” and “skimmer” can also refer to equipment used to confine and collect oil in water. And what we have also discovered is that the Obama administration initially turned its back on foreign countries that were saying: “Look, we have some terrific booms and skimmers, we know how to use them as well as anyone in the world and we are prepared to help save you from that BP-initiated environmental catastrophe if you’ll let us.”
I had been willing to give Obama a bit of a break on the spill. Yes, his regulators had disregarded the law in awarding a permit to BP and his blame-Bush prattle about how long it takes to change a “culture” was bogus. His trashing of BP while BP was a vital partner struck me as counterproductive politics. His talk of kicking some rear ends was phony. The administration could have done more to get sand barriers up. But I was not convinced there was much else he could have done to make a decisive difference in what was clearly a perplexing, extremely difficult situation.
Now I am, and as I look at this along with everything else that’s happened since the inauguration – the health-care travesty, the stimulus farce, the America-is-bad speeches abroad, the ignoring of laws, the march toward ruin by debt accumulation and more – I realize that we as a nation are in a fix. It’s not just that the guy is inexperienced as many noted before he was elected. Or that he’s far to the left of a lot of us. Or that he and those around him are scarily arrogant. It hits me now as it has failed to hit me before that this very smart guy, this powerfully attractive personality, is a presidential disaster.
The health-care remake sums it up better than anything.
It was enacted on the back of horror stories as if it would make them all cease when in fact no one much knew what it would actually do and the small good that was in it could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost. We now know it will make health care far more expensive and probably worsen it as hospitals fold, that it will send insurance premiums and taxes up and that right now – as this nation is struggling to come out of a recession – it is striking fear in the hearts of business operators. It’s going to be more expensive for many to hire additional hands, and they’re backing off.
Adding a new entitlement to the ones already threatening to ruin us economically hardly emboldens the private sector, either. Obama has us on a march toward a $10 trillion jump in the national debt by 2020 and offers as a solution little more than a commission to look into it at some point.
Meanwhile, on top of a clumsily constructed stimulus that cost as much as the war in Iraq, he wants billions more to bail out state and local governments that ought to be dealing themselves with what their own irresponsibility has wrought.
As bad as this oil spill is, we could have worse problems from such things as a terrorist attack with biological weapons capable of killing tens of thousands, and here is a question: Do we want as president someone who will tell us after containment efforts have failed that, yes, he wanted to address that, and is very sorry, but his appointees had a hard time changing the bureaucratic culture quickly enough?
I don’t think so.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.