If Obama Honeymoon is Over, Is Divorce Next?
I’m not breaking any new ground here or telling you something you don’t already know, but Barack Obama is not exactly living any glory days as President recently. This is kind of reinforced by the following headline I noticed on the Drudge Report on Tuesday: WASHPOSTABCNEWS POLL: Confidence in Obama reaches new low... The report starts out very bluntly by stating that “nearly six in 10 voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country.” If that isn’t even a little sobering to the administration, then they have better poker faces than Darth Vader. This is certainly a far cry from a Jan. 16, 2009 Gallup poll that showed an 83 percent approval rating for then President Elect Obama’s handling of the transition to the Oval Office and a 64 percent confidence rating in his ability to be a good president.
Having said that, here’s a question that many before me have already asked: What the hell happened? I mean...you know...hope and change, man!
One of the most obvious culprits is the economy, which in the last few years has tanked almost worse than Crystal Pepsi, Cop Rock, and Mel Gibson. Now I'm not saying that George W. Bush did not have a hand in the country's current economic situation. There is certainly a degree of validity to some of the claims that the current administration inherited a few things from previous one, namely the fact that spending was already a nightmare under Dubya, particularly in his last couple of years in office. When Obama took office, the federal government was already hemorrhaging money faster than Lindsay Lohan can sweat vodka.
The way I see it, this was a prime opportunity for the president to seize on the "hope and change" theme. No matter how you slice it, the rampant spending wasn't working, and Obama could have truly set himself up for success and shown he was more of a maverick than John McCain if he had simply said, "No more." Instead, what we got was more of the same, especially in the form of the $787 billion stimulus package...you know, the one that the president said in January of last year would cut off the national unemployment rate at 8 percent if it was enacted. I'm happy to report that it worked as promised...oh, wait. What's that, Alex Trebek? "Ooh, sorry. The answer is, 'What is pipe dream?' '" According to the Department of Labor website, unemployment was at 9.5 percent in June, but hey, at least it didn't hit 12 or 13 percent. Right, Mr. President?
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