On July 24, 2008, candidate Barack Obama toured Europe and drew 200,000 spectators to a rally in Berlin. On May 5, 2012, President Barack Obama officially launched his reelection campaign—which he unofficially launched over a year ago—but couldn’t fill a 19,000-seat basketball arena in Columbus, Ohio. While the level of enthusiasm has noticeably declined, the message is remarkably similar. Aside from a few stray sentences, Obama sounded no more like a president running on a four-year record of accomplishments when he spoke in Columbus than he had when he’d spoken in Berlin.

Of course, when your two biggest legislative achievements are a hugely unpopular 2,700-page health care overhaul that most Americans want to see repealed (if the Supreme Court doesn’t strike it down first) and a $787,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” that didn’t stimulate much of anything besides the national debt (which has risen from $9.8 trillion at this point in 2008 to $15.7 trillion today), perhaps silence is golden.