Today is a day of reckoning for the future of America. There is a very real possibility that the federal government will be shut down at the end of this week.
If it is, President Obama will bear the full responsibility for not stepping up and showing leadership at a time of great difficulty for our nation. Strangely, President Obama chose yesterday to launch his bid for re-election amidst two crises which demonstrate with unmistakable clarity why he is so completely and entirely unfit to lead.
First, as the democracy movement in the Middle East accelerates, the President continues to take a back seat to France, NATO, and the UN in setting the foreign policy of the United States. Secondly, in the impasse over the federal budget, which remains unfinished from the last Congress, Obama continues to punt the issue back to House Speaker Boehner instead of taking up the recommendations of his own blue-ribbon fiscal commission.
In one sense, Obama is lashing out with childlike wrath at the voters who no longer support him. In many of his recent speeches, he has adopted a tone of unwilling desperation. He didn’t want to act in Libya, but he had to do something, and he wants to make sure we all know how upset he is about it.
Now that he is no longer adored by crowds of fainting supporters, he exudes an odd sort of self-loathing.
In another sense, today is a day of wrath for the voters who spoke so clearly in November. After enduring repeated insult and injury with the so-called “stimulus package,” the passage of ObamaCare, and head-spinning increases in the size and scope of government, voters elected a Republican majority to the House of Representatives which has brought President Obama and his party to their knees.
Now the only question is not whether there will be cuts, but how big and how painful they will be.
Instead of complaining about sour grapes, the President needed to step up and build a compromise on the budget months ago. There is an old axiom that “inaction is a decision.”
The day of reckoning on Capitol Hill and in the hearts of all Americans is a result of the choice that Obama already made when he voted “present” on the rest of his presidency. He will not be rewarded for this complacency in November 2012.
