At the official kickoff of his reelection campaign, President Obama offered a tacit (although unintended) admission of four years of failure, declaring, “We have to move forward, to the future we imagined in 2008. … That’s why I’m running for a second term as president of the United States.” This peculiar yet revealing emphasis on the future, the past, and the imaginary neglects only two things: the present and reality. Lacking laudable achievements to tout in the present, Obama wants voters to focus on the future they imagined in the past. This is what he means by moving “forward.”
As viewers watch the Democratic Convention unfold this week in Charlotte, they will hear a steady dose of emphasis on the increasingly distant past (“it’s Bush’s fault”) and the still-imaginary future. But they will hear precious little about the present—about achievements by the Obama administration that are bearing fruit in the present day lives of everyday Americans.
In four years, Obama has spearheaded the passage of two major pieces of legislation: his economic “stimulus” and Obamacare. Viewers likely won’t hear much about either.
On the “stimulus,” they likely won’t hear Obama—or his party—talk about the estimate published by Obama’s own economists, which says that for every $317,000 in taxpayer-provided “stimulus” money that has been spent, just one job has been created or saved. Obama and his party hardly want to highlight the paltry bang that Americans have gotten for each of the $831,000,000,000 in “stimulus” bucks that have made (or are still making) their way out the door. Moreover, as Paul Ryan saidWednesday night at the GOP convention, “That money wasn’t just spent and wasted—it wasborrowed, spent, and wasted.”
Indeed, viewers likely won’t hear Obama or the Democrats note that the national debt has risen more in a single term under Obama than it has in two terms under any other president.
Read more at The Weekly Standard
