Magical Misery Tour

President Obama: Insensitive Man

Mark Noonan30 Comments

Not satisfied with how going to Martha’s Vineyard will look to average Americans struggling to make ends meet, the President went for broke and also got himself a couple of massively expensive campaign buses…made in Canada!

I know, I know – it probably was the Secret Service which insisted upon a particular type of bus, and it may well be that the Canadian company is best to make them.  But a little bit of thought needs to go on here…while Americans are having trouble finding work, it just isn’t sensible for an America President to buy foreign goods.  Period.  End of story.  No, you don’t get to say “but” and come up with an explanation.  It doesn’t matter.  It simply should not have been done.  Either buy an American bus, or don’t buy one at all.

This is a stupid, self-inflicted wound.  And it doesn’t stand alone – the President’s frequent golf dates and the First Lady’s massively lavish vacations have fed in to this “let ’em eat cake” perception.  Over the past three years it has grown upon the American mind that the President doesn’t know and doesn’t care how average Americans live…this trip to the refuge of the super-rich after a short ride around “fly-over America” in a Canadian bus has set the perception in stone:  the President is callously insensitive.

Lots of things can happen between now and the election next year…but it is quite possible that even now the people have just tuned him out.  He was a mistake, not to be repeated.  And the sooner we’re rid of him, the better.

Obama Feels the Heat

Mark Noonan9 Comments

From Obama’s Magical Misery Tour:

 

Yesterday, at work, I took a call from a customer and after relatively quickly disposing of the issue at hand, I was treated to a 30 minute lecture on how Obama is ruining our nation.  I, naturally, could not comment on this – as an official representative of my employer, it was not for me to engage in partisan politics, regardless of my personal views.  So, I just kind of let it wash over me and after the customer had got it off the chest, I ended the call.  This wasn’t the first such unsolicited anti-Obama rhetoric I had received.

I don’t think in all my life I’ve ever come across a President who has so greatly angered so many.  While there are those who still worship at the shopworn altar of The One, the bulk of the people can be classed two ways – those who have tuned Obama out, and those who are going to crawl across broken glass on their knees to eject him from office next year.

In this, the massive build up of Obama during the 2008 campaign – which Obama gleefully joined in (remember, the seas were going to start to recede?) – has boomeranged on the President.  He was sold to the public as the answer to all our hopes and dreams – the cure for all that ailed us.  It was an impossible standard to measure up to…and Obama’s problem is not just that he didn’t measure up to the hype (really, the lies…everyone who pumped him up in 2008 knew darn well he wasn’t what they claimed), but that he didn’t even come close.  In addition to this broken dream there is also the growing public perception that Obama has nothing but contempt for the American people (in this I think the majority is mistaken…he doesn’t know enough about us to have contempt for us; he appears just plain and simple ignorant of how life in America outside the government/academic bubble is lived).  It makes for a poisonous stew…and it is reflected in Obama’s cratering approval rating.

In sum, Obama is in deep political trouble, and I don’t know how he gets out of it.  We’ll see what he does – and what the GOP does.