Where Is Your Soaring Rhetoric Now, Mr. President?

by Charles Hurt

Oct 26, 2014 9:14 PM PT

President Obama is about as popular on the campaign trail these days as the Ebola virus.

Democrats flee from him. At the mere mention of his name, they betray him. Facing dejected and angry voters, Democrats play dumb and pretend they never supported him.

Where is all your soaring rhetoric now, Mr. President? What have you done with those fake columns from your big speech in 2008 that you held in the modest venue of the Broncos' Mile High Stadium? Where is all that hope you told us about?

Nobody is "fired up" anymore. Nobody is "ready to go" anymore.

Now it is: "Fed up! Ready to leave!"

It is sad to watch the ancient faded rock star desperately search for anybody willing to associate with him.

Finally, this week, Al Sharpton answered the sad call and let him in from the darkness.

"The bottom line," the dejected and bewildered president said, "is these are all folks who vote with me. They have supported my agenda in Congress."

Mr. Sharpton listened therapeutically, if not exactly sympathetically.

Always able to rally unjustified pride in himself, the president then said it's not about "my feelings being hurt." He just wants to set the truth free, remind the world how much they all once adored him.

"These are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me," he said of the unrequited love.

Take one look at the president's record (rubber-stamped by Democrats in Congress currently on the ballot), and what you see is a monument to failure. And while that failure belongs mostly to the president, his Democratic minions in Congress cannot escape blame.

Democrats have controlled at least half of his failure during Obama's entire presidency. For two of those years, they controlled both chambers. And part of those two years, they held a filibuster-proof majority.

In other words, Mr. Obama had every ounce of power at his disposal to create the utopia of his wildest dreams. But just look at what he has done:

Economy: Economists can debate tax rates and employment figures today, but one thing is absolutely indisputably certain: "Income inequality" is higher today after six years of Obama policies than at any time during modern U.S. history.

"By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then," Mr. Obama's Fed Chairman Janet Yellen said last week.

Somewhere Jay Gatsby is blushing.

War: The entire premise of the Obama presidency is that the war in Iraq was a fool's errand, and President Bush should never have gotten into it. It was the only reason Mr. Obama wrestled the Democratic nomination from Hillary Rodham Clinton, and it was one of the primary reasons he beat Republican John McCain.

After surrendering Iraq to terrorists, Mr. Obama has launched a whole new war in Iraq at a cost of up to $22 billion annually. It is a stunning admission of total error by this president and leaves his antiwar credentials in tatters.

Gitmo: The first order Mr. Obama signed upon entering the White House directed the closure of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. Today, nearly six years later, it remains open.

Environment: Wipe clear all the voodoo and religion surrounding global warming, and there is only one goal these people seek: Jack energy prices through the roof so that turning on a light or driving to the grocery store hurts so bad that Americans surrender and become inhabitants of an unindustrialized Third World country. This is the theory behind their "war on coal."

In a moment of unguarded excitement speaking to a newspaper editorial board in San Francisco in 2008, Mr. Obama admitted just that. "Under my plan," he told them, "electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket."

Today, gas prices have fallen below $3 a gallon, and experts predict they could fall another couple of dimes to levels not seen since before Mr. Obama took office. While this is good news for most Americans, it is a wooden stake in the heart for the voodoo global warming crowd.

Race: Remember all the gauzy promises about a "post-partisan" and "post-racial" society America would become after electing — and re-electing — Mr. Obama.

Perhaps it is that this president's policies have hurt poorer blacks the most, or maybe people are just seriously frustrated and dejected after all the soaring promises that have been broken. Either way, what we have already seen in Ferguson, Missouri — a town almost entirely served by Mr. Obama's fellow Democrats — is not the "post-racial" utopia any of us were dreaming of.

Is it any wonder Democrats in Congress are facing one of the most punishing routs in political history?

Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com, or on Twitter at @charleshurt.

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