Strained Metaphors

Obama has a penchant for casting long, strained, and often silly metaphors to paint a pitiable picture of his Presidency:

I- describe us…as…I'm the captain and they're the crew on a ship, going through really bad storms. And no matter how well we're steering the ship, if the boat's rocking back and forth and people are getting sick and…they're being buffeted by the winds and the rain and…at a certain point-- if you're asking, "Are you enjoying the ride right now?" Folks are going to say, "No." And are they going to say, "Do you think the captain's good—doing a good job?" People are going say, "You know what? A good captain would have had us in some smooth waters and sunny skies, at this point." And I don't control the weather. Obama, coming up soon on 60 Minutes

Obama compared the country to a car Republicans drove into a ditch, "a deep ditch, muddy and hot, with lots of bugs." Democrats, Obama said, including him and Oregon's congressional Democrats, piled into the ditch and began pushing the car out. "We look up and Republicans are just standing there watching. We say, 'come on down and help''' Obama said. "But they just stand there and say 'you're not pushing hard enough. Finally, we get the car out of the ditch and the Republicans tap us on the shoulder—they want the car," Obama continued. "But we tell them you can't have the keys because you don't know how to drive." Then in his best laugh line of the night, Obama observed, "if you want to go forward in a car, you put it in 'D'; if you want to go backward, you put it in 'R.'" from the Willamette Week, 12/9/10

…We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we've done. But even though we've answered these concerns, I suspect there will be some who will try to move the goal posts one more time. They said we need to triple the border patrol. Or now they’ll say we need to quadruple the border patrol. Or they’ll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat! They'll never be satisfied, and I understand that. That's politics. But the truth is the measures we've put in place are getting results.  Obama in El Paso, Texas

Mr. Obama also tried out a cleaning metaphor, accusing Republicans of acting like fussy supervisors who refuse to lift a finger to help the crew.  “We’ve got our mops and our brooms out here, and were cleaning stuff out and they’re sitting there saying, ‘Hold the broom better; that’s not how you mop.’ Don’t tell me how to mop! Pick up a mop! Do some work on behalf of the American people to solve some of these problems.’’ from the New York Times, 5/13/2010

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Such dewy drivel might play well to his adoring audiences, but now I think I understand why The Barry never wrote nor published anything when he was the Editor of The Harvard Law Review.

Ditch the Republicans?

Yesterday at a Democrat fundraiser, our august prexy, Barack Obama, gave his partisan argument as to why a Democrat Congress deserves to win the elections in November. Basically, he said that Bush and the rest of the Republicans drove our economy into the ditch in 2008. Obama was subsequently elected and thus he [sigh] was required to patch up this accident. With that sly grin of his, he went on to say that the Democrats have gotten the car (our economy) out of the ditch and back on the asphalt. And he added with a snide guffaw … now the Republicans want the keys back. In his best sophomoric manner, he said, “No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”

Perhaps what he said has a modicum of metaphoric truth to it, however please allow me to modify and extend his remarks with the following observations:

- The Republicans were not alone in driving our economy into the ditch. Clearly, by insisting on the irrational expansion of sub-prime mortgages, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and their cronies in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did their share of reckless driving. The major sin that Bush and his Republican compatriots in Congress can be accused of is not pushing back hard enough.

- Yes, the Democrats have stopped our economy from sliding further into the ditch. But to say that we are back on the asphalt is, at best, political hyperbole. At worst, it is demagoguery. Economic growth is clearly anemic and unemployment still hovers around 10%. In fact, we are in serious jeopardy of slipping back into negative GNP growth. And this is occurring after monstrous government deficit spending that cannot be sustained. Such a Keynesian economic experiment has once again been proven misguided … and if the Bush tax cuts are left to expire this coming January, it is quite likely that Obama’s stretch limo will also end up back in the economic ditch.

- Even public opinion has now decided that it is Obama’s recession. See: Obama's Fault. After 18 months in office, Obama needs to stop pushing his ultra-liberal agenda at the expense of job seekers and economic growth. He is rapidly losing Bush as a scapegoat and would be advised to start accepting responsibility for our economic malaise. Perhaps, as Obama was decrying at the fundraiser, the Republicans might make an equivalent mess of things if they win back majorities in Congress this fall, but then we would still have some hope that things will finally change. I kind of suspect that if the tea partiers have anything to say about it, things will.