As I once wrote in this blog, when Bush was president he embarrassed me when he made a speech. His speaking skills were terrible. The hemming and hawing, the smirk, the mispronunciations, and the deer in the headlights look. Sadly, it never got better. It seemed like Bush could be blamed for Obama being president. The country wanted someone who didn’t embarrass us at the podium. We thought Obama was the answer.
Now, we know, that isn’t true. You hear so many say, “Oh no, not another speech” or “does he think a million jobs are going to fly out of that teleprompter this week with the big jobs speech”. What we got was a man who only makes speeches. Even worse, this week, he has made this speech seem like a bigger event than the kickoff of the NFL season. He will finally give us his first real plan as president. He will tell us how he will solve the jobs problem. President Obama, the nation seems sceptical. People seem to think we will just get more of the teleprompter and no substance. As we watched you chumming around with your union friends in Detroit on Labor Day, promising them the world, we realized you don’t recognize the union friends as part of the problem. On the stage with Jimmy Hoffa Jr., you seemed right at home. You might have suppressed a smile as he vowed to take back the country from those son-of-a-bitches, the tea party.
Let me sum up your speech. Then, I can do something else while you are making it in that style that grates on me more than the Bush style. First, we must place blame for all that has gone wrong in first three years. This week, that will be Congress. Blaming Bush is getting passe. You will threaten them if they don’t do what you want. What you want will be to spend more money. Money you know we don’t have and can’t afford to spend and that congress can’t authorize.
You will tell us that you can put a million Americans back to work with a stimulus bill to build bridges, roads, and government buildings. You will tell us you can make this work despite telling us that shovel ready is not so shovel ready a few months ago, while you chuckled as if blowing a trillion was funny.
You will extend the tax holiday on collecting withdrawals for taxes in payroll. You will extend unemployment.
You may pander to the regulation issue, but in truth, you will not do anything meaningful in that arena.
Once again, you will tell us that government is the answer, not the problem. But, from day one, business has known that you are anti-business. They have watched you and your minions attack them on every front, from regulations to taxes. They don’t trust you and they won’t expand until you have moved on with the next phase of your life.
The man at the teleprompter giving us the answer to unemployment is a big part of the cause of that unemployment. For that reason, I, like many of my friends will not be watching the big speech. It’s like watching a rerun of the Ed Sullivan show. We saw it the first time when granny got the TV rights on Sunday night, we didn’t like it the first time, and now we have the TV rights to watch something other than an angry man stabbing his finger at our TV spewing nonsense.
