By Wes Pedersen
The 2012-model multi-cylinder Obama scares me.
The old one had its faults: no zip, no traction on desert sand, a tendency to slip into reverse in heavy traffic, a hyper sound system repeating the same limp song, “Recovery: It’s Only a Day Away,” and a dashboard-mounted navigation system unable to locate the Capitol only blocks away.
The Obama 2012 is a frighteningly slapdash creation retaining the current models flaws but designed specifically by White House tinkerers to shift automatically into reverse on domestic debate and balk indecisively when taken abroad for presidential visits.
Like the current model, it cannot maintain momentum despite an insatiable demand for admiration and constant polishing of the brand by a 24/7 White House PR crew. And, like the 2011 model, it comes to a screeching halt when any of these key words is voiced: jobs, economic recovery, or housing.
On cue from the president, a unique communications system can broadcast his words throughout the Middle East: “We’re coming to save you. Clear your leader’s compound. We start bombing in five hours. No, make that two hours, no, 15 minutes.”
This clearly is not a vehicle that can bring Obama across the victory line in the presidential election. His only hope for victory lies in the fact that his competitors at the moment are pretty much clunkers likely dead on the fast track.
All any of them needs to win, though, is to cite the president’s record of losses on domestic and foreign issues.
The Obama victory chant, “I killed Osama bin Laden” worked for a few heroic days. It sputtered out when the latest figures showed a rise in unemployment to 9.1 percent despite the 7 percent low promised by Obama at the time of the 2009 elections.
Next, the House of Representatives waved Obama off track with a stunning bipartisan rebuke for failing to make the case for war in Libya and failing to seek Congressional approval for military action there.
Reports of new deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq came as Obama’s team was telling Americans we really need to hang in there, and in Afghanistan for a while longer. All this is happening at a time that Afghanistan and Pakistan are cozying up to China.
Meanwhile, analysts are waving new danger flags as higher commodity prices nudge inflation upward, 10-year interest rates drop to less than 3 percent, and debate on the federal debt goes nowhere in the face of a possible government shutdown.
The Republicans are complicit in all this always casting the President in the worst possible light. He is doing his damnedest to accommodate them on that score. That leaves us, as Clive Crook, a Financial Times writer notes, with a “government that does not work.”
It also leaves us with presidential candidates and potential candidates who, like the incumbent, do not know how to make it work.
We are, in short, on a fast track to disaster.
You can help get us out of this mess. Flood the White House and Congress with letters, emails, Tweets and phone calls.
Tell them all to get moving or get out.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C. |