- Until the midterm elections in November, 2010 I had never voted for a Republican for national office, President or Congress, in my life.
- I have voted for very few Republicans for local, county, and state elections in my life.
- Thus, I am not a long term Republican voter or conservative.
- The reason I wrote and published my book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” was because of the insanity I witnessed during the Republican Bush administration. The waste, stupidity, and corruption of that era was something I found unacceptable in a democracy and wanted to do my part to fix our ailing democracy. It had nothing to do with the Obama administration and its failures.
- Thus, I am not out to do a hatchet job on President Obama, I would do a similar assessment on any other person with the same dismal track record.
- I am not saying that John McCain would have been more effective than Obama has been. We will never know, given McCain did not get elected.
- I am not enthusiastic about Romney by any stretch of the imagination and I am not saying that Romney would be more effective than Obama has been.
- The information sources for my writings, analyses, conclusions almost never include Fox News and never include conservative/Republican blogs or forums. Most of the time my sources are unbiased or liberal leaning organizations that tend to portray the Obama administration in a more favorable light than it deserves.
- I believe that in sports, politics, and life, the old saying that “you are only as good as your record” should be the only guide to reality. Saying you tried hard or claiming the failure was not your fault are easy to do. But results are the only things that count in the final assessment. Excuses are a sign of weakness and immaturity when it comes to leadership in life. However, they are an ongoing trait of this administration.
- Some of the points of failure listed below might be viewed as petty and unimportant in the big picture. However, this assessment is meant as a comprehensive view of the Obama Presidency and one person’s view of pettiness and unimportance might be viewed as a failed opportunity at leadership by someone else. That is why everything was included
- Harry Truman once eloquently stated: “The buck stops here.” He realized he was the overall boss so that anything that went wrong on his watch ultimately was his responsibility, a responsibility he was willing to accept. The Obama administration should not be held to any lower standard of excellence.
- For the first two years of his Presidency, Obama’s Democratic party held a majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. His approval ratings were sky high. He could have done anything he wanted. He wasted that historic opportunity and as a result, he does not now get to blame Bush, the Arab Spring, the Iranians, the Japanese tsunami, ATM machines, Congress, the Republicans, or anything else for his failures. The buck stops at his desk, he accepted the job and both the glory and the blame that goes with it.
I am 59 years old and have always viewed the Carter administration as one of the most inept and ineffective presidencies of all time. With the exception of the Israeli/Egyptian peace accords, I cannot remember anything else positive from those years but I do remember long gas lines, high gas prices, the Iranian hostage crisis and the timid response to it, high unemployment, and sky high inflation and interest rates. Not a legacy of success or hope.
But along comes the Obama administration and the following failures across just about every dimension, in no particular order:
1) Failure to implement an economic stimulus program that lived up to its objectives, the President predicting that unless the Federal government spent about $800 billion, the unemployment rate could go as high as 8%. Over $800 billion was spent, and wasted, and the unemployment rate remained above 8% for a record 42 straight months.
2) Failure to implement to an effective overall economic strategy, instead relying on petty, tactical, short term, and unsuccessful economic programs that accomplished nothing but wasted billions of dollars. The short list of failures includes Cash For Clunkers, Cash For Appliances, Cash For Caulkers, HAMP, General Motors bailout (currently billions of taxpayer dollars still unpaid), and a small business tax credit package.
3) Failure to reduce this high unemployment rate, with almost 13 million Americans still unemployed, millions of other Americans who are underemployed or have become to discouraged to look for work, resulting in a total unemployment/underemployment rate of an unacceptable 14.9% in September which translate into about 23 million Americans who are unemployed or under employed. As a result, we have record high welfare payments and record high food stamp recipients.
4) Failure to provide a healthy, growing economic climate, with about half of this year’s college graduates not able to find a position in their preferred field and more than 80% of them moving back in with their parents or relatives since they cannot afford to strike out on their own.
5) Failure to protect the nation’s AAA bond rating, resulting in a major credit rating agency downgrading the credit worthiness of the United States for the first time in our history and other major credit agencies warning that they could follow suit unless the Federal government gets its spending under control.
6) Failure to reduce the Federal government’s annual spending deficit by 50% as promised in his 2008 Presidential campaign.
7) Failure to get Federal government spending under control, creating record annual TRILLION dollar deficits for the entire time of his Presidency, adding about $5 TRILLION to our national debt to bring it to over $16 TRILLION.
8) Failure to even consider forcing Congress to consider implementing the fine work of his deficit reduction commission, a commission he himself put together but ended up completely ignoring.
9) Failure to pressure a fellow Democrat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to do the Majority Leader’s job and produce an annual detailed Federal budget plan, a failure that has resulting in the Senate not producing a formal budget in over 1,200 days, a performance by Reid that has to be un-Constitutional and impeachable on some level
10) Failure to rein in waste, corruption, inefficiency, and criminal fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, all of which cost the American taxpayer anywhere from $110 to $150 billion a year.
11) Failure to rein in waste, corruption, inefficiency, and criminal fraud in the Social Security program, which costs the American taxpayer at least $100 billion a year.
12) Failure to rein in waste, corruption, inefficiency, and criminal fraud in the food stamp and unemployment benefit programs, which cost the American taxpayer about $25 billion a year.
13) Failure to streamline government functions and operations, which would save tax payers tens of billions of dollars a year, as witnessed by the fact that after three and a half years of this Presidency we are still burdened with 15 different agencies overseeing food safety laws, more than 20 independent programs helping the homeless, 80 different programs to help economic development, 82 different government agencies working on improving teacher quality, 47 different government agencies working on job training, and 18 different programs working on food and nutrition assistance.
14) Failure to improve tax collection at the Internal Revenue service which estimates that it fails to collect about $380 billion a year from tax evaders, putting additional tax burdens on honest taxpayers who actually pay their taxes.
15) Failure to live up to his campaign promise to close the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, a facility that annually costs the American taxpayer about $160 million to operate.
16) Failure to live up to his campaign promise to not allow lobbyists to serve in high ranking positions in his administration, an administration that currently has several dozen ex-lobbyists high up in the administration
17) Failure to live up to his campaign promise of significantly reducing budget earmarks which are only thinly disguised schemes for incumbent politicians to finance their reelection campaigns.
18) Failure to live up to his campaign promise of not using executive privilege when he invoked executive privilege to hamper and cover up a legitimate Congressional investigation into misconduct and illegal activity relative to the fatal Fast and Furious gun walking operation.
19) Failure to live up to his statement several years ago when as Senator he boldly asserted that raising the nation’s debt limit was a Presidential failure of leadership, a statement he contradicted the first time he was confronted with out of control spending bumping up against the nation’s debt limit level.
20) Failure to lead the country to a comprehensive and effective strategy for educating our kids, who currently rank behind dozens of other countries around the world in the quality of their education despite the U.S. spending more than every other country in the world. At the Federal level, the continuing failure of the Department of Education has cost us over $200 billion since the Obama inauguration.
21) Failure to lead the country to a comprehensive and effective strategy for cost effective energy independence, with no strategy in place to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources and our carbon footprint. At the Federal level, the continuing failure of the Department of Energy has cost us over $100 billion since Obama’s inauguration.
22) Failure to lead the country to a comprehensive and effective health care reform strategy to rein in our escalating health care costs, with Obama Care likely to cost well over $2 TRILLION to execute, likely to drain wealth out of the economy with dozens of new taxes, likely curtail economic growth, likely result in tens of millions of Americans losing their current health care insurance protection, likely to have millions of Americans have their working hours reduced, will definitely leave at least twenty million Americans without health care insurance ten years after the legislation was passed and likely have no chance to succeed since the legislation never addressed the root causes of our higher and higher health care costs.
23) Failure to lead the country to a comprehensive and effective restart of our strategy relative to our illegal drug usage problems, resulting in the enrichment of violent Mexican drug cartels, the continuing imprisonment of non-violent drug users, the continuing emphasis on law enforcement vs. drug treatment, and the continuing lost “war on drugs.”
24) Failure to lead the country to a comprehensive and effective restructuring of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, all of which are hurdling towards fiscal insolvency.
25) Failure to lead the country to a comprehensive overhaul of our 70,000 page, cumbersome, inefficient, and economy inhibiting Federal tax code, a tax code that results in hundreds of billions of dollars every year not being collected and a tax code that results in American companies keeping over a TRILLION dollars in profits overseas, sitting idly, not helping the U.S. economy to grow.
26) Failure to lead the country to an overhaul or termination of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two main culprits in the creation and collapse of the housing bubble, leading directly to the Great Recession and a taxpayer bailout of the two government housing entities that has already cost the American taxpayer over $180 billion (and growing).
27) Failure to lead the country to an overhaul of the country’s financial regulation processes, claiming responsibility for the Dodd-Frank legislation that has already missed three major financial industry disasters, the collapse of MF Global, the dangerous investing and reckless style of JP Morgan, and the collapse of Peregrine Financial Group, three situations that were supposed to be impossible with the new regulations.
28) Failure to eliminate the “too big to fail” syndrome of America’s largest banks, with the five largest banks now larger on every banking measure than they were prior to the Great Recession.
29) Failure to terminate the ill-fated Fast and Furious gun walking campaign, a campaign that broke numerous laws and at least one international treaty while resulting in the unnecessary death of a U.S. agent and dozens of innocent Mexican civilians.
30) Failure to have his administration prepared and act promptly when the Gulf oil spill occurred, with himself taking several vacations, playing numerous rounds of golf, and making several long campaign fund raising trips while the Gulf environment and economy suffered the ravages of the multi-month oil spill.
Tomorrow we will review the final 31 reasons why this Presidential administration is the worst this country has seen in a very long time and why Jimmy Carter is now off the hook, given the failed legacy of the Obama administration.
We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at
http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/
The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple
The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/
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