He clearly doesn't suffer from a shortage of chutzpah.
According to the Politico's Josh Gerstein, President Barack Obama was asked the following question by The View's Barabara Walters in a Monday appearance to be broadcast on Tuesday: "What would be so terrible if Mitt Romney were elected? Would it be disastrous for the country?" His response: "We can survive a lot. But the American people don't want to just survive. We want to thrive. I've just got a different vision of how we grow an economy. We grow fastest when the middle class is doing well."
The President clearly believes that he can make the past 44 months disappear. Part of the reason for that belief is that reporters like Gerstein, as was the case in the subject dispatch, fail to point out the obvious (Cliff's Notes version): First, we haven't "thrived" since Obama was inaugurated. Second, for those who want to give Obama a pass while the recession continued -- he doesn't deserve it; he and his party caused it; and yours truly called it when the negative influences coalesced in mid-2008 to begin the worst downturn since the Great Depression), we haven't "thrived" since it ended (as officially defined) in June 2009. Third, even if you give this bunch a pass until February 2010 when job losses finally bottomed out, monthly unemployment rates of 8%-plus have never stopped, and indicators of workforce discouragement remain frighteningly high.
It is an inarguable fact that Obama's first term has seen the worst economic stewardship since Franklin Delano Roosevelt extended the Great Depression for eight years, and has given rise to an unprecedented post-World War II gutting of a large portion of the middle class.
Here are several other paragraphs from Gerstein's report, including yet another example of Obama dissembling:
(Obama's) answer prompted First Lady Michelle Obama, who joined her husband on the female-oriented daytime talk show, to exclaim: "I'm voting for him!"
... While much of the show consisted of softballs, Obama was pressed by the show's resident conservative co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck about comments he made last week suggesting that the events of his first term demonstrated that "you can't change Washington from the inside."
"You are Washington, you're about as inside as it gets," Hasselbeck ventured, according to a pool report.
"The idea was you can't change Washington just from the inside; you've got to mobilize the American people. When ordinary people are engaged and paying attention, that's when Congress responds. We can't play just an inside game," Obama replied.
Oh, he's mobilized the American people -- against the kinds of policies he wants to foist on the rest of the country.
Here is the original context of Obama's "change from the inside" statement, indicating the level of personal fantasy in which the president has chosen to indulge:
President Obama, at a forum Thursday hosted by the Spanish-language TV channel Univision, lamented the challenge of shaking up the status quo in the capital.
"The fact that we haven't been able to change the tone in Washington is disappointing," Obama said, in response to a question about his greatest failure. "The most important lesson I've learned is you can't change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside."
He didn't explicitly state how he defines that distinction, but he suggested change "from the outside" means getting more ordinary Americans involved in the process.
"That’s how I got elected, and that’s how the big accomplishments like health care got done, was because we mobilized the American people to speak out," he said. "That’s how we were able to cut taxes for middle-class families."
For the record, a large majority of the American people opposed ObamaCare in the runup to its passage (and still do), and the so-called middle-class tax cut of 2010 was a reduction in the Social Security payroll tax which gave Obama cover on his left flank for not allowing regular income tax rates to rise by "extending the Bush tax cuts." Obama only did so because an income tax increase at that time would very likely have sent the country into another recession -- as is the case with the upcoming "Taxmageddon" on January 1, 2013.
To be cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
