Howard Fineman: Obama Should Have Spent More Time as an Alderman Than Teaching Law

The primary argument conservatives made against presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 was that he lacked the proper experience and qualifications for the most important job on the planet.

On Tuesday, Huffington Post's Howard Fineman, one of the many liberal media members that helped get the woefully lacking junior senator from Illinois into the White House, said on MSNBC's "Hardball," Obama "should have spent more time on the Chicago Board of Aldermen than at the University of Chicago" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: It seems to me that mainly it's a political challenge from right now to get the attention of the Republicans, force them to deal with the jobs issue, force them if necessary to say yes or no to creating jobs in their own districts. History, common sense tells us it's hard for a politician to say no to a job site in his own or her own district. How does he do it, Howard? You and I know politics. Doesn't the President know politics?

HOWARD FINEMAN, HUFFINGTON POST: Well, I don't think he knows it the way you know it in this context, Chris, which is that you've got to be specific. The stimulus package that famously was enacted at the beginning of President Obama's term did some good things, but it was more like spraying water in the desert as opposed to dropping each drop of water on each seed, and that's what needs to happen.

Hmmm. So now Fineman tells us the stimulus program was way too general in scope and not targeted enough to be effective.

Wasn’t that the conservative argument? Didn't people on the Right claim this was far too scattered an approach to have any significant impact and therefore would be a huge waste of money?

Moments later, Fineman supported another right-wing viewpoint:

FINEMAN: Number two, Barack Obama as John was indicating probably should have spent more time on the Chicago Board of Aldermen than at the University of Chicago. That way he would have understood the specifics of these kinds, this kind of politics as opposed to the abstraction of politics.

Isn't it nice that three years since Fineman did his darnedest to convince Americans to vote for "Hope and Change" he's now realizing the man he supported lacked the experience for the job.

Maybe if people like him spent less time swooning over the junior senator from Illinois and instead examined and reported his background we'd have a far more qualified man in the White House.

Of course, it seems a metaphysical certitude that whatever realizations Fineman comes to concerning Obama's shortcomings, he and his colleagues will be enthusiastically supporting the President next November making any criticism of him now rather hypocritical despite the entertainment value.