One Year Later: No We Can't

By Alan Caruba

The day was November 4, 2008 and the place was Grant Park in Chicago. A jubilant crowd was there to hear Barack Hussein Obama give his first speech following news that he had been elected the 44th President of the United States of America.

If there is anyone “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time…tonight is your answer,” said the President-elect. It is doubtful the founders had this in mind. Some wondered if Obama was referring to Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya.

“This time must be different”, said Obama, “change has come to America.” Obama had been elected on the promise of hope and change, but without ever defining what he meant by it.

We now know it meant massive unemployment, a doubled national debt, the government takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, control of elements of the financial community, both presumably unconstitutional at best, and socialist at worst.

Obama kept repeating and repeating that “change has come to America” No one had a clue what he had in mind. “For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest in our lifetime—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.”

One of those wars, Afghanistan, was “a war of necessity.” Ten months into his first term, Obama is dragging his feet, reluctant to fully commit to that war and likely to send a token force instead of the numbers his generals told him are needed to wage it successfully. Does this sound like a certain former president who took years to realize what was needed in Iraq? Yes, it does.

As for “a planet in peril”, just which planet does he have in mind and what kind of peril is it? Could it be the “global warming” that isn’t happening? If so, he need not bother signing the upcoming treaty at the United Nations Copenhagen liars’ climate conference because the Earth’s climate has been cooling for the past ten years.

We have been in a financial crisis, but typically it was the result once again of the government distorting the marketplace; in this case “social justice” legislation to turn home ownership into a “right” instead of an aspiration. It is a crisis worsened by cockeyed “stimulus” spending and bogus claims of jobs created and saved.

And yet, this is the same Obama who said a year ago that “we know the government can’t solve every problem.” No, but it can surely make a bad one worse.

Every poll of late demonstrates that Americans HATE his healthcare “reform” legislation, but you can bet he will sign any bill with that description, a hideous 1,900-page morass that will destroy Medicare along with a huge piece of the nation’s economy.

“Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long,” he said a year ago, apparently unaware that Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid’s idea of bipartisanship was to resist machine-gunning Republican legislators in the halls of the Capitol building.

Then, after eight repetitions of “Yes, we can”, he finally left the stage as the Reverend Jesse Jackson wept openly, possibly because he had run for president and lost, possibly because he knew he wasn’t going to be welcome at the new White House, or possibly because he knew what a total screw-up Barack Hussein Obama really was.

In the months since that historic evening, the President’s popularity ratings have been falling faster than the Dow Jones Average.

Apparently, Americans have recovered from the euphoria of electing the first Black American as President and have decided that, so long as he remains in office, “No, we can’t” is a more accurate description of his ability to govern.