President Obama held a town hall meeting in Annandale, Virginia today, addressing a crowd of students at Northern Virginia Community College. It was a revealing look at a disastrous presidency dissolving completely into a re-election campaign… and the campaign isn’t going well.
Obama was nervous and stilted in his delivery, even when speaking before a crowd of starry-eyed students. He’s surrounded by smiling faces, but he sounds like a man who realizes he’s backed himself into a corner, and isn’t sure what to say next. He should probably wait a while before he tries to address adults again.
Here’s a clip in which he makes a hilariously awkward attempt to portray himself as a regular hard-working Joe, who wistfully remembers wondering why so much of his first part-time paycheck went to some Greek lady named “Fica.”
So “nobody likes paying taxes” and “nobody volunteers and says they’re wild to pay more taxes?” That’s funny - I thought paying taxes was the essence of patriotism. Aren’t Obama’s millionaire and billionaire supporters literally begging to have their taxes raised? Do they know Obama thinks they’re “nobody?”
Abandoning his alien-in-a-human-suit routine, Obama transitions to what he really loves to talk about: tax increases. Note the hectoring, arrogant attitude he takes when he leans forward and says he doesn’t think his taxes should be lower, ending on a kookaburra note that implies the very notion is absurd. Thus does a man who enjoys million-dollar vacations on the taxpayer dime, who has never worked a private-sector job, and will never be subjected to the socialist schemes he wants to impose on his audience, insult those who desire greater economic liberty. Can’t imagine why his poll numbers are in free-fall.
He rattles off buzz-phrases like “lean” and “accountable,” even though his Administration has increased the national debt faster than any other in history, while dodging inquiries from both citizens and Congress – to the point where oversight committees have been forced to issue subpoenas.
One minute into the clip, he deploys one of his trademark straw men – a desperate ideologue forced to pretend he’s defeating arguments no one is making. “We don’t want no government,” he maintains, again using a tone of voice appropriate for telling a small child why shoplifting is wrong. Those are the only alternatives, America: mountains of wild, irresponsible Obama spending, or complete anarchy.
To buttress his argument, he lies outrageously about the collapse of the St. Anthony’s Falls bridge in Minneapolis, which had absolutely nothing to do cuts to infrastructure spending. And, of course, he slips in a plug for “high speed rail,” his expensive new Big Government obsession.
The pathetic childishness of Obama’s approach is unsettling. His college audience is ten or fifteen years too old to believe that cuts to the transportation budget will cause potholes to suddenly appear around the country, while bridges collapse into dust, and our airports become dilapidated hellholes where air traffic controllers can’t get a good night’s sleep. After destroying countless jobs and wiping out entire industries, he frets about how businesses won’t come to America to invest, because spending cuts will wipe out our infrastructure, and foreign businessmen will “get messed up” driving over potholes dug by Republican penny-pinching.
We’re in the midst of the greatest debate of our age, in which the demands of government will be tested against the imperative of liberty, and the reality of finance, and this delusional baby-talk is all the President has to offer? No wonder he looked so nervous on that stage. That might be the only thing he truly has in common with the rest of us.
