In many ways, America is like a giant public company. It produces roughly a quarter of the world’s total economic output, and rewards its 300 million shareholders with a standard of living standard that is the envy of the planet.
Large companies require skillful leaders, and the shareholders have high performance expectations of their executives. Leadership changes happen because of scheduled retirement, or when the shareholders become upset with the company’s performance.
In 2008, America had a retiring President, but the shareholders of America had also grown weary of a prolonged war, an economy sliding backwards, and politicians who spent too much and listened too little.
Of the applicants for the job of President, America decided on the relatively untested, fresh new face that promised “hope and change” – exactly what the shareholders in America thought they wanted.
Obama had campaigned pledging to not just address America’s problems and improve outcomes, but to “transform America.” He had established the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate (no easy feat, when considering the competition) and his running mate, Joe Biden, was ranked as the third most liberal member. Obama was a self-described disciple of the radical leftist community organizer, Saul Alinsky, infamous author of Rules for Radicals. Obama had publicly criticized the United States Constitution as a “charter of negative liberties” and lamented over the “essential constraints” the Founding Fathers placed on government’s ability to address “redistributed change.”
Obama is a radical leftist in the Socialist-Marxist-Fascist mold. He believes in big government and expanding the power of government to control and limit individual liberty. He despises the free-market private sector and seeks to either seize it, or by regulation, taxation, and intimidation control it and bring it to its knees. He believes in “central planning” right out of Orwell’s Animal Farm, and he has surrounded himself with a team of other central planning devotees to aid him in the “transformation” he envisioned for America.
He talks of freedom, but not individual freedom. The freedom of which he speaks is for his “central planners” to control every facet of American life without limit or even respect for the Constitution and the Rule of Law.
Deployment of Obama’s radical transformative agenda has been greatly aided by a willing and complicit large Democrat majority in Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, effectively neutering the legislative checks-and-balances constraint on a rogue Executive Branch as envisioned by the Founders.
Stockholders are typically a patient lot, and grant any new Chief Executive a “honeymoon” period to get their feet on the ground, their team in place, and get fully operational. But, measurable results – particularly in regards to the critical needs and issues facing the company – had better show up quickly, or the shareholders become nervous again.
Barack Obama is already more than one-third of the way through his four year term; high time for measurable results of the expectations of the American shareholders and the agenda he championed. But, measurable success is hard to find for the new President. In fact, he seems to be digging a deeper hole – and faster.
A quick performance review of some of the key agenda items is in order:
Just one month into the new job, Obama sounded like a fiscal hawk as he blasted his predecessor, George W. Bush for his "casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks." "We cannot and will not sustain deficits like these without end," President Obama said in reference to the Bush deficits. "We cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences," he promised the nation.
However, his first two budget years will have deficits of $1.4 trillion and $1.3 trillion; each about 3X greater than the largest annual Bush deficit. Furthermore, according to a CBO analysis, Obama’s own 2011 budget will add another $10 trillion of deficit spending by 2020. Compared to when Obama took office, federal public debt will grow 322 percent by the end of the present decade to $20 trillion and will total 90% of the nation’s total economic output, up from 40 percent at the end of fiscal 2008, and it is projected to continue to climb, thereafter - a path the government accountants accurately describe as “unsustainable.”
Three out of four Americans believe Obama’s economic “Stimulus” was a waste of money. Two-thirds of Americans say Obama’s Stimulus failed in its primary objective; creating jobs. Obama promised that his spending plan would create 3-4 million jobs and unemployment would stay below 8 percent. However, the most recent Labor Department report indicatesthat for every one new private sector job, ten government jobs are created, mostly temporary census workers, and unemployment has hovered around 10 percent since last August, with millions having given up even trying to find work.
Obama, with a little help from George W. Bush on the way out, championed the Troubled Assets Relief Program to rescue the financial industry. America quickly dubbed TARP as “the bailout bill” and when Obama started using it as his own private slush fund to seize the car companies, prop up government programs, and buy favor with whining constituent groups, public opinion quickly move against him. More Americans now believe TARP did nothing to “prevent a more serious crisis” than think it helped at all.
Obamacare would improve access to health care and the quality of service while saving money, too, the President promised. And, miraculously Obamacare would also create “400,000 jobs almost immediately” according to Nancy Pelosi.
Unfortunately, the bloom is already off that rose, and even the government has confessedpremium costs will go up, the deficit will go up, taxes will go up – a lot, senior’s care will be more limited, doctors get squeezed, millions will lose or be forced to change employer provided coverage, and thousands of jobs will be lost. Nirvana it is not.
Candidate Obama promised to end the war. He hasn’t. But, he did win the Nobel Peace Prize simply on the false belief that his aura would spark a global kumbayah epoch in history. Instead, he’s made the world a more dangerous place through his weakness and naiveté. Heembraced our adversaries while insulting and humiliating our best friends. He’s apologizedfor American greatness, unilaterally cancelled missile defense for our allies, announced his strategy for limited reaction to an enemy attack taking a nuclear option off the table, volunteered at the U.N. that no “world order” could survive one nation is “elevated” over another, and has proven completely impotent at thwarting Iran’s race to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities. With the current tensions over the Gaza flotilla incident, he chose to chastise and embarrass our greatest ally, Israel, while opening the Oval Office to Palestinian leader Abbas and announcing a near doubling of American foreign aid going into Gaza.
The man who was to save the planet from the false threat of global warming has proven completely inept at dealing with the oil crisis in the gulf. Other than looking for “somebody’s a** to kick” after two months of crude oil spewing into the ocean at 5000 ft. below the surface, Obama and his administration are clueless. Instead of managing a crisis, with his amateurish inabilities and his ill conceived drilling moratorium, he is flirting with further economic chaos and precipitating a double-dip recession.
Even his pledge of transparency and openness in government has evaporated as Obama rarely avails himself to the press unplugged and off-script. Instead of open door with C-SPAN cameras in the room, every serious negotiation happens in secret back rooms, purged not only of the media but of Republicans, as well. Top White House officials including Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel are mired in a growing scandal involving bribery of two U.S. Senate candidates, Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff, to drop out of Democrat primary contests in exchange for jobs in the administration.
So, a third of the way through his first term, the economy is worse, the environment is worse, our fiscal house is collapsing, and the world is a more dangerous place. It’s hard to look around and point to a success that the new Chief Executive has had.
It is little wonder, then, that an average of major public opinion polls demonstrates a dramatic change in the attitude of the American shareholders. In seventeen months, the ratio of those approving of the President’s job performance has collapsed from a 3:1 (63-20) ratio to barely 1:1 (47-46).
No CEO would (or should) be comfortable with their job security with such a precipitous evaporation of shareholder support in such a short period of time. But, Obama seems oblivious as does the Democrat leadership in Congress. Rather than “represent” the shareholders’ interests who entrusted them with a temporary proxy, Obama & Co. rule from their elitist perch intent on cramming their agenda through over growing objections from the people. Indeed, when the people do speak out in disgust, Obama finds it “amusing.”
If America were a big company out in the real world, the next meeting with the shareholders or board-of-directors might not be very pleasant for the still new President. He’s hard pressed to offer a good accounting of himself for addressing the critical needs of the people who gave him a shot at the best job in the world. Unable to prove that he is up to the task, nothing to offer showing that his strategy is working, that he realizes his mistakes and is ready to correct his failings - why would the shareholders risk further damage to their investment? Particularly when their entire life and that of their children is dependent on the success of the company? In the real world, he’d be put on notice and given a very short leash – or, more likely just fired.
Obama’s not going to get fired for at least 2 ½ more years. But, the American shareholders are likely to remember this time, and historians will record it as the watershed moment when the politicians shut out the American public, ignored their constituents, stopped listening, and relied on their own misguided elitist arrogance.
Obama’s poor performance is one thing, but that won’t be his biggest undoing. Americans understand the difficulty of the job and the complexity of the issues, and they’re willing to cut anybody a little slack. But, they won’t tolerate arrogance, nor a President and leadership that refuse to listen. That will cost them dearly sooner or later.
