“Has Obama Quit Already?”--forget governing, just descend to ideological brawl

“Has Obama Quit Already?”

by John Hinderaker/Powerlineblog

That’s the question Ed Morrissey posts in The Week. Ed’s question is not whether Obama has quit running for re-election, but rather whether he has quit trying to govern. Ed points out that Obama did not even go through the motions of trying to get either Son of Stimulus or his most recent spending/debt package through Congress:

Obama has offered two major proposals this month in an attempt to change the narrative, to reverse the perception that his presidency is floundering with the poor economy. The first proposal deals with job creation, which is how most Americans gauge economic success. The president had not offered any new thoughts on job creation since the first stimulus package, instead issuing a series of predictions that massive job creation was just around the corner. …
The White House apparently forgot to consult with its own allies in the upper chamber when writing the rerun of the 2009 stimulus bill, only to discover to their embarrassment that it won’t pass the Senate. …
Instead of working with Republicans to craft a deficit-reduction plan that could pass Congress, Obama instead filled his with tax hikes that even his own party rejected in 2009 and 2010 in the effort to fund Obama’s signature health-care overhaul bill. …
Obama mailed in both proposals rather than engage in the hard work of governance. If Obama had any interest in actually passing his deficit-reduction plan, he would not have filled it with tax hikes that have floated around the Beltway for years — and which both Republicans and Democrats have rejected in the past. The jobs bill was even less creative than his approach to deficit reduction, cribbed from a failed and costly exercise in central economic control. Obama didn’t bother to put much effort into either because he has no intention of doing the hard work needed to accomplish actual deficit reduction or improve the job-creation climate. The president has more than a year to go before the next election, but Obama has stopped governing and has shifted entirely to campaign mode. This is what it looks like when a president quits.

I think that is a fair assessment. One can ask, too: if Obama is no longer interested in doing the work of being president, how determined can he be to get himself re-elected?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/09/has-obama-quit-already.php