We Can’t Wait Either, Mr. President

Take a stroll through your neighborhood Occupy Wall Street protest–whether it’s in New York or Chicago, Detroit or San Francisco–and you’re likely to see a recurring theme emblazoned across cardboard signs: redistribute wealth from the 1 percent to the 99 percent, all in the name of fairness, whether or not it makes good policy. Or if you want to hear that message without fighting the crowds, you could save yourself some time, turn on the TV, and tune in to President Barack Obama’s latest campaign swing across America, this time titled “We Can’t Wait.”

---

“I’m here to say that we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will,” President Obama proclaimed in Las Vegas, Nevada. “There is no excuse for the games and gridlock we’ve seen in Washington. Where we don’t have to wait for Congress, we’re just going to go ahead and act on our own.” The actions the President is proposing? More money for “underwater” mortgages and a yet-to-be-announced student loan initiative. There is no hiding the ball in the President’s populist pitch–and that ball is Obama’s desire to circumvent Congress and enact policies that appeal to his far-left, big-government base, regardless of the will of the people or their representatives in the House and Senate. Obama’s problem is that he failed to convince the American people–and his own party–to pass his latest stimulus plan (a.k.a., “the American Jobs Act”), and now he’s headed into an election season with 14 million jobless Americans, a 9.1 percent unemployment rate, stagnant economic growth as far as the eye can see, and nothing to show for it. More...

---