Obama Incompetent, Making MANY Mistakes

No matter whether you believed Obama's promises and rosy rhetoric or you didn't, one thing you probably expected was a minimal level of competency. That's pretty much what we've seen from the Obama administration... competence has DEFINITELY been minimized. His administration has been plagued with repeated missteps, mistakes, and gaffes. Examples include Obama returning the Winston Churchill bust to England, the Air Force One photo shoot over New York... complete with a trailing fighter plane, Obama's failed personal appeal for the 2016 Olympics, and his extended dithering and failure to act in the first two months of the BP oil leak. Deroy Murdock makes this case rather well.
http://article.nationalreview.com/438405/a-year-and-a-half-of-president-obama/deroy-murdock

"After Obama’s nearly flawless campaign (rattled by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist rants, but little else), the big surprise one and a half years after Obama’s momentous and truly moving inauguration is the staggering incompetence of his government. Like some Americans, I expected a nanny-state, socialist agenda from Obama & Co. However, I thought that at least they would manage things smoothly and professionally, in somewhat refreshing contrast to the general ineptitude of the detached, tongue-tied Bush-Rove years. Instead, what America and the world have witnessed is an extravaganza of frequent gaffes, blunders, and catastrophes:"

Murdock provides ELEVEN examples to make his point. Although that's a good start, I'd like to bring you a few more that he did not include in his article.


The first example is his failure to competently run the auto companies after he finagled government ownership.

Set aside for the moment the constitutional argument. There's a practical reason why Washington politicians and bureaucrats have no business managing General Motors and Chrysler: They're no good at it.

Exhibit A is what Washington has done to Detroit in little more than a year since the bailouts of 2009. An audit by Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, found that President Obama's auto task force arbitrarily closed many profitable dealerships, destroying thousands of jobs "based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decision's broader economic impact." Barofsky observed that Chrysler and GM were subsequently forced to reinstate more than 700 of the approximately 3,000 disenfranchised dealers, "suggesting, at the very least, that the number and speed of the terminations was not necessarily critical to the manufacturers' viability."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Washington-bureaucrats-can_t-run-the-auto-industry-1002112-98874524.html

Next, we look at what is turning out to be his albatross: unemployment. No matter how much he and Congress spend or how many regulations or overly-expansive laws they enact, the unemployment rate isn't cooperating with their leftist ideology and Keynesian economic theories!

There were 464,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended July 17, up 37,000 from a revised 427,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.

The number of claims was much higher than expected. A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected new claims to rise to 445,000.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/22/news/economy/jobless_claims/index.htm

Obama demonized private-sector businesses in order to get his TARP, stimulus, and financial reform bills passed. He's now finding out that actions have consequences, as most of the country and virtually all of the business community are highly upset at his war on business.

Some corporate leaders said Obama’s comments prove that he’s hostile to business. Others cited corporate fears of a credit crunch as banks comply with financial reform or the possibility of significant tax hikes if the Bush administration tax cuts are allowed to expire.

But it all adds up to a lack of confidence in Obama among some in corporate America — and that’s fueling a reluctance among executives from Wall Street to Main Street to deploy their large cash reserves to make new investments and hire new workers.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40081.html

Despite numerous massive attempts to stimulate job growth, it's just not happening. This is because they don't have much real-world experience in the private sector, and they over-rely on discredited Keynesian theories.

Part of the problem was a misplaced faith in Keynesian economics -- that is, in the discredited notion that politicians can borrow money from the economy's right pocket and increase prosperity by dumping money in the economy's left pocket.

But the bigger stumbling block is the folks in the White House seem to have no clue how the real-world economy works. Critics have noted that the Obama Cabinet sets the record for the lowest-ever level of private-sector experience. That doesn't necessarily mean people who don't understand how and why jobs are created -- but that seems to be the case with this administration.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/jobs_errors_HhM8thFjyVk9R4TvVatPCN

The bottom line is that this administration makes mistake after mistake, and gaffe after gaffe that COULD have been avoided. They pursue ineffective and harmful policies when they don't HAVE to. Their situation IS avoidable... but their own incompetence prevents them from avoiding it.