“President Obama is telling backers that next year’s re-election is ‘going to be hard,’ in part because people have lost faith in Washington, D.C., lawmakers.

“‘We still have work to do to make sure that this town is working on behalf of ordinary folks so that they can start once again believing in the American Dream,’ Obama told donors in Washington last night. ‘Because people have lost confidence in the capacity of folks to look out for them as opposed to look out for themselves or their most powerful patrons.’

“That is part of the Republican agenda, Obama argued: ‘To roll back environmental regulations; to try to shrink the capacity of government to act in a proactive way to make sure that we can out-educate and out-innovate and out-build the rest of the world; to basically allow the most powerful forces in our society to write their own rules and everybody else is going to be on their own.'”

“Look at Obama’s speeches in the last couple of months, and he has repeatedly scolded audiences for not working hard enough and for not sacrificing enough to achieve the goals he has set for his administration. He’s done it with both supporters and with adversaries. With friends, his message has been: Nobody told you this would be easy, and you’ve got to work harder to enact my agenda. With adversaries, his message is: You’ve had it too easy, and you’ve got to make sacrifices to enact my agenda. Obama’s ‘gotten a little soft’ remark fits into that theme: A soft America is one that is insufficiently willing to work and sacrifice to enact the Obama agenda…

“Obama has said similar things to liberal audiences in recent weeks. ‘I never promised you easy,’ he told a crowd at a September 26 fundraiser at a glitzy restaurant in Los Angeles. ‘If you wanted easy, you wouldn’t have campaigned for Barack Hussein Obama.’ At another fundraiser, on September 20 in New York, Obama said, ‘When I was in Grant Park [on election night 2008], I warned everybody, this is going to be hard.’ The message was the same as the one Obama delivered to the Congressional Black Caucus: Shape up and get to work. For me…

“Quit complaining. Stop grumbling. Get to work. Sacrifice. Obama is constantly telling Americans they need to shape up and snap to it, all for the purpose of making the Obama agenda a reality. Lately, with the economy worsening and his approval ratings falling, he’s been having a hard time bending Washington, and the country, to his will. Is it any surprise that he’s now telling Americans they’ve gotten soft?”

“He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as ‘hope’ and ‘change’…

“Three years on, nothing has changed. Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett seriously as an archetypal exemplar of the ‘American business community’ rather than as an especially well-connected crony. Sometimes, Obama cronyism is merely fiscally wasteful, as in the still-underreported Solyndra ‘green jobs’ scandal. One sympathizes with reporters assigned to the story: It’s hard to get all the public monies and Solyndra-exec White House visit logs lined up in digestible form for the casual reader. But sometimes Obama cronyism is murderous: Eric Holder, a man unfit to be attorney general of the United States, continues to stonewall the ‘Fast and Furious’ investigation into taxpayer-funded government gun-running to Mexican drug cartels…

“Obama says America has ‘gotten a little soft.’ But there’s nothing soft about a dead-parrot economy, a flatline jobs market, regulatory sclerosis, ‘green jobs’ multi-billion-dollar squandering — and a mountain of dead Mexicans. In a soft nation, ‘centrist’ government is hard and cruel. Only the media coverage is soft-focus.”

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“It’s been almost three weeks since I sent the American Jobs Act to Congress – three weeks since I sent them a bill that would put people back to work and put money in people’s pockets. This jobs bill is fully paid for. This jobs bill contains the kinds of proposals that Democrats and Republicans have supported in the past. And now I want it back. It is time for Congress to get its act together and pass this jobs bill so I can sign it into law.

“Some Republicans in Congress have said that they agree with certain parts of this jobs bill. If so, it’s time for them to tell me what those proposals are. And if they’re opposed to this jobs bill, I’d like to know what exactly they’re against. Are they against putting teachers and police officers and firefighters back on the job? Are they against hiring construction workers to rebuild our roads and bridges and schools? Are they against giving tax cuts to virtually every worker and small business in America?”