Barack Obama wants America to know that this country can’t move forward on just slogans and gimmicks. No, he wasn’t speaking ironically at the Congressional Correspondent’s Dinner, but as Conservatives 4 Palin notes, he went off of his TelePrompter to try to zing Sarah Palin on “drill, baby, drill.” Unfortunately, Obama’s practically the poster child for the ills he decries:

But here’s the thing – we’ve been down this road before. Remember, it was just three years ago that gas prices topped $4 a gallon. I remember because I was in the middle of a Presidential campaign. Working folks haven’t forgotten that. It hit a lot of people pretty hard. But it was also the height of political season, so you had a lot of slogans and gimmicks and outraged politicians waving three-point-plans for two-dollar gas – you remember that-’drill, baby,drill’-we were going through all that. And none of it would really do anything to solve the problem. There was a lot of hue and cry, a lot of fulminating and hand wringing, but nothing actually happened. Imagine that in Washington. The truth is, none of these slogans made a bit of difference.

So the man who got elected almost entirely on the basis of one slogan — Hope and Change — and whose economic policies consist of one gimmick after another (Porkulus, Cash for Clunkers, short-term homebuyer credits) now warns us about “slogans and gimmicks”? Isn’t Obama Exhibit A for that warning?

Oh, and by the way … the utterly trite “drilling won’t solve the problem” is a slogan, too, and a lot more empty than “drill, baby, drill.”

Update: I can’t believe I missed this, but Obama is griping about empty slogans while standing in front of a “Winning The Future” backdrop. Thanks to commenter FlipFlop for pointing that out.

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