Obamateurism of the Day

Let’s return to the scene of yesterday’s Obamateurism, where the President told a joke about how even a Jeep Wrangler couldn’t make it over some of the economic obstacles in America’s path this year, to the immediate disapproval of the audience … of Jeep Wrangler builders. Barack Obama lists off a series of excuses for these economic obstacles as if they all just appeared by magic and had nothing to do with Obama’s own policy, referring to them as “headwinds”:

Now, I don’t want to pretend like everything is solved. We’ve still got a long way to go not just in this industry, but in our economy; for all our friends, all our neighbors who are still feeling the sting of recession. There’s nobody here who doesn’t know someone who is looking for work and hasn’t found something yet. Even though the economy is growing, even though it’s created more than 2 million jobs over the past 15 months, we still face some tough times. We still face some challenges. This economy took a big hit. You know, it’s just like if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, it’s going to take a while for you to mend. And that’s what’s happened to our economy. It’s taking a while to mend.

And there are still some headwinds that are coming at us. Lately, it’s been high gas prices that have caused a lot of hardship for a lot of working families. And then you had the economic disruptions following the tragedy in Japan. You got the instability in the Middle East, which makes folks uncertain. There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery.

Yeah, those high gas prices sure have caused a lot of hardship for a lot of working families, haven’t they … a lot?  You know what contributes a lot to those high gas (and food) prices?  Domestic energy policies that keep a lot of American oil production artificially low, like, say, permitoriums that defy even a federal court order to start issuing not a lot of permits in the Gulf of Mexico.  Regulatory policies that lock out a lot of exploration and production in shale formations in the interior West and halt fracking in Pennsylvania and New York.  Refusing to even consider opening up a lot of American resources off the outer continental shelves and in Alaska that would greatly reduce America’s dependence on a lot of those foreign nations in the Middle East that cause a lot of the instability that worries people like Barack Obama … a lot.

You know what else changing all that would do?  It would create jobs … a lot of jobs, in fact.  Good paying jobs that will create qualified homebuyers to end the housing market slides, and qualified buyers who would then buy a lot of cars.

That would take a president with a lot of leadership.  Instead, all we get from the White House is a lot of …  “headwinds.”

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!