Is The American Dream Withering On The Vine?

At a Chicago fundraiser, on Wednesday, August 3, 2011, the gelding who occupies the Oval Office said, “It’s been a long, tough journey. But we have made some incredible strides together. Yes, we have. But the thing that we all ought to remember is that as much good as we have done, precisely because the challenges were so daunting, precisely because we were inheriting so many challenges, that we’re not even halfway there yet. When I said ‘change we can believe in’ I didn’t say ‘change we can believe in tomorrow.’ Not change we can believe in next week. We knew this was going to take time because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

That was the day after Congress passed the debt deal forestalling a default.  What loomed in the background was the threat that Standard & Poors was going to downgrade America’s credit rating.  I believe the Administration thought that passage of the bill would prevent the actions of S&P.  That belief was proof of their unparalleled naiveté.

Philip Klein, writing at The Washington Examiner, believes that this president will not escape the blame for America’s credit rating being downgraded.  Klein cited that “Obama was elected president at a time when Americans felt the nation was in decline, and his central job was to restore their faith that our best days were ahead of us, as President Reagan did after the Carter era.  Whether you think he was dealt a poor hand or not, the bottom line is that the sense of decline has only deepened during the Obama presidency, and the first-ever downgrade of U.S. credit, whatever its ultimate financial implications, is yet another symbol of that decline.”

Via Memeorandum, Drew Westen, writing at The New York Times, gives us a glimpse at the inconvenient truth that the Left must now face: “A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in twelve years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted “present” (instead of “yea” or “nay”) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.”

As the presidential election draws ever nearer, it will be damn near impossible for this errand boy sent by grocery clerks to erase the electorate’s memory of his commitment to drive America deeper into debt for a distorted ideology to “fundamentally transform America.”

Cross-posted at The Conservatory.
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