“Summer of recovery,” quips P.J. Media over Barack Obama’s latest Bushism, a speech at the White House in which he boasts of adding “9.4 new jobs” over the past 51 months, but the joke’s on them. The real Summer of Recovery, in 2010, added only 8 jobs, though when you factor in “jobs saved,” the total mushrooms to 947 billion.
What makes this all so pathetic is not just that Obama is a mere mortal — like his much-despised predecessor — and, therefore, fallible: susceptible to slips of the tongue. It is that this late in the game, his job approval and likability ratings both cratering, he’s still peddling the same tired horse pucky.
He still labors under the delusion that his magic aura, though entirely a fiction created and perpetuated by a once-adoring press, still surrounds him. The reflection that greets him in his mirror is still a silver-tongued orator, not a bumbler who populates his off-the-cuff remarks with so many ahhs that the listener looks in vain for a doctor holding a tongue depressor.
He refuses to own up to the fact that his presidency is a failure, that if he has a legacy at all is one of mistrust and partisan division. And yet for all that, the self-aggrandizing speeches come.
