Mr. Obama visits Las Vegas
Two years ago, the majority of American voters supported freshman U.S. Sen. Barack Obama for president. Today, neither he nor his party seem that popular. Why?
No one supported candidate Obama based on his achievements -- military, legislative, administrative, or creating jobs in the private sector. There weren't any.
What they embraced was his vow to move past race and partisanship, to seek not merely Democratic solutions or Republican solutions, but bi-partisan solutions, multi-partisan solutions, American solutions.
If that Barack Obama had spoken at Aria in CityCenter Thursday evening, and then at UNLV Friday, one could easily imagine him saying, "You know, our economic policies of the past 18 months have not succeeded. In fact, many things have gotten worse. Here in Southern Nevada, your unemployment rate has skyrocketed from 4.4 percent to 14 percent, people have lost their homes, businesses have closed, 135,000 jobs have been lost. And it just might be that the tax-and-spend dinosaurs of my own party are part of the problem. So instead of making fun of Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, anyone with some fresh ideas, I've started calling in some of those 'greedy capitalists' who've created jobs in the past. I'm asking them what they think we should 'change.'"
Instead, Mr. Obama was here to raise funds for one of those aforementioned graying partisans of the Senate, Sen. Harry Reid. And Mr. Obama continued to blame all his -- and our -- problems on the mess he inherited two years ago.
Change? While the president did not mention Mr. Reid's front-running Republican challenger Sharron Angle by name, he did comment on her plan to let younger workers invest part of their Social Security withholdings in private accounts they would own, while Washington would continue paying promised benefits to older Americans:
"On a lot of these issues, she favors an approach that's even more extreme than the Republicans in Washington," said the "post-partisan" president, drawing laughter from the hand-picked, closed-door Democratic crowd. "That's saying something. That is saying something. I mean, she wants to phase out and privatize Social Security and Medicare."
Whereupon the president proceeded to set out his own detailed plan -- and Sen. Reid's -- to save a Social Security and Medicare entitlement system that's already spent all the money current retirees ever paid in, and which is thus headed for bankruptcy.
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