Partisan speech was out of place

Published 9:42 pm Wednesday, September 18, 2013

On a day that called for unification and healing words, President Barack Obama again displayed his tin ear and short-sighted partisanship by blasting the opposition party for being the opposition party.

Even as the story of a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard that took 12 innocent lives on Monday, Obama was in campaign mode, complaining loudly that Republicans weren’t ready to hand him a stack of blank checks.

“I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can’t get 100 percent of what it wants,” Obama said in an ill-timed speech on the nation’s finances. “That’s never happened before.”

That’s ridiculous. Of course it has happened before; it pretty much happens every year. These are budget negotiations. Each side has a starting point, and both sides must give a little. There’s every indication that Republicans are ready to do so again. They’re ready to talk about the cuts made during “sequestration,” and they want to use Obamacare as a bargaining chip (the key word here is “bargaining”).

In fact, it’s Obama who says there’s no room for negotiation.

“We can’t negotiate around the debt ceiling,” Obama said during an interview on Sunday.

In his speech on Monday, following the shootings, Obama seemed tone-deaf. He referred to the GOP 11 times. It was a partisan speech on a day that should have been above partisanship.

“The problem is at the moment, Republicans in Congress don’t seem to be focused on how to grow the economy and build the middle class,” he said. “I say ‘at the moment’ because I’m still hoping that a light bulb goes off here.”

In other words, Republicans have no idea how to help the middle class.

The truth is, of course, Republicans have other ideas for helping the middle class — mostly by reining in the uncertainty that emanates from Obama’s ad-hoc governing style and “Rule of Whim” administration. Obama’s own executive actions have deepened the uncertainty surrounding Obamacare, as he delays this and implements that. Businesses don’t know what to expect, and that’s kept many of them from hiring.

The jobless recovery isn’t Bush’s fault. It’s the fault of Barack Obama.

And as ill-used and picked on as Obama clearly feels, presidents before him have faced opposition. Reagan had the Democratic Party, for example.

“Liberals hated Reagan in the 1980s, pure and simple,” Commentary magazine reported in 2011. “They used language that would make the most fervid anti-Obama rhetoric of the Tea Party seem like, well, a tea party. Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was ‘trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.’ The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall.”

But Reagan’s extraordinary leadership skills prevailed; he was able to work with one of his most vocal critics, House Speaker Tip O’Neill.

That’s what’s lacking in Obama — leadership. There’s no more clear proof of this than the partisan speech he gave on Monday.