Wednesday, November 10, 2010

November 10, 2010--Optics

Former president George Bush is making the rounds humping his memoirs. I caught some of his interview the other night with Matt Lauer and was reminded, more by his affect than his words, how disengaged and incurious he is. Maybe he'll do better on Oprah's cozy sofa or when on the official GOP outlet, Fox News.

Of course, Bush's reemergence is great fodder for David Letterman. On Monday night he put together a package of Bush's greatest hits. Literally his greatest hits. Like the time he smacked his head while boarding a helicopter or when he exited from a news conferebce and couldn't open a locked door. And then, most irrsistably, Letterman showed a video clip of Bush in Africa trying to participate in a native dance. He looked ridiculous when attempting to "get down" with tribal members while wearing a shirt and tie and Oxford shoes.

I cut away from Letterman to check on the real news and there, on CNN, was Barack Obama in India, in shirt and tie and shiny leather shoes also trying to fit in while dancing with indian school children. If David Letterman would set aside his liberal inclinations, he could put together a pretty good package of Obama's greatest India hits.

In addition to looking as ridiculous as his predecessor, Obama has also been saying some pretty silly things while on this junket, especially silly since he is saying them while out of the country for 10 days on a trip that commenced right after he and the Democrats got trounced at the polls.

For months he and his political advisors knew what was coming on Election Day and yet they decided to have him take off for Asia before all the votes were counted. Bad enough in itself but did he need to go, of all places, to India where tens of thousands of U.S. jobs have been outsourced?

As one wag put it the election was about jobs and so was the trip--about former American jobs that had been outsourced to India. And he added, if Obama wanted to feel Americans' pain he should have visited a Master Card customer service center in Mumbai and listened in on how people are telling Indian workers that they can't pay their bills because they lost their jobs.

Another Obama hit was his lame explanation when questioned about this outsourcing. In his clinical, unfeeling way he gave one of his academic-style answers. He said that from an American perspective outsourcing is not a problem. That as many jobs have been created in America as the result of the win-win nature of outsourcing. He literally described it as "win-win."

If true, this is obviously a politically disastrous thing to say in India; but since it is not true--from enhanced trade and globalization hundreds of thousands of our jobs have flowed in India's direction while at most 50,000 have been created in America--it shows that he is either ill informed (not likely) or was pandering to his Indian hosts.

He should have stayed home and at his press conference and subsequent interview on 60 Minutes shown that he got the message delivered by the election and told us what he is going to do to return the focus to the economy--to jobs and the foreclosure crisis. Things Americans care and worry about.

And if he had to go to Asia why did he ignore China? Is it more important to go to Indonesia and Korea? True, they are significant players in the globalized economy (and Indonesia is where he pretty much grew up), but we have big issues with China that need his attention. Big issues with big consequences for our economy.

He needs to clean house back at the White House, getting rid of his Chicago friends and advisors and bring some adults on board who can tell him what's going on in America and try to get him reoriented to what his job is. If he doesn't, the voters will do the White House cleaning in 2012. And perhaps they will be right to do so.

1 Comments:

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