Steve Gunn: 'The Amateur' apt title for president who just doesn't get it
Published: Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 10:22 AM
Traders gather at a post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange June 1, 2012. The stock market suffered its worst day of the year Friday after a surprisingly weak report about hiring and employment cast a pall of gloom over the U.S. economy.President Barack Obama clearly doesn't understand the fundamentals of the American economy, or perhaps he just doesn't want to accept them.
We all gasped last week when Obama uttered the unbelievable words, "The private sector is doing fine." A lot of out-of-work Americans would like to see evidence of that.
Obama went on to argue that our biggest employment crisis is in the public sector, meaning he thinks we need more government jobs. Our government is nearly $16 trillion in debt and he wants to spend more money to put more people on the federal payroll.
This poor guy is barking up the wrong tree.
Government employees only comprise about 10 percent of our national workforce. The vast majority of jobs are, and always have been, created by private companies. Simple logic suggests that the health of the private sector should be the president's main concern.
And remember, the public sector can't be healthy unless the private sector is thriving. A healthy business community produces most of the tax revenue that allows government to expand and hire more bureaucrats. When the private sector is struggling, the public sector will necessarily follow.
Are you following this, Mr. President? Didn't they cover this stuff in your economics classes at Harvard?
What's really disturbing about Obama's comment is that is demonstrates his fundamental distaste for our capitalistic economy, which has consistently given us the highest standard of living of any large, developed nation on earth.
Obama wants to expand government at the precise moment we need to shrink it, balance the budget and significantly decrease our national debt. If less money were wasted in Washington, D.C., and our state capitals, more would be available for investors to work their magic and create the real jobs we desperately need.
The private sector creates wealth. The public sector is a parasite that sucks its lifeblood from the private sector. Yet the president is more concerned about the health of the parasite. His economic theories are backward at best, and he needs to be replaced before we all suffer the permanent consequences.
What if Moore had written "The Amateur?"
In 2004, when President George W. Bush ran for re-election, radical filmmaker Michael Moore produced "Fahrenheit 911," a documentary harshly critical of the Bush administration's policies. The media made a very big deal of out that film, much of which was later discredited as a partisan hack job by the incredibly biased Moore.
Now we have another expose about the alleged shortcomings of an incumbent president, and it's selling like hotcakes. "The Amateur," an inside look at the dysfunctional and disappointing Obama presidency, has reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
But I can't find any reference to the book in mainstream newspapers or television news. It's as if it doesn't exist. Perhaps the author should call Moore and ask him how he manages to get full media attention for his attacks on Republicans. This couldn't possibly be a case of liberal media bias, could it? Of course not, because the media insists there is no such thing.
But I suppose it really doesn't matter. Millions of Americans have discovered this interesting book without the help of the media. They should have plenty of eye-opening reading this summer.
What did the president know?
Americans like tough presidents who aren't afraid to confront our enemies and take action when necessary.
Aside from approving the killing of Osama bin Laden, Obama has been an embarrassingly weak foreign policy president. He's the architect of our poorly timed retreat from the war on terror, which I believe we will come to regret. He's the leader who refuses to address the growing threat posed by Iran's nuclear program.
But the president apparently does pick and choose which terrorist leaders will be targeted by unmanned drone military aircraft. That sounds pretty tough, doesn't it?
The problem is that the drone program is classified information. We're not supposed to know much about it, Obama's death list, American cyber attacks on Iran or the existence of a double agent who helped foil a terrorist plot aimed at the U.S.
Yet somehow the media got all of those stories -- right in the middle of an election year.
Now the president's own attorney general, Eric Holder, is investigating whether the White House itself leaked the information to friendly reporters to make the president look like a ruthless commander-in-chief. But who in the White House might be responsible?
Or, phrased another way, what did the president know about the leaks, and when did he know it? This could become an interesting story line by the time the election rolls around.
Steve Gunn, a former Chronicle staff writer, is the communications director of Education Action Group. He adds a local conservative voice to our columnist lineup. Write: Muskegon Chronicle, 379 W. Western, Suite 100, Muskegon, MI 49443.
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