OBAMA: A STAND-UP COMEDY ACT?

Obama tells Atlanta supporters very funny, but also very true stories.

...President Obama headed to the Atlanta fundraiser

For those that did not hear Obama´s verbal shot aimed at the past administration, they missed a good example of a very funny stand-up routine, and the telling of truthful stories in a way that virtually anyone can understand.

At a recent political fund raiser in Atlanta, President Obama rekindled a favorite metaphor of his by telling Democratic supporters that Republicans drove the economy into the ditch before he was sworn in, and now they "want the keys back" as the economy is slowly stabilizing.

The president then told a funny, but true story about how that due to the Republicans, the car (the US economy) went to the bottom of the ditch and how the Democrats had to put on their boots, go down to the "car" stuck in the mud, and to proceed to get the car-economy out of the deep mud. He stated that while the Democrats were doing all this, the Republicans were just standing around, in the way and doing nothing. And as the Republicans watched, they criticized as to how they didn´t like the way the Democrats were dealing with the disaster that they, the GOP members of Congress and the past administration had caused. Of course, all of this effort by the Dems was all being done with no recommendations from the opposition party for what they would do for saving the nation´s economy.

As the president continued, he stated that now, as the car was coming out of the ditch and the US economy was starting to slowly show some life, those that drove it into the ditch, we stating that "they wanted the car keys back".

And do they want the keys back in order to drive the economy forward?

Oh no, they want to go backwards into the ditch again, doing exactly what put them in the ditch in the first place.

As the president said to the audience, "When you get in your car, when you want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in 'D´, When you want to go backwards, what do you do? You put it in 'R'. That´s what they want to do…..to put it in ´R´. "

The president then said that he wasn´t going to give the keys back to someone that obviously doesn´t know how to drive.

The president went on to say that the Republicans are counting that everyone will all forget how they had managed the economy in the Bush years. He also added that the GOP just wants to "bamboozle all of you."

He then stated that for the last 18 months since he took office, he and the Democrats have been working to solve the nation problems. And during this 18 months, the Republicans have just been "politicking". Now, with three months to the mid-term elections, he and his party will also politick. And he added that he has shown in the past that he is pretty good at "politicking" as well.

What is so sad about this picture is that it is all so true. The Republican´s are so desperate at being out of political power for the first time in years, they will now do whatever they can in trying to get that power back. Even if it ruins the very nation that they almost succeeded in destroying.

They have no new ideas for solving the nation´s problems. They just want to do more of what didn´t work while under the Bush administration.

At the fund raiser, the president also repeated that the election this fall is a real choice. That choice is between going forward with positive policies or going backward to those of the Republicans. But then he added a line that he hasn't used much since the campaign. "They don't have a single idea that's different from George Bush's ideas -- not one!". He said this, invoking the former president directly by name and linking the GOP of today to his unpopular predecessor. (This is also something that President Obama has seldom done.)

That message from the president tracks closely with a recent poll making the rounds on Capitol Hill in the past weeks. Paid for by Third Way think tank and conducted by the pollster Pete Brodnitz, of the Benenson Strategy Group, the poll had some interesting findings.

Chief among them was that, as stated in an interview, Brodnitz said that "voters don't necessarily assume that today's Republicans will repeat the policies of the past. I personally feel like today's Republicans are getting away with murder."

The answer, Brodnitz said, is for Democrats to become much more explicit about connecting the Republicans of this Congress to Bush's policies, from which the country sharply departed at the end of 2008. "When people understand that's the real choice, it favors Obama," he said. "We really have to point out that this is the real choice."

But some say that there's a danger in heading too far in that direction. Elections are about the future, not the past, and making the 2010 elections all about Bush risks trying to replay the last election when the voters may have moved on.

Surveys have suggested that people now believe Obama owns the economy, despite any recognition of how bad things were when he started. Blaming Bush was the centerpiece of the 2006 election cycle and again in 2008. Therefore, the third time may, or may not, be a charm….?

The other issue today regarding the up-coming election is that since the major corporations are holding onto their piles of cash and many have decided to either not begin hiring locally or they are expanding their off-shore operations as they move their jobs and their headquarters off-shore to places like the Cayman Islands. And since Obama did not make "jobs" the number one issue when he came into office, and if things keep up in November as they are today, Obama and the Democrats could pay dearly for that omission in the mid-terms. This is especially true since the Republicans have broken all the records for Senate "Filibusters" as they have stopped many of the positive bills which were passed by the House that would have helped most of today´s American workers with jobs and extended unemployment insurance.

Will most Americans realize just how obstructive and destructive the Republicans in Congress have been? One can only hope so. Had the GOP had their way, the US economy would now be dead and unemployment would be in the high 20´s or low 30%´s instead of today´s ~9%.

But with the corporations not interested in expanding their American businesses, Obama could end up owning a double-dip Recession.

I guess only time will tell.

Copyright G.Ater 2010

Follow me on Twitter: gater01