By Mark Rhoads -
The late Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. of New York once upon a time managed to actually run against his own record and win. In 1961 he tried to break with Tammany Hall bosses and he ran on a platform of cleaning up corruption in City Hall at a time when he himself had been the incumbent for the previous 8 years! President Barack Obama now seems to be lifting a page from the Wagner playbook and he is trying to claim his platform is to restore private-sector jobs when his entire first-term was devoted to an $800 billion stimulis that did
not work and a massive government take over of health care systems that will cost trillions of dollars in the next decade. Today President Obama said at one of his first White House news conference in two months, "Here's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how to put Americans back to work." "Talking about" jobs is what Obama does best but actually doing something about it was limited to wasting $800 billion in 2009 and 2010 on so-called "shovel-ready" jobs that he finally admitted in 2011 did not exist. For favorite Obama donors who found his health care reform too much of a burden on them, Obama simply allowed HHS to create hundreds of waivers for unions and others who pushed for his plan. Unlike Mayor Wagner, I don't think Obama's 2012 strategy of running against his own record is going to work.
