Monday, August 15, 2011

After Running Out of People to Blame, Obama Blames Bad Luck


We award the World's Smallest Violin to President Obama, as the Power Line blog chronicles his "run of bad luck."

Poor Barack Obama! He keeps doing the right thing, but–like Jimmy Carter before him–he can’t seem to catch a break. That is the revisionist line that Obama fed to an audience in Iowa today, as reported by Byron York:

“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa.

Now, when was that, exactly? The unemployment rate stood at 7.6% when Obama was inaugurated. Six months later, in July 2009, it was 9.4%. It rose as high as 10.2% and stayed over 9% until the end of 2010...

Will blaming his failure on bad luck help Obama? I doubt it. Once again, he is following in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter. Encyclopedia.com begins its entry on Carter with the words: “Jimmy Carter was an unlucky president.” Sure, that’s how I remember it too. But the American people didn’t take any chances: they limited Carter’s “bad luck” to a single term. If the best Obama can say for himself is that he is jinxed, voters will do the same with him.

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