Obama 2012?

This morning, Chicago was eliminated as a contender city for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games by the IOC. While this is a blow to all Chicagoans, this, perhaps, is an even bigger blow to the political creditability of President Obama. This is the opinion of the LA Times, anyway.

Nonetheless, numbers do not lie, and after nine months of the Obama administration, no major legislation has been passed (even with a bulletproof Democratic majority in the Senate), his health care bill is failing, his job approval rating is a respectable 54%, although this is down 13 points from when he entered office, but even more astonishing is that his DISapproval rating has more than TRIPLED since January.

Obama won this last election for the same reason the Democrats won a senate majority: they are not Republicans or Bush Cronies. In fact that's probably a reasonable explanation for most electoral outcomes in the history of The United States, especially since Watergate: he's not the other guy. During his campaign, he played on this precedent exactly, claiming that he would bring change and accountability to Federal spending habits, that he would bring the troops home, and that he would abandon many of the policies of his predecessor. Yet much is unchanged.

Like George W., President Obama has proposed expanded and new programming without surefire ways to pay for the ideas; he has attempted to impose more governmental control over the people by apparently forgetting all that he should have learned from Milton Friedman and Thomas Paine, and encouraging domestic policies, from education to health care to economic policy, that would have Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton rolling over in their graves! I have to congratulate Mr. Obama on this feat. It's really quite incredible!

It also seems, as of late, that his charisma has all but disappeared, giving way to the reality that he simply cannot provide what his constituents and supporters wanted from their President. With this is mind, what will his platform be in 2012? "Four more years of trying?

He has failed to end the wars, in fact Afghanistan has been getting worse. He failed to reform and fund No Child Left Behind, an act that has only harmed our students and turned what were places of learning into houses of absent-minded memorization. He has all but failed to bring about health care reformation, and he has now failed to bring the Olympic Games to his home town?

Mitt Romney 2012 anyone? At least he can pass universal health care.