While working for an electric utility, I worked for a regional vice president who had the rugged good looks of Daniel Craig and the booming voice of Fred Thompson. After moving up through the ranks and becoming one of the company's top executives, his ascension stopped. He actually moved down quite a few notches, exiled to an office doing little to nothing until he retired.
One of the executives later told me that "they had finally figured him out," and that "he was just wasn't very smart."
I could have told them that. But I'll share more about this with you later.
The fact is that people often look at the wrapping on the package, instead of considering what might be inside that package. On the outside, the package might be neat, colorful and shiny, but it is only just the covering. It's what's on the inside that counts, whether you're considering a present, or a President.
President Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention yesterday evening featured the soothing voice of one of America's greatest orators. He shared lofty goals about creating millions of new jobs, restoring America's manufacturing prominence, cutting college costs for young people and hiring more thousands of teachers. What was missing, though, were the details -- the strategies that will help America reach those goals. Sadly, he proposed no policy changes in a second term that would be different from those in his first term that have failed so miserably.
One day after the President's soaring speech, America returned to Earth with the release of the August jobs report.
Even the most generous expert would say that the report clearly does not point to an economy that is "turning around." To the 23 million Americans out of work, though, the report has to be viewed as disappointing and devastating.
The report featured a downtick in the overall unemployment rate from 8.3% to 8.1%, but only because 368,000 Americans simply stopped looking for work and were no longer included in the data. A paltry 96,000 jobs were created, significantly fewer than the number of jobs required just to keep pace with population growth.
To put this report in perspective, consider this: For every new job created, four Americans stopped looking for work because the jobs outlook has become so bleak.
One day after the glitz and glamour, the rhetoric and rationalizations, the wrapping is clearly off our President and his party. What's left is a jobs report that provides indisputable proof that the policies of the current administration have failed.
For some reason, after listening to some of President Obama's speech yesterday and reading the jobs report today, I thought of my old boss, the vice president. I thought about his good looks and great voice, but how little he really had to offer. I learned early on what the top executives learned years later: This man didn't have any common sense and just wasn't very smart. I learned this as he was just beginning his climb up the organization, when he was a district manager.
We had experienced an afternoon thunderstorm that left a couple of hundred customers without power. With power restored to all but about a dozen customers in one area, this manager stopped the crews from working for a couple of hours, taking them milk and cookies. When our plain-talking dispatcher found out that his crews weren't working to restore power to the few remaining customers because they were enjoying milk and cookies with their district manager, he yelled to his crew on the radio: "Get your butts to those customers now. You can have all the $#@!^# milk and cookies you want once we have all power restored!!!" Believe it or not, this is a true story.
This company manager and our President have a lot in common. Instead of restoring power to customers, the manager had crews drinking milk and cookies. Instead of focusing on creating jobs early in his first term after millions of jobs were lossed due to the financial meltdown, the President expended his political energy passing healthcare reform. And now, three years later, with the economy still sputtering, the President has spent significantly more time playing golf, attending fundraisers and giving speeches than working to create jobs by meeting with his cabinet and jobs council, or working with and leading Congress to pass jobs legislation. Those activities that the President enjoys, but don't create jobs, are the milk and cookies of this President.
I actually think that Clint Eastwood summed it up most eloquently and succinctly in a recent interview to explain why he took the time to speak at the Republican National Convention:
“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
If Clint has sized up our President, I have to believe that the American people can't be far behind. The jobs report simply tore the shiny package off of his convention speech and his record of the past four years, revealing what was inside all along.
Nothing.
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