Obama's stimulus bill: A failure of leadership

In Bill Veeck's autobiography, Veeck--As In Wreck, the baseball team owner recalls his lack of confidence in Lou Boudreau, the manager he inherited when he bought the Cleveland Indians. I can't find my copy, so I'm going to have to approximate wrote Veeck wrote. "You ask Casey Stengel why he did something during a game, he'll tell you a story about something that happened in 1919. But when I asked Boudreau the same thing, he'd reply, 'I had to do something!'"

That's the type of leadership we have with President Barack Obama: "I have to do something!'" Yes, the economy is in bad shape. We probably should do something, especially along the lines of job creation, although left alone, the economy will over time fix itself.

Obama won the presidency by a large but not overwhelming majority. Over the last two years, Obama has been sounding the drum of "Change...change...change," without specifics.

Now is the time for specificity, and Obama doesn't know what to do--except "something." So he farmed out his stimulus plan to the House Appropriations Committee, who packed the bill with items from liberal wish-list compiled since Lyndon Johnson left the White House.

This is Obama "leadership." Tell one of his "experts" to come up with something, and he'll sell it..."Change...change...change..." to to the moronic masses.

Except the hoi polloi aren't buying it. A CBS News poll, the third such one this week, reports slipping support for the stimulus.

How did we get here? A majority of Americans voted for a man whose sole executive experience consisted of the chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a group kick-started by former terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama was a state senator--a part-time gig--for eight years before moving on to the US Senate in 2005. But in 2007, Obama became a full-time presidential candidate, "Change...change...change," so we have a guy running the country whose sole "qualification" for the job was his two years as a low-seniority minority party senator.

"Change" isn't working in selling the stimulus. Not that he isn't trying to reignite the flame, as he attempted to last night:

"They did not choose more of the same in November," Obama said Friday. "They did not send us to Washington to get stuck in partisan posturing, to try to score political points. They did not send us here to turn back to the same tried and failed approaches that were rejected because we saw the results. They sent us here to make change with the expectation that we would act."

No one really knows if Obama's plan, Obama included, will work. My guess is that it won't. Yet the president, with most (but not all) of the Democratic members of Congress following, is still pushing, with an air of desperation, this expensive stimulus bill.

But Obama feels he has to do something.

We have four more years of this coming.

Welcome to the big leagues, Obama.

Oh, it's not too late for you to "change" your mind about your stimulus bill.

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