President Clinton Redux?

During the presidential campaign, I noticed (and believe I remarked in a post about it) that Barack Obama reminded me an awful lot of President Clinton.  Like Clinton, Obama is a very talented speech maker (probably better than Clinton). As with Clinton, while watching an Obama speech, I find myself wanting to believe him, hoping he’s right, and thinking he’s sincere.  And, just like with Clinton, upon further analysis, I find Obama’s speeches to be empty of anything meaningful, coming down on both sides of the same issue, and full of contradiction.  The other similarity, which I first noticed during the debates, and which has become blatantly obvious lately, is that Obama will say, shamelessly, the exact opposite of what is the obvious truth.

For example, during his address to Congress the other night, he said that there were “no earmarks” in the stimulus bill.  But, if you go by the general understanding of earmarks, you really can’t say that the stimulus bill contained none.  I heard many examples within that bill of dollars directed at very specific spending projects, benefiting a particular state or congressional district.  He also stood there and, with a straight face, said that he did not like big government.  But he’s using big (HUGE) government spending in an effort to revive the economy.  So, obviously he believes in it — but he doesn’t “like” it?  (I made fun of Bush for doing pretty much the same thing, when he claimed to be a “free market guy.”)  And now he’s saying he’s ending the war in Iraq by 2010, even though he plans to leave 35-50k troops beyond his deadline, in part for “conducting targeted counter-terrorism missions.”  Um… yeah.  Maybe President Bush should just have said, “Uh, the war is over.  Yeah.  Uh, just leaving the troops there to fight the terrorists,” and everything would have been OK?

It goes on and on like this.  I wonder how long he’ll be able to keep it up.  I’ve said before that a lot of people who thought they knew what they were voting for when they voted for Obama would eventually be disappointed.  That’s because he cannot possibly be all the different things he made different people believe he was.  And I think it’s only a matter of time before people realize that just because he keeps promising that 3 is 4, it doesn’t mean 3 is 4.  This is the same problem Clinton created for himself.  It got to the point where nobody really believed what he would say.  Sure, people still liked him — he happened to be in office in pretty fat times.  Unfortunately for Obama, with things being as they are, once people begin to not trust him, I can’t see him getting the same kind of pass.