Bobby Jindal Gives us View Behind the Head of Obama....and It's not Pretty....

Take a peek behind the curtain



11:00 PM, Aug 23, 2012 |


It's campaign season, and that means candidates and political parties are picking at each other's every word. Candidates on the stump occasionally say things that distract from their intended message, but reveal something more. The press calls these gaffes. Vice President Joe Biden is famous for these blunders on the campaign trail.

In just the past few months the president has made more than a few of his own. First he said that "the private sector is doing fine" and then his now famous quip that "if you've got a business - you didn't build that." After the president said these outrageous things, the White House staff quickly tried to explain what the President really meant. By now, there is probably a person in the White House whose sole job is to try and explain what the president really means.

The American people don't need spin though. In each instance, President Obama's gaffes offer a peek behind the curtain of his real philosophy about government. The truth is that this president wants to grow the public sector and make people more reliant on the government. He wants to take us the way of Europe - the way of less liberty and more dependency.

Under President Obama's reckless policies, he has added nearly $5 trillion to the national debt and increased federal spending to a post-World War II high. The president has tried to borrow and spend our way into prosperity. It hasn't worked and it actually made our economic problems worse.

The national unemployment rate has been above 8 percent a record 42 straight months, 23 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, the nation has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs since President Obama took office, median household income has declined by $4,300, 30 percent of homeowners with mortgages are underwater and the list goes on and on.

Even with rising unemployment, the president has moved to dismantle the historic reform of 1996 that instituted work requirements for welfare. Despite the fact that the welfare caseload fell by half after those historic reforms, the president is telling states that his administration will waive established work requirements for welfare assistance. That's nothing but a policy to put more people on government assistance — even after the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by 70 percent over the past five years.

To most people, these terrible numbers would be a signal to reverse course and do the exact opposite of what you have been doing. In fact, just this past week in Iowa, President Obama said that his "general rule is, if I do something and it doesn't work, and then I do it again and it doesn't work again, I stop doing it." It's a shame the president doesn't follow his own advice, and it calls into question whether his true intentions are job creation and economic growth or simply expanding the size and scope of government so that more and more families are on the government dole and the success of every business is dependent on government favor.

There is a common thread uniting all of this president's policies — a view that individuals only succeed when government takes care of them. It's not often, caught without a Teleprompter, that we hear the President acknowledge this fact, but when we do the message is clear.

He is entirely willing to defy more than two centuries of American innovation, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit, because this president thinks our nation has, in his own words, "gotten a little soft," "lost our ambition," and gotten "a little bit lazy." He doesn't seem to see the decades ahead as the next great American century, but, instead, a time to manage the slow decline of American economic prominence and influence.

His solutions are not solutions at all. America's greatest asset has never been our government; it's been our people. It will never be government that rescues our nation and we will not maintain our rightful place as the world's superpower if we do not believe in our people.

Gov. Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have a vision of America's future that will inspire, support, and free the dreamers, risk takers, adventurers, and leaders of America's great economic engine to create the opportunities all our citizens deserve. That is the hope and change America needs today.

Bobby Jindal is governor of Louisiana.