Mr. Obama, Meet Mr. Adams

The midterms are over.  That's good news.

President Obama's approval rating is 42%, as it was on election day and the days and weeks before that. That's not good news. 

To combat all that was encompassed in his all-time low rating, the President had essentially crafted an adaptation Richard Pryor's famous line, "Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes."  You have to read between the lines just a bit, but the see excerpted 60 Minutes interview taped in September for evidence of Mr. Obama's invocation of the sage comic:

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Steve Kroft: You've got midterm elections coming up. Are you going to get shellacked?

President Obama: Well...

Steve Kroft: Or do you think that, I mean, are you optimistic? What are the issues and what are you going to tell the American people?

President Obama: Here's what I'm going to tell the American people. When I came into office, our economy was in crisis. We had unemployment up at 10 percent. It's now down to 6.1. We've had the longest run of uninterrupted private sector job growth in our history. We have seen deficits cut by more than half. Corporate balance sheets are probably the best they've been in the last several decades. We are producing more energy than we have before. We are producing more clean energy than we ever have before. I can put my record against any leader around the world in terms of digging ourselves out of a terrible, almost unprecedented financial crisis. Ronald Reagan used to ask the question, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" In this case, are you better off than you were in six? And the answer is, the country is definitely better off than we were when I came into office, but now we have to make sure...

Steve Kroft: Do you think people will feel that?

President Obama: They don't feel it. And the reason they don't feel it is because incomes and wages are not going up. There are solutions to that. If we raise the minimum wage, if we make sure women are getting paid the same as men for doing the same work, if we are rebuilding our infrastructure, if we're doing more to invest in job training so people are able to get the jobs that are out there right now, because manufacturing is coming back to this country. Not just the auto industry that we've saved, but you're starting to see reinvestment here in the United States. Businesses around the world are saying for the first time in a long time, "The place to invest isn't in China. It's the United States."

Steve Kroft: Do you think you can hold the Senate?

President Obama: Yes. I do.

Steve Kroft: You think you can sell this.

President Obama: You know what?

Steve Kroft: You think you can convince people that they're doing fine, economically?

President Obama: Hopefully, they get a chance to hear the argument, because all I'm doing is presenting the facts.

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Americans appear to have weighed the facts yesterday in voting to give Republicans control of Congress.

President John Adams pointed out the problem with President's Obama's chosen tack over 240 years ago when, in defending some British soldiers who were involved in the Boston Massacre, he said, :  "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

We should all commit them to memory and use their essence as an inoculation against the emotional arguments and platitudes we will hear once again two years from now when our political saviors begin their quests anew.


Thanks.

Keenan