Our 'Blame Duck' President

President Barack Obama won in 2008 by promising hope, change, high ethics, and a post-partisan uniting of our country.

Instead he arguably has governed as the most partisan, polarizing, and anti-business president in American history.

Mr. Obama has failed to lead and seek compromise, and this has turned what historically would probably have been a brief recession into a prolonged Great Recession from which it could take a decade or more to recover.

This recession has cost the median American family 39 percent of its net worth, much of this in home prices that continue to fall. Our country has never had an economic recovery that did not include housing, and after more than three years of the Obama administration housing is not recovering.

Half of Americans have suffered a loss greater than this 39 percent median.

Our economy continues to struggle, largely because President Obama continues to demand higher taxes, more regulation, ever-deepening debt and a sense — as he voiced to one of Russia's leaders when unaware that a microphone was on — that if re-elected he will pursue policies kept secret from the American people.

By the time most politicians reach high office, they have learned how to compromise. Politics is "the art of the possible."

President Obama instead went from being a radical community organizer — a master of confrontation, threats, and deliberate polarization — to being the Chicago political machine's presidential candidate.

Obama apparently never matured as a political leader, and his radical ideology and tactics have produced a president who seems unable to compromise or craft ways on which both sides can agree.

President Obama's inability to lead by building consensus and agreement is making all of us losers.

As I see it, President Obama's idea of community organizer politics is collectivist, to get people to think of themselves as rival groups pitted against each other instead of individuals with shared values and goals.

In Obama's world view, if one group wins another must lose, so the idea of seeking a win-win compromise is simply unthinkable.

Even worse, President Obama seems to lack the maturity and experience to admit that any of his disastrous, misguided economic policies have failed.

This lame "Blame Duck" president relentlessly blames others for everything that goes wrong and ducks taking responsibility for his mistaken policies, even though he has been president for more than three years.

It has become almost a joke how Obama claims that everything from President George W. Bush to the troubles in Europe — and not he — are to blame for the economic fear and uncertainty now holding back hiring and investment in the United States.

The world at first cheered and applauded Obama, but as the German newspaper Spiegel and the BBC this week have reported, the whole world is now beginning to see President Obama as a failure who has misled all of us and made the United States a cause of economic problems in other lands.

The tragedy is that we are all paying a terrible price for his smug, stubborn unwillingness to change policies that clearly have failed.

It is not bad to make mistakes. It is bad that President Obama refuses to change policies that are choking off what by now should be a recovery. It is time for President Obama to end his obsession with making government ever-bigger at the expense of everybody else.

Even John Maynard Keynes, the guiding light to Obama's economic team, said that taxes should not be raised in a down economy, that this would severely impair and delay a return to prosperity. In this, President Obama should listen to Keynes.

If President Obama were a great statesman, he could restore our economy immediately. If he resigned, investment, hiring, and the economy would recover almost overnight.

Even as a virtuous politician who wanted the best for his country, President Obama could say that he is done blaming others and ducking his own responsibility — that he will make a return to economic health for the nation his first responsibility, and that he extends his hand to Republicans and the few surviving moderate Democrat lawmakers to help restore prosperity.

Lowell Ponte is co-author, with Craig R. Smith, of "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"; "The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us . . . And Seven Ways to Stop It"; and "Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America's Optimistic Golden Age." For a limited time, you can get a free postpaid copy of "The Inflation Deception" by calling 800-630-1494. Read more reports from Lowell Ponte — Click Here Now.