Please, someone, tell me that Barack Obama did not say, on The Daily Show last night, that Larry Summers did a "heckuva job" as Obama's economic adviser.
I mean, unemployment was around 6.5% when Obama became president in January 2009. Today, virtually on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, unemployment stands at around 9.5%.
Doesn't sound like a heckuva job to me. For formerly hard–working Americans who have found themselves tossed on the economic scrap heap, the last couple of years have been as devastating as any hurricane.
And, of course, that phrase — "heckuva job" — is bound to remind most Americans of George W. Bush's much–ridiculed endorsement of former FEMA head Michael Brown's handling of the disaster response/relief effort.
Oh. Obama did use that phrase, eh?
Well, that's bad enough. I mean, throughout his presidential campaign — and long after he took office, when he was awarded a Nobel Prize essentially on spec — Obama and his supporters portrayed him as the anti–Bush.
Dubya couldn't speak in complete sentences — although he did use completely nonexistent words at times (remember misunderestimate?). But Obama was well educated, a constitutional scholar. He'd written more books than Dubya had read, a diehard Obama supporter told me two years ago.
He would restore literacy — among other things — to the presidency. We wouldn't cringe, anymore, I was told, when the president of the United States stood up to speak.
And yet, here he was, in his attempt to appeal to the very groups that got him elected in the first place (and now appear to be abandoning him), and one of the gems to spring from his mouth was an unavoidable reminder of one of the bleakest chapters of recent American history.
Speaking of the American economy with the same words used to praise the incompetence of the "response" of FEMA to Hurricane Katrina is hardly reassuring.
And essentially saying "Well, things could have been worse" doesn't seem likely to rally anyone beyond Obama's unshakably devoted supporters — and their numbers continue to dwindle — to get out and vote next Tuesday.
But, frankly, being reprimanded, however gently, by Jon Stewart, who admonished him that "You don't want to use that phrase, dude" only serves to remind many voters of how amateurishly many things have been handled by this administration.
And for the president of the United States to be called "dude" is demeaning to the office, no matter what one thinks of its occupant.
Obama should have said so.
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