I consider President Obama to be the nation’s slickest salesman. Notice that I did not say “most successful.” For the past three years or so, he has been at least moderately successful at selling himself. He ran his presidential campaign selling Americans “hope and change,” which a great many citizens desperately wanted.
However, anyone employed in sales knows that, not only do you have to deliver the goods that you have promised, you must continue to deliver, to improve your product, to innovate, and to service your product after the sale. Obama has failed miserably in all of these respects.
Look at the world’s most successful companies and draw your own comparisons to the president: Take, for instance, Wal-Mart, arguably the most successful company in the history of the world. Wal-Mart provides a vast array of products (albeit most made in China) at excellent prices and gives its customers excellent, if uninspired, service. It gives the people what they want and its customers have rewarded it by spending a great deal of money there. Wal-Mart promises low prices and Wal-Mart delivers.
If Obama were a real employee — a commissioned salesman — employed by a real company, he would be starving. Since his 2008 campaign, he has been promising “hope and change,” but if you take a closer look at the aforementioned hope and change, you will see that the salesman does not deliver the goods. He never has and, by all indications over the past twenty-three months, he never will.
The administration’s sales strategy for 2010 was to promote the notion of a “recovery summer.” Obama launched this strategy during a speech in Ohio on June 18th. He made a feeble sales pitch by trying to convince the masses that the $787 billion “stimulus” package — passed sixteen months earlier — was a success. For nearly two years (through November 2010), the nation’s unemployment rate has been at or above nine percent, and for sixteen consecutive months it has been at 9.5 percent or higher.
And Obama calls this a “success.” Someone should ask him to define “failure.” Then again, perhaps that is not such a good idea.
The masses that fell for Obama’s brand of snake oil in 2008 — the ones that still display “Obama ‘08” stickers on their cars — are buying. But the thinking people in America see this for what it is: a train that has come off the tracks and is still traveling at a high rate of speed. In other words, the train derailed some time ago but it is still causing damage. And, with the momentum that it carries, it is poised to inflict much greater damage before the wreckage finally comes to a rest.
Obama is trying to sell a Lexus and some customers are purchasing a Lexus.
But he is delivering a Yugo.
James Sharp is a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-management sales guy. He believes in a strong military, limited government and unlimited opportunity for all US citizens.