-By Warner Todd Huston
A few days ago, Politico reported that Obama’s vaunted Economic Recovery Advisory Board supposedly headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker has not even met yet, six weeks after its storied birth at the president’s behest, months after Obama began to shrilly say that we are in the “emergency” of an economic crisis.
Worse, it was revealed that some of the members of this “board” have met, but in smaller groups and in private making the lie to Obama’s self-reverential, and now prosaic claim of the importance he was to place on government transparency.
Also not long ago, it was realized that Obama’s White House website was not being employed in the manner Obama claimed it would once he became president. It was found that quite a few documents, proclamations, executive orders and announcements were never posted on the website that Obama claimed would serve as the way for all Americans to track what government was doing.
And then there are the “czars.” He would, he said, have an expert here, a czar there, to head up important panels of other experts so that we could all be saved from ourselves, so that every ill that faces America could be neatly solved in one great committee effort or another. It would be a momentous and studious approach befitting the “smartest president ever,” like a university faculty board writ large. Less leadership was needed from the top and more study was called for and Obama was just the man to kick off a new age of thoughtful, careful, even painstaking study.
So, have we seen any inkling of success from these czars? How many have even been empowered? Where are these “expert” panels and committees that are so important in this emergency? And, finally, where is the Herculean effort at “transparency” that featured so prominently in nearly every stump speech that Obama uttered over the last four years?
It must be pointed out that it is all been either forgotten, placed firmly on back burners or merely dabbled in with little to show for it.
So, what is the lesson we might learn here? What else but that all Obama’s czars, experts, panels, committees, transparency and claims at better government are little else but hoary campaign rhetoric and it is plain he has no desire to follow up on any of this populist talk. It was all smoke and mirrors, all chicken-in-every-pot boilerplate, and none of it was really going to be in the cards once he won.
Obama has truly fooled the voters. How long until they realize it?
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, Human Events Magazine, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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