By Eric Cornett, Right Side News
During the first presidential debate yesterday evening, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney provided our incumbent president with something he’s been in sore need of these past four years – a job review and evaluation. The President, while hopeful and confident entering this debate, seemed at times despondent and abashed as he made his case to America for keeping his job after a dismal first term in office.
Eyes cast downward, head hung low in apparent shame, Barack Obama heard from his Republican challenger just how ineffective his policies and performance have been. Like an employee called into the front office for a sit-down with the company CEO, Barack Obama made an effort to defend his lack of progress by stating at one point that his policies were the same as Bill Clinton. Just as trying to claim another’s record as your own doesn’t work in the world of business, it didn’t work here either.
The lesson for Mr. Obama to take away from this first debate is a simple one, and one long overdue. Simply believing in your own greatness does not make it so. High self esteem does not make up for a lack of fundamental skills and experience, and doesn’t enable you to perform a complex job successfully. With Mitt Romney maintaining his genial composure and never losing his nerve, he turned the tables on “the professor” and offered some much needed instruction of his own on the fundamentals of economics and job creation. At one point, responding to a comment the President made on tax credits for job outsourcing, Mr. Romney shook his head. He replied to Obama that in twenty five years of being a businessman he’d never heard of such a credit and that perhaps he needed to have a word with his accountant. You know, the same accountant that Mitt Romney hired to not prepare and file his taxes, a claim made by Harry Reid earlier in the campaign.
The debates continue next week with Vice-President Joe Biden getting his own job evaluation at the hands of challenger Paul Ryan. Given Mr. Biden’s penchant for being easily angered and susceptibility to recurrent “foot in mouth” disease, I have little doubt that we’ll see a strong performance by Mitt Romney’s running mate. If Ryan can only instruct Biden on basic geography half as well as Mitt Romney did Barack Obama on economics, it should give the voting public a better understanding on what true leadership looks like.
Eric Cornett, Right Side News
Writer/Photographer/Graphic Artist
Eric is a writer and professional photographer in charge of the Right Side News graphic design projects. Devoted father of four and husband, Eric is proud to be head of a traditional nuclear family in times where proclaiming such is politically incorrect.