Wonder how Matt Lauer and his colleagues in the legacy media would have reacted had George W. Bush expressed a similar frustration:
I think this is the nature of being President. What’s frustrated people is that I have not been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.
Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change that I would like sometimes. But what I have been able to do is move in the right direction. And what I’m going to keep on doing is plot away, very persistent. You know what? One of the things about being President is you get better as time goes on.
Emphasis. What arrogance. Assuming people are frustrated because he can’t force Congress to implement his promises? (Maybe they’d have been frustrated if he tried (and failed) to “force” Congress to act on something he’d been proposing throughout the campaign, you know that “net spending cut“.)
In reality, his party controlled Congress for the first two years of his term. He was able to “force” the legislature to implement a good chunk of his agenda. And people were frustrated, frustrated that the Democratic Congress implemented many of his proposals.
Doesn’t he understand that the people elected a Republican Congress in response to such implementation?
Many of us like the system our Founders designed — and they designed it deliberately to make it difficult to bring about the types of changes men like Obama would propose, changes which usurp the liberties of the people and centralize power in a in a far-distant capital.
“What’s this about ‘Founders,’” asks Jim Treacher in commenting on the president’s interview, “Since when do they matter? If the Constitution prevents him from getting what he wants, he just ignores it. Rules are for people who aren’t Obama. Oh, you don’t think so? Racist.” (Via Instapundit.)
What’s frustrated people is his presence in the White House.
He is addressing the numbskull voters who swooned and drooled in 2008 over “hope” and “change.”
What was “every aspect” of what Obama “said in 2008”? Show me the laundry list. It wasn’t there. It was about stopping the seas from rising, it was about “social justice” and “fundamentally transforming America” and the “audacity of hope” and blah, blah, blah.
He is playing to the crowd that would be the first to beg him to be dictator.
What is strange about that? He has “accomplished” circumventing Congress by executive regulation and made eunuchs of the Senate to the point that they conspire with him by ignoring the budget process and whatever smoke and mirrors they used to “pass” Obamacare.
That highlighted sentence is as much a warning as a lament. It is a view into the man’s soul. The Messiah president is looking at the sinners blocking his way and he is damning them to Hell.
President Obama is frustrated he can’t be America’s first dictator. If America becomes a dictatorship, Obama will not live for very long. I’m certain the military & even the Secret Service would kill him first. America & dictatorship is a contradiction in terms. We the people won’t let it happen. Oh, & the Democrat Party would be completely destroyed–finished.
However, I believe America has set-up safe guards that we would not have any more bloodshed; it’s why the powers are separated among the 3 branches of Executive, Congress (House & Senate), & Judiciary. We have elections instead of bloodshed by the people for the people.
Obama is also clueless that the people want gridlock to stop the Obama Marxist agenda.
So it turns out that the Constitution established an elaborate system of checks and balances that prevents the president from forcing Congress to do what he wants? Who’d have ever guessed? Certainly not a brilliant constitutional scholar and Senior Lecturer (or whatever his title was) on Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago School of Law.
Sarcasm aside, Heliotrope is right about Obama’s intended audience for these remarks.