President Barack Obama seems to be working very hard at honing his skills for his next job, that of former president. After his disastrous first term, it is pretty clear that Mr Obama will be moving out of the White House in January 2013. When he does leave the White House in January, 2013, he will finally have a chance to do something he has never done: a job for which he is qualified.
With absolutely no experience as an executive, Mr Obama was ushered into the Oval Office by an electorate dissatisfied with the Bush Administration and eager to vote for the first African-American presidential candidate. His dearth of experience and radical leftist ideology were of no apparent interest to the American electorate. But when he becomes a former president immediately after the next election, Mr Obama will enter an occupation for which he has all the experience he needs.
Former presidents do pretty much what Mr Obama does now. They give speeches, play golf, raise money for disaster victims, build libraries to laud their achievements, travel abroad, vacation in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, and democrat former presidents sometimes win Nobel Prizes. For once in his life, Mr Obama need not be embarrassed at being the least experienced person in any meeting he attends. With the amount of time Mr Obama spends on the golf course and going on vacation, he should have no trouble making the transition. He even has some experience in winning Nobel Prizes.
The major difference, of course, is that as a former president, Mr Obama will no longer hold the reins of power in the United States. He will no longer be able to stifle business recovery with the staggering burden of federal regulations. He will no longer prevent meaningful l development of domestic energy sources. He will no longer be able to suggest raising taxes on particular groups of Americans, while increasing welfare distributions to other groups. He will be free to do what he does best, relax and give speeches, while the American people will be free to do what they do best, innovate and work hard to save the American economy from the mismanagement of this dangerous economic illiterate.
While many other former presidents have been hampered by the silly tradition of silence with regard to their successors, Mr Obama has the example of fellow former president and fellow democrat Jimmy Carter to follow. While previous presidents have had the class and dignity to refrain from casting aspersions on their successors, Mr Carter has traveled the world, castigating his republican successors despite their obvious successes in international and domestic economic affairs, while simultaneously reviling his country.
Here again, Mr Obama has already demonstrated that the traditional refrain shown by previous presidents not named Carter is no obstacle for him. He has already been very vocal in assigning responsibility for every malady facing the nation to the administration of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Beyond that, he has traveled the world apologizing for his country, and presumably all previous presidents, while still occupying the office of its Chief Executive.
All indications suggest that the next presidential election will be interesting. It will be an election similar to that which followed the inept Carter administration, a landslide repudiation and defeat of the democrat incumbent, followed a quarter century of economic growth and prosperity. Mr Obama can then attend to his new job as former president with all the venom and perfidy now solely the province of the hapless Jimmy Carter, but the nation will no longer have to suffer the consequences of his breathtaking ineptitude. But he certainly is supremely qualified to take the baton from the aging peanut farmer.
