Obama Auditioning For His Next Career?

It's increasingly likely that Barack Obama will be looking for a new job on or about Jan.20, 2013. He might want to consider comedy. He's been getting the laughs lately.

His most recent knee-slapper came while he was addressing the Democratic National Committee on Monday: "Over the last 15 months we've created over 2.1 million private-sector jobs."

According to the first draft of the transcript posted on the official White House website, this comment drew laughter from those in attendance.

It's hardly surprising that this comment would evoke guffaws from a friendly audience. During a meeting of his own Council on Jobs and Competitiveness a few days earlier, Obama brought the house down when he quipped: "'Shovel-ready was not as . . . uh . .. shovel-ready as we expected."

Council chairman Jeffrey Immelt laughed the hardest, but Obama chuckled as well.

He was referring to the catastrophic $787 billion economic stimulus program that he and the Democratic Party foisted upon the American people back in February 2009. This plan, you will recall, was guaranteed to prevent unemployment from rising beyond 8 percent. Unemployment quickly soared past 10 percent and has only dipped back below double digits because so many Americans have despaired of ever finding work again and have dropped out of the job market altogether.

He boasted that America would see immediate benefits because the stimulus was going to create jobs that were "shovel ready."

It turns out that he was the one who was shoveling it.

I'm beginning to wonder if Joe Biden wasn't auditioning for a comedy tour when, back on Sept. 25, 2009, seven months after the stimulus bill was signed, when he proclaimed himself stunned at how well the stimulus was working: "In my wildest dreams, I neverthought it would work this well."

And of course, it was the summer of 2010 that Biden anointed as "recovery summer."

I'd like to believe that Obama was honing his comedy chops the other day when he blamed the nation's persistent unemployment on ATM machines. "There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers," he said. "You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate."

This follows a growing pattern among the left. Jesse Jackson, Jr., who like Obama hails from Chicago, blamed unemployment on Apple iPads. He noted that the Borders bookstore chain has gone out of business soon after the iPad was introduced and so concluded that people were buying their reading material online rather than going to the bookstore.

Is it possible that the hilarity generated by Jackson's philosophizing inspired Obama to include it as part of his routine? Or has Obama and the Democratic Party given up on Keynesian economics and chosen now to embrace the Ted Turner school of thought?

Twenty years ago, tens of thousands of Northwest timber jobs were lost when the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species. The abrupt economic consequences of the owl's protection got Turner to thinking. Perhaps we could remediate the court-ordered logging jobs losses by banning chain saws and returning to the old-style, two-man cross-cut hand saws of the kind now only seen in vintage black and white photographs. Adopting such inefficient logging methods on the lands where logging was still legal should compensate for the jobs lost in spotted owl habitat, he reasoned.

If cross-cut saws didn't get all those loggers rehired, then I suppose we could have them learn how to make and use stone axes.

Right! And after that, we'll make women wash clothes in the streams and carry jugs of water on their heads.

Assuming Obama was serious in blaming unemployment on automation, and that this represents the level of economic understanding that drives policy-making within this White House, it's hardly surprising that they could do as much damage as they have in barely 21/2 years. Only an Ivy League education can clear the mind so thoroughly of common sense and backfill the empty space with ignorance.

Quick, somebody find one thing that Sarah Palin has said that is half that dumb.