Not Adding Value

Barack Obama is a "No Excuses!" education reformer.

He believes teachers have to increase test scores and graduation rates of all students or be fired.

Obama was quite open about that when he cheered the firing of the teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island back in 2010:

Speaking at an event intended to highlight his strategy for turning around struggling schools by offering an increase in federal funding for local districts that shake up their lowest-achieving campuses, Obama called the controversial firings justified.

"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability," he said. "And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests -- 7 percent."

Central Falls is one of the poorest towns in the state of Rhode Island.

As of 2010, 26% of families and nearly 30% of individuals lived below the poverty line in Central Falls.

The town declared itself insolvent in 2010 and declared bankruptcy in 2011.

It can't afford to pay its pensioners, it had to lay off most of its municipal employees.

The factories in the town long ago closed.

Central Falls has all the ancillary problems that come with high rates of poverty - alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic abuse, homelessness, depression, etc.

But Barack Obama doesn't care about any of that.

All he cares is that the teachers in that town increase students' test scores and graduation rates, regardless of what is happening outside of school.

When teachers couldn't do that, Obama wanted the school "turned around" and much of the staff fired.

You see, teachers cannot make excuses when it comes to kids' lives.

Doesn't matter how bad the economy is, how depressed the town is.

NO EXCUSES!!!

Given Obama's "No Excuses!" education policies, what are we to make of the president's own economic record as of today?

(Reuters) - U.S. job growth braked sharply for a third straight month in May and the unemployment rate rose for the first time in nearly a year, raising chances of further monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve to support the sputtering recovery.

Employers added a paltry 69,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the least since May of last year, and 49,000 fewer jobs were created in the previous two months than had been thought, the Labor Department said on Friday.

The report is troubling for President Barack Obama, whose prospects of winning re-election in November could hinge on the economy's health. Republican opponent Mitt Romney called the report "a harsh indictment" of Obama's policies.

The jobless rate rose to 8.2 percent in May from 8.1 percent in April, although the increase reflected more people entering the labor force to look for work, a possible sign of growing confidence.

The data offered the clearest evidence yet that the deepening debt crisis in Europe and a slowdown in China were starting to dampen an already lackluster U.S. recovery. Concerns over the course of U.S. fiscal policy may also be weighing.

...

Stocks on Wall Street ended down more than 2 percent, extending May's rout. The Dow Jones industrial average sank into negative territory for the year.

Gee, that seems like a pretty dismal record.

Unemployment is heading back up, fewer people are finding work as we roll toward summer, the stock market is now in negative territory for the year and GDP has fallen below 2%.

While the country is not yet in imminent danger of a double dip recession, it is in danger of one.

It surely doesn't look like our intrepid Obama is adding much value to the American economy, does it?

Uh, uh - it sure doesn't.

Barack Obama is a "No Excuses!" kind of guy, so I bet he manned up and took ownership of these serious economic problems.

I bet Obama didn't try to blame the country's economic woes on outside forces like the Eurozone crisis or China's slowing economy or political gridlock in Washington.

After all, if Central Falls, Rhode Island teachers and teachers all over this country aren't afforded any excuses, why should Obama be afforded any?

He must see that, right?

Wrong:

(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama told his supporters on Friday he could break Washington's gridlock in a second term, and pushed Congress to enact his "to-do list" prescriptions to heal the economy in spite of it being an election year.

...

The Democratic president has repeatedly blamed his opponents on Capitol Hill for blindly opposing his efforts to kick-start growth and job creation in the hopes that bad economic news would hurt his re-election drive.

Earlier on Friday, responding to a disappointing jobs report that drove down stock markets, he also pointed to high gasoline prices and Europe's brewing economic crisis as factors getting in the way of recovery.

So much for "No Excuses!"

The piss-poor jobs report, the falling GDP - these aren't Obama's fault.

They're China's fault! They're the Eurozone's fault! They're the Republicans' fault!

I guess the president's "No Excuses!" philosophy only counts for teachers, not for presidents with shabby economic records.

If the Obama White House was a school in Rhode Island, Obama himself would call for it to be "turned around" and all the employees fired.

I think America needs to hold Obama to his "No Excuses!" rhetoric.