Obama's 'Country First' Recursion

To borrow from a post last month, past performance is no guarantee of future results:

“Obama: ‘It’s time for the games to stop,’” the Alberta Lea Tribune reports today, with an assist from AP:

CANNON FALLS — Kicking off a three-day bus tour to the Midwest, President Barack Obama on Monday challenged Congress to be willing to compromise and put America first over their political parties.

During what was a town-hall style meeting in the city’s Lower Hannah Bend Park, Obama said he expects political representatives to show the same amount of responsibility that most Americans show when making budget and other family decisions.

“You’ve got to send a message to Washington that it’s time for the games to stop, it’s time to put country first,” Obama said.

But I thought everyone did that, right? In Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention on August 28th, 2008, he said:

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.

The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together, and bled together, and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a red America or a blue America; they have served the United States of America.

So I’ve got news for you, John McCain: We all put our country first.

So yes, President Obama, it’s time for the games to stop, though I can understand why you, and your vice president might be hearing footsteps.

At the New York Post today, Michael Walsh writes on “Bam’s terrible risk — Advisers making him seem like just another politician:”

Do President Obama’s advisers realize they’ve got him frittering away the last political asset he has left?

As unpopular as the president’s policies — and especially his results — have proved, a majority of Americans still like and, somehow, even trust him personally. But his new political strategy is based on a manuever that even fellow Democrats see as transparently cynical.

He’s tramping around the country “demanding” that Republicans “put country before party” to pass his “jobs” bill right now — knowing full well that there’s no chance they will.

That is, the president is posing as the one man in Washington who’s above the partisan fray — and the pose itself is just a nakedly partisan ploy.

One that Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats just dynamited.