Jack Welch on O (the finger-pointer)

Welch Hits Finger-Pointer In Chief

Leadership: A business icon has ripped the administration's "divide and conquer" strategy, the president's refusal to take responsibility for his policies and for an enemies list that would make a disgraced ex-president proud.

We now have the Obama Principle. It's like the Peter Principle, in which people rise to the level of their incompetence, except as redefined by this administration you refuse to recognize your incompetence and constantly blame others when things go wrong.

Jack Welch, renowned former CEO of General Electric before it became the nontaxpaying sock puppet for the administration's green energy push, has penned an Op-Ed article for Reuters in which he says Obama's "divide-and-conquer" re-election strategy is unworthy of a great leader and chides the president for blaming others for our economic woes.

"Over the past three years," Welch wrote last Wednesday, "Obama has taken a sort of divide-and-conquer approach, amassing a list of enemies that would make Richard Nixon proud — bankers, health care insurance providers, oil companies, wealthy taxpayers, Congress and, most recently, the Supreme Court.

"Gas prices are the fault of oil speculators. The failure of solar power companies is the fault of unfair Chinese competition. The bad economy is one of the many things he inherited, as is the deficit. Operation Fast and Furious was a program begun under the Bush administration that he knew nothing about. The deficit is skyrocketing because the rich aren't paying their 'fair share.'"

On CNBC's "The Kudlow Report" the next day, Welch elaborated: "It was the insurance executives in health care. It was the bankers in the collapse. It was the oil companies as oil prices go up. It was Congress if things didn't go the way he wanted. And recently it's been the Supreme Court."

Indeed, of all the trial-balloon campaign slogans that President Obama has and will be trotting out, "the buck stops here" will not be one of them.

The slogans have ranged from "we can't wait," a slogan that blames a Congress that for two years was a wholly owned subsidiary of his own party, to saying he wanted to build an "America that can last." Which sums up his statement that the system of free-market capitalism, democracy and respect for the Constitution — a system that raised a colonial backwater to the greatest economic and military superpower in history — never worked.

While Obama says he wants an "America that can last," we long for a president who can govern, who sits in the Oval Office in this time of crisis instead of jet-setting from one fundraiser to another. Ronald Reagan worked with Tip O'Neill. Bill Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich. Obama couldn't work with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to produce a budget as deficits soared.

On "The Kudlow Report," Welch argued that in running their companies "great leaders are interested in coalescing." "You don't have one division pitted against the other," he said. "You try to get the whole company to pull together."

The goal of such companies, of course, is to turn profits and provide good returns to investors — concepts foreign to a president more interested in redistributing wealth than creating it. When Obama's creeping socialism and industrial policy of picking winners and losers fails, he seeks scapegoats rather than solutions.

President Obama is the Steve Urkel of presidents, the bumbling sitcom character who, when his ill-conceived plans and blundering actions caused disaster, would look around plaintively and asked, "Did I do that?"At least Urkel knew he had nobody to blame but himself.

Not Obama.