One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to tour the world telling anyone who would listen (and could provide a stage with Greek columns) that America sucks because of all the things it had done in the past.
But now, an older and more experienced Barack Obama has changed his tune and says that America sucks because we're incapable of doing things we did in the past.
Specifically, after recently criticizing Americans for being "soft," the president upped the ante while speaking to a group of liberal 1-percenters (at $5000 a seat) in San Francisco - where he declared that "We've lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam and unleashed all the potential in this country."
And he makes a great point. Who can forget all of the ambitious, imaginative, and willing construction workers who finished those big projects then channeled their newly unleashed potential into freelancing and leaving flyers on doors offering to build other Golden Gate Bridges and Hoover Dams? And sadly, today's goldbricking history-deprived Americans barely remember that only a few generations ago, Hoover Dams were as common as Starbucks.
But is it really a failure of the American people and American spirit that we can no longer build anything great...or does the failure rest elsewhere?
Hope n' Change would like to suggest that the answer is, as the president likes to say, simply a matter of math.
The cost of the Golden Gate Bridge was $35 million and it's still standing. The cost of the Hoover Dam was $49 million and it's still standing. But the cost to taxpayers for government support of Solyndra was $535 million...and after little more than a year, it's gone forever.
Perhaps if Mr. Obama wasn't quite so keen on building The Great National Debt, the rest of us could finally start thinking about building The Great Anything Else.
Dream big, America.
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