Pirate's Cove

Not too well, actually, partly because it would require……work!

(Politico) Stymied by Republicans, an exasperated President Barack Obama told the nation he would go it alone and use his executive authority to get things done.

“We can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job,” he said in Las Vegas in October. “Where they won’t act, I will.”

But five months and almost three dozen announcements later, a closer look at the We Can’t Wait program shows just how hamstrung the president has been in acting on his own to provide expansive or quick relief to struggling Americans.

Some initiatives involve little more than a new website, a pilot program or a brochure. Others are basically repackaged announcements of programs already well under way. Yet others are works in progress, waiting on the government bureaucracy to catch up with the urgency of Obama’s “we can’t wait” mantra.

Now, that’s funny, even a hard left progressive like Obama can’t get the entrenched central government bureaucracy to cooperate. Among the actions

• Obama blamed Republicans for blocking education reform and declared in November that the administration would “take matters into our hands” and overhaul the rules for funding Head Start. Left unsaid at Obama’s event in Philadelphia: He was implementing a law that Congress had already passed on a bipartisan basis — nearly five years earlier.

• The administration announced in October a one-stop website where businesses can access federal programs, and a bare-bones version of BusinessUSA.gov formally launched in February. But the Small Business Administration now says it needs $6 million to develop and market the site.

• Obama announced in December that he would extend minimum wage and overtime protections to certain health care workers. But relief may still be months off: It can’t be implemented until the government finishes the rule-writing process.

• The White House launched Ethics.gov this month under the We Can’t Wait banner. But the effort, which brought together seven databases already available on the Internet, was just as much about fulfilling a campaign pledge from 2008 to create a centralized Web platform for ethics data.

So, all we’re basically seeing is lots of talk, but little action, because making this stuff work is hard work, and interferes with all the parties, golf outings, and campaign appearances. Politico points out that this is why Obama turned to the use of executive orders (and fails to mention that Obama decried the use of EOs while Bush was president), because Obama has zero leadership skills to go along with his entrenched progressive doctrine. He wants to appear to be doing something, but, he doesn’t know how to get it done, which is why he outsources so many of his initiatives. If only he was a quasi-dictator like China’s president….