DeLAY: Obama’s schedule, rhetoric belie world realities

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Meetings, meetings meetings.

You can tell a lot about a person from his appointment book, and that’s certainly true of our president this week. Meeting with Democratic supporters in Wisconsin one day and world leaders in Europe just a few days later, President Obama told us all we need to know about his administration’s shortcomings, in both foreign and domestic policy.

Let’s start with Europe, where the president traveled to Estonia and now the NATO meeting in Britain a week after letting the entire world know he didn’t “have a strategy yet” for dealing with the murderous threats from the Islamic State in the Syria and Iraq.

In Estonia, Mr. Obama finally started talking tough about facing up to the threat, but those of us who have followed this administration’s foreign policy closely are left wondering: Is this for real? Is this another “red line” our enemies can cross with impunity?

With a president who has such a shaky grasp of history — whether it’s the results of appeasement of murderous regimes in the 1930s or the sources of the hatred we face today from Islamist terrorists — one wonders whether Mr. Obama will find the words or the policies at this NATO summit equal to the moment. President George W. Bush understood instinctively what needed to be done — assembling a “coalition of the willing” to take on ISIL, starting with the states in the region such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Jordan, backed by the power of NATO and the West.

The short-term threat is to the powers in the region itself; the long-term threat is to all of us. We can only hope the president understands the challenge he is facing.

(Speaking of appointment books and Mr. Bush, can you imagine the flak a Republican president would be getting from the media if he kept up the vacation schedule of this president? President Bush got hammered for one round of golf, let alone the hundreds President Obama has found time to play, while Secretary of State John Kerry gets photographed sailing off the coast of Nantucket. Clearly the president’s political base in the media remains secure.)

Back home, the president found time to schedule a truly amazing Labor Day rally with supporters in Milwaukee. With all the dangers in the world, with all the problems still facing the jobless in Milwaukee and cities and towns across the country, President Obama felt it was the right time to discuss — wait for it — raising the minimum wage.

Democrats always argue that raising the minimum wage will “help the economy,” but this is a policy that amounts to little more than a government-ordered redistribution of wealth, a tax on job creation that hurts most the people it is supposedly designed to help.

It just boggles the mind that Mr. Obama’s audience cheered wildly for his speech, but that is just a telling reminder of the dream world in which so much of the left prefers to live. While ISIS is beheading Americans and threatening the security of the Middle East, Mr. Obama is talking up socialist utopian dreams of raising everyone’s wages or fixing the immigration problem without bothering to work with Congress.

That USA Today poll released this week tells you everything you need to know: Democrats rate global warming as a bigger threat than ISIS — a policy hoax scares them more than the very real murder of innocent Americans.

We can’t finish without taking note of one more item of the White House itinerary: Vice President Biden’s comical visit to Detroit just as his boss was in Milwaukee. While spouting the same economic nonsense, Mr. Biden, as is his wont, had to go a bit further than the president, telling supporters it was time to “take back America.”

Aside from the fact that a Republican who used that line would be immediately charged, tried and convicted of racism in the mainstream media, there’s another question I’d love to ask the vice president: Take back from whom? You’ve been in power six years, remember? Who exactly do you think should be held responsible for all the problems at home and abroad we’re facing?

Let’s hope the president’s meetings in the future are more productive than the ones he’s been having lately. And let’s hope — let’s pray — that Mr. Biden, the gift that just keeps giving, does actually run for president in two years. It’s time to get humor back into American politics.

• Tom DeLay, a former congressman from Texas and House majority leader from 2003 to 2005, writes a weekly column for The Washington Times and www.washingtontimes.com.