Obama, the Virtual Challenger

[Geee]

National Review:

In these last days of the race, Obama counts on the news of Sandy turning attention away from Romney’s October momentum, to photo-ops of himself in a monogrammed bomber jacket trying to look presidential. The more Benghazi creeps into the news, the stranger the silence from the Obama administration. But the real story is that almost all of the hope of 2008 has ended in the fear and loathing of 2012.

Obama has made no real attempt to defend much of what he has done in the last four years. It is as if his first term never existed — no 70 percent approval rating, no Democratic House, no Democratic Senate. Instead we are back to the future as a young Lincolnesque senator, with a clean slate, has come to save us from George W. Bush’s recession, which, we now learn, was caused by plutocrat Mitt Romney all along. Obama is the perpetual challenger, once more running against Bobby Rush, Alan Keyes, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain on all the wonderful things he would do if only he were elected.

On energy, suddenly the president has dropped all mention of “wind, solar, and 5 million new green jobs.” Under the radar, he may be pursuing cap-and-trade and shutting down coal plants by executive orders, but officially Obama is bragging that the oil and gas industry ignored him, drilled like crazy on private lands, and — in spite of him, not because of him — have vastly upped U.S. fossil-fuel production. And suddenly that is a good thing. His new energy message seems to have been reduced to something like, “Vote for me, because I failed to stop private energy companies, and so we are much better off.” It is as if cap-and-trade, the Chevy Volt, and Solyndra never existed.