The Myth of Could Have Beens

     Anyone exhibiting even a modicum of intellectual honesty, would admit that by any metric one would examine, things are much worse in this country than when President Obama took the oath of office in January of 2009. Unemployment is higher and has stayed there for more months than at any other time in our history. The Federal debt has increased by almost six trillion dollars. Gas prices have more than doubled since "The One" graced us with his brilliance. The housing market has shown little signs of recovery and Gross Domestic Product is growing at historically low post-recovery rates. And I haven't even gotten to the failure that is this President's foreign policy.
     Even the Democrats and the rest of the left know the Obama Presidency has been a failure. He hasn't even lived up to his own metrics he set for himself when he took office (halving the deficit, bringing unemployment under 6 percent, and making the Muslim world love us). But the tactic the President and his sycophants in the media have employed to excuse his pitiful record is to convince the nation that things would have been worse, if it weren't for the President's ground-breaking policies. In other words, "Just imagine how much more I could have failed." I like to call it, "The Myth of Could Have Beens." You can't prove or disprove a "Could Have Been", so it's an effective device employed by people who have failed to lessen the perception of their failure. This method is also used in reverse to blunt the success of the opposition, a tactic employed most notably during the Reagan years.
     This tactic, mostly employed by Democrats and the left, is only effective when practiced on an uniformed or misinformed populace. Therein lies the problem, i.e. the U.S. voter is woefully uneducated when it comes to the functions of government and the economy. If someone doesn't know, for instance, that the average GDP rate since the end of WWII has been around 3.2 percent, they can be fooled into thinking that 1.5 to 2.0 percent is good. Furthermore, if that same person doesn't understand the labor force participation rate and how it shows that there are 2 million fewer people working than when Barrack Obama took office, then they can be fooled into thinking that 4 million jobs have been added to the economy. And the deception goes on and on, it's easy, especially when you have a media that purposely misinforms the people.
     If the American public accepts the "Myth of The Could Have Beens", I wonder if they understand that what they are really accepting is mediocrity, from themselves and their leaders.