Instead of leading with a pro-business agenda, President Obama left the creation of the stimulus legislation to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

When Barack Obama was elected president, he inherited a looming fiscal crisis. President Bush attempted to stem this fiscal tide but by the time Obama was inaugurated, the fiscal crisis still existed. With problems there come opportunities. President Obama had an opportunity to solve this fiscal crisis and heal the political bickering that he said he would. Instead of throwing for a touchdown, he punted.

Every president starts with a "honeymoon" period. The honeymoon usually lasts for a few months and the president can make policy decisions without howls of opposition. President Obama had such an opportunity with the fiscal crisis. He could and should have assembled a team of business and economic leaders to create his blueprint to solve the crisis. The most effective way to get out of a recession is to stimulate business productivity. As business improves, hiring increases, spending increases, and the whole economy improves. Instead of leading with a pro-business agenda, Obama left the creation of the stimulus legislation to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi's associations and affiliations with some of the country's more left-wing organizations is well known, so expecting her to create legislation that would actually stimulus business was foolhardy.

It takes months to create the legislation for just one of the appropriation bills. So how did Pelosi produce the "stimulus" bill in just a few days? Peolsi, true to her leftist leanings, dusted off all the socialist pork legislation that sat on the shelves for years and submitted it as the solution to our fiscal woes.

There was a mad rush to pass this massive spending bill. An artificial "need" date was February 16^th, President's Day. The theatrical significance cannot be ignored but the speed of the legislation was not as important as the economic viability of the legislation. Make-work projects will not improve the economy. Hiring someone to dig a hole and someone else to fill it will employ two people, but it won't increase our productivity. Third World countries use hundreds of people to do the same job that one skilled operator of a bulldozer can do. Productivity is the key to a prosperous economy.

In the frenzy to get the legislation through the House of Representatives, we also learned that there was another priority that drove the immediate passage. Speaker Pelosi had an eight-day vacation (whoops – strike that); Speaker Pelosi had a congressional fact-finding mission scheduled to leave for Rome at 6:00 PM February 13. You would think that the facts wouldn't change from day to day, so the urgency of the trip would be nonexistent. And since Pelosi travels on an Air Force aircraft that flies when and where she wants, getting a ticket or losing her reservation is a non-issue. So it is evident that Pelosi's priority was her schedule, NOT the content of the legislation or the promise to allow the public 48 hours to view legislation before any vote. So much for Pelosi and her San Francisco "values." But worse than the public not reading the legislation, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) predicted that NONE of his Senate colleagues would have the chance to read the bill before voting. This is another admission that our legislators vote on legislation that they haven't read. Is there any wonder why we are in deep trouble?

President Obama had an opportunity to defuse opposition, cement a long honeymoon, while solving a fiscal crisis, but he gave that up to pacify Pelosi. Time will tell who is really wearing the pants but right now it looks like Obama is just wearing knickers.