The Battle of the Border

By Rich Galen

Thursday, July 10, 2014

It is one thing for Republicans to point fingers at President Barack Obama. It is something else for a Democrat to point a finger at Barack Obama.

Henry Cuellar is the Democratic Congressman from west Texas. In fact his district, the 28th, runs from San Antonio about 7,271 miles south, southwest along the Mexican border.

When you talk about America's border problems, you are talking Henry Cuellar's problems.

You might have read that President Obama is on another fund-raising trip. This time to Colorado and to Texas.

It was suggested that the President, as long as he was going to be in Texas and all, might want to make a trip to the border to see what all the hoo-hah is about.

This suggestion was made by Henry Cuellar. After he saw photos of the President playing pool and drinking beer with Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper during the Colorado segment of his trip.

Cuellar said on Fox News that the President should zip on down to the border while he's in Texas. The Dallas Morning News reported that Cuellar said:

    "He can get on Air Force One, be there in a half an hour? right after he finishes his fundraising in Texas"

You don't need a PhD in political science to understand why the White House doesn't want the President physically anywhere near the issue of unaccompanied children storming the barricades.

They know that while the President's position on immigration generally might be popular with many Americans, but his apparent paralysis in stemming the tide of tens of thousands of children illegally entering the United States is not helpful to his already dismal job approval ratings.

The Obama Administration is as close to total paralysis as any Presidency since Richard Nixon's Watergate days.

The IRS, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Middle East? you name it and the President is ignoring it.

The last time there was an issue like the Battle of the Border, was the British Petroleum oil spill.

The White House made a big deal of sending the Secretary of Energy who, as it happened, was a nuclear physicist not a chemist, a oceanographer, nor a geologist.

It took James Carville - JAMES CARVILLE - to light a fire under the White House to get the President to go to Louisiana.

Carville said, on ABC News:

    "Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We're about to die down here."

According to the Los Angeles Times, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz did his James Carville imitation saying,

    "Apparently there's no time [for Obama] to look at the devastation that's being caused by his policies."

Which is another example of one of my favorite sayings: No matter how good your cause, there is always someone who agrees with you that you wish didn't

Remember the agony that George W. Bush went through when he had Air Force One fly over the damage done by Hurricane Katrina? He never fully recovered from that decision.

Obama made that same mistake in 2010 with the BP oil spill and he's making it again in 2014 with the Bebé Border Crisis.

There is a growing suspicion in our Nation's Capital that President Obama is more-or-less playing out the string. His administration has until January 20, 2017 to go.

He is likely to spend the majority of that time with a House and Senate in control of Republicans. His attempt to reinvent American foreign policy is a failure. And his signature domestic accomplishment - the ACA - is limping along costing far more to insure far fewer people than promised.

Kudos to Henry Cuellar for calling BS on the President's refusal to do a side trip to, at a minimum, show the American people he at least pretends to care about the Battle of the Border.