Instead of trying to govern, a matter about which I suppose we should be grateful, President Obama is once again galloping from fundraiser to fundraiser, straining to make the implausible case that the country needs his second term.

In New York for three events – in which he raked in $2 million from the very type of fat cats he daily condemns – he pleaded with voters (Reuters’ terminology, not mine) to be patient with him and to give him more time to fulfill his 2008 “hope and change” campaign promise.

He told supporters: “After all that is happening in Washington, it may be tempting to believe that change may not be as possible as we thought. It has been three wrenching years for this country.” I’ll say.

Well, I, for one, fault him not for failing to honor that promise, but for keeping it. We’ve had change, all right, and precisely the kind he had in mind. One can only imagine how much more change he would have effected if he’d had his way – if democracy, as he has complained, weren’t so “slow” and so “messy.” Worse still, let’s imagine how much more change he’d attempt if, God forbid, he were to purloin a second term.

His words to the friendly audiences confirm what attentive observers already understand about his remaining ambitions. He said: “Every single thing that we care about is at stake in this next election. It’s going to take more than a few years to meet the challenges that have been decades in the making.”

It would be one thing if Obama had been referring to the entitlement structure that the liberal establishment has imposed on Americans over the past half-century or more. But if entitlements were his concern, he wouldn’t be single-handedly obstructing their structural reform. No, he’s talking about the sluggish state of the economy, which absolutely wouldn’t take even two years – much less a decade – to turn around if he would remove his socialist boot from its gasping throat.

But we should note that Obama cleverly gets double mileage out of conveniently shifting the goal posts. Back in his messianic era, he wasn’t fecklessly cautioning that it would take a generation to bring about real change or to turn the economy around. He said that with his “stimulus” bill, unemployment would top out at 8 percent and that if he didn’t turn things around within his first term, the voters wouldn’t give him another chance.

But by rewriting history to erase those statements, he hopes to get a pass on his failure to produce in the time period he proposed, and he shiftily bolsters his case that his policies haven’t failed at all, that they only need more time to work, which they will unless reversed by hyper-partisan Republicans.

This may be doubly good for Obama, but it’s doubly bad for America. For if such sophistry abets his re-election, we will have lost any real chance to save the nation from financial bankruptcy, and he will have a mandate to make matters even worse – on a wide range of fronts.

What would Obama do in a second term? He told his fawning benefactors that he considers his achievements to be overhauling health care, ending the war in Iraq and fighting al-Qaida but that he needs another term to fully address the economy, the environment and other issues.

So he considers imposing cost-prohibitive, freedom-suppressing and quality-destroying nationalized health care against the people’s will his major achievement? His awkward withdrawal from Iraq and increasingly deteriorating relations there a close second? And “fighting al-Qaida” with most of the tools, save enhanced interrogation techniques, he slandered President George W. Bush for using?

But now he wants more time to “address the economy” and “the environment” – as if his approaches to those aren’t mutually exclusive and as if he has earned any good will or credibility on either.

As for the economy, the only thing Obama knows are the failed practices of spending yet more borrowed money, establishing incestuous government-business partnerships and raising taxes, all of which would accelerate our appointment with financial Armageddon. He insists on more Solyndras, just as the world is beginning to wise up to the horrors attendant to worshipping false green gods. (Europe is starting to bail on Kyoto.) He will not allow the private sector and the producers likeliest to resurrect it the freedom to breathe. If the economy were to rebound on his watch – first or second term – it would be despite his agenda.

Amazingly, Obama told his contributors that he tries not to pat himself “too much on the back” but that his “administration has done more for the security of … Israel than any previous administration.”

This is outright surreal, and so would be his second term.

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