Campaign speeches won’t fix economy

I thought it strange that after President Obama was done with his non-football-spiking Osama bin Laden victory tour that he was making an immigration reform address his next priority. Then I heard that the trip included a fundraiser in Austin, Texas, and it became clear that the speech in El Paso was the throw-in excuse for firing up Air Force One.

Then I heard the speech, a speech sold as an immigration reform address. It was strictly a campaign speech filled with rhetoric. It was packed with inaccurate, dishonest and exaggerated talking points all designed to rally the largely Hispanic crowd against Republicans. I would love to see a survey of people who live within 100 miles of the Mexican border and ask them what they thought of Obama’s “immigration reform address” and the things he presented as facts. I feel very safe in saying the vast majority would say it wasn’t even close to the truth.

We are all paying record high gas prices, we are all paying inflated grocery prices, we are all watching our home values drop at a record-setting rate and anyone like myself whose job depends on sales can tell you what business is like these days. But instead of concentrating on that, our fearless leader is making more divisive campaign speeches as he tries to reach his goal of a billion-dollar campaign war chest.

I continue to hear that the Republican presidential candidate field is weak; well, I for one would take any one of them over Obama in a heartbeat. At a time when we need some serious leadership we are stuck with a political hack spit out of the extremely corrupt Chicago Democratic machine falling back on his only strength -- making campaign speeches that produce nothing and solve even less.

Marc Thomsen

Elk Grove Village