Williamson offers the president a performance review

Kevin D. Williamson explains for National Review Online readers why he recommends that voters not “renew” the president’s four-year contract.

Deliverable 3: Energy. When interviewing for this position, you said, and I quote, “We could have headed off $4-a-gallon gas.” We’ve seen gas prices above or near $4 for most of your term, and above $5 in some parts of the country under the management of your associates. Energy production on the firm’s lands is down substantially year-over-year.

Deliverable 4: Balance Sheet. During your interview, you proposed cutting the firm’s current operating deficit in half. In fact, the firm has acquired trillions of dollars of new debt under your management, along with new unfunded liabilities that our accountants are still trying to work out. When you were presented recommendations from a committee named by you and your management team, you refused even to consider implementing them. You are on track to add another $1 trillion in debt this year.

Deliverable 4: Growth. The first and second quarters of this year saw 1.2 percent and 2 percent growth, respectively, well under the firm’s historic average and less than half of your own team’s assumptions.

Deliverable 5: Human-Capital Deployment. We lose money when our people aren’t working. On the day you were hired, we had 65.7 percent of them on the job; today we have only 63.6 percent. We understand that the recession presented challenges, but if you had kept pace with prior post-recession human-capital deployment, we’d have 6 million more workers on the job today.

Deliverable 6: Retained Shareholder Earnings by Unit. Household incomes are down in real terms by $3,002.96 since you’ve been on the job. In case you haven’t been informed, we were hoping to get them moving in the other direction. Losing money for our shareholders is not our business model.

Deliverable 7: Cost Control. Welfare expenditures are up 32 percent since we hired you and your team. Instead of paying our people to work, we’re paying them not to work. As you might say, this is “not optimal.”