Obama's Pathetic Picture Book !

As a sign of the diminishment of President Barack Hussein Obama, it is hard to top his newly released pamphlet, ''A Plan for Jobs & Middle Class Security.''  The plan purports, first to be a plan and second, to outline a second-term agenda distinct from his first term agenda. It fails on both counts. It cobbles together his current policies with some ill-defined new bullet points to barely 20 pages and largely devoted to nice pictures of el Presidente.

Make no mistake: What the Obama agenda lacks in substance, it makes up in graphic design. The pamphlet has as much gloss and as many soft-focus photos as a copy of Playboy. The question arises; why would the president wait until 14 days before the election, after the conventions and debates, to release his plan? And then print 3.5 million copies of it, making the plan a publishing phenomenon to rival ''Dreams of My Father.'' 

It's obviously the panicked realization that his campaign's attempted destruction of Mitt Romney hasn't worked and isn't enough to win. The Obama-Ass-kissers, the NBC and Wall Street Journal, poll this week found 62% of people want major changes in a prospective Obama second term. An 4%, that's almost down to Obama administration officials and immediate family, want more of the same status-quo presidency. If the pamphlet works, it deserves to join the ranks of the classic picture books of all time, right up there with ''Go, Dog, Go!'' and ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar.''  In an amusing touch, it has a table of contents -- as if readers would have trouble navigating the extensive volume.

The pamphlet's ''reviving American manufacturing'' section touts the creation of a new network of 15-20 manufacturing innovation institutes and a new trade enforcement unit (probably instigated by another EO). Heady stuff. The big idea is a reform of the corporate tax code. Obama calls for reducing rates and making up revenue by closing tax preferences and loopholes -- in other words, exactly what Romney is proposing for income taxes and what the president deems utterly impossible.

The ''energy made-in-America'' section takes credit for the country's oil and gas boom, to which the president has been a bystander. Its celebration of subsidies for green-energy makes it clear that the president has learned nothing from the scandals and disappointments of his first years of lavishly funding alternative energy. It's the same old ''carry-on regardless'' philosophy.

The upshot of the ''putting you in charge of your health care'' section is that if you liked ''Obamacare'' in the first term, you'll love it in the second. The pamphlet doesn't mention the roughly $2 trillion in new spending, nor the $5000 billion in new taxes, nor the Congressional Budget Office estimate that 20 million people could lose their employer-provided health insurance. (Those points must have been crowded out by the inspiring photo of Obama discussing weighty matters with a half-dozen doctors in white coats.)

On the deficit, the pamphlet touts the same ole $4 trillion plan, which is a little more than a hoary talking point. On entitlements, the president's plan evidently is to do nothing, since he already gutted Bill Clinton's sensible 1994 Welfare Plan by removing the one motivating factors that made it work and save government money; if you don't look for work, your welfare cheque stops. Also, he'll do nothing on Medicaid, do nothing on Social Security and do nothing on Medicare, except pretend that his $716 billion in cuts to fund ''Obamacare'' were a boon to the program.

The Way i See it.....the pamphlet is quite a comedown for the president. Gone are the days when he was over-promising. Now, he's trying to cover for his lack of anything new to promise. The Berlin speech in 2008 and this second-term pamphlet are the exact opposites of the Obama phenomenon. He has gone from airy and grandiose to airy and picayune in the span of four short years.