Canute the Great was a Viking leader and an 11th-century King of England. Legend has it that once he overheard his flattering royal advisors brag that their king was “so great, he could command the tides of the sea to go back.”
These courtiers’ extravagant claims remind me of our own president, Barack Obama. Back in 2008, he claimed that future generations of Americans would look back on his election and say, “this was the moment when…we began to provide jobs for the jobless…when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” No speech in American politics has contained more hubris than Obama’s 47 seconds.
Sadly, it was a quick fall for our president.
Fox News reports:
President Obama, in the first of potentially many executive actions tied to his State of the Union address, will unilaterally increase the minimum wage for workers under new federal contracts to $10.10 an hour, from $7.25, in an effort to build momentum for a minimum wage hike for all Americans. The executive order, which had been pushed by progressive Democratic lawmakers, applies to all contractors performing services for the federal government and would affect more than 2 million employees, according to an administration official.
Well, he did say that we’d look back and see his election as the moment when we started providing “jobs for the jobless.” Raising the minimum wage for workers would be a step in the right direction, right?