By STEPHEN
MOORE

Barack Obama now faces perhaps his most politically crippling deficit of all:
a credibility deficit.

That observation is reflected in the latest Bloomberg poll, which finds that
on the heels of his big jobs speech last Thursday night, more than half of
Americans (51%) do not believe the president's claim that this latest $447
billion spend-and-tax-or-borrow scheme will create new jobs.

"As the economy has gotten worse, people have stopped listening to Obama and
his speeches are no longer an asset, they're a liability," concludes Kellyanne
Conway, president of the Polling Company. That is because the gulf between three
years of rhetoric and reality is so gigantic.

American voters can't conceive of how $447 billion of more debt and spending
will create jobs when the last three years have already given us $4 trillion of
new debt with no jobs. What is even harder to believe is the president's
assurance that the new American Jobs Act "will not add to the deficit. It will
be paid for." How can this plan be paid for when the first, $830 billion, plan
has never been paid for?

While running for president Mr. Obama promised "pay as you go budgeting," and
in February 2009 during his "fiscal responsibility summit" he sounded like
Ronald Reagan when he said that "this is the rule that families across this
country follow every single day, and there's no reason why their government
shouldn't do the same." But the Obama government isn't doing the same. It is
doing the opposite.

Here's another Obama promise that sounds like a whopper today. In 2008 he
pledged he would "go through our federal budget—page by page, line by
line—eliminating those programs we don't need, and insisting that those we do
operate in a sensible cost-effective way." That hasn't happened.

In the wake of the lousy economic news, Mr. Obama, who promised a new era of
"accountability," has blamed the ongoing jobs recession on "a run of bad luck."
Who knew there would be a tsunami in Japan, disruptions in the oil supply from
the Mideast—when has that ever happened before?—and so many other job-killing
events beyond the president's control?

The green jobs revolution we were expecting to put America back to work is
also browning out. A new Department of Energy study finds that between 2007 and
2010, clean-energy subsidies more than doubled. But after billions of taxpayer
handouts have been pumped year after year into solar and wind power, these two
industries supply 2.4% of America's electricity.

Mr. Obama says he wants to make America less dependent on foreign oil, but
this week he called again for raising taxes on domestic oil and gas production.
He said last year that he believes America is "running out of places to drill"
even though in the last five years new discoveries of oil and natural gas have
occurred in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Dakota, Texas, Montana and
Colorado—causing a near doubling in U.S. recoverable reserves.

Mr. Obama said in his speech on Thursday that health-care costs are a major
contributor to the debt and need to be reined in. He neglected to mention what
voters surely remember, which is that last year Mr. Obama signed a health-care
law that adds at least 30 million more Americans to Medicaid—the program Mr.
Obama now says is the problem. During the debate over ObamaCare the White House
insisted that the fees in the plan for not purchasing health insurance were not
a tax. But arguing before the courts on the constitutionality of the law, the
White House now says these are taxes. Which is it?

Mr. Obama says he has been one of the most constantly attacked presidents in
history and he is probably right about that. But his attackers in the
conservative movement aren't likely to be his undoing. His most damning
persecutors are his own words and promises. The problem for President Obama is
that fewer voters are listening to him. There's no blaming George W. Bush for
that.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903927204576572782466492342.html