President simply doesn’t feel our pain

He came. He spoke. He hedged.

But, hey, when you're teed up to be history's "depression president," it takes a special kind of guts to speak honestly with the people feeling most of the pain of your lousy economy, which now teeters on inflation, a double-dip recession and far deeper misery.

But instead, President Barack Obama dropped by Nevada and did what all lesser politicians do half-way through the first term of their presidency: He weasel-worded the truth about our collective future and then begged Nevadans for a second term.

He purred about "shared responsibility," "shared sacrifice" and "shared prosperity." He promised that green energy holds the answer to high gasoline prices; chided the federal government for failing to resist deficit spending (like he's somehow not ruler of that universe now); called for an embrace of tax reform and mustered absolutely no fortitude at all to advocate for a strengthening of the proverbial "middle class."

And our silver-tongued president made it all sound like, if we only gave him another term (that's Obamanomics until 2016, by the way), he could get the job done.

Well, if you think roaring drunks make good bartenders, Obama's your man. The rest of us, however, have reality to contend with.

So, let's get to the honesty President Obama failed to muster in his Reno trip.

The recession in the first two years of the Obama presidency absolutely hammered Nevadans. For the president to swing by for a 30-minute "re-elect me" speech and with a straight face tell us the best medicine to cure Nevada now is years more of the same ineffective treatment, well, that's nothing short of adding insult to injury.

He might have swung by to tell us that he's sorry for the pain the economy has caused Nevada, but if we'll give him more time he'll get things turned around.

Or, he might have said that he's sorry for the bad economy, he knows his "summer of recovery" plan failed and he's going to try something different.

Either approach would have been better because economists warn us that if you suffered under the last two years of Obamanomics, you'll suffer even more in the coming Obamaflation years.

Under Obama's presidency, the price of gasoline has gone from $1.80 to $4 a gallon. And lest we forget, as a candidate in 2008 Obama said he favored a gradual and steep increase in gasoline prices to alter American driving habits.

Unfortunately for us, he's getting the high prices he thinks best for us. Some analysts already are predicting an economic perfect storm this summer that could bring gasoline prices to $7 a gallon.

Richard Hastings, strategist at Global Hunter Securities in Charlotte, N.C., said last week that "if you get weakness in the dollar concurrent with the strong driving season concurrent with the impact of one or two hurricanes in the wrong place, prices could go up in a quasi-exponential manner."

Gasoline is just one of the signs. Been to the grocery store lately? Food prices have jumped 6.5 percent in 120 days.

Is that enough to kick the economy back into a recession? Well, the last time the average American's bill for energy and food reached 15 percent of disposable income, it was 1973 -- and the economy proceeded into a deep recession.

I'm not wishing for it, of course. But someone must sound the alarm.

On top of rising prices for food and fuel, add the devastation of Las Vegas' real estate market, and Nevadans are poised to continue to feel the pain of Obamanomics unabated like no other state.

The value of virtually every home in Las Vegas has declined by half or more, breaking nest eggs and ruining family plans for prosperity.

The president can fly in and take the coward's way out by shining us on about "shared sacrifice," but nobody's "sharing" more than Nevadans.

If President Obama wants to earn Nevada's vote in 2012, as he did in 2008, he better come up with a more believable re-election speech than what he gave in Reno 10 days ago. I'd suggest he at least pretend he knows what it's like to feel our pain.

Otherwise, he'll feel Nevada's pain in another way -- right up the old ballot box.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com), the former publisher of the Review-Journal and a member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at www.lvrj.com/ blogs/sherm.