President Barack Obama has proved he wasn't ready for the job, former Rep. Joe Scarborough said Tuesday, as he questioned whether Obama has accomplished much of anything — either in the White House or during his brief tenure as a U.S. senator from Illinois.
"Barack Obama has proven over the past 5 years that he wasn't ready to be president of the United States. And, he proves it still today," the conservative Florida Republican said on his MSNBC "Morning Joe" program.
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Scarborough said Obama "came out of nowhere" as a freshman senator and "a couple years later people elected him president of the United States."
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"(Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid said to Barack Obama early, 'You don't like it around here. It's obvious. Why don't you run for president?' He was already on his way there," Scarborough noted.
The conservative argued that spending a short time in the Senate does not qualify a person to be president, and asserted that Obama was able to win only because he was marketed and sold to voters like a bag of "potato chips."
To make his point, he challenged guests on his show to name
one significant piece of legislation Obama introduced while he was in that could be marked as an accomplishment that caught the public's attention.
Scarborough compared Obama's progression to the White House to a similar path, that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
The Republican has made headlines for his effort to defund the president's signature healthcare-reform law since he was first elected last year. Although he's been in office only nine months, Cruz is often mentioned as
a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2016.
"You have people that come out of nowhere and get in the Senate. They don't want to be in the Senate. They don't want to work for the people that hired them. Immediately, they start running for president of the United States a week after they get to the Senate," he said.
Scarborough noted that there are other newly elected officials who already may have set their sights on running for the White House, even before they've established themselves as competent lawmakers with a decent record of accomplishments.
"Let me put in (Florida GOP Sen.) Marco Rubio. Here is a guy who could be a great United States senator, from my home state. But, the second he got in, he immediately started running for president. I think it hasn't served him well," Scarborough said.
"You can go one after another after another," he said. "This doesn't work. The Barack Obama way does not work."
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