Six months into the Obama Administration, the domestic topic of greatest concern can be summed up in one word - jobs. With a national unemployment rate of 9.5% last month, we're at a 26-year high. Maryland's jobless rate is at 7.2%, also a 26-year high; not even our proximity to the nation's capital, the Mecca of government jobs, has spared us.

I have personally felt the sting of the job crisis. In the past eighteen months, I've been laid off twice, took a $15,000 cut in annual salary so I could work, and found myself placed on part-time status for four months and not getting a dime for three weeks while they tried to find billable work for me. Given the dire jobs situation and my own personal struggles, I was dismayed when I read this statement from the President:

“It took years for us to get into this mess and it will take us more than a few months to turn it around.”

Wait a minute. Isn't this the same person who declared his $787 billion economic stimulus package "will likely save or create three to four million jobs"? Didn't his Council of Economic Advisors project the unemployment rate at this time would be just above 8% without the stimulus package and below 8% with it? Now that their projections for the stimulus package have crashed and burned, and unemployment is approaching double digits and levels not seen since Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was dominating the charts, the story changes.

We all know by now that "it took years for us to get into this mess" is yet another veiled swipe at the Bush Administration, which presided over an average unemployment rate of 5.27% over eight years. Obama now concedes unemployment will exceed 10% by 2010, and many experts predict we won't see a 6% unemployment rate until 2016.

My two words of advice to President Obama and his economic team: stop it. By promising immediate job creation if the stimulus bill passed, and browbeating the Congress into passing a bill it didn't read because not doing so would force millions of Americans out of work, you took ownership of these numbers. The "Bush did it" defense is wearing thin and the statue of limitations on that stale excuse is about to expire.

Kirk Lippold, the former commander of the USS Cole, had this to say about Obama's leadership:

"If he didn't want to deal with the legacy that he had been left with, if he didn't want to fix the mess that he claims he was left with, then he needed to have seriously considered whether or not to assume the responsibility that he has today...Leaders don't blame; they lead."

Every man who has occupied the White House has had to contend with problems not of their own making, and President Obama is no exception. He promised results from his stimulus package and he failed to deliver, yet he refuses to own up to his mistakes. A year from now, should business-busting and job-crushing initiatives like cap-and-trade and health care reform be enacted this year, "Bush did it" will work only on the most obsequious of citizens who are also still employed.