In Cleveland on Thursday, President Obama gave what Democrats had said would be a major speech on the economy. After several bad weeks for the President, including the news that the economy created a dismal 69,000 jobs in May, this was to be the moment he turned things around, rallied the American people to his agenda, and put Mitt Romney on the defensive. What happened instead was a sad spectacle.

In his serious, practiced “presidential” tone, Obama recited a 54-minute-long hodge-podge of slogans extracted from his last four years’ worth of campaign speeches. There was nothing new. It was the same tired, old Obama rhetoric delivered by a now tired and older candidate.

The President framed this election precisely as he framed the election four years ago: Republican laissez-faire policies wrecked the economy, and America needs Barack Obama to fix it. Republican policies were presented as the incumbent, and Obama as the reformer who offers our only hope of economic recovery.

The inconvenient truth, however, is that Obama is the incumbent — an incumbent who said upon election that if he did not get the economy going again he was facing a “one-term proposition.”

Obama hopes America will believe the falsehood that all of our problems are due to what he calls “the failed policies of the past.” It is a shifting of blame that has worn tiresome after so many years. The fact is that our economy is sputtering in large part because of the failed policies of the present. It is creating too few jobs because our President and Senate believe that tax hikes, more government spending and higher government debt are the keys to the recovery. They are 100 percent wrong, as the economic data show.

In Cleveland, the President revealed that his plan is to try to convince us that we should give him four more years to continue doing precisely the same things that have not worked in the last three years. We are not going to fall for that, are we?