300 Day Assessment

From a “liberal” perspective, the President’s record is anything but satisfactory. Our wars drag on, some have been dramatically expanded: Afghanistan, Pakistan. We are outraged over drone airstrikes, and consider them to be counterproductive. We are outraged by selective “killing” of civilians, including American citizens---. Beyond this, our government has become involved in a number of other struggles, as in Syria and Somalia.

There are endless other examples of failed policy on social and environmental fronts. The President was late on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” forced into moving on marriage rights by his vice president. This insane "war on drugs" still rages-- (aside from the toll that criminalization of drugs takes on our youth, who thinks that if the Canadian government outlawed tobacco products, our government would kill 70,000 of us to stop the flow of cigarettes across the Canadian border?); and he's been MIA on reeling in the financial establishment that has brought the world economy to its knees. These men should be in jail, not collecting record bonuses for their illegal practices (see accompanying article.)  Admittedly, much of candidate Obama’s “promise” was actually “expectations” on the part of the left wing. The president is a “Corporate Liberal:” he tilts left, but remains well within the bounds of the existing power structure. No corporate feathers are ruffled. Republican claims of liberal takeover and socialist decline are inane blather. (Comparisons with Hitler, Stalin, etc. are such vapid dribble that they magnify the irony: Hitler and Stalin were right-wing despots, not liberals. The Republicans have adopted and fully endorsed these leaders’ programs of propaganda/brainwashing, fear and hate mongering to gain political support.)

We can tell ourselves that if reelected, Mr. Obama will pursue the agenda that is really in his heart in his final years. But history has shown this to be unrealistic. Emerging from a triumphant, first term in 1996, President Clinton brought in enormous political capital, and many expected his second term to yield tremendous positive change. This was short-circuited by Republican exploitation of his personal foibles.

The real question looking forward to November is: which of our two candidates will make a better President for the next four years? While Mr. Obama is a known entity, we can only speculate about Mr. Romney. A more protean character has not been seen on the contemporary US tableau.

The Republican base, and the “Tea Partiers” in particular, have not lost their taste for the GOP promise to cut taxes, cut government services and balance the budget on the backs of the irresponsible, undeserving poor. The fact that this program has met with dismal failure every time it has been put to the test causes no caution or skepticism among this group of “believers.”

Mr. Romney has opted to 1) discard the conventional “shift to the middle” expected of general election candidates; 2) double down on expansion of our wars and our vast war-making capacity; and 3) glorify our nation’s position on the world stage, defying widespread international opposition, even among our “allies,” and fully re-endorsing “American Exceptionalism,” the primary source of the vast majority of our domestic insecurity and international mischief. Please re-visit our discussion of American Exceptionalism.

With almost daily faux pas that would make G. W. Bush blush, frequent disclosures of his shady business practices, even shadier personal financial practices, frequent offensive remarks made to almost every interest group, daily reversals on policy positions, evasion of almost any kind of concrete proposal or policy stance, the candidacy remains afloat.

Romney comes from a political family. Father George was a long-time political activist, governor of Michigan in 1962, and ran for president in ‘68. His mother ran for U. S. Senate. Both were moderate, and pursued many progressive programs. As Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt followed a moderate course and set up the archetype of “Obamacare,” which he now vilifies.

But in order to run as a Republican, he must run as an extreme “conservative.” (Extreme conservative is an oxymoron, my friends.) His base, the one that led George W. Bush to office, is incredibly active, angry and energized by racial hatred of our African American President. We believe that the dichotomy between his personal beliefs and the “conservatism” which he’s forced to profess lies at the core of why the man makes so many mistakes. His blunders are a reflection of the battle going on inside. This does not, however, explain his personal problems, such as his tax returns. The man has been running for President for probably six years, or more. Reputed to have wealth approaching ten figures, as a future presidential prospect, everyone knows that the public expects him to pay taxes! Certainly he can afford it.

The latest flap is a case study in the difficulty of the campaign. In a video clip produced by Priorities USA, a senior citizen whose wife died from cancer after he was laid off from a steel plant, perhaps displaced by Bain Capital, alludes to Romney’s culpability. To cast her candidate in a favorable light, Andrea Saul, Romney’s press secretary, stated that if the woman had been a Massachusetts resident, Romney’s healthcare plan would have covered her and saved her life. (Actually, the woman had private healthcare insurance.) But the Republicans want to distance themselves from Romney’s plan in Mass.  Ann coulter, Rush and the GOP establishment demanded Saul’s head for going “off message,” “message” being reiteration of the same meaningless and misleading blather over and over ad nauseum.

It gets better! The most intriguing thing about this flap is that the video clip was an allusion only. There’s no claim of Romney’s blame. More significantly, it was never commercially broadcast…it was a brief bit on the internet. The Romney camp took the bait and in their indignant zeal to repudiate Mr. Obama, they forced the issue to public attention---the clip goes viral.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is circulating ads referring to Romney’s personal and business financial practices. With Romney as head of their audit board, Marriott Hotels was running a “Son of BOSS” tax evasion scheme for several years in the ‘90s. The IRS sued and Marriott was hit for back taxes and a multi-million dollar fine. This coupled with Romney’s personal tax avoidance schemes present an effective negative ad campaign. The Romney camp hasn’t bothered refuting this ad.

Instead, he counters with the claim that: Mr. Obama is trying to “undo welfare reform.” This is false. He signed an executive order which allows individual states discretion in implementing welfare. Republicans are supposed to favor “States’ rights,” but really they simply oppose everything Obama does.

We might assume that if elected, Romney will revert to the moderate policies that have highlighted his career, but that would be naïve. The reality of modern American politics is that immediately after election, a first term president begins running for reelection. That will demand continuing gratification of his boisterous, right-wing constituency. Robbinsense believes strongly that the spectacle that we have seen, which prompted most prominent Republicans to dismiss him as the worst candidate that the party could put forward, will continue to play out on the national and world stage. Romney will become George W. Bush II, a better-educated, perhaps more polished version, but every bit as embarrassing and disastrous for our country.

We know that there are good people at various levels of government still holding onto the Republican banner, but it’s difficult to get behind any candidate pandering to this base. For the last three years Republicans have shown that they have no interest in advancing the welfare of our country. In fact, they have been up front with this, announcing to the public that their legislative and political agenda for the next 3 ½ years was to unseat the President. In the process, they have done everything possible to aggravate our recession, including opposition to any program that might create jobs or restrain businesses from exporting jobs. Much of the President’s moderate policies have been pulled right from the GOP playbook, yet they still oppose and revile the man.

The Republican Party tosses the terms “liberal” and “conservative” around like pillows at an adolescent slumber party. “Liberal” comes from the root: liberty. The classic liberal is one who advances freedom, generally through change in social and political processes and institutions. “Conservative,” in contrast, is one who resists change, or strives to conserve the status quo. It doesn’t take much to see how the modern Republican Party has stood these terms on their heads.

While extolling the virtues of “understood” American freedom and “liberty,” the GOP pursues an agenda that actively suppresses our freedoms: freedom to vote, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, the right to an abortion, freedom to control the size of our families (through birth control), freedom to practice any religion (except GOP-favored Christianity) and freedom to conduct our lives in a style that is different from their norm. They claim they want government “out of our lives,” but actually, they demand to have it in YOUR bedroom, monitoring your private affairs. This hypocrisy should not be tolerated.

While Robbinsense is dissatisfied with the record of the president, and recognizes that progress on any number of fronts toward reforming our society has been poor, the prospect of a Romney presidency is even worst. We advocate reelection of President Obama.