Thursday, October 4, 2012

Disappointment’s Haunting All Their Dreams….


© 2012 by Tom King
 
 
The split screen was unkind to the President.
If Mitt Romney manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot and wins this election, then for a long time after his inauguration is over and done, pundits, political consultants and Democrat true believers will be still shaking their heads and wondering how things went so very, very wrong.
 
After all, they had this guy. They were so certain sure. I mean, how could Obama lose when Mitt Romney had so much going against him?
 
  1. He is a Mormon. No self-respecting conservative redneck Christian was ever supposed to vote for a Mormon so that meant he would certainly lose the Christian right?
  2. He’s rich. The Occupy Movement was supposed to define Romney as one of the privileged exploiters in the top 1% - something guaranteed to turn the proletariat 99% against him, or so, their Marxist professors assured them.
  3. He presided over the creation of a state health care system while he was Massachusetts governor. This should have turned all the hard right fiscal conservatives against him.
  4. He was the Republican candidate most diametrically opposed by Ron Paul in the primary. The Paulistas were supposed to reject a Romney nomination and carry Ron Paul on their shoulders into the presidential race as a third party candidate and divide the Republican vote. How could Ron Paul not lust for the presidency so much that he would take the opportunity to bask in all that national attention? Surely he knew he’d have the support of the mainstream media. How could he do something as principled as consider the good of the country over his own ego? Isn’t he a politician after all?
  5. He laid off workers as president of Bain Capital. This was supposed to undermine his reputation as a job creator and turn all the unions against him – even the coal miners who could be counted to vote Democrat despite Obama’s anti-coal rhetoric.
  6. He’s awfully white. The minority vote was supposed to be solidly against him.
Romney, like McCain before him, was supposed to be a political straw man; an easy target for the charismatic Barak Obama, the emblem of hope and change, the brilliant speaker and the “clean and articulate” black person. Working hand in glove with the mainstream media, the Obama campaign pummeled Romney’s primary opponents for him while smoothing his way to the Republican nomination – even inducing Democrats to vote for Romney in the primary to insure he would be the candidate.
 
In focusing so hard on setting up the Republican Party to lose the 2012 election, President Obama’s handlers failed to notice that the president’s policies were a disaster.
 
  1. The new tone from the American president was supposed to send people into the streets around the world to cheer the new and improved United States foreign policy. Even Islamists were supposed to like us. Instead, if anything, things got worse. We’re hated more than ever. Terrorists are hitting us on our own soil again, murdering diplomats and continuing to blow themselves up willy nilly, even though we left Iraq like we were supposed to. 
  2. Obama was supposed to save us from the disastrous policies of George W. Bush and save the economy. In reality, the stimulus packages did little for the economy besides give corporate bigwigs a golden parachute and jack up the national debt beyond what anyone can imagine and put us heavily into debt to China, which doesn’t really like us much. Unemployment is higher than any time under President Bush and persisted throughout the Obama administration. The economy is relentlessly bad and small business has pretty much lost hope.
  3. Obama was supposed to unite America and end partisanship in a burst of rainbows and unicorns. Instead, the country is more sharply divided along political lines than it has been since 1859 and we all know what started up in 1861. I saw a political cartoon the other day showing a small businessman boarding up his windows “in case Obama is re-elected”. He should probably go ahead and keep them boarded up if Romney is elected. It could get ugly!
  4. Obama was supposed to close Gitmo and end the war and stuff. Gitmo is still open; troops in Iraq went from being soldiers to “advisors as though that counts as withdrawing. We’re mired in Afghanistan under rules of engagement reminiscent of those that hamstrung G.I.’s in the Vietnam era. Obama, almost reluctantly and at great personal risk to his political career, ordered Seals to capture Osama(with a “U”) Bin Laden, then saw his staff leak so much information that it compromised the security of intelligence assets, got people arrested and probably more than a few killed. A helicopter full of Seals wound up shot down shortly after the operation. The timing was more than a little troubling.
  5. Obama was supposed to give us universal health care and lower the debt in the process. Ironically he did get the bill passed, but the whole “you can’t see what’s in it till we pass it” strategy left Americans deeply suspicious of the bill and rightly so. Reading the bill brought forth a litany of horrors that shocked the economy into inactivity. Homeowners who were supposed to not lose their homes lost them anyway. Small business took cover and stopped creating jobs. Corporate giants chose to sit on their piles of money till the dust settles, if it ever does.
  6. Obama was supposed to collapse the economy by overloading the government with entitlement spending. The American economy proved more resilient than Obama advisors Bill Ayers or Frances Fox Piven counted on and the Progressive Millennium did not arise from the ashes of capitalism like it was supposed to.
  7. He was supposed to bring true equality and opportunity to all minority Americans. They were supposed to march lock step to the polls because Obama was a man of color like them. In his first term he became a man at odds with the church that the majority of members of one of those “reliable” minorities belong to; a man who is being burned in effigy by mobs of the minority whose schools he attended as a child; a man who has done more to increase the numbers of his own ethnic group who are joining the Republican Party, the tea party and other conservative groups than any president in history; a man on whose watch saw black unemployment rise to almost double the unemployment rate of the general population. Between inflation and falling wages, guess who got hit the hardest by the recession?
  8. Finally, the mainstream media was supposed to make this election a walk in the park. Unfortunately for the president, the failures of his administration have left blood in the water and reporters are more closely kin to sharks than sheep. If he looks like he’s losing, the MSM will rush it’s armies of pundits to the nearest microphones and get it on record that they knew Obama was toast long before the election.
The president’s mistake was confusing sheep with sharks, cats with dogs and freeloaders with fans. The media smells blood and circles the source in a feeding frenzy. The almost-feline prides of pundits wander away to look for someplace where they will be better fed and will look more attractive. The mob will turn on him because they expected free housing, free food and their car payments to be covered with cash from the Obama stash. All they got were free cell phones.
 
Seriously, there could be pitchforks!
 
 

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