The question is…
…will enough of the public care about Obama’s blatant hypocrisy and abuse of power to make a difference in 2012?
I wouldn’t bet on it. They never have before, and Obama knows it.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I’m afraid I wouldn’t bet on it either. He seems to get a pass on everything.
It might be easier to list the promises Barack Obama has not broken.
I think a collage of Candidate vs. President Obama soundbites would make for a really effective commercial. That and reminding everyone what a mess he has made of pretty much anything he’s touched.
His approval rating is really low. He’s not getting a pass.
Unless the GOP runs a complete moron, or a RINO, or the Dems stuff the ballot boxes Obama is toast. He will have to run on his abysmal record with a centerpiece legislative achievement that about 65% of the people do not like.
holmes, where do you get the numbers for approval rating? At Rasmussen he holds steady at about 47%. Considering everything he’s done I doubt if he were to rape and murder a dozen nuns on TV if his approval rating would sink pass 45%.
It’s amazing, tragic and inexplicable. You may recall a movie, The Amazing Mr. Ripley, who murders one person after another but whenever he appears to be on the verge of being caught a strange luck intervenes and he winds up better off than before. Obama’s story is even more bizarre. His actions are clearly detrimental to western freedom and too many seem indifferent or delusional. Whether he is elected or not, his presence in the presidency is a tragic commentary on the US electorate.
Unfortunately, all Obama needs to win is for some Perot-like character to run as an independent and split the conservative and/or moderate vote. I fear that Trump might be that guy.
I will worry about O much less when I see some of my friends of color take off the glasses of true believers. Or my daughters. Integrity is not an issue. The smooth talking suit is a good enough sales pitch. That and the D behind his name.
He always gets a pass by a percentage of the people. Those people we don’t need to worry about, it is a the swing voters that matter. I think they’ll remember.
As long as the food stamps, unemployment benefits, rent subsidies, Social Security, Pell grants, Medicaid, and refundable earned income tax credits keep flowing, Obama is in good shape. AG Holder sticking it to whitey every now and then firms things up as do appearances at college campuses and looking cool.
I think much of his free pass comes from the dinosaur media. Too many people do not pay attention to any details, they read headlines and listen to soundbites.
On of his first large reversals was during the last campaign when he backtracked on using public funds and out raised and outspent Senator McCain and was not called to task in any meaningful way.
I hope that the new media will be enough to overcome the blatant cheer-leading by the MSM.
Obama would be an outcast in democrat circles if he didn’t lie to the infidel normal Americans regularly.
Roman:
I thought we had turned the corner in 2004 when the New Media exposed the fraudulent TANG memos. But I was proven wrong in 2008 when the Old Media closed ranks behind Obama and dropped all pretense of objectivity. If they had shown the slightest interest in investigating his dubious background and lack of qualifications, he would have never come close to being elected. They still have far too much power and influence.
People can only disapprove of what they know about; I blame the media much more than the average person who doesn’t follow the news closely, but picks up on not just the content but the tone of the media.
One thing is certain – the media won’t report on anything negative about Obama. However, there is a list of things as long as your arm that the republican nominee can hit him with in ad campaigns, hopefully those have some affect on those not hypnotized by the guy.
Two cents’ worth . . .
In 2008, before Obama caught fire, Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for the Democrat nomination — and Democrats in states with crossover primaries did a lot to stick the Republicans with wonderful John McCain. { sarcasm }
Fast forward to 2012. Obama’s an incumbent. Whatcha think crossover state Democrats are gonna do on primary day? Correct; go to the head of the class . . .
Come November, Obama trumps The Donald.
Come to think of it, didn’t Obama break one of his campaign promises during the campaign, forget the details, something about public financing, which puts limits on how much you can raise. Whenever things get tough (see Bush tax cuts, repeal of) he takes the easy way out, even if it does mean doing a 180.
The Washington Times lead with a story today demonstrating just how powerful a pass Pres. Obama is getting from MSM
Afghanistan ‘death squad’ killings fail to get media, political attention
In part:
All the bad news is true. However, for tonight, let us draw strength from the remembrance of God’s past deliverance and His promise to be with us in the future. Happy Passover!
and they are already working to make sure competitive votes are fractured with outside candidates and poor main candidate as an opponent…
I’m not as pessimistic as most of the above comments, including Neo’s opening remarks. It is true that far too many people do not pay attention. (Isn’t that always true?) Yes, the MSM is totally inside Obama’s underwear. But the MSM doesn’t have high approval ratings beyond American Idol. And people definitely pay attention to grocery prices, the gas pump, and the rate of unemployment.
The last set of polling data I saw had somewhere north of 60% in the nation is headed in the wrong direction category. Granted, BHO still has high personal approval ratings, but I suspect we can shave 20% off that figure simply because of white guilt. (Many are bashful to admit they don’t like our first multi-racial president.) However, I think there is a strong possibility that none of this will matter because there is a rather large elephant in the room that is going to be impossible to ignore.
IMO the economy will be the real sticking point come 11/12. Ask yourself this question: do you think a (real) recovery is underway? I’m not Paul Krugman and have never portrayed an economist on TV, but I pay a lot of attention to markets (I’m into commodities) and I read & listen to a wide variety of market analysis reports.
It seems to me the DJIA, NASDAQ, & the S&P 500 will all self-correct to a level of somewhere around 50% of their current, artificially inflated by the Fed Reserve highs, within the remainder of this year. (Once the panic starts it always spreads like wild fire.) I can state with 100% certainty that commodity prices are not going to take any serious losses anytime soon. It is highly probable that grains, oil, copper, gold, & silver will remain strong for the foreseeable future. Thus, real inflation, not the phony ‘core inflation’ tricked out by the DOL is going to heat up. Real estate will take another hit as more defaults poison the market. Under & unemployment is not going to go down. It will remain in the (combined) 20% range at best between now and 11/12.
Additionally, despite TARP & QE1 & 2 & 3 coming to a theater near you, there remains a lot of rot in the big banks both here and abroad. Estimates I have read from credible sources put the figure at between 3 to 5 trillion, with some outliers suggesting as much as 10 trillion. The euro zone is in deep trouble. If Spain goes Greek there is not enough printing power in all of Europe to prevent a crash. And, Japan’s many problems will also damp down the global market.
Finally, the bond vigilantes are going to ride roughshod over central government bonds (here & in Europe) and state and municipal bonds. Governments at all levels with have to pay much higher interest rates and much higher premiums to insure their ability to repay short term (1, 2 & 5 year) bonds.
In a nutshell, BHO is vulnerable. The economy and numerous unpredictable events between now and 11/12 can easily sink him if right candidate, who is willing to go strongly on the offensive materializes, MSM or no MSM. The only real problem is who should that person be. (And, it will be close 1 to 2 percentage points.)
That is my take, sorry for being so wordy.
Michael: thanks for remembering Passover. It does help to keep our current mess in perspective.
Are you better off today than you were four years ago?
No, Daniel, I’m worse off, unfortunately. But the real question is, does the voting public know why they’re not better off than they were four years ago, or are they still blaming Bush?
Well, this is the tsunami of misinformation, propaganda, and lies that is coming at us, folks. The MSM may be the least of our problems.
Life at Bowdoin College:
“I took a look at Bowdoin’s American history offerings. I am sorry to have to report they are right out of Nussbaum’s playbook. There are any number of courses that deal with some group aspect of America, but virtually none that deals with America as a whole.
“For example, there is African-American history from 1619 to 1865 and from 1865 to the present, but there is not a comparable sequence on America. Every course is social or cultural history that looks at the world through the prism of race, class, and gender. Even a course on the environment (offered in the history department) “examines the links between ecology and race, class, and gender.”
“Do Bowdoin alumni know their alma mater offers not one history course in American political, military, diplomatic, constitutional, or intellectual history, and nothing at all on the American Founding or the Constitution; that the one Civil War course is essentially African-American history (it is offered also in Africana Studies); and that there are more courses on gay and lesbian subjects than on American history? Is it possible this is one reason why some conservatives are disinclined to send their children to Bowdoin? Mr. Mills did not inquire.”
[from a Claremont Institute essay by Thomas Klingenstein; q.v.]
He also said that only 4% — yes, four percent — of the faculty there are Republican. This is incredible, and ever so much Worse than it was when I was in college in the late 1970s. Then, we had women’s studies and black studies, but they hadn’t replaced core curriculum.
Even as a feminist, I realized that women’s being confined largely to the domestic sphere meant that we only really started to take part (in any numbers) in the public sphere within the century. So I didn’t count women’s studies as “core” in a world-historical sense; meaning no slight to my own sex.
But if this sludge is all they’re getting at Bowdoin, which is accounted one of the better private colleges, then we’re really in the culture war up to our necks, folks.
Perot fractured the vote and got Clinton elected the first time. I hope no one, such as Trump, enters in as a thrid party candidate. He will unbalance things more in the conservative arena than the progressive arena.
I doubt we will escape it. I feel we will go through what the USSR went through in order to come back to how and why we were founded as a nation in the first place. Hopefully, we can skip over the majority of the bloodshed, and the rest of the world stays out of it while we pummel ourselves in the streets of America. If it happens, I wish it would start today. I want my kids and grand kids to live a better life than I have had, as my parents wished the same for me.
Mr. Frank said:
“As long as the food stamps, unemployment benefits, rent subsidies, Social Security, Pell grants, Medicaid, and refundable earned income tax credits keep flowing, Obama is in good shape. AG Holder sticking it to whitey every now and then firms things up as do appearances at college campuses and looking cool.”
A…..MEN!
This is a terrible flaw of our democracy…people getting handouts from the government can vote.
What kinda’ sense does THAT make?
I guess we should all start looking at Argentina to see how they manage.
The little I’ve read about Argentina always described it as an alternate-universe United States that went terribly terribly wrong due to bad leadership who made economic mistakes.
link via Instapundit:
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/greetings-from-argentina-an-obamaesque-land-of-crony-capitalism-and-a-warning-to-america/
Neoneocon . . .
Please let me know if it’s not OK to post a link like this. I don’t know how to do shorter links. This is how I do my e-mail links.
Sorry if I messed up anything.
If you didn’t just sit back and accept the pro-Obama propaganda/crap that the MSM was dishing out, and weren’t in the throes of fanatical MSM-manufactured and inflamed Bush hatred, but actually took the time to ferret it out, there were enough troubling signs, enough gaps in his resume and unanswered questions, there was enough of a “critical mass” of information on the Internet in 2008 to dissuade you from voting for Obama. Yet, a plurality of voters swallowed the crap that the MSM was dishing out–hook, line, and sinker–got all starry-eyed over stage managed, hubris-filled, Olympian themed rallies and a meaningless Orwellian slogan or two, the slick, totally unrealistic and unrealizable promises of a sweet talking flimflam man, selling illusory “Hope” and “Change,” but not telling us what the price would be–and were dragged to the polling booth by a large measure of white guilt, and voted for Obama, to add to the something like 95% of the black vote, and the 75% or more of the Jewish vote Obama got just for his skin color alone (a percentage of support by blacks for Obama that today still seems to be in that same 90% + range)
This time we have the MSM playing the same old–if somewhat subdued–tune, about how it is still “all Bush’s fault,” about how glorious Obama and his current actions and proposed policies are, about how all who oppose Obama and his policies, and his gargantuan, ruinous spending are knuckle-dragging mouth breathers and racists, mean-spirited “haters” who want to steal the food out of children’s mouths, foster “back alley” abortions, and condemn old people to ignominious deaths in unheated apartments, where they wait for death, in pain and want and without medical care and, all the while, the MSM is twisting and puffing up every little scrap of news they can portray as “good news,” and as signs that the mythical “recovery” is just picking up steam.
Meanwhile, back in reality, for the first time since 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, U.S. households now receive more in government benefits than they pay out in taxes, a reported 60% of each dollar the government now spends is borrowed money, and we have unprecedentedly enormous, massive deficits, are headed for an un-payable $14 trillion dollar debt, the dollar is loosing credibility and investors are dumping and fleeing our Treasuries. Moreover, according to the way the government used to calculate inflation in the 1980s–calculations that have been manipulated so that they no longer accurately measure but, instead, downplay inflation–we already have 10% inflation, virtually each and every economic indicator is headed downward, unemployment is at 10% (but really closer to 20%), millions of homeowners have been foreclosed on and millions more have mortgages that are “underwater,” and house prices are headed even lower still, a reported 40 million people are on food stamps, as a sign of lack of confidence in our currency, Gold is at almost $1,500 per ounce and Silver at an all time high, GM is likely to be sold off in the near future to a Chinese car manufacturer and–in an extraordinarily ominous development–just yesterday Standard & Poors downgraded their estimate for the U.S. economy in the long term from the former “stable” to “negative. ” Yet, Democrats in Congress immediately reacted to the S & P bombshell by saying–without any countering analysis from the MSM–that this means that there must be an unconditional and immediate increase in the debt limit, so that they can spend even more borrowed money to “make sure the recovery that is just starting/is underway doesn’t falter.
And those who still get their news from the MSM–apparently believing what the MSM tells them, rather than their “lying eyes”–will likely buy this shit again and vote, yet again, for Obama.
I know my extraordinarily liberal, uber-Democrat in-laws will–no matter what–vote again for Obama. Even if Obama were to be broadcast live on the White House lawn torturing, killing, and eating a baby, “its all Bush’s fault” that we are in the mess we’re in, Obama is doing his best to pull us out, and nothing that I can say, no developments they see (and ignore or blow off) in their daily lives, will dissuade them.
I just hope that reality will bite enough people so that they will wake up from their MSM induced enchantment and vote against the President who has deliberately caused so much pain and wreckage on his way to a Socialist/Marxist Utopia.
why teach about what your getting rid of.
why should obama know economics, when that isnt the system they are making?
i would love to say..
hey Hux’s out there that said weimar germany II and shoa II is impossible.. how close are we now?
Promethea: no problem.
It is impossible to win a political battle without winning cultural war first. Both Antonio Gramci and Ronald Reagan understood this.
“As long as the food stamps, unemployment benefits, rent subsidies, Social Security, Pell grants, Medicaid, and refundable earned income tax credits keep flowing, Obama is in good shape. AG Holder sticking it to whitey every now and then firms things up as do appearances at college campuses and looking cool.”
What are the implications if those things only begin dissappearing under a 2013 republican president? I’ll have to say there is a part of me that wants this masochistic hysteria of liberalism to run its awful course, so we can have an albeit broke but humbled and appreciative citizenry again.
Promethea:
Go to tinyurl.com to convert long links to short links.
ACORN has been damaged, there will be a new generation of college students that have to be inspired, working blacks aware of the bigger financial picture may be disillusioned, and the kumbaya community may be turned off because the troops aren’t home. These kinds of factors can affect voter turnout without showing up in approval ratings.
I’m surrounded by coworkers who, before November 2008, wouldn’t hesitate to make anti-Bush/Republican comments, or ask me about any mistake/gaffe he made, or generally go on tirades about government.
Now, when I bring up Obama’s many failings, those same people say “Jim, I don’t want to talk about politics…” Yup, they’ve become apolitical. What they’re doing is putting their fingers in their ears to keep from hearing ANYTHING negative about the man, and ANYTHING positive about his opponents. Trying to explain that Sarah Palin DOESN’T believe that dinosaurs never existed, DIDN’T ban books in Wasilla and NEVER said she could see Russia from her house is an exercise in futility.
There are few so-called “Independents” (the prized demo, apparently) at my job who say that they’re disappointed in Obama, but then go on to regurgitate the tired talking points about republicans. When Obama starts officially campaigning, they’ll fall back into line.
Now I’m depressed.
Wish me luck at my Second Seder tonight. My guests (family) are all Loony Liberals. One of them was named after Eugene Debs. That tells you something.
None of them can hold a political discussion. I’ve stopped trying to talk about anything except recipes.
BTW, I went to a Tea Party yesterday and heard Herman Cain speak. He was quite good. Let’s hope he runs. I don’t know much about him, but he looks like a manly man, not a pussy cat America hater.
Herman Cain is, indeed quite impressive and knowledgeable.
I fear, tho’ because of Obama attaining the Presidency in 2008, he may have ruined the chances for other black Americans reaching the Presidency — at least in consecutive elections.
I do hope he hangs in there long enough to be recognized for his passion, patriotism, and clear vision not clouded with class warfare and and left-wing ideology that demands economic parity for all. (i.e. raiding the assets of the rich, so those unfortunate souls who prefer instant gratification by having their iPods, latest in computers & huge flat screens, not to mention all those addictive computer games, no savings — now or for their later years, no health insurance — no personal responsibility.
Cain (thus far) has been a candid voice of reason, minus political talking points. That could change, of course, but he is well worth watching.
The biggest thing in the coming campaign is that the GOP not fixate on their single favoite candidate — and lose interest should that person not gain traction. We all have to focus on what needs to be done to set this country back on track, and who can best do that!
Unless the GOP runs a complete moron, or a RINO, or the Dems stuff the ballot boxes Obama is toast.
So… the odds are strongly in Obama’s favor.
Promethea:
Promethea, Mount Holyoke College has a page to Learn HTML in 20 Minutes. Go down to Creating Links.
Unfortunately, Neo’s page no longer has the Preview function.
The path of least resistance is appropriately classified. Unfortunately, progressive corruption is the rule throughout most of the world and not the exception.
Distribution of funds through involuntary exploitation promotes the progressive corruption of individuals and systems. For a large minority of Americans, it is already too late to avoid their fate. The effects of their corruption will be exacerbated through a democratic process which ignores the rule of law (i.e., the Constitution) designed to constrain it.
And people thought the “evil empire” was an extraordinary affront to individuals of dignity. That misconception is born through ignorance, ostensibly for the reason that involuntary exploitation and progressive loss of liberty was committed through overt and explicit acts by Soviet morons.
In America we have progressive corruption (PC). By the time we realized the consequences of denigrating individual dignity and devaluing human life, we have become a nation divided. Still, those who have not completely submitted or been consumed by PC, may yet choose an enlightened order, and reject the progress which has manifested itself as regression.
If Americans still do not know what left-wing ideologies are and are not, then we have already progressed half way to resurrecting the old systems.
If Americans still do not know what distinguishes American conservatism from other conservative ideologies around the world, then there is no hope for individual dignity in America.
If Americans believe that supporters holding promissory notes distributed by individuals with delusions of grandeur will voluntarily reject instant gratification, then they are hopelessly delusional to the true nature of corrupted human beings.
No, the only hope America has to avoid a second correction is through swaying the opinion of “moderates” (i.e., those who follow the prevailing winds).
Let’s hope America’s civil servants and pioneers (i.e., entrepreneurs) decide to stand with America.
Thankfully, I still have my guns, and my religion.
I compared Obama’s approval ratings to Bush’s and the difference, as you can see, is more than 20%. Bush at the 2004-2007 timeline had exceedingly low approval, dipping into the 20s. People compare Obama’s first term with Bush’s first term in approval ratings and that’s entirely erroneous.
The best comparison is Bush’s second term (Iraq, Afghanistan, GitMo, gas prices, Democrat deficit spending and fear mongering) with Obama’s first term (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, gas prices, Democrat deficit spending and Obamacare).
25% for Bush. 43% for Obama. Eh? The media is worth that much.
Will enough of the public care about the hypocrisy and abuse of power? I was leaning toward yes, probably because of the smart people I pal around with on the internet. But then yesterday I watched this video and realized we’re probably doomed: SEIU Flash Mob at Target Store.