As we get closer to Election Day, hope and change has devolved into fear and loathing.
The increasingly desperate campaign of President Obama, crippled by an inability to either defend his own record or present a coherent vision for a second term, has now been distilled down to two essential elements straight out of the Chicago playbook
This strategy comes at great risk, and may ultimately prove to be fatal by bankrupting the one asset the president did have going for him: his vaunted personal popularity, and the associated desire of Americans to see him succeed.
The first strategic element, of course, is gutter politics, as Mitt Romney pointed out a few days ago. From high-level operatives like the insufferable Debbie Wasserman-Schultz down to common, occupy-style thugs at the Iowa state fair employing the heckler’s veto, the president and his operatives, surrogates and loyalists are doubling down on their well-documented race-, class- and fear-based strategy, as ever based on division, distortion and disruption.
The second key element of the campaign is the shameless and flagrant distribution of goodies to various key constituencies and voting blocs.
Consistent with this strategy, President Obama kicked off a three-day bus tour across Iowa this week by announcing that the federal government would purchase up to $170 million worth of meat and poultry to buy, uh I mean, boost farmers and ranchers struggling with this summer’s devastating drought.
Ideas and policies have consequences, so did the media bother to ask what this will do to already elevated prices for meat and poultry? I sense you might already know the answer. Prices for these everyday commodities have risen because of the drought, and the administration’s answer to this problem is to increase demand by using taxpayer dollars to buy up a huge amount of product… which will increase prices even further for everyone else.
This is a perfect example of Obama’s vote-purchasing strategy, and the result is that life is that much harder for those at the bottom of the economic ladder (remind me again which is the party of the common man). Food prices have already risen almost 13% just since January. As food goes from farm to table, more markups are added, so we know that increase at the wholesale commodity level will be multiplied by the time it gets to Harris Teeter.
So, ranchers and chicken farmers get more cash, while American consumers get what amounts to another tax. That he announced the plan in Iowa – of course – a state Obama believes he must win to secure re-election, is just further proof that Obama has no shame in buying votes.
In May, the President suddenly announced his support for gay marriage. Like a mirror image of John Kerry, he was against it before he was for it. He openly opposed gay marriage right up until the time he needed to reverse himself to secure money, favors, and votes from the growing number of gay marriage proponents.
Before that we had the “Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” Obama’s executive order to win Florida, uh, I mean his plan to make immigration policy “more fair, more efficient and more just.” This order, signed in June and now in force, is essentially an executive fiat designed to avoid the annoyance of having to actually pass a law. It makes hundreds of thousands of illegals virtually legal in a nation with almost 13 million people unemployed, and millions more underemployed or having given up looking for work. Where will the political allegiance of those Hispanics and their families lie in November? Gee, let me ponder that.
The list goes on to include the payoff to extreme watermelon environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) with the president’s head-shaking decision on one of the easiest, slam-dunk issues he could face in a job-starved economy: the Keystone pipeline, deep-sixed because the tree huggers oppose cheap energy, and mistakenly believe that the Koch Brothers must have something to do with the whole thing (as they do with all evil capitalist schemes).
And then there’s this goody – the lowering of student loan payments by a few bucks, designed to entice those young voters who swooned over him four years ago, and have soured on him since.
And on and on. This cynical and shameless one-two punch of partitioning the electorate and purchasing the support of targeted special interest constituencies is so transparent, you would think voters will easily catch on. We’ll see.
Lord Woodhouselee said “[a] democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
Barack Obama is doing his best to assure that history repeats itself.
