Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Obama's key to victory - not being Romney
Posted by Steve Hammer on Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 4:00 AM
President Barack Obama will accept his party's nomination on Thursday night with a simple message guaranteed to win him re-election: It could be worse.
While he can't point to economic prosperity, or ending the partisan mess in Washington, he can truthfully say that without him at the helm, things would be exponentially worse than they are at the moment.
Imagine what another four years of Bush-Reagan economic theory would have done to the country. We would probably be at war with Iran, Syria and maybe even Russia right now. Even worse than that, Sarah Palin would be our vice president.
After last week's Republican convention, which was a weeklong infomercial for the rich, all Obama has to do to not lose the election is to continually point out that he is not Mitt Romney and stands in opposition to what his big-money friends represent.
The message the Republicans kept saying, over and over, is that the poor and unemployed simply aren't working hard enough. All you have to do to become wealthy in America is work hard and worship Jesus.
Of course both my parents worked 50-hour weeks for decades and stayed poor. Millions of others hold down two or three jobs just to feed their families and remain broke despite their hard work. They must not be working hard enough.
The other message Republicans keep promoting is that the nation needs a businessman to run the country, disregarding the basic fact that it was businessmen who ruined the economy and left Obama with a trillion-dollar mess to fix up.
Since Saint Reagan was elected in 1980, the nation has undergone the largest redistribution of wealth in its history. Money that once went to the middle-class and poor in wages in exchange for hard work is now returned to CEOs as bonuses and shareholders as dividends.
Meanwhile, as large companies grow larger under the name of "deregulation," small businesses are being squashed. The deregulation conservatives prefer is not in expanding freedoms for the majority, it's in eliminating rules regarding corporate greed, monopolistic practices and in crushing the labor movement.
Hardly any of Romney's acceptance speech spoke to the poor in America. He doesn't want or need their votes. Instead, he's trying to convince a small segment of independents that returning more money to the rich is in the best interests of the country.
Barring a complete collapse or scandal, Obama will probably be re-elected. He deserves four more years. He deserves a shot at fulfilling the promises he made America in 2008 without the reflexive opposition he's encountered from Congress and the Supreme Court. A convincing Obama win will hopefully silence those voices and give the president some room to work.
Watching interviews with delegates and others attending the Republican convention, several themes came out repeatedly. One, that Obama will endanger the rights of the rich. Two, Obama's policies will help bring about civil war in America.
Both of those things make me want to vote for Obama even more. My chief complaint with the president is not that he's bringing about the collapse of America but that he's not doing it fast enough. He's like Gorbachev, trying to save a sinking ship by throwing spoonfuls of water overboard.
At this point in our nation's history, we don't have much to admire or to save. Better to cancel all debt, bring home all our troops and deal with domestic insurrection with an iron fist. We need a rewritten Constitution, an expansion of human and worker rights and punitive measures against the greediest people and corporations.
An alternative would be to allow five or six conservative states to drop out of the Union peacefully. A 45-star flag looks better than the one we have now.
Of course, Obama won't allow any of this to happen, but the average person stands a better shot at a good living with him than Romney at the helm.
There was a presidential candidate this year who spoke the same language as me. He wanted to withdraw all our troops immediately, end the war on drugs, establish a "fair tax" policy and throw out the lobbyists and moneychangers from the Capitol. But Ron Paul was silenced at the convention and not even allowed to speak.
If it had been Paul versus Obama, voters would have had a choice between competing, equally valid schools of thought. But the Republicans once again appointed a middle-aged, wealthy, white businessman who promises to return even more money to the rich, its rightful owners.
So I'll be watching the president on Thursday night and listening to what he has to say, but I'm not worried about the results in November. Evil has never prevailed over good for too long in America and it won't prevail this year, either.
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