President Obama’s contempt for voters - Keith Koffler - POLITICO.com
Are you an idiot?
President Obama seems to think that’s exactly what you are.
It must be the reason he is conducting a campaign marked by a certain contempt for voters. He probably thinks you’re not smart enough to notice the sneer.
But with Mitt Romney rising in the polls, Obama and his political advisers may be discovering that Americans are not idiots.
Obama shows his contempt when he fails to be specific about what he will do if he is reelected president.
Obama has been at least as specific about his plans as Romney has. If you’re curious about details, you could pay attention to the parts of his stump speeches that haven’t been cherry-picked by the Romney campaign or even check out his website.
And can I just say, if Obama’s “lack of details” shows contempt for the American voters, what does it say about Romney when one of his campaign advisers comes out and straight up says that the American people don’t deserve to know the full details of his plan until he’s president, and even then Romney only might be called on to reveal his details? Might.
And he shows his contempt wh en he draws a caricature of a despicable Romney that’s as believable as Freddy Krueger.
Where’s the caricature? Romney privately tells donors that he thinks nearly half of the country intractibly view themselves as victims, entitled to suckle at the government teat, while publicly assuring people he cares about everyone. That’s not made up. Romney actually said that. It’s not like Obama had to really stretch to make Romney seem contemptuous of the poor and lower middle class.
Romney’s political positions are a complete moving target. He changed his position on abortion twice in a single day. He states he can’t think of any legislation on abortion that he would advance as president, but then puts on his website that he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. And that’s just one example.
Painting him a flip-flopper? Not hard, given the fact that he is a wet bar of soap when you try to pin down his policies.
And as he insults the American people, Obama is also insulting himself. The president is a man who has thought hard about the liberal philosophy that guides him. He once hoped to sway Americans with his ideas. Instead, he’s trying to obscure his program and vilify his opponent.
Though sometimes derided as being built on an empty promise of “hope and change,” Obama’s 2008 campaign offered tangible goals, including an overhaul of the health care system and an end to the war in Iraq.
But in the first two presidential debates, Obama has offered up mainly general promises to increase spending in a few areas, and almost nothing about how to solve the great problem of our time – long term deficits driven by entitlement spending that will have to be dramatically slashed.
Actually Obama’s been pretty clear on how he plans to deal with the deficit: raise taxes on the wealthy. In fact, not only has Obama talked about this repeatedly and used it to starkly contrast himself to Romney, but it’s been a huge source of conservative criticism.
Of course, you can contrast this to Mitt Romney, who has talked a lot about significant tax cuts, but not a lot about what spending he will cut. According to his website, he’s proposing about $97 billion in cuts…which looks like a lot until you consider that’s only about 7% of the total deficit. And that’s if you buy that the largest cut Romney proposes—repealing Obamacare—won’t actually add to deficits, and the CBO estimates that rather than a cost savings of $95 billion, repealing would actually end up costing us $109 billion. In other words, Romney’s biggest proposed spending cut would actually result in $14 billion more in debt.
When you factor in Romney’s proposed tax cuts, Romney’s proposed spending and tax cuts amount to even more debt. And that’s without factoring in areas where he’s discussed actually raising spending, like Medicare and defens Romney knows his incredibly vague plan won’t work in practice, too, or otherwise, he wouldn’t be so reticent about his plan.
Obama’s solution, served up in the first debate, amounts to, “Don’t worry, be happy.” At a moment when a leader is needed to propose the hard choices necessary and create a mandate to address an existential dilemma, Obama hopes you’ll fall for the idea that The Hindenburg is the perfect flying machine.
“So the way for us to deal with Medicare in particular is to lower health care costs,” he said. “But when it comes to Social Security, as I said, you don’t need a major structural change in order to make sure that Social Security is there for the future.”
This is nonsense that ignores the pain that’s on the way.
This is actually true. To date more has been paid in to social security than has been paid out, and social security still has 40 good years left in it without making any changes at all.
The only real issue with social security is that conservatives don’t like the taxes and don’t think the government should be responsible for bolstering “irresponsible” elderly folks who “didn’t plan” for their retirement.
Obama’s plan for the near-term deficit, other than – somewhat counter-intuitively – increasing spending, is to smack the rich around with a tax increase.
Raising the taxes of families making more than $250,000 a year will not go very far toward eliminating the deficit.
Instead, the proposal is a symptom of Obama’s ideology, which wants to punish success and redistribute it.
You know, most economists agree that you’d either have to cut benefits for programs like Medicaid and Medicare or raise taxes. Just like most economists agree that cutting taxes is never going to increase incomes enough to offset revenue losses from tax cuts.
You can look at this as Obama’s Robin Hood ideology of take from the rich and give to the poor, or you can look at this as simple fact. We either have to raise taxes or we have to significantly cut spending to balance the budget, and cutting government spending hurts the economy. Meanwhile, there is evidence that not only does cutting taxes on the wealthy not encourage economic growth, but actually raising taxes on them does.
How can you criticize Obama’s plan for being counter-intuitive when all the math and real world data backs it up, when the conservative argument is that cutting taxes raises revenues—something that does not bear out in reality? This is not only counter-intuitive. It’s counter to the real world.
But it is also an appeal to the basest emotions of voters, an effort to breed resentment against the wealthy and translate it into support for Obama, who fashions himself the champion of the middle class.
It’s an appeal to anger, built on the hope that you won’t be able to discern populist demagoguery and left-wing dogma from a serious attempt to tackle the deficit.
But calling 47% of the country victims who refuse to take responsibility for their lives and instead leech off wealthier Americans…that’s not trying to capitalize on another kind of inter-class resentment? A series of ads that paint various welfare programs as taking money from decent, hard-working, tax-paying [white] folk, that’s not trying to capitalize on inter-class resentment?
You do realize that even the term “redistributionist” is invoking upper class resentment toward the poor, right?
Driving parallel to Obama’s empty agenda but traveling on an even lower road is his extraordinarily personal attempt to brand Romney a liar and a shameless tool of the wealthy.
Obama was again testing your intelligence during the second debate, when he tried to peddle some snake oil about Romney aching to devote his presidency to making the rich richer.
“Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan,” Obama said. “And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector, that’s been his philosophy as governor, that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate.”
Romney made at least one speech about how nearly half of the country view themselves as victims who won’t take responsibility for their lives. He has run a series of ads that paint people who use welfare services as taking money from hard-working Americans who earn more money. He advocates keeping low tax rates on capital gains tax—part of the reason his own tax rate is so low, and a low tax rate that the wealthy benefit from the most—and getting rid of the “death tax,” which only applies on estates worth more than $1 million. He’s encouraged employers to tell their employees who to vote for.
Obama hasn’t had to work very hard on painting Mitt Romney as a guy who will do a lot to protect the benefits the wealthy enjoy in our tax code or who view the bottom half of the country with contempt. He’s done a pretty good job of that with his own words and proposed policies.
It’s almost sad to see a thinker of Obama’s caliber lofting such simplistic left-wing rhetoric out of the mud, bellowing, in effect, “He only cares about rich people!”
It would be sad except Obama knows better, and he hopes you won’t.
And in what appears to have been part Machiavellian political strategy and part foot-stomping fit of pique by a sore loser,
Romney is just barely in the lead, and that’s something that’s only happened in the last few days. It’s hard to argue that Obama is a “sore loser” when he hasn’t lost yet.
Obama reportedly chaired a meeting in which he and his operatives decided to make Romney’s “dishonesty” the central issue of their campaign. The charge, in essence, was that Romney cheated during the debate by lying about his record and his plans.
This was a new addition to the portfolio of insults the Obama campaign had already been spitting out at Romney, which had mainly focused on his supposedly unscrupulous business practices.
When you consider that Mitt Romney isn’t above cracking birther jokes, I fail to see where either opponent has the moral high ground in this election.
It’s an election. Strategically attacking your opponents’ weaknesses—and Romney’s record and his outright refusal to be specific on many of his policies are absolutely his weaknesses—is part of the game. That’s why you’re here talking about how Obama isn’t being specific enough about his vision. It’s the Romney campaign talking point of the week, and you’re hopping on the band wagon. It’s a deliberate attempt to distract from the fact that Romney’s been accused of the same thing repeatedly in the last several months, and what’s more, when it comes to Romney, it’s actually true.
These are the desperate ravings of a campaign that has nothing more politically effective to talk about.
If Obama going after Romney’s lack of a plan constitutes “the desperate ravings of a campaign that has nothing more politically effective to talk about,” then why is Romney going after Obama on the same thing? Why are you going after Obama on the same thing? (Read the bolded sentence above, in case you forgot your own critique of the president.)
Obama’s signature policies, the stimulus and Obamacare, are unpopular. The campaign’s slogan is “forward,” but it doesn’t want to give you too much detail about where “forward” leads.
1) The stimulus was not unpopular.
2) When I think of “forward,” I think of things like 31 straight months of job growth and the success of the auto industry bail out, ending the war in Iraq, and the fact that at my job last week a group of women were excited that our birth control would finally be covered by our insurance thanks to Obamacare. I think about the repeal of DADT, the fact that current president stands by and will protect women’s choice, the DREAM Act and what it means to immigrant families. I think about the legislation he’s proposed to help small business owners and veterans.
If you choose to focus more on what Romney has to say about Obama than what Obama has to say about Obama, that’s your business, but don’t go around acting like that means you actually know what Obama has been talking about for the last few weeks. You clearly get your view of things from Mitt Romney, which is your prerogative. It just doesn’t make your arguments about what Barack Obama has been talking about very creditable.
The Obama campaign has a sense of unreality about it, both in its agenda and its argument with its opponent.
Says the person backing the guy who wants to cut taxes by 20%, raise spending on defense and Medicare, and then won’t give any specifics about how he’ll balance the budget.
At its core, the Obama campaign is a cartoon. And it hopes you are dumb enough that you like cartoons.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82683.html#ixzz2A2mgZoZy
At its core, the Romney campaign is all about telling people whatever it thinks people want to hear, which is why its message changes depending on the audience and why specifics are few and far between. And it hopes that you are dumb enough only to listen to the things you like…or that you hate Obama so much, you just won’t care what Romney actually thinks.