What A President Obama Means
Note: I wrote this before Obama voted for immunity for the telecommunications companies that unconstitutionally spied on you and your fellow American citizens. Everything I said here has proven to be true and actually even worse than I initially suspected.
Why should someone have supported Ron Paul (or any Republican) over Obama? Obama has been great at attracting support from independents and even Republicans. I’ve found, though, that Obama supporters look more at the surface than the substance of their candidate. When they find out what he’s really for, they often were easy converts until the general election came around.
I like Obama as a person, although he has become more of a typical politician, abandoning principled stands for postured pandering, as the campaign has worn on. You just don’t know what position he’ll take next. He is a cut above all the candidates he beat for the Democratic nomination and exudes class. He makes newbie “mistakes” like sometimes actually saying what he thinks. I found that endearing, until he started listening to his veteran Democratic campaign advisers and stopped saying these sorts of things.
The Daily Kos didn’t like him all that much, either, which is a good sign that he’s doing something right. He says things like “What I’ve always found is people who talk about how tough they are aren’t the tough ones… Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.” That’s nice to hear after eight years of the cowboy president’s son in the Oval Office.
But what can we expect from a President Obama?
The Economy: Taxes, Big Government, and what would really help African-Americans.
Obama doesn’t mind raising taxes or promising spending we just can’t afford. He wrongly (and insistently) blames general “deregulation” for our country’s current financial problems, rather than pointing the finger at the real problems: big government and the American people, overspending hand in hand. He can take both sides of every issue, and then he invariably takes the wrong position in the end. (Here are his most strident economist critics, many of them liberals.)
Although he goes for decentralization in some areas like juvenile crime (with his friend the US Capitol bomber), he wants to centralize most financial matters and restore block grants that used to cause a whole lot of problems.
He hasn’t said that he’ll decline the plush taxpayer-paid pension he’ll receive as a United States Senator, either, so presumably he doesn’t mind a lot of people paying taxes to pay him.
He doesn’t support decriminalization of adult possession of marijuana, which would save billions of dollars in America’s bursting-at-the-seams prison system and really help both black and poor people, who are disproportionately affected by these laws. He also never mentions the obvious fact that his experimental drug use when he was younger should give him an insight into how harmful drug laws could be (if he had been caught with marijuana as a teenager, his life probably wouldn’t have been so rosy, and maybe he wouldn’t have gotten into Columbia). He also comes up with all sorts of ideas that are novel, but also cost a lot of money. He wants to increase the size of the IRS’ bureaucracy by having it fill out people’s taxes for them (a task which is currently done for many low-income people already by the government or by volunteer organizations.
Iraq.
Is Obama going to end the war in Iraq– or even more importantly, not get us into another war? His Cabinet choices say no: “What does it say that, with 130 members of the House and 23 in the Senate who voted against the war, Obama chooses to hire Democrats who made the same judgement as Bush and McCain?”
He did not take the consistent, principled anti-war stance that at least one presidential candidate did. Obama was against it from the start, but since being elected to the US Senate he has not done all he can to get us out. He continued to vote for funding of the war, consistently green-lit President Bush’s earmark-filled appropriations bills, which are systematically bankrupting us all. He has not said that he would not go to war with Iran and has instead said that nothing should be taken off the table, including, apparently, nuclear weapons, in regards to Iran, a nation with a GDP the size of Alabama’s and a military that pales beside Israel’s. He also engages in misleading, warmongering rhetoric in regards to other conflicts.
Obama specifically said about Iran, “I will not take any military options off the table.”
How much will hope cost?
He sounds good.
However, Obama is just not impressive with his actual policies, especially in economics– he is ranked by left-leaning Congressional watchdog groups as to the left of Bernie Sanders, the independent, self-proclaimed socialist elected to the Senate from Vermont.
He was a Constitutional lawyer and says that he believes in a limited government as outlined by the Constitution, but he really doesn’t (as evidenced by his voting record, in which he just voted straight party line 96% of the time). He votes for a lot of things that the federal government doesn’t have authorization from the Constitution to get involved in.
When I was campaigning in Iowa, I saw lots of Obama signs with just one word: “HOPE.” That’s a nice sentiment, but what does it entail and how much will it cost? Obama has said that, rather than encouraging companies to hire Americans or acknowledging that the H1-B visa system is a form of corporate welfare for some of our largest corporations, he would like to increase H1-Bs until Americans are supposedly educated enough to take these jobs. Meanwhile, studies have shown that the United States does not have a shortage of tech graduates. At the same time that he’s cuddling up to corporations who want more cheap workers from foreign countries, he’s making crazy claims about NAFTA that don’t hold up.
Guns.
Obama’s said that he believes an individual has the right to possess a gun according to the Second Amendment. That’s good. However, again his actions don’t line up with his words. According to his website, he thinks people have a right to own guns “for the purposes of hunting and target shooting,” with no mention of the primary reason that the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution– self-defense. He has also said that he supports any and all gun control laws (including requiring guns to be unloaded in the home, which means they cannot be used for self-defense), despite the fact that these laws have been proven not to keep guns out the hands of criminals and instead prevent law-abiding citizens from being able to protect themselves and their home. A police officer even told me he wishes all citizens would be trained to carry handguns.
Civil Liberties?
Obama voted for the Patriot Act and for the Real ID Act, which creates a national ID card. He is terrible in regards to civil liberties (as civil liberties advocates are now realizing), despite the fact that he used to be a professor on the Constitution. He now says he’s against the Real ID Act; why did he not have the foresight to vote against it? What mistakes will he sign into law as president?
Healthcare.
Obama’s health insurance plan, while better than Hillary’s in that it doesn’t require a mandate, is a plan that will entail massive corporate welfare to insurance companies, requiring each and every one of us to be covered by one of them– and pay whatever they want to charge. And when you’re required to do something by the government, the price goes sky-high. Remember all the people who had problems with their insurance in Sicko? It’ll be like that, except this time the government will require you to be covered by an insurance company like that. Obama has also called for universal health screening of newborns, a plan which will also come with a massive price tag on top of Obama’s trillions in other new spending. Obama’s health plan will tie health insurance further to employment, which as his own advisers have said, discriminates against individuals who may want to leave their jobs, freelancers, and small business owners who have to pay for it all. As Obama’s college classmate Wayne Allyn Root points out, Obama has “never started a business; never funded a business; never run a business; never risked a dime of his own money on a business; never created a job; and never paid anyone else’s health insurance or payroll taxes. And he’s never had to face the endless stream of government regulations and interference in the running of a business either.”
Lobbyists?
Obama at first said that lobbyists “won’t work in my White House,” then later changed that to say lobbyists “are not going to dominate my White House.” Are not going to dominate? That’s the best Obama can do? How about, “Yes, we can run a country without the influence of lobbyists.” No, no such guarantee from Obama. He also praised public financing before he realized he could make more money outside that system, when he promptly changed his mind for the Democratic primary. He then said he would take public financing if the GOP candidate did in the general election, McCain agreed, and Obama has backed off his promise. Sometimes, even Barack Obama seems like a typical politician, and that’s why he is not the best candidate for President.
Communism?
Perhaps most oddly, Obama’s campaign has embraced communist rhetoric and images. Che Guevara was a murderer, yet he’s prominently displayed in Obama campaign headquarters?
Conclusion.
“While Obama’s solutions may temporarily improve the American economy, come midnight, the illusion will shatter and Americans will be even more devastated. The government measures that could actually help the economy—tax cuts, reduced earmarks and subsidies, free trade agreements—Obama has consistently opposed in favor of his magic wand approach. Perhaps this is why many of us young people are so smitten by Obama: in our childhood nostalgia, we are still yearning for a fairy godmother. But I think it’s time that we wake up from our fairy tales and face reality: an Obama presidency would be an abomination.”