WhatFinger


The Republican Party – Minus the Hurricane and Its Repercussions – Is Stronger Than the Democratic Party

Obama’s Election Not a Repudiation of Romney or Republicans



The idea that Obama’s election is a repudiation of Romney or Republicans couldn’t be more misleading, nor could it be more misleading than the misleading communications by the Obama campaign that led to the president’s reelection.
President Obama made a reasonable number of reasonable claims during his campaign, but he also authorized an unreasonable number of unreasonable and misleading claims that made the difference between a misguided victory and deserved defeat. All agree that the Obama administration has not been as successful as it could have been because of gridlock in Congress. Obama campaigned on the principle of being a uniter willing to cross the aisle to get things done in a bipartisan way, but his claim to have actually done so is outrageously misleading. He passed his landmark “stimulus” and healthcare legislation not only without the cooperation of Republicans but without even giving them time to read these huge pieces of legislation, let alone to digest them and debate them. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, the leader of his effort to get the bills signed, famously said “vote for it, and then find out what’s in it.” As Romney pointed out, this is not bipartisanship; this is MORE partisanship. By Contrast, Romney succeeded as a governor by working together with a legislature that was 87% Democrat. Yet Obama continued to campaign as a bipartisan uniter, and to the extent he was believed, he obtained votes by misrepresentation. Ironically, he was pretending to do what the Republican Romney had actually done.

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Further, Obama made a public spectacle of photo ops with New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie, a former hard liner shown in the photo ops thanking him profusely, and nodding his head like a puppet or a bobblehead doll for Obama’s help during the recent hurricane Sandy that did more to benefit Obama’s campaign than anything Obama said or did during the rest of his entire administration, because the hurricane gave Obama an opportunity to look presidential and to look like he was actually doing something. In point of fact, Obama has been the least engaged of any president in US history in terms of the amount of time spent fund raising and campaigning instead of working, especially during the past year. As noted in my article in this periodical October 3, 2012, Obama has been so busy fund raising and campaigning all over the country outside of Washington that he
  1. missed about 60% of his face-to-face daily security briefings (with dire consequences in Libya and elsewhere),
  2. failed to have a single cabinet meeting from the end of January until mid July of this year,
  3. has not met with his “Jobs Council” (a/k/a Council on Jobs and Competitiveness) since January, but of course had time to sit down for an interview with his gushing sycophants on the View while snubbing every single world leader at the United Nations; and
  4. never took the time or the effort to develop a rapport with the leaders on the other side of the aisle the way Clinton did with Gingrich and the way Reagan did with Tip O’Neill.
Any employee in the private sector who would take so much time from what he was being paid to do to raise money for himself and to talk about himself would have long since been fired, not hired to lead the free world. So the photo ops at scenes of the hurricane were not doubly but triply misleading, (1) implying he was regularly actively involved in his job, (2) implying his administration was characterized by bipartisanship, and (3) implying he was getting things done. In fact, his photo op in New Jersey lasted about an hour and a half, and then he was off to Las Vegas, and the accomplishments of his administration and FEMA were not necessarily significantly better than the accomplishments of President Bush and FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Some in the know have said the Obama response to Sandy was actually worse then the Bush response to Katrina. With five days notice, the simple failure to bring in enough gas to the region, in advance, to avoid the crippling gas lines for fuel for cars and home generators shows incredibly poor planning of the simplest of tasks in response to the most predictable of challenges. The complicity of the mainstream media in focusing on what Obama claimed to be doing and not on the complaints that not enough was being done was obvious to anyone who relied on media other than those in the mainstream, and who relied on first person testimony. The voters were not repudiating Republicans; they were endorsing actions by a Democrat acting like a competent technocrat of any party, but not acting like the real Obama. Some exit polls showed that over 64% of the people who voted for Obama felt that his performance in response to Hurricane Sandy contributed to their decisions to vote for him, even though, as we have shown, these opinions were formulated on three fundamental misrepresentations by Obama and his administration, which for all intents and purposes includes the mainstream media. They were voting for the Obama as he wanted to be perceived; not as he WAS the rest of the eleven months and three weeks of the year. Obama’s cover-up in the wake of the Libya scandal was covered up by the media so effectively, that the main question left unanswered is which cover-up was more insidious. Although it’s true that an argument can be made that Obama’s people couldn’t have done any better due to the “fog of war,” even that term highlighted by Hillary Clinton is misleading since for a few weeks after the Libyan violence, Obama and Hillary were blaming the violence on a movie even though they knew on day one that it was caused by terrorism. It’s just that terrorism in a post-Bin-Laden world didn’t fit into the Obama narrative, so he engaged in the most open cover-up in the history of cover ups. Yet their cover up was one of the reasons why the American voters actually gave Obama good marks for his foreign policy that was highlighted by his support of the Arab Spring that brought the hateful anti-American Muslim Brotherhood into power throughout the Arab World. And when Romney brought this up in one of the debates, the moderator violated the regulations of the debate by interjecting most misleadingly that Obama had indeed mentioned terrorism the day after the Libyan murders, even though in context he was not talking about the Libyan attacks, but terrorism in general, and if he WAS talking about terrorism as the cause of the Libyan attack, then this further highlights that he and all his main spokespeople were lying to the American people with their fictional account of a movie having been responsible for the violence in Libya. Romney was approximately five points above Obama in some of the primary opinion polls when the hurricane hit, and surging, before the hurricane arrived and surged even more. The hurricane wreaked havoc with the Eastern Coast of the American shore, but it also in effect swept Romney out of contention, and Obama back into political power, without of course allowing millions of people to get the benefits of electric power in their homes and offices. Had the press been fair, and had Romney been even half as aggressive as Obama in terms of attacking his opponent, they all would have pointed out that Obama demonstrated his bipartisanship and acted presidential for a total of about 90 minutes on the shores of New Jersey in the wake of the hurricane, but that should not have been deemed to compensate for the previous four years during which he showed no such comparable leadership or engagement. Perhaps had Obama paid half as much time on his daily briefings about Libya and other hot spots as he did on his photo ops about the hurricane right before the election, the four Americans who were murdered in Libya would be alive today. Obama claimed credit for killing Bin Laden even though the necessary intelligence was obtained in part during the Bush administration with tactics Obama forbade; it took him three days of vacillation to simply decide whether to press the green light; and then he compromised national security by revealing the raid prematurely so that our enemies were thereby forewarned that our government had intelligence about them. These actions – and inactions -- showed how deficient Obama was as the commander in chief, yet he managed to package himself as a decisive leader of the war on terror (a term he forbade) in large measure because of what happened to Bin Laden on his watch. What happened to Bin Laden on his watch was based to a great extent on Obama acting like a Republican, and benefiting from intelligence gathered, in part, by Republicans. To the extent he benefited from these activities, the electorate was endorsing Republicanism; not repudiating it. The other distortions of the campaign were discussed ad nauseum elsewhere and won’t be repeated here, but clearly at least some of them were misleading, and to the extent that they were, Romney lost his lead in the election, and then the election itself. But he never lost his integrity. To suggest that the Republicans have forever lost their majority because of the current demographics and the trends toward more minorities is not valid since polls consistently show that there are at least 10% more Americans who consider themselves to be conservatives than liberals, and more Americans who consider themselves moderates than conservatives, so there is enough room for a large enough Republican base for the foreseeable future. In addition, the Republicans are bound to become resourceful enough to attract more minorities in the future, especially considering that one – Cain – was leading the pack of presidential candidates at one point, and another two – Rubio and Gindel – were in or close to the first tier of potential vice-presidential nominees at one point, and the chairman of the party was an African-American the previous time around. To suggest that the Republicans lost and were repudiated because of their policies is clearly unfair in light of the fact that, despite all the collusion (whether formal or informal, direct or indirect) of the mainstream press with Obama and his fellow illusionists, Romney had the momentum and was ahead in the polls until the hurricane hit, and then most of the misrepresentations outlined above took place.


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Aaron I. Reichel, Esq. -- Bio and Archives

Aaron Reichel is a New York attorney whose writings have been widely published and republished, some in the U.S. Congressional Record. His most notable book remains Fahrenheit 9-12 – Rebuttal to Fahrenheit 9/11.

 


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