Election May Not Even Be Close

It may not even be close

Aside from the logically-strained Supreme Court opinion preserving
Obamacare, President Barack Obama has nothing to show for more than three
years in office other than a slow economy, a weak dollar, a failed stimulus,
a $5 trillion increase in the national debt, his administration’s regulatory
assault on American business, inflation, high unemployment, a proposed tax
on the wealthy and an antipathy to conventional sources that has contributed
to high energy prices. And Obamacare, his signature "achievement" exposed by
the Court as a massive tax increase, remains unpopular with nearly
two-thirds of Americans.

Even Obama’s most ardent supporters won’t claim that the Obama recovery has
been robust, arguing instead that Obama was dealt a lousy hand.

But that’s misleading. Three years after an uptick in GDP numbers ended this
last recession, the official jobless rate is still above 8 percent – the
longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. If one
includes all the discouraged job seekers and part-timers seeking full-time
work, the unemployment rate is nearly 15 percent.

In a normal post-World War II recovery, the economy would be growing at an
average rate of nearly 5 percent. Obama’s recovery averages less than 2
percent.

Adjusted for inflation, a by-product of the administration’s monetary
policies, take-home pay for US workers has fallen. Job creation continues to
lag the numbers necessary just to absorb new applicants entering the work
force.

The November presidential election will hinge on Obama’s record in office –
on the economy and Obamacare. Decided only on those criteria, Obama will
lose badly – and his handlers know it.

That’s why Obama, his administration, his campaign staff and the national
media (forgive the redundancies) have attempted to obscure Obama’s real
problems by declaring that the only thing wrong with the president’s
policies and the progressive social model is that both are underfunded.

Americans know better, so Obama’s team has been trying to distract voters
with irrelevancies. The "War on Women" ended when it became known that the
unmarried 29-year-old Georgetown student who demanded that the government
pay for her birth control could walk two blocks from campus and purchase it
for seven bucks. The faux outrage over the Romneys having secured a dog
carrier to the roof of their car thirty years ago died when the blogosphere
noticed in one of two self-absorbed autobiographies he published before
reaching the age of forty-five that Obama had eaten dog meat.

Running out of distractions and lacking a defensible record, other than
malicious, dishonest attempts to trash the Republican nominee, the Obama
crowd has settled on two themes: class warfare and race.

National Democrats and their media enablers have been demanding that the
rich pay their "fair share" of taxes, even though confiscating the entire
net worth of the top 1% wouldn’t close one of Obama’s annual deficits while
leaving nothing to tax the next year. The top ten percent of earners already
pay more than seventy percent of federal taxes, and nearly half of Americans
pay no income taxes at all. Is that fair? For nearly eight decades,
Democrats have succeeded in making more Americans dependent upon government
handouts. Historically, that’s been a successful vote-gathering strategy,
one which they can’t resist recycling.

But class warfare may not work this year. American prosperity fueled big
wins for Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan in 1956 and 1984, respectively.
Poor economic conditions influence voters even more profoundly. Only once,
in 1936, has a president won reelection in a bad economy. President Jimmy
Carter was a one-term failure. Like Obama’s, Carter’s policies helped to
create the economic conditions he faced when seeking a second term.

The 2010 midterm election may be predictive, too. Congressional Democrats
fared worse in Obama’s 2010 midterm election than Republicans did in
President Herbert Hoover’s 1930 midterm. Two years later Hoover was swept
out of office.

Obama pays lip-service to but disregards public unhappiness, promising more
of what he has been doing for more than three years. It won’t work. The
president now has a record. Many voters fell for a charismatic chimera in
2008. They won’t do it again.

Finally, among the most vicious charges one can make in a civil society is
to accuse another of being racist. Though they continue to throw it down,
the race card has been overplayed by Obama and the left. Ironically,
charging racism as the lone motivation for opposing a president who most
detractors merely see as incompetent is skewing the polls which reassure the
president’s supporters. Currently, presidential polling shows the candidates
to be close, usually within the margin of error. Rather than admit their
opposition to Obama and risk being branded racists, some of those polled lie
to pollsters.

But, America has a secret ballot. Many who poll positive for Obama will vote
for the other guy.

It may not even be close.