I suppose i should have written this a month ago, if i wanted to sway anyone's mind about this election. But better late than never, i suppose.
Let's cut through the clutter and the crap. Let's not start hurling accusations about Ted Kennedy killing a drunk girl, or Anthony Weiner taking a photo of his crotch, or any of this other silliness. Let's get down to the real talk. Let me lay out why i voted for Barack Obama, why i'm proud of it, and why i think you should vote for him as well.
And let's just focus on the last four years, the essential state of things.
As everyone knows, by the end of 2008, the American economy was in freefall after a decade of conservative economic policies. Tax cuts for the wealthy and two frivolous wars exploded the debt, American jobs were vanishing overseas, and a deregulated Wall Street -- no longer hindered by the rules that once prevented commercial banks from engaging in the same speculative behavior as investment banks -- bet the farm on junk securities and leveraged their money into a house of cards that collapsed, obliterating trillions in wealth overnight.
Things were very bad.
Almost any Democrat could have won the 2008 election in such circumstances. But we didn't have just any Democrat, we had Barack Obama, who seemed new and different because he was young and black and hip and cool in a way that most politicians aren't. He won in a landslide, and vowed to work with Republicans on getting the country back on it's feet...
...but it takes two to tango, as they say. We now know, for a fact, that the core of the Republican party -- Boehner, McConnell, Cantor, and Ryan -- called a meeting to formalize their strategy in the coming years. And that strategy was to ruin Obama by any means necessary. To vote against him, even if he were proposing things that they agree with. Stall, delay, and filibuster legislation. When your side is losing a fight, after all, you can't just build yourself back up -- you have to tear the other guy down.
Obama did try to compromise. The necessary stimulus package included huge tax cuts, favored by Republicans. Republicans like Paul Ryan received hefty chunks of money to help their districts that they would disavow later. Obama's healthcare reform plan was not the progressive Clinton plan of the early '90s, but rather a market-based approach that was modeled after Mitt Romney's Massachusetts model...
...Obama extended his hand, and the Republicans spit in his palm. They placed party warfare above the interests of the American People in nearly every case.
The conservative media began a smear campaign unlike any other, on several fronts of society. The Wall Street bankers, who largely went scot-free for their misbehavior, were aghast that they should suffer even token measures to keep their venality in check. Their support for a generic Republican candidate to replace Obama was a foregone conclusion...
...but on the ground, things got dirty. Before Obama, one might have assumed that the election of a black president would result in his enemies' holding their tongues and pulling their punches as not to appear like racist creeps -- instead, the opposite happened, and Obama was subjected to a campaign of racist bullshit unlike anything i've ever seen. Every conservative voice whispered -- he's really a Muslim. He wasn't born here. He doesn't like America and wants it to fail. He's an anticolonialist. He's a socialist dictator. He wants to take money from hardworking white suburbanites and give it to lazy inner-city blacks and mexicans. He's not a Christian. He's a Black Panther. He apologizes for America. He's not one of us!
Remember the birth certificate sideshow?
Do you think that a single one of those howling loons would have cared if there was some suspicion that Sarah Palin wasn't born in Idaho, but across the Canadian border while her parents were on a hunting trip?
'Course not.
And as a result, we ended up with the Teabaggers, the single most wrongheaded political movement in modern American history. These people -- who didn't bat an eye when Republican presidents and Congresses drove up trillion-dollar deficits, and cheered when Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" -- suddenly decided that the looming national debt was the single most important issue facing the country...
...which of course, was just a cover for their emotional rage. Willing tools of their media masters, all their hatred and racism could be channeled through this issue in a desperate attempt at political legitimacy. The truth that our massive debt was almost entirely caused by slashing taxes and needless wars was unacceptable to them, so they created an alternative universe in which Obama was giving away trillions of dollars in "free shit" to undeserving "looters and moochers" as part of some "socialist plan" to "create a nirvana on earth." You only need to read their sneering rants in which they express outrage that Michelle Obama eats the same food as other First Ladies (as opposed to what, crackers and Spam?) to see their motivations.
Their masters know the truth, but the grunts and foot soldiers swallowed those lies whole. White suburban Americans don't want to look at the last thirty years and realize that everyone is to blame. They don't want to realize that Saint Ronald Reagan and subsequent Republicans started the nation down the path of ruin. They were told that they could enjoy lower taxes during their working years, and then reap the benefits of Medicare and Social Security during their retirements...
...no, that would require intelligence and honesty. It's much more appealing to them to believe that some invading socialist Democrat Secret Muslim caused all of it four years ago.
Even worse, legions of young people who were of a libertarian bent bought into the lie. They had probably never paid much attention to politics before, and the problems of the last three decades could all be wrapped up and placed on Barack Obama's doorstep. Jobs are hard to find? Why blame decades of offshoring and wage stagnation and corporate malfeasance, combined with new technological realities and the rise of India and China? Why take that responsibility when an old white guy is pointing a finger at Obama and saying "he did it!"
It's been horrific to watch.
Curiously, the same libertarians who insist over and over again that politics is entirely corrupt and that ALL politicians are liars and scoundrels -- don't think that the Republican Party is capable of orchestrating this kind of smear movement. They're just all acting in good faith, right?
Meanwhile, Obama soldiered on and did what he could. He passed healthcare reform. He brought the war in Iraq to a sensible close. He's wisely avoided ground wars with Iran and Libya. And as a bonus, he killed Osama Bin Laden -- something that George Bush was never able to do, something that both Mitt Romney and John McCain said they would NOT do because it might be too risky. The fact that conservatives could not even acknowledge this single achievement is proof of their blindness and reality evasion. Give Obama credit for a gutsy move? Why do that when you can just construct another false narrative where Obama supposedly hid in a corner crying and protesting while someone else gave the order to pull the trigger?
Has Obama been a perfect president?
Of course not. He's done things i don't agree with, and hasn't done things i think he ought to have done. Most of my criticisms are of the latter sort -- there have been too many times when i think the President should have raised holy hell against Republican obstructionism rather than compromising.
He's still trying to reach across the aisle, no matter how many times he gets spit upon.
Anyway, that brings us to this election. The fact that it's even close is shocking to me. You don't need me to tell you why Mitt Romney is a hypocritical, deceptive fraud when Matt Taibbi can do it so much better...
...nah, this is about Obama. See, the conservatives have this goofy belief that everyone is let down by Obama. That everyone voted for him last time did so just to prove they weren't racist. That everyone voting for him this time is doing so because they're either an illegal immigrant or some lazy moocher who wants more welfare.
Screw that!
I'm a hardworking American who left home at age 17 with a bicycle and $500 in my pocket from a Fountainhead essay contest. And i proudly voted for Obama a second time.
If Mitt Romney wins, it won't be the end of America -- that's the type of drooling hyperbole that Teabaggers indulge in -- but i do think he would be a rotten president. And the Republican strategy of lies, obstructionism, hypocrisy, greed, and racism will have been totally vindicated.
They don't care if it's right, they just care if it works.
Don't let it work.
OBAMA 2012.
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