The question the Right loves to ask; how does Obama plan to create jobs if he manages to win the election. After all he has been only moderately successful so far and that success has not happened fast enough or in great enough numbers to satisfy the American people.
It’s understandable that people are frustrated but when you consider that it took the country twelve years to recover from the last depression and that it needed WWII to nudge it along, Obama looks like he’s doing a pretty good job. True there are still an awful lot of people out of work, but he saved the auto industry that Romney wanted to junk and in the process saved over a million jobs. The economy has added over 4 million jobs since he took office, more than George Bush did in eight years of prosperity, and he passed the greatest piece of health legislation since Medicare, one which presidents and politicians have been trying to pass for seventy years, but still people are restless, which is natural if you’re out of work and have a family to feed.
The question, therefore, keeps coming up, why hasn’t he done more. Well, maybe he would have if he’d had even a modicum of cooperation from the GOP but those good old patriotic poseurs were more interested in keeping him from getting a second term then they were in helping Americans get jobs.
Because of the GOP failure to cooperate on job creating legislation, Obama’s jobs bill has languished in the House for over a year and the Republicans have backed themselves into a very dangerous corner. If Obama wins this election the far right will have to cooperate or collapse. Either that or the moderate conservatives will form a new party. Either situation will be good for the country because it will mean something finally gets done in congress. The Right keeps harping on the idea that Obama, with both House & Senate didn’t get anything done in his first two years. Let’s consider that statement for what it is, another Republican lie. In fact, because of the 60 vote rule in the Senate, the Democrats only had control of that arm of government for about two months, not the two years the GOP likes to crow about. And during those two month when the Democrats had the 60 votes the Republicans filibustered every bill that came to the floor out of existence. So let’s stop with the big lie about Obama having both houses of congress for two years. It’s just another of the GOP’s fallacious fantasies.
Of course Obama did manage to get an amazing amount of legislation passed in his first months in office. Start with the Affordable Health Care Act and add the Stimulus bill, which saved the auto industry, created jobs, and kept people who were out of work fed and housed. Follow that with Wall Street regulation, which would have been very effective if the butt boys of the investment banks hadn’t blocked funding in the House. True, he didn’t pass anything like the jobs bill, but they were working on it and by the time it was ready, the House had a big enough majority to block it. Why did they block it? Because they didn’t want Obama to accomplish anything that might get him votes. To hell with the people who were out of work, to hell with the kids who didn’t have meals at night, to hell with America, just don’t let the black guy get re-elected.
The moderate conservatives are smart enough to know that if they don’t cooperate or at least negotiate with Obama after the election it will be blatantly clear that they are not interested in the aims or welfare of the country but only in their own paychecks from big business.
It’s very simple. If Obama is elected, it will be the country telling the Right that we are tired of corporate greed, bigotry, religious prosecution in the name of religious freedom, unregulated big business and warmongering. If they, at least, try cooperating, the Republicans will find the Obama is not trying to give away the country to the lazy and incompetent but that he is trying to make it live up to the bargain that it has always held out to all its citizens. That no child left behind is really no person left behind and that only through providing opportunity can we ever achieve the national goals that all true Americans have set for this country.
To do that we must eliminate the culture of obstruction that the far right has used to block the work of congress, especially in the last two years. Negotiation is the oil that lubricates the function of government. Without it we have only the loggerhead failure that we have experienced in the last two years. We must eliminate or foil all legislators who approach the next four years with the same destructive credo with which they approached the last four. Caring more, about whether a man who has not yet served, is reelected, than one does about doing one’s own job to help the country, is not just unpatriotic, it is downright traitorous.
If he is elected in November, there will no longer be any question about whether or not Obama can be elected again and no way to run this country except in a spirit of cooperation.
I find it fascinating how many Republicans now flock to the banner of Bill Clinton when most of them tried everything they could to obstruct his presidency from the first minute he stepped into the Oval Office. The beginning of Clinton’s presidency was the first time I had seen a minority party refuse to be the loyal opposition in such an obvious manner. Previously in American politics there had been, a least, a public position that, you won it fair and square so we’ll be behind you until the next election, when we’ll try to beat your brains out. For the first time this was not the case. The Republicans tried from the moment he took office, to obstruct Clinton in the most personal ways, ways that usually seemed petty and cheap. They finally succeeded, mainly because of character weakness in Bill’s own personality, not for any political reason and what was the result? The country staggered along with its leader involved in whether or not he got a blow job from an infatuated intern instead of having his considerable skills applied to the job to which he was elected.
They have done the same and worse to Obama, starting out with the outrageous claim that he was not a citizen and refusing to let it die even after he proved them wrong. They have done everything they can to obstruct this presidency and they have often succeeded, always to the detriment of the country. If he wins next month they will be forced to either cooperate with him or be shown up for the hypocritical self-servers that they are, and even their staunchest supporters will have to abandon them or watch them destroy the country.
Moderate, intelligent Republicans, many of whom I sometimes disagree with, have been pretty specific lately about their distain for the Tea Party dullards and their destructive leaders. Men and women such as David Books, Joe Scarborough, Peggy Noonan and George Will, understand that in order for the country to function and to pull itself out of this financial swamp, we must have bipartisan cooperation. They understand and have commented on the inability of the Tea Party functionaries to come close to functionality. Jeb Bush, who must play out his political career with the millstone of his incompetent brother dragging him into the quicksand has come out in favor of losing the Tea Party and the far right.
Will this mean a new third party or will it just mean that the far right will fall from power in the established party? The sixty odd congressmen who were elected by the Tea Party in 2010 have, with the possible exceptions of Paul Ryan and two Hispanic reps from Texas, been complete failures. But what does one expect from a party that runs the likes of Christine O’Donnell.