Barack Obama’s unserious re-election campaign
By U-T San Diego Editorial Board
Monday, August 20, 2012
With 11 weeks until Election Day, President Barack Obama’s desperation couldn’t be plainer. He wants the campaign to be about anything other than his record, starting with the failure of the $787 billion “stimulus” plan to revive the economy and the deeply unpopular, vastly expensive and utterly flawed botch that is Obamacare.
The most substantive remarks about policy the president typically makes are to reinforce his class-warfare themes by talking about his eagerness to let the Bush tax cuts expire on Dec. 31 for single earners making more than $200,000 a year and families making more than $250,000. Obama depicts this as crucial to bringing the immense federal budget deficit under control. His stump speech emphasizes that unless you agree with him, “you’re not serious about deficit reduction.”
But according to FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan research center run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the Obama White House itself says that letting income taxes go up for the wealthy and restoring the estate tax to 2009 levels would reduce the projected $1.2 trillion federal deficit for 2012 by less than 9 percent. Remember, these are the president’s own numbers, and they predict average annual additional revenue of $96.8 billion per year over the next decade if he gets his way.
In other words, letting tax breaks for the wealthy expire doesn’t come close to changing the trajectory of trillion-dollar annual deficits that have the U.S. well on its way to federal budgets in which one-quarter of all spending is just to retire interest on the debt. So much for Obama’s February 2009 vow to cut the deficit in half and to take “responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”
What would change this trajectory? Two things: 1) an overhaul of entitlement programs for the elderly to contain costs; and 2) a reform of the federal tax and regulatory codes that would encourage job growth and unfetter the free-market economy to work its magic.
Guess who used to agree with the first point and partly agree with the second point? Barack Obama.
But now he’s using the time-dishonored Democratic tradition of telling elderly voters that Republicans want them to die and the more specific new tradition of inferring that GOP rival Mitt Romney’s tax reform proposals are motivated by Romney’s desire to cut his own taxes.
This needs to change. We need to have a substantive debate about the deficit, about entitlements, about how to turn the tax code into an economic engine.
But here’s why that won’t happen: If the president took responsibility, right now, for his record – for the gap between his promises and what he’s accomplished – the election would be over.
Instead, the president believes his unpopularity stems from the failures of others. The last president. House Republicans. Voters who can’t figure out how wonderful he’s been.
This list keeps growing. On Aug. 7, The New York Times reported that Obama didn’t care for the mainstream media coverage of him. And on Monday, Politico reported Obama was down on some members of his campaign team and administration over the state of his re-election campaign.
It’s not his fault, you see. It never is.
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