It's time to stop making excuses for Barack Obama. With so much at stake in this election, his performance at the debate on Wednesday night was indefensible.
Ever since he was elected, there have been reasons offered, either publicly or privately, for why Obama has been unable to fully engage some of the nation's most important challenges. Despite the rampant increase in poverty in the worst downturn since the Depression, Obama supporters whispered that he couldn't do more for the poor and couldn't speak out more forcefully on their behalf because that would not be politically advantageous. So nearly all of his economic initiatives had to be couched in language that referred to the middle class, even though the poor were being hurt far worse. LBJ could launch a war on poverty but not Barack Obama.
Black Americans have been disproportionately clobbered by the Great Recession and its aftermath, losing both income and wealth at staggering rates. Much of the black community is enduring a full-blown economic depression. But Obama and his advisers have been unwilling to address this catastrophe openly and forcefully out of fear that the president would be perceived as too black by prejudiced white voters, thus losing their support.
There is always some excuse, some reason for not bringing all of the president's energy and resources to the fight.
On jobs, the biggest crisis facing the country, the excuse for not having done more has been Republican obstructionism. There is no doubt the Republicans have tried to thwart the president every which way from sundown. But Obama never fought back in kind. He never found his inner Harry Truman, never took his case forcefully to the people. He kept trying to accommodate the other side long after it was clear that no accommodation was possible.
In the face of the worst economic calamity since the 1930s, the United States needed a mammoth job-creation and economic revitalization program, a New Deal for the 21st century. But that would have required presidential leadership capable of challenging the formidable opposition mounted by the very folks who caused the crisis in the first place. Instead we got a woefully insufficient stimulus program and a failed effort at some kind of grand bargain between the president and the retrograde Republicans in Congress. That grand bargain would have imposed austerity measures that would have further crushed the poor and the black and the middle class.
On Wednesday night nearly 60 million television viewers got to witness this chronic unwillingness of Barack Obama to fight. He did not hammer Mitt Romney for his ugly, all-too-revealing comments that demeaned nearly half the population as slackers and ne-er-do-wells. He did not go after Romney's terrible job-creation record as governor of Massachusetts. He did not assail Romney for his callous contention on 60 Minutes that people who don't have health insurance actually do get care -- in the nation's emergency rooms. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die," said Romney. "We pick them up in an ambulance and take them to the hospital and give them care."
Obama never bothered to bring up that cold-hearted comment during the debate, never bothered to explain why the reliance on emergency room treatment is one of the worst possible approaches imaginable to providing health care.
One of the more remarkable things about the debate was Mitt Romney's absolute contempt for anything resembling facts, truth or reality. Deliberate deception was the bedrock foundation of his strategy. He wouldn't even come clean on the tax cuts that are a cornerstone of his campaign. And yet it was Romney who had the chutzpah to look Obama in the eye and assert: "Mr. President, you're entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts."
How in heaven's name could Obama let him get away with that?
The harsh truth is that President Obama seemed unprepared for the debate. He came off as a man who didn't really want to be there, who wondered why he should have to be bothered fending off the impertinent attacks and serial untruths being flung at him by his opponent. The millions of Obama supporters who wanted to see flashes of passion and fire from their guy -- from a president fighting effectively on their behalf -- were left with nothing but the bitter taste of disappointment.
Romney, in contrast, seemed not just confident but in command. He was dynamic (as he fashioned one falsehood after another), while Obama seemed flat, uncomfortable and unwilling to vigorously counteract the falsehoods. Most important, Romney was the one far more willing to fight.
There will be more debates. And the election has not been decided by any means. But Obama's supporters need to make it clear that the time for excuses is over. The president had no right to show up for a debate unprepared and offer an expectant nation an embarrassingly half-hearted performance. Progressive leaders, who represent Obama's strongest and most faithful supporters, have an obligation to convey that message in the strongest possible terms.
The president let his people down. And if he's capable of doing that in an election that is clearly so important, it means he's capable of doing it again if he wins a second term.
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Do you know what a Romney presidency with a tea party congress and a faithful mormon heart will do to the nation, its rivers its workers its teachers etc its not rich "garbage " as he effectively calls us?
I would vote for a rusted can before a republican even if the can flunks the " debate"
Grow up for heaven sake !, only in this country of BS " debates" have such weight. If they are so important the shallowness of this country is negation of democracy.
democracy is based on facts not on technicolor and tv crap.
If you'll notice, the Obama campaign immediately began releasing ads featuring clips of Romney's lies at the Denver debate. The President left nothing for the Romney campaign to use in their ads.
These ads are being run in only the 4 to 8 swing states. That handful of voters will determine who wins the election. All the other states are locked up for one candidate or the other. It doesn't matter how many millions were watching the debate live, the pitch is being made to those few states.
The President didn't let anyone down except those who don't understand strategy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/obama-mitt-romney-taxes_n_1939928.html
Please, point out Romney's lies, with links to support the claims. Provide details.
It is time for a change.
Accordingly, this Administration's dismissal of progressives led to disillusionment (often verging on rage) until President Obama’s campaign rhetoric moved to the left by emphasizing economic fairness, and support for the middle class. His debate disaster revived progressive mistrust and threatens an Obama second term more than any exodus of “independents” can do.
So I agree: There can be no more excuses; no more ambivalence in support of core Democratic principles; no more efforts to grow the Democratic party by turning it into the “Rockefeller” Republican party. Even if President Obama wins in November, progressives must demand accountability as the price for their support. They must be resolute in opposing so-called “bipartisan” policies (e.g., Simpson-Bowles) that will hurt the middle class and the poor.
Before the campaign really started getting going, I told my husband that the best thing Obama could do was go to every town in the US like Harry Truman did. Of course, he couldn't use a train like Harry, but a big blue bus would still do the trick.
Obama needs to start channeling his inner Harry Truman.
Pathetic, hypocritical, evil liars and the rest of us have to pay for it. The Regressives are truly destroying our nation and proud of it. It's shameful and completely against Christian values.
The Butchering of Gaddafi Is America’s Crime
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared like ghoulish despots at a Roman Coliseum, reveling in their Libyan gladiators’ butchery.”
Last week the whole world saw, and every decent soul recoiled, at the true face of NATO’s answer to the Arab Spring. An elderly, helpless prisoner struggled to maintain his dignity in a screaming swirl of savages, one of whom thrusts a knife [4] up his rectum. These are Europe and America’s jihadis in the flesh. In a few minutes of joyously recorded bestiality, the rabid pack undid every carefully packaged image of NATO’s “humanitarian” project in North Africa – a horror and revelation indelibly imprinted on the global consciousness by the brutes’ own cell phones.
Nearly eight months of incessant bombing by the air forces of nations that account for 70 percent of the world’s weapons spending, all culminating in the gang-bang slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi, his son Mutassim and his military chief of staff, outside Sirte. The NATO-armed bands then displayed the battered corpses for days in Misurata – the city that had earlier made good on its vow to “purge Black skin” through the massacre and dispersal of 30,000 darker residents of nearby Tawurgha – before disposing of the bodies in an unknown location.
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Obama is complicit in the deaths of more Africans than any president in recent history.
The American people need to choose a political philosophy and then vote accordingly.
No more excuses for HIS performance as president. He has stunk up the WH for the last 4 years.
I support the President, but I am disappoint that the he has failed to crusader for the "obvious truth" and failed to effectively address this enemies as they denigrate him and the presidency. Mr. President you don't even have to get mad, but for heaven sake, be the loudest advocate for obvious. The Repubs can't govern, they don't like fairness, truth and all those "values" we were suppose to be about as Americans.
The next debate will be pivotal in American history. This is bigger than Obama and Romney, it's about who we are and how we threat each other. The Republicans, an exclusive ideology of - ' power to the few'. The Democratic an inclusive ideology of "power to the many". For all the Repubs have done to squander this country's lives and treasures, its amazing they are still a political option, but it is what it is!
1. The power of style over substance
2. The power of the press to tell people what to think
The first one is because EVERYONE noted Mr. Romney's forceful delivery over the substance and flip flops. At the same time Mr. Obama's more methodical and collegiate style and delivery was a dissapointment for those who may have wanted to see a brawl. Instead Mr Obama's (or his team"s) decision to stay focused on the substance of his responses was indeed the stuff that defeat is made of.
The second one is really not a criticism of the press but more an observation at the willingness of the people to fall for the same trick EVERY TIME. People claim they want to hear the details but in the end they give Romney the "win" for style.
We get what we vote for !!!!
The very fact that obama never met a reporter he didn't like backfired on him big time on Wednesday night. As Clint Eastwood said, Obama is "the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people".
Obama will leave this country, every one of us, in far worse shape than he found us. What a legacy.