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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (75995)	7/21/2012 5:51:33 PM
From: calgal	1 Recommendation Respond to of 103300

Obama’s emphasis on liberal issues won’t appease independents—and may alienate many of them. He has a separate plan for overcoming their disaffection: trashing Romney. His personal attacks and campaign ads characterize Romney as a capitalist buccaneer unfit to be president. If those work, independents—a few million, anyway—may reluctantly settle for Obama as the lesser evil. But arousing the base is still key. “He has gone to the left on everything as aggressively as he can,” says Scott Reed, a Republican consultant who ran Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. And on practically every issue he can. The Obama administration’s imposition of a rule requiring health insurance policies to provide free birth control pills and free sterilization thrilled liberals, especially feminists. His blocking of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas made the environmental lobby happy. By an executive order of dubious constitutionality, Obama changed immigration law to allow roughly one million illegal immigrants to remain in the country free from arrest and deportation—an unabashed effort to increase the Hispanic vote. His attorney general, Eric Holder, has noisily criticized voter ID laws as thinly veiled attempts to prevent African Americans from voting. Two weeks ago, the administration announced another policy shift to please liberals. By bureaucratic directive, it decreed states could abandon the requirement that welfare recipients seek work. Intentionally or not, this gutted the welfare reform law of 1996, the most significant achievement of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Besides Hispanics and African Americans, Obama has wooed gays by announcing his support for same-sex marriage. This also had the intent of unleashing a flood of campaign contributions from wealthy gays, just as the Keystone decision was expected to spark donations from environmentalists. In pulling off these unsubtle moves, Obama has had an ally. Republicans and conservatives complained about all of them, the Catholic bishops are furious over the unprecedented requirement that Catholic employers provide health insurance that violates their church’s teaching, and the about-face on enforcing immigration law drew strong attacks. But the mainstream media were sympathetic to the president’s actions, either downplaying them or openly siding with Obama, and the protests died down. The notion that Obama was purposely veering away from the center was rarely noted. But the impact of Obama’s latest pitch to the left, delivered on July 13 at a firehouse in Roanoke, Virginia, is likely to linger. Except for the conservative press, the media largely ignored his speech. Yet it was memorable for his denigration of success in business and glorification of government. Obama’s hostility to business, the profit motive, and wealth in general is no secret. During the 2008 campaign, he talked up income redistribution, telling Joe the Plumber that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”