Ten Days

Why The Election Matters

New And Improved

Ford Motor Company sold the exact same Mustang from 1987 to 2000, building the car on the venerable “Fox” chassis while making only small and negligible changes in the fiberglass body every model year. Yet, each year, they presented the “new” Mustang, and sold America on the idea that this was a must-have new item. Giving the president’s policies time to work—and they are clearly working—is a fair enough request, but people who’ve lost their home have every right to be impatient. People who’ve been laid off and struggling for two years are looking for a different message. Intellectually, the president understands how the political and economic machinery of America works. What he seems disconnected from is the reality that, for many of us, America is only New York, Chicago and L.A., but it is those pesky states in-between, the ones hit hardest by the Great Recession, who will be calling the shots. Many of America’s tribal roots are deeply embedded in these places, including the specter of racism that demands the heartland’s rejection of Obama as the nation’s leader. While many of these people embrace what are dismissively referred to as “flyover values,” tribal culture of states we fly over while traveling to a real city like Denver or Detroit. These are not stupid people, but their sense of self and belonging often overwhelms their intellect. They are impatient for explanations and lectures. You have to explain things to us in ten word or less, boil down extremely complex issues to a 30-second TV spot. Both presidential campaigns have made Herculean efforts to speak to us—myself included—smashing down 3-hour sociology and economics lectures to ten words, while distorting the simple mechanics of truth with the moral ambiguity of propaganda. Instead of simply informing us of the immense danger of the Keystone Pipeline, which can and likely would become an ecological (and therefore economic) disaster like 2010’s Deeepwater Horizon’s massive 18-week oil spill, the TV ads skip the science and simply say Obama Is Bad. The president comes across as unreasonable and irrational for blocking the pipeline construction because he or his campaign assumes the hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction and energy workers understand, in detail, the risks and the science behind the pipeline construction, and understand a disaster from the pipeline would be exponentially worse than the Horizon disaster (for which the Republicans blamed the president, as if Obama could slip into is scuba gear and go turn the switch himself).

We are all, to one degree or another, underinformed about things the campaigns are, in many ways, over-informed about. They know we are impatient, unfocused, busy soccer moms struggling to get the kids to this practice or that rehearsal. They know we’ve bought into The American Dream, and, therefore, own a house we can’t afford, have too many kids and are struggling through a marriage we regret having entered into. Most of us are living beyond are means, have been for a long time, have too much stuff, too much house, and our struggle is mostly about keeping things and feeding kids most of us did not plan to have in the first place. We are hurting. We are impatient for solutions.

The president has run an awful campaign. A simply awful campaign. “Forward” is a theme that requires if not demands a modifier: forward to what? The president ran on a platform of More Of The Same—give my policies time to work—which any political strategist could have told him was a huge mistake.  What makes the president’s campaign a study in political mismanagement is the executive decision to not run for president. For reasons I can’t understand, the campaign just kind of blithely meandered along in a disorganized way. Obama was not running for president. He was running as president, assuming, on some level, that he would not need to apply for the job. Thus, his campaign offered us nothing. Showed us nothing new. There was no Obama 2.0, and there really should have been.

The Novelty Has Worn Off Obama speaks to 75,000 in Portland, May, 2008.

Booked

Last week, the president’s campaign printed out a glossy booklet they mailed to a few million people. This appeared to be an act of desperation, the Obama campaign taking the bait of the Romney campaign, which had begun incessantly demanding to see the president’s papers. Romney correctly asserted the president’s campaign’s failure to lay out the president’s second-term agenda, a huge mistake on Obama’s part. The accusation had real teeth. White men, particularly in the flyover states, weren’t planning to reelect the president anyway, and Obama was hemorrhaging married white women—soccer moms. He’d posted his plan to his website, but websites have their limits: two decades into the Internet revolution, many flyover people are still just barely discovering the Internet. They’ve discovered Facebook and maybe MSN for their Hotmail. For millions of people, Facebook, Google and MSN is their Internet, ignoring most content beyond that. The president’s incredibly expensive mass-mailing seems an attempt to bring the mountain to Muhammad by printing out his website and delivering it to our door.

But it was an obvious trap. By squawking about the president’s failure to lay out a second-term agenda, the Romney folk knew the president would either ignore or respond to them. If he ignored them, his numbers would continue to erode because they’d just dig in and keep going. If he responded to them, then the president was playing defense. If you’re not on offense, you’re losing. Obama lost the minute he printed out this ridiculous booklet and held it up on national TV. That was the art—the optic—the Romnettes wanted: the president holding up this idiotic book. Once that image was in the air, the Romney campaign immediately did the same thing, holding up the Obama book (or a clever facsimile because they had it almost immediately), and issuing the quote we all knew was coming. I mean, I knew this was exactly what they’d do. The Romney campaign would not say, “there’s no new ideas in here,” they’d wait for a credible and unbiased news source to say it, which happened virtually the same day. And there was Paul Ryan, holding up the Stupid Obama Book, using not his own words but those of a major, trusted TV news personality, “There’s nothing new in here.” This was an amateur mistake. The Obama campaign has been riddled with them.

The president has failed to turn the racist tide—surgically manipulated by Republicans—to power the president’s campaign turbines. It is precisely the president’s intellectualism and liberalism that is killing his reelection attempt, his failure to come to terms with the simple truth that Barack Hussein Obama Is A Black Man And They Hate Him. Hate and Fear are good for Republicans. This has been their traditional campaign weapon for most of this century. Obama Hate is especially powerful. An emotion that powerful can be turned into useful energy. The republicans are using racism to fire up white men, most especially, against the president. The president’s campaign has completely avoided the corrosive battery acid of racism and hate, which was stupid. Turned on its ear, racism and fear become guilt. Race Guilt is as powerful a weapon as Race Hate. You add oxygen to hydrogen and you get water. Instead, the Obama campaign ceded all of the fuel to the Republicans in some misplaced, naive assumption that “good” Americans will find the Republican tactics appalling and support the e president. The Republicans, on the other hand, know that “good” Americans will find their tactics appalling and still support Romney. They know “good” Americans aren’t stupid: they know, for a fact, Romney is a bald-faced liar and are voting for him anyway. Republicans understand these “flyover” Americans—the people who actually decide elections—much better than intellectual and idealistic Democrats. The dirty little secret is the Republicans hate and despise these ignorant and under informed Middle American idiots, but pander to them anyway. Democrats seem to think everybody’s from New York and reads the Wall Street Journal op-eds every day. Republicans cynically manipulate weak-minded people in the ergs of American tribalism, exposing their weak points and pressing on those nerve endings. Democrats put on puppet shows.

A Powerful Retrospective The historic and groundbreaking achievements of the
Obama presidency, and why white voters choose to ignore them.

Prevailing Winds

Hope and change are the winds of the thoughtful, if not the naïve. The Obama campaign needed to roll out a new product. More than any other president in history, this president needed to re-apply for his job. The campaign needed to mix baking soda and vinegar into the racial battery acid and transform hate to guilt, using guilt to power the president’s campaign warp drive.

Republicans have long ago mastered the alchemy of spinning hate and fear into votes. The president’s campaign has spent millions trying to scare Joe Lunchbox about Romney the Evil Corporate Raider. By contrast, Republicans never had to make Obama look scary. He’s black. That’s it. That’s all the campaign slogan the Republicans needed. Their overwhelming asset is the institutionalized nature of racism and White America’s palpable discomfort with having a black man in the White House.

So, it really is up to you. If you really believe your vote doesn’t count, or that Obama will win without you so it’s no big deal, you are electing Mitt Romney. And, if you think, even for a minute, that any promise Mitt Romney makes or any position Mitt Romney takes will actually be kept in a Mitt Romney administration, if you actually believe Mitt Romney is running because he actually cares about America, then you’ll be getting what you deserve.

Christopher J. Priest
26 October 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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Three Votes

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At this writing, I have no idea who
will be president when we return on November 10th. I will be heartbroken if it is Mitt Romney, not because of his policies (whatever they actually may be), but because America will have elected an obvious liar. This drains my faith not in the presidency but in America, for so many people to abandon the core values that makes this the greatest nation on Earth. I’m deeply saddened the race is so close. It horrifies me that so many people are casting ballots for a man they know, beyond any question, is a liar. It is irrational to place faith and trust in someone who sheds his skin almost every day; a user who exploits and abandons people. How so many Americans are finding ways to deny or overlook that truth is absolutely beyond me. Any man you have to wrestle with your ethics to vote for is a bad choice.

The president has run a bad campaign. He has failed to disqualify Mitt Romney as a viable alternative and has underestimated both public anger and public ignorance. There is absolutely no doubt Republicans obstructed each and every initiative the president put forward to improve the economic situation, and yet the public remains angry about that situation and is turning back to those very same Republicans for relief. Voting for Mitt Romney is simply not rational, yet clearly half the voting public, if not more, are doing it. Regardless of what you think of or how you feel about Barack Obama, you cannot reasonably or rationally make a case that Mitt Romney is the solution, that Mitt Romney will be a better or more effective president than the one we already have. This November, there really are only three credible votes for Mitt Romney: a protest vote, a panic vote, or a racist vote. But, those are the only three votes he actually needs.

The U.S.
Economic Downturn

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What began as a significant economic slowdown in the beginning of 2001 became a rout after September 11. The U.S. economy was in a full-blown recession for the first time in a decade, which has caused fiscal and monetary stimulus to be applied in doses not seen in a generation.

The year began with Alan Greenspan cutting the federal funds rate by half of a percentage point on January 3 (see Figure 1). This was a surprise because it occurred between FOMC meetings and it was a large cut in the fed funds rate. It certainly caught everyone’s attention. Despite the fact that the U.S. economy continued to grow at a respectable 2% in the last quarter of 2000, the Federal Reserve had sufficient inside information that the economy was headed for a recession and immediate actions were needed.

The Bush administration was able to get Congress to pass a major tax cut. However, other than a one-time rebate of $300 - $600, most of the cuts in taxes would not occur until five years out or more. Thus the tax cut was more of a ‘promise’ than a reality. The argument for the long delay in the realization of the tax cuts was that we had to wait and see if the surpluses would persist for years or would be a temporary phenomenon.

Then the roof caved in on September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. were the types of shocks that economists could never dream of. An era of fear and uncertainty unknown since the Cuban missile crisis took hold of America and the world. The consequences of this terrorist attack are only now being determined. The major effect on the economy from the terrorist attack is the creation of tremendous uncertainty about the future. It is this uncertainty that is wreaking havoc on the economy.

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