Shooting Holes in Obama’s Campaign Strategy

Shooting Holes in Obama’s Campaign Strategy
by Burt Prelutsky
Thursday, October 20, 2011

For three years, I have pointed out that even a broken clock is right twice a day, but I am still waiting for Barack Obama to be right even once.

That sort of honesty has led some people to accuse me of failing to give Chairman Obama credit when it’s due. I’d reply that I was still waiting and they’d insist I wasn’t really trying. I did want to be fair and balanced, at least so long as that didn’t mean I had to give equal time to Alan Colmes, Geraldo Rivera, Leslie Marshall and Juan Williams, so I racked and re-racked my brains until I finally came up with two accomplishments that even I have to grant merit praise. By appointing the governors of Kansas and Arizona, Kathleen Sebelius and Janet Napolitano, to head up Health and Human Resources and Homeland Security, respectively, Obama cleared the way for Republicans Sam Brownback and Jan Brewer to take up residence in the governor’s mansion. I hope that finally silences my critics.

Obama is convinced that by running against congressional Republicans, he’ll coast to victory in 2012. That’s what comes from counting on people like David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Rahm Emanuel, for advice. For one thing, poll numbers on Congress are misleading. Voters may have a negative opinion of Congress in general, but that’s because they despise certain high-profile members of the other party, such as Pelosi, Waxman and Reid or Boehner, Cantor and McConnell, but they don’t usually hate their own representatives.

However, when a president’s poll numbers are in the toilet, that does mean something. So Obama can spend from now until November, 2012, berating conservatives, but on Election Day, the voters won’t be choosing between him and the House of Representatives, they’ll be choosing between Rick Perry, Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann, and the guy who swore his trillion dollar stimulus bill and another three trillion dollars in additional spending would cure our unemployment woes and jump-start our stagnant economy, and instead made everything worse and wound up costing our nation its triple-A credit rating.

Voters will also recall that members of his administration tried to convince us that endless extensions of unemployment benefits, along with 47 million Americans collecting food stamps, were sure signs of economic growth.

I, for one, find it difficult to imagine that anyone on Obama’s re-election team can take a look at all the elections that liberals have lost since 2008 -- including those in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, where Obama spent months campaigning -- and feel even slightly optimistic about next year’s results.

During the first two years of his administration, when the liberals controlled the Oval Office and both houses of Congress, Obama took delight in steamrollering over Republicans. He arrogantly reminded John McCain, just in case he’d forgotten, who had won the election when the senator simply, and politely, objected to a piece of proposed legislation. Furthermore, Obama characterized the Republicans as obstructionists when they balked at supporting his plans to redistribute America’s wealth, while he, himself, was too busy golfing and trolling for campaign funds to propose a budget or present a plan to curtail spending. He told the Republicans to shut up and eat their peas. I would have told him to eat this!

It was only after the Republicans, many of them Tea Party candidates, took control of the House in the 2010 elections that “bi-partisanship” became an essential part of Obama’s mantra. But of course by his definition, it meant that Republicans would join Democrats in supporting his radically insane agenda. When this galoot speaks of compromise, he means that conservatives are supposed to compromise their principles so that he can continue to turn America into a third world socialistic state.

Don Quixote, who was nuts but courageous, did battle against windmills. Obama, who is nuts but arrogant, is equally fixated on them. He has squandered hundreds of billions of our tax dollars subsidizing their manufacture, along with anything else that doesn’t depend on coal, oil or nuclear power. Whereas Don Quixote was a noble, but foolish, character who believed he was risking his life to battle against evil giants, Don Obama, whose personal carbon footprint is roughly the size of Montana, doesn’t really believe that the oil and coal industries are evil; he is merely taking his marching orders from the petty left-wing tyrants who fill the rosters of the environmentalist movement. It will make things ever so much clearer if you think of them as Big Green.

Recently, White House liar-in-chief Jay Carney deigned to appear on The Factor with Bill O’Reilly. At one point, Carney made a doozy of a Freudian slip. Because O’Reilly, as usual, was yakking when he should have been listening, he missed it and made no comment. Inasmuch as Carney’s job description is to spin like a top for Obama, it’s probably not too surprising if he occasionally gets dizzy and mixes up his clichés, as he did when he told O’Reilly, “As the president has said, it’s time to put Party ahead of Country.”

Even though I realized that Carney had simply botched up a sound bite, this rare example of political honesty had me running outside to see if the moon had turned blue or if hell had finally frozen over.
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Introducing Tom Dewey to Barack Obama
by Burt Prelutsky Monday, October 17, 2011

By this time, we’re all aware that union thugs, including nurses and school teachers, not only went AWOL from their jobs, but caused over seven million dollars in damage to Wisconsin’s state capitol when they stormed Madison and tried to bully Governor Walker and the state legislators into capitulating to their outlandish demands. What you may not have heard about is that hundreds of goons from the Longshoreman’s Union descended on the Port of Longview (Washington), broke down gates, smashed windows, overpowered security guards, damaged railroad cars, cut brake lines and dumped carloads of grain, in a jurisdictional dispute with a different union.

Speaking of union thugs, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa welcomed Chairman Obama to a Labor Day celebration by calling on his members to take out Tea Party members. I don’t believe he was suggesting an evening of dinner and slow dancing.

It all leads me to pose the following question: What is the difference between the folks who do the bidding of union bosses and Hitler’s Brown Shirts? Answer: The Nazis had a better dress code.

Watching Barack Obama demand that Congress pass his Jobs Act, a half trillion dollar bill that hasn’t been written and calls for funding with money that doesn’t exist, is a classic case of déjà vu. One can’t help being reminded of ObamaCare, which, as Nancy Pelosi coyly pointed out at the time, required passage as a precursor to our knowing what it said.

It’s obvious that Obama realizes that no Republican is going to agree to raise taxes to finance this latest bit of legislative lunacy. He tosses it out for no other reason than as a way to blame Congress for record unemployment and a disastrous economy as he campaigns for re-election.

Clearly, someone, David Axelrod perhaps, remembered that Harry Truman successfully used Congress as a scapegoat when he won the 1948 election. There are a few important differences, however. One, the opposition party controlled both houses in 1948. In Obama’s case, his own party controlled both houses from 2006-2010 and still controls the Senate.

For another thing, Truman was running against Tom Dewey, who had not only been walloped badly by a nearly comatose FDR in 1944, but had been famously mocked by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s socialite daughter, as bearing a striking resemblance to the little man who stands atop wedding cakes. Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney, on the other hand, are not only more photogenic than Obama, but are far less arrogant, annoying and narcissistic.

Finally, Harry Truman had been the man who green-lighted the dropping of A-Bombs on Japan, bringing World War II to an abrupt and joyous conclusion.

Although Obama will try to cast himself as the guy who single-handedly brought down Osama bin Laden, most people will recall how he hogged the credit, making it sound during his victory lap as if he and not the Navy Seals had carried off the mission.

Aside from those parasites feeding off the public trough, the majority of American voters will see him as the nincompoop they associate with the trillion dollar stimulus; ObamaCare; Cash for Clunkers; a fixation on “green” jobs; appointing leftwing dingbats like Kagan and Sottomayor to the Supreme Court; making the racist gun runner Eric Holder head of the Justice Department; kowtowing to Islamics while kicking Israel in the teeth; ignoring the counsel of his military advisors, instead using our young warriors as political pawns; and, lest we forget, lecturing Republicans on civility while turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to his political henchmen when they refer to conservatives as bigots, fascists, hostage-taking terrorists and, most recently, as sons of bitches.

About the only good thing that Obama can take credit for is that he has led millions of people to re-read their Bibles. It’s not that they’re seeking confirmation that he is in fact the Second Coming of the Messiah, a role in which he cast himself in 2008, when he spoke of himself as The One who would see to it that the oceans would recede and the planet would heal and America would, all thanks to him, be radically transformed.

Rather, the faithful are going back to the Good Book in order to better compare biblical plagues to those wrought by Barack Obama
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.