Obama’s second-term agenda

Obama’s second-term agenda
By:John Hayward
6/12/2012 11:18 AM

Nervous voters watching the American economy teeter on the brink of a double-dip recession might wonder what, precisely, Barack Obama plans to do in his prospective second term.

It’s interesting that the Obama campaign has spent very little time talking about this. Almost all of their efforts have been attacks on Mitt Romney. First they criticized his dog transportation policies from the 1980s. Then they declared war on stay-at-home moms like Ann Romney, portraying them as out-of-touch Rapunzels who don’t understand life in the brutal Obama economy well enough to offer informed opinions about anything.

Then we got a series of dishonest attacks on venture capitalism, which were so repellent they caused a fracture in the Democrat Party. This was followed by the amazingly weird tactic of criticizing Mitt Romney for achieving an unemployment rate less than half of Obama’s real average, during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. Don’t elect Romney, or he might saddle all of America with 4.7 percent unemployment!

So, what would Obama do if he got a second term? One of the reasons his “private sector is doing fine” press conference got him in so much trouble is that it offered us a fearsome glimpse of his future plans. He thinks the problem with the U.S. economy is that we’re not hiring enough unionized public-sector workers. There is little doubt that he’ll “fix” that, if he gets a chance.

Voters have good reason to question any priorities Obama sets for a second term, since he’s notoriously bad at projecting future trends, or establishing priorities for limited government spending. He predicted his “stimulus” would bring unemployment down, but it has consistently remained far above where he said it would be, if the trillion-dollar stimulus wasn’t spent. He also predicted he would be a one-term president if the stimulus failed – which, by his own standards, it unquestionably has.

The first Obama term has included no less than seventeen declared “pivots to job creation,” in which reducing unemployment supposedly became the President’s top priority. This never actually happened. He has always, at every given moment in his presidency, demonstrably entertained priorities far above job creation. Throughout his term, the American workforce continued to shrink, and now even unemployment within the diminished workforce has gotten worse.

The New Yorker recently published a piece on Obama’s “ambitious second-term agenda.” What’s at the top of the list? Another pivot to job creation? Ha! You wish!

No, according to the New Yorker, “the President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change, one of the few issues that he thinks could fundamentally improve the world decades from now.”

Climate change is the theology of a bizarre religious cult, which believes, contrary to all scientific evidence, that human activity is somehow having more of an effect on the planetary climate than natural cycles of terrestrial motion and solar emissions. The cult leaders have further declared that sinful activity in the cleanest, most environmentally conscious nations actually upsets the Angry Sky Gods more than far dirtier industry in poor and developing nations.

This ideology is a guaranteed job killer. It is entirely premised on the notion that efficient means of energy production are evil, and must be suppressed in favor of far more expensive, much less efficient and reliable power sources. Obama has already seized billions of dollars of American taxpayer money to artificially create a market for “green energy” junk, and it was a miserable failure. He’s also directed the agencies of his massive government to crack down on the more desirable but “evil” means of power generation, such as oil and coal. Unfortunately, that was a "success."

And the top priority of his second term is going to be more of this? He thinks the only problem with Solyndra is that he didn’t force us to give enough money to his pals in the “green energy” racket? He’s asking America to commit national suicide by voting him back into office.

What else has Obama got on his plate? Well, after spending even more of our money to force our economy into a more primitive state, the New Yorker says “he also is concerned with containing nuclear proliferation.” They quote Obama's declaration in Prague, back in April 2009: “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” He later made a famous promise to incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin, which was not meant for the ears of the American public, that he would be more “flexible” after he secured re-election.

Anyone who thinks the world will ever be "without nuclear weapons" is a dangerous lunatic. Preventing rogue states from acquiring them is a crucial national security goal, but that's not what Obama means. He's talking about arms-reduction treaties with the Russians... who frequently encounter, shall we say, difficulties holding up their end of the bargain. How about it, dear voters? After paying further tribute to the global warming cult, is your second priority American nuclear disarmament?

Rounding out the New Yorker’s take on “Obama II: The Revenge,” we get immigration reform (by which Obama means amnesty for illegal aliens, creating a reliable new Democrat voting bloc), and more foreign aid to developing countries. Absolutely nothing in that list would do a single thing to help the American private sector, or reduce out-of-control government spending to avoid fiscal apocalypse. Quite the contrary.

Obama’s campaign advisor David Axelrod - who has become his chief campaign “surrogate” now that all the others have been declared “dead to Obama” or “senile” - threw in one more high priority for the second Obama term: suppressing free speech he doesn’t like.

In an interview with New York magazine, Axelrod vowed, “When we win, we will use whatever tools are out there, including a constitutional amendment, to turn this back,” referring to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. This landmark decision allowed corporations other than ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC to spend money on political speech. Of course the hard Left doesn’t like it. They have been fervently constructing a mythology that blames every political defeat - including those in which Citizens United demonstrably played no role whatsoever, like the Wisconsin recall election - on the flood of Evil Corporate Money unleashed by the Supreme Court. Remember, Obama made a point of insulting the Court by criticizing their decision during a State of the Union address, while several of the Justices sat in the audience and fumed.

Does a Constitutional battle over political expenditures sound like it belongs alongside climate change, nuclear disarmament, immigration reform, increased foreign aid spending, and hiring more government employees as the top items on the American agenda for 2013?
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.