Re-Elect Obama

…so we can see just how much worse it can be.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Spite and revenge is the new “hope and change”:

For Obama, this entire campaign has felt like revenge against Romney, and against the kind of people Obama thinks Romney represents. Obama could have spent the last several months talking about his own record and his plans to change direction from our current economic stagnation that has kept the level of employment in the population at or near 30-year lows. Instead, Obama approached this election as a personal mission of revenge, and left the door open for Romney to present the only vision of change for the future in this campaign. Romney defined his campaign as an expression of love rather than revenge. So what Obama said on Friday was no gaffe. It’s just the obvious takeaway from a relentlessly empty and negative campaign.

But he’s “likable.” I guess.

17 thoughts on “Re-Elect Obama”

  1. One does wonder what four more years of Obama would bring. Four more years of near stagnancy. More attempts at bad law. More overreach from the executive branch. Well, at least he’d be in office when Hurricane Obamacare hits.

    1. I predict:

      * Continued economic recovery, with Obama getting the credit
      * Growing popularity for Obamacare, starting in 2014
      * The withdrawal of the rest of our troops from Afghanistan

      As I predicted in 2008, by 2016 more than 50% of voters will wish we didn’t have the 22nd Amendment.

      1. You and Rachel Maddow. Yesterday she was listing all Obama’s accomplishments. It was a real hoot.

        * Continued economic recovery, with Obama getting the credit

        If it did occur it would have been because of the struggles of businessmen, but you’re right, Obama would try and take the credit with his media lapdogs going along.

        * Growing popularity for Obamacare, starting in 2014

        People on the program, not paying for it, would of course find it popular. Not so popular with those having to pay for it though.

        * The withdrawal of the rest of our troops from Afghanistan

        It’s a landlocked country with less strategic importance as Pakistan and other places play host to our enemy. Not a difficult prediction to make.

        …more than 50% of voters will wish we didn’t have the 22nd Amendment.

        Romney was right, 47% are idiots. We all know Obama wants to rule us as emperor. The thing that’s flabbergasting is that any sane person would see that as a good thing.

      2. I agree. When Mr. Romney is in office and the economy rebounds, many will credit the policies that Mr. Obama had put in place.

  2. Reynolds’ oped is a lazy piece of work. His evidence that the stimulus failed is that one administration forecast, which predated accurate information about the depth of the crash, didn’t come true. Never mind the pile of studies showing the effectiveness of the stimulus, and the unprecedented lack of waste or corruption — that one forecast is the only metric that matters. The message to politicians is: don’t worry about picking policies that actually work, just make sure you don’t make any specific predictions.

    He manages to write about Libya without even mentioning that Obama took down Gaddafi without putting a single American boot on the ground. A Republican spending $1T and 4,000 lives looking for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq isn’t a disqualifying failure to Reynolds, but a Democrat losing 4 diplomats to terrorists is.

    Then he wraps up his case with the fact that Obama lost the support of Douglas Wilder. Because Wilder is of course the final arbiter of presidential success.

    Reynolds can’t even get the simplest facts right: “When elected, Obama was inexperienced … with only a couple of years experience in the U.S. Senate….” Amazing how Obama got from January, 2005 to November, 2008 in only two years. “He had no private-sector experience” (except for working in a restaurant, for a publisher, as a community organizer, as an attorney, and as a law professor). He had “little knowledge of the United States beyond the major metropolitan areas of New York, Boston and Chicago”, because Hawaii (where spent nearly a third of his life to that point) isn’t really part of the United States.

    But never mind the facts, they aren’t what Reynolds cares about.

    1. “His evidence that the stimulus failed is that one administration forecast,”

      So, people are not allowed to hold Obama accountable to his own words and policies? Isn’t that exactly what we should be doing?

      “which predated accurate information about the depth of the crash, didn’t come true.”

      B.S. Obama had been saying since before he was elected to the Senate that we were in the worst economy since Hoover. If after all that rhetoric over nearly a decade before taking office he still didn’t know how the economy was doing, it is just one more reason to vote him out based on incompetency.

      “He manages to write about Libya without even mentioning that Obama took down Gaddafi without putting a single American boot on the ground. ”

      Obama led from behind, meaning it was other countries doing the actual leading. And Obama didn’t take Moomar out, the Libyans did. But if you want to take credit for Moomar being sodomized and executed in the street, then go for it. Are Democrats the party of peace, love, and happiness?

      “A Republican spending $1T and 4,000 lives looking for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq isn’t a disqualifying failure to Reynolds, but a Democrat losing 4 diplomats to terrorists is.”

      How many troops have we lost in Afghanistan due to the brilliant war planning of Obama? More than we lost in Bush’s term. And guess what, Bush isn’t running for President.

      It is also ironic that most of Obama’s success has come from following Bush’s policies and his failures when he departed from them.

      1. So, people are not allowed to hold Obama accountable to his own words and policies?

        By all means, he should be criticized for an inaccurate forecast. And he should be praised for a policy that, according to independent studies, created millions of jobs. Getting the policy right mattered much more than getting the forecast wrong.

        Obama had been saying since before he was elected to the Senate that we were in the worst economy since Hoover.

        Do you have a link, or did you just make that up?

        How many troops have we lost in Afghanistan due to the brilliant war planning of Obama?

        Too many. How many would we have lost with McCain in the White House? Far more.

        Bush isn’t running for President

        No, but when he was, Reynolds was supporting him, despite the Iraq debacle. For him to consider Obama a failure because of Benghazi is an egregious double standard.

        1. “created millions of jobs. Getting the policy right mattered much more than getting the forecast wrong.”

          Umm no. Wrong on both counts.

          ” Obama had been saying since before he was elected to the Senate that we were in the worst economy since Hoover.

          Do you have a link, or did you just make that up?”

          You have the Romnesia that has been going around? Did you forget Obama and the Democrats attacks against Bush for eight years?

          “Too many. How many would we have lost with McCain in the White House? Far more.”

          I am glad you can see the future, that is like saying that if we didn’t have the stimulus, unemployment would have risen to 300%. You hold up military deaths as something bad for Bush (who still isn’t running for president) but you think the deaths due to Obama’s policies are great because he wants to leave Afghanistan.

          “No, but when he was, Reynolds was supporting him, despite the Iraq debacle. For him to consider Obama a failure because of Benghazi is an egregious double standard.”

          Perhaps it is time for you to read what you post.

          1. Wrong on both counts

            So I should ignore the research, and believe you?

            Did you forget Obama and the Democrats attacks against Bush for eight years?

            I don’t remember Senatorial candidate Obama saying that the Bush economy was the worst since Hoover. Did he, or did you make it up?

            You hold up military deaths as something bad for Bush

            They were bad!

            the deaths due to Obama’s policies are great because he wants to leave Afghanistan

            They’re bad too — Obama should have listened to Biden and not done the Afghan surge — but they happened in pursuit of a better cause than non-existent WMDs, and they were far fewer than would have been the case under McCain. McCain would have had us on the ground in Syria by now.

  3. To paraphrase a former Speaker of the House– We need to re-elect the Campaigner-in-Chief in order to find out what He wants to do these next four years.

  4. Well I’m going to vote right now so we can put Obama back outside of Washington since he’s already admitted he can’t change it from the inside.

  5. Baghdad Jim is a good example of what I call “the New American Exceptionalism.” It promotes the belief that, while statism has fails to bring prosperity elsewhere, in the USA somehow, more and more statism will somehow bring prosperity here. I guess it’s related to the Cult of Dear Leader: other statists can’t bring about propsperity, but the Chosen One, in addition to making the oceans rise (mission accomplished on that one as of last week), will be the guy to finally make statist economics work in the US.

      1. I see it’s been a while since you last had this question answered:

        Yes they do, Jim. They are just not the only forces operating. You can certainly have very high top marginal rates briefly, after a long period of capital concentration, such as in the 1940s with all those damned “war profits”. You can eat a little bit seed corn, from time to time. Of course, let those brutal high marginal rates go on long enough, and things fall apart. That is, your 50s were followed by the noticeably weaker 60s and 70s. And following the massive tax cuts from Kennedy to Reagan, skipping over Johnson, Nixon and Obama I (Carter), you had in the late 80s and early 90s substantial economic growth.
        Secondly, your per-capita GDP is not a very useful indicator of future prosperity, unless you are an idiot and believe that life is static, and the only people who will be (or can be) rich are those who are rich today. What you want to look for is GDP growth rates. Now, go look at your list of countries again and look at the GDP growth rates. Here they are for 2005:
        Denmark: 3.36
        Sweden: 2.70
        Belgium: 1.54
        France: 1.72
        Norway: 2.49
        United States:3.06
        Aside from the peculiarity that is Denmark, you see substantially weaker growth rates in your high-tax continental Eurostates, compared to the US.
        If you’re interested in growth because, say, you would like the poor to become rich, or you’re just in a recession, then high tax rates are a killer.

        It’s interesting and a bit sad how one can keep asking the same questions for years, get solid answers, and yet never change.

  6. I know it’s futile to discuss things with the Obama Zombies on this board, but: I would say “semi-statist.” It’s always been semi-statist to greater or lesser degree (if you hear people talk about the “laissex-faire” of the 1920s, for example, you’re probably listening to people repeating a party line they’ve been indoctrinated by State-shtupping teachers in high school), but with the teeter-totter more on the pro-freedom side than the statist side.

    Are you saying that Eisenhower was as big a statist as Obama? More? Less? Was there as much State intervention in the private sector in the 1950s than now? More? Less?

    By the way, I know that economics and logic aren’t the Obama Zombies strong suits, but if Obama does get credit for growing prosperity in a post-Obama America (and if a genius such as Rachel Maddow gives him credit for him, who am I to dissent?), what would the economic cause-and-effect be there?

    Maybe having a Red Diaper Baby/socialist New Party member/Rev. Wright altar boy with “spread the wealth” rhetoric and an anti-business (except for his capitalist cronies) mindset so scared the private sector that businessmen worked harder to produce wealth?

  7. Semi-statist, as it always been. Although the US was founded on principles of individual liberty, there have always been statists who want to limit that liberty and use the State to impose their will on others. (You know what I’m talking about, right, BJ?) For most of this country’s history, the scale has been on the pro-freedom side but thanks to your gang, that has been tilting further and further to the statist side.

    Are you saying that Eisenhower was a bigger statist than Obama? More? Less? (If more, Ike must be one of Jim’s heroes.) And that the amount of statist intervention in the private sector has actually shrunk since the 1950s? And that high taxes actually bring prosperity? That taking more and more wealth away from the people who earned it, and giving it to politcians and bureaucrats helps, rather than hinders, the wealth-creating class? If so, what is the cause-and-effect there? Youth wants to know.

    By the way, although it’s clear that economics and logic aren’t the Obama Zombies’ strong suit, if the economy in a post-Obama America does improve–as I expect it would, all other things being equal–and the Obama Zombies want to give “Il Dufe” the credit for it, what argument would they make to advance that position? I mean, what would the specific relationship between cause (an Obama presidency) and effect (post-Obama prosperity) be? I mean, if a genius such as Rachel Maddow argues this position, who am I to argue? But I’m still curious. It would seem like the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy.

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