Sunday, October 28, 2012

President Obama visits Richmond, asks for Richmond’s votes again in 2012


President Barack Obama visited Richmond again on Thursday at the Carillion in Byrd Park where close to 15,000 onlookers waited to hear the president speak.

President Obama reminded the crowd that Richmond gave him his second-widest vote margin in Virginia in 2008. So, President Obama said, “I need your vote. I’ve come to ask for your help in keeping American moving forward.”[1]

Continuing the theme of ‘moving forward’, Obama stated, “We don’t turn back. We look forward at that distant horizon, at the next destination.”[2] Thus, the president offered a sober view of America’s prospects for the future, in contrast to the much more optimistic political vision offered by President Obama in 2007.

While conservatives and members of the Republican Party have been quick to fault President Obama for failing to deliver some of the campaign promises he made while running for president four years ago, President Obama has achieved quite a few policy successes during his first four years: health care reform, higher fuel efficiency standards, the rescue of American auto-manufacturers, progressive environmental legislation, and the list could go on. President Obama’s achievements are all the more impressive given the outright obstructionism of the current U.S. Congress.

The Republican Party’s counter-argument has essentially been, ‘more can be done’. Sure, more can always be done. But if it isn’t too cliché at this point, what the Republican Party has offered Americans are more of the failed policies that engulfed us in two wars, threw our economy into a depression, unleashed the floodgates of unemployment, and turned a blind eye to environmental degradation and, in some cases, almost seemed to encourage it.

The GOP was once a party with a number of good ideas. For instance, the debt should be curtailed; excessive spending is the sign of inept or corrupt political representatives[3]. But even this policy position has transformed inside of an ideological vacuum that has sucked off the most practical aspects and replaced them with ideas like absolutely no deficit spending; Great in theory, but impractical in the real world. And guess which classes of Americans get negatively affected the most?

Thus, putting Mitt Romney in the White House will only serve to send America down a worse path than even George W. Bush could have achieved. America can’t afford a Mitt Romney presidency. 


[1] http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/news/2012/oct/26/tdmain01-obama-rallies-15000-at-carillon-in-richmo-ar-2312500/
[2] http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/news/2012/oct/26/tdmain01-obama-rallies-15000-at-carillon-in-richmo-ar-2312500/
[3] http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/mailbag/jack-degnan-eisenhower-was-last-republican-president-with-balanced-budget/article_e09859d7-8a9f-5aa3-8528-76e2a89eeaa5.html

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