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Barack Obama vs. the Flip Flop Man

The 2012 US Presidential Election as seen by our American in Hastings, photographer John Cole

During his four-year term as the Governor of Massachusetts, the leader of the New England state supported abortion, gun control, tackling climate change and a requirement that everyone should buy health insurance, backed by generous subsidies for those who could not afford it. That Governor was Mitt Romney, the current Republican candidate for the presidency. He now vehemently opposes all these things.

All politicians renege on campaigning promises made in the heat of the campaign. But Mitt Romney really is the Olympic Flip Flop Man. In an effort to win the hard-core conservative voters of America, he has appeared to do whatever his PR people tell him to do, willing to say or do anything to get elected. On the one hand, he promises to cut American’s income taxes by 20 per cent, while bringing down the country’s $1.2 trillion dollar budget deficit. According to the Daily Telegraph (not exactly a staunch Obama supporter) “Romney’s recent economic plan had a $360 billion black hole that must be filled by tax increases on middle income Americans…the same middle income Americans that he says he staunchly defends.“ Even the conservative Wall Street Journal said that Romney’s nomination speech was “a ‘policy-free zone’ that left Mr. Obama a blank canvas on which to caricature Republican proposals as mean spirited and destructive.”

If his economic policies are vague, his ventures into foreign policy have been nothing short of disastrous. His disparaging remarks about the UK’s preparations for the Olympics managed to insult an entire nation, and perhaps more seriously, his insinuation that Palestinians are somehow genetically less developed than Israelis was unbelievable. When Romney’s press attaché told the international press corps to “Kiss my ass!” one wonders what sort of foreign policy advisors he surrounds himself with.

And then there’s the question of Romney’s tax affairs. He has waffled and prevaricated about revealing his vast wealth, overseas bank accounts and his tax records for the last ten years. What is he hiding? His running mate, Paul Ryan, doesn’t seem to be much better at telling the truth. He accused Obama of failing to honour a campaign pledge to keep a Wisconsin car-making factory open. In fact, Obama had made no such promise and the factory closed a month before Obama took office. On a less serious note, Congressman Ryan recently told the press that in 1990 he had run a marathon in under three hours. When questioned by running enthusiasts about this impressive time, his aides were forced to admit that Ryan had really run it in just over four hours. Perhaps in the great scheme of politics, a man’s marathon time doesn’t really count for much. But telling the truth does.

If even the right wing press can’t get behind Romney with any enthusiasm, why is it now such a close race, with only a few percentage points difference between the two candidates on any given day? I suspect that with the US economy still in the doldrums, many Americans want to blame someone, anyone for their problems. The fact that Obama’s seemingly liberal solutions to American’s economic woes have him branded as a socialist would be laughable, if it wasn’t so depressing. I also suspect that the nasty ogre of racism is not that far from the surface, and if some people can’t express their racist rants, then they can – and have — called him the next worse thing, a communist.

There’s no denying that the Obama glow has faded since his historical election victory in 2008 and the truth is he hasn’t been true to all his promises. But his achievements have been remarkable in spite of Republican intransigence:  he has definitely averted a second Great Depression; revived a dying auto industry; and passed a health care package that every president since Teddy Roosevelt – including hard core Republicans like Nixon and Reagan — has tried to implement.  Early in his presidency, he reached out to Republicans to get his policies through, but for four long years he has been frustrated by unreasoning Republicans who would rather see Obama fail than do what is best for the nation. Ironically, Obama based his health care package on Governor Romney’s health care plans for Massachusetts.

Although Obama’s oratory doesn’t seem to have the fizz and exhilaration of four years ago, he’s still light years ahead of the wooden read-from-the-notes Romney. And he’s at least honest enough to recognise his own shortcomings. “I am far more mindful of my own failings,” he said at the recent Democratic convention, “knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said: ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go’”.

Can Obama win against the Flip Flop Man when it seems that nearly 50 per cent of the American voting public want to crucify him for the economic mess created by the Bush family? It will surely be a tight race, but I am confident that the American public will wake up to the winner-take-all society of Mitt Romney and vote, in the words of Bill Clinton, for Obama’s vision of “shared prosperity and shared responsibility.”

But more importantly, Obama will prevail because he has a secret weapon. “Presidential elections,” said the Daily Telegraph, “are said to be won by the candidate with whom voters would most like to have a beer. On that front Barrack Obama has a key advantage: he brews his own. He uses a special blend of hops, malts and yeasts, with honey from Michelle Obama’s beehive on the White House South Lawn. “An eloquent, honest, far-from-perfect President who brews his own beer. How can anyone NOT raise a pint of real, honey-sweet ale to the once and future President of the United States of America, Barack Obama.

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Posted 11:58 Wednesday, Oct 31, 2012 In: Campaigns

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