It's becoming clear: Obama thinks American voters are stupid. Anyone believing Obama's current campaign promises is either gullible or amnesia-prone. Increasingly, his campaign speeches indicate a rather pitiful and cynical hope that Americans will not remember his earlier promises nor will they recall past decisions by the Obama Administration that have failed so spectacularly. Obama’s reelection strategy seems dependent upon an ability to fool most of the people one more time.
Obama’s most cynical campaign effort is the oft repeated mantra that some Americans are not “paying their fair share" of taxes. For example, in September 2011, Obama said he supports "a plan that asks the most fortunate among us to pay their fair share, just like everybody else."What Obama hopes voters do not remember is that the President has demonstrated a very peculiar notion of what constitutes “a fair share”? If you happen to be one of President Obama’s favored friends or businesses, such as GE CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, your fair share of the tax is zero. If you happen to be a union member, you may not be expected to pay much in taxes either. Other Obama friends and supporters seem to follow a different set of rules for paying taxes too.
In fact, Obama holds the dubious honor of having perhaps the largest percentage--ever-- of nominated and appointed officials who didn't pay their taxes. Just for starters, there's Tim Geithner, Hilda Solis, Tom Daschle, Nancy Kilefer, Kathleen Sibelius, Ronald Kirk, Gregory Craig, Rahm Emanuel -- just to name a few, who did not fully pay their taxes. Of course, these are the nominees whose issues have come to light because they chose to proceed with the nominations. There are likely a slew of others whose issues were so severe, they never made it past the vetting process.
What is painfully clear is that Obama believes that tax policy should apply differently to his friends and supporters than to the rest of the nation. So why is it surprising that Obama hopes that Americans will simply forget how shamefully he has embraced tax cheats while simultaneously berating other Americans to pony up and “pay their fair share”?
Take a look, too, at the issue of "green" everything. When elected, Obama promised a science-based policy on energy efficiency. Instead, Americans got a colossal waste of taxpayer money that has been showered on bogus green energy ideas such as Solyndra. Subsidies for ethanol have been ramped up, wasting even more taxpayer money (now up to $7 billion a year) to placate critical voters in mid Western states. Meanwhile, domestic gas and oil production, which candidate Obama admitted needed to be expanded to help reduce American dependency on foreign oil, has been tied up in a new Obama regulatory thicket. So much for science.
Consider, too, that Obama has asked Americans to avoid inflammatory language in public discourse. In May 2010, Obama said: "We can’t expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down". Yet, two weeks earlier, Obama heaped personal scorn on Congressman Paul Ryan's and flayed Ryan publicly for his budget proposal. The President would later add that Republicans and others that might offer a different view were actually “enemies” to be punished, obstructionist, and worse. Clearly, Obama hopes voters do not remember or hold him accountable for the vast difference between his words and his actions.
Sadly, the list of other such examples seems endless. Obama urged Americans to avoid jumping to conclusions in law enforcement matters, yet 4 months earlier, when the matter concerned his "bud", Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the Cambridge police force, Obama was quick to condone the inflammatory label "racist" and disparage Cambridge's Finest.
Obama said he would create 3.5 to 4 million jobs, instead, America has seen 32 consecutive months of unemployment over 8%.
Obama said it is time to get America's fiscal house in order, expecting Americans to ignore his unprecedented hypocrisy in the 34 months that he has been in office, where Obama has run up $5 trillion dollars of debt.
Obama said that the $787 billion dollar stimulus would solve our nation's unemployment problems and grow the economy. Instead, Americans have to listen as Obama plays the blame game, explaining why the stimulus didn't work and Standard & Poor downgraded the U.S.' credit rating.
Obama said Obamacare would be more inclusive, provide more coverage for more Americans, require no new taxes and would incur no increased insurance policy costs. Instead, within months of Obama signing the legislation into law, insurance companies raised the rates; it became apparent that 23 million in the country would remain without insurance coverage. Taxes were increased, and when the latest CBO report came out, even Democrats in congress have admitted that Obamacare, the CLASS Act in particular, is too expensive and the country can't afford it.
Obama promised to reduce the number of regulations, and has made a great show of reducing one or two of them. In actuality, Obama has simply re-packaged policies from the Bush Administration--such as hiring of veterans or existing policies such as the Prompt Payment Act for small businesses. At the same time, Obama is hoping that Americans won't read the reports which show, for example, that in just one month--July of 2011--Obama put in place over 300 new rules.
Americans are, for the first time in our history, facing the likelihood of a declining standard of living for future generations. Obama's presidency, to date, has been characterized by unprecedented hypocrisy, arrogance and incompetence. The question is: will Americans hold Obama accountable for his deeds rather than his rhetoric?
If, as we have been told since childhood--what you do is what matters most--then Americans will have to succumb to a colossal case of amnesia to even consider voting Obama into office for a second term.