With a dismal record of achievement and forced to accept the bitter harvest of their failed economic and foreign policies, no one should be surprised that Team Obama and the Democrats in Congress are running scared. Nor are the Democrats’ fears irrational.
With an historical supermajority in the House and the Senate, Team Obama and Democrats pushed their pet, progressive ideas with a vengeance, spending and borrowing. Yet despite full political power and despite the trillions of dollars thrown into the maw of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi vision of utopia, our nation is left with the nastiest of all financial hangovers as a result of queasy, Democrat-initiated, shameful indulgences. Of course too, the bills, some $16 trillion dollars of them, are coming due as well.
No one in America can possibly be pleased with the sorry achievement of Team Obama, perhaps the most miserable record of failed leadership in American history. And yet, Obama and his Democrat allies that are responsible for so much of the economic pain, including the jump in the misery index, are now determined to win the next election, remain in office, and presumably spoon out even more of the wealth redistribution, job killing regulatory regimes, and anti-business policies that have gotten us into this mess.
So how do Democrats plan to get elected? They certainly cannot run on their record. Even they must know their grand, economic plans to transform the American economy have failed. They know, too, that Americans, by wide margins, believe the country is on the wrong track. So what to do?
Desperate people do desperate things, and taking a harder look at some recent Team Obama actions, it seems clear that one of the primary strategies for the election is going to be voter fraud.
In the past, ACORN was the Democrats’ trump card, empowered and encouraged to recruit fraudulent voters that would return the favors by padding votes to favorite candidates. But the ACORN sham, which had been such an obvious wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat party, was exposed and is now (mostly) out of the voter fraud business.
With ACORN gone and unable to produce the loyal legions of fraudulent voters, there’s a good chance that Team Obama may “pull a Putin.” There are lots of different ways to rig an election and encourage voter fraud. Americans recently saw that in Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s party gained a “surprise” election win, despite the widespread, anti-Putin sentiment throughout Russia. Putin showed that voter fraud, intimidation, and slick electioneering schemes can be effective.
Already, Team Obama is putting voter fraud policies in effect to tilt the election. Eric Holder’s stance on the right of individual states within the U.S. to require voter identification is the most obvious example. Several court cases have already upheld the states’ right to require voter identification.
Furthermore, many studies have shown that requiring voter identification prevents voter fraud and is no more illegal than requiring identification to obtain Medicare or Medicaid or social security payments. Nevertheless, , Holder’s move—especially claiming that voter identification requirements are racist---is indicative of the panic that Democrats in power are feeling as the 2012 election looms and they search for ways to replace ACORN’s fraudulent voter numbers.
More recently, Team, Obama is speeding up the immigration process and rushing illegal aliens to citizenship, often ahead of those who have waited, patiently and legally, for years. A 2011 report exposed the problem wherein the immigration visa processors within DHS are, apparently, being pressured by senior officials within the agency to approve applications as quickly as possible, often ignoring issues relating to eligibility and security.
Many Americans have broad-based concerns about immigration, illegal and otherwise, and there is broad-based consensus that the current immigration system and our nation’s policies need reform urgently. But what the Obama Administration is doing is not the kind of reform Americans had in mind. This current urgency to relax immigration standards in advance of the upcoming election looks exactly like it is-- a craven attempt to mine for new voters to tilt the election.
These kinds of desperation moves by Obama Administration officials are especially despicable because they seek short-term, political advantages at the expense of longer-term policies that could actually benefit the nation. For example, it is an act of economic stupidity to force foreign-born science and engineering majors from our leading universities to leave the country following graduation. These are the very technology and science professionals that we need her to spur economic growth. But, Obama is mute on the need for this sort of urgent immigration reform and, instead, now spends his time and effort on relaxing standards of the immigrants that he hopes will reward him with a vote in November. How sad is that?
Obama is a desperate man, desperate to win an election, and desperate enough to take a shameful path to his goal. Obama cannot win on the merits of his policies, and even his once, most-fervent supporters recognize that Obama’s economic policies have failed. Expect Obama to find and push even more imaginative electioneering schemes as he takes the desperate path to “pull a Putin” and resorts to voter fraud.