(Fred Weinberg/The Penny Press) – Class warfare works.
Or, as Bill O’Reilly said during the Fox News election pre-game show, “50% of America wants ‘stuff’ and Barack Obama will give them ‘stuff’”.
Republicans and conservatives didn’t factor in the resentment towards the big banks which the “folks”, as O’Reilly calls them, have.
In retrospect, it’s understandable.
The financial system has always been rigged against the little guy. And, by the way, it’s not like Barack Obama and his ilk aren’t whores for Wall Street as well. They just articulated their indignation better.
The truth is that banks like Goldman Sachs have always found ways to make money from little guys. The trick has always been, in the past, to not rub their noses in it.
The minute the government bailed out American Insurance Group (AIG) and, by extension, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and their buddies, everybody who lost their house, or knows somebody who did or lost their job, decided they, too, were entitled to the same kind of welfare.
So, Mitt Romney was right.
By default, he had lost the 47% of the country who pay no taxes.
That’s a hard start to overcome, no matter how decent a guy you are and no matter how much sense you make as a businessman.
So, where are we now?
We have a President who is just as incompetent today as he was last week. I still don’t believe he is some kind of an evil genius who would enslave us. But his incompetence will severely limit the progress this nation can make.
The social agenda he would like to see will fail under its own weight.
A $16-trillion debt will stop a whole lot of new spending all by itself.
And, just for good measure, nothing much is going to happen from a legislative front because the American voters wisely left a Republican House of Representatives intact thus insuring at least two years of gridlock.
Unless Obama decides he really wants to work with the Republican House and our idiot water boy Harry Reid does the same, nothing good is going to come out of Washington for at least two years and probably four.
Since Reid said that he, himself, would make sure that a President Romney could not work with Senate Democrats we cannot imagine that he will work with the Republican House.
So, your taxes will rise, the defense budget will be drastically cut and inflation will run rampant because these clowns are too incompetent to do anything else.
The only way out is for Obama to show something he has only talked about in four year—leadership.
In order to do so, he would have to look his constituencies in the eye and say that nobody—especially the big banks—are getting “stuff”. And that also includes unions, individuals, anybody. Because we simply cannot afford it.
Also, Obama has to do something about what is going to be a bigger and bigger issue as time goes on—energy independence.
He needs to tell the folks who would like to see us not drive cars that their vision is insane and that we are going to drill and build pipelines. $3.50 a gallon gas is a tax on everyone who wants “stuff” from the government. The best “stuff” Obama could deliver would be energy independence from the Arab Middle East.
If he chooses to continue in a second term the way he conducted his first, than his victory will be a pyrrhic one.
Mitt Romney fought a good fight. He lost. He would make a good Secretary of the Treasury or Secretary of Commerce. That would probably never happen, but given Obama’s current level of incompetence, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to consider.
