Candidate Barack Obama famously said when running for the Presidency nearly four years ago “There is not a black America and white America, and Latino America and Asian America: there’s the United States of America.” Those were certainly encouraging words. But it turns out, that’s all they were. Just words, rhetoric.
What he’s actually doing is running perhaps the most divisive Presidential campaign in American history – attempting to pit one group of Americans against another.
The Obama Administration, for example, lashes out at Republicans for allegedly attempting to disenfranchise African Americans and Hispanics just because Republicans favor voter photo ID laws. In reality, Republicans just want to make sure that every person who votes only votes one time, and that those who vote are actually citizens of this country. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. (We’ve required photo IDs in Ohio for years now and there’s no indication that anyone’s being disenfranchised. And if it works here, why can’t it work just as well in North Carolina and Texas – states Obama’s Justice Department is currently fighting similar efforts.)
Another ludicrous charge by the Obama campaign is that Republicans are somehow engaged in a “war on women.” Supposed proof of this is that most Republicans oppose Obamacare bureaucrats requiring Catholic hospitals to provide abortion-inducing drugs and sterilizations even though such practices violate strongly held tenets of the Catholic faith.
The Obama campaign is also trying to convince young people, especially college students, that Republicans are out to get them by allegedly wanting them to pay higher student loan interest rates. The truth is, Republicans in the House just passed a bill to keep the interest rates on student loans down at their current 3.4% level, but which actually pays for it by cutting funds from an Obamacare slush fund, rather than just adding the extra cost to the national debt, or raising taxes as Democrats (including Obama) want to do.
And finally, seniors. Two key programs that are important to most senior citizens in America, Social Security and Medicare, are under severe financial strain. Rather than work with Republicans to find a solution to the impending bankruptcy of both programs, Obama has cynically chosen to frighten seniors and bludgeon his political opponents with overcharged rhetoric and hysteria. He tacitly approved of over-the-top TV ads showing a Paul Ryan look-alike pushing poor granny in a wheelchair over a cliff. Subtle.
The hope and change Obama who famously said “there are no red states or blue states, just the United States” is clearly no longer with us. He’s been replaced by the Great Divider Obama who is cynically practicing the politics of envy and division. Fortunately, I don’t believe it will work. The American people have had enough.
