Loose Leaf Notes

My favorite post-election column title is one by authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson: Giving the Keys Back to the Folks Who Crashed the Car. But it’s not just our country’s economy that’s been derailed, got back on the track, and is now set to be pushed off before gaining any momentum. Slow progress made on environmental protections under the Obama administration is sure to be sidelined with Republicans soon to be in charge of Congress. The majority of Republicans don’t even believe the science behind climate change, and Sarah Palin has stated that she wants to dismantle the EPA, leaving American families unprotected from corporate polluters who would be expected to oversee themselves.

One of the strangest examples of doublespeak hype that Republicans engaged in during the campaign was framing their own obstructionism on making tax cuts permanent for 98% of Americans, because they didn’t include the wealthiest 2%, as Democrats raising taxes. Repealing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans could provide revenue for paying down the deficit that has been so relentlessly complained about and blamed on Obama even though it was created under Bush, who began his presidency with a budget surplus.

The bank bailouts are also said to have fueled voter anger that resulted in ousting many incumbents. Not many Americans liked those, but sadly, reports say that forty-seven percent of the country incorrectly thinks that the bank bailout (TARP) was passed by Obama, when in reality it was Bush who passed it.

“Obama Care” or “a government take-over of the health care system” was another fear tactic mantra that Republicans drilled into disillusioned voters as a reason to oust Democrats, even though half the country supports the new health care reform and many of those thought it didn’t go far enough. Republicans against it can’t be upset that it could end the monopoly of the health care business, which without reform can raise prices and terminate coverage whenever they want, or reject insurers for pre-existing conditions. Their aversion to it must be because they don’t like the government imposing mandatory health care insurance on citizens. Maybe they want to do away with mandatory automobile insurance too and end up paying for all those uninsured accident victims like we already pay for the uninsured that use hospital emergency rooms for health care.

A “failed stimulus package” was also part of the Republican campaign rhetoric that cost Democrats seats.  But, according to news reports, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that “the second quarter 2010 GDP is 1.7 to 4.5 percent higher than it would have been without the stimulus; and the unemployment rate in 2010 would have been 0.7 to 1.8 percentage points higher than it is. The report also found that payroll employment is greater than it would have been without the stimulus.” Writer Bernard Henri Levy recently wrote,“Barack Obama has sometimes “disappointed,” but he has not “failed.” And only those who confuse politics and magic, regretting that he did not transform his country and the world in the wink of an eye, can speak of “failure.”

After a two year welcomed reprise from the Bush administration – which dragged us into a costly elective war started on a phony premise, brought us Guantanamo and torture at Abu Ghraib, and presided over the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression – the result of this week’s election was like bringing me back to the scene of an accident, giving me a sinking feeling in my stomach. Not only does it feel like we’re giving the keys back to the people who crashed the car, we now have to deal with the added fear that they’ll drive us down a dead end road, one that we’ve been down before.  ~ Colleen Redman

Note: Personally, while I appreciate Obama’s statesmanship, I think a “No More Mr. Nice Guy” approach is overdue.   HERE is an article titled “Obama Can Pursue Ambitious Agenda Without Congress’s Help” that is worth a read.   The above commentary was published in The Roanoke Times HERE.