Has there been a presidential election since World War II in which the country looked more divided against itself than in 2012? The division has been percolating since the morning after our first minority president won the office. The consensus that has been working among Republican playmakers from that day forward has been the blind opposition that would allow unrequited bigotry to limit the black commander in chief to one term. They’re still counting on it. Historians have made too little so far of President Obama’s meeting with House Republicans in his first month in office. They met with him at his request, but had taken in advance a unanimous decision against supporting anything he proposed. In the Senate, the Southern leader of the Republican minority, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, was wed to the same game. His sole aim has never varied: limiting President Obama to one term. Are there newscasters who actually fail to see the racism that laces the arrogant minds behind such opposition?
It plays on into the fact-starved campaign that Governor Romney and Representative Ryan are waging for the presidency. The bigotry is still there. They bury their discomfit with race under verbal barrages about moochers and freeloaders, about Makers and Takers. They make every effort to associate Democrats with class warfare, yet nowhere is it waged more clearly, more divisively than in the word game of Makers and Takers.
Voters can be thankful that Romney has defined himself and his political purpose so precisely in his view of workers not earning enough to pay federal income taxes essentially as people who see themselves as “victims,” a mindset of dependency that only government handouts will satisfy. He consigns 47 percent of the voters to this caste of “entitlement.” Its a caste that of course enfolds seniors on Social Security. By what twist of mind does he think he can be elected with no votes at all from a bloc as large as 47 percent? e says, “These people need to take responsibility for themselves.” How could a man whose eaten every meal in his life with a platinum spoon possibly know how the people without a platinum spoon view themselves?
Plainly he wants the fame and glory of caring most for the 53-percent who can take care of themselves, thank you very much. What can the world expect in leadership from a president and party that see their own people split 53/47? Where’s the show of unity that has always given the United States a firm hand in foreign affairs? What we have now is a ticket of Romney and Ryan that shoots from the hip in second-guessing the president on almost any move he makes to fight global terrorism. It’s a colossal irony that our president’s color opens doors abroad that no predecessor ever could, yet its effect at home has drawn bigots to the sole aim of denying him a second term – the national interest and the greater good be damned!
Can any voter forget the fiascos that the last Republican presidency left us? By any measure of cost, Bush-Cheney was most destructive presidency of our history. With a war we didn’t want, and one we can’t end, they left us with the largest national debt in the history of the world, with homeownership sinking in debt that exceeded its worth, with Wall Street and the banks at the brink of collapse, with GM and Chrysler about to close shop and terminate tens of thousands of their workers, and Ford’s nose barely above water. They had taken office on a Clinton legacy of successive budget surpluses, which they buried with tax cuts that no one had asked for. They were recycling the Reagan economics of “trickle down,” which had proven to be the antithesis of democracy. Democracy grows from the ground up, never from the top down.
What they had given us made us the home of what has become popularly known as the Vulture Culture.
Governor Romney’s refusal to show the voters his tax returns for this century tell us rather clearly that he made his substantial fortune flying with the Vultures. On the scant details that he’s supplied for his tax and economic policy, do we have reason to expect anything from him but more of the same? He’s been more than clear, however, it putting his care on the side of the favored 53 Percent. That tells us a lot in fact about where his domestic policy would point. Ryan and the infamous Ryan Budget are even more pointed. On domestic needs and entitlements, we can count on them for a 53-percent presidency. Romney has in fact said he doesn’t have to worry about the 47 Percent.
Where then are they pointed in national security and foreign affairs? So far, Romney has done a lot of sabre-rattling, little explaining. Shoot first, explain later, if you can. Has he forgotten the smarts of the first President Roosevelt: speak softly, carry a big stick?
In completing the Constitution, WethePeople could not have cast the presidency more plainly: the incumbent would serve all the people, in administering the law and government, with no responsibility greater than the 24/7 duty of Commander in Chief. History has in no way altered the office but in fact has toughened it through the incumbents’ living up to it. More than one president has taken the country to war without the constitutionally required sanction of Congress, claiming that his duty outweighed the obvious contradiction that would keep his hands tied by Congress when national security was threatened. He alone could act quickly for WethePeople when the threat was immediate.
On that premise, President George W. Bush met the 9/ll massacre of New York’s Twin Towers with the immediate invasion of Afghanistan, which has evolved into the longest war of our history and the costliest in coin. He then shunned both Congress and the Constitution by invading Iraq, on the pretext that its murderous dictator and its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction threatened the world. The arsenal didn’t exist.
How does a 53-percent president play commander in chief when nearly all his forces come from that 47 Percent that he puts down as second-class Americans at best?
Since the forces are on the federal payroll, they must be moochers and free-loaders in Romney’s book. He can’t have it both ways. Or, can he? November will tell. Should he win, would we be getting another Teddy or another George W? The second possibility leaves me sleepless.
Frank Mensel – September 2012