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Jewish World Review Nov. 11, 2008 / 13 Mar-Cheshvan 5769
A contrarian post-election post-mortem
By Marty Nemko
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
With the election a foregone conclusion, a few observations: •
his having promised to limit his campaign to public financing and
then reneged.
•
the disingenuousness of his promise to lower taxes on 95% of
Americans while funding all the massive programs he promised.
•
the fact that in just weeks, he changed his proposal from raising
taxes on people with incomes of $250,000 or more, down to $200,000, and this
week, according to his vice president, $150,000. Most observers are
convinced that Obama will end up not lowering but raising taxes on
middle-income people.
1. Obama would have won without the media's help and without a
billion-dollar campaign, eight times that spent by McCain. America was
ready to tilt leftward and Obama is smart and modulated in temperament,
while McCain is an old 72, with failing intelligence and increasing
whininess.
2. McCain ran a terrible campaign, running on vague platitudes and against a
tax cut for people making $250,000+ a year.
He should have run on the virtues of lightly regulated versus heavily
regulated capitalism and more compellingly, humanly, explained the
tremendous liabilities of big government, high taxation, and excessive
redistributive "justice."
3. McCain made an unimaginably bad choice of running mate. In my view, he
would have been wisest to try to convince Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein,
or Colin Powell to join him, and to do so, he would agree to run and govern
as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, which is as conservative a
stance as America will tolerate today.
4. McCain became indistinguishable from a tax-and-spend liberal by, for
example, voting for the $700 billion bailout, advocating bailout of
mortgagees, calling for legalizing illegal immigrants, and refusing to state
what programs he would cut.
5. Obama, as a liberal, knew he could get away with lying. He knew the media
would minimize:
If McCain had been guilty of such disingenuousness (not to mention of
centrally formative relationships with extremists, most notably Reverend
Jeremiah Wright
6. The media should be ashamed of itself for its blatant bias and its
focusing on the horse race rather than deep probing of the
devils-in-the-details on the core issues of health care, balancing the
budget, the economy, illegal immigration, the environment, the Middle East,
etc.
Perhaps the media focused on the horse race, in part, because it knew that
probing on the issues would force Obama to reveal unpopular leftist
positions that could jeopardize his election, and the media would not risk
that.
The media used to serve the key role of investigator and reporter, whereever
the chips fell. In this election, consistent with its ever more liberal
bias, the media was just a huge wing of the Obama campaign--and with the
billion dollars Obama raised, he hardly needed help.
7. Our election system cries out for reinvention. My proposal:
three-week-long, 100% publically funded elections consistingly primary of
debates and a widely distributed summary of the candidates' voting record
and positions on key issues.
8. The Obama jubilation will continue long past the election celebrations. I
am convinced he will indeed make major changes to this country, armed with a
liberal congress and an unprecedentedly liberal media. And short-term, the
non-rich will feel encouraged. Indeed fiscal and other resources will be
redistributed to them.
The problem is that those changes (a few of which I mention in my previous
post) are likely to be, like cocaine, just short-term feel-goods. It takes a
decade or longer for the long-enduring ill-effects of major redistribution
and big government to be felt.
I believe they will be felt and that America will be a more impoverished
nation a decade from now and for decades to come, but I suspect that the
media will never blame Obama or the liberals for it. They'll simply call for
more tax money for more government programs and more redistribution.
Of course, I could be wrong about the preceding--Too many factors affect the
U.S. economy to , with confidence, predict how well it will do a decade or
two from now.
9. While I'm scared of what that perfect storm of liberality (Obama, liberal
congress, and liberal media) will do to America, I admit that, from an
intellectual curiosity point of view, it will be interesting to watch.
10. Of course, I want President-Elect Obama to prove me wrong and create a
better America and world. I wish him all the best.