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Your Midterm Mandate Is Clear, Republicans: Stop Obama

If Republicans win next week, they will carry a mandate from the people to stop Barack Obama's drive to re-shape America into his radical image.

by
Bryan Preston

Bio

October 28, 2010 - 12:12 am
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Obama has made good on that idea, not in taking over the oil companies (yet, though he did hurt them by using the Gulf oil spill to halt offshore drilling), but in taking over two-thirds of the U.S. auto industry, capturing the banking industry and the student loan industry, and via cap and trade and his EPA’s effort to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, working to exert government control over U.S. free enterprise as a whole. And he is working toward this policy in spite of the fact that it’s a proven failure in Europe.  In the teeth of rising unemployment, Obama and the Democrats did nothing to help the American company or worker. Instead, they chose to spend money we don’t have on payoffs to their political allies.

Dividing to conquer. Candidate Obama ran as a post-racial, post-partisan unifier. He has governed as an intentional divider, using extreme and even violent rhetoric to keep Americans from uniting against him and his agenda. Consider that just in the past couple of weeks, President Obama has told Republicans that even if the American people vote as a majority to empower them in Congress and statehouses across America, they will be forced to “sit in the back.” That’s a dog whistle line intended to invoke Rosa Parks and the civil rights struggle, only Obama is saying to Republicans that he will force them into the role against which Parks rightly rebelled. He is signaling his intent to stick to his far left policies rather than taking a more Clintonian tack toward the political center. He’s telling the same thing to the majorities who will be electing those Republicans, too, if that’s what happens next week: You, the American people, will sit in the back. “Shut up,” he explained. This is the rhetoric of racial revenge.  What will be its lasting impact?  Division, which Obama hopes he and his party can exploit into the future.

This president has also called on Hispanic voters to “punish their enemies” by, of course, voting against Republicans who he claims are standing in the way of “comprehensive immigration reform.” That “reform” has been repeatedly rejected by the majority of the American people, but that’s of no concern to Obama. His is a condescending call for Hispanics to vote exclusively based on their race and their perceptions of white Republican voters — perceptions created by decades of Democratic demagoguery and enhanced by Obama himself. And it’s telling that Obama will use the word “enemy” to describe fellow Americans, but won’t use that word to describe the Islamists who are waging war against us.

This president has chided the American people who stand against him for being “scared” and therefore not “thinking clearly.”  Speaker Nancy Pelosi has offered her own version of this insult, arguing that the Democrats simply aren’t getting enough credit for what they’ve done.

Looking broadly at all of these comments, it’s clear that Obama is leading a campaign intended to stir up animosity among Americans. He intends to destroy what’s left of our unity.

The representative republic. You cannot fundamentally transform something without engaging in acts of destruction first.  Obama has engaged in those acts of destruction.

Since coming to power, Obama has been extraordinarily deferential to the big labor unions. There are two reasons for this. One, the unions are the Democrats’ most reliable source for major campaign donations. And two, he’s philosophically on their side.  But what do the unions want that he also wants?

Simply put, they share a desire for power. The unions, which for decades served the vital purpose of keeping the power of the big corporations over the common man in check, have long outlived that role and have themselves become the power they once fought against. They have pushed American industry and education to the point of stagnation. They have pushed pension programs for corporations and states to the brink of bankruptcy. Yet they still want more. So Obama has delivered them control of the auto industry. He has promised them “card check,” a scheme that would allow whole industries to become unionized whether workers want that or not. That is a fundamentally un-democratic position to take, but it’s a sop to his union allies that would transform American industry. He and the left, including of course the unions, have pushed thriving companies like Wal-Mart to unionize against their will. Tellingly, they have left more Democrat-friendly companies headquartered in blue states alone, for now.

He tried to empower ACORN, the far left community organizing entity for which he was one an attorney and trainer, by granting them a role in the U.S. census. They would almost certainly have used that role to corrupt the census, which among other things is the basis for apportioning our electoral maps, which govern how we elect our representatives. He was only stopped in that gambit by an outcry from the American people — and in the discrediting of ACORN itself. But ACORN didn’t dissolve; it’s still alive or merely morphed into other entities that carry on its electoral corruption:

Disturbingly, Project Vote, ACORN’s scandal-plagued voter registration and mobilization division, remains open for business. Project Vote has been part of the ACORN family since at least 1992 when Barack Obama ran a successful voter drive in Illinois.

Although legally separate entities, in practice the two are the same, as the congressional testimony of former ACORN/Project Vote employee Anita MonCrief can attest. They share office space, employees, and budgets. Project Vote continues to operate out of ACORN’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

Even worse, its voter drive is being run by Amy Busefink, an ACORN employee under indictment in Nevada for violating election laws. It might be understandable for an employer not to fire an employee until she is actually convicted of a crime, but this is ridiculous. Busefink should not be running a voter drive.

Consider for a moment if a Republican had ties to such a corrupt organization, as Obama does to ACORN, how the media would handle it. He has corrupted an already biased media.

Obama and the Democrats used midnight and holiday weekend votes to move their health care takeover bill through Congress along party line votes. They had virtually locked Republicans out of the bill’s crafting, using their raw power to strong arm the entire process. When it was clear that the American people opposed that bill, Obama led the way in passing it anyway, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus smeared Tea Partiers to ramp up the national animosity. The bill came with a gunpoint mandate to buy health insurance or face the government. It turns citizens into subjects. That’s “fundamental transformation.”

And consider his handling of border security and Arizona. That state has suffered greatly from drug war violence in Mexico getting across the border, along with the persistent effects of human trafficking, and the constant stream of migrants walking across the border and camping out on American landowners’ property along the way. Arizona passes a law in an attempt to enhance their own security, and Obama denounces them, and has his Department of Justice sue them — even though a heavy majority of Arizonans and Americans generally support Arizona’s law. In his “enemies” rhetoric, noted above, he has declared the 70% of Americans who support that law to be the enemies of Hispanics, and by putting himself on their side, enemies of the president of the United States and his administration as well.

Taken together, President Obama is intentionally acting against the majority of what the American voters want across a range of issues. He is telling the American people that no matter what they tell him in in the midterm vote or in his job approval polls, he will continue to act against their wishes. This repeated and intentional acting against the voters’ wishes, while casting them as unthinking racists and enemies of minorities, corrupts the republic itself.

The good news in the election trajectory is that it’s clear that a majority of the American people are rising up to stop him before he completes it. This will result in Republican wins, and a mission for the new majority.

Republicans, you have a mission once you retake the House and maybe the Senate.  This is not one of those “should you choose to accept it” kind of missions.  The people expect you to accept it, and you will face their wrath very soon if you don’t.  That mission is simple: Stop Obama from fulfilling his mission of “fundamentally transforming” America.

That means repealing ObamaCare and restoring the free market, en route to real free market reform. That means stopping cap and trade in its tracks. That means reining in federal spending, restoring the state-federal balance of power, and stopping this divisive president at every turn. It means not sitting in back, as he demands, or moving his way at all, but leading in restoring free enterprise and the government’s rightful place in relation to its bosses, the citizens. If you don’t lead, Obama will try to regain his footing by dividing you and the country, again. He’s already telegraphing that he will “fight the Republicans day and night” after the midterms.  Dividing the country and behaving as an ideologue are things he knows how to do.

Squishy Republicans like Lindsay Graham will try to move the GOP toward the president. That would be a mistake, both from a policy point of view and a tactical point of view. Voters aren’t sending Republicans to Washington to work with President Obama, but to stop him.  And they’re not doing that out of spite, but because Obama’s policy ideas are proven disasters for the country.

So there’s your mandate, Republican Congress.  You’re talking the right game now.  Make sure you follow through once you’re actually in power.

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Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.
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