So long “hope and change”; hello “forward.” Huh? That’s exactly my reaction. President Obama and his team of strategists have released their 2012 campaign slogan. We long ago answered Gov. Palin’s question, “how’s that hopey-changy thing working out for you?” with a resounding groan. It’s been all change for sure, but mostly for the worse; and as for hope, well about two-thirds of the population believes the country’s heading in the wrong direction. Little surprise that the Obama team has itself given up on hope and change.
In its place we are to get the single word, “forward.” One word is better than two it seems, but this one doesn’t have much attitude to it. Nothing but a simple statement, if it’s not in fact another command. Giving Obama’s penchant for lecturing the people, my guess it’s the latter. The great commander in chief is going to command things to move forward. I seem to remember that he was going to command the seas to rise and the earth to heal itself or something like that. I’m not sure he ever achieved either. But that’s old style, first campaign. Now he is more grandiosely going to move everything forward — mountains, people, the economy, time itself, who knows. It’s necessarily vague. Welcome to the new style, second campaign.
It’s vague, it’s grandiose, it’s future. Anything to take our minds off where these past four years have got us. And before the liberal, progressive, contortionist punditry chimes in, let’s just allow for the sake of argument that every problem known to the human race was the fault of George W. Bush. Let’s just accept that no president has ever in the history of our country had more problems to deal with than poor ole President Obama. Let’s examine how “hope and change” made it happen for us.
Four trillion dollars in debt when he started; $12 trillion and still growing in debt today. When counting all those who have given up looking for a job, the unemployment rate is substantially higher today than when he took office. The economy is still sputtering along like a 1975 Pinto wagon. Oh wait, that may be a bad analogy, I almost forgot our taxpayer dollars funded the “Cash for Clunkers” program at a cost of billions, so there aren’t likely to be any Pintos still on the road. We have also seen passed the largest government boondoggle ever with Obamacare, which the majority of the public doesn’t like and will cost trillions more than estimated. Obama’s Democratic-controlled Senate has not deigned to pass a federal budget in three years. You see there really has been a lot of “change”; only none of it seems for the better.
So what about “hope”? Well you can hope, if you still have a job, that Obama won’t raise your taxes to pay for everyone who doesn’t. You can hope that even though your child who recently graduated from college is unlikely to find a job, four more years of Obama will likely see the federal government pay off their student loans. You can only hope to hang on to the place you live despite higher taxes and the risk of unemployment, but you can be absolutely certain that the desert tortoise and the fishy in the pond will be just fine. You can hope that all those bad foreign leaders will come out to play but watch out if North Korea and Iran want to play with their new toys.
So now “forward” it is. If you’re tempted to buy into that slogan, please remember Ronald Reagan’s better slogan from the 1980 campaign: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” No, most people are rather worse off. Yes, I know President George W. is to blame for everything that’s ever gone wrong, but even he could not make things this bad. And if these past four years of Obama have done nothing to improve the situation, fast “forward” another four years and think where we might be.
Jon Edney is a former El Centro city councilman.
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