When campaigning for the presidency in 2007 and 2008, candidate Barack Obama drove the most uplifting and inspiring message of any candidate in the history of politics. His landmark victory, at the time, seemed to promise a new age in American politics, one without so much partisan squabbling. One marked by a willingness to work together for the common good. The man appeared to be a transcendent and pragmatic post-partisan leader.
We then found out the sad truth about President Obama, he's just like everybody else running things in our nation's capital: cynically calculating and tragically detached from the rest of the country.
This political ethos has been on display time and time again throughout his presidency. During the campaign season last time around, he chose to opt out of the public financing system once he realized he could raise more money than Senator John McCain.
Early on in his presidency, he lost all of his centrist appeal and political capital when he pushed through an unpopular government takeover of health insurance and an $800 billion economic stimulus package. He then gave the post-partisan crowd another reason to distrust him when he rejected the common sense solutions laid out by the Simpson-Bowles fiscal reform commission he had formed.
Most recently, we've seen it on display in his decision to reject 20,000 American jobs and increased energy independence by rejecting the Keystone Pipeline in order to appease the environmentalists, an important part of his base for reelection. He's asked private Catholic institutions "not to be Catholic" by forcing them to provide contraceptives as a part of their health insurance coverage for employees — an act of ridiculous "one size fits all" liberal overreach.
And finally, not only does he have the audacity to hope, but he also had the audacity to challenge the Supreme Court to their faces in his 2010 State of the Union on their ruling in the Citizens United campaign finance reform case, but then decided last week to support a SuperPAC bankrolling his own reelection. The same SuperPACs, which, in his own words, "open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign companies — to spend without limit in our elections . . . I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests."
The president doesn't have a politically courageous bone in his body, if he did he would have advocated for a real balanced approach to deficit reduction (Simpson-Bowles), not just given lip service to the idea of one. He also would stop saying he wants fundamental tax reform, and then proposing more deductions that complicate our tax code further in the next sentence.
To be clear, none of these moves are wholly egregious for a politician, in fact almost all but the contraceptive decision have basically been politically smart decisions for a Democratic president trying, above all else, to please the left; but President Obama claimed to be a different kind of politician. He told us he was audacious and a majority of Americans believed him.
Simpson-Bowles and the SuperPAC issue specifically were opportunities for the president, opportunities for him to live up to his rhetoric from four years ago. Rhetoric like what he said to his supporters after Super Tuesday four year ago, "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
While President Obama certainly has some notable accomplishments, he has refused to do anything on the domestic policy side that does anything but pander to his liberal base.
America was duped once into believing in the uplifting post partisan change rhetoric. This time Americans should remember, a vote for Obama is a vote for a conventional liberal politician, nothing more and nothing less. The one thing it certainly is not is a vote for a politically courageous post-partisan change agent. The candidate of change is no more than the president of business as usual, and it really is a shame.
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