THE DAY AFTER....Well, surprising no one, Barack Obama is our President Elect. Congratulations to him and best of luck to his administration. He will be inheriting a struggling economy, and a rising tide of Islamo-fascist terrorism in the Middle East and Europe. With 51% of the vote, he doesn’t have a mandate. But he’ll have a compliant Congress ready to do his bidding.
I’m not happy about some of the way he handled his campaign. There are clearly fund-raising and get-out-the-vote irregularities that really need to be investigated, but they won’t. I’m pretty convinced that Ohio was stolen. But other states weren’t, and McCain didn’t do what was necessary to get his message out to the voters.
Without question, Obama will be the most politically liberal man ever to occupy the White House. He will certainly allow the Bush tax cuts to lapse, which in combination with his redistribution agenda will certainly drag down the economy even further. Iraq better be ready; he will almost certainly pull troop out and if he keeps his word will cut military spending 25%. And while I don’t expect universal health care to have that much traction, expect no improvement in the health care area.
With gas prices returning to a semblance of normalcy, energy issues will be less prominent, but ‘cap and trade’ policies will hurt energy production and increase prices. And if he embraces Kyoto and other global warming protocols, we can expect unprecedented economic challenges.
Republicans put themselves in the wilderness when they acted like drunken teenagers with Dad’s sports car in the 2001-2004 Congress. They abandoned the conservative principles that swept them into office in the first place, and it cost them. The Democrats haven’t been any better, but with a compliant media they don’t have to be. Until the Republican party and it's leadership can embrace a conservative methodology and focus the voters with a solid message, we can expect them to be out there for a long time to come.
Until that time comes, how much can Obama do? As a Marxist (by his own words), quite a bit. Look at Venezuela. It was a free country when populist Hugo Chavez took power as president. Now the country is a basket case, kept alive only because it sells oil to the U.S. He shut down newspapers and TV stations. Nationalized the oil industry. Can Obama do that? We got a taste of what he is capable of doing when he sent his operatives to Missouri, and his response to the Orlando TV station when they didn’t do the usual puff piece on Joe Biden. Now there is talk of reviving the “fairness doctrine,” which will stifle free speech in the radio markets, and there may even be moves to shut down political speech on the internet (including this feeble site!). The Democrats have power again, and we’ve seen that they will do what it takes to keep it.
It’s going to get rough.
