Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
April 5th, 2012 | 
Author: Story By: by Frank James
Incumbent presidents generally try to cast their re-election contest as a choice between the imperfect but well-meaning and effective occupant of the White House and the far worse alternative offered by the rival party.
Challengers, on the other hand, try to frame a presidential race as a referendum on the sitting president whose record nearly always contains missteps, or who can be blamed for trouble in the economy or elsewhere.
In short, whether it’s the president or the challenger, the way the game is played requires each to define the opposition as well as himself.
And in speeches both President Obama and the likely Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, gave Tuesday, a day that may have been a pivotal day in the 2012 election, both men were hard at work trying to define the other as in one way or another disconnected from the reality of ordinary Americans and from the arc of U.S. history.
Tuesday was probably pivotal because, with Romney’s wins in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C. primaries, the contest for the GOP presidential nomination really appears to be settled and the general-election campaign begun, according to many analysts.
For his part Obama, in his Tuesday speech to news executives, painted Romney as being in the thrall of the discredited economic notion of trickle-down economics as well as a radical House Republican budget that would eviscerate domestic spending programs that help the middle class in order to give the superwealthy more tax breaks. (Romney spoke to the same news executives’ group Wednesday.)
Obama also tried to reinforce the idea that Romney is a very wealthy man lacking the common touch by jabbing the former Massachusetts governor for using the word “marvelous” to describe the House Republican budget. “It’s a word you don’t often hear generally,” Obama said.
Meanwhile Romney, in the victory speech that followed his sweep of the Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C. primaries, portrayed the president as believing that government knows best.
Romney even went back to the president’s days as a community organizer to try and buttress his charge against the president:
“When he was a community organizer and communities were hurt by plant closings, his reaction was to turn to the government for help. He saw free enterprise as the villain and government as the solution.”
Romney accused the president of being disconnected from reality because of the bubble that surrounds a president, of “flying around on Air Force One, surrounded by an adoring staff of true believers” which has left the president “out of touch.”
While both men worked to define the way they hoped those voters who are in play would see the other party’s presidential nominee, they also worked on defining themselves.
In an argument the president has made repeatedly in the past and will make continuously into the future it is he, not his Republican rivals, whose governing philosophy embodies the type of American values that have created the nation that became an economic and military superpower. Worth noting is that he, too, raised his experience as a community organizer though to make a point that was exactly opposite of Romney’s attack:
“Keep in mind, I have never been somebody who believes that government can or should try to solve every problem. Some of you know my first job in Chicago was working with a group of Catholic churches that often did more good for the people in their communities than any government program could. In those same communities I saw that no education policy, however well crafted, can take the place of a parent’s love and attention.
“As President, I’ve eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t working, and announced over 500 regulatory reforms that will save businesses and taxpayers billions, and put annual domestic spending on a path to become the smallest share of the economy since Dwight Eisenhower held this office â since before I was born. I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington, which is why I’ve cut taxes for small business owners 17 times over the last three years.
“So I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. My mother and the grandparents who raised me instilled the values of self-reliance and personal responsibility that remain the cornerstone of the American idea. But I also share the belief of our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln â a belief that, through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”
Romney attempt at self-definition Tuesday night was as someone seeking to return America to a lost past, as a candidate more in tune than Obama with what made the U.S. the world’s indispensable nation in the 20th and early 21st centuries:
“I don’t want to transform America. I want to restore to America the economic values of freedom and opportunity and limited government that has made us the powerhouse of the world.
“It’s opportunity. It’s opportunity, not a check from government â it’s opportunity that has always driven America and defined us as Americans. Now I am not naive enough to believe that free enterprise is a solution to all of our problems. But nor am I naive enough to doubt that it is one of the greatest forces for good this world has ever known.
“Free enterprise has done more to lift people out of poverty, to help build a strong middle class, to help educate our kids, and to make our lives better than all the programs of government combined.”
In a speech to news media executives Wednesday, Romney went further in defining himself and the president than he did Tuesday evening. Romney offered himself as a successful businessman and former governor who has proven himself as a problem solver.
He described the president, by contrast, as flip flopping on one position after another, taking one stance as president, another as an incumbent seeking re-election.
And he accused Obama of having a “hide and seek campaign”, using an example Obama’s inadvertently public open-mic comments to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that after re-election, he would have more flexibility on European missile-defense negotiations.
Now that the Republican primary contest appears to be, once and for all, petering out, the race is on for the president and Romney to see whose definition of the other and himself will most fire up his base while demoralizing the other side and moving those voters who are truly persuadable into his corner.
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WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) – I have been home all day caring for my wife who has been very ill. I am also taking care of our dear grandson whom we are helping to raise. One of our daughters lives with us. She is a single Mom. She chose life and I am proud of her for doing so!
My readers know of my deep and serious concern about the upcoming Presidential campaign in the United States. I believe this is the most important Presidential campaign of my lifetime. I will not keep silent about its importance and will do everything I can to ensure that the current President is not reelected.
The American Public is now aware of the lie behind the Obama Administrations’ “Affordable Care Act”. Those who purport to be champions of Freedom now seek to compel Christians, especially Catholic Christians, to violate their deeply held religious beliefs and bend the knee to a New Caesar. They will not succeed.
This is precisely what is at stake in the unconstitutional mandate which threatens punitive measures if Catholic and other Christian organizations do not provide abortion inducing drugs, contraceptives, sterilization and referrals to abortions as “preventative” health care under their health insurance plans. The alleged “accommodation” or “compromise”, offered after the understandable outcry the mandate incurred, is a fraud.
I write to address a political golden calf; the claim that the current agenda calling itself “progressive” is progressive at all. The term implies progress toward something better. In fact, the political agenda being offered under the moniker of “progressive” is regressive. The dictionary defines “progressive” as an adjective, meaning “Moving forward; advancing.” We have lived through the use of word games too many times in the last few decades. The misuse of the word “progressive” is just one more example of what the late great C.S. Lewis, in his “Studies in Words” called “verbicide.”
C.S. Lewis warned us about allegedly “progressive” governing schemes wherein a collectivist ideology built upon moral relativism is unleashed in his book entitled “The Abolition of Man.” In it we find these insightful words, “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”
One of his Essays, found in “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics” and entitled “Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” warned, “Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny.’ All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of others. . . . The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be.”
There is a concerted effort to paint those who adhere to the Jewish and Christian vision of the human person, the family and a truly just civil society as “backward.” We are deluged with direct and indirect efforts to portray us as committed to a kind of return to some perceived “dark age”. In fact, what we offer is the path to true progress. True progress passes through authentic human freedom.
We are accused of forcing “our view” on others. While those who engage in this kind of word game, using the word “progressive” to promote a regressive cultural revolution, are actually the ones who are intolerant of any view other than their own. Let’s consider just two of many policy agenda items of the political “progressives” of our age.
Abortion on Demand
Abortion on demand is the current state of the law in the United States since the infamous decisions of Roe and Doe. Our youngest neighbors in the first home of the whole human race can be killed by surgical instruments, chemical weapons or suction, at any time, for any reason. While restrictions on the practice are being slowly enacted in the States, the current state of the federal law has not changed.
However, our medical science has advanced. We now routinely reach into the womb and offer surgery to these same children in order to help them live fuller lives after birth. Our criminal codes have advanced. We now prosecute a criminal offender who, in the course of committing another felony, takes their lives as well as their mothers.We take 4D and 3D images of them and send them to our friends. Sadly, the same technology guides the abortionist in his or her execution of those who are “unwanted”.
We all know the truth, that child in the womb is our neighbor. We also recognize the Natural Law written in every human heart which gives us the basis for our criminal codes. The real “Right” is the Right to Life. Without life there can be no other “rights” or liberty. The Right to life is the foundation of the prohibition against killing our innocent neighbor. All human persons have a right to life.
Those currently stealing the label “progressive” made …