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Evan Bayh, retiring Senator from Indiana and the only Democrat who recognized over a year ago that Obama was straying far off course and the Democrats were in danger of suffering a tremendous defeat, t5ied to warn the president and fellow Democrats of the potential peril.
This soft spoken Hoosier politician was ignored by the Chicago gang in the White House and by the Democratic leadership in the House, Senate and DNC. As a result the Democrats suffered a historic defeat. But it is not too late to recogize their mistake and embrace moderte voices like Bayh.
For well over a year I have been urging the president to consider appointing Senator Bayh as his chief of staff. Bayh is one of few Democrats to have the respect of Republicans while being a supporter ofPresident Obama. He has always worked on a non-partisan basis on legislation, something few in DC know.
He is still young, dynamic and at ease with the media. His tone is conciliatory and he never loses his cool. The post-Emanuel White House staff failed to protect the president from suffering a humiliating defeat because of their lack of experience, lack of knowledge of national politics and bitter partisanship. They just did not know how to get things done in our nation's capitol. In short, he would be the perfect pick to create the bi-partisan forum Obama and his gang have failed to achieve and that the people demand.
Now if Obama does not want Bayh, then it will be business as usual for the White House and then I would urge Democrats to draft Bayh for president in 2012 because it will be the only way the Democrats will keep control of the presidency. Obama needs to break out of his palace guard and listen to the people while working with his "enemy" as he calls it, the GOP majority in the House and governor's offices. Without them there will be no Obama agenda.
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Our young and inexperienced president has continued to dominate the television entertainment, talk, comedy and sports shows since he took office where he is in control of the agenda and can get an occasional laugh. In fact, no other president in history has come close to the number of appearances Obama has made on Oprah, the View, Jon Stewart, Letterman, Leno an on and on.
At the same time our kind of telegenic president, who now allows comedians to call him "Dude", has only held two real news conferences the past year. Even George Bush made himself available to the news media far, far more than Obama. Why are the Obama people so dedicated to protecting him from news questions while making it seem as if he is always available?
I suppose if my domestic legislative accomplishments could not be understood, like health care, financial reform and the stimulus, and my foreign accomplishments did not exist, like failures to stop Iran, North Korea, Israel, Afghanistan, Russia or China from doing things we don't like I might not want to face the music either.
As the economy stumbles along, unemployment remains far higher than we were promised when we gave Obama his trillion dollar stimulus, health care costs continue to spiral up, wars get worse and relations keep deteriorating, it is probably better that Obama be kept far away from the news media on the comedy and entertainment shows.
Heaven forbid if the news media, what used to be the watchdogs of the public, ever got to know the truth about what Obama is doing.
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After watching the evolution of the Tea Party over the past two years I often wonder if the Main street and Lame Street media who cover the Tea Party have listened to a word said by Tea Party participants. Since we know they condemned the Tea Party back in the beginning as dangerous radical fringe, and we know some in the media like Nora O'Donnell of NBC have been bitterly jealous or hateful of Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin. Just yesterday O'Donnell said she was sick of hearing how Palin is "attractive and appealing".
So our first exposure to the Tea Party was the health care town hall fiascos of the Democrats when Nancy Pelosi said her congressmen were physically threatened by these radicals and her pit bull Steny Hoyer organized his own mercenaries to control the tea people, his being the SEIU thugs who claimed to put Obama in office.
Obama, Pelosi, Reid and all the liberal Democrats quickly joined the media trashing of the Tea Party people and apparently they thought the Tea people would just go away. Then along came the election to fill Teddy Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat and the radical Tea Party helped propel a Republican unknown named Scott Brown to a stunning capture of the Kennedy seat.
From that point on the Tea party treatment in the media changed, though not necessarily for the better. For the next year the media looked for every nut case, oddball sign and strange utterance from anyone even remotely connected to the Tea party in an effort to prove these were not ordinary citizens but were escaped mental patients.
But the scorn and disbelief by the media and politicians paled compared to the actions by the political parties as both joined in a holy war against the Tea party as both began to realize their old boy political network was threatened by these outsiders.
You see, the Tea party advocated a conservative platform aimed solely at the top issues of every citizen in America. Well, at least all the citizens except Obama and the Democrats who only seemed able to talk about health care, financial reform, and some stimulus that would keep unemployment under 8%. As the unemployment shot up to 9.7% it was obvious Obama and the Democrats had filed to see the light.
The Tea Party people wanted less government, a balanced budget and a reduced national deficit. Quite the radical agenda. There were no social issues. It didn't matter if you were Republican, Democrat or Independent, all were welcome to the Tea party movement.
It was about this time Sarah Palin and others took a very big chance and embraced the Tea Party movement and the grassroots candidates being fostered by the Tea party. The good old boys who controlled the GOP party had to be having fits and may even turned on Sarah to punish her for helping the enemy, outsiders that could not be controlled.
By the time the early primaries of this year came around the Tea party was knocking off Republican favorites and someone in the GOP machine woke up and realized if they embraced the Tea party primary winners, the Republican advantage in the off year election could be turned into a landslide.
Despite continuing efforts by a media appalled by the fact normal Tea party people thought they should be elected, and in spite of the media and Obama/Pelosi efforts to discredit and laugh off the Tea party, the outside radicals caught the attention of Main Street America and suddenly became a powerful political force Independent of the two old political parties.
Main Street Independents were first to embrace the ideals of the Tea party followed by disgruntled members of both the Democrat and Republican parties who were disgusted with the direction of both mainstream parties. Late last spring when the number of registered Independents in America surged past the registered Democrats and Republicans for the first time in over 100 years it struck a note of terror in even the old professional politicians.
Of course the media were the last to stop trashing the Tea party as the Lame Street media have never been known to catch on to popular opinion that conflicts with their own prejudices. Over 100 viable Tea party candidates got nominated to major offices and hundreds more are viable candidates for state legislatures and other local offices yet still the media focuses all attention on the political mistakes of a handful of Tea party candidates while ignoring the many legitimate candidates.
Just today the liberal mouth pieces of MSNBC were blaming the Republicans for letting "inferior" Tea party candidates run and win in primary elections when the GOP could have won the general election with traditional GOP candidates.
They still don't get it. The Tea party is not and never has been a Republican creation. Right now it is the only party in America that stands on it's principles. The Tea party would rather lose an election trying to get an outsider elected than back a candidate who will change positions to get elected. Such integrity no longer seems to exist with professional politicians or parties.
The Tea party winners will swell the GOP landslide because the GOP is opposed to the Obama agenda, pure and simple. It is the Obama agenda that has totally ignored the needs of the people. After the election, if the Tea party winners embrace campaign and campaign finance reform and force through, in order to stop special interests and the selling of America, long overdue changes, both political parties and the media will lose control of the national agenda and America will be returned to the People where it belongs.
By the way, the professional politicians might have pocketed more than TWO BILLION DOLLARS in campaign contributions, but the Main Street Lame Street media has pocketed over THREE BILLION DOLLARS in media buys from the same politicians and special interests. So just who do we think is owned by the billions in spending?
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One of the realities of economics is a favorable (Conservative) Congress can always trump an unfavorable (Liberal) president and never is that more obvious than in the 2010 midterm elections. Obama has clearly staked his claim as the enemy of the business community, big and small business, with harsh anti-business and class polarization rhetoric and a Progressive agenda threatening income redistribution and regulatory interference in a broad range of business interests.
Anyone wanting to send a message to Washington need only vote Republican and the extent of GOP wins will dictate the extent of the positive economic bounce that may result in the stock market and throughout the business community. Seldom, if ever, has a sitting president run against the entire scope of the broad based business community that fuels the American economy.
Perhaps Obama had no choice because he relied on the far left and self-serving special interests to get elected in the first place in 2008 and as feeble as his efforts were to take care of the unions, health care industries like insurers and pharmaceutical giants, and the housing industry, he built a base of special interests with diametrically opposed agendas.
Whatever he did to help his Goldman Sachs base hurt his SEIU union base. His efforts to protect the union health care plans while trying to appease the health care industry left him with a phony health care reform that may extend coverage to the uninsured at some point, but assured the health care industry they could raise prices and premiums to cover any loss. By guaranteeing that unions could keep their Cadillac high cost plans he assured future health care would drive up prices for all Americans.
As for his so called economic reforms, his highly heralded economic reform program did not even touch the housing industry which brought down the economy in the first place. His hundreds of millions of dollar contributors from Wall Street not only did not even get a slap on the wrist, they got federal bailouts and record bonuses since Obama was elected.
To protect his contributors to the most expensive presidential campaign in history in which Obama and the Democrats spent well over ONE BILLION DOLLARS to get him elected, he had to create a straw dog to blame for his failure to keep unemployment under 8%, his promise not mine, in order to get his TRILLION DOLLAR non-stimulus bill passed. Thus the Republicans and Bush became the enemy.
Certain truths have been conveniently obscured by our young president and he seems convinced the people of Main Street America are too stupid see through the political smoke screen. He cannot deliver on his promises to his own liberal base because the nation and the world are rejecting the folly of a liberal nation dominating the world. Unfortunately someone has to pay for the socialist agenda and it won't be the socialists who claim to be entitled to cradle to grave care from the government.
Every socialist experiment in the world in which there is no capitalist base to pay for the program has failed, pure and simple. Nearly every country in Europe has had to elect a conservative government to undertake the painful budget and deficit reforms needed to save the nations from bankruptcy while gutting the liberal promises previously made.
At the same time, Obama has run against the Bush and Republican record the 8 years before he got elected and forgets to mention the Democrats under Pelosi, not the Republicans, controlled the House the last two Bush years and approved the record deficits. During the entire 8 years many Democrats had to vote with the GOP in order for the depending to happen. In fact during the entire Bush years Republicans never had control like Obama did the last two years with huge majorities in the House and Senate, yet Bush always got the Democrats to approve his budgets and deficits and never whined about the Democrat minority or majority blocking progress.
A whole lot of misinformation has been thrown at the electorate in this, the worst year in campaigns in ages. It is a testament to the fact Obama made no effort to reform the campaign laws that give special interests more control than citizens and give campaign funds more importance than citizen needs. He owned the national agenda and made NO effort to fix the corrupt campaign mess we are in.
So we shall see to what extent the people were fooled by the politicians like Obama who has now taken his rightful place among the political establishment he is so quick to condemn. As I said, the stronger the Republican vote against the Obama agenda the stronger the recovery of the economy and the return to bi-partisan cooperation to solve our problems.
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