Guest Post: Why President Obama Was Reelected
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/12/2012 10:52 -0500
Via James E. Miller of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada,
It’s a safe assumption to make that the reelection of Barack Hussein Obama to the office of the United States Presidency will be talked about for decades to come. In history textbooks, 2012 will be referred as a momentous election year when the nation came together and collectively decided to stick with a president through the thick. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and other “transformative” presidents before him, Obama will be praised for keeping the country together in the midst of economic difficulty. In sum, he will be called a popular figure who triumphed over America’s old guard and lead the nation into a new era of solidarity and renewed social tolerance.
The lavishing has already begun with prominent voices on the left like Paul Krugman declaring the “new America” has made Obama their champion. It’s being said in major newspapers across the world that this new incarnation of the American experiment is much more attuned to the struggle of minorities and the downtrodden. They went with a President who will use the divine power of the federal government to lift the disenfranchised onto the platform of dignified living.
Like most of what passes for accepted history, this is downright propaganda. The country as a whole wasn’t frightened over sudden change by throwing out the incumbent. It wasn’t a declaration of a new, more diverse America. Shaping a new destiny wasn’t on the casual voter’s mind on November 6th.
There is a rational explanation for the President’s reelection which doesn’t invoke a deep or complex meaning. The only way to explain the outcome is in the simplest and direct prose: the moochers prevailed.
Obama’s winning tactic was to do what any respectable man does when he wishes to have something; he bought it. From cell phones and contraceptives to food stamps and unemployment benefits, the Obama administration kept the money flowing to ensure a steady turnout on Election Day. The coup de grâce was painting his opponent as a second coming of Dickens’ Scrooge that was ready to cut the voters from their trust funds.
The campaign made no attempt to hide this tactic. In an online video, celebrity Lena Dunham was tapped to extol the virtues of government-supplied birth control. The advertisement was aimed at a younger generation already guaranteed access to their parent’s health insurance till they turn 26 (and then morph simultaneously into full grown, self-sufficient adults). The video was a great demonstration of the campaign strategy but it was topped by one woman from Cleveland, Ohio who exemplified the public trough mentality on camera. Commonly referred to as the Obama-phone lady, this woman was so enraptured by her “free” cell phone and other welfare entitlements, she was determined to “keep Obama in president” to use her exact words. Though clearly dimwitted, Ms. Obamaphone was a phenomenal orator of the President’s message of goodies in exchange for votes.
Though it worked splendidly, Obama’s strategy was not brilliantly crafted from the minds of experts. It was the same bread and circus routine employed by the Romans and applied to modern demographics that relish in a victim-like mentality. Women, the youth, blacks, Hispanics, and the elderly were all catered to through subtle patronization and outright payoffs. It was the same tactic employed by the Roosevelt administration when the New Deal got underway. As journalist John T. Flynn wrote of the popular 32nd president:
It was always easy to sell him a plan that involved giving away government money. It was always easy to interest him in a plan which would confer some special benefit upon some special class in the population in exchange for their votes.
The 2009 auto industry bailout was Obama’s great tribute to Roosevelt. By infusing two auto giants with the federal government and still maintaining the appearance of their private ownership, the President convinced a majority in the battleground state of Ohio to put him back in the White House. Criticizing the auto bailout was the last nail in the coffin for Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations.
None of this is to say the election of Romney would have meant the much needed axing of the welfare state and state-subsidized dependency. The army of bureaucrats tasked with cutting checks in the name of kindness would still work to expand their budgets. The wealthy interests the former Massachusetts governor looked to appease were welfare queens in themselves and would likely receive all the state coddling money can buy.
Obama won the election by catering to the worst of all human traits: envy. He demonized the rich while promising to take more of their income and give it out in the form of entitlement payments. Under his presidency, the attitude of the takers will continue to swell as they clamor for more privileges. Anybody who speaks out against the Robin Hood scheme will be called an unconscionable xenophobe and a hater of the poor. The protestant work ethic will slowly be choked into submission through deliberate iconoclasm launched by the political class and their pet media pundits.
The opponents of capitalism will keep blaming money and greed for all the ills of society. They will also keep wearing fashionable clothes and coordinating protests on their smartphones while drinking caffeinated drinks that cost the same as some third world country’s average salary. They will scoff at hard work when it’s the sweat and labor of generations before them that has created the living standard they enjoy today. Under their tutelage America will be brought into its final form of, as right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh accurately defined it, a “country of children.”
Economist Thomas DiLorenzo sums up the key to Obama’s victory in this pungent bit of fine wisdom:
Every time Romney made one of his “let’s get the economy going again” speeches extolling the virtues of hard work he terrified the millions of welfare bums and parasites and motivated them more than ever to stand in line for hours to vote for Santa Claus Obama, their “savior” from having to work for a living. (It’s always the low opportunity cost class that has the “luxury” of spending half a day or more standing in a line).
With Obama’s reelection comes the onward march of American society’s degeneration into that of the lazy, bitter masses forever on the lookout to loot a hapless minority still trying to make an honest living. The coming brave new world will be filled to the brim with self-righteous individuals eager to shuffle around the Earth’s gifts to achieve some kind of equality. In the process, none of them will produce a lick of good outside of satisfying their own disturbed need to dominate. It will be rule of the inept over the capable. Barack Obama will lead the way. He will be replaced in four years with someone that follows the same doctrine. The collective age of the country will continue to collapse till it reaches just shy of an unclothed infant wailing for succor. Except it will be grown men doing the crying and no one around to feed him because the sensible among us has already left.
The people have spoken and made it so.
