As everyone in the galaxy has by now learned, our esteemed Vice
President spoke before a group of Barack Obama’s remaining
supporters last week and included the following in his observations
about Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan: “Look at what they value, and look
at their budget. And look what they’re proposing … unchain Wall
Street. They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.” This was no slip
of the tongue. It was in a prepared speech delivered with the aid
of a teleprompter, and it is part of the trifecta of fear on which
he and his boss are betting in the hope that a majority of the
electorate can be frightened into voting for them in November.
Biden’s slimy race-baiting is the inevitable complement to
“Mediscare” and “the war on women.”
How sad. Four years ago, then-Senator Obama was an inspirational
figure for many. Millions of voters pulled the lever for him and
watched with glistening eyes as he declared, “If there is anyone
out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things
are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is
alive in our time … tonight is your answer.” Four years later,
however, he is just another cynical pol. Thus, when his Vice
President produced a disgusting minstrel drawl to conflate GOP
victory with the return of slavery, he
shrugged it off: “The truth is that during the course of these
campaigns, folks like to get obsessed with how something was
phrased even if everybody personally understands that’s not how it
was meant.”
It would appear, however, that not everyone believes “that’s not
how it was meant.” Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves who
became the nation’s first elected African-American governor when he
won Virginia’s gubernatorial election in 1989, isn’t buying the
President’s excuses. Shortly after Biden’s speech, Wilder
said the reference to “chains” was an obvious appeal to race,
and he went on to point out that the Vice President’s comments
revealed his own racism: “Biden separated himself from what he
accused the people of doing. As a matter of fact what he said is,
they are going to do something to y’all, not to me, not us. So he
was still involved with that separate America. And I’m sick and
tired of being considered something other than an American.”
Wilder, who is a Democrat, went on to characterize Biden’s
remarks as offensively patronizing to his audience and to
African-Americans in general. And the former Virginia governor is
not buying the standard “crazy old Joe just committed another faux
pas” excuse: “You can forgive people for gaffes, but there comes a
time when you realize you’re forgiving the same guy for making the
same mistakes.” Finally, Wilder delivered the unkindest cut of all
by suggesting that President Obama would be much better off with a
different running mate than Biden: “If Hillary were on that ticket
today, based on the job she’s done as secretary of state, I think
there would be a clearer advantage the president would be
seeing.”
Wilder is right about Hillary’s superiority to Biden. The Vice
President is indeed a buffoon. And Ed Klein, author of The
Amateur,
says Hillary was actually offered the number two spot on the
2012 Obama ticket: “Up until just a couple of weeks ago the White
House was putting out feelers to see if Hillary would accept the
vice-presidential nod and replace Joe Biden.… But then Hillary had
lunch in the White House a couple of weeks ago with Valerie Jarrett
… and she told Valerie that she would not accept the vice
president’s spot.” But even had Hillary accepted, her presence on
the ticket would not have obviated the real problem that has forced
the White House to trade in the 2008 message of hope for a
reelection campaign based on fear — Obama’s pathetic record.
Barack Obama’s presidency has been a catalogue of clumsy
failures. His domestic initiatives, particularly the “stimulus”
package, ObamaCare and the financial “reform” law, have exacerbated
the problems they were allegedly meant to solve. His foreign policy
has been even more amateurish. Obama’s mishandling of the “Arab
Spring” has abetted extremists like the Muslim Brotherhood, the
“Russian reset” is a dangerous joke, and his politicization of the
Osama bin Laden killing has provoked former special operations
officers to produce a documentary
accusing him of taking undeserved credit for the raid and leaking
sensitive secrets about U.S. covert operations to the news media.
These and other failures have left the country demonstrably worse
off than it was four years ago
Obviously, no President could hope to win reelection running on
such an abysmal record. Thus, the Obama reelection crew decided to
bet on their trifecta of fear. First, they fabricated the
Republican “war on women” and launched it with a faux congressional
hearing whose star witness was an upper middle class law student
whining about the refusal of a Catholic university to pay for her
birth control pills. The President then demonstrated his solidarity
with this absurd creature by calling her on the telephone and
thanking her for speaking out on his manufactured contraception
issue. And, as if to erase any doubt that he actually believes such
nonsense will win him votes, he recently made a campaign appearance
with her in Denver.
Having thus demonstrated his determination to protect
well-heeled law students from the necessity of respecting the
religious beliefs that animate schools they voluntarily attend,
Obama and his minions then embarked on a “scare the seniors”
campaign, in which they accused Mitt Romney of choosing a running
mate who wants to “end Medicare as we know it.” Never mind that
Obama and his accomplices siphoned more than $700 billion from
Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Forget about the inconvenient fact
that “Medicare as we know it” will begin collapsing under its own
weight a mere decade from now, and that Obama has offered no
credible plan for preventing this debacle. Just scare the hell out
of the oldsters.
Which brings us back to the third horse on the Obama campaign’s
trifecta — race baiting. Obama won in 2008 because he was able to
turn out a lot of voters who don’t always vote. This year, however,
there is a noticeable decline in the enthusiasm of these same
voters: “Black turnout is traditionally 11% of the total vote.
In 2008, it rose to 14%, providing Obama with more than half of his
margin of victory. Current polls suggest a reversion to the
pre-2008 turnout level.” This decline, combined with the
disaffection of many independents who voted for him last time, will
cost Obama the election. So, he has to scare these voters so badly
that their fear drives them to the polls in November to vote
against Romney and Ryan.
And that’s where good old Joe comes in. Obama can’t indulge in
too much race-baiting himself without further damaging his personal
favorability ratings. So, he sent Biden to Virginia to suggest to
African Americans that a GOP victory will be the first step in
their long march back to the cotton fields. This led Governor
Wilder to ask, “Did he feel that these people were so dumb that he
had to appeal to them with something like that?” The answer is
obviously “yes,” and the President clearly shares that view. They
both believe that blacks, women, and seniors are so many cattle who
can be stampeded with ridiculous lies about the evil genius Mitt
Romney and his demonic running mate. No one this cynical should be
rewarded with reelection.
