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I Think I May Be Rooting for Obama
Max’s View
I Think I May Be Rooting for Obama
Ronald Reagan was the best president of my lifetime.
At its best, the Republican Party is the party of Reagan: the party of lower taxes for everybody. The party of peace through hard-nosed diplomacy. The party that believes that people are better at solving problems than government.
Since Reagan, I have rooted for the Republican Party in every election. Until this one. I find myself rooting for President Obama.
Make no mistake: Obama isn’t a great president. If I had children, I’d be concerned about the burden of debt that they would be inheriting.
However, if the ballooning national debt is in fact a dire problem, I doubt that Mitt Romney can fix it. It will take a principled, disciplined fighter to get Congress to truly cut the size of the Federal Government. Romney isn’t the man for the job.
The Right accuses Obama of being an ideological Socialist who aims to destroy private enterprise. I wonder if the president’s accusers even believe their silly accusations. Obama came into office with a mandate to break up the big financial corporations and to reign in Wall Street with tougher regulations. He did neither.
The stock market has gone way up during the President’s first term. Fox News says that Obama is killing the economy, but all that green on Fox Business tells a different story.
I am not a huge fan of ObamaCare. I am a cold-hearted capitalist: in my ideal world, health insurance would be used only for catastrophic illness and injury.
In my utopia, doctors visits and medical tests would be expensive privileges. If you want top notch medical treatment, you should have to get up every morning and work a soul-sucking job like I do.
However, American health care is absolutely nothing like my heartless utopia. The current system is irredeemably complex, inefficient, and bureaucratic. Under the circumstances, changing to a single-payer system seems like a reasonable reform.
My least favorite thing about the Democratic platform is the belief in an activist, UN-style military. Wasting money and American lives in faraway lands on strategically meaningless missions is the most unforgivable thing that government does.
To me, sending troops overseas and calling it a “humanitarian war” is as diabolically absurd as calling the Defense Department “The Ministry of Peace” like in ‘1984.’
Obama gets it. While President Clinton sent troops to all corners of the globe on ill-conceived liberal crusades (Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia), the Obama foreign policy is more innovative and more focused.
I love that we’re moving away from traditional invasions and relying more on strategic strikes and unmanned drones. The word is out to international bad guys: if you anger us now, we are going to kill you – not the army of ignorant peasant kids that you force to fight on your behalf.
The Democrats used to be the party of foreign policy bungling and unnecessary war. Now, with Mitt Romney flapping his mouth irresponsibly about Russia and Iran, I am pretty sure that we’re safer under President Obama.
The political landscape is becoming increasingly polarized. I found it ridiculous when the Left accused George W. Bush of being the worst President of all time (spend a day at the Vietnam War Memorial and tell me that Bush was really worse than Lyndon Johnson). And I find it equally ridiculous when the Right accuses Barack Obama of destroying our country.
President Obama isn’t perfect, but I am starting to think that he is preferable to Mitt Romney.
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