Opinion: Obama vs. Romney and the Keystone Kampaigners
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Can’t anyone around here campaign? Can’t anyone around here govern?
Let’s take those questions in order, starting with the Republicans, our very own Keystone Kampaigners.
Give them the gift of an incumbent president presiding over a listless, jobless economy, and what do they do with it?
They take shots at Mormons, letting the religion be called a cult and non-Christian. Or they deride people protesting today’s corporate greedfest as ‘jealous’ Americans who ‘play the victim card’ and want to ‘take somebody else’s’ Cadillac. And when a GOP debate crowd boos a gay soldier or calls to let someone without health insurance die, the candidates go mute.
Plus, they don’t trust their front-runner. However, they also don’t much care for their rear-runners. Witness how quickly political fortunes turn in today’s GOP: Rick Perry went from toast of the party to Mr. BBQ Beef to Texas toast in, well, a New York minute.
And when they finally do get around to talking about jobs, their solution is to cut taxes. Making rich people even richer might win you hearts and minds (and money) on Wall Street, but down on Main Street -- where the jobs used to be before those rich folks shipped them off to China -- it doesn’t play as well.
Which brings us to question No. 2 and President Hope and Change, who has given us too little of the former and not enough of the latter.
There aren’t enough jobs being created. So the president does what Washington has always done: He creates a job-creation panel. Which creates jobs for people like Kenneth I. Chenault, chairman and chief executive of American Express, and Jim McNerney, chief executive of Boeing, and, for diversity’s sake, Xerox’s chief executive, Ursula Burns.
And they know about jobs, all right: They know how to make them disappear. For example, as The Times’ Alana Semuels reported, American Express, shortly before Chenault’s appointment to the panel, ‘closed a facility in North Carolina and eliminated 550 jobs, or about 1% of the company’s workforce.’
And did it do that to bolster its sagging fortunes? Ah, nope: ‘At the same time, American Express announced it had made $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, up 48% from the same period the previous year.’
No wonder Chenault has time to be on a presidential panel: His job is safe.
But, just like the Republicans who now kowtow to the tea party, Obama and the Democrats have suddenly discovered the ‘Occupy’ movement. As the president said last week:
‘I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country ... and yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place.’
Uh, yea, that’s one way to look at it. Another would be that Obama needs to get a clue. Stocking a job-creation panel with job killers -- corporate executives who care far more about the bottom line than they do about the American people -- gives no one ‘hope’ and certainly isn’t the ‘change’ those living in tents in U.S. cities voted for.
Which brings us back to the Keystone Kampaigners. A savvy politician would seize the opportunity to cultivate disaffected voters.
So here’s the GOP’s Mr. Savvy: At a town hall in New Hampshire on Monday, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said the Occupy movement was born of people ‘seeking scapegoats.’
Good job, Mitt. You make new friends wherever you go, don’t you?
And he’s the moderate in the race. Herman Cain suggested that the rallies had been organized by labor unions to serve as a ‘distraction so that many people won’t focus on the failed policies of the Obama administration.’
Yes, and later in his campaign, he’s going to reveal who really shot JFK and how many aliens the Air Force has hidden at Area 51.
I hate to admit it, but it’s starting to look like the sign I saw last weekend being toted by an Occupy LA protester:
‘Is this freedom, or freedumb?’
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-- Paul Whitefield
Left photo: President Obama. Credit: Jewel Samad / AFP/Getty Images
Right photo: Mitt Romney. Credit: AFP/Getty Images
