Obama Is Hitting The Campaign Trail Again
By Carole on Apr 18, 2010
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Expect more friendly crowds cheering whatever he says. Expect more long winded "answers" that don't come close to addressing the actual questions asked by everyday Americans. Expect complete avoidance of any tough questioning from the press. President Barack Obama is going back on the road to pitch another one of his "remake America" policies.
Continued...
White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage announced Sunday that the president will travel outside Washington in the coming weeks to sell his proposal for financial regulatory reform. (source) As with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), Mr. Obama is choosing not to hold traditional press conferences in which he would take direct questions from prepared professional journalists, live on camera and be subjected to follow ups. No, he'll be giving a standard stump speech filled with his talking points in city after city so that the only media coverage the nation will get to see are clips of an unchallenged performer reading his lines off a teleprompter.
Sure, he'll go through the motions of taking questions from the audience and his handlers may even allow a question or two from someone who doesn't agree with the administration. But as he has done in the past, Mr. Obama will simply provide a long winded non-answer to these amateur questioners, dismissing their objections and going back on message to say what he wants to say.
The Obama talking points this time around are eerily similar to those on health care:
- Frame the debate as the American people versus what he calls special interests. This time Wall Street is the boogeyman instead of the insurance companies, but the class warfare approach and the job killing attack on capitalism are the same.
- Claim that without his exact plan being put into effect, tragedy will ensue. Expect statements meant to strike enough fear in the hearts of Americans that they won't dare question whether the Obama plan is the right plan; statements like this one from the his weekly radio address: "Every day we don’t act, the same system that led to bailouts remains in place, with the exact same loopholes and the exact same liabilities. And if we don’t change what led to the crisis, we’ll doom ourselves to repeat it."
Meanwhile here in reality, the president's latest financial reform plan is recognized as yet another overstuffed piece of legislation meant to let the federal government in general and the Obama administration in particular grab more power.
The current proposal creates a mechanism for liquidating large financial companies, it gives the government unprecedented power to regulate derivatives (financial instruments whose value depends on an underlying asset, such as mortgages or stocks) and it creates a council to detect threats to the financial system and set up a consumer protection agency to police people's dealings with financial institutions.(source)
Republicans are united against the proposal claiming, as they did with health care, that reform should be smaller, less intrusive and not create more problems than it solves. Even Senate Democrats haven’t agreed on how far the new regulations should go making it even tougher for Obama and his cronies to get the 60 votes needed to pass a bill.
But President Obama seems ready to repeat the tactics that, at least temporarily, worked for him on health care reform. He'll avoid answering any real questions, ignore his political opposition and demonize the capitalist system. As he said in his radio address, "One way or another, we will move forward." We already know how dangerous his other ways can be for our country.
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