Will Voters Listen to Bill Clinton and Vote Obama Out?

The above video is all over the Internet. In fact, I would not be offended if you have seen this enough – seen it ad nauseam – and just click to the next blog, or a new site.  However, the content is too rich, and must be covered.

Bill Clinton said “And [Republicans] say [Democrats] had 21 months, put us back in.  The Democrats are saying something like this: Look, we found a big hole that we did not dig, and we didn’t get out of it in 21 months, but at least we quit digging.  So, don’t go back in reverse, give us two more years and if it doesn’t work you have another election in just two years, you can vote us all out then. But for goodness sakes, we quit digging, don’t bring back the shovel brigade.”

One has to wonder, has the former president been working on telling the truth the last decade.  It is true that the president has now had the full four years Clinton asked the country to give him, and the Democrats.  The Senate has not passed a budget in so long; the new normal is to run the country without a budget.  For all the cadences that candidate Obama comes equipped with, nothing is going to help him hide the fact that the country is not moving in the right direction.  For all the blame the president wants to levy, nothing is going to convince the voters that the country is not moving in the right direction.  Obama loves to talk about how conservative principles – who is hid under the guise of Republican economic thought – had left the country in “the ditch.”   He is completely ignoring the fact that the housing crisis started in the 1990’s.  This is when many of the rules that allowed the risky loans to be made.

 

Peter Wallison wrote about this is 2011 saying that “Barney Frank had spent his career as an advocate of Congress for using the government's authority to force lower underwriting standards in the business of housing finance” and that the congressman had said that they attempted to change course in 2003.  That was also the year that Frank made this comment, "I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation toward subsidized housing.”  If you have not read Willison’s article, it is an informative read.  At the very least, some of the blame for the housing crisis that led to the economic meltdown should be laid at the feet of the Democrats.

Obama is attempting to discredit what Ronald Reagan accomplished in the 1980’s; while at the same time using the same years as a model of the Republican Party that was willing to work together.  I still cannot believe how often I hear Obama use Reagan for one of his anecdotes about the Grand Ole Party’s glory days. However, under those same economic initiatives that Obama is now decrying, the economy had skyrocketed back to health.  Obama has a long way to go before he can even compete with the recovery experienced under Reagan.  If I were Mitt Romney, I would be studying the numbers, because when they debate and Obama tries to through around dichotomic rhetoric about two paths, he can have the truth of Reagan record to use like a hammer.

As Clinton had said in 2010, if the Democrats cannot fix the economy by 2012, then “you can vote [them] all out.” Heck, even Obama had said something along these lines in 2008 when he said he would be held accountable.  He had said if he had not had the economy fixed in three years, then he would be a one-term president.  Well those three years have come and gone, and the country is not moving [sic] forward.  It is almost as the last two Democratic presidents are on the same page on this issue. Maybe all this talk about Clinton hurting Obama’s reelection is just more nonsense from a party that has not come to grips with its own failures, or maybe they really thought they could fix things.  Either way, the voter is likely to want someone more than blame if they are to stay in power.