The Popular Vote
So, the GOP dream team of a rich white guy and a young conservative buck lost the presidential election in the United States on Tuesday. It was a close match by any estimations and the team of Romney/Ryan didn't lose this election alone -- they lost the election thanks to the Republican Party's platform and the choke-hold the libertarian Tea Party holds on the GOP.
No matter the excuses the GOP leaders are spreading this Wednesday morning about Romney not being a capable candidate, even though they spent nearly a billion dollars trying to defeat President Obama, the fact of the matter is, a majority of Americans rejected the GOP's platform.
Americans as a nation are not hateful people, but the Right would have us believe we hate minorities, Mexicans, gays and poor people; hate them so much that we'd run to the polls and vote for the perfect image of a non-minority gay poor person: a rich white guy.
I read an article the other day, or perhaps it was a blog post, that states simply: Romney is running his campaign as someone who can fix the economy and hoping people will vote for him based on that alone. What Romney, and his team, didn't capmaign on and shied away from, were social issues. Sure Americans want a stable economy providing jobs and livable wages but Americans are also interested in the foundations of this county: "...all men are created equal..." not just those who can purchase equality. We're a nation that believes in helping our neighbor even if Ayn Rand says that policy goes against an individual's natural instincts. We believe if a community fails it failed as a direct result of the people within that community, not because a given community became too black, too poor, or too secular. However, what the GOP doesn't admit is that societies consist of people and societies cannot exist when people only look out for themselves.
We're a people who have matured past the point where women and black Americans are considered lesser than white Americans, who have and should maintain rights over their own persons and yet the GOP willfully noted time and again women shouldn't be allowed to determine their own biology and black Americans are just sitting around waiting for handouts. The Republicans love talking about individual responsibility, but fail to talk about individual rights when they try to legislate those matters removing decision-making rights from the individual. According to the GOP, individual liberties and the individual's right to "pursuit of happiness" are fine as long as they pre-approve your love life, pre-approved your sexual orientation, pre-approved what decisions you can make about your own body, and pre-approved your education.
Americans are also tired of war. We're tired of spending billions of dollars every year supporting a war we never understood in the first place. We invaded Iraq under a false flag and found it politically difficult to withdrawal without completing some undefined mission. It's been ten years since we invaded Afghanistan to bring the Taliban and al-Qaeda to justice. The Taliban, while not gone, is disbanded and Osama bin Laden, including most of his senior advisers, are dead or captured. Al-Qaeda no longer has a single head and while still a threat, the threat level is that of a vicious dog, not a stampeding herd of buffalo. And yet the GOP sabre-rattled the need to re-invade Iraq, invade Iran and possibly invade Pakistan, too. At times it seemed they're willing to invade anyone to ignite the hawks and ensure those hawkish voters head to the polls. The Republican mantra for the past 50 years has been simple: if there is no threat, create one. It has worked before and it could work again. People don't change, right? Especially if you tout you're conservative. If a plan worked in the 80s it should work in the 21st century, right?
Americans are also tired of corporate welfare. While Romney and Ryan were talking about setting the poor and the unemployed adrift, corporate profits were at an all time high and corporate tax rebates, thanks to Bush Jr., were in the tens of billions. Oh, you're company has record profits and you have millions, or perhaps billions, of tax-dollars in tax refunds from the state? The whole purpose of tax breaks are to encourage business, innovation, trade, etc. not to subsidize profits with taxpayer support. However, that's exactly what's happened for decades. People making less than $100,000 a year are watching as their tax bills are getting larger while corporations and wealthy people are receiving tax-payer funded bonuses every year for nothing more than being rich. I don't need to pay the government thirty cents on every dollar so they can pay you (the corporations) twenty of those cents for being successful. That's not capitalism, that's democratic-socialism and those people who aren't in the 1-percenter club are paying attention.
Most Americans, whether middle-class or lower-class, whether in the racial majority or a minority, whether a follower of Jude-Christian faith or a minority religion, just want to be treated equally and fairly. Romney and Ryan stuck to the GOP party-line and tried to convince people that if rich people were richer everyone else's lives would be better. If the Koch brothers could buy another private island, somehow that was going to make a plumber's life better; if companies like Exxon were given an extra billion dollars in taxpayer (rebates) money, somehow gas prices would come down. And somehow, if you took away unemployment insurance from the unemployed you'd force people to go out and get job, even if there were no jobs to be had. (Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of people who abused the unemployment system for personal gain, but ironically most of those people said they'd vote Romney this election -- they have to keep those dirty parasites from sucking at the government teat).
Since 2008 President Obama has always stated fixing the economy would be more tortoise than hare, slow and steady versus a lightning quick-fix. The GOP started on January 21, 2009 asking why Obama hadn't waved some magic wand and fixed the economy and they've been hammering him ever since, even though the stock markets have been hovering around an all-time high, corporate profits are breaking records, oil and natural gas production is up and while the population of this country is the highest it's ever been in the history of the United States, the percentage of unemployment is lower than many other western nations.
The Republican party also ran a campaign of fear. It's their campaigning bread-and-butter. They geneerally can't speak to the people with facts and reason because they do not have facts and reason on their side, instead they have to intimidate with fear, one of the universe's most base emotions. Romney and Ryan, Republican candidates from across the country all tried using fear to motivate independent and swing voters to their cause. The now and the future isn't as bleak as the GOP would have us believe and a majority of Americans believe that, no matter how many commercials they see during prime time.
The American populace is stronger and braver than the Republicans understand. We're also a hell of a lot smarter than they credit us. They put on their ties and expensive suits, they flew around in Citizen's United paid for airplanes and they told Mainstreet Americans "you, too, can be like us someday. And if you are, you're not going to want to pay your taxes either." What they failed to understand is the American spirit. Most of have a drive to succeed, to excel at our jobs and our lives. But most of us are more concerned with putting food on the table and making sure our kids have warm clothes to wear; we lose more sleep over worrying about heating our houses and making sure the car works tomorrow so we can get to work. Americans worry about their marriages, their schools, whether their neighborhoods are safe and of course, our jobs. We need stability in life, in our individual cosms of family, neighborhood, city, society and culture -- we're not looking for handouts we're looking for fairness and an equal chance.
[I also wanted to point out that a majority of people, about 97%, vote in one of three ways: (1) how their family/friends vote, (2) party identification and (3) incumbents. Obama had the edge being an incumbent, not that he would have lost otherwise, but the incumbent always has the edge]
No matter the excuses the GOP leaders are spreading this Wednesday morning about Romney not being a capable candidate, even though they spent nearly a billion dollars trying to defeat President Obama, the fact of the matter is, a majority of Americans rejected the GOP's platform.
Americans as a nation are not hateful people, but the Right would have us believe we hate minorities, Mexicans, gays and poor people; hate them so much that we'd run to the polls and vote for the perfect image of a non-minority gay poor person: a rich white guy.I read an article the other day, or perhaps it was a blog post, that states simply: Romney is running his campaign as someone who can fix the economy and hoping people will vote for him based on that alone. What Romney, and his team, didn't capmaign on and shied away from, were social issues. Sure Americans want a stable economy providing jobs and livable wages but Americans are also interested in the foundations of this county: "...all men are created equal..." not just those who can purchase equality. We're a nation that believes in helping our neighbor even if Ayn Rand says that policy goes against an individual's natural instincts. We believe if a community fails it failed as a direct result of the people within that community, not because a given community became too black, too poor, or too secular. However, what the GOP doesn't admit is that societies consist of people and societies cannot exist when people only look out for themselves.
We're a people who have matured past the point where women and black Americans are considered lesser than white Americans, who have and should maintain rights over their own persons and yet the GOP willfully noted time and again women shouldn't be allowed to determine their own biology and black Americans are just sitting around waiting for handouts. The Republicans love talking about individual responsibility, but fail to talk about individual rights when they try to legislate those matters removing decision-making rights from the individual. According to the GOP, individual liberties and the individual's right to "pursuit of happiness" are fine as long as they pre-approve your love life, pre-approved your sexual orientation, pre-approved what decisions you can make about your own body, and pre-approved your education.
Americans are also tired of war. We're tired of spending billions of dollars every year supporting a war we never understood in the first place. We invaded Iraq under a false flag and found it politically difficult to withdrawal without completing some undefined mission. It's been ten years since we invaded Afghanistan to bring the Taliban and al-Qaeda to justice. The Taliban, while not gone, is disbanded and Osama bin Laden, including most of his senior advisers, are dead or captured. Al-Qaeda no longer has a single head and while still a threat, the threat level is that of a vicious dog, not a stampeding herd of buffalo. And yet the GOP sabre-rattled the need to re-invade Iraq, invade Iran and possibly invade Pakistan, too. At times it seemed they're willing to invade anyone to ignite the hawks and ensure those hawkish voters head to the polls. The Republican mantra for the past 50 years has been simple: if there is no threat, create one. It has worked before and it could work again. People don't change, right? Especially if you tout you're conservative. If a plan worked in the 80s it should work in the 21st century, right?
Americans are also tired of corporate welfare. While Romney and Ryan were talking about setting the poor and the unemployed adrift, corporate profits were at an all time high and corporate tax rebates, thanks to Bush Jr., were in the tens of billions. Oh, you're company has record profits and you have millions, or perhaps billions, of tax-dollars in tax refunds from the state? The whole purpose of tax breaks are to encourage business, innovation, trade, etc. not to subsidize profits with taxpayer support. However, that's exactly what's happened for decades. People making less than $100,000 a year are watching as their tax bills are getting larger while corporations and wealthy people are receiving tax-payer funded bonuses every year for nothing more than being rich. I don't need to pay the government thirty cents on every dollar so they can pay you (the corporations) twenty of those cents for being successful. That's not capitalism, that's democratic-socialism and those people who aren't in the 1-percenter club are paying attention.Most Americans, whether middle-class or lower-class, whether in the racial majority or a minority, whether a follower of Jude-Christian faith or a minority religion, just want to be treated equally and fairly. Romney and Ryan stuck to the GOP party-line and tried to convince people that if rich people were richer everyone else's lives would be better. If the Koch brothers could buy another private island, somehow that was going to make a plumber's life better; if companies like Exxon were given an extra billion dollars in taxpayer (rebates) money, somehow gas prices would come down. And somehow, if you took away unemployment insurance from the unemployed you'd force people to go out and get job, even if there were no jobs to be had. (Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of people who abused the unemployment system for personal gain, but ironically most of those people said they'd vote Romney this election -- they have to keep those dirty parasites from sucking at the government teat).
Since 2008 President Obama has always stated fixing the economy would be more tortoise than hare, slow and steady versus a lightning quick-fix. The GOP started on January 21, 2009 asking why Obama hadn't waved some magic wand and fixed the economy and they've been hammering him ever since, even though the stock markets have been hovering around an all-time high, corporate profits are breaking records, oil and natural gas production is up and while the population of this country is the highest it's ever been in the history of the United States, the percentage of unemployment is lower than many other western nations.
The Republican party also ran a campaign of fear. It's their campaigning bread-and-butter. They geneerally can't speak to the people with facts and reason because they do not have facts and reason on their side, instead they have to intimidate with fear, one of the universe's most base emotions. Romney and Ryan, Republican candidates from across the country all tried using fear to motivate independent and swing voters to their cause. The now and the future isn't as bleak as the GOP would have us believe and a majority of Americans believe that, no matter how many commercials they see during prime time.
The American populace is stronger and braver than the Republicans understand. We're also a hell of a lot smarter than they credit us. They put on their ties and expensive suits, they flew around in Citizen's United paid for airplanes and they told Mainstreet Americans "you, too, can be like us someday. And if you are, you're not going to want to pay your taxes either." What they failed to understand is the American spirit. Most of have a drive to succeed, to excel at our jobs and our lives. But most of us are more concerned with putting food on the table and making sure our kids have warm clothes to wear; we lose more sleep over worrying about heating our houses and making sure the car works tomorrow so we can get to work. Americans worry about their marriages, their schools, whether their neighborhoods are safe and of course, our jobs. We need stability in life, in our individual cosms of family, neighborhood, city, society and culture -- we're not looking for handouts we're looking for fairness and an equal chance.
[I also wanted to point out that a majority of people, about 97%, vote in one of three ways: (1) how their family/friends vote, (2) party identification and (3) incumbents. Obama had the edge being an incumbent, not that he would have lost otherwise, but the incumbent always has the edge]
Comments