News Flash: Bush is Not on the Ballot

By Mark Rhoads -

Many people might have assumed that President Obama's comical habit of blaming George W. Bush for all the economic failures of the Obama Administration since January 2009 would become too stale to continue into the current campaign.  They would be wrong to think so.  As of Labor Day, Maryland Democratic Governor and Obama surrogate Martin O'Malley was still trying hard to undo his remarks on Sunday that the nation is not better off today than four years ago by once again blaming Bush as responsible for the recesssion and not Obama. 

While this argument might help to make Democrats to feel better about their own failed policies since January 2009, the problem is that Bush is not on the ballot in 2012 but Obama is.  In most elections that have an incumbent on the ballot, the vote is normally a referendum on the record of the incumbent so far.  But since Team Obama knows that a referendum vote would more than likely mean defeat for Obama, they are trying desperately to change the conversation to a "vision" for the next four years.  But there are pitfalls with that strategy also.

The first obvious problem with the "vision" campaign is that voters are entitled to ask, "How would your next four years be more successsful than your first four?"  After all, Obama could pass almost any bill he wanted to in 2009 and 2010 with large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, but instead of focusing on on job creation or immigraton reform as he had promised to do, he instead squandered his time and that of Congress for his first 18 months a divisive campaign to take over one-sixth of the economy dealing with health care services that a majority of Americans according to current polls still do not support.

While Obama's policies have spent more money in only the last 44 months than Bush spent in the previous eight years adding $5 trillion in new debt, he has nevertheless found enough time to sueeze into his burdens a chance to play golf 104 times or about one trip to the links every ten days.  If this is supposed to be a vision election for the next four years instead of a referendum on the last 44 months, then what exactly is the Obama vision for for dealing with a $16 trillion national debt and the interest on that debt before it consumes all of the national budget and all of our annual GDP? 

But even if Bush is not on the ballot in 2012, it looks like Obama wants to pretend that he is the clone of Bill Cinton who has not been on a ballot since 1996 when he defeated Bob Dole.  Obama has only a 43 percent approval rating according to the latest Gallup Poll but former President Clinton has an approval rating of 65 percent so Obama needs Bill Clinton to replace him as a positive image.  Wow, just imagine how bad the Obama record must be if you need Bill Clinton to be your primary crutch in the next 60 days.  Whatever big mistakes George W. Bush made in failing to manage the financial institution meltdown of late 2008, Obama has failed to bring unemployment below 8 percent in the last 44 months, Democrats in the Senate have failed to pass a budget in three years, and Obama has failed to unite the country as he promised he would and none of those failures since the Obama inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009 can be rationally blamed on Bush or anyone but Obama himself.