Here is my last appeal before the election, my appeal for sanity and for the best interests of our country. Our country has never faced a more divergent choice between two paths than it faces now.
On one hand, we have President Barack Obama, who I believe has done a credible job under as extenuating circumstances as have faced a president in our lifetime, and on the other, Mitt Romney, a man backed by incredibly rich and powerful interests, who will do or say anything to become president.
The interests backing him are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to further their interests, not ours. Twenty years ago, any candidate of either party who said the things that Romney has said, as well as refused to say, would have never been seriously considered to become the most powerful man in the world.
Romney, his running mate Paul Ryan and the shadowy groups hoping to hijack the government have shown no hesitation to rewrite history, twist or ignore facts and lie to reach their ends. Romney has changed positions so many times on so many subjects, it’s hard to believe he has any true beliefs. He makes up things Obama supposedly said, like how Obama promised to create 9 million jobs with his stimulus. Fact-checkers have never been able to find any such statement. The closest they could come was when Obama was a candidate and promised to create 2.5 million jobs by 2011, which in fact, he exceeded.
Romney claims Obama has doubled the deficit with four straight years of $1 trillion deficits. But the 2009 deficit of $1.2 trillion dollars was George W. Bush’s last budget, not Obama’s first budget. In fact, spending growth under Obama is at the lowest rate in 60 years.
One lie that is on every other commercial on every channel is that Jeep is moving its production to China. This ad was specifically made for the Toledo area, to try to scare voters into thinking that Romney will prevent that from happening. The head of Chrysler’s American operations issued a statement that completely refuted that notion. Instead of “My bad” or some such statement, Romney did what he’s done throughout the campaign; he doubled down instead of pulling the ads.
If you’re a woman, you should be really concerned. To get the backing of the more extreme elements of his party, Romney has adopted the policies of the most radical old white men who profess to know what’s better for you than you do.
If Romney is so wonderful, why did The Boston Globe, the paper of record in Massachusetts where he was governor, and the Salt Lake Tribune, the Mormon-owned paper of record in Utah, both endorse Obama?
Obama, on the other hand, has accomplished more in four years than Bush accomplished in eight years for the good of working Americans and the middle class. Financial recessions take longer to recover from than normal recessions, and this one was a doozy. Despite getting no help from the scorched-earth policies of the GOP legislators, Obama has managed to create 5.2 million new jobs, shrink the size of the federal government, reduce the deficit by $2 trillion and get health care reform enacted that will provide health care for tens of millions more people, help small businesses provide affordable care to their employees, get rid of bias against pre-existing conditions, allow kids to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 and will not take $716 million from Medicare.
Obama got significant Wall Street reforms passed. He saved the auto industry and got the loans paid back with interest. He got the Lilly Ledbetter reforms instituted for equal pay for women, got Osama bin Laden, ended the war in Iraq, has instituted an end to the war in Afghanistan, got Moammar Gadhafi out with no troops, repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” got the BP oil spill cleaned up with no taxpayer money, unified the world against Iran with crippling sanctions and saved the global economy from collapse.
With the GOP support he got, this was like having one hand tied behind his back. If you want to see the difference, watch the news. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is extolling the virtues of the president’s response to Hurricane Sandy. Romney is collecting canned goods on the campaign trail while previously promising to gut FEMA. Who’s in it for the right reasons?
The choice is Barack Obama.
