CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, October 11, 2010

Restoring America: It isn’t over until...

Lots of folks are focused on the upcoming mid-term elections to be held on November 2, 2010. But mid-term elections do not happen in a vacuum. They need to be considered in the context of the November 6, 2012, presidential election as well.

According to current polling data, masses of voters are going to reject the attempt by Mr. Obama, Senator Harry Reid and Speaker Pelosi to turn America into a Mussolini-like corporate-fascist state, by exercising government control over education, medicine, housing, energy, industrial decision-making and finance -- both public and private.

One is reminded of the dog-food company that spent millions to reformulate its dog food to include spending huge sums on a slick advertising campaign to promote the “supposedly” new and better product. Sales plummeted. In desperation, the normally know-it-all corporate leadership finally asked its retailers: “What went wrong?” Answer: “The dogs won’t eat it.”

But, even though the American public may turn up its collective nose at what four years of a Democrat-controlled Congress and 20 months of Barack H. Obama have put in the public bowl, do not dismiss the idea of an Obama reelection in 2012. Mr. Obama may, in 2012, fall into reelection clover by virtue of that old axiom: “No amount of prior planning beats dumb luck.”

Here’s why: If the Republicans take control of one or both Houses of Congress in January, 2011, they will have to redeem their Pledge to America to stop the runaway spending of the Democrats and start cutting back on the massive entitlements the Democrats have granted to a lot of folks who don’t pay income taxes or even any taxes at all.

Many of the people who will feel their entitlements cut by the GOP in 2011 and 2012 are among that 17-percent who end up deciding election outcomes – even though they, for the most part, spend their time watching laugh-track sitcoms and game shows while subscribing to Benjamin Franklin’s famous aphorism: “Beer is a sign that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.”

During his 2012 presidential reelection campaign, Mr. Obama would be able to blame the Republicans for making “cuts” in education, health-care, green-energy efforts and for turning the fat cats on Wall Street and in banking loose again. Of course, the Republicans won’t have actually “cut” anything. The Republicans need only arrest the super-sonic rate-of-growth in government entitlements set in motion by the Obamessiahs and the Republicans will be blamed for making “cuts.” Moreover, when the Republicans allow free-market economics to overcome the current recession and get the economy moving again, the Republicans will be called the pawns of big business.

This is where the Tea Party Movement comes in. To redeem its own time, money and effort to rescue the nation from Obama, Reid and Pelosi in 2010, the Tea Party Movement must pressure a Republican Congress throughout 2011 and 2012 to trim non-defense spending back to the days of the Contract With America in 1994 and then hang in there with the GOP through the defeat of Mr. Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.

Otherwise, Mr. Obama is going to succeed in using 2011 and 2012 to lambast the GOP as the party of “no,” and as the party that robs school children of their education, starves the elderly, takes-no-prisoners, and bayonets the wounded. (Granted, that last bit is the third-worst cliché since: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”)

If the Republicans succeed in restoring the economy, that old cliché: “Let no good deed go unpunished,” could bite the Republicans right in the derrière. Mr. Obama would, no doubt, claim credit for restoring the economy. Good economic times favor incumbents. Ironically, Mr. Obama might ride the Republican’s rising economic tide right into the White House.

Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the George Washington University, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University.

©2010. William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com