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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Victor Davis Hanson
What should we not expect during next summer's presidential campaign, given what was put off-limits in 2008 and later?
There is much talk about what some are perceiving as the fringe religiosity of possible Republican primary candidates such as Michele Bachman and Rick Perry. But the media established the precedent four years ago that no candidate can be held responsible for his church. Barack Obama's pastor of more than 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was an unapologetic racist and anti-Semite, and a raving conspiracy theorist whose parishioners gave him standing ovations for his hate-filled "G-d damn America" rants.
Prior education and college preparation should not be 2012 issues either. Recent articles have referred to a leaked
Civility is off the table, too. Candidate Obama once called sitting president Bush "unpatriotic" for borrowing
Public campaign financing won't come up either. Both sides will raise obscene amounts of money. You see, in 2008, Obama set another election precedent: He was the first president in the history of public campaign financing laws to shun federal money and oversight in the general election, largely because he wanted -- and got -- a record level of private cash, much of it from Wall Street.
The old bogeyman George W. Bush won't matter much either by 2012. Since 2008, Obama has blamed Bush for chronic high unemployment, record annual deficits, massive national debt, the erratic stock market, credit downgrading, a continuing housing slump and near nonexistent growth. But even the president's supporters confess that Obama finally now "owns" the economy, especially given the newly elected president's boast in early 2009 that if he didn't fix things in three years, he would not deserve re-election.
In the 2008 campaign, Obama derided the war on terror as either ineffective or unconstitutional. That issue in 2012 will be ancient history, too, since President Obama has simply embraced all the major Bush-Cheney antiterrorism protocols and wars, and expanded many of them, from renditions to Predator drone targeted assassinations to a third war in Libya. Obama's campaign commercials will highlight the commander in chief who ordered the successful hit on bin Laden, not the civil libertarian who closed Guantanamo Bay as promised.
A supposedly do-nothing
So if we know what won't be campaign issues, what exactly will be?
The economy. If the current bleak picture stays the same or gets worse, Obama will be forced to argue, as did incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1932, that after four years his borrow/print/spend remedies still have not kicked in. And so he will claim that he needs eight years, not four, for Keynesian economics to finally work. Good luck with that silly argument.
But should things improve somewhat over the next year, then Obama will insist that his spending tonic is at last working, and he deserves another term to further nurse the recovering economy.
It is that simple: Almost every campaign issue other than the economy either will be off the table or irrelevant -- thanks largely to the past protocols of Barack Obama himself.
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What's Off the Table in 2012? | Politics
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