Obama Dumps Dems

Obama's speech did not contain a single reference to the Democratic Party or Democrats. His website doesn't mention that he is running on the Democratic ticket. His bio says he was elected to the Illinois Senate, then the U.S. Senate, and then the Presidency, but it never mentions which party he has been affiliated with. The convention that just concluded is not referred to by his campaign as the Democratic National Convention, but instead as just the 2012 Convention. None of the t-shirts, coffee cups, bumper stickers, or other trinkets that his campaign is selling indicate which party Obama is with. From his website, you can buy merchandise proclaiming Nurses for Obama, Environmentalists for Obama, Hispanics for Obama, Latinos for Obama, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Obama, African Americans for Obama, and Babies for Obama, but there isn't a single Democrats for Obama item for sale.

It's pretty clear that Obama does not want to be identified as a Democrat. Presidential campaigns don't just accidentally forget to mention their party affiliation. The decision would have been made at the very highest level, by Obama himself.

People who have watched Obama over the years will not be surprised that he is running alone. When he ran for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, Obama positioned himself as a candidate who was beyond partisan politics. He paid very little attention to most of the other candidates who were running in the same election, putting all his effort into getting himself elected. He didn't want to be encumbered by the positions his party had taken in the past or by politicians whom he might not agree with on all issues. He didn't share the rock-star attention he was drawing to himself, and he didn't share the enormous amounts of money or volunteers he amassed.

Obama followed the same plan when he first ran for President. He was elected with the help of Democratic voters and the Democratic Party, even though he did almost nothing to help the party succeed. As a result, he had no coattails, and his election left him with a Congress that did not have the strong Democratic majority he needed. Once he was president, he turned his back on one Democratic constituency after another, angering his base.

Now, Obama is once again running on the Democratic ticket, but without any indication that he feels any obligation to his own party or even sees a value in having a Democratic Party. It would have been easy for Obama to urge at the convention that everyone work hard for the entire Democratic ticket. Presidents usually do that. But he didn't. He drew all the attention to himself. He told us what he had done during his first term, and what he was going to do during his second, as if he was the entire government and not just the head of one branch. Although he told us that the Republican message that “you are on your own” is an un-American message, that is precisely the message he was sending to nearly every Democrat who is running for Congress, Senate, governor, mayor, or sheriff, and to every Democratic party volunteer and voter. He is running for President, and the rest of us are on our own.

Obama does not seem to realize that without more Democrats in Congress, his agenda is doomed. The Republicans who opposed his policies will be no more interested in them after the election than they were before, and if there aren't more Democrats to support his policies, they will go nowhere.

Obama is a smart man, but in his zeal to promote himself he seems not to have understood what he told the nation in his big speech Thursday night, that we are all in this together. Unless he figures that out very soon and helps other Democrats get elected, he will have no more success in governing the nation during his second term than he did in his first.

Romney Remakes the Blues Brothers

Romney's acceptance speech at the Republican convention last evening reminded me of a scene that has been in so many movies. The audience is gathered, but when the lights dim, for some reason the starring act isn't ready to start the show. Maybe the star performer is caught in traffic, passed out from drinking too much, or just suffering from a bad case of nerves. Stalling for time, someone takes the stage and tells some jokes, or draws out the introduction until the crowd grows restless. In the movies, at the last minute, the performance begins and everything comes out OK.

Last night, Mitt Romney took the stage and tap danced through his entire speech. He kept telling us he had a plan, but he never told us what it was. He kept telling us he would do better than Obama has done, but he never told us how. For nearly an hour, he sounded as if he was waiting for someone to run up to the podium and hand him the notes he had forgotten to bring with him which spelled out what he was going to do if he was elected president.

As Romney concluded his speech, I half expected him to tell the audience in the convention center that he was going to take a little break and that they should order another round of drinks and come back for the second set when he would tell them what his plan was. But, of course, he didn't. He smiled and waved as the balloons dropped and the band played, apparently hoping that we wouldn't notice that he never told us what we wanted to know.

The pundits say that all Romney was trying to do was convince us he was a nice guy. He almost succeeded, as he told us stories about his wife, parents, and kids. But when he went on to attack Obama for not fixing the economy and told us that he wished that Obama had succeeded because he wanted America to succeed, Romney reminded me of the bully who trips a kid in school and then smirks at him, “Gee, sorry you fell down.” Romney's party announced at the beginning of Obama's term that their primary goal was to make sure Obama failed so that they could defeat him when he ran for reelection. If Romney had really wanted Obama to succeed, he should have scolded the delegates he was speaking to for sabotaging their country's economy just to gain a political advantage. Instead, he grinningly affirmed their strategy. Not a nice guy.

Romney promised to put ten million people back to work. He promised prosperity. He promised to reduce the deficit without raising taxes or cutting military spending. He promised and promised and promised. But he never even came close to giving us even the slightest idea of how he was going to accomplish any of these things.

Romney is telling us we should elect him because our country is failing and he knows how to fix it. I would hope that before banks loaned Mr. Romney millions of dollars to take over companies, they would have insisted that he show them a business plan for how he was going to make failing companies succeed. It seems to me that we have at least as much right to insist that Romney explain his plans to us before we trust him with our future.