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Townhall...
What’s
Off the Table in 2012?
By Victor Davis Hanson
9/1/2011
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
Texas A&M undergraduate transcript of Texas Gov. Rick Perry,
showing some
dismal grades and thus apparent proof that Perry was not much of a past
student
-- or current thinker. But in this regard, Obama has never released
either his
Occidental or Columbia transcripts. In response, the media in 2008
shrugged and
chose not to pursue the matter the way it had with the C-grade records
of
George W. Bush, Al Gore and John Kerry. Apparently Obama has
established
another wise precedent that long-ago college transcripts, like
churchgoing, are
irrelevant.
Civility
is off the table, too.
Candidate Obama once called sitting president Bush “unpatriotic” for
borrowing
$4 trillion in eight years -- a sum he matched in less than three. He
advised
Latinos to “punish our enemies” and mocked opponents for wanting to put
“alligators and moats” on the border. Obama’s advisors reportedly
promised to
“Kill Romney.” So civility is out the window, and 2012 will once again
be a
typically American no-holds-barred slugfest of anything goes from both
sides.
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.
Read the rest of the column at Townhall
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