Some have felt they've already seen a criminal take over the White House in the present and the historical past of the country, like when Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were in office. But a recent Democratic primary in West Virginia showed that the latest political party, the "anybody-but-Obama crowd" was willing to purposefully put an official criminal in the White House during election 2012 if it meant Obama got the boot.
Keith Judd, a Texas inmate serving time for the felony crime of threatening a Mexico university, made it to the Democratic primary ticket in West Virginia this week and almost trounced the president in total votes of support.
Isn't that interesting?
Judd isn't gay, black or a member of the New Black Panthers and he still gave the president a run for his money, garnering as much as 41 percent of the vote, according to NPR. The more shocking thing is many didn't even know him that voted for him.
"The folks that we spoke to generally had no idea who Mr. Judd was. They just knew he was not the president," Host Messina Block said.
That proves that the sentiment running in W. VA., as well as other parts of the country—as evidenced by Romney supporters—is that Obama is so disliked for whatever reasons (just take your pick: poor economy, no job growth, high gas prices, energy failures), that folks are willing to vote for an unknown candidate rather than have four more years of the same ole, same ole from this one.
And that includes voting for a criminal.
With that kind of sentiment running around the country, Keith Judd just might have gotten elected if Mitt Romney wasn't giving Americans a better option, instead.
Judd's main W. VA. supporters according to NPR appear to be those who have suffered from Obama's energy policy decisions and how they impact the economy.
"The recurring issue involves coal," an AP journalist named Lawrence Messina told the NPR host.
Apparently, since W. VA. is dependent for the most part on its coal mining abilities and resources, and Obama is as tight with the mining permits as he is with the oil drilling kind, work has been scarce in the state.
Unlike other parts of the country, the state has little other means to support its citizens, driving them to seek a new president more sympathetic to their plight than offering to keep them on welfare the rest of his time in office.
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Comments: 64
You missed the one, true reason why this feeling exists: Obama is black. You know it, I know it and the voters of West Virginia know it. As the photo of GWB floating around the Internet says: "I know I screwed up, but thanks for blaming it all on the black guy."
Having inherited that situation, accomplishing anything is noteworthy. What he has accomplished is implementing an imperfect but improved health care regimen, raised employment, watch the stock market recover, ended the war in Iraq, caught bin Laden, and restored some of the respect that Bush lost in the world. Not great, but not all that bad.
What other than racism and hyper partisanship prevents the right from acknowledging any of that and instead acting as though Obama inherited sunshine, roses, rainbows and pots of gold and gave it all to Hugo Chavez while praying to Allah and giving the American people the finger.
You guys are reality challenged if you can't see your own bias.
Oops. He really didn't. So it's unethical for him to go blaming his predecessor for his failure to deliver what he said he could. Bush, in this case, "didn't make him do it." Obama got his own self into that hot water.
Jane Brown said: "Rory, what you would admit if your fair-minded is that Obama created the bed he now lays in because he campaigned that he was Mr. Fix It and had all the answers."
Not accurate, Jane. What I admit, since I am an impartial (Canadian) observer without a dog in this race, is that Obama did not do some of the things he probably should have done. He should have gone further with health care reform and institute single-payer, universal health care closer to the Canadian model. He should have used his Congressional majority in the first two years more aggressively and not wasted so much time trying to get obstinant Republican obstructionists to co-operate. He should have seen sooner that they never would. He should not have appointed Wall Street types to important cabinets posts. He should have turned sharply away from Bush-era foreign policy instead of continuing in that direction largely.
But Obama never claimed to have "all the answers", and the degree to which he promised to be "Mr. Fixi It" was not out of proportion with any other candidate for the presidency. They all promise to fix things. To some degree, they all fail.
I would take Republican criticism of Obama more seriously if it were rational and grounded in something real. Obama is deserving of criticism on several fronts. But instead of attempting to voice such reasoned objections to his presidency we have been treated to the thinly disguised yet overt racism of the birther nonsense, irrelevent and inaccurate accusations regarding his religious affiliation, over-the-top claims of communism for a president who has been determinedly centrist, and complete amnesia concerning the very real crises he inherited from his predecessor.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
Try, just try, to actually express concrete criticism of his presidency without resorting to birther nonsense, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, or the ignorant and inaccurate use of the terms communist and socialist. It can be done, there are legitimate criticism to be made of him in this nature. None of them have been made on the right in the past four years (with the possible exception of David Frum, a Canadian ex-pat and former Bush speech writer who got drummed out of conservative circles for daring to speak rationally about the man).
Can you do it?
The Republicans did the right thing opposing the Obama agenda.
And if you are not hearing the legitimate criticisms of Obama it's because you are not listening.
It would be refreshing to hear reality based criticism of Obama from the right. It's not an impossible task, just one that seems beyond the capacity of the right wing in America today. I already asked for this above and in response got your platitude about Republican fealty to the wishes of their constituents (without evidence to support the claim) and Democratic fecklessness (agains, sans evidence) and a negative offering attempting to blame me for the lack of critique not centred on racism, hyper-partisanship, political ignorance, homophobia or Islamophobia.
Go ahead. The floor's all yours.
Precisely Rory, & why I have yet to decide whether I'll vote for him again...
Any money says he hates "1%ers".
Every billionaire in America will pay more in taxes in one year than you will make in your entire life. They will probably donate more to the democrat party than you will make in your entire life. Why do you think a liberal president elected in 2008, promising to make them pay their fair share, who inherited a filibuster proof congressional super majority DIDN'T raise taxes? Instead they voted to keep the tax cuts in a lame duck session after the TEA arty whipped their asses 2 years later and he signed it!!
You guys are wonderful and I love you to death but I'll never understand why you allow yourselves to be so easily lead around by your noses...
Ask Romney's sec who pays higher taxes than he ;) or better yet. Google it.
2012 Liberal that = "The rich will pay their fair share!!"
Blah Blah Blah...
Liberals won a super majority and extended tax cuts... In a lame duck session!!!
Don't worry Chelsea, They are serious this time. Obviously you are smart enough to realize this.
It's all politics isn't it
And I believe that Obama never had a super-majority, but was one seat short of a filibuster-proof congress.
If "fixing the economy" is easy why hasn't the rest of the world done it either? This wasn't a case of one thing happening back in 2008 and somebody just walking in and righting the ship and everything would be hunky dory. The last time the economy took a hit like the one it did in the last months of the Bush administration was in 1929 and it took a decade and the start of a world war to end that economic mess. So stop believing in magic wands and recognize that there are much bigger problems than any president could have just wished away in four years.
Add to the deep complexity of America's economic problems (over-consumption, excessive public, private and corporate debt, under taxation, declining manufacturing sector going back at least to the 1970s, over reliance on foreign energy imports, etc.) the fact that the president does not have absolute power over the government, let alone over the economy. The American Constitution provides for the separation of powers, and Congress also plays a role. Most Americans seem to think Congress has done a pretty poor job on there end over the past two years. But even if the government was all at Obama's beck and call, that is still not total control over the economy. You have a free enterprise system, remember. That means that the private sector is a much bigger player in the economy and the president cannot just send them a memo saying pick up your socks.
Obama did reduce taxes for the middle class. But that was wrong, even if politically expedient. The fact is that Americans are taxed less than pretty much every other industrialized nation in the world and this fact is not unrelated to your massive public debt. You have to pay your bills.
Just because you don't want a tax increase doesn't mean you don't need one.
I don't care if you believe in santa clause, the Easter bunny and bigfoot. He inherited a filibuster proof super-majority and only lost it when Ted Kennedy died and Scott brown ran against Obama's HC bill. Google it.
What a failure Obama is for not getting his entire agenda through between January and March of 2009. Clearly a white president could have mopped up the Bush mess and rammed through a few dozen bills in that time, right?
As with all presidential candidates going back as far as there are records, Obama offered a platform and presented himself as capable of delivering on that platform. As with all presidents elected in your entire history, he has not delivered the entirety of his platform exactly as imagined in campaign rhetoric. As with all presidents, not only of the USA but of any country, he encountered obstacles both known and unforeseen that delayed or diverted some of his agenda. As with all presidents in a country with a constitutional division of powers, he had to negotiate, cajole, entreat, implore, bluff, and threaten to try and get co-operation with the legislative branch.
Success or failure? Arguments can be made to support either contention. But if your criteria is holding him to his promises literally and in every detail then he joins a list of presidential failures 44 names long and counting.
But you (i.e. 'the right') do hold Obama to a different standard. You hold him responsible for things that happened before he was president (the Bush era economic collapse and the immediate debt increase that inevitably followed it are laid entirely at his door). His campaign rhetoric and promises are raised to canonical scripture in your assessment of him in a position historically known for divergence from such pronouncements. You ask him to prove his citizenship in a way never asked of any of the white men that went before him and for no reason at all. You disparage his name constantly as though it was something he chose rather than being born into. You infer religious beliefs he has never claimed to hold and thus deny your own national creed of freedom of religion.
All I have asked of you here is that you express honest criticism of his actual policies and performance without invective and the application of a standard unique to him alone amongst all presidents who have held the office. In response I've have received none, only more of the same.
If that is not bigotry, racial prejudice, then what is it? Please, tell me, I'd like to know.
That's why Toomey and Corbett both won in November of 2010, and why Romney will take Pennsylvania.
I know what havoc Obama has wrought in four years...and what failure he has brought to the economic and job scene, let alone the divisions between races and the same-sex issue, so he's not getting my vote.
I'll give the new guy on the block a chance, as he hasn't proven to me yet that he is a failure as a president. What do I have to lose, anyway, but four more years of failure, and I've already had that. :-)