Why voters should give Obama four more years
Lewis DiuguidKansas City area households haven’t had to endure endless political ads from President Barack Obama or Republican challenger Mitt Romney, but that doesn’t mean people have surrendered the Show-Me State to either candidate.
Committed folks have been making calls and knocking on doors. Never mind that in 2008 Missouri veered from a long tradition of picking the winning presidential candidate. The state went to Republican John McCain.
That shift caused people to assume Missouri would go for Romney on Election Day. But Susan Montee isn’t so sure.
Montee, a Democrat seeking the lieutenant governor job, said in a July meeting with The Star’s editorial board that in the 2008 presidential election McCain won by only about 3,600 votes. Missouri had abolished straight ticket voting in 2006.
Many voters, unaware of the change, may have marked their ballots thinking they were voting a straight ticket, only to have the ballots rejected. If enough of the errant ballots favored Democrats, that could have swung the state to McCain.
Montee, who had been Missouri auditor, said the vote was not checked. But many suspect Missouri had again picked the winner — Obama.
Courts have tossed out voter ID laws in Missouri and some other states saying they disenfranchise older people, minorities and the poor. Many of those groups traditionally vote for Democrats. Missourians should pick Obama again. He offers the clearest plan on ending the war in Afghanistan in 2014, following his bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.
Voters should give the president four more years to fix the economy, lower the jobless rate and set the nation on a new course for the future. That’ll entail getting youths and out-of-work Americans college-ready for jobs.
Obama wants to invest more in education. GOP cuts in funding for schools and Republicans’ plans to kill the U.S. Department of Education are hardly the way to go.
The country needs a solid kick in the slats like the Russians gave the U.S. in the 1950s by launching Sputnik, showing that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in science. That energized kindergarten-to-college education and got the country excited enough to get baby boomers to follow their GI-bill fathers on to college.
But boomers, being the self-centered generation, appear to have dropped the ball. Many of our offspring may not live as well as we have.
Obama hopes to push the nation to correct that downward trajectory.
Voters have to see the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. Having the best and most costly health care system in the world that 50 million people who live here have to do without is sinful.
Romney, cheered by his base, has said he plans to end what many derisively label Obamacare. That should be unacceptable to voters.
Baby boomers, who haven’t been the best at taking care of themselves, need Obamacare to keep from being dropped by insurance companies. Women also won’t have to pay more just because of their gender.
An additional 35 million more Americans by 2014 will be covered by health insurance than before. Thank Obamacare. Presidents going back to Teddy Roosevelt had tried and failed to achieve what Obama accomplished. Tearing up that progressive course for the country would be backward.
So would tax cuts and radical spending cuts as solutions to every economic problem. Going retro in this global economy would be ruinous.
The NAACP Crisis Magazine deservedly gives Obama high marks on civil rights enforcement, reducing sentencing disparities on crack vs. powder cocaine possession, boosting Pell Grants so low-income students can go to college and broadening federal authority over hate crimes.
“So without making a public flourish, Obama has run an administration that has done the unglamorous work of enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws, a thrust particularly important in the job market during this period of high unemployment,” Crisis said.
Voters must decide whether they want to be worse off or better off in the next four years. Obama offers plans to take the U.S. forward.
To reach Lewis W. Diuguid call 816-234-4723 or send email to Ldiuguid@kcstar.com.
George Hunsucker
Northland
6 months, 3 weeks agoanohter parody from lewis….
16 TRILLION in debt, TRILLION dollar deficits, unemployment over 8% for 43 months and the latest, Benghazi gate where Americans were basically abandoned by the big 0 and lewis says “give him another 4 years”….
Good Sunday morning laugher lewis… keep ‘em coming which I am sure you will….
Even the Des Moines Register has the intelligence to say the big 0 failed and “has to be let go”…. the star and its lib dominated EB will never do that….
John Stolte
6 months, 2 weeks agoAmerica tends to back winners and allow losers to fall by the wayside. Obama belongs at the wayside.