There are two different President Barack Obamas.
One is the person who passed health care reform, turned the U.S. auto industry around and made college more affordable by expanding the Federal Pell Grant and keeping interest rates down on loans. His foreign policy has also led to the death of Osama Bin Laden and the end of the war in Iraq.
The other Obama is a person republicans have made up. He is no more real than the invisible Obama Clint Eastwood talked to during the Republican National Convention.
Republicans have been able to convince some that Obama is a president who has put us in danger with his weak foreign policy. They paint him as the farthest left president we have ever had. They say Obama’s signature health care law, “Obamacare,” is the root of all our economic problems.
I once heard someone say, “Obamacare is driving up the cost of plywood.”
This person believed this because republicans do what they always do. They double down and keep repeating something until some people believe the nonsense that is coming out of their mouths.
The truth about the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is that it is a good thing for lower and middle-income families. It does not allow insurance companies to discriminate based on preexisting conditions and insures children and young adults until the age of 26.
Also, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that over the long run the Affordable Care Act will reduce the deficit, not increase it, by paying for itself through tax increases and a restructuring of Medicare.
Obama did not drag down small businesses with his healthcare plan. Truly small businesses with 10 employees or less get a 50 percent tax credit for providing health insurance.
The republican’s version of Obama is a guy who is also weak on foreign policy. He is easy on Iran, wants to cut military spending and views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from both perspectives instead of taking foreign policy advice from a 3,000-year-old book. The latter is thankfully true.
In reality, the current sanctions on Iran are some of the toughest in history. Earlier this year the U.S. and several other nations, including Japan, South Korea and China, diverted oil purchases away from Iran.
This move severely damaged Iran’s economy and has caused them to take some big steps back in their efforts to enrich uranium.
Obama has actually mentioned the idea of decreasing the defense budget, but military spending has increased since he took office. This should be very frustrating to anyone who claims to be fiscally responsible, such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Yet, a Romney/Ryan ticket does not want to cut defense spending.
Five percent of our gross domestic product goes toward defense spending. Combine the defense spending of every country in the world, and the U.S. makes up 41 percent of the world military spending, according to the SIPRI Yearbook 2012.
Our military is budgeted to fight a future war with space aliens, while our greatest security threat at the moment is people who make homemade bombs. There is not a need, defensively, to be spending a ton of money building a bunch of Space-Based Lasers, which is an actual thing.
Obama and his fellow democrats have had trouble selling their successes to the public in the past. This is why republicans have been somewhat successful in creating this fake Obama. Since hitting the campaign trail, Obama, with some help from Bill Clinton, has gotten better at owning the successes he has had and communicating them with the public.
The republicans now need a fake Obama to run against because they cannot beat the real Obama come November.
