Obama’s ideology, failures are linked

Charles Krauthammer's Aug. 12 piece “The case against re-election,” cogently lays out two potent strategies for guiding the GOP campaign to unseat the current U.S. president. One is to capitalize on the president's spectacularly unsuccessful effort to end the nation's economic stagnation. The other is to attack his ideological tunnel vision.

Krauthammer couches his discussion as an either-or proposition. I suggest that the two arguments actually dovetail with each other. The president's accomplishments fall far short of satisfactory because of his flawed philosophy of governance. The Republicans could handily impale him on this connection.

The Associated Press reports this as the weakest economic recovery since the 1930s. While the recession did begin during the previous administration, candidate Obama was presented to the electorate as an over-hyped superhero with vast powers to heal and restore. What has followed since the inauguration, however, is a series of spastic and incomprehensible big government spending stunts, nightmarish regulatory expansion, and a specter of paralyzing tax increases. The president's obsessive and toxic war on the wealthy - the producers, the job creators - can only perpetuate this paralysis.

All this was foreseeable in 2009 as the administration began unrolling its naive and gimmick-riddled program. It is this jarring disconnect between presidential promise and presidential attainment, underscored by an obvious witlessness of economic fundamentals, that provides the GOP a fertile field to link Obama's ideology to his consequent failures.

Dale Fitzgibbons

Cedar Rapids