Marco
Rubio, Republican Senator from Florida and the new Republican hope to attract
Latino voters has declared in his campaign to get the Vice Presidential nod
from Romney that Barack Obama is the most divisive president in our nation's
history.
That
Rubio charge can be addressed on a number of levels. First, historically he’s just wrong. Abraham Lincoln’s election was used as an
excuse by some southerners to get their states to secede from the Union. Ultimately a Civil War ensued because the
“divisive” President Lincoln insisted on keeping this one nation. Six hundred thousand Americans died, four
million slaves were freed from bondage and America remained one nation. But if
you believed the southerners, and the northern Democrats, it was all due to
that divisive “Black Republican” A.
Lincoln.
President
Andrew Jackson because of his successful attack on the Bank of the US was
censured by the Senate; and, the political parties of the 1830's were developed
around whether you liked or disliked “King Andrew”.
And of
course there was Franklin Delano Roosevelt (referred to as Rosenfeld by his
anti Semitic conservative opponents).
The haters hated him. He said he
reveled in their hatred. And because of
the unity of the country after Pearl Harbor the popular image is not of the
divisiveness of the 1930's. A
divisiveness by the way that pitted a minority of voters against a clear and
recurring majority.
Now
along comes Barack Obama. Following
eight years of the Bush-Cheney Presidency in which the concept of dividing our
people by age, gender, class, ideology and life style met its apogee and was
the political strategy of both the election of 2000 (where a majority of the
American voters rejected it) and 2004.
President
Obama since his inauguration has made effort after effort to work with his
opponents. He even adopts their policies
to the chagrin of liberal Democrats and then the right wing radical tea party
Republican turn on him. They blame him
for the failures and or weaknesses of their policies that he institutes. And they deny him credit for his successes -
such as saving the American auto industry.
In the election of 2008 Obama did not make an issue of McCain being born
in the Canal Zone but the right wing tea party Republicans continue to this day
to make an issue of his birth in Hawaii. In one state, Arizona, they are even
trying to deny people the right to vote on his re-election. The Republicans in
the Senate filibuster every proposal and delay every appointment. The attacks on the President make the attacks
on Bill Clinton seem mild in comparison.
On the
first matter to come before the administration the President compromised on the
amount of the stimulus and while economists now concede that that program
prevented the economy from getting worse their remains a strong contingent who
believe that it should have been much larger.
The President has given ground to
the Republicans on program cuts as they hold expiring programs and debt
ceilings hostage - the result - while the private sector tries to reinvigorate
the economy the Republican forced compromises reduce the governments
participation in pumping up the public sector.
On health care the President compromised - dropped the Democratic public
option and incorporated the Republican individual mandate and so what did they do
-- appealed to the Supreme Court to
ditch the plan because it contained their individual mandate.
Who
here has been divisive - the President who smiles when attacked and offers to
reason together -- or the Republicans
who cannot concede even the fact of his birth not to mention the sincerity of
his patriotism.
Rubio
and The Romneyites are the dividers.
Romney with his million dollars of commercials even divides his own
party as he destroys his primary opponents.
For these radical right wing tea party Republicans to now claim that it
is Obama who has been divisive is “like the pot calling the kettle black” or
maybe that’s the problem - they can’t deal with the fact that the kettle isn’t
aluminum.
21 May
2012
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