Rabbi Pruzansky's Blog

How even and unpredictable is the presidential election? Consider this: Barack Obama’s approval ratings are lower than that of any incumbent president who has been re-elected, but higher than any incumbent president who has been defeated for re-election. No incumbent has been re-elected with a lower winning percentage than in his first election, but Obama –if he wins, still unlikely – will likely be the first to achieve that dubious feat – garnering fewer votes but still winning re-election. He is right on the cusp, which points to his ineffectiveness as president but success as campaigner.

It is still Mitt Romney’s election to lose. No president with Obama’s economic record and foreign policy failures has ever been re-elected, but Romney needs to hammer home several essential points that will defuse Obama’s relentless recitation of meaningless clichés. Debates are an odd format in which to judge presidential timber, as presidents are rarely if ever called on to debate anyone. It is not something they need to have in their tool box, except insofar as it is necessary to connect with an electorate honed on entertainment rather than policy. In short, Romney needs to get tough while remaining pleasant, a little less Mormon-nice and a little more New York.

Therefore, I offer these choice rebuttals to the Obama chestnuts.

Obama:  “I inherited a mess.”

Romney: “Yes, and you made it worse, not better.  Ronald Reagan inherited a bigger mess (20% interest rates, 10% inflation) but he made it better, catapulting the economy to 25 years of economic growth. I want to adopt similar policies.”

Obama: “My opponent’s policies are the same ones that got us into this mess in the first place.”

Romney:  “Not at all. But when you inherited the mess, you made these mistakes – A,B,C,D. You spent money you didn’t have, you pursued an ideological agenda that spent even more money we don’t have, you introduced more instability into the financial system and have depressed investment. No wonder no one is hiring. You made these mistakes – amateurish mistakes – because you have no business experience. You have never run a business in your life and it shows. In the real world, a failing company cannot just print six trillion dollars to bail itself out.

   You didn’t allow failing businesses to be properly reconstructed but intervened in such a way that investors lost while your union buddies received their payoffs. You spent hundreds of billions of dollars on “shovel ready projects” that you laughed off “were not really shovel ready.” There is nothing funny about that, nothing worthy of laughter. That was not your money, that was the hard-earned money of taxpayers. See, you have never run a business and never really worked in the private sector. In the real world, when you lose money, you are losing your money, not someone else’s money, so you’re more careful. You don’t respect the private sector –you just see it as a cash cow that allows you to re-distribute money from the productive to the unproductive, or pursue quixotic quests like Solyndra. Big joke! Another half-trillion dollars – hard earned taxpayer money – down the drain.

    You spent all this money and have nothing to show for it.

    If I had been President in 2009, I would have cut taxes for private businesses and provided tax credits for the first year’s wages to new employees. That would have stimulated growth and jobs. I would have enabled the productive to be more productive by not consuming their work time with compliance with ever increasing paperwork and new regulations. Only the private sector creates jobs that build the economy. You claim you created 5 million new jobs. Please explain exactly what you did to create those jobs. What policies did you pursue to create those jobs? Paying taxpayer money to keep construction crews working – when the money has to be borrowed – creates nothing. It is more reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s whimsical suggestion for “government sponsored full employment:” pay half the people to dig holes, and the other half to fill the holes. Voila! Full employment.

    You are crushing the private sector, and because you have no business experience, you don’t even know it.”

     Obama: “Yes, but I inherited an economy that was the worst since the Great Depression.”

Romney: “Mr. President, with all due respect, blaming your predecessor for everything is not a policy. It’s just whining. Every president inherits problems. That is why he runs for president. I will inherit your mess. But rather than focus every day of my administration on re-election and catering to special interest groups, I will stimulate the economy through targeted tax cuts, unleash the private sector to create jobs and begin an era of American recovery and dominance. You are crushing America’s spirit by waging class warfare and minimizing our true potential. You are crushing America’s spirit by boasting about how many more people receive food stamps, thanks to you, and how many more people receive government assistance, thanks to you. I hope to boast about how many Americans I helped make independent and self-sufficient, how many families remained intact.”

    Obama: “The Republican Congress has blocked all my initiative that would have saved the day.”

Romney: “Sir, even you are aware that for the first two years of your term, Congress was controlled by Democrats with overwhelming majorities. You failed to pursue any meaningful policies that the Democrat Congress could have adopted to jump start the economy. Instead, you squandered your majority by passing a mammoth and wildly unpopular government takeover of the health care system. You and your Democrat Congress have not even submitted a budget in years – how’s that for injecting uncertainty into the business world ? Didn’t you promise your government would be the most transparent ever? It is the least – no one even knows what it is in the budget because you never produce one. That is shameful incompetence. No business could succeed that way – but how would you know? You have never run a business, and it shows.

   It is true that since the people rebelled against your incompetence 2010 and elected a Republican House with which you have been unable to find any common ground. But that is another failure as president. You are president, not dictator. In my state of Massachusetts, I had to cooperate with a Democratic legislature. We compromised, we found common ground. If you can’t, it is another sign of failed leadership and a failed presidency.

     There will likely be a Republican House again and maybe even a Republican Senate. Will you continue to use that as an excuse for inaction if you are re-elected? Probably, and that’s another reason why you should not be re-elected.”

   Obama: “Fortunately, we have turned the corner, and everything is looking up, so let’s look forward.”

Romney: “Actually, everything is worse since you took over. The deficit has skyrocketed to unimaginable levels, unemployment remains stubbornly high and unacceptable, gasoline prices have doubled – do you hear me? Doubled! – since you took office, and yet you are still strangling domestic oil production. You lament our reliance on Mideast oil, but you stubbornly refuse to permit oil exploration in Alaska and unconscionably have refused to allow the construction of the Keystone pipeline that will create thousands of jobs and bring us good Canadian – not Saudi – crude oil. That’s outrageous!

    You were against the extraction of shale oil but couldn’t stop it – so you claimed credit for it!  You have stopped offshore domestic oil drilling but you are subsidizing – with hard-earned taxpayer money – the Brazilians to drill for oil off their coast. Whose president are you?”

    Obama: “My opponent just wants to give more tax breaks to his rich friends.”

Romney: “”You know what you are saying is false, and yet you keep saying it. I want to cut tax rates for everyone – everyone. Naturally, this might sound complicated to Democrats, but you can’t cut taxes for people who don’t pay taxes. That should be easy to follow. They can’t pay less than zero. Cutting tax rates – especially capital gains tax rate – has always increased revenues, not decreased them. More people invest, more people spend, more people are hired and more people work. You know that. You even said once that you know that but fairness is more important than stimulating the economy. But there is nothing fair about taking someone’s money and giving it to someone else. I believe in charity. I give more in charity than I pay in taxes – and that is how it should be.

    Perhaps had you actually worked a day in your life in the private sector you would realize this. The good news is that come November, with the people’s help, you will be dispatched to the private sector. Trust me, you will benefit greatly from my policies, as will the country.”

If Mitt Romney can articulate these themes, the election is his to win. And we will all prosper.

     The narrative sounds eerily familiar. A Democratic president presiding over a weak economy, prone to a foreign policy that distances allies and coddles enemies and who thinks he’s the smartest person on the planet, witnesses the assault on American diplomatic missions in the Muslim world.

      Barack Obama, meet Jimmy Carter, if you haven’t already.

      Muslims, the people of perpetual grievance, have found yet another pretext to kill innocent people – the production by an American of a film biography of Muhammad. From excerpts aired on the radio, the dialogue was so pedestrian as to be laughable. No matter. Muslims, who are forbidden to depict Muhammad in any image, assume that their strictures must apply to every person on the planet, and so have attacked the US embassy in Cairo and the mission in Libya – desecrating the American flag in Cairo (where embassy personnel had been sent home earlier in the day) and murdering innocents (including the US Ambassador to Libya) in Benghazi.

     That tolerance is unknown in the Muslim world is by now a given, so accepted that it is neither sought nor expected. The US embassy’s initial reaction to the Cairo rioters (so far, the only reaction) was to apologize for the film, as if “Americans,” rather than an American exercising his freedom of speech, were responsible. Instead of defending the embassy – which, after all, is considered as sovereign US territory – and/or denouncing the rioters and the Muslim government that allowed the attack to occur, the Obama administration chose, yet again, to apologize to Muslims. The apology, apparently, was for putting Muslims in a position where they have no choice but to kill you. Poor dears, with their uncontrollable rage that is stoked by fecklessness and weakness.

     The irony of the Cairo attack is twofold. Less than a decade ago, Egyptian television aired a fictional series based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” that was replete with Jew hatred, offensive stereotypes and caricatures of Jews. Clearly, Muslims somehow rationalize repugnant attacks on other religions – Judaism, Christianity, and recall the destruction of ancient Buddhist shrines by the Taliban – but fly into a riotous rage when Islam is portrayed negatively. They reserve the right to destroy shuls and churches, but insist that mosques remain sacrosanct. This obvious double standard is abetted by the world – especially the United States – when the victims apologize to the Muslims for unleashing their primitive Muslim wrath. What happened yesterday is just the continuation of the Danish “Muhammad-cartoon” controversy in another form, with Muslims again insisting that rights cherished in the Western world have to be vitiated in order to accommodate Muslim special sensitivities. Of course, no other religion or nation is allowed to insist on a similar claim, and especially not from Muslims. Such weakness only engenders more attacks, as does the coddling of any bully.

     Certainly, good taste and elementary decency would insist that no faith’s cherished icons, edifices, personalities or tenets be ridiculed at all – but taste and decency are not hallmarks of the Western world, nor are they considered limitations on the freedoms extant in the West. More importantly, Muslims have no moral right to insist on good taste and decency from anyone as long as they don’t practice it themselves. Mutual respect, the foundation of the civilized world, begins with mutuality.

     The second irony of the Cairo embassy attack is that Cairo, in June 2009, was the locus for one of President Obama’s most famous apology speeches, where he sought to assuage the hurt feelings of the Muslim world from the years of US imperialism and domination, as Obama saw it. It was intended to be America’s reset button with Islam, especially after the US actions “forced” Muslims to hijack US airliners, fly them into US skyscrapers and murder thousands of American civilians – a crime celebrated in the Muslim world at the time with wild cheering, and a crime commemorated yesterday in Egypt and Libya with assaults on American diplomatic missions and the murder of yet more Americans.

     It is fascinating that what generates fury in the Muslim world is a bad movie, but not the ongoing massacre of upwards of 23,000 Muslims in Syria. Syria’s diplomatic posts are safe from Muslim frenzy, and the carnage continues apace. Why doesn’t any nation intervene? Why is the slaughter being observed with Western detachment, except for periodic and perfunctory denunciations accompanied by empty threats?

    One possibility presents, as indelicate as it sounds. The Western world has tired of Muslims and their irrational passions, and simply does not care if they kill each other – as long as they don’t kill us. The Western world is tired of intervening – with the loss of blood and treasure – to prevent Muslims from killing each other. Let them blow each other up, in their mosques, streets and wedding halls. Yet another 100 people were killed in Iraq this past Sunday without evincing the slightest reaction from Americans or other Westerners. Another 10,000 will be killed in Syria in the coming months? Great, knock yourselves out, have a good time. We extend our sympathies to the victims and their families, feel bad about the children, and hope it ends soon. But if Muslims are troubled by Muslims killing Muslims, let Muslims do something about it.

     When savagery becomes routine, even acceptable, and when today’s victims were yesterday’s murderers, it is difficult to muster even crocodile tears, much less genuine sympathy for their plight. The Muslim world has coerced a hardening of Western hearts. It is one of the few places in the world where dictators are overthrown in popular uprisings only to be succeeded by even more brutal dictators; it is the only place in the world were random violence against innocent civilians is considered normal, and even sacred. And Muslim attacks on American diplomats preceded even the Carter feebleness; in March, 1973, the US Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel was kidnapped and killed (along with his deputy) in a Palestinian attack on the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, an attack orchestrated and masterminded by Yasser Arafat who (it’s on tape) personally ordered their murders. That didn’t stop Bill Clinton from feting Arafat at the White House twenty years later, when he should have been incarcerating him.

     Obama’s reset with Russia has worked out as well as his reset with Muslims. Each has only grown in contempt for America’s weak leader and the helplessness of the country he leads. Obama’s foreign policy successes (e.g., the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, on something close to the Bush timetable, it is worth adding) has not made America stronger or the world safer. On the contrary: the incompetence and spinelessness (literally: Obama’s bowing to the Saudi king made a deep impression in Islam) of the Obama administration set the stage for this latest attack on Americans and American interests in the Muslim world, and a new round of apologies.

     Add to that another snub of Israel’s prime minister by this president, and it is Jimmy Carter-time once again.

     Fortunately, Jimmy Carter was a one-term president.