Friday, October 26, 2012

Why You Should Vote for President Obama

I have several friends who I've heard want to vote for Mr. Romney in the upcoming presidential election. I decided that I need to do my part in providing both positive reasons for President Obama and negative reasons against Mr. Romney in my own words in an attempt to persuade you to change your vote. So here I go.
  • Because he restored our standing in the world after Bush screwed it all up. We got out of Iraq, we’re trying to get out of Afghanistan, we got Bin Laden, and we helped depose Gadhafi at a tiny fraction of the cost of Iraq and with no lives lost.
  • Because he actually wants to pay for things and not put them on a credit card. Bush put two wars, Medicare D, and two huge tax cuts on a credit card while Obama gets pilloried for defining how the Affordable Care Act will be paid for. You may complain about the deficit and how it grew under Obama: Of course it grew! He a) put all those unpaid items on the official books and b) saved the US financial system from a monumental meltdown which required spending money to help stabilize the economy.
  • Because Obama saved us from a freaking financial meltdown. Do you not remember where the DOW was four years ago because of Bush’s incompetence and republican deregulation? It was at around 6,000. Today it is over 13,000. How’s that for growth? And jobs are growing. Slowly, but that beats the 700,000 job losses/month when he entered office.
  • Because of the stimulus. Speaking of growth, I know that “stimulus” may be a dirty word with conservatives (and Obama capitulated to this mindset). However, did you notice that the economy has slowed down this year? Romney sure did, he keeps saying this year was slower than last year; last year was slower than the year before. This is true, and it’s because the (too small!) stimulus ran out and Congress has refused to pass a second stimulus along with any other economic help. Almost all economists were for a second one (or a significantly bigger first one), this would have definitely helped to recover the economy quicker if it had passed. So if you don’t like our current economy, blame Congressional Republican intransigence.
  • Because Obama saved GM and the US auto industry. I also wouldn’t have done it; I would have let them go bankrupt. But he did it, and it worked. I was wrong.
  • Because Obama passed the Affordable Care Act. It’s not perfect; I would have preferred a single payer system. But it’s definitely not a “socialist government takeover of healthcare”. It gets rid of preexisting conditions (including “being a woman”), helps kids stay on their parents’ insurance longer, and encourages personal responsibility by mandating that everyone sign up. That’s right, the “personal mandate”. Don’t tell me that you’re one of the Tea Partiers who are against personal responsibility of everyone to be “in the system” in order to pay for it.
  • Because the economy needs levelheaded help.
  • Because it is not class warfare to say that if you make millions of dollars, you should contribute a little more in taxes to help out those not as fortunate.
  • Because Obama (finally!) endorsed the idea that a loving same-sex couple should have the same rights to marry as any other couple. Others have made many arguments for same-sex marriage that I won’t go to here. All I’ll say is this: if you don’t think this is such a big deal, or if you think “civil unions” are enough, then I’m disappointed you think marriage is such a cheap and unimportant thing. LGBT people certainly think higher of marriage than that and aspire to it.
  • Because he got rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It was a very harmful policy, and its repeal has been shown as a non-event. We were right.
  • Because we need more Supreme Court Justices like Kennedy, Stevens, and Ginsburg, not Thomas, Scalia, and Alito.
  • Because reality and history currently has a pro-Obama bias. Facts matter and facts back up Obama’s stands on much more than Romney.

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