The Undecideds

By Alan Caruba

We are now into the seemingly endless countdown until the November 6 elections and the agony of waiting is already wearing upon a vast portion of those people who know for whom the will vote. They have already made up their minds, leaving the outcome to a slim margin of those identified as either “undecideds” or “independents.”

These are the people who tend to forget your birthday and send a “belated” card to make amends, but it is always too late. They are likely the ones who file their income tax late despite months in which to prepare it. These are people who ignore parking tickets. They are not studiously studying the candidate’s positions on issues. They haven’t been paying any attention to them.

This election, like all elections, is deemed the most important one in the history of the nation, but despite electing some genuinely bad previous choices for President, there is an ominous quality to this election because the nation is dead broke and, curiously, arguing over whether to let Social Security and Medicare become insolvent in a few years or whether to keep the latest destruction of our health system, Obamacare. It is a piece of legislation that literally takes $700 billion from Medicare and includes some twenty hidden taxes.

So, yes, it really does matter who gets elected or reelected.

How America has managed to split so dramatically along partisan lines of division is something that I will leave to future historians to determine. We have spent the second part of the last century and first decade of this one swinging wildly back and forth between conservatives and liberals. The conservatives like Ronald Reagan were usually elected to clean up the mess left behind by liberals like Jimmy Carter.

Muddying the problem for conservative voters are men like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush who were nominally Republicans and conservatives, but who just as often left a legacy of a liberal expansion of government. In Nixon’s case, it is the horror of the Environmental Protection Agency and, in Bush43’s case, the failure of No Child Left Behind, the expansion of the federal government into the education sector; one that has been rendering generations of Americans ignorant of history, civics, math and science.

What makes this election so grotesque is the mind-boggling record of failure of the current incumbent, Barack Obama. He has literally imposed more debt on the nation than all the previous presidents combined! His “solutions” have been a string of costly failures. And his campaign is a series of lies and blunders that are setting new records for mendacity and deceit.

The wisest thing Lyndon Johnson did was to announce that he would not run for reelection in1968 after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. He had blundered so badly in escalating the war in Vietnam that he stepped aside. He was arguably the most liberal President, remembered for his “War on Poverty”, until the advent of Barack Obama, a Marxist who is likely to be remembered for his war on America.

The Republican Nixon replaced Johnson, promising that he had a “plan” to end the war, but it did not end until his second term. Then he was forced to end his second term by resigning over an insane effort to influence his reelection, Watergate. Why do I cite such matters of history—because Americans in general seem to have no memory of history even when it has been fairly recent.

So the nation now finds that its future is in the hands of a slim margin of voters who, we’re told by pollsters, are undecided. How can one be undecided about a President who has not solved unemployment for the past forty-two months?

# Who has waged war on Wall Street and Main Street.

# Who has waged war on the energy sector of the economy, coal, oil, and natural gas.

# Who has ignored the advice of his own commission on ways to turn around and save the economy.

# Who has engaged in the worst examples of crony capitalism, all of which resulted in the loss or waste of billions.

# Who now allows his surrogate super pacs to engage in the most scurrilous slanders of his opponents, claiming that they are literally murderers!

# Who lies about their efforts to save Social Security and Medicare, saying they intend to end these programs.

In the 1980s, Americans understood how poor Jimmy Carter’s term in office had been and turned to a sunny, optimistic, and unapologetic patriot, Ronald Reagan. One has to wonder if the current generations of voters—old and young—understand just what a disaster Barack Obama has been?

That is why we must endure more weeks and months until we learn the answer. For most voters, the decision has already been made. Some care deeply about the future. Others care more deeply about their welfare checks and food stamps in an economy driven into the ditch by politicians they have blindly supported.

America teeters on financial collapse and there are people who will vote for a man who is telling them that whatever success they have had in their lives is due entirely to a government that is too large, too intrusive, and a growing threat to their hopes and dreams.

It should be a no-brainer. It isn’t.

At times like this, I am reminded of John Adams, a Founding Father, who said, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

It is an apt description of those who will vote to reelect Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012