DO WE ALL HAVE ROMNESIA? OR WERE WE JUST NOT PAYING ATTENTION? By Louise Annarino, October 20, 2012
Honestly, if one more person is interviewed on camera to explain why she is still undecided about this election, I’ll….use your imagination! The media needs to stop giving special attention to undecided voters; and instead, pay more attention to the candidates. Civic duty should be encouraged. Instead, we reward those who lack it while they act as if their decisions are more thoughtful than those who have been engaged all along. Hogwash!
Barack Obama has been president nearly 4 years and was running for the office a year before that. Mitt Romney ran for president 4 years ago and is now running a SECOND time. He appeared in numerous televised debates for the Republican Party nomination during the primary season. These two are not strangers in our news cycles.
Where have undecided persons been all this time? To think that the least attentive, least informed, and one could argue, least interested among us could decide an election is pathetic. Newscasters and pollsters, must stop coddling them and empowering their lack of civi engagement. What they think and the positions they take are not based on an accumulation of facts over time, but on last minute celebrity!
Playing to undecided voters allows newspersons to create drama and avoid hard realities. Playing to undecided voters allows candidates to wiggle out of earlier positions and pretend they don’t recall shameful past incidents. Playing to undecided voters rewrites what each candidate has, or has failed to, accomplish.
I’ll be watching the next debate. But, afterwards, I shall not be watching the focus group of undecided voters to see who they decide to vote off the island.
Meanwhile, if you are someone who still has questions because you work 2 jobs, have kids to deliver to school/work/activities and have been just too busy to keep up, you are faced with the fact that for months Romney has refused to provide details of how he would implement his policies (which change repeatedly), cannot do the math on any of his broad proposals, and thinks if he repeats a right-wing talking-point often enough it becomes truth. His secrecy regarding his off-shore holdings and tax filings is another issue. To counter the repeated challenge to his lack of details, secrecy and bad math he has charged President Obama with those same sins. Since undecided voters have not been paying attention, and since newspersons like a hard fight to the finish, these charges are treated as an equivalent sin for Obama. There is no equivalency.
Obama says he would take us forward, building on what he has done and is currently attempting to do, and what he plans to do in the future. Please refer to my earlier blog WHAT HAS OBAMA DONE? HERE ARE 194 ACCOMPLISHMENTS! WITH CITATIONS! From PCTC Blog http://worthingtonforobama2012.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/713/ where you can see what Forward looks like. The list provided at the link was put together months ago. SInce then, the list has grown.
While Romney plays politics with foreign affairs, Obama governs the nation, acts as a well-respected leader of the free world, improves US trade balance, challenges China at World Trade Organization (WTO), stops a terrorist attack on the NY Federal Reserve Bank, hunts down those responsible for the death of our ambassador and diplomatic staff in Ben Ghazi, Libya, continues to bring down unemployment and increase jobs, winds down the Afghanistan War, organizes cuts to the military budget (arms purchases, operational expenses etc.) while increasing the VA budget 40% and protecting VA from ANY cuts, and continues to reduce the deficit ( $1.7 trillion in 2011) as illustrated below:
DEFICIT REDUCTION UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA’S BUDGET, 2013-2022
$ 2.2 TRILLION + $ 1.7 TRILLION = $3.8 TRILLION
Proposed Policies Savings Enacted 2011 (figures rounded up)
Not Included is Additional $1.5 Trillion War Savings
[ Sources: Fiscal Year 2013 Budget, Table S-3, and CBPP Calculations,Center on Budget and Policy Priorities…cbpp.org]
If you are still undecided, or know someone who is, or know someone who would welcome a refresher course please forward this information to them before the next debate. Maybe we can remember what we know, even if Mr. Romney cannot.
annarino writes 
And today we learn Iran,for the first time, has agreed after months of secret negotiations with Obama’s team to sit down and talk about Iran’s nuclear program, after the election. Do you really want Romney and his team of Neo-Cons from the Bush Adminstration handling these talks?
“What they think and the positions they take are not based on an accumulation of facts over time …”
Alas, in close elections the sad fact is that it is such ill-informed voters who are the ones who put the winner over the top. Your likening many voters to fans of reality TV is the sobering truth of this republic in which we live. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”