by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
What should we\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0expect during next summer\u2019s presidential campaign, given what was put off limits in 2008 and later?<\/p>\n There is much talk about what some are perceiving as the fringe religiosity of Republican candidates such as Michele Bachman and Rick Perry. But the media established the precedent four years ago that no candidate can be held responsible for his church. Barack Obama\u2019s pastor of more than 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was an unapologetic racist, an anti-Semite, and a raving conspiracy theorist whose parishioners gave him standing ovations for his hate-filled \u201cG*d damn America\u201d rants.<\/p>\n Prior education and college preparation should not be 2012 issues either. Recent articles have referred to a leaked Texas A&M undergraduate transcript of Texas governor Rick Perry, showing some dismal grades and thus apparent proof that Perry was not much of a past student \u2014 or current thinker. But Obama has never released either his Occidental or Columbia transcripts. In response, the media in 2008 shrugged and chose not to pursue the matter the way it had with the C-grade records of George W. Bush, Al Gore, and John Kerry. Apparently, Obama has established a wise precedent that long-ago college transcripts, like churchgoing, are irrelevant.<\/p>\n Civility is off the table, too. Candidate Obama once called sitting president Bush \u201cunpatriotic\u201d for borrowing $4 trillion in eight years \u2014 a sum he matched in less than three. He advised Latinos to \u201cpunish our enemies\u201d and mocked opponents for wanting to put \u201calligators and moats\u201d on the border. Obama\u2019s advisers reportedly promised to \u201ckill Romney.\u201d So civility is out the window, and 2012 will once again be a typically American no-holds-barred slugfest of anything goes from both sides.<\/p>\n Public campaign financing won\u2019t come up either. Both sides will raise obscene amounts of money. You see, in 2008, Obama set another election precedent: He was the first president in the history of public campaign-financing laws to shun federal money and oversight in the general election, largely because he wanted \u2014 and got \u2014 a record level of private cash, much of it from Wall Street.<\/p>\n The old bogeyman George W. Bush won\u2019t matter much either by 2012. Since 2008, Obama has blamed Bush for chronic high unemployment, record annual deficits, massive national debt, the erratic stock market, credit downgrading, a continuing housing slump, and near-nonexistent growth. But even the president\u2019s supporters confess that Obama finally now \u201cowns\u201d the economy, especially given the newly elected president\u2019s boast in early 2009 that if he didn\u2019t fix things in three years, he would not deserve reelection.<\/p>\n In the 2008 campaign, Obama derided the War on Terror as ineffective and unconstitutional. That issue in 2012 will be ancient history, too, since President Obama has simply embraced all the major Bush-Cheney antiterrorism protocols and wars, and expanded many of them, from renditions to Predator-drone targeted assassinations to a third war in Libya. Obama\u2019s campaign commercials will highlight the commander-in-chief who ordered the successful hit on bin Laden, not the civil libertarian who closed Guantanamo Bay as promised.<\/p>\n A supposedly do-nothing Congress that has thwarted Obama \u2014 like an earlier Republican one that had blocked \u201cGive \u2019em Hell\u201d Harry Truman \u2014 won\u2019t come up much either. Remember, Obama had large majorities in both the House and Senate until January 2011. That\u2019s how he rammed through everything from Obamacare to trillion-dollar subsidies along strictly partisan-majority votes. The \u201cdo-nothing\u201d Congress of Obama\u2019s first two years that failed to pass alien amnesty and cap-and-trade legislation and failed to grow the economy was controlled by his fellow Democrats. Even now, the loud but largely still impotent Republicans only control one-half of one-third of the US government.<\/p>\n So if we know what won\u2019t be campaign issues, what exactly will be?<\/p>\n The economy. If the current bleak picture stays the same or gets worse, Obama will be forced to argue, as did incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1932, that after four years his borrow\/print\/spend remedies still have not kicked in. And so he will claim that he needs eight years, not four, for Keynesian economics to finally work. Good luck with that silly argument.<\/p>\n But should things improve somewhat over the next year, Obama will insist that his spending tonic is at last working, and he deserves another term to further nurse the recovering economy.<\/p>\n It is that simple: Almost every campaign issue other than the economy either will be off the table or irrelevant \u2014 thanks largely to the past protocols of Barack Obama himself.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services What should we\u00a0not\u00a0expect during next summer\u2019s presidential campaign, given what was put off limits in 2008 and later?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[362],"tags":[366,12,308,1026,32,660,585,1022,67,592],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Cu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1067,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-racial-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":2386,"position":0},"title":"Obama’s Racial Politics","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried \u2014 as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":516,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/white-on-the-brain\/","url_meta":{"origin":2386,"position":1},"title":"‘White’ on the Brain","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The election of the biracial Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. Instead, that dream is becoming a tribally polarized nightmare \u2014 by design, and intended to assist in the reelection of Barack Obama. 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