Posted on 09/17/2009 4:05:47 AM PDT by Kaslin
For years, I've been wishing for another Ross Perot -- a leader who would awaken the American people to the dangers of living beyond our national means through huge federal budget deficits. Now, at last, we have that leader. His name is Barack Obama.
Perot ran for president in 1992 as a third-party candidate, and an unlikely Pied Piper he was -- a short, crew-cut scold with a thick twang and a cranky manner who proposed to raise taxes. But his complaints about Washington's chronic overspending struck a chord with the public. A few months before the election, he was leading both incumbent George H.W. Bush and challenger Bill Clinton in the polls.
Only his bizarre decision to withdraw (because, he claimed, the Bush campaign had a sinister plot to sabotage his daughter's wedding) popped the balloon. But after re-entering the race, brandishing charts and graphs in wonky half-hour infomercials, Perot managed to win 19 percent of the popular vote, one of the best showings ever by a third-party candidate.
His candidacy was not for nothing. It created a new awareness of a risky fiscal policy that, in Perot's words, was "robbing future generations." It caused Americans to consider whether fiscal indiscipline was defensible on either economic or moral terms. And it sowed the legitimate fear that deficits would be fatal to prosperity.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
The reasons behind their opinions of America’s spending habit are totally opposite.
Perot was trying to help, Obama wants all your money for his Marxist dream programs.
Obama is to deficits as Acorn is to underage prostitution
Perot may have helped give us Clinton, but Bush (the elder or dumber) Gave us the biggest tax increase in history and killed the Reagan economic boom. (I bet RR wanted to personally kick his ass.)
Clintoon’s open socialst attempts to take over health care begat the Republican revolution (Thank you Newt!) in 1994.... Which the Republicans BLEW AGAIN by ‘reaching across the aisle’
Steve Chapman had (still has, I guess) a raging case of BDS. I have no idea why townhall wants any part of him. He is in no sense a conservative.
sorry to disappoint you, but it was the democrats who forced Bush 41 to sign the tax increase and that is a fact
No need to read further.
Utterly laughable.
It seems that way. Hence my hurl alert
Indeed
How did the Democrats FORCE him? He was the President. It was entirely his decision to sign it. The Democrats may have pressured him, but they didn't have the power to force it.
Actually, we do have 2 heirs to Ross Perot but they’re media people, not politicians: Glenn Beck and Karl Denninger.
LQ
I don’t really find this hurl-worthy, at least not the author’s overarching point.
No, it was Bush’s spinelessness. The Democrats could not have over-ridden a veto.
That is the anti-gun, pro-abortion, Ross Perot that I watched pro-gun, anti-abortion people vote for because he wanted to do something under the hood.
Ross Perot’s only real purpose was to make sure G.H.W. Bush did not win reelection because Perot hated the Bushes. He had to drop out of the race because it looked as though he might actually win which was something he had no intention of doing. He reentered the race when he was sure he couldn’t win but believed he could siphon enough votes from Bush to ensure the election of Bill Clinton. All the rest was smokescreen.
How much Kool Aid do you drink everyday??
At this point, not making the problem worse may not appease a public worried that he and Congress are waltzing toward national bankruptcy. Obama, unlike Perot, didn't intend to make Americans care about the federal deficit. But now he may find it hard to get them to think about anything else.
His point isn't that Obama was a modern-day Ross Perot, trying to fix our spending problems.
His point was that Obama, by spending trillions of dollars, has made us all THINK about how we shouldn't be doing that. Obama has focused on deficit spending because he DID it, and made us all react.
I think it is true that we have a lot more people outraged about spending now, then we had a year ago when Bush was overspending.
I agree; he’s not praising Obama here.
Can't let that pass.
Newt co-opted the Republican Revolution and introduced his absurd 'Contract With America' that effectively redirected the mandate that the 'class of 94' had been given. Newt made sure that the Washington Insiders kept control of the power, not a bunch of freshmen arrivals from the ranks of the commoners.
Thank you Newt indeed.
The reaching across the aisle was engineered by Newt, not the other way around.
IF Repubs EVER find themselves in the majority again in Congress, the ONLY reaching across the aisle should be to slap the HELL out of the nearest Dem!
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