Obama: Less Than Meets the Eye

Opinion By Nathan Shapiro

College students and activists have made a mistake in Barack Obama—he’s not the candidate he first appeared to be.

Young primary voters gravitated to Obama unlike other Democrat nominees in the past. His message of change and working together struck a cord with students tired of past partisan battles. He offered us a new kind of candidate and a new kind of campaign.

But we haven’t really received a new candidate and Obama is starting to look like the same old politicians that have alienated young voters for generations. He talks about bipartisanship, but his record in the Senate shows he stepped aside when John McCain was forging bipartisan agreements on judicial nominees and he voted against comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform.

He promised a more-honest campaign style, but then engaged in disingenuous political posturing. He pledged to take public money, but reneged when he proved capable of raising a mound of treasure. He spoke out against NAFTA to American voters, but his campaign advisors admitted to Canadian official he wasn’t really against it.

Obama’s words and Obama’s actions have been at constant odds with each other. He offered to open a national dialogue on race and “move beyond some of our old racial wounds.” But campaign words aside, he spent 20 years in the pews of a church that promoted a racial message most Americans find repugnant without taking a single action to try and address it.

Obama has no record to support his rhetoric. But supporters defend him as being a far more substantive candidate that the 24-hour news cycles can show us. That at the heart of this campaign season, there are major difficulties facing our nation and Obama has new, creative plans to deal with them.

But the actual policies put forth by the Obama campaign fall far short of his lofty claims. While Obama trumpets a break with the past, his policy initiatives are stuck looking backwards.

Social Security is broken and in desperate needs of change—the Obama campaign’s specialty. When Social Security was created, there were about 159 workers for every one beneficiary; today it’s about three to one. Its structure is aged and stagnant and, if it doesn’t collapse first, the exceptionally high burden threatens to crush young people under its weight.

Future workers need to be rescued from this system by innovative ideas, but Obama has allied himself with the status quo. Instead of inventive changes to address its shortcomings, his solution is old-fashioned and unsatisfactory: he wants to raise taxes to pay for it.

Obama’s plan keeps the system’s flaws lumped together with a huge tax increase. It effectively increases the top marginal federal income tax rate from 37.9 percent to 50.3 percent, but only puts off the Social Security deficit by three years, according to an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Andrew Biggs, a former Social Security principal deputy commissioner. Far from addressing our nation’s problems, he is offering a typical politician’s shallow “quick fix.”

Holding direct talks with the leaders of rogue states, as Obama has pledged to do, should also be a concern to college students, who are traditionally proponents of international human rights. It gives legitimacy to dangerous regimes and undermine democratic activists worldwide. An Obama presidency will resemble Jimmy Carter’s in the loss of human freedom to totalitarian and theocratic dictatorships.

Such meetings aren’t just symbolically damaging, they have a concrete impact on human rights. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—after the White House had broken off diplomatic ties—Assad used the opportunity as a distraction to increase his crackdown on dissidents at home. “This sends a message to the regime that the pressure is off, that it can do what it likes,” said one anti-government activist to The New York Observer.

College students should be appalled at these prospects. Obama, like Pelosi before him, would reward Assad for these actions and give him the opportunity to perform more acts against human decency.

Most college students are liberally-inclined, whether it’s over the war in Iraq or healthcare policy. But that only means they’d be ideologically comfortable with almost any Democrat nominee. They were attracted to Obama for reasons that, under re-examination of his record and campaign tactics, are starting to crumble.

So now the question to be asked is whether he can still attract and motivate those voters come November. Or will they decide that he isn’t the candidate they thought he was a few short months ago and, like in years past, sit this one out.