Obama's Backyard Visits, Government is the Real Foe

In Obama's Backyard Visits, GOP Is the Absent Foe - US News and World Report

September 29, 2010 AP

DES MOINES, Iowa — A priest expressed concern to President Barack Obama about an unemployed parishioner. A businessman criticized Obama's tax policy. A woman said her son and his friends, once inspired by Obama, "are losing their hope."

Over two days and in four states this week, the president met with people in their backyards to listen to their complaints and hear their fears. He also drew raucous cheers at a college rally.

So Obama does the 'unexpected', He Blames Republicans, What Else!

With his party facing potentially mammoth losses on Nov. 2, Obama is pouring more time into campaigning. In the backyard visits, he used almost every voter comment or question to pivot into a criticism of the GOP's record on taxes, student aid, even home weatherization.

With time running short, Obama also showed a plaintive side. He poked fun at himself and practically begged those who voted for him in 2008 to turn out this fall for congressional and gubernatorial Democratic candidates.

"I know times are tough," he told thousands of students at the University of Wisconsin on Tuesday. In 2008, he said, "the feeling was, well, this is just exciting. You got those nice 'Hope' posters."

"Sometimes it feels a long way from the hope and excitement that we felt on Election Day," he said, but young voters' involvement "can't end with the vote that you cast in 2008."

At a backyard gathering Wednesday in Des Moines, a woman said her college-graduate son and his friends "are losing their hope."

Obama cited his administration's steps to expand student loans, spur private job growth and promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

A man who described himself as a small-business owner manufacturing promotional items such as T-shirts and lawn signs criticized Obama's plans for allowing tax cuts on income over $250,000 a year to expire.

"As the government gets more and more involved in business and more and more involved in taxes, what you're finding is you're strangling those job creation vehicles," he said.

The president disputed that, saying he's already signed eight pieces of legislation providing small business tax cuts.

Showing some frustration, Obama said: "Your taxes haven't gone up in this administration. Your taxes have gone down in this administration. There's a notion that, well, he's a Democrat so your taxes must have gone up. That's just not true."

The only thing that is not true is WHAT OBAMA SAID! The taxes on business have gone up in hidden fees, added taxes hidden in Obamacare and the the most insidious of all, the stolen time in new regulations, forms and complying with added bureaucracy!

Obama was claiming that he implemented eight new small business TX cuts, but these were only given for complying with new regulations or making specific purchase. They were added burdens in paper work, not reductions, but credits only for specific compliance to new regulations and more government bureaucrats.

It is obvious that, either out of sinister design or ignorance, Obama is lying.

A priest told Obama of a parishioner who lost his job in manufacturing and can't find a new one. The president said that some manufacturing jobs won't come back and the parishioner might need to develop new skills to work in growth sectors like clean energy.

Even in an election season, the president said, he can't always tell people what they want to hear. Moving forward will take "some tough but necessary adjustments," he said.

In Washington, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., essentially called the president's efforts a sham. For the past 18 months, he said in the Senate, Americans have watched "a governing party that was more or less completely uninterested in what the governed had to say about the direction of our country."