Dwight Eisenhower's Granddaughter Endorses Obama

It seems that more and more former moderate Republicans are throwing up their hands in disgust and simply walking away from the GOP which seemingly now requires that one be a far right religious extremist, a white supremacist, a self-centered and greed driven scrooge,  or have had a lobotomy to be a party member.  As I have noted many times I and my family of moderate Rockefeller Republicans left the GOP years ago in light of the party's growing insanity and outright nastiness.  Now, Susan Eisenhower (pictured at right), granddaughter of the late President Dwight Eisenhower, has formally announced that she is endorsing Barack Obama for reelection (and that she has left the GOP).  Here are highlights from her website on her decision to back Obama:

Four years ago, I left the Republican Party of which I was a lifelong member and became an independent. Not long after, I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election for president. I made this decision determined to look at the issues not as a Republican or a Democrat, but as an American.

It is through that lens that I consider my choice in the 2012 election. Like many other voters who crossed party lines to vote for Barack Obama in the last election, I have watched the 2012 campaign carefully and listened closely to what the candidates have said. I believe that President Obama should be re-elected.

Obama was elected and took office, building on a number of stabilization programs initiated by the Bush administration. He took many other vital steps that reestablished our economic footing, including saving America’s automobile industry.

In the last four years, and despite the global downturn, America has come back from the brink. While pain is still being felt in far too many sectors of the economy, from a macroeconomic standpoint the situation in the United States is better than it is among our allies. According to the International Monetary Fund, today the United States is poised for 3 percent growth, which would make our economy the strongest of the other richest economies, including Canada and Germany.

Other influential studies, cited in a recent column by Fareed Zakaria, show that debt in the U.S. financial sector, relative to GDP, has declined to levels not seen since before the 2000 bubble. And consumer confidence is now at its highest levels since September 2007. The housing market is also slowly coming back. While there is still an enormous amount to do to assure a recovery, the president deserves credit for a steady hand during this dangerous and unpredictable time.

The Obama Administration has also been responsible for decimating the top leadership of al-Qaeda and introducing biting sanctions on Iran. Today the president has significant experience in managing foreign relations, experience that GOP candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, do not have.

As a result of this campaign I am more confused than ever about what Mitt Romney stands for. I know little of his core beliefs, if he even has any. No one seems to agree on what they are, and that’s why I do not want to take a chance on finding out.

Given Romney’s shifting positions, he can only be judged by the people with whom he surrounds himself. Many of them espouse yesterday’s thinking on national defense and security, female/family reproductive rights, and the interplay of government and independent private enterprise. In this context, Barack Obama represents the future, not that past.

Barack Obama’s record as president has not been perfect, and there have been frustrations for all of us during this time. Nevertheless, I believe that he deserves four more years in the White House. If the voters on November 6 give him that chance, we should expect and demand, if necessary, that members of both parties work closely with him to find a way to avert the “fiscal cliff” and other pressing and possibly destabilizing problems.

Would that more rational conservatives would recognize the systemic sickness of today's GOP.  Only by repeated  crushing electoral defeats will the GOP perhaps as a party find a way to exorcise itself of the religious extremists, jingoistic nationalists and shape shifting corporate vultures who now hold sway.