It drives me crazy that Mitt Romney too often go unchallenged when they claim that Barack Obama has laid out no agenda for his second term. It's even more maddening because if anyone has failed to lay out an agenda it is Romney/Ryan. Other than slashing taxes for the wealthy and promising huge increases in military spending - without ever laying out how this would be done without making the budget deficit truly explode - Romney and Ryan have not provided any agenda. The only real details, if any come form Ryan's past budget proposals which ought to terrify average Americans since it would trow the county back to a state akin to that in which the robber barons of the Gilded Age made their huge fortunes while workers endured often horrific labor conditions. A column in the Washington Post lays out the case that Obama does have a second term agenda it one only stops listening to the bleating of Romney/Ryan and the nearly 100% false ads being run by Karl Rove's nasty Crossroads organization. Here are column excerpts:
Everywhere you turn, President Obama is accused of not offering a clear second-term agenda. It’s not surprising that Republicans say it, but you also hear it from quarters sympathetic to the president. But how true is the charge?
Mitt Romney’s five-point plan sounds good but is quite vague and, upon inspection, looks rather like five-point plans issued by earlier Republican presidential candidates. Moreover, Romney has been resolutely unspecific about his tax plans, leading to the understandable suspicion that he’s hiding something politically unsavory, either in the popular deductions he’d have to slash or in the programs he’d have to get rid of.
Obama, by contrast, has been far more straightforward about what he would do about the deficit: He wants a budget deal that includes both spending cuts and tax increases. He has put forward rather detailed deficit-reduction proposals. The centerpiece is a plan that, when combined with cuts made in 2011, would reduce the deficit by $3.8 trillion over a decade, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Obama keeps insisting (rightly) that no deal can work without new revenue, and he is upfront that he’d begin by raising taxes on Americans earning over $250,000 a year.
Some dismiss what an Obama second term might achieve by claiming that it will be mainly concerned with consolidating his first-term accomplishments. If these had been trivial, that might be a legitimate criticism. But does anyone seriously believe that implementing a massive new health insurance program that will cover an additional 30 million Americans is unimportant? Can anyone argue that translating the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms into workable regulations is a minor undertaking?
The president has also been clear that he wants to take on immigration reform. The question always asked is: Why should we think he’ll do it in a second term when he didn’t do it in the first? The answer is that if Obama is reelected, it will be in no small part because he overwhelms Romney among Latino voters who have stoutly rejected the Republican’s “self-deportation” ideas. It’s possible that Republicans will cooperate on immigration reform simply because they don’t want to keep losing elections by getting clobbered in Latino precincts. And Obama will know that he has an electoral debt to pay.
Republicans have been relentless in attacking the clean-energy projects Obama has financed. If Obama wins, the president will have reason to say that clean energy won, too, and push ahead.
Obama speaks incessantly about upgrading the country’s infrastructure. He also stresses the urgency of retooling both our education system and the way we train people for well-paying jobs. One can imagine a comprehensive education, jobs and investment program being a high priority in a second Obama term.
So yes, Obama has a second term agenda. And it is far more specific that the Romney/Ryan proposals that would inflict a reverse Robin Hood effect on millions of Americans while turning the nation's energy policy over to big oil and polluters like the Koch brothers.
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