When Barack Obama announced his campaign for the presidency, he delivered a speech of sweeping promises to deliver hope and change. He decried politics-as-usual in Washington and argued his administration would be different. “Too many times,” he said, “after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in, and people turn away, disappointed as before, left to struggle on their own.”
That was February 10, 2007. Almost exactly two years later, on February 17, 2009, President Obama signed the stimulus bill, which soon became the poster child for the excesses of his administration. With a price tag of $787 billion, the President justified the steep spending as an “investment” to create jobs. As President Obama once predicted, however, it didn’t take long for the confetti to be swept away, for special interests to take hold, and for everyday people to be “left to struggle on their own.”
That, after all, is the predicament of the middle class families in America three and a half years into the Obama presidency. With sinking incomes and record long-term unemployment, they’re being squeezed like never before. They can barely afford to feed their families, let alone set aside money to send their kids to college. Neighborhoods are becoming empty as people lose their homes to foreclosure.
President Obama’s political allies—the very people who are gathered in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week to nominate him for another term in the White House—are “doing fine.” It’s not difficult to understand why. The President has directed billions of dollars in government giveaways their way. Far from creating jobs, these grants and loan guarantees merely shelled out payoffs to the politically connected. Bundlers for President Obama’s 2008 campaign have been generously rewarded at the expense of taxpayers. A host of companies—from Solyndra to First Wind to BrightSource Energy to Fisker—benefited simply because their shareholders backed the right candidate or they hired a well-placed lobbyist.
Given this context, it is easy to understand the President’s comments in Virginia where he declared, “If you’ve got a business,” he said, “you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” President Obama has a confused view on the way the marketplace works. When he looks at small business, he doesn’t see the backbone of the American economy. He sees a group of people who owe the government. Is it any wonder that such a philosophy would lead to cronyism and government intervention in the marketplace?
But picking winners and losers is not the American way. The principle of “to the victor go the spoils” is nowhere to be found in our founding documents because we are a nation of laws. And it’s certainly not a successful recipe to create jobs or to, as President Obama would say, forge “an economy built to last.” The President’s record suggests as much.
The examples speak for themselves. Solyndra, the prodigy of President Obama’s pay-to-play vision, cost taxpayers $500 million. Instead of creating jobs, it’s now bankrupt, having laid off more than 1,800 employees. Or take Fisker, a company which also received about a half a billion from the government. Its Delaware plant remains empty because the company actually manufactures cars in Finland.
Here in Virginia’s Sixth District, the Administration, in violation of its own rules, told bidders the highest contract price it would pay for a project intended to increase the energy efficiency of the Richard H. Poff Federal Building, before the bidding process had even begun! Millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted in this still uncompleted “shovel-ready” project.
Those may be some of the most egregious examples, but they are part of a larger pattern—a pattern in which President Obama keeps his promises to top-dollar donors, but breaks his promises to everyone else. Most of us can’t afford to buy access to the President. But that doesn’t make the challenges we face any less real. And some communities are bearing a tremendous burden as a result of President Obama’s failed policies.
Fortunately, there are some things that are not for sale. The President’s bundlers cannot erase the abysmal record of this administration. And this November, voters will have a real choice. Let’s put a leader in the White House who practices free enterprise, not cronyism. Let’s elect Mitt Romney.
U.S. Congressman Bob Goodlatte
