{"id":1481,"date":"2008-09-20T11:27:44","date_gmt":"2008-09-20T16:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1481"},"modified":"2008-09-20T11:42:37","modified_gmt":"2008-09-20T16:42:37","slug":"supporting-obama-with-trepidation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1481","title":{"rendered":"Supporting Obama with trepidation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My fiercest debating adversary is Vic. He keeps sending me information to deter me from voting for Obama. I <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1475\">posted one fairly persuasive piece<\/a> a bit ago. He&#8217;s sent me <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/200809u\/mccain-economics\">another item that&#8217;s worth considering.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>It ends with the comment, &#8220;The bottom line is that I support John McCain. With trepidation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In the same vein I could say I still support Obama with trepidation. I think that unlike McCain, Obama actually understands some of the columnists tricky economic worries. I&#8217;ll agree that the folks who will elect Barack will expect him to enforce uncompetitive policies that could hamstring America&#8217;s and the world&#8217;s economy. On the other hand, I fervently hope, his campaign backed as it has been by a non-Democrat Party groundswell will give him much freer reign from party and particularly Union orthodoxies than other Presidents like George W Bush. Bush hewed to far too many wrongheaded ideological principals &#8211; both those of Dick Cheney and James Dobson. I voted for W in 2000 without any trepidation never realizing how incompetently he would preside over the Country. Maybe now that I&#8217;m on the verge of becoming an old man I should start viewing every candidate for the Presidency with trepidation. You know, &#8220;The greates thing we have to fear is fear itself.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Of course, blissfully ignorant complacency ain&#8217;t so great either. We let the financial community think they could have their bad debt forgiven by the government. Oops!  Under a President Obama we daren&#8217;t let American citizens in general think the same thing. Apropos of this was a very interesting parenthetical assertion in the column worth considering:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>(It is one of the great myths of 21st century that the Bush tax cuts made the tax code less progressive; the opposite is true. If you are in the bottom 38% of taxpayers, you now pay zero income tax\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand therefore have an incentive to support any spending bill that comes down the pike.) <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My fiercest debating adversary is Vic. He keeps sending me information to deter me from voting for Obama. I posted one fairly persuasive piece&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,39],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}