Obama: From Hope & Changer to Fearmonger-in-Chief

Four years after he was elected as a self-described ‘hopemonger’ promising a new post-partisan era, President Barack Obama is trying to claw his way to re-election with an ugly, divisive campaign in which he is playing the role of fearmonger-in-chief.

On a chilling Wednesday evening in a Las Vegas park, Obama spoke to a raucous gathering of some 13,000 – more than twice the number his opponent Mitt Romney had attracted a few days earlier but a far cry from the crowds of 2008 when he was swept into office with a seven-point victory over Senator John McCain.

[T]he mood quickly darkened and it was at this point that any comparisons with 2008 evaporated. Obama – who was reading his remarks from two teleprompters flanking the stage – launched into a exhaustive and exhausting diatribe about Romney.

[H]e told the crowd that a vote for Romney would plunge Americans back to the early 1960s. ‘You can choose to turn the clock back 50 years for women and immigrants and gays,’ he said. ‘Or in this election you can stand up for the principle that America includes everybody. We’re all created equal – black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, abled, disabled – no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from or who you love, in America you can make it if you try.’

[I]f Obama is re-elected the way he has run his campaign may make it almost impossible for him to govern effectively – let alone in the spirit of the ‘better angels of our nature’ that Abraham Lincoln cited in his first inaugural speech and that Obama used to love quoting.

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