Four More Years? Some Predictions

Greetings from the Left Coast, which, once again, has lived up to its nickname by remaining solidly "blue."

Well, the people have spoken. And, incredibly, they have decided to give Barack Obama four more years. The second-guessing and what-went-wrong analyses will go on for at least that long. Certainly the media had a lot to do with it. If they had done their job in the first place, he wouldn't have been elected in 2008, let alone re-elected with the economy in the dismal shape it's in today. All you need to do is go back and review what the media said about the state of the economy in the run-up to the 2004 election, when, in fact, it was in much better shape than it is today, and compare it to their reporting this campaign season. Add to that their deliberate inattention to the Benghazi story, making it easy for their man to run out the clock, and Barack Obama becomes the first president in modern times to be re-elected with a smaller percentage of the vote than he got the first time around, despite having run the most despicable campaign I can remember in my 60 years on this planet.

In four years, we went from "hope and change" to seniors threatening to "burn this motherf***er down" and c**k-punch Romney if he won. We saw Obama follow precisely the path he accused others of in the last campaign: "When you don't have a record to run on, you paint the other guy as someone people should run away from." We saw the phoney "war on women," which was given legitimacy by a compliant media. We saw Romney falsely accused of indirectly killing a man's wife by being responsible for taking away her health insurance. We saw him falsely accused of wanting to take away women's access to contraceptives. Elect Romney, we were told, and he would overturn Roe v. Wade and completely eliminate "a woman's right to choose," which was patently ridiculous, because it is not possible for any president to simply overturn a Supreme Court decision. Republicans, we were told, were for dirty air and dirty water, and for letting autistic children fend for themselves.

But apparently enough voters believed all of that to put Obama over the top - a realization that saddens me. It isn't pleasant to realize that so many of my fellow citizens are that susceptible to lies and manipulation. We may have had an excuse in 2008 in that the media didn't do its job in telling us who Obama was and what he believed. But we've seen him govern for four years now, and we've seen that he is, as some of us tried to say in the beginning, an extreme left-wing ideologue who wants to reshape the nation to fit his ideology and has no desire to compromise. We've seen the results of his four years: continuing high unemployment, anemic economic growth, disdain for the separation of powers, and a willingness to simply ignore laws that he finds inconvenient to the pursuit of his goals. There is no excuse this time for not knowing who Barack Obama is. But we re-elected him anyway.

It's possible that we've finally reached the tipping point in the electorate that we've been warned about. When nearly 50% of the population pays no federal income tax, and 10% of the population pays 70% of all the federal income tax collected, we are in a dangerous place as a nation. Why shouldn't a large portion of the population vote for bigger government and more entitlements if they're not the ones who have to pay for it? If you add in those who simply can't be bothered to educate themselves on the issues beyond the 5-second sound bites on the six o'clock news, those people may now be in the majority. Only time will tell. And if you think I'm overstating the case, consider that the top Google search trend in the few days before election day was "who is running for president." Most of those searches came out of North Carolina, with Ohio and Pennsylvania coming in second and third, respectively. All three, of course, being "swing states" that were enormously important in the election, and that had been saturated by ads for months.

But, nevertheless, today's reality is that Barack Obama will be our President for four more years. So what should we expect? Here are some predictions that I really hope are wrong. We'll circle back in a few years and see how many I got right:

• The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare) is here to stay. (This statement really isn't a prediction, it's now a fact of life.) Four years from now, we will be much too far down that road to unwind things, or to do more than implement some minor tweaks. As Obama knew all along, by the time the majority of Americans find out they've been lied to about the cost of the program, their ability to keep their own insurance if they like it, etc., it will be too late. It only remains to be seen how much damage will be done to the economy from companies deciding not to hire new employees because of the cost of providing them with health care, or cutting them back to fewer than 30 hours per week so they aren't required to do so, or dumping their health plans altogether and pushing their employees to the health insurance exchanges because it's less expensive for the employers to pay the annual fine than it is to pay the premiums.
• Sometime in the next four years, unless stopped by an Israeli attack, Iran will obtain nuclear weapons.
• The Muslim Brotherhood will turn Egypt into an Islamist state and renounce Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.
• At some point in the next four years, possibly as a result of increasing instability in the Middle East, the average price of a gallon of gas will top $5.00.
• Unemployment will not drop below 6% in the next four years, unless the number is manipulated by more and more people giving up on finding a job and dropping out of the labor force. We will be told that this is the "new normal."
• Economic growth will continue at its current anemic level of roughly 2% per year, which will not be enough to return us to pre-recession employment levels by the end of Obama's second term.
• Federal deficits will continue to average $1 trillion per year.
• Sometime in the next four years, America's credit rating will be downgraded again.
• President Obama will continue to blame Republicans in general, and former President Bush in particular, for our ongoing economic problems.

As I said, I sincerely hope that I'm wrong on all of the above. We'll find out over the next four years. Thanks for listening.