Mike Hughes: Obama policy is on the ballot

Oct. 19, 2014 @ 04:00 AM

HIGH POINT —

While Senator Kay Hagan has been doing her best to distance herself from anything and everything related to the president, President Obama recently gave us this jewel: “I am not on the ballot this fall… But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.”

I couldn’t agree more, but first, let me be clear: Obama has a lot of words to describe his policies, but it’s not his words that matter, it’s the implementation that matters. Obama would love for his grandiose policy statements to be on the ballot, but it’s the end results of his policy implementations that affect all Americans and should be judged by voters.
That being said, this is an excellent time to review some of the policy implementations of Obama and Hagan.
Let’s start with Cash for Clunkers. The program started out with the same kind of website problems that would later plague the Obamacare roll-out. While Obama Administration officials claimed the program would boost sales for American auto makers, it actually led to an increase in market share among Japanese and Korean manufacturers at the expense of GM and Chrysler. Not only did the program hurt the working poor by increasing the cost and decreasing the availability of used cars, it hurt American taxpayers by squandering almost $3 billion on a harebrained scheme that was primarily motivated by blind faith in big government and an irrational hatred of fossil fuels.
Next is Obama’s trillion dollar shovel-ready stimulus spending. The ruse here was the idea that Washington bureaucrats could target massive federal outlays in ways that would kick-start the national economy. Hagan called it “the best way forward for working families across North Carolina.” But in reality, the Democrat’s stimulus spending, as stated by John Lott of FoxNews.com, “was simply a massive partisan wealth transfer – the largest single transfer in American history.”
Obama and his big business cronies laughed about non-existent shovel-ready jobs after the media could no longer ignore this massive policy failure. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars were funneled to public-sector unions, Washington bureaucrats, and mega-donor billionaire Democrats like George Kaiser and Warren Buffett. It was recently reported that even the well-to-do Hagan family received federal grants and tax credits from the stimulus package. Lott wrote, “All together about 75 percent of loans and grants [were] given out to companies run by Obama supporters… Stimulus dollars were highly correlated to which political party controlled the state… the states that Obama won by the largest percentage margin in 2008 got the most money.”   
Those are just two out of many disastrous Obama policies that Hagan would like you to forget about. Others include Obamacare, facilitating the flow of illegal aliens through our open borders, NSA spying on Americans, Obama’s flagrant abuse of executive power, using drone strikes in non-war zones killing innocent civilians and at least one American citizen, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremists in the Middle East, foolishly pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, taxing and regulating American jobs out of existence, etc., etc., etc. Incredible as it is, I’m only scratching the surface here.
One policy that’s largely been ignored, but may prove to be one of the most harmful, is Obama’s preference for killing terrorists at the expense of intelligence gathering. The war on terror cannot be won without widespread intelligence gathering, but Obama would rather kill terrorists than interrogate them. Dead terrorists don’t talk. The ultimate price for this major policy blunder will be high.

Six years of Obama and Hagan have been a colossal mess. Let’s at least vote one of them out.  
Mike Hughes is a Navy veteran who lives in High Point. His column appears here every other Sunday. To comment, visit www.hpe.com and click on opinion. E-mail him at mrmike27282@gmail.com. Representations of fact and opinions are solely those of the author.

Mike Hughes: Obama policy is on the ballot