Presidential Campaign 2012 | An Independent Voters View

Well folks, here we are in the first week of April and the 2012 Presidential Campaign is underway. Some would say it’s been underway for a while; but officially, it took the Presidents announcement of his 2012 Presidential Campaign today, 4 April 2011, to mark the first official candidacy of the race. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty marked the day by releasing his own ad from within his exploratory committee. I would suspect he will announce soon.

Below is the Associated Press’ report on the Obama announcement.

It is certainly no secret to those of you who follow me that I have significant issues with the Presidents leadership skills. President Obama has cemented in stone my personal view that Senators and Congressmen make crappy Presidents. Having said that I can understand that the Dems think he’s pretty good, after all he did get Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repealed, he’s managed to spend more money and make the government bigger than it ever has been. Of course the deficit and debt are increasing at 4 times the rate that it did under President Bush, and many of us had problems with the spending at that level.

He’s managed to demonize the rich, while helping ensure the lobbyist for GE and others managed to get tax rules that have allowed them to pay no taxes the whole time he’s been in office, while  GE capitalized 78 Billion in loans to its industrial customers at less than 2% ‘Fees’ through an FDIC program known as the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program (TLGIP); and of course charge their customers higher rates (5-7%) for borrowing our tax money. So while he laments that folks that make more than 250K aren’t paying enough, he makes sure his ‘corporate partners’ pay NO TAX AT ALL. But that’s just the politics.

On the Leadership front he has taken a back seat during the times it seems to me that he needed to be out in front. His success with ending the Iraq War has been to follow a plan negotiated by President Bush with the Iraqi government in 2008. He has continued the Bush policies in Afghanistan with the exception of increasing the drone strikes in Pakistan. I give him credit for listening to his advisors on the surge, though he was slow on the uptake. I could go on and on but it’s beyond the scope of this article to go into all the details. Safe to summarize I’m not a big fan at this point in time, but I will say that the nation still could do worse so it means all the Republican candidates will need to be scrutinized carefully since the devil you don’t know can be a lot worse than the one you do.

So Here is the Ad for Gov Tim Pawlenty (R)….

Good commercial lot of good words here and for substance he mentioned taking on entitlements. It will be interesting to see how this floats in Peoria once you start talking about changes to Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense. The fact that he was a two term Governor as a Republican in Minnesota is a mark of someone with some demonstrated leadership potential. I figure the media will start to dig and we’ll find out more about him soon.

The only other name I would be interested in at this moment is former Governor Jeb Bush but he has stated clearly he has no intention of running so, so be it.  As for all the other names hovering in the wings, including but not limited to Gingrich, Palin, Bachmann, Romney and Trump; they are not folks I’m interested in for President at this point in time.

The 2012 Presidential Race is sure going to foster some interesting political debate, I feel pretty sure we will have a clear choice in 2012, and so the race is on.