Story time in Charlotte

Democrats gathering in Charlotte this week must be wondering if it’s really possible for President Barack Obama to win a second term. After all, the bad news and disappointments just keep coming.

On the jobs front, unemployment remains stuck above 8 percent in spite of massive government spending.When you consider workers who have given up looking for work and those who are underemployed, the unemployment rate is over 15 percent. For African-American voters the picture is worse, and for young blacks the rate is a staggering 40 percent. Even this key voting group is beginning to doubt.

Food stamp usage and poverty has reached record highs. The U.S. has lost its coveted AAA bond rating. The dollar is weak and growing weaker causing prices of almost everything to go higher. At a nearby gas station in Boardman, gas has reached $4.00, not a good sign for the president.

The national debt is $16 trillion and will continue to grow at a rate that can only push the country toward disaster. In the meantime, Obama promotes offshore drilling, just not off the U.S., but off the coast of Brazil. He has pushed big government to become bigger, taking over health care, student loans, home mortgages and the auto industry. Our banks and energy producers are crippled with new regulations.

Why would a president behave this way? Some suggest he lacks the leadership and skills to fix the problems of our country. Others suggest that it is actually his plan to weaken or fundamentally change the country. Still others point out that Obama’s worldview is shaped by his most formative years being spent in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan. Or that his most powerful influences were his anti-colonial father, Frank Marshall Davis and Jeremiah Wright. Whatever the reason, Americans are becoming increasingly wary of the direction Obama is taking us.

A ‘hero’ to GM?

Democratic pundits suggest Obama is a hero for allowing GM to avoid bankruptcy. Wrong. It was the Obama administration that forced GM into bankruptcy in exchange for more of your tax dollars. As a result the proceedings were tainted with messy politics and backroom deals designed to reward some at the expense of others. Unions were protected while Delphi salaried retirees were forced to absorb losses to their pensions of up to 70 percent. Meanwhile, GM, which is owned largely by U.S. taxpayers and a UAW trust, is building 70 percent of its vehicles outside the U.S. They have 11 assembly plants in China and are building a new $1 billion plant that will assemble 300,000 cars per year. Automotive research and development used to be an American advantage. Today much of GM’s R&D is being moved to China. It’s outsourcing on a massive scale and it’s being done with your tax dollars.

Without a working plan, the president is reduced to blaming everyone else for his problems, especially President George W. Bush. While Bush is a popular target, let’s remember that he too had a very difficult start to his presidency. Remember 9/11? And the recession that followed? For most of his term he had pretty good employment numbers. The recession of 2008 was brought on not by policies of Bush, but by an overactive federal government that trapped lenders and borrowers into houses and mortgages that made no sense.

Obama promises more of the same: an overreaching federal government trying to fix all of life’s problems with government programs that are too expensive, work poorly, and have unintended negative consequences.

So what are Democratic convention goers to do with all this bad news? I suspect the Obama spin machine will be spinning faster than hurricane Isaac as it moved through the Gulf of Mexico. When you don’t have a good story to tell, you have to tell a story.

Mark E. Munroe is chairman of the Mahoning County Republican Party.