If Obama Had Told Us Before His Election

If Barack Obama had campaigned on what he has actually done in his first 300 days in office, would he have been elected? That's the question so many are asking today.

If Obama had told us he would appoint 34 czars, reporting only to himself and not vetted or confirmed in the constitutional way, building a powerful unitary executive branch of government, would he have been elected? What if he had told us that his green jobs czar had been a Communist, that the science czar wrote in a college textbook that compulsory "green abortions" are an acceptable way to control population growth and that the diversity czar has spoken publicly of getting white media executives to "step down" in favor of minorities?


If Obama had told us he would take over the automobile industry faster than any socialist dictator ever nationalized an industry, fire the CEO of General Motors and replace him with a Democratic Party campaign contributor, would Obama have been elected? If Obama had campaigned on closing down thousands of profitable car dealers, nearly all Republicans, would we have believed that this vindictive financial retaliation against those who didn't vote for Obama could happen in America?

If Hugo Chavez, the communist who nationalized most of Venezuela's industries, had said before the election that "Comrade Obama" would nationalize the U.S. automobile industry and Chavez would "end up to his right," would anybody have believed it? If talk shows had warned against such a socialist takeover, would the Obama-loving media have accused them of McCarthyism?

If Obama had told us he would spend $3 billion in a Cash for Clunkers program that would use taxpayers' funds to buy mostly foreign cars and grind up the used American cars traded in to make them unusable, would he have been elected?

If Obama had told us that his stimulus package is a sham because it does not create private-sector jobs (as a tax cut would do), so that the unemployment rate has risen to nearly 10 percent, with 15 million Americans unemployed plus another 11 million underemployed, could he have been elected?

If Obama had told us his Supreme Court pick would be a woman who said repeatedly that a "Latina woman" would make better decisions than "a white male," that his pick for chief State Department lawyer would be a transnationalist who wants to integrate foreign law into law binding on U.S. citizens and that his pick for regulations czar argues that animals are entitled to have lawyers to sue humans in court, would Obama have been elected?

If we had known that Obama would be totally incompetent as commander-in-chief of his chosen war in Afghanistan, and would not speak to the general in the field for 70 days, ignoring his dire report for six weeks, would Obama have been elected?

If Obama had told us he would have the government guarantee 90 percent of all U.S. mortgages, imposing $5 trillion in off-budget debt on U.S. taxpayers who had faithfully made their own mortgage payments, would he have been elected? And what if Obama had told us he would have the taxpayers take over 80 percent of all student loans at a cost of $1 trillion over the next decade?

If Obama had told us that he would make the U.S. government a major shareholder in Citigroup (one of the world's largest banks), would you have believed he could get away with this socialist takeover?

If Obama had admitted that his health care plan would include the same provisions for which he ran negative TV ads against Hillary Clinton (a federal mandate requiring every American to buy health insurance) and against John McCain (a tax on high-cost employer-based plans), would Obama have been elected?

And what if Obama had told us that his federal health plan would pay for all abortions without regard to the Hyde Amendment and provide full health care (including private doctor visits) to immigrants without requiring proof of legal residence?

If Obama had campaigned on increasing federal spending and debt from a multibillion-dollar level to multitrillions, would he have been elected? And what if Obama had told us that his promise to "spread the wealth around" would balloon his first year's budget deficit to $1.6 trillion?

If Obama had told us that his promise to "spread the wealth around" meant wiping out the Republican welfare reform of 1996 and increasing annual welfare spending by 39 percent to almost $1 trillion a year by the end of his first term, would he have been elected?

If Obama had declared during his campaign that his first major speech abroad would be to the Muslim world and that he would proclaim in Muslim Turkey that "one of the great strengths of the United States is ... we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation," would he have been elected?

by Phyllis Schlafly - originally appearing on her Townhall site