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RADIO
Is
this Obama's Monica Lewinsky?
'Somebody
can lie to you over and over again and do it pretty convincingly'
Lyndon
Johnson had Vietnam.
Richard
Nixon had Watergate.
Ronald
Reagan had Iran-Contra.
George
H.W. Bush had tax increases.
And,
as first reported by The Drudge Report, Bill Clinton had an intimate
relationship with a White House intern.
Now
President Obama has a major credibility issue that is sure to forever
taint his legacy.
Obama’s
credibility will be difficult to regain after the failure of his core
Obamacare promise, and the disastrous roll-out of the health-care law
rescued the Republicans from a public relations nightmare following
the government shutdown, according to one of the nation’s leading
political scientists.
Larry
Sabato is a professor of political science at the University of
Virginia and directs the school’s Center for Politics. He told WND
President Obama lost a lot of ground with the American people by
promising them if they liked their health plans and doctors that they
could keep them.
“One
thing that I think all historians and political scientists look for
is the moment, if it occurs, when the credibility gap opens, and it’s
happened for Obama. It’s not because of the rocky roll-out of
Obamacare and not because a website doesn’t work, although it
should have,” Sabato explained. “It’s because of that
oft-repeated statement, which many people bought because the
president said it, and people said, ‘Well, if he’s got all these
advisers, surely they checked.’”
“The
fact that a president would say that over and over again creates a
credibility problem,” said Sabato, noting similar drops for
Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.
“There
are these moments in a presidency when people can focus on whether a
president is telling the truth or not. And once you’ve found out
that somebody can lie to you over and over again and do it pretty
convincingly, you’re a little less inclined to be gullible,” said
Sabato, who added that the credibility gap is obvious in Obama’s
latest polling.
“Right
now, depending on the poll, it’s between the upper 30s and the low
40s. Obviously that’s not a very good position to be in when you’re
the incumbent president and you have more than three years to run in
your term. This is going to be a long, long lame duck period,” he
said.
In
addition to severely damaging the president’s credibility, Sabato
said the timing of the fiasco saved congressional Republicans, who
were getting the lion’s share of the public’s wrath over the
government shutdown. But Sabato warned Republicans also need to dodge
the bullet again in 2014.
“Obamacare
saved the Republicans from a long-term hit. Remember, we’ve got the
debt limit coming up again. The question is, did Republicans really
learn a lesson from that 17-day shutdown, because it cost them big.
They’re not going to get a second roll-out of Obamacare to rescue
them, in all likelihood. If they learned their lesson, they’re
going to leave that alone during the election year, and they’re
going to go ahead and raise the debt limit and not shut down the
government. People may not like it, but, politically, in an election
year, that’s the thing to do if you want to win,” Sabato said.
In
assessing the legislative battles from 2013, Sabato said he never
thought President Obama’s gun-control push would ever gain much
traction.
“On
the day of Sandy Hook, as sad as we all were and as tragic as that
situation was, I tweeted that there wasn’t going to be any
gun-control legislation because of the alignment in Congress. You
always go back to the last election. What did it create?” said
Sabato, noting that some deeply Democratic states advanced new gun
restrictions but a GOP-led House would never go along with Obama’s
agenda...
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the rest of the article at WND Radio
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