Obama Calls Gas Tax Holiday a "Shell Game"
(CBS)
From CBS News' Maria Gavrilovic:
INDIANAPOLIS -- With less than 72 hours until the polls open in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Barack Obama made a last minute pitch to voters urging them to look past the recent controversies which have overshadowed his candidacy.
He said he can win the election only if voters "decide that you've had enough of the way things are, if you decide that this election is bigger than flag pins and sniper fire and the comments of a former pastor, bigger than the differences between what we look like or where we come from or what party we belong to."
Obama continued to portray Hillary Clinton as the establishment candidate, arguing that he is the only candidate who represents change. Slamming Clinton's support for the gas tax holiday, he accused her of pandering to voters instead of offering a real solution to the energy problem.
"In a moment of candor, her advisers actually admitted that it wouldn't have much of an effect on gas prices. But, they said, it's a great political issue for Senator Clinton. So this is not about getting you through the summer, it's about getting elected," Obama argued. "This is what passes for leadership in Washington, phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems."
Obama said that a Clinton has deployed a surrogate, who is also lobbyist for Shell Oil, to pitch the gas tax holiday to voters. "It's a shell game, literally," Obama said. Some economists have said that the gas tax holiday may increase profits for the oil companies, as demand may rise with the reduction in price. The campaign said Obama was referring to Steve Elmendorf, a lobbyist for Shell Oil and a Clinton supporter.
The Clinton campaign accused Obama's camp of employing a lobbyist as well. "Considering that Senator Obama voted to suspend the gas tax three times when gas cost less than $2 a gallon and has an energy lobbyist chairing his Indiana campaign, it's hard to take his latest criticisms very seriously," said Clinton spokesman Phil Singer. "Senator Obama wants Americans to pay the gas tax, but Senator Clinton thinks the big oil companies should pay it this summer."
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For instance.... There are two reasons why the ongoing fraud court case against the Clintons (Paul vs. Clinton) is unknown to most Americans. One is because the media has chosen, for whatever reasons, to not report this bombshell. Two is because Obama has stood by his promise to run a clean campaign and has not indulged in the sort of gutter politics enjoyed by the Clinton campaign. Don''''t think for one minute that the Republicans would take the high road here.
The mentality that sees strength in petty, unscrupulous bullying is the same mentality that elected Bush-Cheney to a second term. Yes, there are many in this country who see integrity as weakness, and who see strength in ruthless, greedy powermongering. But I believe that there are far more who crave the integrity of character necessary to going against the status quo and, for the first time in decades, doing the right thing.
And for households with two or more cars needing to be driven to different jobs, the savings per household goes up even more. Every dollar counts. It has comes down to a choice between gas and food. Some vague tax credit next year to those who don''t earn enough to pay income tax is no help at all. Senator Obama must live in a whole different world for rich people.
economist clinton holiday
The thing is, he has never been on top by the will of the people!
Nobody else is responsible for Barak Obama''s bad judgment all his adult life by surrounding himself with whackjob radicals!
It''s HIS fault! Not HIllary''s, not mine, not anybody elses!
By associating with these whack jobs he casts aspersions on HIS OWN CHARACTER!
Obama has a way of ducking hard votes or explaining away his bad votes by trying to blame poorly-written statutes. Case in point: an amendment he voted on as part of a recent bankruptcy bill before the US Senate would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Inexplicably, Obama voted against it, although it would have been the beginning of setting these predatory lending rates under federal control. Even Senator Hillary Clinton supported it.
Now Obama explains his vote by saying the amendment was poorly written or set the ceiling too high. His explanation isn%u2019t credible as Obama offered no lower number as an alternative, and didn%u2019t put forward his own amendment clarifying whatever language he found objectionable.
Why wouldn%u2019t Obama have voted to create the first federal ceiling on predatory credit card interest rates, particularly as he calls himself a champion of the poor and middle classes? Perhaps he was signaling to the corporate establishment that they need not fear him. For all of his dynamic rhetoric about lifting up the masses, it seems Obama has little intention of doing anything concrete to reverse the cycle of poverty many struggle to overcome.
Regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama recently boasted, "I don''t think NAFTA has been good for Americans, and I never have." Yet, Calvin Woodward reviewed Obama''s record on NAFTA in a February 26, 2008 Associated Press article and found that comment to be misleading: "In his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama said the US should pursue more deals such as NAFTA, and argued more broadly that his opponent''s call for tariffs would spark a trade war. AP reported then that the Illinois senator had spoken of enormous benefits having accrued to his state from NAFTA, while adding that he also called for more aggressive trade protections for US workers."
Putting aside campaign rhetoric, when actually given an opportunity to protect workers from unfair trade agreements, Obama cast the deciding vote against an amendment to a September 2005 Commerce Appropriations Bill, proposed by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, that would have prohibited US trade negotiators from weakening US laws that provide safeguards from unfair foreign trade practices. The bill would have been a vital tool to combat the outsourcing of jobs to foreign workers and would have ended a common corporate practice known as "pole-vaulting" over regulations, which allows companies doing foreign business to avoid "right to organize," "minimum wage," and other worker protections.