Really?
Judging from Tuesday's results, the president had a strong, smart political team backing him and I guarantee you they knew the visits to Joplin would net them few, if any, votes. They were simply the right thing for a United States president to do.
Joplin's anti-Obama (or pro-Romney vote, if you prefer) is examined in a Daily Kos post:
So....getting to the vote. One might think that the residents of Joplin would finally see through the GOP bellows against the EPA, against the 47% who are 'taking stuff', against 'big government'. One would think they would have been appalled at Willard Romney wanting to eliminate FEMA and let the private sector 'help' at huge profits to themselves at the expense of taxpayers. Let's see.Joplin is mainly in Jasper county, MO but part of it lies in Newton county. Let's check out the vote totals for both in the 2012 presidential election.
JASPER COUNTY: Obama 12,808/Romney 31,345NEWTON COUNTY: Obama 6,425/Romney 18.179TOTALS Obama 19,233/Romney 49,524
While these numbers are discouraging, the population of Joplin pre-tornado was a smidgen over 50k so it's possible that the Obama numbers are coming primarily from Joplin - but it's still less than half of the existing population of Joplin and comes from a metropolitan area of over 176k - a metro area that did pretty well with the federal funding as it provided much-needed construction jobs. If this isn't voting against your own self-interest I'm not sure what is. Or it's possible that they figure that they have their federal funding and will now vote to ensure that other such stricken communities won't have the same opportunity to rebuild that they did.
3 comments:
One word sums up the republican mentality....unbelievable.
I knew it would happen this way. An old friend of mine once ran for Assessor in Taney County on the Democrat ticket. He had a huge barbque, hundreds attended. They thanked him for a wonderful evening and beat the hell out of him at the polls. He always said after that "The Republicans will eat your meat but they will never vote your ticket".
So true.
More disappointing is that they didn't even support Jay Nixon, who has done so much, been there through all the rebuilding and gave such a great speech at the Memorial service on the following Sunday.ncryoutl
Couldn't someone use the same argument (Obama doing what was right and not trying to get the vote) in his visits to Joplin with Jay Nixon. Couldn't it be safe to assume that regardless of party affiliation, after the tornado that anyone who was in the office of governor would have been down here just as much as Nixon was? It was the right thing to do, just as someone pointed out about Obama.
My issues with Nixon lie in his opinions on education, which I do not agree with at all. He see's very little, if any, need for higher education as can be pointed out with his continual cutting of statewide budgets every year he's been in office. He even tried to "pay" for the destruction and his time in Joplin by cutting university budgets statewide. That, is why I couldn't vote for the man. It had nothing to do with what he did after the tornado.
As I stated above, I feel that whomever was in office during that event would have done just as much as Nixon would have as it was the right thing to do.
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