Letter: Yes, I am better off with Obama

Ronald Reagan once asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

The economy in 2008 as a whole was on the brink of total disaster. Things were so bad that presidential candidate John McCain suspended his campaigning to concentrate on what he could do to stop the country’s economy from going completely down the drain.

The stock market was dropping like a rock, pink slips were being handed out like Halloween candy and people were losing their retirement funds and homes and jobs. Two wars were raging with no end in sight.

Four years later, Osama Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes; the war in Iraq has ended. General Motors is hiring, the stock market has come back and 30 million more people will have health care thanks to an admittedly imperfect “Obamacare.”

I look on the Republican side and I see birthers, tea partiers, union-busters and a man at the top of the ticket who wants to repeal Obamacare.

In 1952, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had these comments:

“Workers have a right to organize into unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. And a strong, free labor movement is an invigorating and necessary part of our industrial society. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice.

“Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things, but their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

In the last two years, with the union-busting by the Republican Party in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, that number is no longer negligible — and it’s growing.

The Republican Party today has never seen a union that they didn’t want to bust, a job that they didn’t want to privatize or outsource or a safety net that they didn’t want to end.

So am I better off than I was four years ago with “Obamacare” and a President Barack Obama rather than a President Mitt Romney coming at me with a political gun in one hand and a knife in the other?

Yes, and we as a country are better off.

I’ll pass on voting for Romney, a man described as a “vulture capitalist” by Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

So, yes, I can support Barack Obama for president again.

Michael D. Day

union pipefitter

Baton Rouge