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"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
WEBCommentary Contributor
Author:  Michael J. Gaynor
Bio: Michael J. Gaynor
Date:  April 27, 2012
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Topic category:  Elections - Politics, Polling, etc.

Whether called "moocher vote," "entitlement vote" or "ACORN vote," it's Obama's base!

Putting more people on food stamps and having the percentage of Americans who actually pay federal income tax shrink is what Team Obama's re-election strategy has been all about all along.

"We're headed in the right direction. Unemployment continues to drop and those people who are unemployed, they're not going to be voting for the party who wants to cut their benefits, cut access to food stamps, cut job training," Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA) said on MSNBC's Al Sharpton program.

"The idea that Republicans are trying to help those who are unemployed is nonsense and I think that on this election day, those who have a job can credit the administration for stabilizing our economy and those who don't know that this administration is trying to put them to work," he said.

Whoops! Congressman Fattah's view of the economic and employment situation in the United States is wishful thinking, at best, but he foolishly called attention to Team Obama's political interest in the "moocher" or "entitlement vote."

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey's right: there IS a "moocher" or "entitlement" vote.

Team Obama benefits from increasing it, not decreasing it.

In "Dem Rep: Jobless will vote for Obama to keep benefits flowing" (http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/27/dem-rep-jobless-will-vote-for-obama-to-keep-benefits-flowing/), Morrissey wrote:

"Rep. Chaka Fattah’s assertion on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show last night has received plenty of derision. Instapundit calls it 'banking on the moocher vote,' and Twitter pundit Keder derisively notes, 'Democrats would rather give you freebie "benefits’"then do anything useful that might actually help you find a job. I know this may be hard for @TheDemocrats to understand, but the unemployed don’t want "benefits." They want jobs.' Unfortunately, that may all be true, but that doesn’t make Fattah wrong...."

There are unemployed who do what benefits as well as unemployed who prefer jobs.

The former constitute what I called the ACORN vote Morrissey: "The problem is that there probably will be a 'moocher vote,' and not just in unemployment benefits. Rather than call it a 'moocher vote,' a better and more accurate term would be the 'entitlement vote.' We’re heading toward a fiscal crisis on entitlement spending that makes the 2008 bubble crisis look like the House check-writing embarrassment. It could destroy our currency and leave us destitute, far worse than the Great Depression that spawned the entitlement spree in the first place. And yet Americans who say they want cuts in government spending that would barely dent the juggernaut blanch at the specific cuts that reduce their own take from the entitlement systems, even when those cuts come in the future rather than now. The entitlement vote is real, and it’s going to benefit Democrats in exactly the manner Fattah warns here."

EXACTLY!

Newt Gingrich has a point when he called President Obama "the food stamp president."

Putting more people on food stamps and having the percentage of Americans who actually pay federal income tax shrink is what Team Obama's re-election strategy has been all about all along.

Morrissey is hopeful: "The good news is that the entitlement vote has always been limited, and the crisis in 2008 probably made it significantly stronger than what it is now. Those legions of people on unemployment benefits have already run past the 99-week limit, and now they want jobs, not handouts. Republicans need to point to the generational lows in workforce participation rates and the millions of jobs lost that haven’t come back, thanks to the economic and regulatory policies of this administration. The entitlement vote does not have to be decisive in 2012, and almost certainly won’t be."

Unfortunately, there's a big problem with Morrissey's hopeful view: the people who preferred benefits for 99 weeks may want jobs now, but they are not temperamentally inclined to vote Republican. They are more likely to buy Team Obama's message that Wall Street is to blame and Obama is a good guy and their best bet.

The solution is to show what Obama really has been all about all along, win the votes of those NOT susceptible to Obama's charm and freebies and not to let voter fraud win the election for Obama.

Michael J. Gaynor

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Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.


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