Trustworthiness in American Politics

As Election Day in American politics draws ever so near, both candidates running for the office of the president are stepping up their efforts to try to sway voters to choose them over the other. One of the most pressing issues right now is which of these candidates can you really trust to lead the US out of its current economic crisis as well as keep the US in good standing with the rest of the world? All in all the issue of trust is what this election will boil down to in the end.

Both President Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney have accused one another of not being completely honest with American voters. Whether the issue is Mitt Romney’s tax returns or the more recent debate on the cost of Medicare, both candidates have been extremely vocal about the other party’s lack of honesty. Most Americans joke about the inability to trust politicians as a whole but when it comes down to choosing the President of the United States a politician’s honesty is no laughing matter.

Mitt Romney is known as being a “flip flopper.” To put it simply, he has changed his position on almost every major political issue since he began running for president last year. There is countless video footage of Romney stating as late as 2002 that he supported a woman’s right to choose whether or not she had an abortion and that, siting a story of a relative who passed away due to complications of an illegal abortion, he insisted abortions be safe and legal. He recently went on record stating that he “is and always has been pro-life,” yet there is stark evidence to the contrary. What exactly does this have to do with being trustworthy and why does it matter? Since there are numerous accounts of Mitt Romney’s ever-changing political views on the major social and economic issues of the day, who’s to say we can trust that he will not suddenly change his position once he is elected to run this country?  

President Obama has come under fire from the Romney Campaign for allegedly lying to the American people about what the Affordable Care Act does to Medicare.  The campaign accuses President Obama of stripping 716 billion dollars away from Medicare in order to pay for the ACA. However, the money that is taken away does not affect Medicare recipients at all. On the contrary, it is money that is wastefully spent on insurance subsidies and other unnecessary fees that are not needed for the healthy operation of the program. So the question that comes to mind is: why, with all of the clear and concise information on why the 716 billion dollars is being removed, do the vast majority of republicans still cry foul about the cuts, especially when the Romney/Ryan budget would completely abandon the current form of Medicare as we know it? The sad truth of the matter is a great number of average American citizens believe everything they hear and do not take the rime to research the claims made by either party themselves.

Come Election Day on November 6, 2012, as you are standing in the polling booth getting ready to make your final decision on who you think the next President of the United States will be, you will have to decide whom you believe is the more trustworthy of the two candidates. On the one hand you have an incumbent president with a strong and reliable track record; a man who has proven time and time again that he has the courage and tenacity to lead this nation in a progressive and definitive direction.  On the other hand is a man who has consistently changed his political beliefs in order to appease a voter base that would have more than likely voted for him if for no other reason than his label as a Republican; a man whose political strategy was to say anything about his opponent, whether it be true or not, in order to put him on the defensive and make him deny issues on record. You have to decide which of these two men are the most trustworthy and which of them is the most dishonest about their true intentions for the American people. Election Day is less than eleven weeks away and we can only hope that the eyes of the American people are able to see each candidate for whom they real