Who Are You Gonna Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes?

That quote comes to mind when you’re confronted with a political ideologue who only sees an issue through the prism of his political party’s philosophy and talking points, and what he claims as facts are not facts, but are untruths (lies). In other words, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.

It seems like Obama’s whole campaign is not to champion his policies, but to trash his opponent personally. Over the past three months, the Obama campaign has spent a couple of hundred million dollars in campaign ads running down his opponent. First, it was calling Romney a “vulture capitalist” instead of a “venture capitalist”, even though 80% of the business deals he was involved in as CEO of Bain Capital, were positive undertakings where over 100,000 jobs were created including Staples, Sports Authority, Burger King, Dominos Pizza, Burlington Coat Factory, AMC Entertainment etc. Compare his record with that of Obama who has used taxpayer money (actually borrowed money) to finance failing “green “ Co.’s like Solyndra, Ener 1, Beacon Power, Eastern Energy etc., all which went bankrupt. In addition, they tried to trash his stint as CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics as being a failure, when, in fact, he took a money-losing proposition and turned it into a highly successful operation and wound up with a surplus when the games were over. Not to be outdone with their former lies, the Obama campaign went after his term as governor of Massachusetts as being a failure, when, in fact, he turned a deficit the state had rung up prior to him taking office, and when he left office in 2007, he left with a surplus and a state ranked #1 in education achievement along with an unemployment rate of 4.7%. Next, they implied that he wasn’t paying his fair share of income taxes, claiming that the 14% rate (the present capital gains rate is 15%) he paid, of his adjusted gross income, was much less than what the average taxpayer paid on his income from wages. Everything was legal and his returns showed that he donated more than $4 million to charity besides paying millions in taxes. The voters who were exposed to this relentless barrage of negative ads were starting to believe the charges and Obama began to pull away in the polls.

But on Oct. 3rd, at and after the first presidential debate, the American people (an audience estimated at over 63 million) were able to see Romney “unfiltered” without the slant of the vicious ads about him that was being put forth by the Obama campaign. What they saw was a very likeable man with a formidable grasp of the issues who looked presidential, as opposed to a Zombie-like performance of a president who looked like he didn’t want to be there. Even his flunky’s in the “lame stream media” (especially MSNBC) went apoplectic in evaluating his performance in the debate. Even they gave him a grade of “F”. From that time on, the polls reversed course, and Romney started to inch up and within a little over a week, he began to pull ahead of Obama, especially in some of the swing states.

If history is any criteria for predicting outcomes of elections, whenever an incumbent cannot gather at least 50% in the polls prior to the election, he will lose the election as undecided voters generally break for the challenger. This is the same scenario that occurred in the 1980 campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, in which just weeks before the election after a strong debate by Reagan, Carter’s 8 point lead evaporated and Reagan won going away. Could this election be déjà vu all over again?

Of course, predictions are open to question, but who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann