President’s record is frightening

In Mr. Robinson’s May 23 column, he is hyperventilating over the possibility that Gov. Mitt Romney would be a conservative rather than a moderate president. Personally I don’t find frightening the prospect of a president who respects the Constitution, who believes in and understands the free market system, who understands and believes in every man’s desire for dignity that comes from a well-paying job and the ability to better himself through his own earned effort, who is capable and willing to once again reestablish America’ leadership, both economically and politically, in the world.

What I do find frightening is the current Democratic candidate named Barack Obama. Other than the name there is no similarity between the 2008 and 2012 candidate. The 2008 candidate ran on a successful sloganeering of “hope and change” but no public record. As Illinois states representative he voted 187 times as “present” — an obvious clue to his evolving leadership style of “leading from behind.” His four years as U.S. senator (the last two on the campaign trail) was at best nondescript.

The 2012 candidate now has a record and it is abysmal. Four years of an unemployment rate above 8 percent (15 percent counting those who have given up looking for work), a moribund economy, record deficit spending, the crushing and unbearable debt of $15 trillion-plus and growing, and a national policy of governmental control of every phase of our lives to turn American into another European-style socialist state. Now that’s a record that is truly frightening, which of course Mr. Robinson finds attractive and desirable. Strange.

As an immigrant who came to American after World War II, (to borrow a phrase) “yearning to be free,” I am once more “yearning to be free,” free from the Obama administration.

Laszlo Stephan

Des Plaines