{"id":1603,"date":"2009-09-21T17:24:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T17:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/21\/yep-hes-legitimate"},"modified":"2009-09-21T17:24:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-21T17:24:00","slug":"yep-hes-legitimate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=1603","title":{"rendered":"Yep, he’s legitimate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Defenders of President Obama are taking an interesting course as they seek to single out the motives of the president’s critics.<\/p>\n

They suggest that the anti-Obama crowd is questioning his “legitimacy” as president.<\/p>\n

We’ve been down this road before in recent political history, more or less.<\/p>\n

Those who gnashed their teeth at George W. Bush’s election in 2000 questioned whether Dubya’s presidency was legit. He eventually was seated after a 5-4 vote by the U.S. Supreme Court to end the recount of ballots in Florida. Thus, Bush was elected by a single vote — on the high court. And that single vote came from a justice appointed by a Republican president, belonging to the same party as Bush.<\/p>\n

Then we have the two elections of Bill Clinton. In 1992, Clinton was elected with 43 percent of the vote. In 1996, he was re-elected with a 49-percent plurality. “He wasn’t elected by a majority!”<\/em> came the cries of the Clinton-haters. Those folks forgot, apparently, that Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 with a similar 43-percent plurality, but one didn’t hear those who opposed Nixon bring up his failure to obtain a majority. Nixon and Clinton were denied majorities by the presence of strong third-party candidates.<\/p>\n

But here’s the deal. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t require a president to be elected by a majority. A simple plurality gets the job done, just as it does in Texas. Gov. Rick Perry won re-election in 2006, you’ll recall, with just 39 percent of the total vote. And Bush’s first election in 2000 was done in accordance with constitutional provisions.<\/p>\n

President Obama’s popular vote margin of victory was significantly greater in 2008 than President Bush’s was in 2004 — and his Electoral College margin (365-173) was close to the totals run up by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.<\/p>\n

Obama’s presidency is legit, all right. So, let’s stop this talk of whether the president belongs in office. He does.<\/p>\n\n

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Defenders of President Obama are taking an interesting course as they seek to single out the motives of the president’s critics. They suggest that the anti-Obama crowd is questioning his “legitimacy” as president. We’ve been down this road before in recent political history, more or less. Those who gnashed their teeth at George W. Bush’s … Continue reading Yep, he’s legitimate<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}