Turner: Obama's record won't help Nov. 6

While the Republican presidential primaries mean a lot, the record of this incumbent president will influence the election more. After nearly three years in office, President Obama's regime offers more questions than answers in the bid for a second term.

Here is a baker's dozen of reasons why some who voted for him in 2008, like me, might be less willing to do so this time:

1. Whiffs of corruption: The White House backed a solar-cell maker named Solyndra with a $535 million loan guarantee. Its major investor was an Obama donor named George Kaiser. It failed. Now, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., wants a probe into a $433 million no-bid contract for a smallpox vaccine by Siga Technologies. Two major players in Siga are Obama donor Ron Perlman and Andrew Stein, the former head of the Service Employees International Union, a major force in Obama's 2008 victory.

2. Gutlessness: There is no record yet of a single criminal prosecution brought by the Obama administration against anyone involved in the lying, cheating and shameless manipulation by wealthy brokers that helped sink the economy. At the same time, Obama is milking millions in campaign cash from Wall Street.

3. Snubbing the cities: The metros of the blue states, where most of the struggling black and Hispanic households are, got nothing from this administration but charm. No federal investment programs like those of the Johnson, Nixon and Carter administrations were seriously proposed by Obama. Yet Obama counts on these same minority communities to help carry him across the line once more.

4. Evading civil rights: Electronic surveillance of Americans is stronger now than after enactment of the first Patriot Act. Obama recently signed a defense bill that gives the military the power to indefinitely detain anyone suspected of being a supporter of al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces."

5. Warfare: Expanding use of killer and surveillance drones worldwide without explanation, without specific congressional authorization. Ditto on Obama's intervention in Libya, and permission for civilian authorities to use them to spy in the states.

6. Gutting health care: After promising Americans near universal health care, Obama let lobbyists for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries diminish his program by killing the public option and negotiated drug buys. Obama has granted at least 1,400 waivers to companies and unions under a shroud of secrecy. The law contains unfunded Medicaid mandates that could cost New Yorkers $1 billion a year.

7. Flip-flops: On closing Guantanamo Bay, and trying Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the confessed 9/11 plotter, in New York City. It's 10 years and four months later and Mohammad still hasn't been tried.

8. Economy: After squandering $900 billion on Stimulus I, largely on one-year subsidies to local government unions, Obama let the Republicans bully him into continuing the Bush tax cuts. He has officially denied six times that Communist China subsidizes its exports with currency games.

9. Environment: The Sierra Club says the government is weighing a rule permitting logging in the Redwood National Forest.

10.Nullification: Obama's refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation in Philadelphia in 2008.

11. Culture: The administration is considering a rule defining a religious hospital as one whose staff is of one religion that serves only adherents of that religion.

12. Fast and Furious: The continuing coverup of the Justice Department program to release 2,200 deadly weapons into the United States and Mexico, one of which killed a border patrol agent in 2010.

13. Iraq: Leaving without a friendly regime in place, and refusing for political purposes to give our brave troops a welcome-home parade.

Douglas Turner is a columnist for the Buffalo News. His email address is dturner@buffnews.com. Distributed by MCT Information Services.