Jim DeMint: Obama Is Self-Destructing

Friday, 15 Oct 2010 06:56 PM

By: Ronald Kessler

President Barack Obama is “self-destructing” and probably will not be re-elected, Sen. Jim DeMint tells Newsmax.

The South Carolina Republican cites the out-of-control spending and the fact that the stimulus bill did not keep unemployment below 8 percent, as the White House said it would if passed.

“I don’t think Obama will get re-elected,” DeMint says. “He appears to be self-destructing right now in the sense that when the pressure is really on to do something, he’s not able to organize or coordinate the effort to actually sustain any action,” DeMint says.

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Sen. DeMint: Obama Self-Destructing, Re-election Unlikely. Oct. 16, 2010 — Sen. Jim DeMint talks with Newsmax's Chief Washington Correspondent Ron Kessler about the kind of 2012 candidate he'd like to see in the White House. The South Carolina Republican also offers his predictions for the Nov. 2 midterm elections.
“Unfortunately, we can’t trust what he says anymore, and I don’t think that the American people are going to begin to trust him more and more as we get towards the elections, even if the economy improves,” DeMint says.

DeMint is chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, which includes the majority of Republican senators and works to advance conservative legislation. Through his Senate Conservatives Fund, DeMint, 59, has become a political powerhouse, throwing coveted support early on to rock-solid conservatives not well known outside the Beltway and not the darlings of the Republican establishment.

Explaining how he came to take on his own party, DeMint says that, when he was a congressman, Republicans were the majority in Congress, and George W. Bush was in the White House.

Back then, he thought Republicans “could do the things that I came to do, and that was fix the tax code and change Social Security from a dependency program to a wealth-creating program where we really saved the money and fix our healthcare system,” DeMint says. “A lot of my work was in healthcare, and with a goal of having every American on a policy that they can afford and keep.”

But, DeMint says, he was “disappointed relatively quickly when I found out that a lot of my Republican colleagues had settled in from the ’94 revolution and were no longer trying to reform the system. They were just trying to stay in power.”

In spite of out-of-control spending and deficits that plague the country today, “you got a lot of people here in the House and in the Senate who just don’t get it, and so even some of my Republican colleagues have resisted any change, and I don’t really call it conservative or liberal,” DeMint says. “This is about counting. It’s about accounting. It’s about numbers. I mean we cannot live beyond our means year after year and keep expanding our debt and expect to survive as a nation.”

DeMint notes that he is now in his 12th year in Congress.

“I was a team player, and I listened to my leadership, and I saw that they run this party into the ground,” DeMint says. “I mean after a disastrous 2006 election, where we lost the majority in both Houses, there weren’t any changes. I couldn’t believe it.”

DeMint decided he would no longer be Mr. Nice Guy.

“The only way to change this place is to change the people that are here, and that’s what I’m trying to do,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t love these people. A lot of them are my good friends, but they don’t believe in constitutional limited government, and they are not ready to give up their parochial earmarks, and Americans aren’t going to buy that anymore.”

Now Americans are saying enough is enough.

“They have taken it to the streets,” DeMint says. “For every one person that goes out to a tea party, I think there are a thousand at home who feel the same way but just don’t have the time between work and soccer games to go out and be a part of the political process, but what I’m seeing is thousands of people who have never really been involved in politics who are ready to throw the bums out and take back their country, and those are the people that I am working for.”

DeMint believes Republicans will retake the House and will add at least eight members to the Senate. If that happens, he says, they will repeal the healthcare bill.

“I’ve got to believe we can [repeal it], because if we give up on repealing the healthcare bill, I think we’re giving up on our country,” DeMint says. “I really believe this will destroy our healthcare system. I think it will bankrupt our country. It will put us on a course of just more and more spending where the government messes it up.”

Looking ahead to the 2012 presidential election, “I would like to see a Republican candidate who has the courage to tell Americans the hard truths right now, that we can’t make more federal promises,” DeMint says. “We have to tell people that the federal government has to do less and not more. We have to figure out how to focus on priorities and turn the rest over to the states and communities and families and stop trying to do everything from Washington.”


Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via e-mail. Go here now

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