All
Doubt Dispelled
The Most Recent Incarnation of Barack Obama
If there was any doubt where President Barack Obama’s ideological heart
lies, yesterday he let it be known loud and clear in a wide-ranging speech in
President Obama is at his core a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who sees the
federal government as the answer to all of
charging full steam ahead on this far-left course toward Election Day 2012,
despite the total failure of his big-government policies and an American people
who have flatly rejected the message he is trying to sell.
True to form, President Obama yesterday did what he does best: He delivered
a flowery speech and flexed his rhetorical muscles. It’s a talent that won him
the presidency, but unfortunately it hasn’t won the future for the American
people. And that’s because the President’s underlying philosophy is terribly
flawed. After three years of a massive expansion of government, the enactment
of Obamacare, hundreds of billions of dollars in failed stimulus spending,
government ownership of General Motors, a Big Labor/pro-unionization onslaught,
threats of even higher taxation, the promulgation of more unnecessary
regulations, and a total failure to confront the entitlement challenge, the
verdict is in on President Obama’s record and the soundness of his statist,
progressive philosophy. Deficits are soaring, the economy is stagnant, 13.3
million Americans are out of work, and job growth is flat. Not surprisingly,
the Presidents speech did not touch on those facts.
Instead of confronting the reality of America under his watch, President
Obama hearkened back to the days of Bull Moose progressive Theodore Roosevelt,
citing him as his model of good governance, quoting his 1910 “New
Nationalism” speech and calling for “fairness” in America–along
with more infrastructure spending, more federal education programs, more
regulations, and higher taxation on job creators to redistribute wealth and pay
for his big government programs. And in order to raise the temperature of his
rhetoric–and inflame the passions of his audience–the President fell back to
his class warfare ways, demonizing the haves in order to win over the have-nots
while painting a picture of an
where “unfairness” reigns and opportunity cannot be found.
Matthew Spalding, vice president of The Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth
Simon Center for Principles and Politics, explains why President Obama’s
reliance on class warfare and his perverted view of “fairness” is so
contrary to what
is really about:
There are no class distinctions in
could start an adopted child in a broken home, start Apple in a garage and
become a billionaire eight times over. The real distinction here is caused by
the rise of a new governing class of experts, bureaucrats and political elites
who insist on ruling us to enforce “fairness” rather than letting us
govern ourselves under the rule of law.
Indeed, the new fairness inevitably leads to bureaucratic favoritism,
inequalities based on special interests and undue political influence. The real
class warfare, as Paul Ryan argued in his recent speech at The Heritage
Foundation, is caused by “a class of governing elites, exploiting the
politics of division to pick winners and losers in our economy and determine
our destinies for us.”
Ironically, the President’s conception of America–that it is a land of no
opportunity–stands in stark contrast to his own personal story, which he even
trumpeted in his speech. Barack Obama came from meager beginnings and now sits
in the Oval Office. There are countless stories of other Americans who have
risen and found success on their own merit in this fertile land. But speaking
to
rugged individualism and the notion of achieving success without the helping
hand of the government would not serve President Obama’s progressive agenda. In
his world, the government is the giver of all things, the defender of the
middle class, and the architect of prosperity. Likewise, success is not
something to be championed but to be demagogued in the name of the expansion of
the state.
Over the past three years, we have seen the President articulate many ideas
and cloak himself in many different philosophies. Of late, he has even called
himself a tax-cutter and posed as a deficit hawk, all while calling for massive
amounts of new spending. But with yesterday’s speech, he has emerged in his
truest incarnation–a hard-line progressive to the core. The speech fits perfectly
with reports that the Obama 2012 campaign has come to the realization that it
will lose white blue-collar voters by large margins and is concentrating
instead on cobbling together a coalition of culture elites and racial
minorities. The abandonment of the middle class–or, rather, the fact that the
middle class has abandoned him–puts in context this latest incarnation of the
President as he prepares to run next year.
This is not the way to lead
to prosperity, to stand the economy on its feet, or to put the millions of
unemployed Americans back to work. Rather than make government bigger and more
intrusive, now is the time to make it smaller and more responsible so that
entrepreneurs can achieve what
cannot manufacture: new jobs, new ideas, and a better
future generations. But that
is quite different from the one President Obama envisions.
Interesting Note:
Norman Thomas ran for President of the
times, representing the Socialist Party of America. In 1944, he said the
following:
“The American people will never knowingly accept or
adopt socialism. However, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt
every fragment of the Socialist program. Eventually,
become a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened. I no longer
need to run for President under the Socialist Party banner. The
Democratic party has adopted our platform.”
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