Bad news: Those words came from Theodore Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech, delivered in 1910 in Osawatomie, Kan., nearly a year and a half after his presidency ended.
President Obama chose that little town as the appropriate setting for his own speech echoing Roosevelt's fiery condemnation of concentrated wealth.
Praising Roosevelt's "vision," Obama re-asserted Washington's obligation -- and right -- to combat "the gaping inequality" produced by " 'you're on your own' economics." Decrying the "breathtaking greed of a few," Obama said Roosevelt "knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest."
Obama repeated Roosevelt's warning that "our country means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy ... of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him."
So who, under the Roosevelt-Obama concept, guarantees that opportunity?
The federal government, of course.
Hey, how are all those other federal guarantees working out for you?
OK, so without practical government regulation of business, economic Darwinism will run amuck. But at this point, regulation run amuck is strangling our gasping economic recovery -- and Obama wants more.
Ponder this ominous passage, wisely omitted by Obama, from that Roosevelt speech: "We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community."
Whoa, "Roughriders."
So who decides whether to "permit" gaining a fortune -- and whether it "represents benefit to the community"?
Again, the federal government.
No wonder "T.R." didn't win the Republican presidential nomination he sought in 1912. No wonder he lost that year's general election when he ran as the Progressive (aka Bull Moose) Party nominee.
And no wonder the "progressive" Obama picked that call to class-warfare arms to quote.
Too bad he doesn't instead quote, and heed, these words uttered by other former Republicans -- while they were still presidents:
This, in a country $15 trillion in debt with out-of-control entitlements systematically starving every other national need. This obsession with a sock-it-to-the-rich tax hike that, at most, would have reduced this year’s deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion is the classic reflex of reactionary liberalism — anything to avoid addressing the underlying structural problems, which would require modernizing the totemic programs of the New Deal and Great Society.
As for those structural problems, Obama has spent three years on signature policies that either ignore or aggravate them:
●A massive stimulus, a gigantic payoff to Democratic interest groups (such as teachers, public-sector unions) that will add nearly $1 trillion to the national debt.
●A sweeping federally run reorganization of health care that (a) cost Congress a year, (b) created an entirely new entitlement in a nation hemorrhaging from unsustainable entitlements, (c) introduced new levels of uncertainty into an already stagnant economy.
●High-handed regulation, best exemplified by Obama’s failed cap-and-trade legislation, promptly followed by the Environmental Protection Agency trying to impose the same conventional-energy-killing agenda by administrative means.
Moreover, on the one issue that already enjoys a bipartisan consensus — the need for fundamental reform of a corrosive, corrupted tax code that misdirects capital and promotes unfairness — Obama did nothing, ignoring the recommendations of several bipartisan commissions, including his own.
In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!
Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.
This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?
He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.
No comments:
Post a Comment