PrintJanuary 8, 2011
Conservative Audacity Ahead
Candidate Obama ran on a promise to fundamentally transform the United States of America. Regarding health care, we knew that Obama believed that the system was broken and unfair and that he intended to fix it.
So he ran, in part, on the intention of transforming the best health care system in the free and oppressed world.
When the public discovered the details hidden within the million words of "reform" legislation, protests broke out spontaneously. And the more the public learns of the specifics of central control, the higher the disapproval numbers go.
But the people be damned -- Obama got what he wanted.
Mr. Obama plugged his ears and pushed full steam ahead with his far-left health-care agenda despite the phenomenal election of Scott Brown to kill the bill. President Obama painted doctors and insurers as greedy and corrupt and dissenters as liars. The president used every Chicago backroom tactic in the book to shove down his bad-tasting medicine over the objections of the people.
Consequently, Mr. Obama has inspired me with the following hope: that a conservative presidential candidate will follow Obama's example in 2012 and beyond and get things done, no matter the cost.
...Except in the next election, the conservative should run on the promise to fundamentally restore rather than transform. The focus should be on something that actually needs a complete overhauling: the federal government. May the statist politicians be damned and the American people get what they want.
Our entire way of life -- our free-market system -- did not need a fundamental transformation as Obama believed. What our health-care system needed was some commonsense tweaking -- like enacting the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines and tort reform.
In contrast, our federal government is in fact broken and corrupt, and most significantly it is operating outside the Constitution.
In politics, getting the federal government back to its constitutional boundaries is the key battle for our national wellbeing.
We need a candidate who can muster the same level of stubbornness, audacity, and tenacity as Obama in order to take us back to the Constitution.
Yes, many are timid because the left has the benefit of the major media to influence opinion. But conservatives will need to learn to imitate Obama and plug their ears to the "chatter" of the liberal media and the rest of the 20% left wing demographic.
Regardless of media intimidation, a real conservative can push as hard as Obama can, but in the opposite direction to restore the Constitution. The major difference would be that the conservative would have a mandate from the people to do so.
So what will conservative assertiveness look like? For sure, a commensurate effort will look as radical to the leftists as Obama's radicalism looks to conservatives and moderates.
But as Barry Goldwater iterated back in 1964, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." What is now at stake is the very survival of our constitutional republic and the liberties it was intended to ensure.
Obama's extremism in the pursuit of social and economic justice is no virtue; rather, it is a vice that weakens the foundations of America's unique liberty.
Just as Obama did whatever he had to do to ram "health care" through, we need a conservative president to do likewise in the defense of liberty.
We cannot function as a constitutional republic with a "federal government" that "can do most anything in this country," as Pete Stark (D-CA) unfortunately but correctly put it.
We have a real problem when the federal Congress can use the Commerce Clause to do most anything. We have a real problem when the United States Supreme Court can use the 14th Amendment to "incorporate" the Bill of Rights to do most anything. Or in the latter case, I should say to prevent the states from doing most anything -- especially when it comes to transferring their own values in their own schools.
The systemic problem is such that we have a constitutional crisis in the country.
As such, let's hope that our next crop of conservative presidential candidates learn from our present leader and muster the resolve necessary to do whatever it takes.
