PrintJanuary 25, 2011
State of the Obama 'Remaking America' Revolution
While we citizens are dutifully perched upon pins and needles, awaiting the president's next pep rally -- the SOTU -- we might as well use this time to consider the state of the Obama "Remaking America" revolution.
Calling to mind Obama's campaign pledge to fundamentally "transform" the United States of America, good citizens ought never forget that this remaking of America was and still is the goal of the Obama presidency. By hook and by crook, whether through gargantuan bills passed against the will of the people with aid and abetment from bribes, kickbacks, and corporatist maneuvers, or through the bypassing of Congress with agency regulations, this president has both his mind and his heart set on making America into the "world as it should be" according to Barack Obama.
So how's that fundamental transformation going this year? It's time to take stock again.
Has Obama changed into a reasonable moderate?
Supposedly, the American people have just witnessed the political remaking of the most stalwartly progressive president since Woodrow Wilson. Fickle moderate/independent voters have already drunk the triangulation Kool-Aid and seem poised to march blindly once again towards the cliff, shouting, "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!" Immediately following Obama's days-late-and-dollars-short presidential call to civility in Tucson, his poll numbers shot up among these civics-challenged voters.
Pity, really. For nothing whatsoever has changed except Obama's outward demeanor. And anyone who thinks otherwise failed to notice the "together we thrive" t-shirts at the all-hail-Obama speech in Tucson. The eulogy turned political pep rally was so reminiscent of faux Greek columns, white coat press-conference props, and preselected town hall questioners that it would take a bulb of dimmest wattage to have thought Obama's Tucson speech truly presidential.
As anyone who has read Barack Obama's own autobiography, Dreams from My Father, would handily know, this president learned very early how to masquerade as the person with which his current audience felt most comfortable. Obama recounted his penchant for pretense rather early in life:
I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn't do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved - such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time. (94-95)
In this particular instance, a young Barack was employing the "reassuring" tactic to mollify his own mother. She was upset with his lackadaisical academic efforts and his using drugs. He didn't change his behavior, he recounts. He merely changed his demeanor and employed this reassurance tactic to get around the discomfort of being held to account for his behavior.
So call me a skeptic when it comes to Barack Obama, the far-left ideologue, suddenly morphing into a statesman with temperance and a modicum of respect for the public. I'm not buying this ruse for even an instant.
Nevertheless, if Obama can pull this off with close to Clintonian finesse, then he has gained enormous ground by dropping the in-your-face, messianic pose to which he clung throughout his first two years in office.
Score one for the "remaking America" revolution.
What about ObamaCare?
This time last year, President Obama was growing desperate in his cherished goal to pass a national health care bill. He was facing growing headwinds from all corners and had just lost his super-majority in the Senate with Scott Brown's miraculous Massachusetts victory.
But by March, Obama and Axelrod were high-fiving it in the Oval Office, celebrating the completely partisan passage of the 2,300-page ObamaCare monstrosity that no one had even read. It was hailed as "big f**king deal" by the vice president himself. Though the public was steadfastly against the bill, Nancy Pelosi declared that once we saw what was in it, we really were going to love it.
Just the opposite has proven true. The more people have learned about ObamaCare, the more it's become a treacherous thorn in the president's political side. The president's ubiquitous claim that we needed the health care bill to save the economy has proven not only hubristic, but patently untrue. As the new House Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan (R-WI), has meticulously pointed out, the health care bill is a budget-busting, job-killing, business-strangling yoke on an economy just struggling to recover.
From the House Budget Committee report:
This new report clearly documents the devastating effects of the Democrats' new health care law on the American worker, as well as the debilitating strain it will put on our nation's finances. Simply put, this bill kills jobs. Its burdensome penalties will make it harder for businesses to expand and add workers, and we have already seen how its costly mandates are driving up insurance premiums across the country. Nor would the bill improve our fiscal picture, contrary to some claims. Misleading arguments about its true deficit impact exclude the $115 billion needed to implement the law and over $500 billion in double-counting Social Security payroll taxes, CLASS Act premiums, and Medicare reductions. The law was written to measure 10 years of tax increases to offset 6 years of new spending. There is no question that the creation of a trillion-dollar open-ended entitlement is a fiscal train wreck.
At this juncture, the newly ordained Republican majority in the people's House has repealed ObamaCare, and Republicans are maneuvering to force Harry Reid to hold a vote in the Senate. To say that this is merely symbolic political posturing does a grave disservice to the will of the American people, who voted overwhelmingly in November for candidates vowing to do exactly what they have now done. Hanging this monstrosity around the necks of every Democrat -- especially President Obama -- may be the undoing of Obama's reelection campaign.
Adding to the president's ObamaCare woes is the fact that one federal judge has already ruled the bill's individual mandate unconstitutional, and more than half the states -- now 26 -- are suing to prevent its full enactment. Some states are even moving to pass nullification statutes in a clearly provoked standoff between federal and state powers.
The president brought all of this on himself. Indulging purely blind ideological zeal and narcissistic glory-seeking, President Obama ignored the will of the American people and then had the unrivaled audacity to mock their displeasure.
Score one -- a big one -- for the people of the United States of America. May the fight continue. And it will. ObamaCare may be the one thing that stands stalwartly against this president's reelection.
And now it's time for tea.
Just days after the Tea Party-enabled Republicans took over the leadership of the House of Representatives, the U.S. editor for the U.K. Telegraph, Toby Harnden, opined on Obama's chances for genuine "comeback kid" status in the Clintonian mold. Mr. Harnden believes, and I am inclined to agree, that President Obama's utter failure to comprehend the Tea Parties will be his fatal flaw and the reason why his Clinton-inspired political makeover will not -- ultimately -- serve him nearly as well in the end.
From the moment of Rick Santelli's valiant call for a modern Tea Party in February of '09, Barack Obama and his minions failed to grasp the uniquely American, deeply ingrained resistance to tyranny. Whether that authoritarian yoke comes in the form of laws passed against their consent or whether it comes by stealth from regulatory agencies on high, the American people have it infused into their genes to resist.
And so, when Obama's animal-house press secretary, Robert Gibbs, tried to fob off questions about Santelli and the call for a Tea Party by saying he would love to buy that man a cup of coffee -- decaf -- the public was not amused. When President Obama gleefully mocked the first protests in '09 by saying folks ought to instead be "thanking" him, the public's will to resist grew by leaps and bounds. When House and Senate Democrat leaders tried to call Tea Partiers Nazis, or say they were too "well-dressed" not to be "Astroturf," well, the grassroots Tea Partiers grew more incensed.
And by the time Democrats arrogantly passed their backroom-deals monstrosity into law, all the anger that Obama & Co. had actively inflamed for more than a year firmly hardened into electoral resolve.
For months before the midterms, liberal analysts and talking heads hammered home their belief that the election was all about -- and about only -- the economy. If the economy were humming and the unemployment rate had fallen, then the Democrats would be swimming in a sweeter-than-sweet pot of voters' honey, they claimed.
Immediately after the midterm election, Obama began his public metamorphosis as a reasonable centrist, one who would henceforth work with Republicans and focus only on the economy. All would be well in the world according to Obama.
So far, the tactic of political pretense would appear to be working, as demonstrated by Obama's rising approval numbers. A two-years-too-late focus on the economy might actually bring about some financial relief. And perhaps Obama has faint reason to cheer on this year's State of the Union occasion.
But sooner or later, brought on by one instigating event or another, Barack Obama's true "I know far better than you" nature is bound to reassert itself.
And when it does, there simply will not be enough tea in America to soothe the ruffled feathers of liberty.
Obama's failure to understand the true nature of Tea Party revolt against encroaching tyranny and overburdening taxation may yet prove his fatal flaw, just as his unbridled arrogance has always been his Achilles heel.
Fundamentally transform America? Right now, Americans are forcing transformation on Barack -- not the other way around.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
