Nonymous: State of Myself Address part two

I promised a part two on the State of the Union address… tardy but here you go:

Remember that in the first installment we looked at the word I.  The President has revealed an egocentric and myopic personality. We have discovered that there is definitely an I in Obama.  President Bush set up a baseball diamond on the grounds of the White House so that children could play baseball, President Obama wants to run the BCS and impose a playoff system.  Why, because he not only believes that he can help, he believes that he should impose his ideas.  To paraphrase the junior Senator from the state of Minnesota, “he is better, and smarter and doggone it, people like him.”

This is the change that Obama apparently aspired to, but it is not the change that we were promised.  When the Democratic Party ran against the Bush administration in the last Presidential election, they ran against President Bush’s go it alone strategies in Iraq and on the world stage.  They railed against the raw use of partisan political power.  They promised something different.  What we have thus seen, however, has been the naked use of partisan power and old-school Chicago style politics.  Our public school principals would call it by it’s real name, bullying and intimidation.  This was not the tone that made Senator Barack Obama the President.

President Obama’s campaign was based on the twin cannons of hope and change.  Hope and Change. Remember the order of the terms.  Word order usually contains meaning, especially when it deviates from the typical alphabetical listing.  As an example, from our own founding documents we find, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Several years ago I began to wonder why these words were listed in this order? Alphabetically it would read: liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness; but Jefferson and his compatriots chose to put them in a different order.  They put them in the order of importance.  For a government to protect liberty, they first must value and protect life.  This articulates the type of liberty that our government ascribes to.  This is not the liberty of the grave, but a freedom that holds life to be sacred and honored.   The pursuit of happiness (or property as originally rendered by philosopher John Locke) is contingent on the first two.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness reveals an important principle of the founders, and would be recognized by many 20^th century philosophy students as a basic Maslowian scale.  You need life to have liberty, and you need liberty to pursue happiness.  This can also be used as a philosophical litmus for God given and Constitutionally defended rights.  You do not have the right to kill, even if it assists you in exercising your freedom.  Why?  Because life trumps liberty.  Of course as many a lawyer has told me, legal logic is not really logical, so much of what I have expressed as the understandings of the founders has been dismantled by legal decisions and congressional mismanagement.

Now let’s take this understanding and apply it to Hope and Change.  Notice the order.  It could have just as easily been Change and Hope.  Hope is placed first to modify both the purpose and the mood of change.  Now let me be clear (another Obamism), the American people were ready for change, but they wanted hopeful change.  In other words, improvement.  If 5.5 % unemployment was unacceptable, it doesn’t mean that we wanted 10.5%.  We now understand that change can be both good and bad.  We now understand that change can mean both finding a job or losing one.  And the American people are unhappy that they have lost their jobs.

This is why the hope was so important in the campaign, and why it has been noticeably absent since the inauguration.  This is the lie that was imbedded in the Alinsky-based call for change.  Hope makes change palatable, even for those who are currently satisfied.  This is because for the majority of Americans the problem was not where they were, but the perception of the direction that we were heading.  They saw the dangers of run away spending and heard Candidate Obama rail against it.  They saw an open ended do nothing strategy in Iraq (pre-surge) and were angered at the meandering movements.  They saw a Congress that seemed to be stuck in an endless partisan argument and perceived that they were fiddling while the infrastructure burned down.

We wanted to see a future that was hopeful and candidate Obama said all the right things.  Hope and change became a call to a post-racial, and post-partisan politics.  People rallied behind the hope and the hype, they wanted to see their nation in a positive light, and here was the smiling, radiant candidate Obama.  But now we have a different man governing.  A man without hope, a man unwilling to bend to the will of the people.  An administration who actually believes that you must be mentally challenged in order to disagree with their perspective. A President who is so interested in remaking the nation in his own image that he is willing to sacrifice the electoral future of his party for his personal victories.

As concerned as Conservatives must have been to hear the State of the Union address it must have been even more sobering for centrist, or blue dog, Democrats who must be wondering whether their demise will come from an electoral defeat at home or because of the long knives unsheathed by their own partisan administration in the White House.

Now President Obama has abandoned all Hope, and has stuck with the Change.  This is a bad electoral strategy, though it is a time honored strategy of those who would follow the road to tyranny.  He is doing his best to keep the smile on and to maintain a positive image, but the blows are beginning to take their toll.  It will be interesting to see if the press or his party will be the first to abandon him.  It will be even more interesting to see how he will deal with an attack from within.

President Obama can no longer be considered the golden boy.  He is tarnished and wounded.  He has never faced this challenge before.  Now the American people will see his true character.  So far, I am unimpressed with what I see.

Tags: al franken, alinsky, bcs, change, chicago style politics, egocentric, hope, liberty, life, night of long knives, Obama, philosphy, president bush, pursuit of happiness, right to kill, senator stuart smalley, state of the union address