“Bill” Board – Day 14: turn in your test

Time is up.  Time to decide. Time to turn in your test papers, as my government teacher in the 11^th grade use to say.

This is the last post in this series. The last “Bill” Board for me. I leave you with this thought: words form ideas, ideas drive elections, and elections have consequences. 

In 2008, the words were “hope and change.” Today, the word is “forward.”  Both slogans convey positive ideas, but upon reflection, are nothing more than empty shells into which the average voter can project his or her own meaning.  In 2008, few looked beyond the rhetoric to discover what then Senator Obama and his merry band of “critical theorists” meant by those words.  In the name of political correctness, his ethnicity trumped any serious discussion about his ideology, his circle of friends, or his track record.  Instead, we left it to him to define how those words would “fundamentally transform America.”  We were satisfied to believe, with no basis in fact, that the election of a black President would prove once and for all we had achieved the civil rights era objective of a post-racial America in which, as Barack Obama said, “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.”   Instead, what we elected was the first post-American president, who has accomplished – if nothing else – dividing America by race, by economic class, by religious belief, and by political party. 

As Abraham Lincoln famously stated in his second inaugural address, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” a fact on which this President is counting – but in a negative sense – to achieve his goal of fundamental transformation.  In his speech, Lincoln made the case that the struggle against slavery would determine the outcome of a free people.  If President Obama were to give Lincoln’s speech, he would make the case that the struggle against our republican form of government will determine the outcome of the socialist / Marxist ideal of a one-world government.  The speech might go something like this:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave [social democracy] and half free [a constitutional republic]. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery [social democracy] will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.^[1]

Fortunately for us we do not have to opine about what the President might say. It is 2012, and we have the President’s track record and his own words we can examine.  Here is his track record:

• Net U.S. jobs lost since 2008: up 5 million (“Bill” Board – Day 1)
• Food stamp recipients since 2009: up 65% (“Bill” Board – Day 2)
• Price of gas since 2009: up 93% (“Bill” Board – Day 3)
• 2010 deficit: 3^rd largest in U.S. history - $1.294 Trillion (“Bill” Board – Day 4)
• 2011 deficit: 2^nd largest in U.S. history - $1.298 Trillion (“Bill” Board – Day 5)
• 2009 deficit: largest in U.S. history - $1.416 Trillion (“Bill” Board – Day 6)
• Borrowed federal spending – 40% (“Bill” Board – Day 7)
• Your family’s share of the U.S. Total Debt - $684,000 (“Bill” Board – Day 8)
• Your share of the U.S. Total Debt - $181,000 (“Bill” Board – Day 9)
• Unemployment for 43 months: > 8% (“Bill” Board – Day 10)
• Household net worth: down 35% (“Bill” Board – Day 11)

We also have the President’s own words. In a 2001 WBEZ.FM Chicago Public radio interview, when Mr. Obama – then an Illinois State Senator – said this “… the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of the redistribution of wealth and the more basic issue of political and economic justice in this society.  … The Warren Court … did not break free of the essential constraints placed by the founding fathers in the constitution.”  President Obama concludes,  “Generally, the constitution is interpreted as a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the state government or the federal government must do on your behalf.” 

Taken in its in entirety, the WBEZ interview reveals a President who sees himself and his “coalitions of power” as the mechanism to bring about “fundamental change” to America rather than working through Congress and the Constitution.  The President’s thinking is foreign to me and seems to me to be an abrogation of the constitutional “contract” between the federal government, the states, and most importantly the citizens of the United States.

To me, the choice seems clear. I pray it does for you also.

Turn in your test.  Vote November 6^th.