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Saturday, July 5, 2008
Obama’s disingenuous ‘change’ agenda
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It was “Patriotism Week” in the Barack Obama campaign, a time to strap on a flag lapel pin, frame the face in the flag and declare emptily that these darn Americans just haven’t been properly asked to volunteer to serve our country.
What a bizarre week it was, scripted as alas they all will now be until after November’s general election, when a nation, sufficiently inspired by the theme-of-the-week reintroduction of the new messiah, prompts us all to declare by acclamation that, indeed, we want “change.”
Oh, there will be a few of us troglodytes, the grumpy old gramps and grannies, resistant to the “change” that looks to us so vaguely familiar from the ’60s and ’70s we left behind. But by now we are grown accustomed to the reality that until the old hippies die, or until a new idea for governing burrows its way into the Party of Envy and Entitlement, “change” will always mean resurrecting yesterday’s solutions.
The Left persists in believing that the problem with Big Government is not that it saps the enterprise of individuals and cultivates dependency, but that they’ve just never had the right people in place to make it work, or if they did, their good efforts were thwarted by the insidious forces of obstructionism, as was the case with HillaryCare.
The lesson learned from that is not that the concept is flawed, but that the Left’s intelligentsia has to be more creative in getting back to yesterday’s solutions without arousing the inattentive masses to ire. One way is to claim that the pain of financing Obama’s Big Government agenda will be borne by “the rich.”
And while they don’t use the modern-day equivalent of “peace dividend” — the appropriate term now would be “surrender dividend” — to describe plans for a hollow military brought home from Iraq and reassigned to humanitarian and road-building projects in Third World countries, the Left’s view all along has been that war, for whatever reason, is a nettlesome distraction from more important domestic spending priorities.
But, inconveniently, the American public is not yet there. It’s not ready to lose, and it’s not ready to embrace socialism, however masked.
One other thing about the Left is that it is sometimes much too clever for its own good. At the start of the Obama campaign’s “Patriotism Week” performances, the too-eager retired Army general whose pronouncements offer cover to the Left on Iraq and national security weighed in on John McCain’s supposed advantage in the patriotism arena. Emoted retired Gen. Wesley Clark, quite bizarrely: “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is qualfication to be president.”
Now, this is spoken in support of a candidate whose primary qualification for public office was that he’d been a community organizer on the Southside of Chicago, service that came in lieu of any military commitment. Not incidentally, that chosen environment included a circle of friends whose lives and rhetoric, even in the context of latte liberalism, reflected a virulent anti-Americanism.
As it wound down — Obama respects McCain’s service and rejects Clark’s statement — the takeaway message is that there’s not much difference between Obama and McCain in service to the nation. It is an attempt to inoculate the Obama campaign from an assault they know will come on his Chicago connections.
This is equivalency, one of the Left’s favored tactics. “You ran a red light; I murdered a puppy: Let’s agree we’ve both committed crimes and not raise those questions again.”
As the campaign sailed into Independence Day, Obama defined patriotism as he always does: with a checkbook, drawn on your account. On the day before Memorial Day, he delivered an entire commencement speech on national service at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., without once mentioning the military option.
Last week he did, along with a new and expanded array of paid-volunteerism programs. Everything’s a checkbook.
It’s change, all right. But not change those who lived through the ’60s and ’70s haven’t seen before, and not change the working middle class can afford.
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