Obama Defined

At some point every president defines himself and his policies. By turning to TR’s New Nationalism model in his own Osawatomie speech, Obama revealed once and for all that his objective as president is to complete the progressive transformation of America, and define its next phase as assuring not equal opportunity, but “Fair” outcomes, by redistributing wealth and benefits through an ever more complicated and extensive government that regulates more and more of the economy and society.
He alluded to “an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried–no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out.” But continued with this “basic bar­gain” has become so “eroded by the mar­ketplace that the defining issue of our time is to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore Fairness.”
The choice we face, as Obama frames it is between the harshness of mar­ket capitalism (defined in straw-man fashion as “you’re-on-your-own econom­ics” with “a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can” and the fairness of progressive nationalism (the view that “we are greater together–when everyone engages in fair play, and everybody gets a fair shot, and everybody does their fair share”.
The word “Fair” recurs in various forms throughout the speech, with reminders along the way that things have to be made Fair–and that means ever more govern­ment authority, programs, and regulation. “As a nation,” Obama said, “we’ve always come together, through our government.” And so Obama returned to his mantra of more federal education programs, more infrastructure spending, and more eco­nomic regulations. And, of course, raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for these “investments” would only be fair.
Obama denies the charge of class war­fare but what he is actually doing is cobbling together an alliance of state dependents, government hangers-on, and political elites who claim the capacity to run things. Obama’s program is fundamentally about the rise of a new governing class that insists on enforcing political and economic “fairness” rather than letting us govern ourselves.
As the national government becomes ever more centralized and bureaucratic, acting without constitutional limits, it also becomes more undemocratic, and more potentially despotic, than ever. The result is a government designed to secure the right to “the pursuit of happiness” and to break down unjust barriers to opportunity now penalizes success, restricts opportunity, and has become the chief barrier to the achievement of the American Dream.
Consider that after almost 50 years of the governments war on poverty the poor have lost.