The Recycled Forward Speech

Last Thursday seems so long ago, the Obama acceptance speech has already become irrelevant. But in the interest of completing what I set out to do, this is Part II of commentary on the speech. [Part I here.]

Some of the coming sentences are simply false. Some are painfully ironic.

“I've cut taxes for those who need it.” Taxes are down for those who paid very little to none; 50% of earners pay no taxes, and many of those nonpayers actually receive tax credits. Does this redistribution create wealth? No, none. But he remains willing to nearly double capital gains taxes, even if doing so brings even less revenue to government, because taking from the rich (as he defines anyone making $250,000 a year who has been investing post-tax money as capital) is “fair.” Hmm.

“Now, I won't pretend the path I'm offering is quick or easy. I never have. You didn't elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth.” Actually, he indicated that economic recovery was doable, and quickly: “If I don’t have this done in three years, we’re looking at a one-term proposition.” That statement wasn’t from the speech; that was from an interview with Matt Lauer, February 1, 2009, a couple of weeks after the inauguration, where he’s predicting real progress within a year and says he’s glad he’ll be held accountable. OK, then.

“The path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place.” Definitions are so useful when communicating. Does he mean the path to prosperity, which he hopes you believe? Or does he, in his mind, mean the path to government controlled economy, which he sees as “a better place,” even though most Americans, who are not happy to be takers for nothing nor as providers of slave labor for nonproducers, would not see it as better? They would rather have job opportunities instead of unpaid-for government largesse.

“I'm asking you to rally around a set of goals for your country, goals in manufacturing, energy, education, national security and the deficit, real, achievable plans that will lead to new jobs, more opportunity and rebuild this economy on a stronger foundation.” What set of goals, exactly? None mentioned, so you go ahead and fill in the blank.

“We reinvented a dying auto industry that's back on the top of the world.” Except that the parts of the auto industry that are doing worst are the ones Obama chose to take over and subsidize, as well as those that would have been competitive if Obama hadn’t bet against them, using taxpayer dollars.

“And after a decade of decline, this country created over half a million manufacturing jobs in the last 2 1/2 years.” This seems arbitrary, as stats go. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 582,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since Obama took office, a little more in loss than the gain he claims.

“In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by 1 million barrels a day, more than any administration in recent history. And today the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in the last two decades.” Any increase in domestic production is mainly due to boom going on in North Dakota—on private land, so Obama had no power to stop it. He shut down production in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, and sent huge amounts of tax money to help Brazil drill off their coast. No one related to the industry actually believes Obama deserves credit for anything positive about oil production.

“So long as I'm commander in chief, we will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known.” His “plan” includes cutting $1 Trillion from the military. To make it the strongest ever. How? Obama isn’t what we’d call good at math, so maybe we shouldn’t trust him on this one.

“My plan would cut our deficit by $4 trillion.” Didn’t he say this before? And the result was not halving the deficit, but more or less doubling it? Not that such a budget is anything but air, because we can trust Obama’s Democrat-controlled Senate to continue to pass no budget at all.

photo found here

Nothing amused me so much as a side-by-side comparison, provided on Rush Limbaugh’s Friday show, with Jimmy Carter’s 1980 acceptance speech. One would think they used the same speechwriter, if it weren’t for the 32-year time difference. And then team Obama has the temerity to choose the word “forward” as their campaign mantra.

Here are a few samples:

The Choice between Two Futures:

OBAMA: The choice you face won't just be between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America, a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.

CARTER 1980: This election is a stark choice between two men, two parties, two sharply different pictures of what America is and what the world is, but it's more than that. It's a choice between two futures.

Being President Is Hard:

OBAMA: Times have changed, and so have I. I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle. For I've held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn't return. I've shared the pain of families who lost their homes and the frustration of workers who've lost their jobs. While I'm very proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, "I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go."

CARTER 1980: Let me talk for a moment about what that job is like and what I've learned from it. I've learned that only the most complex and difficult task comes before me in the Oval Office. No easy answers are found there, because no easy questions come there. I've learned that for a president, experience is the best guide to the right decisions. I'm wiser tonight than I was four years ago. And I have learned that the presidency is a place of compassion. My own heart is burdened for the troubled Americans, the poor and the jobless and the afflicted. They've become part of me.

I’ve Finally Got Energy Figured Out:

OBAMA: You can choose the path where we control more of our own energy. After 30 years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas. We have doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries. In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by 1 million barrels a day, more than any administration in recent history. And today the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in the last two decades.

So now you have a choice between a strategy that reverses this progress or one that builds on it.

We've opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we'll open more. But unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country's energy plan or endanger our coastlines or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers. We're offering a better path.

We're offering a better path where we—a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal, where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks, where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy, where—where we develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas that's right beneath our feet. If you choose this path, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020 and support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone.

CARTER 1980: The battle to secure America's energy future has been fully and finally joined. Americans have cooperated with dramatic results. We've reversed decades of dangerous and growing dependence on foreign oil. We are now importing 20 percent less oil. That is one-and-a-half million barrels of oil every day less than the day I took office. This is what they propose: to destroy the windfall profits tax and to unleash the oil companies and let them solve the energy problem for us.

Maybe it’s just coincidence, or circumstance; maybe there’s nothing else that can be said to ask for four more years of a failed presidency.

Let’s hope, for the sake of our nation’s future, that Obama is exactly as effective with these words as Carter was.

Belonging

There are things, institutions, we belong to, gladly: family, church, community. “I Belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” is a song we teach our young children at church. Belonging is something we want to feel. If we don’t feel we belong in our family, it leaves holes that we may spend a lifetime trying to fill.

from the DNC ad, photo from C-SPAN

The ad that came out earlier this week, shown at the DNC convention, caused something of an uproar about the idea of “belonging.”

I do belong to my family; I don’t think that means they “own” me. I believe it means they have a claim on my loyalty. I belong to my church; I am a member. I don’t think that means the Church owns me, although I would say that my turning my life over to God does mean, in a way, He owns me; I have entrusted my life to Him. I would not trust my life and soul to someone less perfect than God.

I did not immediately assume the DNC ad meant government “owned” me when it said we all “belong” to government. But as I think about it, I believe it is worth making the distinction. We don’t “belong” to government the way we belong to a church or other organization. We are not members of government. We are citizens of the United States of America; we “belong” to the country, meaning we have a claim on this community and offer our loyalty. But government is not The United States of which we are citizens. Government is a service we hire, as citizens, in our efforts to protect our God-given rights to life, liberty, and property (and how we pursue a living). The United States existed with the Articles of Confederation prior to the writing of the Constitution. The “new” government was created “in order to form a more perfect union." It is a constitutional republic, which, unlike a democracy, limits government so the power of the tyrannical majority cannot infringe on my inalienable rights.

When the DNC says we’re in this together, I’d say that is a positive idea that we all share. But when they describe that togetherness as government, they have revealed the underlying rift between their ideas and freedom ideas.

In President Obama’s nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, he used the word “together” seven times that I counted. There are probably additional expressions meaning “together” as well. For someone who has been accused, not infrequently, of being a socialist, giving a speech with the theme “this is a collective” is not good PR, but it is probably truthful.

He claimed he believed in the constitutional concept of being endowed with inalienable God-given rights. It was a paragraph that easily could have been spoken (probably was) at the RNC convention:

As Americans, we believe we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, rights that no man or government can take away. We insist on personal responsibility, and we celebrate individual initiative. We're not entitled to success. We have to earn it. We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world's ever known.

Then he follows with a big “but” clause:

But we also believe in something called citizenship—citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.

What exactly does he mean by “citizenship” and belonging to government? Because the use of the “but” clause implies that this supersedes the lesser idea of inalienable rights. And he doesn’t mean personal responsibility, because the placement of the “but” clause means he’s superseding that as well.

If “belonging” refers to belonging to government, and “citizenship” doesn’t mean having responsibilities as well as rights, then what does he mean? How can we conclude that he means anything other than the transformation to socialism that he’s been accused of seeking?

Nearer the end he says, “As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together.” Actually, no, citizenship does not mean what “we, the government” can do, because the protection of inalienable rights carefully and meticulously limits government. Citizenship is about the guarantee of inalienable rights; the proper role of government is to provide that protection—and that is all! This whole idea of “trust me to gather our collective resources and decide what we should do” is more than a little troubling to someone who loves constitutional liberty.

Near the beginning of the speech, he said this true statement: “When all is said and done, when you pick up that ballot to vote, you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation.” I agree.

He added, accurately, “And on every issue, the choice you face won't just be between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America, a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.”

He used the word “choice” 10 times, and the word “choose” 10 times in the speech. It was a compare/contrast piece. But when he then went on to describe what we’re choosing between, that didn’t go so well on the truthfulness scale. I think we’ll pick up that discussion next time.