In this election cycle, one noticeable phenomenon is
how the Republican presidential candidates are emphasizing our
country’s founding principles — liberty and freedom — more than
in any campaign in the modern political era. Each speaks often of
the Declaration of Independence. Citing articles of the
Constitution is commonplace.
The president’s record of evoking such themes stands in
stark contrast. In his State of the Union address, for example, our
president made only one perfunctory reference to the Constitution
and then went on to misquote it.
In his campaign speeches, the president carefully co-opts
key Republican themes like reducing debt and deficits, exploiting
natural gas, making teachers accountable and reducing regulation.
Yet, in these acts of political triangulation, he sees no value in
pre-empting Republican rivals on basic American principles imbedded
in our founding documents.
An Internet search for examples of Obama advocating for
liberty and economic freedom is futile. They don’t exist. Odd for
man who was once a professor of constitutional law.
So, why is the president so silent while his adversaries
are so vocal?
The answer lies in the president’s own words. In the 2008
campaign he said he was seeking to “fundamentally transform”
America. Indeed he is, and this transformation is directed squarely
at American Exceptionalism.
The Declaration of Independence was the original American
Social Contract. In it, the detail of King George’s “abuses and
usurpations” laid the predicate for our Exceptionalism in a simple
and provocative formula the world had never experienced:
Power would reside with commoners, not kings. The people’s
representatives would be entrusted with it. Government would be
limited and lent to representatives, not vested, with payment on
the loan due periodically via elections. Limited government,
principally for national protection, would free individuals to
pursue their dreams as they wished, and the collective pursuit of
these individual dreams would create a great and prosperous
nation.
The Contract’s counterparties are the government and the
governed; it has no legal authority; its validity is derived from
the Creator; and the terms of the Contract are simple: power is
lent in return for accountability back to the lender, the
people.
Legal contracts have an outlet in the courts for dispute
resolution. The only avenue for redress of violations of our Social
Contract is protest and political upheaval. And this is precisely
what the president has wrought.
For example, the stated focus of the Tea Party’s anger is
fiscal mismanagement, debt, deficits, and entitlements. But the
basis for the Tea Party’s venom is the president’s lack of
accountability for such financial mismanagement. The simple yet
profound wisdom of the Tea Party is that a nation is not
exceptional if it cannot pay its bills or honor its
promises.
Similarly, the stated target of the Occupy protestors is
amorphous “corporate greed,” but the basis for their anger is the
lack of accountability implied by the bailouts following the
financial crisis. To them it is irrelevant whether the culprit for
the crisis was Wall Street CEOs, Fannie Mae, rating agencies, or
regulators. They just see a rigged game where the only price
exacted was their own joblessness.
The joblessness of the Obama presidency endangers the
Contract, but not because a great nation will avoid unemployment.
Joblessness threatens exceptionalism when it is driven by political
elites versus the politically agnostic marketplace. Workers making
typewriters or dot matrix printers did not need a lesson in
Creative Destruction to appreciate that their jobs were displaced
by the personal computer and the laser printer.
But to lose a job to political payback (the Obama stimulus
Recovery Act requiring union-only hiring), or to political
calculation (refusing the Keystone Pipeline in favor of the Sierra
Club), or to government edict (the Offshore Moratorium Act
eliminating offshore drilling), or to regulatory overreach
(Dodd-Frank and Obamacare), is to suffer a shift in accountability
from the governed to the institutions of government entrenchment
and expansion.
The president speaks often of fairness, and of everyone
doing their “fair share.” But fairness, to this president, is
determined not by the people but by the ruling class in the form of
new regulations, new mandates, and new bureaucracies. As the walls
of these government fortresses grow ever higher, they become
permanent.
Thus the Obama presidency turns the Contract on its head.
As government becomes permanent, the will of the people is eclipsed
by the will of the bureaucracy.
For this president, power-on-loan is a quaint notion or
curious relic, rather than our most sacred covenant. The
president’s 2008 election promise to fundamentally transform
America has revealed itself to be an attempt to redefine that
covenant.
Mr. Obama says that keeping America’s “promise alive” is
the “defining issue of our time.” Indeed it is. The promise is to
preserve our Exceptionalism and defend it from those who seek its
redefinition and destruction.
