Your Midterm Mandate Is Clear, Republicans: Stop Obama

Suppose you own an older home, and you want to give it a makeover. A major makeover. Maybe even take it into “extreme makeover” territory. Before you can build the new rooms, walls, and so forth, you have to plan. And that plan must include, among other things, destroying at least some of what’s there. Take a look at this time lapse video to see what I’m talking about.

Tear down the old house, replace it with another one. That’s a pretty fundamental transformation. Destruction had to take place before the rebuilding could begin. Keeping that in mind, let’s rewind to one of candidate Obama’s favorite lines in the closing days of the 2008 campaign that made him president of the United States.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvJJP9AYgqU

The crowds cheered wildly for his promise to “fundamentally transform” America. But did they know what they were cheering for? Did they know that they were cheering for both parts of “fundamental transformation” — not just the transformation’s outcome, but also the planning and destruction that inevitably take place before the transformation can begin?

Obama never really laid out his plans for “fundamental transformation,” not all in one place. Most of his fans probably thought it amounted to passing a couple of major bills that Democrats have wanted for years, ending the war against Islamist fascism (without their man ever calling it that, of course), socking the rich with higher taxes, and promoting the left’s ever nebulous and shifting notions of “fairness.” And they have mostly gotten that. But it’s not “fundamental transformation,” yet.

What is America, fundamentally? Fundamentally, we are a federal constitutional republic based on the rule of law, free citizens, and free enterprise. It is those fundamentals that Obama intends to transform, though unlike the house in the first video, they don’t need replacing. But to Obama, they need to be destroyed first to make way for his vision. What else could he have meant?

Obama’s project is more sweeping that what he has done to date, because his ideas are more radical and his motivations are deeper than most Americans realized when he was elected. Just taking a look at a few of his headline efforts, it’s clear that his promise — or was it a threat? — to “fundamentally transform” America is well under way. And that project inevitably means taking out some of the republic’s load-bearing walls.

Government’s relationship to industry. For decades, the left has agitated for more and more government control of U.S. private enterprise. They genuinely believe that government knows best, that big government=good government, and that government will bring about a more “fair” economy in which the rich will not get richer while the poor, presumably, will also. That demands redistribution of wealth, a principle that Democrats usually shy away from admitting. But candidate Obama, famously, admitted it during his street conversation with Joe the plumber in 2008.

And he admitted that for him, tax policy isn’t about economic efficiency, but “fairness.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpSDBu35K-8&feature=player_embedded

Democrats mostly keep this part of their agenda under wraps, but the mask slips once in a while as in the above, and as in this exchange between Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters and oil company CEOs during their testimony before a House committee.

Dividing to conquer. Candidate Obama ran as a post-racial, post-partisan unifier. He has governed as an intentional divider, using extreme and even violent rhetoric to keep Americans from uniting against him and his agenda. Consider that just in the past couple of weeks, President Obama has told Republicans that even if the American people vote as a majority to empower them in Congress and statehouses across America, they will be forced to “sit in the back.” That’s a dog whistle line intended to invoke Rosa Parks and the civil rights struggle, only Obama is saying to Republicans that he will force them into the role against which Parks rightly rebelled. He is signaling his intent to stick to his far left policies rather than taking a more Clintonian tack toward the political center. He’s telling the same thing to the majorities who will be electing those Republicans, too, if that’s what happens next week: You, the American people, will sit in the back. “Shut up,” he explained. This is the rhetoric of racial revenge.  What will be its lasting impact?  Division, which Obama hopes he and his party can exploit into the future.

This president has also called on Hispanic voters to “punish their enemies” by, of course, voting against Republicans who he claims are standing in the way of “comprehensive immigration reform.” That “reform” has been repeatedly rejected by the majority of the American people, but that’s of no concern to Obama. His is a condescending call for Hispanics to vote exclusively based on their race and their perceptions of white Republican voters — perceptions created by decades of Democratic demagoguery and enhanced by Obama himself. And it’s telling that Obama will use the word “enemy” to describe fellow Americans, but won’t use that word to describe the Islamists who are waging war against us.

This president has chided the American people who stand against him for being “scared” and therefore not “thinking clearly.”  Speaker Nancy Pelosi has offered her own version of this insult, arguing that the Democrats simply aren’t getting enough credit for what they’ve done.

Looking broadly at all of these comments, it’s clear that Obama is leading a campaign intended to stir up animosity among Americans. He intends to destroy what’s left of our unity.

The representative republic. You cannot fundamentally transform something without engaging in acts of destruction first.  Obama has engaged in those acts of destruction.

Since coming to power, Obama has been extraordinarily deferential to the big labor unions. There are two reasons for this. One, the unions are the Democrats’ most reliable source for major campaign donations. And two, he’s philosophically on their side.  But what do the unions want that he also wants?

Simply put, they share a desire for power. The unions, which for decades served the vital purpose of keeping the power of the big corporations over the common man in check, have long outlived that role and have themselves become the power they once fought against. They have pushed American industry and education to the point of stagnation. They have pushed pension programs for corporations and states to the brink of bankruptcy. Yet they still want more. So Obama has delivered them control of the auto industry. He has promised them “card check,” a scheme that would allow whole industries to become unionized whether workers want that or not. That is a fundamentally un-democratic position to take, but it’s a sop to his union allies that would transform American industry. He and the left, including of course the unions, have pushed thriving companies like Wal-Mart to unionize against their will. Tellingly, they have left more Democrat-friendly companies headquartered in blue states alone, for now.

He tried to empower ACORN, the far left community organizing entity for which he was one an attorney and trainer, by granting them a role in the U.S. census. They would almost certainly have used that role to corrupt the census, which among other things is the basis for apportioning our electoral maps, which govern how we elect our representatives. He was only stopped in that gambit by an outcry from the American people — and in the discrediting of ACORN itself. But ACORN didn’t dissolve; it’s still alive or merely morphed into other entities that carry on its electoral corruption: