Nothing our president, Barack Hussein Obama, does at this point in his benighted administration should come as a shock to anybody who heard him utter the words “fundamental transformation” back in late 2008, once he knew the McCain fix was in and the election was in the bag. But his suggestion a few days ago that voting should be mandatory needs to be studied by all to see the pure essence of Obamaism — and then beware of it.
Like everything Obama and the Left propose, this crackpot idea is couched and masked in all the usual “progressive” disguises. It’s “fair,” and about “equality.” When in fact it’s neither of those things. But how far the Alinsky ball has been moved down the field is evident from the fact that the Left keep using buzz phrases like these, and keeps getting away with it. By now, one would think that the Left’s promises would be seen for the threadbare lies that they are; black America in particular has suffered for more than half a century while awaiting the coming of the Promised Land, which never quite arrives. But the Left has an out, and it knows it — the old communist bleat that their system will work, but that “it just hasn’t really been tried yet.” And a new generation, particularly the one raised on non-judgmentalism and lunatic egalitarianism, nods and falls for it.
In the president’s current proposal, the red-flag word is “mandatory.” No surprise here; the Fascist Left loves bossing people around. Ban it! Outlaw it! Make it mandatory! Their shopworn bag of social nostrums could never be fully accepted, even when the social poison is sugar-coated up the wazoo, without both deception (Obamacare) and blunt force (Obamacare). Once they’ve enticed the schoolkids into the windowless white-panel truck with a bag of candy, the hammer drops and the populace (judging by how long the Soviet Union lasted) is in for nearly a century of misery before the human spirit reasserts itself and a few finally escape and call the cops. By then, however, the country that previously existed is dead.
Here’s the story about America’s very own Il Duce and his latest foray into establishing a permanent Democrat majority in American electoral politics:
President Obama, whose party was trounced in last year’s midterm election due in part to poor turnout among Democrats, endorsed the idea of mandatory voting Wednesday.
“It would be transformative if everybody voted,” Mr. Obama said during a town-hall event in Cleveland. “That would counteract [campaign] money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.”
“Transformative” (note Obama’s fondness for the word) it would be. Despite their losses in the past two congressional elections, the Democrats sense that on the presidential level the Party of Take has outgrown the Party of Give, and that if they could force the dependent class to the polls the donkeys would never have to relinquish the White House again. Doesn’t matter whether Congress is controlled by the “opposition party” — it would be easier if it weren’t, but Obama has shown repeatedly lately that Congress doesn’t matter, and perhaps not even the Supreme Court. Just seize the White House and then, backed by your constitutional authority as commander in chief, defy the other “co-equal” branches to do something about it.
The notion of coerced voting is, of course, philosophically anathema in a country founded on revolutionary notions of personal freedom. “You call yourself a patriot and a loyal subject to the Crown?” shouts the British officer played by Steven Waddington at Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) in Michael Mann’s great film, The Last of the Mohicans, written by Mann and Christopher Crowe. “I do not call myself subject to much at all,” replies Natty Bumppo, walking away. That’s who we are. At any rate, that’s who we used to be.
Implicitly summoning the current boogeymen, the Koch brothers and other rich GOP-leaning donors, Obama cited campaign-finance inequities as the condition that needs rectifying. (In this, you might notice, he is no different than the co-author of McCain-Feingold, his erstwhile “opponent,” John McCain.)
Mr. Obama raised the subject during a discussion of curbing the influence of campaign donations in U.S. elections. The president said he had never discussed the idea publicly before, but said Australia and some other countries have compulsory voting. The president didn’t commit to pushing a mandatory voting initiative at the federal level but said, “that may end up being a better strategy in the short term” than finding a solution to curbing campaign donations.
“The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups,” Mr. Obama said. “And they’re the folks who are scratching and climbing to get into the middle class and they’re working hard. There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls. We should want to get them into the polls.”
Why? The Democrats’ unspoken premise is that the expansion of the franchise, even at gunpoint, is an unmitigated good thing. (Oregon has just become the first state to automatically register everybody to vote via the DMV, whether the person wants to register or not.) What they don’t mention is that it’s a good thing for them. When the American franchise was extended, first to African-Americans and later to women, it was in the morally correct recognition that blacks and females had a stake in the success of the United States, not a take in it. The franchise, in other words, was not a backdoor means to welfare and other federal benefits, but a commitment on the part of the newly enfranchised to help the country by giving them some skin in the game. This, naturally, is the farthest thing from Obama’s mind, fixated as it is on “transformation,” by which he means “revenge.
The president, who raised $1.1 billion for his re-election, said the “blitzkrieg” of campaign spending is “bad for our democracy.” “I speak as somebody who has raised a lot of money,” Mr. Obama said. “I’m very good at it. It just degrades our democracy generally.”
Nothing would further degrade our “democracy” — the notion that we are a representative republic has long been abandoned by the Left, which loves the Fuehrer Principle and sees “democracy” as the fastest way to get there — than mandatory voting. For one thing, the right to vote includes the right not to vote, a right I myself have exercised judiciously from time to time when especially unworthy candidates were being offered by the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party in presidential elections.
For another, voting should entail some knowledge of the issues and candidates; again, responsibility. Although the Atheist Left likes to throw around the word “sacred” in secular contexts, and loves to apply it to the “right” to vote (a right, let it be noted, that is man-given, not God-given and thus unlike the rights the Framers saw as inherent), voting is neither sacred nor profane. It is a choice — another of those weasel words that shifts meaning on the Left depending on the context. And to take away choice and break the citizenry with the blunt instrument of government (I am not speaking of abortion here, since the “choice” there was not even particularly debatable until Roe v. Wade) is precisely what the American Revolution was all about in the first place.
So to this we’ve come. In the name of “democracy,” the least-democratic president in American history would like to see his policy preferences institutionalized at the point of a gun. Some choice. Some democrat. Some president.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member