What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (7 page)

He continued: “It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you,
but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf
. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and
community organizing
and activities on the ground that are able to put together the
actual coalitions of power
through which you bring about
redistributed change
and in some ways we still suffer from that.” (Emphasis added.) In fact, the Constitution explicitly
limits
the powers of the government because the Founders feared wild-eyed activist power hogs like Obama. But it is those same limits from which Obama would like us to “break free.” No wonder he’ll take any opportunity to get the words “Constitution” and “negative” in the same sentence.

There was, however, one phrase in the Constitution Obama found particularly useful to his mission. As he began running for president in earnest, he and his inner circle, Axelrod, Iranian-born Chicago crony Valerie Jarrett, strategist David Plouffe, and wife, Michelle, kept the focus squarely on the carefully crafted image of Barack as Symbol. He understood the necessity of keeping himself as ambiguous as possible, saying in his second book,
The Audacity of Hope
, “I am a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He knew the power intrinsic in the ability to be both a blank screen and a chameleon, and he exploited it brilliantly. He hit every emotional button precisely when it needed to be hit: “change” after eight years of President Bush and wearying wars, “yes, we can” optimism when the nation was down in the dumps, and, most important, “hope” that “things could be better.” Plus, let’s be honest: liberals in this country just
love
getting “free” crap, and he promised it to them.

Herein lies the brilliance of the Obama deception. Obama took the historical, traditional, and natural American impulse for a “more perfect union” and turned it on its head. And he accomplished this feat of constitutional perversion with very few people noticing.

Starting in 1995 with the publication of
Dreams from My Father
, Obama has seized the phrase and the meaning of “a more perfect union” and co-opted it for the redistributionist cause. The phrase “a more perfect union” means different things to different people. To most Americans, it means the constant vigilance needed to ensure maximum individual liberty, as the Founders intended.

When Obama invokes “a more perfect union,” however, he means one that “spreads the wealth around” while diluting American exceptionalism until it’s nonexistent. Getting America to
that
version of “a more perfect union” is the ultimate mission of the leftists, who loathe America and everything for which she stands, from individual freedom to global dominance.

When he spoke about creating a “more perfect union,” he believed that he was the only one who
could
—or
should
—be doing the perfecting. When he made his garishly ostentatious statement, “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he was really saying, “
I’m
the one who will at last change the very nature of America.
I
will judge when you’ve made enough money and who should get it instead.
I
will judge what health care you should receive.
I
will decide that the country must atone for its past sins and
I
will lead its penance.”

In the spring of 2008, Obama’s campaign was rocked by revelations that he had sat in the pews of Trinity United Church of Christ for over twenty years, listening to, absorbing, and apparently agreeing with the anti-American rantings of Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Audiotapes and videotapes surfaced of Wright pounding the church podium as he spewed anti-American invective.

That Obama sat in Wright’s church for over twenty years, never registering a protest against any of Wright’s inflammatory statements, threatened to define Obama as the anti-American radical some already suspected him to be. The controversy needed to be nipped in the bud quickly if his campaign were to survive.

On March 18, he gave a speech on his relationship with Wright, which he announced he was ending, and then spun his comments into a broader thought piece on race and American ideals.

Obama’s address about Wright became known as the “more perfect union” speech. He began, “‘We the people, in order to form a more
perfect
union.’ This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign—to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a
more just, more equal
, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together—unless we
perfect
our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.... It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children,” Obama said. “But
it is where we start
. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two hundred and twenty-one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the
perfection
begins.”

Despite throwing both Wright and his white grandma under the bus in order to save his presidential campaign, Obama received wide praise for the speech, which was considered by many to be the best of his political career. But while most people were focused on his perfectly orchestrated message of racial “unity” and “healing”—epitomized by the man himself—he had embedded a much more powerful message. The union must be “perfected,”
not
in the way most Americans understand that constitutional concept,
but as the kooks intend it
.

He has peppered other speeches with the phrase “a more perfect union,” and each time he has used it in service to the redistributionists’ ideal of “remaking America.” On August 6, 2009, he got word that the Senate voted to confirm his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, self-described “wise Latina,” to the nation’s highest bench. He gave a statement that sounded much like his 2004 convention speech, saying that the Bronx-born Latina exemplified “the very ideals that have made Judge Sotomayor’s own uniquely American journey possible.” And then he added that “the Senate has upheld today in breaking yet another barrier and moving us yet another step closer to a more
perfect
union” by confirming someone who would help to carry out Obama’s dream of “breaking us free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

Most Americans heard one thing when he spoke of “perfecting the union” whereas he intended something completely different, just as they had when he and Michelle spoke of “fighting for the world as it should be.” In fact, throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama let people fill in the blanks of his “blank screen” with whatever assumptions they wished, and he never disabused them of their own fantasies.

Obama allowed white voters to assume that a “more perfect union” meant closing the door on slavery and racism once and for all. He allowed black voters to see racial triumph. He allowed college kids and other young voters to see a youthful, hip guy who liked the same hip-hop music they did and who would pave the way for a brighter future for them. He allowed the wealthy to alleviate rich guilt by appealing to a sense of “justice” as he asked them to pay more of “their fair share.” He allowed the poor to think that his support for big-government programs meant that they would always be taken care of by the state. He allowed women to swoon and men to feel like he was a hoop-shooting, ESPN-loving, brackets-picking best buddy. He was the perfect political Rorschach test.

The money shot on his Rorschach strategy came five days before the election when a voter in Sarasota, Florida, named Peggy Joseph attended an Obama campaign rally. Asked by an interviewer what she saw in Obama that drew her to vote for him, she replied, “I never thought this day would ever happen. I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car; I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he’s gonna help me.”

There it is. Not only did Joseph tell us what she and countless other Obama voters saw in him—a nonstop big-government goodie giveaway—but she unwittingly revealed the leftists’ grand strategy of moving America away from individual self-reliance and global exceptionalism and toward “collective salvation” and global inconsequence. Joseph was down with that; she just wanted to be on board, hand extended, palm up. With her few exclamatory statements, Joseph summed up the Obama Kook Crusade.

If voters were still unclear about Obama’s intentions, an episode on the 2008 campaign trail should have taken away all doubt. On October 12, an employee of a plumbing contractor, Joe Wurzelbacher, was playing football with his son in his front yard in Holland, Ohio, when Obama came campaigning through town. Obama stopped, perhaps expecting the fawning adulation he received elsewhere. From Joe the Plumber, however, he got a direct question about his tax plan, which Wurzelbacher correctly suspected was a nasty bit of class warfare: “I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes two hundred fifty to two hundred eighty thousand dollars a year. Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?”

Obama responded with a gassy answer about how his plan would affect small businesses and admitted that for individuals and businesses with revenue over $250,000 per year, the marginal tax rate would go up.

And then Obama revealed his ultimate objective: “It’s not that I want to
punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too
....
I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody
.” (Emphasis added.)

Classic kook.

That exchange between Obama and Joe the Plumber became a seminal moment of the campaign, but for the wrong reason. Most observers focused on Joe as a symbol of middle-class working Americans and how they were being squeezed by taxes and regulations. But the more revelatory moment was Obama’s “spread the wealth around” remark. He spent so much time during the campaign projecting an image of moderate reasonableness, but if voters were truly focused on what he was actually telling them, they would have seen the truth. Obama was no reasonable moderate. He could not get to the presidency fast enough in order to “spread the wealth around.”

Of course he wants to “punish your success.” This reminds me of the old, reliable breakup line: “It’s not you, it’s me.” Of course it’s you, which is why they’re breaking up with you! I quote the great George Costanza, who once said, “You’re giving me the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ routine? I INVENTED ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ So NOBODY tells me it’s not me, it’s them. If it’s anybody—IT’S ME!”

In April 2010, Obama gave a speech in Illinois about financial reform. In his prepared remarks, he was supposed to say this: “Now, we’re not doing this to punish these firms or begrudge success that’s fairly earned. We don’t want to stop them from fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy.” Instead, he went off teleprompter and supplied his own thoughts on the matter of making money: “We’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned.
I do think that at a certain point, you’ve made enough money. But you know, part of the American way is, you can just keep on making it
if you’re providing a good product.” (Emphasis added.)

The idea that you can “keep on making money” that Obama cannot touch is abhorrent to him. He was essentially saying that you can just go make that money again in order to justify his taking it from you the first time around. But the point is that he never intends to
stop
confiscating it from you. After all, his ravenous beast of government needs constant care and feeding.

In 2011, Obama spoke at one of his taxpayer-subsidized “green jobs” boondoggles during which he portrayed “the rich” as lazy Thurston Howell III types on the perpetual three-hour tour. “I believe,” he said, “that we can’t ask everybody to sacrifice and then tell the wealthiest among us, well, you can just relax and go count your money, and don’t worry about it. We’re not going to ask anything of you.” No; instead, Obama planned on taking the SS
Minnow
out of port in order to crash the ship onto the rocky shoals of redistributionism.

Obama speaks with such disgust about the “rich,” as if the “rich” became rich by sitting around, doing nothing, relaxing. If sitting around, doing nothing, and relaxing are the gauge of wealth, then he’s got to be more loaded than Richard Branson. As if the country “doesn’t ask anything” of the “rich,” when they carry the vast majority of the tax burden. As if the “rich” spend all day eating bonbons, “counting their money,” and watching
Kourtney & Kim Take New York
. (Okay, they may do that last one, but only because, I mean, who can resist?) Understand: he doesn’t want the Olsen twins’ money or Bill Gates’s or Tiger Woods’s or Harvey Weinstein’s money. Obama’s friends can keep
their
wealth. Instead, he wants to confiscate the wealth of the small businessman. He wants the property of the oil worker, the local dry cleaner, and the insurance salesman. Regular Americans are his targets.

In fact, in mid-2011, Obama’s acting solicitor general, Neal Katyal, went before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to argue in defense of ObamaCare’s “individual mandate.” He told the court that if somebody didn’t like the mandate, they could just earn less money. After all, as Obama said in the fall of 2011 while criticizing the banks, “You don’t have some inherent right just to—you know, get a certain amount of profit.” He’ll see to that.