The Big O - Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

LIKE PEGGY Lee in “Is That All There Is,” conservatives keep wondering if they are missing something about the Democratic presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). Meanwhile, we hum to ourselves, in a rich contralto,

If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

It seems tailor-made to be a McCain campaign song, especially if, as everyone thinks, Republicans are going to get hammered anyway this November. Of course, these days, my friends, “binge drinking” is frowned upon by educated, evolved people and only practiced by bitter people after a Saturday afternoon trip to the gun club.

The song makes sense. There’s nothing in Obama’s “Blueprint for Change” except the usual liberal laundry list of new programs and subsidies for Democratic interest groups. But then you’d expect that in a document prepared for the Democratic Party primary season.

Now that Obama’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party it is time to check his agenda for a heartbeat, and figure out if there is anything there beyond the Big O.

You’d think his big speech of Tuesday, June 3, 2008 would give us a clue, and it did. On Iraq, he’s beginning to walk back towards the center:

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.

It’s an artful statement that could mean anything, but is certainly meant to reassure independent voters, hinting that an Obama administration would continue the Bush policy of standing-up the Iraqi government.

Then, on health care, Obama in his speech wants to:

pass a health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it.

To understand what that means you need help, and the June 6, 2008 edition of The Wall Street Journal has an analysis of the candidate’s position (available online) that mandates that large companies provide health insurance for their employees. Obama would “increase regulations and spend tax dollars” to guarantee health insurance to every American.

On education, the Journal says that Obama would add more money to support No Child Left Behind but relax its punitive aspects. Says Obama:

[W]e owe it to our children to invest in early childhood education; to recruit an army of new teachers and give them better pay and more support... a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American.

In other words, on education it’s liberal business-as-usual. There will be more money for the liberal education blob and more subsidies for liberal colleges.

It’s on energy that Obama most closely honors his promise of “unity,” but that’s only because Republican John McCain buys into the liberal “consensus” on global warming. Obama “supports subsidies for solar and wind energy,” and doesn’t want nuclear power before “storage and safety issues are resolved,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Many conservatives are anxious to paint Barack Obama as a radical left-winger, and maybe he is. But plenty of liberals have flirted with the left, in a youthful experiment with a bit of radical rough trade. They return in their years of political viability to the liberal mainstream, and they propose a new top-down expert-led program here, or ratchet up a subsidy for Democratic voters there, just like every other liberal. Radical or mainstream, the difference is merely one of degree.

Sooner or later, after you’ve brought more and more of American life under the knout of compulsion and after you have provided every Democratic voter with a four-course dinner of government services you’ll get to the day where the American people cry Uncle, break out the booze, and decide they can’t take it any more.

Until then, here’s an audacious hope. When you listen to Obama’s rhetoric you may think: I’d have to be born yesterday to believe this! No taxpayer could buy into the notion that this is

the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,

or that college is a “privilege for the wealthy few,” not when government in the United States spend north of $900 billion a year each on health care and education.

Maybe there’s a clue here. Maybe Obama is the candidate for people born yesterday and the people that don’t pay taxes. For the rest of us, the meaning of Obama seems to be symbolized in his ubiquitous “O” logo. He seems to add up not to “change,” not to “unity,” but to a Big Zero.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

mysql close