President Obama used his inaugural address to make a case – a case for a progressive view of government, and a case for the particular things that government should do in our time.
He gave a speech in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural and Ronald Reagan’s first: Like both, Obama’s was unapologetic in offering an argument for his philosophical commitments and an explanation of the policies that naturally followed. Progressives will be looking back to this speech for many years, much as today’s progressives look back to FDR’s, and conservatives to Reagan’s.
Obama will be seen as combative in his direct refutation of certain conservative ideas, and it was especially good to see him argue — in a passage that rather pointedly alluded to Paul Ryan’s worldview — that social insurance programs encourage rather than discourage risk-taking and make us a more, not less, dynamic society. “The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us,” he said. “They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.” This is one of the most important arguments liberals have made since FDR’s time, and in the face of an aggressive attack now on the very idea of a social insurance state, it was important that Obama make it again.
Yet the president pitched his case by basing it on a long, shared American tradition. He rooted his egalitarian commitments in the promises of our founding. The Declaration of Independence was the driving text– as it was for Martin Luther King, whom we also celebrated today, and as it was for Abraham Lincoln.
Obama’s refrain “We, the people” reminded us that “we” is the very first word of our Constitution and that a commitment to community and the common good is as American Washington, Adams and Jefferson. The passages invoking that phrase spoke of shared responsibility – “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,” “We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.” Obama said a powerful “no” to radical individualism (a point my colleague Greg Sargent made well earlier today in the course of a kind and generous reference to my book “Our Divided Political Heart”).
Some will no doubt think (and write) that Obama should have sought more lofty and non-partisan ground. The problem with this critique is that it asks Obama to speak as if the last four years had not happened. It asks him to abandon the arguments he has been making for nearly two years. It asks us to pretend that we do not have a great deal at stake in the large debate over government’s role that we have been having over an even longer period.
Neither Roosevelt nor Reagan gave in to such counsel of philosophical timidity, and both of their speeches are worth rereading in light of Obama’s.
“We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it,” Roosevelt declared. “[W]e recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. . . . We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.”
“In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan said. “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.”
Like these two presidents, Obama offered his fellow citizens the “why” behind what he thought and what he proposed to do — a point made to me after the speech by former Rep. Dave Obey. In my most recent column, I argued that Obama’s re-election (and the way he won it) had liberated him to be “more at ease declaring exactly what he is for and what he is seeking to achieve.” And that is exactly what he did in this speech.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 21, 2013
January 22, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Inauguration 2013 | Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Conservatives, Declaration of Independence, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, Social Safety Net |
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Watching Wayne LaPierre’s press conference today (transcript here) I found myself searching for various synonyms of “insane” to describe it. Unglued, unhinged, taken leave of his senses, etc. It reads like the nutty handwritten letters to the editor magazines get, complete with lots of italicizations and exclamation points.
But the truth is this is not true madness. It’s something as old as the country, which bears some eerie similarity to the extremism of the slavery movement, as a lovely piece Ta-Nehisi Coates put up today argued. Here’s a taste:
In the 1850s, slaveholders got their way in Congress (including a hardened Fugitive Slave Act), in the Supreme Court (the Dred Scott decision), and in the White House (occupied by a succession of doughfaces). But proslavery hardliners weren’t satisfied. They sought the resumption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which the Constitution had banned as of 1808. They branded moderates like Abraham Lincoln–who pledged to leave slavery alone in the South–as members of a “Black Republican” conspiracy to overthrow slavery. And they banished former allies such as Stephen Douglas, who lost his A-Rating for straying from the ultra-orthodox line that there must not be any restriction on slavery.
Rather than accede to Douglas’s nomination as Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential election, which he might well have won, Southerners split the party and nominated one of their own, dividing the Democratic vote and paving Lincoln’s path to the White House. At which point, the Fire-Eaters led Southern states out of the Union rather than accept a democratically-elected president they opposed.
The NRA shows signs of similar derangement and over-reach. During the election, it demonized a president who had done nothing on gun control, claiming a “massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.” It has alienated staunch allies like Democrat John Dingell who resisted the NRA’s mad-dog campaign to hold Eric Holder in contempt over “Fast and Furious.” Other supporters who have deviated an inch from the NRA line have been targeted for electoral defeat.
This could be a positive development in the medium term, I suspect. The NRA still has a lot of clout, and they’re not clinically insane, but they’ve clearly lost the ability to know what they sound like to non-gun nuts, or a view of sensible tactics. That kind of overreach is the mark of a weak organization—one particularly vulnerable to being baited by the other side into overreach. I predict much trolling of the NRA in the coming weeks.
By: Ryan Cooper, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
December 22, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Guns, Public Safety | Abraham Lincoln, Dred Scott Decision, Gun Control, Gun Lobby, Gun Violence, John Dingell, National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre |
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In an hour of crisis and grief, the president has to tell the country some hard truths about itself. As he does that, he must also explain what it’s all about, this country called America, all over again. President Obama did just that, at about the halfway mark of the two terms he was elected to serve. He looked as if he had aged a few years in a day.
In his words, depth, and demeanor, Obama gave the best speech of his presidency by a country mile in a New England town Sunday evening. They say there are “no words” when you are swimming in salt tears over the loss of a child. But when a town’s children are killed in cold blood, along with six women working at a school, well, there must be words for the blood. There must be words that try to tell the tragedy we have seen, for words are all we have.
The president is the only one who can do that—speak to the shattered people of Newtown, Conn., and to us, the American people, to make us one. We are all implicated; our society’s fingerprints were all over that crime scene. So the truth is, we really need a talking-to about gun violence, a truth that few can speak and be heard. Thankfully, the president uttered words that went beyond the usual suspects at another mass shooting.
Speaking in sad cadences, Obama asked: “Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough, and we will have to change….We can’t tolerate this anymore.”
Here he shows how hard it is to ask and answer fundamental questions. Why were women and children brutally robbed of life and liberty Friday? Isn’t the pursuit of happiness part of the meaning of this nation, formulated in a fine 1776 declaration?
Obama didn’t spell out the broken promises, but there was no need. We’re all in this together, a sense that we failed and there-but-for-the-grace-of-God. If we fail to protect our precious cargo of children, he was saying, nothing else matters very much. That struck a note of truth which resonated far beyond the boundaries of a place called Newtown, which they started building in 1780—four years following that fine declaration.
David Maraniss, the distinguished biographer of Obama and a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, believes the Newtown speech will live long in memory. “He [the president] defined a grave moment with simple and powerful thoughts that worked on several levels at once, both particular and universal,” he said.
President Lincoln gave a stark speech about national loss at the midway of his four years as the Civil War president. He gave it in the autumnal light of November, consecrating a battlefield where the fury of cannons sounded and bloody bodies stained the farm soil for the first three days of July 1863.
Nobody knew better than he, the deaths and suffering were so great he had to heal with words as best he could, to infuse the event and sacrifice with solemn meaning. Theatrically, he set the time and scene: “Fourscore and seven years ago….We are met on a great battlefield of that war.” Then came a short speech that magnificently transcended time and space to give a new fresh explanation for why they were there that day, what they were fighting for, and what it was all about.
For Lincoln, the Civil War had ceased to stand just for keeping the Southern states. As many of us recited in the Gettysburg Address as schoolchildren, the cause was “a new birth of freedom” in the nation. By a stroke of the pen, Lincoln had earlier emancipated all slaves in the “rebellion” states.
Maraniss said the Newtown address may be Obama’s Gettysburg: “If we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no.” That simple candor helped me deal with the shared sorrow. Better not to sugarcoat at a time like this.
Lighting darkness, healing heartbreak, finding meaning—it’s a lot to ask of a president and his words. But on Sunday, the man from Illinois answered the call.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, December 18, 2012
December 19, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Gun Violence, Guns | Abraham Lincoln, Assault Weapons, Barack Obama, Children, Civil War, Gettysburg Address, Gun Control, Newtown Ct |
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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Those are the opening words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and they seem eerily prescient today because once again this country finds itself increasingly divided and pondering the future of this great union and the very ideas of liberty and equality for all.
The gap is growing between liberals and conservatives, the rich and the not rich, intergenerational privilege and new-immigrant power, patriarchy and gender equality, the expanders of liberty and the withholders of it. And that gap, which has geographic contours — the densely populated coastal states versus the less densely populated states of the Rocky Mountains, Mississippi Delta and Great Plains — threatens the very concept of a United States and is pushing conservatives, left quaking after this month’s election, to extremes.
Some have even moved to make our divisions absolute. The Daily Caller reported last week “more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states,” according to its analysis of requests made through the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.
According to The Daily Caller, “Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals.” President Obama lost all those states, except Florida, in November.
The former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul took to his Congressional Web site to laud the petitions of those bent on leaving the union, writing that “secession is a deeply American principle.” He continued: “If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it.”
The Internet has been lit up with the incongruity of Lincoln’s party becoming the party of secessionists.
But even putting secession aside, it is ever more clear that red states are becoming more ideologically strident and creating a regional quasi country within the greater one. They are rushing to enact restrictive laws on everything from voting to women’s health issues.
As Monica Davey reported in The New York Times on Friday, starting in January, “one party will hold the governor’s office and majorities in both legislative chambers in at least 37 states, the largest number in 60 years and a significant jump from even two years ago.”
As the National Conference of State Legislatures put it, “thanks to an apparent historic victory in Arkansas, Republicans gained control of the old South, turning the once solidly Democratic 11 states of the Confederacy upside down.” Arkansas will be the only one of these states with a Democratic governor.
As Davey’s article pointed out, single-party control raises “the prospect that bold partisan agendas — on both ends of the political spectrum — will flourish over the next couple of years.” But it seems that “both ends of the political spectrum” should not be misconstrued as being equal. Democrats may want to expand personal liberties, but Republicans have spent the last few years working feverishly to restrict them.
According to a January report from the Guttmacher Institute: “By almost any measure, issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011. In the 50 states combined, legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions, a sharp increase from the 950 introduced in 2010. By year’s end, 135 of these provisions had been enacted in 36 states, an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.” Almost all the 2011 provisions were enacted in states with Republican-controlled legislatures.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, at least 180 restrictive voting bills were introduced since the beginning of 2011 in 41 states. Most of the states that passed restrictive voting laws have Republican-controlled legislatures.
An N.C.S.L. report last year found “the 50 states and Puerto Rico have introduced a record 1,538 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees in the first quarter of 2011. This number surpasses the first quarter of 2010 by 358.” That trend slowed in 2012 in large part because of legal challenges. Many of the states that had enacted anti-immigrant laws or adopted similar resolutions by March of last year, again, had Republican-controlled legislatures.
We are moving toward two Americas with two contrasting — and increasingly codified — concepts of liberty. Can such a nation long endure?
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 23, 2012
November 25, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Politics | Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburgh Address, Immigration, Income Inequality, Liberty, Republicans, Secession, Voter Suppression, Women's Health |
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“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”–Abraham Lincoln
On January 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of The United States of America. For me, this was the most historic event of my lifetime. I was so thrilled and excited to attend that ceremony with my wife and my daughter. The pride, the sense of progress, the sense that this America, my America, had finally ascended to the pinnacle of the American spirit…the spirit that says no matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter the color of your skin, you too can achieve the American dream.
I watched intently as our president took the oath of office. Barack Obama, a man whose story is an American story, a man with values from the heartland of America and middle class upbringings, a man whose convictions emphasize his commitment to the service of others.
America, or I should say, most of America, was prepared to show the rest of the world what it means to live in a democracy, to show ourselves that democracy works for all Americans. As I look back over these last 4 years since that inauguration day, I wonder with dismay, where and when did we decide to make a U turn?
Apparently, the turn began on the night of the inauguration. While the goodwill and good feeling of the many was being celebrated, a 15 member group of power hungry legislators were meeting to undermine the rest of the country. This was no ordinary four hour meeting. Everyone knew the nation was in crisis…an economy in the tank, millions of Americans without jobs, millions more without healthcare, and two ongoing costly wars. Representatives Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Pete Sessions, Jeb Hersaling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren and Senators Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign and Bob Corker, along with former Speaker Newt Gingrich and pointman Frank Luntz were strategizing on their grand plan to “take back America”. Since no one seemed to know where America had been taken to, their meeting was to enact a plan on how to block and obstruct every possible legislative idea and policy that would be put forth by President Obama. No matter how bad things were already, and no matter the fact that these same people had contributed to the downfall that we were all experiencing, these men, and I use the term cautiously, were essentially plotting to overthrow the government. Some would say that their plan bordered on treason, myself included. Their actions did not represent simple politics, they represented complete disdain and contempt for “we the people” and the first African-American president.
From that point on and for the next four years, history returned with a vengeance. Lead by Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House and Senate Republicans went on the most despicable campaign of desperation, disruption and obstruction never before seen in American history. Mitch McConnell went so far as to say:
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
In other words, we don’t care about what is happening in America, we don’t give a damn if the country goes to hell in a handbasket.
Then came the drum beat from the even “farther right”…Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, John Sununu, Donald Trump. President Obama is now the “other”, “not born in America”, “not one of us”, “lazy”. These are all people who say they believe in America, they believe in democracy, they believe in the American dream. Barack Obama is the 44th duly elected President of the United States. The disrespect, contempt and hatred shown to him is plainly despicable and unacceptable. It simply shows how they feel about the rest of us, especially the 47%. What changed? Race. The occupant of the White House is now an African-American. That’s what changed. During this election cycle, there were bumper stickers that said “put the white back in the White House”. This isn’t a dog whistle, it’s pure racism. Republicans saw this, and still do, as their way to stoke the fears and insecurities of so many who harbor the same sentiments. Mitt Romney, having no core convictions other than to have the title of President of the United States, went along with this agenda.
It didn’t stop there. In order to advance their agenda to return to power, republicans needed to energize their “base”. They had to make the case that America is being taken over by undesirables, by people who do not believe in the same America that they do. Anything less and anyone who disagrees is un-American. America is no longer about “freedom and liberty”, that is “our” brand of freedom and liberty. Women’s rights, abortion, contraception, civil rights, voting rights, immigrant rights, pay inequity, gay and lesbian rights, attacks on the middle class, medicare and social security, all became tools to disenfranchise those who dared not to fall in line. The wealthy wanted more tax cuts and more power, the only two things that mattered.
As I watched the election results, I had no doubt that the better angels in America would prevail. I had no statistics that I could simply rely on. I only had a sense that there is a better America. I had a sense that my America would not reward these wayward ideological republicans although this ideology has put hate and racism front and center. I had a feeling that my America, the “majority of minorities”, would “shut this whole thing down”. I do not believe that America wants to return to the dark ages. Racism, greed, inequality, suppression of voting and civil rights has no place in this society.
Barack Hussein Obama has been re-elected President of the United States of America. This is a good thing for America, for our future, for what we stand for and what we should stand for. This is my America, my President. The republicans had the money in this election but the people had the will to say, enough is enough. It seems that for republicans, the past is never dead and buried, it is not even past.
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves–Abraham Lincoln
America has spoken. It’s time for republicans to become a part of the solution…you have been the problem for far too long.
By: raemd95, mykeystrokes.com, November 6, 2012
November 7, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Abraham Lincoln, America, Barack Hussein Obama, Democracy, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, President Obama, Racism, United States |
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