Found this great article from Cleveland.com and I just had to post it:
As Barack Obama looked out at the throng assembled Tuesday to witness his swearing in, it might have been wise to revive the Roman tradition of stationing a slave behind him to whisper, “Remember, thou art mortal.”
But we don’t have slaves in this country anymore, thank God. Rather, we have a president whose race was not so long ago enslaved here. And that is a wondrous thing.
More fitting for this occasion, perhaps, would have been 50,000 volunteers circulating throughout the adoring crowd to whisper, “Remember, he is mortal.”
During the campaign that won Obama the honor of putting his hand on Abe Lincoln’s Bible to swear his oath to the Constitution, the loftiness of his rhetoric and the force of his personality raised expectations to heights that most mortals would despair of matching with their deeds.
If things are on schedule, for instance, the rise of the oceans ended at noon on Tuesday.
Well. We’ll see.
What certainly did end on Tuesday was President Obama’s liberty to speak in generalities. Now, specifics matter.
So where do we think this speech, and this mortal man, might lead?
Americans should appreciate the call in Obama’s inaugural address to remain “faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.”
But his interpretation of those ideals and his choices of forebears to serve as his examples bear watching.
“The question we ask today,” he declared, “is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”
And new programs will begin in an administration predisposed to seek all solutions in government.
The forebears who wrote our founding documents would tell Obama the same thing they would have told his predecessors all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt: The finding of jobs, the setting of wages, the provision of health care and the safeguarding of dignity in retirement are not the province of government.
They would say that government today is most definitely too big, and far too invasive and influential in the lives of individuals and the conduct of business. What we have today isn’t what Adams and Hamilton had in mind. Jefferson and Madison may have glimpsed it, but only in their nightmares.
When Obama declares that “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply,” he’s wrong. The day the argument about the relationship between the individual American and his government ends — the same argument those forebears failed to settle — is the day this republic is lost forever.
“Nor,” Obama continued, “is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control . . .”
Unfortunately, the watchful eye of government rarely comes without a “helping” hand.
The recent mortgage crisis, for example, occurred not because the regulators’ rules were broken, but because the rules were followed: Lenders obeyed government directives to put cash in the hands of people who were lousy risks for paying it back. “Wall Street greed” would have had nothing to latch onto had the government left the credit market to its own sane methods.
Mankind has never conceived of a more powerful self-regulating mechanism for improvement than the free market. If only we would let it work, we’d probably be able to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost, and harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
Instead, we’re going to make those government projects, thereby wasting a great deal of money to confirm an eternal truth: Government crushes innovation to protect favored interests.
But today, all of those things are merely speculation. No one can know what kind of administration this will be.
And I should note that my applause for one thing Obama said is unrestrained:
“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”
George W. Bush could have said that. He did say that. But Obama said it better.
I just hope he means it.
1 Comment »
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), has criticized President Obama’s appointment of White House “czars” on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change to oversee federal policy, saying these executive positions amount to a power grab by the executive branch.
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