{"id":1034,"date":"2011-10-24T07:38:28","date_gmt":"2011-10-24T14:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/?p=1034"},"modified":"2011-10-25T07:53:24","modified_gmt":"2011-10-25T14:53:24","slug":"weird-statements-from-president-and-democrats-and-what-they-mean-hughhewitt-com-10-24-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/2011\/10\/24\/weird-statements-from-president-and-democrats-and-what-they-mean-hughhewitt-com-10-24-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Weird Statements from President and Democrats and What They Mean | HughHewitt.com | 10.24.11"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today (Monday) President Obama will launch what The New York Times<\/em> reports is \u201ca series of executive-branch actions to confront housing, education and other economic problems over the coming months, heralded by a new mantra: \u2018We can\u2019t wait\u2019 for lawmakers to act.\u201d<\/p>\n

This apparently in your face bypassing of Congress and the constitutional system is the most recent of a weird series of non-, maybe even anti-democratic pronouncements coming out of Democratic Party figures of late.<\/p>\n

There was North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue\u2019s statement that, \u201cIf those of us who hold office could be given a break from having to face voters, we could more freely consider what would be best for this country.\u201d \u00a0Widely interpreted as a call to postpone the 2012 election, it came around the same time as former Obama budget director Peter Orszag\u2019s similar suggestion that we should \u201cstretch out\u201d the time to the next election.<\/p>\n

It is tempting to brush aside Perdue\u2019s and Orszag\u2019s grumblings \u2013 and even the president\u2019s. \u00a0\u00a0They all sound like the fading gasps of a political class whose misrule has most the American people feeling the next election can\u2019t come soon enough. \u00a0Has any economic downturn in the last half-century been handled more ineptly \u2013 with more ideological myopia \u2013 than the one we\u2019re in? \u00a0But something more is involved here than mere forebodings of Election Day doom.<\/p>\n

Remember Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren\u2019s recent and now infamous diatribe against the \u201cself-made man\u201d?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there \u2014 good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.\u201d<\/p>\n

On one hand Warren is being little more than dumb. \u00a0\u00a0Yes, of course, if I build a factory, I will move my goods to market via the public roads, as does everyone else, whether shipping goods or going to work. \u00a0And my tax dollars helped build those roads, as did everyone else\u2019s. \u00a0This is not a matter of agreement or disagreement but of fact.<\/p>\n

But Warren was saying something more. \u00a0She was saying that, whatever our station in life, the government somehow owns a piece of each of us. \u00a0The government is not a creature of us all. \u00a0We are each a creature of it.<\/p>\n

Like the president, Perdue, and Orszag, Warren is challenging a presumption \u2013 the most basic presumption \u2013 of the American experiment. \u00a0No, that challenge is not about class warfare or gridlock in Washington. \u00a0All their statements, as different as Warren\u2019s is from the others, fly in the face of the way almost all Americans understand the national order and political legitimacy.<\/p>\n

The first three words of the Constitution are shorthand for the way most of us conceive of government in America. \u00a0The phrase \u201cWe the People\u201d suggests individuals coming together to form a government. \u00a0It says the government is a creature of freely associating men and women and their communities. \u00a0The people gave powers and privileges to the government, not the other way around.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that the president, Warren, Perdue and Orszag are saying something very similar to one another and very different from the presumption the rest of us hold. As Perdue put it: \u201cMost of us in government know what needs to be done. \u00a0The apparent disagreement between Republicans and Democrats is just jockeying for political advantage.\u201d \u00a0In other words, government is made up of experts who would manage better if only the people would stay out of the way \u2013- which again suggests that government is preeminent, the people subordinate.<\/p>\n

There is a lot of loose talk about the administration and the Democratic Party more generally having a socialist bent. \u00a0Maybe they want comprehensive public ownership of the means of production, though I suspect most of them would recoil at the idea. \u00a0But this presumption about a government of experts to which the people should defer and from which the people derive their just powers and privileges runs through everything they say and do.<\/p>\n

Marx said he stood Hegel on his head. \u00a0Our present day Democrats seem to have stood Jefferson on his head \u2013 and Lincoln, too, with their cozying up to a concept of a people of and by the government.<\/p>\n

As I say, it\u2019s all a little weird — and creepy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today (Monday) President Obama will launch what The New York Times reports is \u201ca series of executive-branch actions to confront housing, education and other economic problems over the coming months, heralded by a new mantra: \u2018We can\u2019t wait\u2019 for lawmakers to act.\u201d This apparently in your face bypassing of Congress and the constitutional system is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1034"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1041,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions\/1041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}