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Wall
Street Journal…
Transformers
2
Obama was honest when he said he
wanted to remake America.
For
all the spin and deception of politics, sooner or later every
politician reveals his true purposes. For Barack Obama, one of those
moments
came when he declared shortly before the 2008 election that "We are
five
days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of
America."
Above all else, the President who asked voters for a second term
Thursday night
sees himself as destined to transform America according to his own
progressive
dreams.
For
most of 2008, Mr. Obama was able to disguise this ambition
behind his gauzy rhetoric of hope and post-partisanship. The fine print
of his
agenda betrayed his plans to expand and entrench the entitlement state,
but
most voters ignored that as they chose his cool confidence over John
McCain's
manic intensity amid a financial panic.
Candidate
Obama was eloquent and likable. His personal story
echoed of America's history as a land of opportunity. Voters put aside
any
worry about his ideology and took a chance on his promise of a better
tomorrow.
Four
years later the shooting liberal star, as we called him then,
has come down to earth. What should have been a buoyant recovery coming
out of
a deep recession was lackluster to start and has grown weaker. The
partisanship
he claimed to want to dampen has become more fierce. The middle-class
incomes
he sought to lift have fallen. These results aren't bad luck or the
lingering
effects of a crash four years ago. They flow directly from his
"transforming" purposes.
To
our mind, two events amid hundreds stand out as defining
President Obama's first term. The first is his go-for-broke pursuit of
progressive social legislation instead of focusing on economic
recovery. The
second is his refusal to strike a budget deal with Speaker John Boehner
in
2011. Both reveal a President more bent on transforming America than
addressing
the needs of our time.
Mr.
Obama was elected first and foremost with a mandate to fix the
economy. Yet when he found himself by rare confluence of luck with 60
votes in
the Senate, he put nurturing a fragile recovery secondary to the
pursuit of
pent-up liberal social policies.
Consider
the amazing course of ObamaCare. Rather than craft a
White House proposal and draw in Republicans from the start, he let
Pete Stark
and the most liberal House Democrats write the bill. As public
opposition built
and the tea party rose in 2009, he doubled down with a September speech
extolling the virtues of government.
Opposition
continued to build. But when Rahm Emanuel and other
advisers urged him to compromise on something smaller, he still pressed
ahead.
Even after Scott Brown's January 2010 victory to replace Ted Kennedy
gave the
GOP 41 Senators, Mr. Obama endorsed an effort to abuse Congressional
procedure
to ram the bill through…
Read
the rest of this article at the Wall Street Journal
The
video of his statement about “fundamentally transforming
America” has been posted several times. Click here for one of them.
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