"You Didn't Build That:" Part I

Late in the day on Friday, July 13^th, President Obama mounted the stage of Historic Firehouse Number One in Roanoke, Virginia.  The room held around 800 people but it was hot and several people fainted.  In front of a carefully screened group of supporters he gave one of the most important speeches of his reelection campaign.   It was not meant to be a major speech.  That will come in the even more carefully scripted Convention Hall in Charlotte, North Carolina this September in front of adoring media and rabid political supporters.  But this speech in Roanoke is crucial to the 2012 election because on Friday, in Virginia, President Obama went off message.  Whether through error or hubris, he abandoned his script and spoke off the cuff.  And in so doing, he showed us the man behind the curtain.  The angry but controlled, insecure yet charismatic, market fearful, socialistically inclined man that Barrack Obama really is.

I am speaking, of course, of the now famous speech where Obama announced that we all owe our success to the government.  It is also the speech where he showed a nasty streak of jealousy.  Obama said, “Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.”  This is a comment that smacks of junior high school envy.  Thank God, I am no psychiatrist, though I’ll bet one could have a riotous romp in the park going through this man’s head. 

It took me a long time to find the entire text of President Obama’s speech about the debt owed to entrepreneurs for the country they live in, but it is scarier in its entirety than in excerpt.  According to President Obama, all of you who own a business, or have a job that pays the bills and perhaps, even stimulates you, or are simply, “making it” in this world, have the government to thank for your success.  If you think you earn your present salary through education, hard work and attention to detail, you are wrong. You didn’t do any of this yourself.  Instead, you are, “beholding” to the Feds for everything.  Stop taking credit for your own accomplishments, you are nothing but modeling clay in the hands of the great deliverer, large centralized government.  This is so Orwellian it scares the ever living crap out of me!  What is even more frightening, this man believes it! 

None of this should surprise me—he hasn’t earned anything himself, so he has no frame of reference.  I keep hoping the oval office has made a better man out of him, but  I hope in vain.  Obama is a product of the public trough.  His education was given to him because he fit an affirmative action profile.  He was a creation of Chicago politics and then became the nominee of the liberal press, again, because he fit the profile.  Deep down, he must know that he is not, “Presidential” material and he deeply resents it.  He then justifies all of this with his view of the government as creator.  His words show us exactly what his ideal America would look like:

  “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”   The President is sincere in what he thinks, and I am sure he is a patriotic American, but he is wrong from the soles of his feet on up. 

Admire success and keep the faith.