Posted by
Pete Chase on Monday, November 10, 2008 1:00:00 PM
"We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Barack Obama spoke these words on October 31 in Columbia, Missouri, days before becoming the President-elect. Change has been the drumbeat of the Obama campaign from its inception, and apparently – given the results of the election – it is a message that struck a chord with the electorate.
Exactly what that change entailed, of course, was a little hard to nail down; Senator Obama himself was vague on that. In recent weeks we’ve learned a lot more about the kind of change he has in mind, thanks to the discovery of an audio clip of a panel discussion on Chicago’s WBEZ Public Radio in which Obama participated. His remarks make clear his view of the founding principles of this country:
The original Constitution . . . is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture. . .
I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot.
(The Constitution) reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.
Obama also bemoaned that the Constitution doesn’t provide for “redistributive change”, that it is essentially “a charter of negative liberties, says . . . what the federal government can’t do (but) doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”
Democrats, led by Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, share a particular set of assumptions about America – that private property, individual liberty, and constitutional limits on government – far from being founded in timeless "self-evident" truths – are merely notions that may have once served a nation struggling for independence but are now hopelessly outdated.
It may very well be that many voters also share those assumptions. But we can at least be very clear about one thing. Whatever the merits of those beliefs, they are not the beliefs of the Framers.
With the election behind us, Democrats are insisting that conservatism has been utterly repudiated, and that they have a mandate for their entire agenda. They may be right. Just let’s not pretend that it has anything to do with the American idea. They have explicitly rejected the Founders' vision, and are intent on replacing it with their own.