American Elephants

Yesterday, in Urbandale, Iowa, President Obama said “Now last week, the other party gave you their pitch at the convention down in Florida.”

It was something to behold.  Despite all the challenges that we face in this new century, what they offered over those three days was more often than not an agenda that was better suited for the last century.  It was a rerun.  We’d seen it before.  You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV.

This is fairly amusing coming from the party that in response to “the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression” (it wasn’t), tried all the failed policies with which FDR addressed the Great Depression.  And they didn’t work any better this time than they did in the 1930’s — long before black and white TV came on the scene. Bad ideas from the last century, indeed.

This administration’s really “new” idea is trying to squeeze more energy out of the wind and the sun, ignoring the most basic fact that the wind does not blow all the time and the sun goes down at night. Doesn’t work. So for real innovation we’ll turn to electric cars that go about the same distance on a charge as they did at the start of the 20th century, when they’re not catching on fire. The Chinese can make solar panels so cheaply that it has driven most American makers out of business, but they’ve gotten out of the business of solar energy for themselves entirely. As are the Europeans, who can still look at cost/effectiveness ratios. Last century?

The divide between the two parties has occasionally, but not often enough, been clearly articulated. Democrats believe in big government which will control and regulate to make things good, and then good things will flow ( dribble, trickle?) down to you. Good things come from a wise and benevolent government.

Republicans believe in free people and free markets —who derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Individual liberty. Governments are instituted among men to secure those unalienable rights that the Declaration talks about. It’s all very well to talk about rights to health care, food, housing, and birth control — but those “rights” are only guaranteed until government decides to take them away, or has to take them away because there is is neither the money nor the will to keep on supporting them.

Republicans believe in those things that have been proven to work in all the years of our struggle as a nation. Free people — really free people — innovate, experiment, try, and fail and succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. There are new things being created in garages and basements and labs — right now, waiting to be set free from overregulation, threatening rules, and an interfering government that wants to protect cronies from competition, and give supporters what they demand in exchange for their support. America has always been a dynamic land of creativity, enterprise and progress, and it is merely waiting to be set free once again.

What is older and more out-of-touch than an imperial presidency that ignores our Constitutional separation of powers because it is annoyingly in the way,  wants to amend the Constitution’s First Amendment because he doesn’t like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that gives hated corporations the same political free speech all citizens have? That is truly radical.

Mitt Romney said it all in one line: President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. MY promise …is to help you and your family.