I attended President Obama’s commencement speech at the US Coast Guard Academy. His oratory was superb. He was relaxed, funny, warm, friendly, and used the teleprompter so deftly that the entire speech appeared to be off-the-cuff.
At least one part of the ceremony was truly off-the-cuff, and may have given the Secret Service it’s only moment of excitement during his visit; one of my best and longstanding student-friends who graduated, Melissa McCafferty, was singled out during his remarks and honored by the President for winning a Truman Fellowship. Later, when she walked toward him to receive her commission as the newest ensign in the Coast Guard, she said quickly, “Mr. President, I voted for you, I marched in your inaugural parade, I respect and admire you. May I have a hug?” Obama complied, yet again endearing himself to the crowd for that moment … and to Melissa forever.
Despite a feeling of some pride that we could elect a black president, a feeling which I think many Americans who didn’t vote for him also shared, I did not vote for Obama. Based on what he said he would do if elected, it was clear that he would steer the country toward bigger government. After he became President, with a complicit congress, his idea of big government exceeded by far what I had imagined. I knew something about the inevitable shortcomings of big governments having lived inside the Soviet Union where big government existed in the extreme.
The bigger the government, the more money that is needed from people who make things and offer services. The bigger the government, the more crooks who will wind up in government (probably more, even, than a pro rata share) and will lie, cheat, deceive and steal. The greater the dependency of the people on big government the more people who will be hooked on entitlements and other government services and vote for bigger and bigger government. At some point, there is no turning back short of economic collapse when too few Americans are making anything that is internationally competitive (as happened to the Soviet Union).
The pundit, Paul Krugman, is all in favor of a weaker US currency as he says, correctly, that a weaker dollar will help increase our exports; the trouble with Krugman’s analysis is that our major exports will include pottery, hand-woven baskets and tie-dyed clothing.
There are signs that our country is in some ways headed in the same direction as the Soviet Union before it and its currency both collapsed, and the country fell into a lawless kleptocracy, which is about where it is today … twenty years later …. and getting worse.
Therefore, I will not vote for Obama in the next election, either. He will say what he has to say in order to get re-elected, and he will say it very well, and people will elect him for a final term. They will be charmed, once again, by his smooth, confident oratory, his ability to hide his anger and defiant partisanship toward most of the voters in the US. Those he dislikes include republicans and conservatives, of course, but also the private sector in general, plus anyone who has become rich by virtue of the unique freedoms that the US still offers (other than specific wealthy contributors to his campaign), plus non-union workers, plus anyone on Medicare (costs will increase by 150% by 2014 with less purchasing power to buy less medical care), plus supporters of Israel in light of his support for returning Israel to its pre-1967 boundaries as an opening bid; he obviously doesn’t need to regain the favor of the 78% of Jewish voters who gave him lots of money and voted for him last time.
Many people, many smart people, will believe in him once more. After his re-election, campaign promises will be tossed aside quickly, however, as he wields the wrecking ball to continue to destroy a once-proud and great country that has given so much to the world, and taken so little it didn’t earn or deserve … certainly not foreign territory or by virtue of unfair advantages in foreign trade (quite the reverse in recent years, in fact). We need a better way to help the nation’s most vulnerable without a 2000 page law that adds more than a hundred new agencies plus 16,000 new positions to the US tax police just to enforce ObamaCare.
It will be long after my time, if ever, before Melissa could comprehend or acknowledge the harm to our country being done by President Obama. She did tell me, however, that despite the fact that she is a social liberal, she is a fiscal conservative. That should give us all some hope.
