Last week, at a Democratic party fundraiser in McLean, Va., Pres. Barack Obama gave his answer to the thousands of Americans showing up at town halls and protests all over America to question his proposed federal takeover of health care. Obama said:
But I don’t want the folks who created the mess — I don’t want folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to just get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.
Obama here was talking about the Republicans and conservatives he holds responsible for the economic downturn. He doesn’t want to hear from them — whether about health-care reform, or economic policy more generally. He just wants them to shut up and get out of the way of his glorious left-wing revolution.
While campaigning last year, Obama was singing a different tune. Then he told us he was going to bring a new era of bipartisanship to Washington. Now he tells us he doesn’t want to hear from Republicans who supposedly created the mess. Many American voters were misled by this calculated deception.
Obama takes no responsibility for his time served in the U.S. Senate since 2004. He wants us to forget that while serving in that role he opposed every Bush budget because it did not spend enough. He wants us to forget that, as a senator, he joined with Barney Frank to successfully oppose the Bush reforms to clean up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which did so much to cause the financial crisis. He joined with Frank and other ultraliberals in Congress to support a policy for which longtime Obama ally ACORN had long agitated — to push Fannie, Freddie, and the nation’s banks to abandon traditional mortgage-lending standards, and grant mortgages to unqualified borrowers who ultimately failed to pay them back.
Now Obama is sending messages from his White House and Democrat Party to unions and other left-wing allies to “punch back twice as hard” at Americans at town halls and rallies questioning his Big Government takeover of health care. And answering this call, union thugs from SEIU have already shown up at these events and started beating up on Americans raising questions there.
In these words and actions, Barack Obama is not sounding presidential. FDR and John Kennedy and Bill Clinton never told any portion of the American people he didn’t want to hear from them. Rather, Obama is sounding and acting more like Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.
– Peter Ferrara served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as associate deputy attorney heneral of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.