The Milwaukee Paradox: Claiming to Unite Us, Obama—Once Again—Only Divides

by Gregg Opelka

If he were alive today, Saul Alinsky would be beaming over President Obama’s Labor Day speech at the Milwaukee Area Labor Council Laborfest. It hit all the right divisive, class-warfare notes, each one sounded to prod the down-trodden Have-nots into even greater envy of the evil Haves. And to no one’s surprise, the Milwaukee mice were more than happy to take the bait—cheering, smiling, applauding, even as the metal bar of the mousetrap is about to snap their necks.

Obama teaching Alinsky photo

Despite campaigning for the office as the Great Unifier, once in it Obama displays over and over his preferred role of Great Divider. His true talent is not in uniting America, but in fomenting, fragmenting, fracturing it. He wields his Alinskyite ideology like a giant chisel, cleaving America into two fractious lumps of stone, probably beyond reunification, at least under the current will-of-the-people-ignoring administration.

The first third of Obama’s 3422-word oration is dedicated to a platitudinous paean to America’s historically aspirational work ethic, a flattering, feel-good affirmation no one could disagree with. Even so, early on, Obama hints at the class-envy rhetoric that later wall-to-wall carpets his speech:

When I was still a candidate for this office…we talked about how, for years, the values of hard work and responsibility that built this country had been given short shrift…about how some on Wall Street took reckless risks and cut corners to turn huge profits, while working Americans were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat.

In the Alinsky-Obama world paradigm, it’s always Us (the working downtrodden) versus Them (the non-working, reckless greedy). In the A-O paradigm, the housing bubble was unilaterally caused by rapacious brokers and bankers, while borrowing-beyond-their-means Tulipomaniac home-buyers are absolved of all blame.

About a third of the way in, the president pivots from platitude to plan, buttressing his argument with the Five Big Lies of his speech, each designed, in classic Obama fashion, to pit American against American.

Lie #1: Greed is bad.

We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t come this far by letting special interests run wild. We didn’t do it by just gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street.

In Obama’s reductive, good-evil view, all of Wall Street is de facto greedy and reckless. There is no distinction between healthy self-interest and noxious cupidity, or the necessary assumption of risk and Enron-style lawlessness. As Milton Friedman so succinctly asked and answered in his famous Phil Donahue interview, “What is greed? Of course, it’s none of us who are greedy. It’s always the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on the pursuit of individuals’ separate interests.” This is a concept too nuanced for simplistic Alinsky acolytes like Obama to understand.


Dr. Friedman performs an impromptu lobotomy.

Lie #2: We’re making college more affordable.

That’s why we eliminated tens of billions of dollars in wasteful taxpayer subsidies to big banks that provide student loans. We’re using those savings to put a college education within reach for working families.

Once again, Obama saves the little guy from the (evil) wasteful “Big Banks.” (Ever notice that “Big” is always bad when it comes to Banks and Oil, but good when it comes to Government?) Obama conceals from his audience how the school loan program was surreptitiously folded into the Health Care Bill, thus giving the government a virtual monopoly on the control of who receives educational loans and how those loans are managed. One provision, for example, allows students who later go into public service to have their student loans forgiven. Government subsidizing itself, government picking winners and losers. To anyone who believes a government-run student loan program will be more efficient and less expensive than a free-market system—four words: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.

LIE #3: Health Care Bill Shifts Control to You

That’s why we passed health insurance reform that will make coverage affordable; reform that ends the indignity of insurance companies jacking up your premiums at will or denying you coverage just because you get sick; reform that shifts control from them to you.

Obama continues to perpetuate the lie (“If you like your current health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”) he repeated ad nauseam during the push to pass Obamacare. As countless analysts—notably Scott Gottlieb in the WSJ elaborates—have shown, nothing could be further from the truth. If losing one’s health care plan and doctor is “shifting control from them to you,” what would relinquishing control look like?

LIE #4: Republicans want to turn Social Security over to Wall Street.

And to those who may still run for office planning to privatize Social Security, let me be clear: as long as I’m President, I’ll fight every effort to take the retirement savings of a generation of Americans and hand it over to Wall Street.

Classic Obama straw-man canardism.  As he himself knows, and dishonestly misstates, Republicans who favor privatizing Social Security do not favor “handing it over to Wall Street,” but rather handing it over to the individual, who would then have complete control over his or her account. The paradigm is similar to Health Savings Accounts. Again, Obama uses untruth to vilify one of his monolithic evil bugaboos, Wall Street. One wonders where Obama thinks most of Americans’ pension funds, retirement savings, college endowment funds, and personal investments reside—under the mattress?

elcar

LIE #5: Government Motors is Good for You

When the naysayers said we should just let the American auto industry vanish and take hundreds of thousands of jobs down with it, we said we’d stand by them if they made the tough choices necessary to compete once again – and today, that industry is on the way back.

As usual, Obama justifies government intrusion using a false choice between government intervention and “just letting the American auto industry vanish.” As if failing to bail out GM would have led to the extinction of Ford, for example, which did not take federal funds. The “moral hazard” issue of government bailouts is well discussed in this WSJ column. The result of government intervention, on the other hand, is the Volt, the first American-made plug-in hybrid electric car. It sells for an “economical” $41,000 and drives a whopping 40 miles before the battery needs recharging. The non-government-subsidized competitor,  the Nissan Leaf, sports a 25% cheaper price tag of $32,000 and a 100-mile battery-driveable distance.

ronald_reagan

It’s interesting that a man claiming to unite us spends one- fifth of his speech vilifying and misrepresenting Republicans. Did Reagan ever do this? No, the passions of the (real) Great Communicator, unlike Obama’s, stirred us because he spoke about Americans as one people, not as divided classes, not as a nation of Haves and Have-Nots, as Obama unremittingly does. Reagan never displayed the punkish, bullying tactics of Obama, vilifying Big Banks, Big Oil, Greedy Wall Street, etc. And, regrettably, Obama never displays the magnanimous unifying patriotism of Reagan.

Obama purports to be bringing the country together. But that’s hard to believe when all you see is that giant chisel in his hand.

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Posted Sep 8th 2010 at 9:37 am in Big Labor, News, Obama, Politics | 82 Comments