President Obama Has Transformed America…But Not for the Better

Dr. Cornel West is a leading liberal public intellectual. He gave an interview to NewsOne immediately following the 2012 Election that was nothing if not provocative. Dr. West said he was happy Romney didn’t win, but far from satisfied with the Obama record and especially with the just-ended presidential campaign:

So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse, as the major problems—ecological catastrophe, climate change, global warming. So it’s very sad. I mean, I’m glad there was not a right-wing takeover, but we end up with a Republican, a Rockefeller Republican in blackface, with Barack Obama, so that our struggle with regard to poverty intensifies.

Say that again? If one of my conservative colleagues had dared to say anything remotely like that, he (or she) would have been charged with racism of the worst sort. Still, it is worth considering the merits of Cornel West’s argument.

Has President Obama really been so disappointing from a genuinely Left-wing perspective? I suggest he has not. Nor has he been “incompetent,” as so many of my conservative colleagues are charging. Most recently, some have raised the bar (or, perhaps, lowered it) by claiming that President Obama’s administration is one of “epic incompetence.”

President Obama has seemingly floated above these charges, these criticisms Left and Right. He marches to the beat of a different drummer.

He shrugged off sharp criticism from the Clinton camp in 2008. Recall he raised the hackles of Bill and Hillary then by saying Ronald Reagan was a “transformational” President in a way that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were not. The Clintons were enraged. But candidate Obama was exactly right. He was giving the Gipper a left-handed compliment, to be sure. He granted that Reagan had transformed American politics—but in no way that he, Obama, would approve.

In fact, the Clintons and most of the Establishment media missed the real point of Mr. Obama’s statement: He was promising liberal activists to be the kind of transformational President for the Left that Reagan was for conservatives.

And so he has been. His administration began by exercising control over the banks, insurance companies, and major automakers. All this was done in the name of pulling the country out of its economic nosedive. Mr. Obama’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers reassured worried corporate leaders that the administration was not going to nationalize everything, but only “the commanding heights of the economy.”

Austin Goolsby seemed blissfully unaware of the Marxian roots of that expression and that tactic. Apparently, it is getting harder to distinguish between classic Marxism and liberal thought in our Ivy League faculty lounges.

After passing a huge, $787 billion stimulus bill that failed to stimulate, Mr. Obama spent the next year driving through the takeover of 1/6 of the U.S. economy. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been going through the throes of “implementation” ever since.

Millions of Americans feel like they’ve been put on the rack. It is torture. Most of the media coverage has focused on the “botched” rollout of the www.healthcare.gov website.

The “patient protection” part of the 2,000-page opus is obviously false. Millions who had health coverage have lost it.

The “affordable care” part is likewise clearly false. For millions, the doctors they liked and the plans they could afford are suddenly out of reach.

From a political science perspective, however, that part of the Obama plan least commented upon is the last word in its title: Act. It is not an Act of Congress, at all.

What passes for ObamaCare today is not the bill that was rammed through both Houses of Congress—using Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s most questionable tactics. It is not the measure signed with great fanfare by President Obama in an East Room ceremony on March 23, 2010. (Yes, that was the august ceremony that Court Jester Joe Biden told us was a “big f___ing deal!)

ObamaCare today is not even the challenged law that was adjudicated and narrowly upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 28, 2012. That was a dog’s breakfast of a ruling, but even that is not the main point

ObamaCare as it is today is vastly different. It is an ongoing process. It is an administrative amoeba, constantly changing, growing, transforming itself–and us.

We no longer have laws, we have mandates.

There have been no fewer than 41 major changes to ObamaCare since its initial passage.

It is impossible to say today what ObamaCare will mandate tomorrow. But President Obama will nonetheless make tomorrow’s changes mandatory.

President Obama sacrificed much to get ObamaCare through Congress and the courts.

But from a fundamentally transformational point of view, it was all worth it.

Most Americans understand this. A recent poll showed that 56% of the American people believe the real purpose of the law is “to control Americans’ lives.” Smart people!

A hint of this could have been gleaned from the last-minute decision to toss an amendment onto the ObamaCare steamroller that would let the federal government take over college student loans.

What has this to do with health care? If you think ObamaCare was actually about health care, the answer is: nothing. College students are among the healthiest portions of the American public. And under Mr. Obama’s legislation, they could stay on their parents’ plans until age 26.

But if you think ObamaCare is truly about controlling our lives, then the nationalization of college loans makes perfect sense. It completes the portfolio of the average American family’s major debts—home mortgages, cars, health care, college tuition.

Henceforth, we Americans must look to Barack Obama for his help in each of these vital areas of our lives. That is, unless we repeal ObamaCare.

So, do not look to America’s retreat from the world, or to our obviously lowered profile in the international sphere as unintended by this administration. Creating a socialist republic here with a veneer of democratic legitimacy requires a lesser America on the world stage.

To President Obama, American Exceptionalism is exactly the problem. Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as “A Shining City on a Hill” is the source of this problem. America under Obama will become like Europe—large, placid, contented, cared for. Like a cow.

His bumper sticker said it all: Obama Cares.

He means to repeal Reagan. That’s why he needs “greater flexibility” toward Putin’s Russia. That’s why we will lead from behind, if at all. Focus inward, focus on bringing socialism to America. That’s what he means by a nation fundamentally transformed.

Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union, and on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.