I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.
In February 2009, a few weeks after his inauguration, President Obama went to Congress to deliver America’s first State of the European Union address. It included the following:
I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina—a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She had been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says,
“We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world.
We are not quitters.” That’s what she said. “We are not quitters.”1
There was much applause, and this passage was cited approvingly even by some conservatives as an example of how President Obama was yoking his “ambitious vision” (also known as record-breaking spending) to traditional appeals to American virtues. In fact, the Commander-in-Chief was deftly yoking the language of American exceptionalism to the cause of European statism. Apparently, nothing testifies to the American virtues of self-reliance and entrepreneurial energy like joining the monstrous army of robotic extras droning in unison, “The government needs to do more for me….”
The animating principles of the American idea were entirely absent from Obama’s vision—unless by American exceptionalism you mean an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending.
Consider first the least contentious part:
We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen…
The doctors are now on track to becoming yet another group of government employees; the lawyers sue the doctors for medical malpractice and, when they’ve made enough dough, like ambulance-chaser par excellence John Edwards, they get elected to Congress. The American Dream, twenty-first-century version? Is there no one in Miss Bethea’s school who’d like to be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a salesman, a generator of wealth?
As for the train “barreling by their classroom,” the closest the railroad track comes to the school is about 240 yards, or over an eighth of a mile.2
The president was wrong: trains are not barreling by any classroom six times a day. And, even if they were, that’s fewer barrelings per diem than when the school was built in 1912, or the new wing added in 1957. Incidentally, multiple press reports referred to the “113-year old building.” Actually, that’s the building
That’s to say, this rotting, dilapidated, mildewed Dotheboys Hall of a Gothic mausoleum dates all the way back to the Cyndi Lauper era.
Needless to say, the Obama stenographers up in the press gallery were happy to take the Hopeychanger-in-Chief at his word on the facts of the case. But even more striking is how indifferent they were to the bigger question: “She had been told her high school is hopeless,” said the president.
But surely a school lavishly funded by world and historical standards that needs outside help from the national government for a paint job is, by definition, “hopeless”?
