Obama Talk
by Jeffrey Folks
Issue 134 - June 24, 2009

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” That was George Orwell in 1946. Fifty-three years later we have Barack Obama, with his lovely political speechmaking, full of high-sounding phrases, grandiose imagery, and constant deceit.

As Orwell understood, the most dangerous sort of politician is the one who can easily manipulate language so as to deceive the public. For example, the politician who proposes the suppression of free speech under the guise of a “fairness doctrine.” The politician who plots to deny union members the right of secret ballot and calls his plan the Employee Free Choice Act. The politician who, while in the Senate, co-sponsored the “Patriot Employer Act,” a strong-arm pro-union bill that might just as well have been called the Labor Payback Bill. The politician who proclaims “middle class tax cuts” as a ruse to expand the earned income credit for those welfare recipients who pay no taxes at all. The politician who shifts from warning of the catastrophe of “global warming” to the dangers of “climate change” when polling reveals that the public doesn’t really put much stock in global warming.

Obama’s speeches are intended to disguise what he is doing, not to clarify it. They are intended to hide the fact that his are the politics of socialism and big government—politics that are indefensible and so must be constantly kept from view. Every time Obama proposes a new tax, such as the proposed $200 billion tax on the foreign earnings of American corporations, that tax is disguised as some sort of “savings” or “investment.” Every time another liberty is taken away, such as the freedom to choose what cars we wish to drive, that restriction of freedom is defended as the only “sustainable” course of action. Every time an opponent disagrees with the president, that opposition is deemed “partisan”; what the president proposes is always the consensus.

Deception and lies, the “defence of the indefensible,” is all we get from this president. What about the Inauguration Speech promise that the Obama administration would usher in a new era of “self-responsibility”? That was a noble-sounding phrase reminiscent of John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, or even Margaret Thatcher, who famously proclaimed that the philosophy of the Western world was superior to that of the rest “because it starts with the individual, with his uniqueness, his responsibility, and his capacity to choose.” The idea of self-responsibility draws applause in an Inauguration Speech, but in what way has the Obama administration promoted self-responsibility since coming to power?

As with all of Obama’s high-sounding phrases, the reality is entirely the opposite. Obama wants to expand welfare, not self-responsibility. He wants to empower union bosses, not worker self-responsibility. He wants to pass universal, government-run health care, not self-responsibility based on choice. He wants unrealistic mileage standards for American auto manufacturers, not self-responsibility in choosing what car to drive. He wants semi-nationalization of major financial institutions and energy companies, not self-responsibility for corporations.

The fact is that every word that this president utters is tinged with deceit. His trademark slogan of “Change You Can Believe In” disguised the fact that his politics are not the politics of change: they are the old politics of government regulation, welfare, and increased taxation. It is more of the old Democratic Party deal-making with trial lawyers, union bosses, and special interests. It’s the old politics of liberal defeatism and appeasement of our enemies. This is the old politics of tax and spend, and of ambitious government experiments that end in failure. The political model of this administration is not JFK or Ronald Reagan; it is Lyndon Baines Johnson. Like Johnson, Obama is ambitious, unprincipled, arrogant, and ruthless. Let us hope that by some miracle we are not led down the same ruinous path.

Why does Obama habitually conceal his real intentions from the public? It is because his plan for a return to big government is indefensible. The American people do not want higher taxes, so Obama conceals his plans for a tax increase proportional to his spending increases (so far—in only five months!) of four trillion dollars. This is an increase of $54,000 for every family of four in the United States. Yet, since only half of American families pay income taxes, it is an increase of $108,000 for every taxpaying family. This is money that must be paid back. It is a real stretch for the president to have raised the future taxes of every taxpaying family by $108,000 and proclaim simultaneously that he has cut taxes for 95% of Americans. Perhaps, as with Bill Clinton, it depends on the meaning of “is.” Or the meaning of “cut.” Or perhaps, like his supporter John Kerry, Obama means to say that he lowered taxes before he raised them.

Obama’s flowery speeches are full of “hope for middle class Americans,” but Obama doesn’t tell those middle class Americans how much he intends to raise their marginal tax rates. Does he still plan, as he asserted during the campaign, to raise taxes on capital gains to “somewhere between 20% and 28%”? There is a considerable difference between 20% and 28%, and both are mammoth increases over the current 15% rate. He obscures his plan to tax dividends and interest as regular income, thus pushing those rates up from 15% to over 40% (taking into account the higher marginal rates to be imposed). He conspires to reinstate the death tax at 45%, but refuses to call it what it is: a death tax.

Then there is the matter of earmarks. On Wednesday, March 11, in a “private ceremony”—no press coverage allowed—President Obama signed a $410 billion omnibus spending bill into law. Breaking his campaign pledge not to sign a “single” earmark, the president signed 8,500 into law during his first 51 days in office. At the same time, on the very day he was so furtively breaking his promise, Obama was loudly hosting a news conference in which he declared war on earmarks. Things are getting very Orwellian when there arises such a discrepancy between appearance and reality. It becomes even more so when the discrepancy goes unremarked by the mainstream press.

It goes on and on. The campaign pledge to cut taxes for 95% of Americans did not mean that taxes would be cut for 95% of taxpayers, only, or mostly, for those “earned income” tax-filers who pay no taxes. The pledge that senior citizens earning less than $50,000 would pay “not one penny” in taxes has been foresworn faster than Romeo’s love for fair Rosaline. It is not clear as to whether the president even recalls posting this pledge on his website and repeating “not one penny” a hundred times while Florida was still in play. Now we are hearing about a plan to tax employee-sponsored health benefits in order to fund universal health care. But by Obama’s logic, this burdensome new tax on half of American workers is not a tax. There will be more and more new taxes, but the phrase “tax increase” will never enter Obama’s vocabulary.

I believe that most human beings are capable of distinguishing quite clearly between a truth and a lie. They are capable of computing the difference between zero and 8,500 earmarks. They understand the difference between wasteful spending and “investment.” They know that an expansion of the welfare state is not an investment. They recognize that a promise cannot be broken and kept at the same time, no matter how many news conferences are held to proclaim that they are being kept.

We have had more than two years now to observe Barack Obama on the campaign trail and in office, and it is becoming increasingly doubtful whether he is capable of distinguishing truth from fiction. If this distinction is so entirely beyond him as the evidence suggests, the country is in great peril. There is then no difference between a billion and a trillion, between capitalism and socialism, between work and welfare. With a president who thinks words can mean whatever he wishes, all appeals to common sense and decency are futile. If words can mean anything at all and can shift their meaning from day to day, no reasoned argument will restrain the ambitions of this president.

Dr. Jeffrey Folks taught for thirty years in universities in Europe, America, and Japan. He has published nine books and over a hundred articles on American culture and politics in national journals and newspapers. He is currently writing on issues in American literature, media, family, and education.