While President Barack Obama hasn’t accomplished much of anything in his tenure in the White House (unless you count his Nobel Prize), he has done one thing that will certainly benefit the United States of America. In his successful bid to be elected President, he’s broken a significant barrier…not the barrier of race…but the barrier set up and defended by the status quo, two-party, good old boys network.
For a long time, presidential politics has been based on candidates getting the nod, when it was “their turn”. There have been a few exceptions to the rule, like perhaps Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan, but even these presidential candidates threw their hats into the ring having been governors first. Barack Obama, in contrast, announced his candidacy for President of the United States with little more experience in state and national government than some congressional interns, but with a firm grasp on “community organizing” as a means of taking control of power and commandeering public resources for “redistribution”. Much to the consternation of his Capitol Dome peers (especially those who had waited their turn), the “audacious” upstart turned the status quo of both the Democrats and the GOP on its ear and became the 44th President of the United States.
Despite the revelation that “audacity of hope” is really just the “audacity of hype”, the ascendency of “The One” to the highest office of the land should be a game changer to a good many patriots. Thanks to Obama, the glass ceiling of the failed two-party system is clearly shattered. As he has for the Nobel Prize, Obama’s candidacy and election has lowered the bar of presidential politics. Frankly, if he can get elected, there’s no reason why candidates from outside the standard “A list” of elephants and donkeys can’t be just as successful.
While Barack Obama ran and got elected as a Democrat, it should be plain by now that he’s anything but. With his subversive criticisms of the US Constitution, his penchant for socialist governing structures like “single payer” health insurance, nationalization of major private sector corporations, deficit spending and exponentially rising debt, and even his attempt to implement a curriculum to turn America’s school children into little Obamatons, it’s clear to more and more Americans that Barack Obama and his army of “avowed communist” czars are attempting a radical revolutionary coup. Their quest is truly to “fundamentally transform the United States of America”…in a model resembling Cuba or Venezuela.
But like a cancer caught in time, there’s good news for America in Obama’s presidency. And the good news is two-fold: First, now that we’ve had a taste of Obama’s fundamental transformation, a lot “Hope and Change” voters are deciding not to swallow the Kool-aid and spitting it back into the cup. Secondly, and more importantly, having seen what’s become of our government under the absolute control first of the Republican Party, then the Democrats, and now the Democrats and Obama, the grass roots of America is awakening like the proverbial sleeping giant, riled up and glaring with anger at the 537 beltway elitists and their “war chest” cronies who no longer serve our interests, but rule our lives and livelihoods from inside the beltway.
The recent elections are a forecast of things to come. On the local scene, the former “rising star of the Democratic Party”, Don Cunningham barely eked out a re-election challenge by political newcomer Scott Ott. Although Ott ran as a Republican, he ran as his campaign independent of the Lehigh County Republican Committee, lowering the stock of the old guard dictatorship. And while Ott lost his election, “Tea Party” patriots, involved in movements like Campaign for Liberty, The Lehigh Valley 9.12 Group, Concerned Citizens for the Bethlehem Area School District, Leadership for Liberty, The American Conservative Party, and myriad others are energized and ready to charge into the temple, slinging bullwhips and flipping over the tables of the money changers. If polling like Rassmussen’s recent generic congressional vote results are any indication, there may be a political realignment on the horizon. And that realignment will be catalyzed and stoked by the coming congressional elections of 2010, the presidential race in 2012, and the state and local elections along the way. Unlike the “audacity of hype”, that will be “Hope and Change we can believe in”.