By Mark Rhoads -
In President Obama's eccentric view of an alternate reality, he thinks he has been a hugely successful CEO for GM and he wants to replicate his "success" now in other industries. Obama worships before the god of omnipotent government and he fears individual liberty because individuals who do not share his secular religion are a danger to the monopoly of government power that collectivist elites must have to impose their Utopian views on everyone else. The danger to him comes from individuals who do not share his view that citizens only exist to serve the government rather than the other way around. In Obama's world, the fruits of your labor do not rightfully belong to you but they belong to the government in the first instance.
The few old-fashioned liberal Democrats that still are living force themselves to be in denial about the full extent of President Obama's extreme socialist ambitions. They even pretend to be offended when conservatives use the word "socialism" to accurately describe the Obama ambitions. But if the word "socialist" does not apply to Obamaism, then the word has no practical meaning or historic context at all. One of old liberal practitioners of denial is The Five on Fox panelist Bob Beckel who managed Walter Mondale's campaign for president in 1984. Few responsible liberal Democrats before 1990 would have ever dreamed it was possible that their party could lurch so far to the extreme Left as to accept socialist ideas as the main stream thinking of their party.
I had many very good personal friends who were liberal Democrats in the thirty-year period of 1960 to 1990. I admired the integrity of the late Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Washington) and the late Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Illinois) who were strong on national defense and sincere anti-Communists. They believed in the cause of advancing civil rights for blacks and perfecting programs to help the poor. Maybe they placed too much faith in government as their default engine for social reform and did not realize the damage that too much government could to to a free society over many years. But they did not despise the free-enterprise system with the same fanatical loathing that President Obama and his team display every day.
I have made allowances for the fact that Mitt Romney was a moderate Republican governor who had to deal with large Democratic majorities in both houses of the Massachusetts state legislature from 2002 to 2004. While Romney was not my ideal first choice for the GOP nomination, I have no doubt at all that he completely understands that the free-market economy allocates resources by the relatively free play of supply and demand under the rule of law and has proven itself to be the most productive supplier of human needs the world has ever known. The free market is at the same time the single economic system that compliments personal economic and political freedom for American citizens. President Obama has no clue as to how the free market works and that is why the stakes of this election are so high and why all people who believe in freedom need to unite behind Romney even if they do not agree with all his ideas all the time. The Democratic Party of Barack Obama is a lost cause to people who believe in free enterprise.
