Wednesday, May 19, 2010

The comparison of the elections of 1912 and 2008

If you want to change laws so that things in the United States are the way you want them to be, yet the people don't want, or are actually un-Constitutional, you have to lie.

Obama lied that he was an ardent supporter of change, that he was for a more open government, that he was a moderate democrat and a champion of the people. Yet when he became president we saw that he was actually a progressive/liberal.

This type of lying by Presidential candidates is nothing new. When Woodrow Wilson was running against then non-progressive republican William Howard Taft, and the progressive republican (progressive party) Teddy Roosevelt, he ran as a conservative.

Like what happened in the run up to the Obama election, conservatives said things like, "look at his books. Look at his associations. They all tell us that he is a progressive. He has no respect for the constitution."

The people didn't listen, and Obama, like Wilson before him, became president. Wilson became president by telling the people what they wanted to hear, and then doing what he wanted to do once he became President.

In fact, on the campaign trail Wilson said, "The history of liberty is the history of the limitations of government power." Yet this went against everything he had written to that point, and everything he did as president.

Once he became President, he said, "While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson's which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible... But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise."

Wilson, as history reveals, governed as a New Nationalist, just as Roosevelt would have if he had won the presidential election of 1912.

As Jonah Goldberg notes in "Liberal Fascism," "America was going to get a progressive president no matter what in 1912. And while those of us with soft spots for Teddy might like to think things would have turned out differently had he won, we are probably deluding ourselves."
I like to wonder if progressive John McCain had won in 2008 if we would have ended up with a progressive president anyway, even though McCain lied and said he was a conservative republican. It's neat how history repeats itself isn't it.

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