No More Saviors in the White House

Let's revisit Michelle Obama’s recent statement, cited in the Cato@Liberty post repeated here last week: “Barack Obama … is going to demand that you shed your cynicism… That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

The problem that I have with Ms. Obama's statement -- the same problem that I have with the attitudes of Hillary Clinton and John McCain -- is that it shows a kind of insipient arrogance that has taken over the leading politicians of this country. Heavens knows George Bush has his share, or more than his share, of it.

While Ms. Obama did not reference "forcing" Americans to do anything, the language she used should be regarded as offensive, just as I regard many statements by Clinton and McCain offensive.

In one of the Dune books, Frank Herbert gives a brief lesson on how democracy is transformed into aristocracy. One of the key warning signs he mentions is increasing arrogance on the part of the political class, a subtle elitism that eventually becomes overt.

You would have to look very hard for a leading politician today who does not show at least some of the arrogance that Herbert said should be a red flag. Positioning yourself as a secular messiah is supremely arrogant, and that is precisely what Senator Obama has done. Hillary likely thinks of herself in similar terms and anyone who's studied John McCain's career knows he is also condescending and arrogant.

A belief that Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton or John McCain, will save America is not rational. Most U.S. presidents have, at least since the time of Teddy Roosevelt, positioned themselves as saviors who would lead us to the Promised Land. Seems logical someone would have succeeded by now, but as we have seen the most prominent results of this historical trend has been a century of war and increasing repression of individual rights.

The problem is not "electing the right people to office" but, rather, the wide range of power that U.S. presidents in particular, and Congress as well, have arrogated to themselves. (Bush's lawyers, in court defending his abritrary detention of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, went so far as to claim that in "wartime" the "commander in chief" could pretty much ignore any law or the Bill of Rights if he chooses. Think about the implications of that.)

Maybe Obama or Clinton are so decent they would never abuse the office the way Bush has. Maybe. But maybe not. Power has a strange effect on people, like a personality-altering hallucogenic. Go to DC sometime and tour K Street and the Capitol area and see the addicts.

The framers of the Constitution -- who'd had it up to here with arbitrary executive power courtesy King George and his despotic royal governors -- deliberately and severely limited the power of the president, of Congress, and of government as a whole. They added on the Bill of Rights for good measure. This was undone by the bloodless coup d'etat FDR carried out in the 1930s. (His chief henchmen later admitted, in so many words, that what they'd been up to was subverting the intentions of the framers and the limits on power in the Constitution.)

Those original limits are all in tatters now. Even more frightening is that the media and the public generally do not understand this.

The presidency has been allowed to accumulate too much power. FDR sent thousands of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps. Truman signed off on experiments on African American servicemen. Nixon and Kennedy used the IRS against political opponents. Bloody, expensive wars became the hallmark of American foreign policy during the 20th century.

I worry deeply about someone with a savior complex in the office of president. FDR had such a complex, so did LBJ. I worry deeply about someone who wants to be nanny for 250 million individuals in the office of president. I worry deeply about someone who doesn't think free speech rights are as important as having a "clean government," as John McCain has stated on national television.

So, yes, Michelle Obama's comments are troubling. Ms. Obama is highly educated, a successful attorney, and doubtless looked on in her own right as a role model by many younger women. Her comments speak to a culture of dependence on government and deference to government, not a culture which cherishes individual liberty and responsibility.

The bottom line is that, although George Bush will thankfully leave office next January 20, none of his three putative successors -- upon close examination -- offer anything different. None are offering to reduce the power of the presidency, or reduce the role of the federal government in individual lives or renounce the fool's errand of America as world policeman. None are offering anything, in fact, but a further expansion of bureaucrats nosing into our lives, and attempting to run them for us, in some way.

Our current president, George Bush, was not the first mass-abuser of executive power. Given that we do not seem to be examining politicians very closely yet, he won't be the last. And remember, he seemed pretty innocuous at first, before 9/11. Many people thought Bush was a dimwit, but figured that the worst thing that could happen would be looting taxpayers on behalf of Halliburton and the oil companies.

Not even close. But the warning signs were there in remarks Bush made on the campaign trail and in the advisers he surrounded himself with, most notably Rove and Cheney.

We must start looking at politicians exceptionally critically. The election is not American Idol, where the winner gets a recording or film contract. The winner ends up in the presidency, which can now, thanks to FDR, visit untold mischief on the country and the world.

No more saviors in the White House; inevitably, they turn out to be anything but.