Is Obama A Secret Republican? A CMC Alum Wants To Know

As we approach inauguration day, I'm reminded of how short a time it's been since Obama was introduced to us. I attended (briefly) the Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004 and watched Obama's speech on the television.  At the time, Professor Lucas Morel CMC '87 wrote this up on No Left Turns. 

Reading it now, I'm more than cautiously optimistic that perhaps an Obama presidency won't be as awful as I fear. If the music isn't right, at least the instruments are properly tuned. Now, if only we could cure Obama of all this Keynesian garbage! 

Barack Obama:
A Republican Soul Trapped Inside a Democrat’s Body
Editorial
July 2004

by: Lucas Morel

With unity as the mandate for the Democratic Convention, a little known State Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, took the ball and ran so far with it that this listener thought he was witnessing Obama’s conversion to the Grand Old Party. Remove all the references to John Kerry, along with the not-so-veiled digs against Bush, and the remaining speech would have fired up a Republican audience.

Touting his home state as "the land of Lincoln," praising the Declaration of Independence as "the true genius of America," and repeatedly affirming that Americans "don’t expect government to solve all their problems," Obama sounded less like the Democratic Party and more like the current president. Even his comments on education, which emphasized parental responsibility and higher student expectations, were right out of Bush’s playbook. Add his concern that Americans couple their devotion to individualism with a belief that "I am my brother’s keeper," and Obama looked like a cheerleader for compassionate conservatism.

That Obama spent most of his speech singing the glories of America must have shocked the Democratic elite. Instead of mouthing the multicultural platitudes of Jesse Jackson’s Democratic Party, Obama pledged allegiance to "one American family." He went so far as to exclaim, "There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there is the United States of America." Jackson stood up and applauded at all the right moments, but he was clearly sitting down and harrumphing on the inside.

Despite his call to unity and hope, Obama established his Democratic bona fides through several criticisms of George Bush’s presidency. But these amounted to just so many throw-away lines and "straw men" arguments. Republicans have little to fear that any of these blows will land when the gloves come off after the convention. Bush has not used "faith as a wedge to divide us," spoken or acted as if war was "the first option," or ignored unemployment or "the health care crisis." And if Obama really thinks the Bush presidency has been "this long political darkness," then Jimmy Carter’s quagmire of a presidency becomes a political black hole.

Obama is widely referred to as a rising star in the Democratic Party. But if Barack Obama, whose first name means "blessed of God" in Swahili, is destined to be God’s gift to Democrats and Republicans alike, he will need to show how the principles of equal freedom and opportunity lead to the policies he has espoused so far as a state senator. His support of Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, tax increases, and increased gun controls—none of which were mentioned in his 15-minute ode to American exceptionalism—says more about his Democratic roots than his seemingly Republican convictions.

Can Obama’s political diversity leaven the Democratic Party? Time will soon tell, given that he is running unopposed for the U.S. Senate. One scenario is that a few years of "going along to get along" with the likes of Daschle, Clinton, and Pelosi will lead him to shed his Lincolnian rhetoric in exchange for a fast-track promotion to a cabinet-level position or even vice-presidential consideration.

For now, his proclamation of a "politics of hope" contrasts greatly with the typical pessimism of the Democratic Party. That it played so well with the Democratic rank and file bodes well for the immediate future of American political discourse.

Lucas E. Morel is associate professor of politics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and is an adjunct fellow at the Ashbrook Center.

All Entrepreneurship is Social, Ms. Whitman

I'm very disappointed to read of Ms. Meg Whitman's visit to Claremont's Scripps College next month as a guest of the Drucker Institute. Ms. Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, is coming to speak about a topic that gets far too much airtime on our campuses, so-called "social entrepreneurship." I say so-called because the idea of social entrepreneurship strains the imagination. Isn't all entrepreneurship inherently social? Imagine someone establishing a business with the express purpose of satiating her own needs. She probably wouldn't stay in business for long!

The title of her talk is a bit more measured than some of the more outlandish programs to which we've been subjected. It seems innocuous enough, "'The Character of the Company': How Business Balance Profit With Social Responsibility," and so we should all give it a fair hearing, but, as always, with critical ears.

In my time at Claremont McKenna, I've come across this weird pathology, as if business often feels the need to apologize for its successes and pine for its sins. We are told far too often by President Gann that we should eschew the private sector in favor of work in government or with NGOs. You might remember that this was what happened when I told David "Rodham" Gergin that I wanted to go into business once I graduated and didn't want any part of his compulsory, national service. He told me that I should just drop out of college if I wanted to found my own company and asked if I was on financial aid, insinuating that I couldn't countenance my receipt of private money from Claremont McKenna with my idea that one doesn't "owe" a geographic entity anything.

It would be lamentable indeed if we got a similar message from Ms. Whitman. Should she say something to that effect while she visited Claremont, I must refuse to vote for her in the primaries.

While we're on the topic, though, I thought I might direct you to an open letter one of my co-workers at the Kauffman Foundation, Judith Cone, wrote to America's students about the importance of creating a new company and how no sector has a monopoly on goodness. Here are some of my favorite paragraphs. Especially relevant sections, as always, are bolded by me.

Some professors attempt to influence you toward those biases. Some think dismissively of business, for instance, as if society would be better off
without it, or they assign pernicious motivations to those who lead businesses. Throughout history, social experiments to this end have failed. Every day, these professors use and benefit from the products and services of business: Google, bookstores, clothing, transportation, and the local coffee shop. They fail to differentiate between business leaders and dismiss the whole sector as greedy, uncaring, and destructive. Yet, even with much evidence of greed and wrongdoing in the public and social sectors, that same categorical condemnation is not present. In fact, you can make a vital contribution in any of the three sectors, because all three are needed for a society to function well. (If just one sector is weak or absent, the result is usually a failed state. Think of the former communist states that tried doing away with private business, or the chaotic warlord states without effective government.)

More to the point, in each sector there are models of virtue and there are scoundrels. Goodness has nothing to do with the sector. Where goodness lies is in the heart of the individual, and the choices that matter are the moral choices made in conducting the work.