Obama-ism "New"? Not Hardly!

Trying to discuss the specifics of The Obamessiah's proposals can be difficult, because they keep zigging and zagging according to his handlers' perception of what his audience of the moment wants to hear. Last week, in frustration at yet another sudden policy shift during a debate, exasperated McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin exploded, "I think they just made it up. They will say anything in the moment. This is like trying to pin Jello to the wall."

Nevertheless, there are a few constants in the fog. One is the Obamabots' firm belief that Their Hero's policies are new and different. In his latest column, Obama's Not ‘New’, Jonah Goldberg proves that they are anything but. In fact, Obama is proposing that we adopt century-old ideas which have failed every time they have been tried.

There’s an old saying: The oldest word in American politics is “new.” Only in that sense is there anything new to Barack Obama.

Obama prefers the word “progressive” to “liberal” because it makes it sound like he’s shedding old liberal ideas. But if he is, it’s only to embrace older ones.

America first encountered the vision Obama espouses under Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president and the first to openly disparage the U.S. Constitution as a hindrance to enlightened government. His new idea was to replace it with a “living constitution” that empowered government to evolve beyond that document’s constraints. The Bill of Rights, lamented the progressives, inhibited what the government can do to people, but it failed to delineate what it must do for people.

The old conception of individualism needed to be replaced by a new system in which the citizen would “marry his interests to the state,” in Wilson’s words. This would allow the state to fulfill the progressive pledge to “spread the prosperity around.” Obama shares Wilson’s faith in a living constitution and has argued that Supreme Court judges should be confirmed based on their empathy for the downtrodden.

Read the rest of it, and learn how Obama is merely the latest in a long line of leftists attempting to implement the statist ideas of the saint of the "Progressive Education" crowd, John Dewey.