Most people say that Barak Obama is a good campaigner. Many of his enemies decry the fact that he seems to use campaign-style tactics to accomplish his purposes. I am certainly no expert on such things, but I am seeing a trend that doesn't seem to be getting much attention and that may be a more accurate way to see the actions and motivations of our current president. I don't know how good a campaigner he is, but from what I have seen of the man, he seems a very effective community organizer. The larger problem may be that Barry is not organizing for your, or my, community and that he is not being what a President of the United States should be.
First, let me talk about what a President was meant to be. The President is the head of the Executive Branch of US government, as the Constitution says. The Executive Branch is charged to carry out the wishes of the Legislative Branch as an implementation and enforcement arm. Essentially, Congress (the legislature) writes the laws and the President (the executive) enforces those laws. On a more local scale, the President is like your local sheriff or police chief. He enforces the laws that your local council creates.
It is important to say some things about how we have strayed from the concepts written in the Constitution. President Obama is simply the latest in a very long line of men (sorry, no ladies yet) who acts as if he were the real leader of Congress and deserves to be treated as such. This has become a common role for all executives in the US, not to be just the enforcer of laws, but to be the proposer of laws as well, a chilling analogue to the "dictator" concept that led to the all-powerful Roman Emperors. What is most disturbing in this unconstitutionally dual role that Presidents now exercise is that a President has a very powerful way to influence how laws are written - he can threaten to use his veto power. A President can now kill potential legislation before it even gets drafted, just by threatening a future veto. He can also use that threat to coerce Congressmen to reconsider laws that a less-twisted process would have abandoned. At its root, the President has the singular ability to "chill" or "heat" any legislation at his whim, which I don't believe any of our founding fathers intended to give him.
So, instead of three branches of government that were meant to balance out power, we see an Emperor President who rules over an often-sycophantic Congress, triumphantly puts his legions of Executive "police" to work enforcing laws that he himself created, and ignores a babbling and increasingly irrelevant Judiciary that can't seem to move past the abortion issue or challenge the constitutionality of anything. This has all come about because we forgot what a President was meant to be and what he was charged to do in the Constitution.
In the attempt to force a new health care scheme on Americans, you need to look at Barak Obama as what he essentially is in his heart: a community organizer. Community organizers use whatever tactics that they can to stir up (or "radicalize") their chosen "community" toward accomplishing some goal with a zeal that smells quite religious, if not fundamentalist. Barry becomes a very frightening individual because he is in a position (President) that other men (most Presidents before him) have taken great pains to imperially empower, which means that a zealously fundamentalist community organizer is now presidentially empowered to do almost anything he chooses through a variety of manipulations. Perhaps our largest concern should be what sort of man has received Emperor powers and what such a man wants to accomplish with those powers.
Everyone decries the amount of access lobbyists have to our decision makers. Most mere citizens are safely ignored by their representatives in favor of powerful people who offer campaign contributions, luncheons, junkets, and other prizes to Congressmen in the hopes that legislation will be proposed and pass that favors their clients. Some speak and put forth token efforts to change such lobbying, but it has bred a sort of crony-ism upon which our modern government depends to feed modern corruption. It sounds very bad, but let me add one thought that is worse: the President, and especially the current one, is the most powerful and active lobbyist in Congress today. Let me illuminate this concept for you.
When a business flies Congressmen around in corporate jets with a wine bar, that is buying favors. When the President flies Congressmen around in Air Force One, that is normal governance. When a non-profit invites Congressmen to eat an expensive meal free of charge in a nice hotel and listen to their side of things, that could be influencing legislation. When the President invites Congressmen to eat an expensive meal free of charge in the White House and tells them how to vote, he is simply doing government business. When we see outside organizations getting tight with legislators, most see that as a corrupting thing. When we see our elected "sheriff" strong-arming legislators to get his agenda passed, we don't even flinch. This is the way government works. But it isn't supposed to be this way and we have to realize that Barak Obama (or any other recent President) is not behaving like an honest enforcer of laws, but rather like the arguably best and most zealous lobbyist and community organizer the office of President has ever seen.
Let me predict something. In the past, inventive Presidents have tried to push through legislative agendas that were not terribly popular and most of the time they failed. A typical person would try a few maneuvers, make some deals, and when it looked like it wasn't going to work out, they would find a graceful way to kill the effort and save face. That is how failing used to work in the "good ol' days" of corrupt governance. Today is a new day and Barry is not (he would likely be proud to say) a typical man.
Most people would have given up on reforming healthcare by now. Congress gave it a good effort, had one-party control of both houses, but still couldn't apply enough corruption grease to get the job done. It was time to throw in the towel and get to work on other initiatives whose success they could point to at election time. However, there is this atypical guy in the White House and that means things are not going to die in the usual fashion.
You have to understand that Barak Obama is a person that either is or wants to be like the great reformers of the past, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was prepared to do anything to provide equal rights to blacks in America. The cause used the courts, huge marches, sit-ins, and many rather innovative techniques to shame the country into accomplishing his goal. It was an uphill road because blacks were a minority and a white majority considered them incapable of handling such rights, but Dr. King and others were driven by conviction and religious zeal. Fortunately, Dr. King seemed to be a very good man and was working for a very noble cause that black people (in the main) have vindicated. Unfortunately, Barry is using these same concepts and tactics to accomplish his goal of more socialized healthcare.
I don't know if socialized healthcare is a good idea or not. It is not an idea supported by the Constitution and it reduces individual liberty, which concepts I refuse to support. I understand that many people don't have health insurance and pay-as-you-go costs are obscenely high (my "falling-through-the-cracks" daughter is suffering with such circumstances), but surely we can come up with other solutions rather than just handing things over to a corrupt and self-serving government that can't see beyond the next election. Many people blame existing government healthcare schemes (Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP) for worsening the problems and forcing up pay-as-you-go charges and "mandating" byzantine billing to make up for income lost to legislated pricing caps and entitlement cost controls. What Obama proposes (and uses his now almost infinite Presidential power to force through) is incrementally forcing everyone into some form of government healthcare scheme. It is an enticingly kind idea that we can give everyone good healthcare and supporters can point out other countries that arguably seem to be able to pull this off courtesy of heavy taxation. As I said before, I don't know if it is a good idea or not, but I do know that having government do such a thing is unconstitutional and therefore un-American.
Because Barak Obama is a zealously fundamental community organizer, he is going to use his special Presidential lobbying powers to force through Congress something that is simply against the founding principles of America. We need to understand that President Obama will not stop when it looks like he may lose the fight. He is prepared to martyr himself (and perhaps a lot of otherwise unwitting and unwilling people) to accomplish his goal. Unlike his predecessors, I don't think Barry is bothering to calculate the political costs at all and people are going to find that out after they have been crucified for his cause. He is on a mission to do government-controlled healthcare and damned be the cost.
After all of this has been said, I am left to consider a few final questions. If President Obama is the zealously fundamentalist community organizer that I suggest him to be, what community is he really serving? Just how far is he prepared to go to accomplish government-controlled healthcare? Finally, after he has accomplished this, what is the next cause that our President will ravage the Constitution and Americans to fight for?