“...I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such... and believe further, that this is likely to be well-administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other...”
Benjamin Franklin, 1787, urging the adoption of the US Constitution.
I was in a group once where the speaker asked people to name the person they thought may have been the most intelligent of all recorded in history. At the end he said Da Vinci was generally considered tops but I voted for Ben Franklin and I am still not sure I was wrong. Certainly when it comes to the understanding of human nature he must be very near the top.
Here is another excerpt from the same volume as the ". . . Living Constitution" essay cited above:
"It was John Adams who said: "The foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people." Clearly, the Founders' passion was liberty, and in order to secure that liberty, they sought out and incorporated into the United States Constitution those ideas and principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
"The French historian, Guizot, once asked James Russell Lowell, "How long will the American republic endure?" Lowell replied: "As long as the IDEAS of the men who founded it continue dominant."
"Herein lies the answer to the question, "Will the Experiment Succeed?"
"It can and will succeed IF the motivating "principle or passion in the minds of the people" is LIBERTY, and if that passion causes them to exert the determination and will to complete the needed restoration of the IDEAS upon which the great American experiment was based."
Romney and the Republican had better get on board quickly with providing voters a sharp and distinct set of IDEAS of LIBERTY, and how those ideas contrast with Obama and the Dem's COUNTERFEIT ideas of SLAVERY TO GOVERNMENT AND LOSS OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM.
The "jobs" argument is the one the Dems want, because it keeps attention off the underlying cause of job loss, which is loss of individual freedom under a cadre of power-hungry political hacks.