I thought that the left's mantra was a "living and breathing" constitution. :)
One President--who understood the advantages of liberty for a nation--saw limits on power as a good thing.
Over 200 hundred years later, a President who just told college students that big government is a good thing, must not understand the difference between liberty and tyranny. In fact, to the same students, he derided those who use such terms and warned the students against paying attention to them.
Yes, you are right on target about the diametrically opposite views of the two. But when you say that Obama "must not understand the difference between liberty and tyranny," I would disagree. He does understand it, having been exposed heavily to the far left scene since childhood. From then on, he has been pretty much consistent in his dreams to transform a society which at least placed some value on liberty of the individual into one based on subjugation of the citizenry to an all-powerful government. But, as a student of Alinsky, he realizes that he has to be clever and disguise his perverse dream while trying to sell it to a prospective group of new comrades, as he attempted to do at Ohio State Sunday.
There is little evidence of any significant study of the history of nations, of the ideas which lead to freedom and opportunity, although there is evidence of study of Marx, Lenin and Alinsky.
The ongoing campaign rhetoric focusing on "fair share" was just a misleading call for "slavery" by another name. Government "masters" buy votes in exchange for retaining their "master redistributionist" status, while their "voters" yield up freedom for themselves and future generations.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
All who doubt the wisdom of Lewis might watch the video of the President's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. There, Obama arrogantly misappropriated Jesus's spiritual challenge to individuals, claiming those words as validating and authorizing abusive use of coercive power by himself and his cronies to "take" from some in order to buy votes and accumulate more power to themselves--all in the name of "helping" the beneficiaries of such unconstitutional "takings."
Hear Samuel Adams:
"Is it now high time for the people of this country to explicitly declare whether they will be free men or slaves. It is an important question which ought to be decided. It concerns more than anything in this life. The salvation of our souls is interested in this event. For wherever tyranny is established, immorality of every kind comes in like a torrent, it is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.” - Samuel Adams
And:
“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.” - Samuel Adams