President Obama's Incredible "Referent Power"

— from the State Department to the CIA, the military leadership, the IRS and Justice — filled with sycophants under the sway of Obama's referent power.

Since Obama was elected president, the political right has been ridiculed for questioning his choice of people to fill administrative posts, creation of a quasi-Cabinet of policy “czars” to skirt Senate confirmation, heavy-handed executive orders, bullying of Supreme Court justices during a State of the Union address, unconstitutional recess appointments and use of the presidency as a celebrity magnet to enhance his image.

The knee-jerk press reaction against the right was to blame any criticism of Obama on racial prejudice, thereby widening the country's racial divide and projecting an us-against-them narrative.

Thus, many journalists became negligent watchdogs while accepting abuse from an administration that scolded them if they came close to criticizing Obama.

When journalists fawn over presidents and don't question them, Washington's political minions, bureaucrats and presidential confidants begin to believe in a president's referent power, then become its guardians.

And all political power can eventually corrupt and destabilize, unless checked by the press, the public or other political forces.

The job of the press is to carefully put the pieces back together, without malice, and uncover what our government has done to its own people. It is not to take presidential spokespersons and surrogates at face value when they insist neither they nor Obama knew anything about a scandal.

Many of us in the press have dealt with this administration at every level possible. Trust me, we all know about its megalomaniacal need for control.

So, the question for today is simply this: Will Obama's fawning media admirers awaken to the degree to which they have been held under the sway of the president's referent power?

One must remember that the current crop of journalists studied in high schools, colleges and universities who never exposed them to the essential ideas of liberty. Neither were they schooled in how to perceive oncoming threats to liberty.

America's founding generations understood both, as was observed by Edmund Burke, who, in speaking of the Americans, asserted:

"Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our colonies, which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the plantations. The colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states, that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law; and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitutions. The smartness of debate will say, that this knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion. All this is mighty well. But my honourable and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground. He has heard, as well as I, that when great honours and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government. If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze."

Then, there was Thomas Jefferson:

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own. It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion . . . ." --Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1803.

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787.

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