The President of No!

WASHINGTON -- In the gloom of the day after last week's election I think even his allies in the media expected something more from the Prophet Barack Obama. After all, he had just suffered through a wave election and he was left soaking wet. He did not merely lose this wave election. He was swamped.

Republicans were victorious practically everywhere. At times they won by double digits: Senator Mitch McConnell won by 15 points, Arkansas' Senator-elect Tom Cotton by 17 points. And forget not the governorships: Ohio's John Kasich by 31 points, South Carolina's Nikki Haley by 15 points. The sorely pressed governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, won his third race for governorship in four years by five points against unions, big money Democrats nationwide, and Hollywood! As I said last week, it was the second wave in the last three elections and an election more epochal than the president's in 2008 and his rerun of 2008 in 2012.

Yet on Wednesday, President Obama did not present a chastened image to the nation. Stepping before the cameras in the East Room of the White House he looked like he had been sucking on a lemon. He made a few graceless remarks and then he assumed his usual demeanor, moral superiority. Remember when President George W. Bush was taken to task by the White House press corps for not being able to enunciate what might have been his "biggest mistake" since 9/11? How would President Obama have fared, if that question had been put to him last week?

Instead, he threatened to achieve immigration reform by executive order if Congress does not send him a bill crafted to his liking. He said this despite Mitch McConnell saying that to do so would "poison the well" with McConnell's Congressional colleagues. Well, the well is already poisoned. Barack Obama is utterly unable to accommodate disagreement. Early in the Prophet Obama's brief career from the Illinois senate to the White House, I read a poetic piece in The New Republic about young Barack Obama's amazing ability as president of the Harvard Law Review to shape a sweet consensus from conflicting views expressed by his antagonistic colleagues on the left and the right. It sounded magical, and it was. It was in fact an exercise in the occult.

If we have learned nothing else about President Obama through these dreary six years, it is that he is a stubborn left-wing ideologue. That piece in the Harvard Law Review was just the opposite of the truth. Yet it established a myth: Obama the conciliator.

He has never negotiated a compromise on anything and he will not turn over a new leaf now. He has never been a compromiser because he has never recognized the validity of his opponents' point of view. At Columbia University, Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School (where he was adjunct professor) he resided in the most rarefied environment imaginable, an environment that prides itself on disagreement while not allowing any disagreement whatsoever. Another word for this peculiar condition is hypocrisy, stupendous hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, according to La Rochefoucauld. It is also the tribute academic conformity pays to virtue.

So do not expect any accommodation from the Prophet Obama toward the Republican majorities in Congress. The best thing that House Speaker John Boehner and presumptive Senate Majority Leader McConnell could do is to flood the White House with utterly reasonable bills on every available issue. Then display enormous dismay when the president vetoes them. Let Obama spend the next two years playing the role of "The President of No!"

Here are the words of an early President who was, himself, the son of a President, and one who well understood what the Declaration of Independence and "the People's" Constitution meant:

In 1839, John Quincy Adams was invited by the New York Historical Society to deliver the "Jubilee" Address honoring the 50th Anniversary of the Inauguration of George Washington. He traced the history of the development of the ideas underlying and the actions leading to the establishment of the Constitution which structured the United States government. His 50th-year summation seems to be a great source for examining what is happening today.
He addresses the ideas of "democracy" and "republic" throughout, but here are some of his concluding remarks, including his comments on the President and his role:
"Every change of a President of the United States, has exhibited some variety of policy from that of his predecessor. In more than one case, the change has extended to political and even to moral principle; but the policy of the country has been fashioned far more by the influences of public opinion, and the prevailing humors in the two Houses of Congress, than by the judgment, the will, or the principles of the President of the United States. The President himself is no more than a representative of public opinion at the time of his election; and as public opinion is subject to great and frequent fluctuations, he must accommodate his policy to them; or the people will speedily give him a successor; or either House of Congress will effectually control his power. It is thus, and in no other sense that the Constitution of the United States is democratic - for the government of our country, instead of a Democracy the most simple, is the most complicated government on the face of the globe. From the immense extent of our territory, the difference of manners, habits, opinions, and above all, the clashing interests of the North, South, East, and West, public opinion formed by the combination of numerous aggregates, becomes itself a problem of compound arithmetic, which nothing but the result of the popular elections can solve.
From the immense extent of our territory, the difference of manners, habits, opinions, and above all, the clashing interests of the North, South, East, and West, public opinion formed by the combination of numerous aggregates, becomes itself a problem of compound arithmetic, which nothing but the result of the popular elections can solve.
"It has been my purpose, Fellow-Citizens, in this discourse to show:-
"1. That this Union was formed by a spontaneous movement of the people of thirteen English Colonies; all subjects of the King of Great Britain - bound to him in allegiance, and to the British empire as their country. That the first object of this Union,was united resistance against oppression, and to obtain from the government of their country redress of their wrongs.
"2. That failing in this object, their petitions having been spurned, and the oppressions of which they complained, aggravated beyond endurance, their Delegates in Congress, in their name and by their authority, issued the Declaration of Independence - proclaiming them to the world as one people, absolving them from their ties and oaths of allegiance to their king and country - renouncing that country; declared the UNITED Colonies, Independent States, and announcing that this ONE PEOPLE of thirteen united independent states, by that act, assumed among the powers of the earth, that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them.
"3. That in justification of themselves for this act of transcendent power, they proclaimed the principles upon which they held all lawful government upon earth to be founded - which principles were, the natural, unalienable, imprescriptible rights of man, specifying among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - that the institution of government is to secure to men in society the possession of those rights: that the institution, dissolution, and reinstitution of government, belong exclusively to THE PEOPLE under a moral responsibility to the Supreme Ruler of the universe; and that all the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed.
"4. That under this proclamation of principles, the dissolution of allegiance to the British king, and the compatriot connection with the people of the British empire, were accomplished; and the one people of the United States of America, became one separate sovereign independent power, assuming an equal station among the nations of the earth.
"5. That this one people did not immediately institute a government for themselves. But instead of it, their delegates in Congress, by authority from their separate state legislatures, without voice or consultation of the people, instituted a mere confederacy.
"6. That this confederacy totally departed from the principles of the Declaration of independence, and substituted instead of the constituent power of the people, an assumed sovereignty of each separate state, as the source of all its authority.
"7. That as a primitive source of power, this separate state sovereignty,was not only a departure from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but directly contrary to, and utterly incompatible with them.
"8. That the tree was made known by its fruits. That after five years wasted in its preparation, the confederation dragged out a miserable existence of eight years more, and expired like a candle in the socket, having brought the union itself to the verge of dissolution.
"9. That the Constitution of the United States was a return to the principles of the Declaration of independence, and the exclusive constituent power of the people. That it was the work of the ONE PEOPLE of the United States; and that those United States, though doubled in numbers, still constitute as a nation, but ONE PEOPLE.
"10. That this Constitution, making due allowance for the imperfections and errors incident to all human affairs, has under all the vicissitudes and changes of war and peace, been administered upon those same principles, during a career of fifty years.
"11. That its fruits have been, still making allowance for human imperfection, a more perfect union, established justice, domestic tranquility, provision for the common defence, promotion of the general welfare, and the enjoyment of the blessings of liberty by the constituent people, and their posterity to the present day.
"And now the future is all before us, and Providence our guide."
In an earlier paragraph, he had stated:
"But this institution was republican, and even democratic. And here not to be misunderstood, I mean by democratic, a government, the administration of which must always be rendered comfortable to that predominating public opinion . . . and by republican I mean a government reposing, not upon the virtues or the powers of any one man - not upon that honor, which Montesquieu lays down as the fundamental principle of monarchy - far less upon that fear which he pronounces the basis of despotism; but upon that virtue which he, a noble of aristocratic peerage, and the subject of an absolute monarch, boldly proclaims as a fundamental principle of republican government. The Constitution of the United States was republican and democratic - but the experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived; and it was obvious that if virtue - the virtue of the people, was the foundation of republican government, the stability and duration of the government must depend upon the stability and duration of the virtue by which it is sustained."

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