By Mr. Curmudgeon
Robert Wright at the New York Times knows who’s to blame for ObamaCare’s political problems – bloggers like me. I’ve never been so proud. Of bloggers, Wright says, “The personal computer, the Internet and allied technologies have given a new fluidity to political opposition, spawning interest groups almost overnight in response to policy initiatives.” Wright, like all on the left, believes the purpose of government is to grow in power and to manage the messy requirement of personal responsibility of otherwise free individuals. Write laments how effective the internet is at informing the electorate, threatening the separation of our rulers from their subjects. “I don’t see a miracle cure here. It would be hard to restore much of the insulation without tampering with the First Amendment.” President Obama is less timid in supporting bipartisan attempts by Congress to curtail First Amendment protections. He took time during his recent State of the Union address to slam the Supreme Court for striking down the McCain-Feingold campaign law’s anti-free speech provisions.
The solution, according to Wright, is to increase the “insulation” of politicians by changing the Constitution’s mandate on terms served by the nation’s lawmakers. “If we lengthened legislative terms and then capped the number of terms, more people in Congress could spend more time worrying about something other than getting re-elected next year, and this could leave them productively indifferent to the most recently manufactured views of their constituents.” It would be hard to convince Martha Coakely that Scott Brown’s big win in Massachusetts’ special election was “manufactured.” It’s difficult to “fundamentally change America” when the victims of that change are anything but indifferent and organize in opposition to target the Democrat “agents of change” and their feeble Republican abettors in the upcoming midterm elections.
A profound good to come out of Obama and his party’s power-grabbing agenda is that the near-death experience of “hope and change” has focused the minds of easily distracted Americans. Tea Partiers are swaying independent swing voters, removing a politician’s best form of political insulation – voter indifference.
