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'Pragmatist' or Not, Obama Is Trying to Remake America

As a veteran of hard-core street organizing with a fair amount of experience at bare-knuckled, backroom political brawling, there's not a whole lot than can surprise a guy like me.

But when I watched Barack Obama's interview with Fox News' Bret Baier, I saw something that made me sit up and take notice. During the interview, President Obama stated:


What I can tell you is that the vote that's taken in the House will be a vote for health care reform. And if the people vote yes, whatever form that takes, that is going to be a vote for health care reform.  And I don't think we should pretend otherwise.

Let me get this straight. Obama is a Harvard-trained constitutional lawyer who once taught con law at the University of Chicago. Yet, here's this man, the president, saying: "I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or the Senate."

Wait a minute -- didn't this president have any constitutional concerns about the "procedure" involved in the strong-arm tactics that were employed to pass a government-run health care plan that amounts to a takeover of one-sixth of the nation's economy?

Even Democrats had grave concerns about the process to jam through a health care plan few Americans wanted. Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen noted before the House vote that "four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it ... while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly."

Nonetheless, Obama has tried to present himself as a deep thinker, a cautious, intellectual president who moves carefully -- in other words, a political pragmatist. However, his ruthless rush to pass a health care bill -- damn the consequences or the methods used -- exposed him as an opportunist who will trash the Constitution if necessary to gain a legacy for himself and remake America as we've known it. If we let him, Obama -- rooted as he is in the beliefs of the old radical Saul Alinsky -- would have America resemble a European-style social democracy, not the nation that rose to greatness based on individual liberty and free market capitalism.