On Wednesday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) said that the focus of the Obama administration during President Obama’s second term will be the annihilation of the Republican Party.
That’s a pretty hefty claim, so I decided to look at what the President actually said and see how it measures up to Speaker Boehner’s claim.
Here’s the quote from Speaker Boehner, from TheHill.com:
Given what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans[,] so we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.
And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal — to just shove us into the dustbin of history.
Okay, fair enough. Courtesy of the New York Times, let’s read some of what the President actually said.
Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.
Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.
Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.
Investment in infrastructure and education, government regulation, and an endorsement of the social safety net. Getting warm…
For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class. We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work; when the wages of honest labor liberate families from the brink of hardship.
The belief that the fundamental strength of the American economy rests on the backs of the middle class, and not the uber-wealthy 1%. Getting warmer…
We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.
Okay, now I’m starting to see Boehner’s point. This is as eloquent a defense of the social safety net, and as damning an attack on fifty years of conservative orthodoxy, as I’ve heard in a very long time.
We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.
So, climate change is real, it’s man-made, and it’s up to us to stop it, because if we don’t invent and manufacture the technology to do so the Chinese sure as hell will.
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
The equation of gay rights to civil rights.
For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.
Equality regardless of gender or sexuality, a reaffirmation of the right of all citizens to vote without undue process, and the welcoming of immigrants to American shores.
For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.
Okay, now he’s just showing off.
Alright, alright, fine. So John Boehner may have a point; President Obama’s second inaugural address is as forceful a defense of liberalism as I’ve seen in my relatively short life, and stabs at the black heart of modern conservatism.
Throughout the whole of mankind’s evolutionary history, at no point could it be argued that Homo Sapiens or any of our ancestors were the “strongest” members of the animal kingdom; we have always been the most adaptable, which is why we have prospered. This is the fundamental crux of evolutionary biology. It is not the strongest that survive; if that were true, we’d all be descended from dinosaurs. It is the most adaptable that survive. Politics is not immune to this fact; political parties have come and gone, and those that have ended up in the “dustbin of history”, as Speaker Boehner put it, have been the ones that failed to adapt.
The Republican party finds itself at an existential crossroads as old as time itself; adapt or die. The principles the President laid out in his second inaugural address are not liberal extremism run amok; rather, they are beliefs widely held not only by the population as it exists today, but also and in greater numbers by the generations to come. Poll after poll has shown the changing nature of the American electorate, and yet the GOP has staunchly refused to change or moderate, shortsightedly backing policy and dogma today that will doom them to electoral irrelevance in the very near future. To that there can only be one response.
I believe Captain James T. Kirk, during a conversation with Captain Spock regarding a treaty with the Klingons in the beginning of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, captures my feelings on Speaker Boehner’s party rather nicely:
Kirk: Don’t believe them. Don’t trust them.
Spock: They are dying.
Kirk: Let them die.
Well said, captains.
Image via Wikipedia.
