Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Meanwhile, Time and Newsweek also managed to run—sandwiched in between the half-dozen negative articles about Iraq, the two articles about the nonexistent “Haditha Massacre,” and a bevy of articles on Republican (but only Republican) scandals—at least four covers heralding a “new recession” when unemployment was a stunning 4.5 percent! Yet when Obama dramatically deepened the depression in 2009, the major magazine covers couldn’t find space for a single message critical of the president’s economic policies. Quite the contrary, Newsweek, showing a blue and red handshake, ran the headline “We Are All Socialists Now.” Suddenly, it was not the president who was responsible for the downturn, but the “rich.” Time (right under a small box called “Anger Management: Why Obama Is Keeping Cool”) explained “How Wall Street Sold Out America.”

  John McCain, a media favorite so long as he criticized Republicans, found the adulatory press retreating from his side as soon as he decided to run against a Democrat, much less Barack Obama. Newsweek juxtaposed the blue Obama as “Mr. Cool” versus the red-faced McCain as “Mr. Hot,” playing on rumors that McCain could easily lose his temper. In a clever positioning on a cover called, “Does Temperament Matter?” (to which the answer was “yes” only if it was positive for Obama), Time placed Obama next to Lincoln, with McCain in the lower left, looking up at the two of them (for guidance, one supposes).

  During the campaign of 2008, the media had a “slobbering love affair,” as Bernard Goldberg called it, with Obama. In his book of the same title, Goldberg asserted that it was not the “same old liberal bias we have witnessed for years. In 2008, the mainstream media crossed the line.”99 MSNBC, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, came close to nearly totally lopsided coverage, with 73 percent of its stories about John McCain assessed as negative, as opposed to only 14 percent of its stories about Obama being labeled negative.100 In a single ten-day period, The New York Times ran a stunning eleven news stories and three op-eds about Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s wardrobe, yet in the two months prior, the Times had only managed to run two stories examining Obama’s close relationship with former and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg said it all when he said journalists “preferred Obama. They liked Obama. They’re Democrats.”101

  Not only was coverage biased when it came out of the media machine, but reporters dutifully and obediently refrained from asking Obama potentially embarrassing questions during the campaign. In May 2008, during an interview with Obama, CNN’s John Roberts referred to the brewing firestorm over Obama’s radical preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had, among other comments, stated that the United States had deserved to be struck on 9/11 and called America the “U.S. of KKK A.” Yet Roberts astoundingly declared a “Reverend Wright free zone today. So, no questions about Reverend Wright. . . . Is that okay with you?”102 Can anyone imagine George W. Bush being told by an interviewer during Operation Iraqi Freedom that he had entered a “WMD free zone today, so, no questions about WMDs”?

  Obama made the cover of the national newspaper insert magazine Parade twice in five months. The second time, Father’s Day, 2009, the White House contacted the magazine and asked for space so that Obama could write an essay on fatherhood. When told it would have to be ready in two days, Obama agreed and it was. This occurred when events in Iran were exploding, and the president had yet to find time to make a statement supporting the protesters trying to overthrow the radical Islamic government there. It led liberal Fox News analyst Juan Williams to explode, “We are going towards a weekend of high tide for kowtowing to the Obama administration,” and Howard Kurtz referred to a “giddy sense of boosterism” among the reporters.103 A few voices on the Left began to question the media’s obsession with Obama. Phil Bronstein, writing on sfgate.com, lectured: “Love or lust, Obama and the fawning press need to get a room.” Powerful people like Obama always tried to “play” the press, he argued, but “you can blame the press, already suffocating under a massive pile of blame, guilt, heavy debt and sinking fortunes, for being played.”104 Radical feminist Camille Paglia, often a maverick on the Left, derided Obama’s frequent avoidance of tough questions, and limits on press-conference topics.

  It was inevitable that the research organizations would study the election, and their conclusions were predictable. According to a Pew Research Center Poll, Obama enjoyed almost twice as much favorable press as George W. Bush over the first hundred days, and about 30 percent more than Bill Clinton.105 Pew described the coverage as “favorable,” but that failed to do justice to the utter homage reporters paid to the new president. During the entire campaign, the only challenging questions Obama got were from Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. Even foreign press were awed by Obama.

  In Germany, when the press attempted to ask about tensions with German chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama cut them off, saying, “So, stop it all of you!”—and they did. Robert Samuelson (no Leftie) in The Washington Post likewise warned of the “Obama infatuation,” calling it the “great unreported story of our time.”106 Obama, Samuelson noted, “has inspired a collective fawning.” Unfortunately, he pointed out, the system only works when the press acts as a brake, or a check, on presidential power. A study by the Center for the Media and Public Affairs, with the highly misleading headline, “Media Boost Obama, Bash His Policies,” confirmed Pew’s research: the media gave Obama more coverage (and far more favorable coverage) than Bush and Clinton combined. Evening news shows devoted 1021 stories lasting 27 hours 44 minutes to Barack Obama’s presidency, with 58 percent of all evaluations of the president and his policies favorable, contrasted with coverage of George W. Bush, who received only 33 percent positive evaluations. Clinton was favorably covered 44 percent of the time. Among the “big three” broadcast news networks, Obama earned 57 percent positive comments on ABC, 58 percent positive on CBS, and 61 percent positive on NBC. But he fared far better in The New York Times, where 73 percent of the references were favorable. In contrast, once again Bush had only about one-third favorable comments from those same outlets.107

  As Bernard Goldberg noted, the press’s coverage amounted to the admission that “we need the black guy to win because he’s black.” Why? Because “helping elect our first African-American president would make liberal journalists feel better about the most important people in their lives—themselves.”108 With such gushing, uncritical coverage, journalists “squandered what little credibility they had left.”109 Credibility? The New York Times Magazine blatantly cheered a “new generation,” “Generation O,” and New York magazine celebrated “OBAMAISM . . . a new kind of religion.”110 Perhaps the most amazing journalistic story of the presidential campaign was that the first major penetrating story to delve into Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racially charged hate did not come from any one of the major news outlets, but from rock and roll magazine Rolling Stone.111

  Increasingly, all “news” credibility disappeared. Major newspapers and especially television “news” programs had become entirely propagandistic—reverting very closely to the situation in the 1830s, without the direct connections to, and funding from, the political parties. Nor did the news organizations seem concerned about losing their audience and readers, because, as Rush Limbaugh told Bernard Goldberg, “the mainstream media’s audience is the mainstream media.”112 Reporters wrote for each other, to impress each other, to generate prestige points at cocktail parties and social affairs, and, of course, for access to the levers of government when that government was in Democratic hands.

  The Founders were adamant that, to paraphrase Jefferson, it was better to have a press without a government than a government without a press. But the press Jefferson and the other Founders championed was meant to act as a healthy, robust, and fair Fourth Estate that countered the government, investigated its abuses, and challenged its claims. Neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson enjoyed complete support from the newspapers of the day, some of which were murderously vindictive (one
flatly called for Washington’s death). For all their vision, they never foresaw a time when the overwhelming number of free journalists would willingly abandon all criticism of the government. While outlets such as Fox News, the Drudge Report, The Washington Times, and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show provide some measure of balance, the trend is depressingly negative.

  In the short term, we are much more likely to come full circle back to the Jacksonian era of competing partisan presses, where there is virtually no “news,” but all politics—funded, supported, and editorially controlled by the major parties. Yet while those papers originally collapsed under the weight of their own unprofitability, combined with the Civil War’s demand for “hard news,” the Brave New World might not offer such hope of righting the ship. The protections the Founders put in the Constitution for freedom of speech were meant to specifically ensure freedom of political dissent by the press—but what happens if the press, for its own purposes, refuses to serve as a check on government? In their well-deserved focus on protecting political speech, the Founders never addressed the possibility that the Fourth Estate would find itself in bed with government itself.

  The free market has provided a solution in the form of the Internet, talk radio, and even a few “old-fashioned” media sources in television and newspapers, such as Fox News and The Washington Times. New media’s power was first demonstrated when Matt Drudge nearly single-handedly forced an investigation into Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern, arguably playing a key role in Clinton’s impeachment. More recently—while the battle has yet to be decided—it is clear that talk radio, the Internet, and “alternative” sources have at the very least badly stalled, and potentially killed, the Obama administration’s health care bill, possibly with a serious impact on Democrats in the 2010 elections. That is the value of a free press. But there already were forces working inside the Obama administration to destroy alternative sources of information: there were plans to impose new regulations on radio stations cloaked under “diversity” requirements that would force owners to abandon all political talk formats under threat of federal lawsuits; and under the guise of “Internet security,” the administration announced plans to enact an “emergency shutdown” of Internet servers and Web sites. One does not need to read Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, or any of the Founders to know what their reaction to such measures would be. One just needs to read the First Amendment to the Constitution.

  CONCLUSION

  We often forget that the Founders were living, breathing people—that they listened to music, ate and drank, suffered from physical pain and sickness, and paid bills. The genius of the Constitution they wrote, based and grounded on the Declaration of Independence, is in the framework of general order and broad principles it provides. The Founders did not want to dictate every move of the American people, and they trusted that later generations would interpret it based on common sense and, above all, religious direction guiding human virtue. Political scientists have long explained to students that the specifics within the Constitution are limited by intent, with the assumption that people did not need to be told how to conduct every aspect of their daily lives.

  Yet running a government, no less than running a country, demands flexibility. Too often, mischief has arisen based on outlandish interpretations of the Founders’ desire to protect the federal government so that it could provide for the common defense or address the failings of the Articles of Confederation. There have been three chief sources of the pernicious expansion of government, all of which are loosely defined and open to future interpretation. First, the preamble itself includes the phrase “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” What did the Founders mean by promoting the general welfare? Did they mean the government should regulate what people could wear? What they could eat? What kinds of interior illumination they had in their homes? How they traveled? Certainly not. It is absurd to assert that the Founders in any way, shape, or form ever intended government to become involved in the personal affairs of individuals. They had plenty of examples from which to choose if they wanted to include such nonsense: some of the colonies had sumptuary laws that restricted what clothing people could wear (for example, rich people could not wear anything that flaunted their wealth). These, however, were mostly the dying (and pernicious) elements of Puritanism, and none of the Founders sought to incorporate such classism into the Constitution.

  Many of the Founders, based as they were in the traditions of the English government, thought it proper to establish a national university or to allow the government to build and maintain roads. Although I would disagree, there is a case to be made for either or both as an element of national security, which is certainly the approach the Founders took. If building freeways and establishing a government-run university were all we had to fear from the government in Washington, D.C., most people would gladly accept these and move on. But if the government had ever tried to meddle in the private affairs of individuals, the Founders would have fought against it. At any rate, as some constitutional historians have observed, the preamble to anything does not constitute a binding law—it is merely a statement of goals and objectives, and therefore for anyone to cite the “general welfare” as a proper function of government, then manipulate that into a defense of Social Security or food stamps or housing subsidies, would demand that we establish the intentions of the Founders beyond a reasonable doubt. In such a case, the Founders would clearly have rejected federal “disaster aid,” a National Endowment for the Arts, and federal dietary guidelines.

  A second way in which the Constitution opened the door for government growth came through the “necessary and proper” clause (Article I, Section 8):The Congress shall have Power—To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

  This, also, has been abused beyond imagination. Note that the clause refers to the “foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution.” Therefore, the so-called elastic clause cannot apply to any powers exercised outside the narrow definitions of the Constitution. It was never meant as carte blanche for government to do what it wished. Unless the actions themselves are delineated in the Constitution, they are illegal. Chief Justice John Marshall and his Court, in the famous McCulloch v. Maryland case in 1819, validated the Bank of the United States (BUS) under this broad interpretation, and a reasonable argument can be made that while the BUS was neither necessary nor prudent, it was completely constitutional and, as an arm of the U.S. Treasury, helped execute the nation’s financial business. Subsequently, however, the “elastic clause” has been stretched further than the truth in Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky defense.

  It is not “necessary and proper” for the United States government to involve itself in local schools; or to dictate a national energy policy in times of peace; or to mount a space program for any purpose other than national security (where, in fact, a good case can be made for one). There is no “necessary and proper” intrusion of Uncle Sam into developing property in your own backyard, (even if rare birds do land there once in a while), and there is certainly nothing that can be construed as “necessary and proper” that would allow the federal government to dictate what cars we drive or how they are made. Only a serious judicial reevaluation of the constitutional meaning of this phrase will redress the imbalance.

  But that leads to the last area in which the looseness of the United States Constitution has allowed liberals to expand federal power beyond anything the Founders could have conceived: the federal judiciary. As Mark Levin, Andrew Napolitano, and Stephen Powers and Stanley Rothman have explained in detail, the majority of unconstitutional programs and policies have come into existence not through power-hungry presidents or runaway legislatures, but through activist judges employing judicial positivism (i.e., the view that whatever you w
ant to use the law for should be permitted—that the law is an instrument of present morality, not permanent principles).1 The purpose of this book is not to restate these authors’ excellent works, but to note that the ambivalence of the Founders toward a federal court system proved a titanic weakness in the Constitution, one created by the experience of the Founders themselves who, throughout their lives, had only dealt with tyrannical parliaments and kings, but never courts. Indeed, to them the courts provided safe havens from the oppression of elected and unelected bodies. Thus we have, over two hundred years later, arrived at the point where in the name of the preamble (when liberals choose to quote the Constitution at all!), by employing the rationale of the “elastic clause” and utilizing judicial activism to circumvent elections, modern liberals have empowered the United States government with the ability not only to open the bedroom door, but literally to peek inside one’s stomach or dictate what music one listens to by forcing a contribution to “approved” arts.

  When writing this book, all too often I searched for specific comments by the Founders on funding of the arts, or the government’s role in advising citizens about diet, or responding to natural disasters, yet I found very few such comments. The obvious conclusion is that such interventions into the private affairs of individuals—even if for “their own good”—were considered so foreign and antithetical to their principles as to scream out by their silence. Many of the events in our history that have led to the expansion of government power have indeed been threats to our survival, including secession by half the nation in 1860-61 and direct attacks on our population in 1941 and 2001. The Founders expected such difficulties to arise and provided remarkable emergency powers within the Constitution, but always trusted that when the threat had subsided, not only would virtuous leaders give power back, but a populace jealous of its own rights would demand it.