Obama Is Neither The Democrats Reagan Or Lincoln Reincarnated

Obama’s second inauguration went about as expected. His speech started out with the sort of rhetoric one might expect to hear at your local Tea Party rally. Obama then rejected all of that in a sea of collective action that we can do “together.” Obama is a socialist, did you expect something else from him? Surely you weren’t surprised by his “climate change” paragraph or his reference to homosexuals. No one should have been surprised by his calls for more government, Obama is exactly what we know him to be. What he is not is the Democrats Reagan and his speech was not the reincarnation of the Gettysburg Address.

The liberal media is making Obama’s speech out to be one of the greatest in history while the conservative media is taking it as a declaration of war. It wasn’t a great speech and war was declared by this President four years ago, so both sides are wrong. We haven’t had a meaningful inauguration speech since Kennedy’s in 1961. Generally speaking these addresses are forgettable. They don’t set the tone for the administration to come. Does anyone remember what Obama said in 2009? Could anyone quote off the top of their head a single line from any of the Bush or Clinton inaugural addresses? Like those speeches, Obama’s will be forgotten by the end of the week.

The liberal media is setting up two narratives about Obama, that he’s the Democrat’s Reagan and he’s Lincoln reincarnated. It is true that Obama is largely the opposite of Reagan. Reagan spoke of individual freedom. Obama clearly rejects this in favor of collectivism. But that’s about where it ends. Obama isn’t a great public speaker, he’s largely monotone. Reagan was detested by the far left but a majority of Democrats liked him. He won 49 states and nearly 60% of the vote in his re-election campaign. Obama is detested by the entire Republican Party and lost votes last year. Reagan got a lot of things passed through a Democrat Congress. Obama has been able to pass little the last two years. He won’t be transformative because he won’t be able to transform anything at this point. He isn’t the Democrat’s Reagan.

The second narrative is that Obama is somehow tied to Lincoln. It was curious that the media fell to pieces over that Lincoln movie that came out of Hollywood a month or so ago. It’s now clear why they picked that film to fall apart over, they’re trying to link Obama with Lincoln. Chris Matthews bellowed that Obama’s speech yesterday was the Gettysburg Address. Absurd as that is, the media has been tossing Obama’s name around with Lincoln’s for the past few weeks. It’s absurd unless of course the left is calling for civil war against the Republican Party. Interestingly the CBS political director called for Obama to declare war on the GOP and he must “destroy” the party. Perhaps the left really is itching for a civil war to link Obama and Lincoln. Hopefully 600,000 Americans don’t have to die for it.

The GOP needs to keep moving forward with it’s plans for the year. We cannot get caught up in inauguration hysteria. We need Boehner to obstruct at all costs and we need to start vetting 2016 Presidential candidates. We need to see Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio and perhaps Ted Cruz become the faces of the GOP opposition. The GOP needs to start the 2016 campaign today and it needs to be focused on the opposite of what Obama called for yesterday. Let the media fall to pieces over an irrelevant speech, our party needs to be focused on having our guy give the next irrelevant inaugural address.