According to New Hampshire Democrats, since Mitt Romney this year criticized a $150,000 federal “stimulus” grant to protect an old New Hampshire bridge that is not connected to any roads, he therefore cannot give his speech today at Bittersweet Farm in Stratham because years ago the town preserved some nearby land (bought from the farm where Romney gives his speech) with a separate, non-stimulus federal grant. The claim is so absurd, it mocks itself.

And still, it provides an easy opportunity for Team Romney to make an important point: It is nearly impossible to find a spot in America from which you can throw a stone without hitting something touched by the ever-expanding federal government — and that is exactly our problem.

President Obama’s case for reelection is that the government must enlarge to control, regulate or oversee every aspect of our lives. This is not new or bold or forward-looking. It is the same old statist impulse indulged at various times by both parties.

It has resulted in a United States of America that the Founders would not recognize, a United States in which we have come to depend on the federal government and its awesome taxing and regulating power to do for us things that we used to, and ought to, do for ourselves, like restore local bridges, fund local police and fire departments and preserve local farmland.

We have a choice: We can be independent, self-reliant Americans, or we can be vassals of Washington, safe, perhaps, but dependent and unfree. We know what our forefathers would have chosen. What will we choose?