First Lady Michelle Obama came to New Hampshire on Thursday to convince voters here that her husband should be elected to a second term because he shares New Hampshire’s values.
That was an easy sell in 2008, when Sen. Obama was a blank slate onto which we all could project images of ourselves.
Four years later, we see that he is not the man New Hampshire took him to be.
“We’re not doing this just because we want to win an election, which we do and we will,” Michelle Obama said of the President’s reelection campaign.
“We’re here and we’re doing this because of the values we believe in.
We’re doing this because of the vision for this country that we all share.”
Whose values and vision?
Surely not New Hampshire’s.
In New Hampshire, we believe in individual liberty.
We do not believe that Washington has the authority or the right to compel us to behave as the politicians think we should, any more than we believe that Concord has.
In New Hampshire, we believe that the size of government should be limited by what the people can afford to pay, not that the people — or their grandchildren — should be milked dry to pay for the grandiose schemes of elected officials.
In New Hampshire, we believe that frugality is a virtue, and permanent deficit spending a vice.
In New Hampshire, we believe that citizens created the government to provide them with essential services, not that government services created the people’s wealth.
In New Hampshire, we believe that individuals and their property should be left alone except when government intervention is essential to the preservation of the rights of others or the provision of necessary services.
We do not believe that the people and their property are tools to be directed at will by the state for the purpose of ordering a new and better society. All of these offenses against New Hampshire values the Obama administration has committed.
The President will do more, and worse, if he gets a second term — a full four years in which he is unaccountable to the voters, unbound by any concern for the people’s response to his actions.
Give him that “flexibility,” as he called it when speaking frankly to Russia’s puppet president, and we will see the depth of his disdain for the values New Hampshire holds dear.
