In my spare time, I dabble in writing historical fiction. Lately, I’ve been thinking of an interesting alternative history: How would the Obama White House deal with Thomas Paine?
Paine was, of course, the most influential writer of the American Revolution. As historian William Forstchen and I detail in our new novel To Try Men’s Souls: A Novel of George Washington and the Fight for American Freedom, George Washington had Paine’s words read to his troops as they boarded boats to cross the Delaware River before their victory at Trenton.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
But before Paine wrote these words, he wrote Common Sense, a pamphlet that was so pivotal in changing American minds about independence that it has been called “the 47 pages that changed America.”
Common Sense was successful because it persuaded colonists that there was no divine right of kings. By putting forward a truly revolutionary notion – that rights come from the Creator to the people themselves, not to kings first – Paine made possible American independence.
He challenged the notion that the English King had unquestionable authority over the lives of his subjects. He challenged the notion that Americans were subjects at all, and for that, he made himself Public Enemy Number One of George the Third.
Fox News is doing something similar with the Obama White House today. In stark contrast to the other major media, Fox News (to which I am a contributor) is raising serious questions about the Obama agenda of endlessly expanding government through its economic stimulus, energy and health care policies.
And for its disloyalty, Fox has found itself in the crosshairs of a full-scale smear campaign by the Obama White House. Senior White House advisors seem to be working fulltime to discredit the news network. Obama advisor David Axelrod has called Fox “not a news organization” and the president himself yesterday derided Fox as a “talk radio format.”
The Obama White House’s war on Fox News is petty and political at the least, and an abuse of the presidency at the worst. And it’s only part of a wider campaign to discredit and destroy the Obama’s White House’s perceived enemies, be they American businessmen and women or independent journalists.
Already, we’ve seen this administration put a gag order on an insurance company for warning its customers about the effects of Democratic health care reform, set up an email account for Americans to inform on their fellow citizens’ criticisms of its policies, and declared open war on the Chamber of Commerce for its failure to remain mute in the face of the Obama administration’s anti-business policies.
To have government officials on the payroll of the taxpayers engaged in the petty politics of institutional destruction, retribution and censorship is scandalous and shameful. To have the president and his senior advisors directing this activity is behavior unbecoming of the presidency.
In fact, it is behavior more in keeping with a monarch than a president.
The president and his advisors no doubt believe they are engaged in a tough but clever political strategy. Time spent attacking Fox, after all, is time not spent answering the American people’s concerns about the economy and the costs of health reform. But while these tactics may have served them well in Chicago, they are a fundamental misreading of American history.
The lesson of Washington and Paine is that you can’t stop a free people from talking, questioning and seeking the truth. Together, these two men declared American independence from the tyranny of unquestioned authority. They helped found a nation of individuals endowed with rights by their Creator, not granted rights by their king.
But the current White House doesn’t seem to get this. If Obama were confronted with Paine today, it’s not hard to imagine him sending out Rahm Emmanuel to call Paine a heretic or a pawn of the military industrial complex.
It’s also not hard to imagine him failing as utterly as King George did.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has published 19 books, including 10 fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation and chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. For more information, see newt.org. His exclusive column for The Examiner appears Fridays.
