President Obama delivered his Osawatomie speech, according to aides, because he wanted to associate himself with the rhetorical and ideological significance of Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” address at the same Kansas location in 1910. It’s odd enough that Obama would associate his policies with a speech that defined a failed political movement — the Bull Moose Party — but there is something else about Osawatomie County that makes it a strange locale for a presidential address ostensibly intended to encourage greater American unity. This was the place in Kansas that was headquarters for John Brown, the murderous radical who obsessed throughout his life about inciting a race war he believed would end slavery in the South. Brown moved to Kansas in 1856 thinking he could start his war from there. Late in the evening of May 24, Brown, four of his sons and two other compatriots traveled from Osawatomie to a nearby county where they rousted five settlers thought to be Southern sympathizers from their beds and slaughtered them with broadswords. The vicious massacre shocked the nation and is remembered to this day as the most horrendous of the many crimes committed by both sides in “Bleeding Kansas” during the years leading to the Civil War. Brown thus became a precursor for contemporary radicals like Bill Ayers, the unreconstructed Students for a Democratic Society bomber, who had no qualms about killing innocent people to achieve his ends.
Obama would never literally follow in Brown’s footsteps, of course, but the chief executive’s reliance on the polarizing rhetoric of class warfare and his assault on the facts of recent economic history recall Brown’s obstinate radicalism that the vast majority of Americans North and South rejected. Take the claim of an extreme unfairness at the heart of Obama’s address: “Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as one percent. One percent. That is the height of unfairness. It is wrong. It’s wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker, maybe earns $50,000 a year, should pay a higher tax rate than somebody raking in $50 million.”
It’s a guaranteed applause line and a total fabrication. As Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler reported yesterday, “an administration official conceded the White House had no actual data to back up the president’s assertion, but argued that other reports showed that some of the wealthy pay little in taxes.” So Obama’s case for the higher taxes required to fund his exploding federal spending rest on hearsay.
Similarly, Obama endlessly repeats his contention that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were “the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history.” That characterization is the key to his claim that his predecessor’s policies caused the Great Recession of 2008, as well as “the slowest job growth in half a century and massive deficits.” But again, as noted by Kessler, Obama “should not suggest that the Bush tax cuts were aimed only at the wealthy, since that is not correct.” Obama can make whatever arguments he likes for his policies, but surely that’s possible without doing rhetorical violence to the facts.
