Just a few simple rules
To follow to a tee

And what a splendid hundred acre wood
This will be.

-Rabbit

The above jingle comes from one of my daughter’s favorite videos, “My Friends Tigger and Pooh and a Musical Too”.  In this video, set in the hundred acre wood, Rabbit runs for mayor and convinces the citizens of the wood that by following his lead their habitat can be much improved.  After a particular stump speech, Winnie the Pooh protests that he likes the wood as it is. Rabbit questions why Pooh would settle for the status quo when the wood “can be perfect” and then launches into a song and dance where he lays out his plans.

All the animals are cheerful at first, singing along in unison as Rabbit leads them in every note.  But as the song unfolds, Rabbit begins to enact his “few simple rules”.  He regulates the amount of honey Pooh can eat, he tells Tigger there are only certain hours in which Tigger can bounce, he even regulates the time of day when Piglet can clean his home. One by one, as the song unwinds and the citizens realize Rabbit wants to run their lives, they fall away--eventually leaving Rabbit singing by himself.

The parallels to Rabbit and Obama are obvious.  Barack Obama got elected essentially promising an American utopia.  He was going to ensure all Americans had health care, heal our racial wounds, restore our confidence in government, solve international conflicts with dialogue. 

America bought the idea, preferring the pizzazz of fairytale rhetoric to reality.   We voted for what Thomas Sowell calls the “unconstrained vision”—the idea that humankind is perfectible and that, instead of man being fallen, the system in which he lives is fallen.  “If only we elect the right people to remake our system,” the unconstrained person says, “all will be right in the world.”[i]

Granted, our country has many faults—both past and present.  (Many of them, by the way, caused and perpetuated by government.)  We know we need change and in some areas drastic change.  But we don't believe government is the answer. We resist the philosophy espoused by Rabbit and Obama, that “all order is the result of design,” and “that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.”[ii]  In other words, we resist the proud politician who overestimates his intellect, believing he has the ability to form a more perfect union—if only the population would forget freedom and follow his dictates.

“In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what's possible, building that more perfect union.”
            -Barack Obama announces his candidacy, 10 February 2007

As Obama and Rabbit have discovered, governing is more difficult than politicking.  The American people enjoy their freedoms and they prefer to make their own decisions about how they live their lives.  The American people, who voted for Obama’s vision, have now realized just what that vision entails.  In order to have a more perfect union, we are asked to give up our liberties.  We are asked to turn over the keys of industry, to give the power of healthcare to the central planners.  As we give up more and more of our economic freedom, however, we see our political freedom eroding in parallel.   Those of us who resist are met with the Chicago Way--the inevitable result of the socialist utopian. 

Just as the citizens in the hundred acre wood realized the consequences of Rabbit’s song and stopped singing, so the American people are beginning to turn their back on their conductor.  And as Obama’s attempts to remake America grow increasingly intrusive, the American people are making plans to leave him on stage, by himself, carrying his own tune.  The sycophants in the media notwithstanding, the average American stands with Winnie the Pooh.  We kind of like our country the way it is, and we’d rather decide for ourselves how much honey we can eat.     

[i] See Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions:  Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, (New York:  Basic Books, 2002).

[ii] Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit:  The Errors of Socialism, (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108.