Just Do It, Mr. President

“President Obama was in Hawaii for his Christmas vacation when Hawaii’s Governor Abercrombie said he wanted to find Obama’s birth certificate,” I said to the class. We were reviewing stories in the news after we returned from our week-and-a-half-long Christmas vacation.

“The New York Times reported on Christmas Eve,” I continued, “that: ‘Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, who befriended President Obama’s parents when they were university students here, has been in office for less than three weeks. But he is so incensed over “birthers” — the conspiracy theorists who assert that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and was thus not eligible to become president — that he is seeking ways to change state policy to allow him to release additional proof that the president was born in Honolulu in 1961.’”

“How can they say Obama’s not eligible to be president?” asked a boy. “He is the president, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said. “However, some people insist he was born in Kenya, Africa where his father lived. Such people are called “birthers” by the New York Times and others who think they’re nuts.”

“What do you think?” asked a girl.

“I’ve been hearing that story since before Obama was elected, but I’m skeptical. When I read that local newspapers reported on Obama’s birth in Honolulu back in 1961, I figured it must be true and stopped giving serious attention to the “birthers.” The skepticism had died down when Abercrombie called attention to it again. I hope he finds it and clears this up. If anyone can do it, I imagine the governor can. Of course, President Obama could do it too and I’m not sure why he doesn’t.”
“Have any of you had to get a copy of your birth certificate?” I asked. Several hands went up.

“I had to get one to prove how old I was for a Babe Ruth game,” said a boy.

“I had to get one so I could get a passport,” said a girl.

“I had to get one so I could visit someone in jail,” said another girl.

“So lots of people have to produce birth certificates for lots of reasons,” I said. “ “What if they find out that President Obama wasn’t born in the USA?” asked the girl. “What would happen then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s never happened before. Let’s hope we don’t have to figure that out. To see what the Constitution says about this, turn to page 879 in your textbooks.” I gave them a few minutes and said, “Look at Article 2, Section 1, Number 5 of the Constitution where it says ‘Qualifications.’ Could someone read that please?”

“‘No person except a natural born citizen or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible for the office of president; neither shall any person be eligible for that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident in the United States,’” read a boy.

“Thank you,” I said.

“That’s all you need to be president? he asked.

“Yup. That’s all,” I said.

Two weeks later, I put a story up on the screen with an LCD projector. It was an article from the London Daily Mail with the headline: “Hawaii governor claims record of Obama's birth 'exists in archives' but can't produce the vital document." “Remember when we discussed this a couple of weeks ago?” I asked. “The story here says: ‘[Governor Abercrombie] told Honolulu's Star-Advertiser: 'It actually exists in the archives, written down,' he said. But it became apparent that what had been discovered was an unspecified listing or notation of Obama's birth that someone had made in the state archives and not a birth certificate. And in the same interview Abercrombie suggested that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health.’”

“So now what?” asked a girl. “Will he have to resign?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “The so-called ‘birthers’ will continue to grumble, I guess. The article says: ‘[Abercrombie] acknowledged the birth certificate issue would  have 'political implications' for the next presidential election 'that we simply cannot have.’ So Obama’s friend Governor Abercrombie thinks it may hurt the president politically when he faces reelection in 2012 if he doesn’t come up with a birth certificate before then. People may think: ‘I have to produce a birth certificate when I’m asked. Why doesn’t the president?’”

When Citizens Are Ready, Leaders Appear

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

Attributed variously to Confucianism, Buddhism or Taoism, the phrase resonates in several aspects of my late-middle-age life. As a veteran teacher, I know there’s truth in it. If the student isn’t ready, and many of my charges each year are not, it’s my job to entice, cajole, stimulate, or arouse them - but I cannot force anyone to learn. I cannot successfully impose my will on anybody else either. Using raw power may appear to work temporarily, but if the subject of my efforts cannot be convinced that my ideas are best for him or her, they will inevitably backfire and the situation will be worse than if I had left it alone.

I’ve accepted this only after years of stubbornly trying as teacher, father, husband, friend, and citizen to force things. In the case of young children, the mentally handicapped, the violently insane, or criminals, it’s necessary to restrain them lest they hurt themselves or others, but for everyone else? Best leave them alone to learn for themselves. When three-year-olds say “I want to do it myself!” it’s best to let them - even if it will take longer, won’t work as well and will make a mess. That’s true for citizens as well. It’s always better to let people do for themselves than have government do anything for them.

The Founding Fathers who wrote our Constitution knew these things and incorporated them into their plan of government - which they saw as a necessary evil that should be kept as small as possible so it would interfere as little as possible with the way people choose to live. In the Preamble they said their intentions were to: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Those “blessings of liberty” were spelled out two years later in the Bill of Rights. Beyond that, government should not go. If the Founders’ intention to strictly limit government weren’t plain enough, the 10th Amendment was their final statement: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Leftist Democrat do-gooders now running our government don’t understand this. They’re determined to “save” us when we want to be left alone. They’re convinced they know better than we do what’s best for us. In his column last Sunday, George Will described them well:

"Even more than the New Deal and the Great Society, Obama's agenda expresses the mentality of a class that was nascent in the 1930s but burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s. The spirit of that class is described in Saul Bellow's 1975 novel ‘Humboldt's Gift.’ In it Bellow wrote that the modern age began when a particular class of people decided, excitedly, that life had ‘lost the ability to arrange itself’:
‘It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. ... This arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power.’”

Exceptional leftists are in power now, and they’ve been vigorously arranging our lives since last January. Now they’re flabbergasted to learn their constituents are pissed at them. Judging from expressions on their faces as voters express exasperation in town hall meetings, they seem to be thinking: “If you only knew how exceptionally smart and nice I am, you wouldn’t talk to me that way.” That’s how Congressman Jim Baird looked when a constituent named David William Hedrick said angrily: “It’s not your right to decide whether I keep my current [medical] plan or not.”

Although invited, my congressmen and senators didn’t attend a townhall meeting organized Tuesday night and attended by 450 constituents in central Maine. Senator Olympia Snowe and Congressman Mike Michaud were “too busy.” Senator Susan Collins didn’t even respond and voters voiced frustrations at photographs.

As I said in my column two weeks ago, something big is brewing out there. It’s grassroots uprising of people telling government “Stop! We want to do it ourselves!” They’re sick of intellectuals arranging everything for everybody with their money. Obama promised to heal red state/blue state divisions, but that isn’t happening. After only a few short months of his presidency, citizens in many states are trying to pull the 10th Amendment out of mothballs and nullify federal efforts to usurp state and popular sovereignty. Texas governor Jim Perry has even mentioned secession.

It’s true that when the student is ready the teacher appears. It’s also true that when citizens are ready, leaders appear. The 2010 elections are going to be very interesting indeed.