For the book I’m currently completing (“THE TEN BIG LIES ABOUT AMERICA”) I’ve been reading through some recent Inaugural Addresses and I came across a truly alarming line from Bill Clinton’s stunningly banal big speech of January 21, 1993.
“We must provide for our nation the way a family provides for its children,” the handsome new president declared.
What in the name of heaven could he possibly have in mind?
In the family model, parents work hard and earn money to support children who, before their teens years at least, don’t earn at all. Did Clinton believe – does his wife now believe – that some American (like parents) should toil away in order to support those who don’t work?
The context encourages that interpretation. In the lines immediately preceding the exhortation to “provide for our nation” in the way “a family provides for its children,” Clinton emphasized sacrifice.
“We must invest more in our own people, in their jobs, in their future,” he declared. “It will not be easy. It will require sacrifice. But it can be done, and done fairly, not choosing sacrifice for its own sake, but for our own sake.”
Beyond the vapid platitudes, he seems to warn the public to expect big tax increases (whenever Democrats talk about “investing more in our own people” they mean they want to raise taxes).
But then, after that hint, comes the chilling bit about “providing for our nation” and the comparison of its citizens to “children.”
In the Clintonian view of the world, do we live in a society made up of helpless, infantilized kids (or adolescents) who depend on a few grown-ups to generate wealth for the whole “family”? Did President Clinton in 1993 himself represent the ultimate Daddy, with Hillary the mother-of-us-all?
I wish someone would ask Senator Clinton whether she agrees with her husband’s analogy, and believes that we have an obligation “to provide for our nation the way a family provides for its children.”
Does she still see a parental role for our leaders?
It shouldn’t take a village to answer such questions.