The Split

I just got home and turned on the TV in time to see a new campaign ad from Barack Obama that lays the blame for our current economic malaise on George W. Bush.  Among the hyperboles and out right falsehoods in the ad was the claim by the narrator that there are some who think out best days are behind us.  What flashed across the screen?  Video from what looked like a Tea Party rally.   

This is dumb.

The Tea Party began to form prior to the 2010 election, and it's focus was on a return to the Constitution.  Tea Partiers saw that government had slowly become unmoored from the Constitution that was built to constrain it--especially on the federal level.  They understood that because government is built upon the consent of the governed, a rejuvenation in civic education was needed to sweep across the land so that the nation would be put back on a course consistent with the principles and virtues of the Founding.  They by no means argued that the U.S.'s best days were behind us; they were arguing that we can get to back to the good days by returning the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Implicit in their argument was the idea that we must get back to the government as construed and realized by the Founders not because of blind veneration for the Founders but because those principles which the Founders' expounded are good for all men and all times. 

Barack Obama, being somewhat of a mix between a post modern and progressive, thinks the idea that there are universals truths outside of our personal preferences is bogus, to put it nicely.  Here is a bit from his The Audacity of Hope where he lays out the Founders (and therefore his) distrust of any claim to absolute truth:

It's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent.  Implicit in the it structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any ideology of theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

Here is another riff:

The rejection of absolutism implicit in our constitutional structure may sometimes make our politics seem unprincipled.

And again in a reference to a supposed teaching from Abraham Lincoln:

Lincoln, and those buried at Gettysburg, remind us that we should pursue our own absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price to pay.

But what the Founders (and Tea Partiers) called self-evident truths in the Declaration and what Lincoln later said were principles that are applicable to all men and all times, Barack Obama calls"our own absolute truths" -- basically rending them nothing more than simple individual preferences that don't have any moral standing beyond the individual.  This is the real difference between President Obama and the Tea Party.