A Straight Line Back to the Founders: Obama's Rhetoric

I just finished reading yesterday Steven Hayward's great book on political greatness aptly entitled Greatness:  Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.  I strongly encourage you to read it (it's only about 170 pages).

Anyway, this brings me to a post Steve just put up on Power Line today that begins at Machiavelli and ends with a liberal historian's agreement with Harry Jaffa of all people on how to properly see Lincoln.  In the midst of this is Hayward's analysis of the opening section of President Obama's second inaugural that in my own post about the speech, I glossed over much too quickly.  Here is what Hayward discovered on a close reading of the opening paragraphs:

Turning to Obama’s second inaugural, there is a single word that now stands out as a flare for the postmodern Left. Many have noted Obama’s fairly traditional beginning to his address:

What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So far, so good, and, needless to say, an important departure from Woodrow Wilson’s explicit rejection of the Declaration of Independence. But note the key term in the next clause:

Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing. . . (Emphasis added.)

Hold it right there: the Declaration’s truths—based on “the laws of nature and nature’s God”—may be self-evident? For Jefferson, as for Lincoln, the “self-evidence” of the truth of the propositions of the Declaration depended upon their internal logic, which Lincoln expressed in Euclidian terms. As Lincoln put it, the self-evident truths of the Declaration are “an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times.” For Obama to say that the truths of the Declaration “may” be self-evident is to mark himself out with the main current of postmodern relativism, which depends upon a rejection of the ideas of the Declaration because they stand in the way of the Left’s will to power. If the Declaration “may” be true, but possibly not true as is implied here, then it isn’t applicable to all men at all times. In the end, Obama doesn’t really disagree with Woodrow Wilson at all in rejecting the Declaration of Independence. As with Obama’s position on gay marriage, his superficial rhetoric is merely conforming to popular opinion, while disguising a contrary intent.

Obama as president is much in the Wilson model but he took the most important lessons from FDR as well.  The rhetorical gymnastics exhibited in this speech is exactly why FDR is a far superior politician and president than Woodrow Wilson ever was.