Obama’s Status Quo and Quiet Revolution

–Fred Barnes: Why Obama Isn’t Changing Washington

….Mr. Obama also decried the prominent role played by lobbyists. “Lobbyists aren’t just a part of the system in Washington, they’re part of the problem,” Mr. Obama said in a May 2008 campaign speech. I was reminded of this last statement by a recent headline on the front page of USA Today. It read: “Health care fight swells lobbying. Number of organizations hiring firms doubles in ’09.” The article suggested that what Mr. Obama had promised to fix had only gotten worse. Indeed that’s the case….

…In Washington it’s business as usual, except for one thing. The bigger the role of government, the more lobbyists flock to town. By pushing for his policies, the president effectively put up a welcome sign to lobbyists.

–Gary North on a Quiet Revolution and Decentralization

….Before we can have a political transformation, the public has to think about why the transformation is mandatory. Usually, the elitists are the effective promoters of political transformation. They have controlled the media in the past. They have hired the writers, producers, and the technicians to get across their idea of why a particular reform needs to be implemented. Today, however, low-cost communications technology, especially free videos, has placed in the hands of creative individuals the ability to create public relations havoc for the Establishment. The Establishment does not know what to do about this….

….It is no accident that no high school history textbook or college history textbook has ever devoted much space to the Articles of Confederation. There is virtually no discussion of the details of that document. Almost no one, including people who have Ph.D.’s in early American history, has ever sat down and read the Articles of Confederation, let alone a volume of analysis of the articles. This is because the victors write the history books. The anti-Federalists did not win the state ratifying conventions in 1788. The Federalists won, and they and their heirs have written the history textbooks….