Obama Accidentally Gives GOP Path to Victory

In one brief comment, Barack Obama revealed what this year’s election is all about.

Don’t be fooled by President Obama’s lame attempt to walk back his comment that, “The private sector is doing fine. Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.”

As we noted last year, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said much the same thing to justify one of Obama’s periodic attempts to reward public sector unions in the guise of legislation to stimulate the economy: “It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about…”.

Democrats and liberals really believe that a big and ever larger government is a benefit -- not a burden -- to the economy.

To Democrats, a government bureaucrat is an economic engine whose payroll has a “multiplier effect” on the economy – and who ends up at the center of a vicious circle in which government employee unions collect dues and spend most of the money to pick their own bosses by electing Democrats to office. These Democrats then bestow ever increasing pay and benefits on the government employees, who are then only too happy to ensure the Democrats’ continued political survival and advancement by sending them ever increasing amounts of campaign donations.

Obama and his liberal allies ignore the fact that every dollar of government payroll starts with a dollar being withdrawn from the food, shelter and clothing budgets of individual taxpayers, and the wealth-producing activities of investors.

The policy implications of this world view for this election are enormous.

To Barack Obama and other liberals, maintaining government employment is a justification for borrowing trillions of dollars from Red China.

Maintaining millions of government employees on the public payroll also justifies Obama’s demand for trillions of dollars in new taxes.

And it is safe to say that of the government employees Obama wants to keep on the payroll, thousands will be engaged in regulatory activities to justify their wages to further burden the economy.

The result of the GOP’s failure to stand for small government constitutional conservative principles was the disaster of the Bush spending spree and the attendant Republican electoral debacles of 2006 and 2008.

Thanks to Obama’s excesses and gaffes, things can be different this year.

The election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and his subsequent retention after an attempt to recall him, proves that voters – even in a blue state like Wisconsin – are ready to put limits on the public sector.

If Mitt Romney, Republican leaders, and Republican candidates for the House and Senate want to win this election, they have to give voters a clear choice between two very different world views.

One world view is Obama’s, in which taxes rise and freedom recedes as government grows and liberal policies of spend, borrow and tax to maintain a huge public sector gobble-up a larger and larger share of the money Americans used to invest in the private economy -- or spend in their own pursuit of happiness.

The other world view -- and the one Romney and the Republicans must present to win -- is one based on freedom and a small constitutional government which allows the private sector and individual prosperity to flourish because it limits government intrusion and spending, and public sector employment, to only those functions that are constitutionally necessary.