You Didn't Build Chick-Fil-A

There’s a remarkable difference between the controversy over what Obama says he didn’t say and the one over what he most certainly did say.

Why should “you didn’t build that” be the defining statement of the Obama campaign, while his “evolution” on single-sex marriage is all but ignored? There are, after all, as the current flap over chickens attests, a lot of folks who don’t like the idea ….

It all has to do with those (usually mythical) “dog whistles” that politicians are so allegedly adept at.

No one who was paying attention could look at Obama’s 2008 campaign and assume anything other than that his protestation of belief in traditional marriage and his opposition to single-sex marriage were simply election-year expedients intended to be discarded at the first practical opportunity – as, indeed, they were.

Similarly, no one paying attention could possibly mistake Obama for a small-government politician. But it is not yet politically expedient for him to campaign on his true belief, that the economy should be completely controlled by the Federal government, so he still pretends that he’s a “middle of the road,” “reasonable,” “moderate” capitalist like nearly everyone else in Washington.

But everyone knows that that’s not so: that he is, in fact, the most radical politician ever elected to office (and, yes, I include Kucinich) whose ultimate goal is the complete dismantling of the free enterprise system and the institution of state control over every aspect of our lives: what kind of cars we can drive, how far we can drive them, where and how often we can fly, what we set our thermostats to, what kind of groceries we can buy – and all in the name of “ensuring fairness,” “protecting our health,” and “combating global warming.”

So when he lets the mask slip and says – or appears to say – what everyone knows he really thinks, people get excited and Obama must, again, deny that he is who he is and believes what he believes.