What is success?

I got an email from a BO drone who had some questions for me:

Don't you know that Obama is our President? His election is a historic event. Don't you want his Presidency to succeed?

Let's take these one at a time.

The drone was a bit premature to declare Obama "our President", but at noon today that will be the case. BO will be the President of America. Unlike the Democrats, we are not going to question the legitimacy of his Presidency. He will have all of the powers the Constitution gives to the President. But that does not mean that we have to agree with everything he wants to do to America, and just step aside and let it happen. In fact, that is exactly what our Constitution was designed to avoid through its system of checks and balances. The Bill of Rights explicitly protects the God-given right of American citizens to raise grievances against the government, and you can count on me to take full advantage of that right.

Yes, Obama’s election is a historic event. BO is the first black man to be elected President. Well, not really. He is the first half black, half white man to be elected President. One must wonder why he chooses to identify himself with the bigamous, drunken, corrupt man who abandoned him and his mother rather than with the mother and grandparents who raised him and gave him all of the opportunities that allowed him to be where he is today. He proves that you can overcome the oppression of slavery and become President. Well, not really. His father was Kenyan, not the descendant of slaves. He proves that you can come from poverty and do anything. Except that he was raised in an affluent family and went to an elite private school in Hawaii before going off to Harvard. But it is a historic event. No one from Delaware has ever been elected Vice President. (While it is true that Biden lived in Pennsylvania for 11 years, he is 83% Delawarian, which gives him much more solid claim to the title than BO’s 50% blackness.)

Finally we come to the real question: “Don’t you want his Presidency to succeed?” The question suggests that if I answer “No” then I am wishing for harm on America. However, that all depends on how you define success.

Do I want BO to succeed in implementing his radical agenda to surrender to the terrorists, raise taxes sky high, nationalize huge portions of the private sector, and “spread the wealth around” through massive socialist redistribution programs? Of course not! I intend to see to it that those goals go down in smoke just like BJ Clinton’s medical takeover scheme crashed and burned when the American people rejected the huge government power grab.

If, as the drone suggests, success means doing what is good for America, then for BO to succeed he would have to come to some kind of epiphany. But I really don’t expect that some fine morning BO will wake up and realize that prosperity does not come from the Government, that free markets private sector innovation and productivity is the only way to create wealth and spread it around effectively, that corporations create jobs and government creates nothing, that terrorists won’t just leave us alone if we try to make nice with them, and that in most cases the best thing the government can do is get out of the way.

So I do hope that BO will succeed, but I’m not counting on it. America can prosper either way. We prospered in spite of BJ Clinton. Every economic cycle has a downturn and a recovery. BO will try to claim credit for it, but the industriousness of the American people is the engine driving American prosperity.