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April 21, 2015 |
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Obama taking collectivist tack on business

Barack Obama may have inadvertently framed the presidential campaign with remarks he made while campaigning in Virginia a little over a week ago.

In making his usual case that successful people haven't become that way on their own, Obama used a formulation that will be endlessly repeated and parsed for the remainder of the political season. This is the official White House transcript of what he said:


There's been more attention to the word "that" in that formulation than to any word since Bill Clinton pondered the deeper epistemological mystery of "is."

Republicans pounced on the statement, claiming that the "that" refers to "business" and Obama was saying business owners didn't build their own businesses.

I think that's nonsense. From Obama's delivery, the "that" pretty clearly refers to "roads and bridges" in the previous sentence.

But it doesn't really matter. The entire riff was a denigration of the centrality of individual initiative in individual achievement. According to Obama, people don't succeed because they are smart and hardworking. That's not what distinguishes those who succeed from those who don't. He said that pretty plainly.

Now, there's a certain amount of truism to what Obama is saying.

Individuals do depend on living and working within a system in which individual initiative can matter. And that system is, for the most part, collectively provided through government. But it's fatuous for him to suggest this is something that somehow divides the parties.

Rep. Paul Ryan's budget would increase federal spending from $3.6 trillion to $4.9 trillion over 10 years. At the end of the 10 years, federal spending would still be 20 percent of GDP. That's still a whole lot of collective providing.

But it's becoming increasingly clear that Obama believes that what we do collectively is at least as important to our success as what we do individually, perhaps more so.

That's not the way Americans have historically viewed themselves or their country. Downplaying the role of individual initiative in individual achievement goes against our grain.

This could be a very big deal.

I doubt that Republicans are going to get very far in their efforts to persuade judges to invalidate the redistricting maps adopted by the Independent Redistricting Commission. But they have produced some very strong circumstantial evidence that the lines were finagled to favor Democrats.

All districts are supposed to have the same population. On the congressional map, the IRC hit the mark on the button. For the legislative map, there were some substantial deviations, and there was a distinct pattern to the deviations.

Of the 12 districts with less than the average in population, 10 have a Democratic plurality in registration. Of the 18 districts that are overpopulated, 16 have a Republican plurality.

So, the effect of the population deviations is to stuff more Republicans into Republican districts, advantaging Democrats in the remainder.

The IRC in its court response claims this is to create more districts where Latinos can influence the outcome. The Republican statistical analysis, however, convincingly disputes this, leaving the partisan effect as the primary outcome.

The map still tilts Republican, which is inevitable so long as the Voting Rights Act requires racial gerrymandering. But the Democratic pickup from the population deviations could amount to 3,000 votes or so in some districts.

Courts tend to turn a blind eye to finagling the lines for partisan advantage so long as minority voting strength isn't weakened in the process.

But the partisan effect of the population deviations makes the IRC's claim of political neutrality hard to accept.

In ordering Secretary of State Ken Bennett to process the signatures for the sales- tax initiative, Judge Robert Oberbillig reportedly said that the case was "silly." That suggests a judge who didn't seriously consider the important legal issue at stake. Bennett owes it to the state to appeal to some judges who might.

State law requires that, before an initiative is circulated, proponents fill out an application provided by the Secretary of State's Office that includes the text of the initiative. The application is available only in paper form. Proponents of the sales-tax initiative filled out that paper form and included a paper copy of the text of the initiative.

They also gave the Secretary of State's Office an electronic version of the initiative that differed materially. They then circulated the electronic version rather than the version that was officially filed in compliance with state law.

According to Oberbillig, Bennett should have just ignored the version that was filed with the paper application. He cited no constitutional or statutory authority for Bennett to do so.

Whether an official text of an initiative has to be filed before being circulated and what constitutes the official text aren't silly matters.

Reach Robb at

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