Congratulations, Comrade Obama

It looks like, for the moment, the shady deals and obsessive-compulsive speechmaking by our Commissar-elect have had their intended effect.

It will be a Pyrrhic victory.

Forgive me a little anecdote: it does bear on our text for today.

Way back, shortly after the Earth's crust cooled, I was at my first job as an advertising copywriter. One day a discussion took place in the creative department about how bland modernism seemed to be triumphing in graphics, architecture, everything. This was the '70s, when sans serif "Swiss style" typefaces were all the rage, barbaric raw concrete architecture was hip, etc.

The art director said: "If I were appointed dictator, I'd pass a law that every street and store sign had to be in Helvetica." We gasped. "What the hell, I thought you said you didn't like this modernist strait-jacket."

The art director continued: "Yes, Helvetica would be the rule, anything else outlawed. Before long, designers would abandon it on principle and use anything but. Townspeople who'd never thought about lettering styles would start grumbling, 'Hey, wait a minute. We have a local tradition … .'"

Comrade Obama has achieved something that a hundred editorials, ten thousand bloggers, and countless books could not have brought about. He has forced Americans en masse to think about the U.S. Constitution, about the meaning of liberty, and about whether they want a federal government with a hand in every aspect of life, large and small. By pushing through a ghastly expansion of Washington's bureaucracy that will require mega-taxation, drain funds from Medicare, probably produce out-of-control inflation, and add more oceans of red ink to the budget — while we already have a deficit of $13 trillion and counting — he has forced millions of formerly apathetic citizens to consider the dire consequences of spending borrowed money unto infinity.

He has made it socially acceptable to ask why the dwindling middle class must be bled white to support a class of welfare recipients and Third World immigrants.

Americans by the millions who haven't thought about the founding principles of the nation since they left school are now researching those principles for themselves. They are finding parts of the Constitution and Bill of Rights that suddenly mean a great deal in our times; for example, the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Comrade Obama has supercharged the Tea Party movement.

He has ensured that he will lose his majority in Congress this year and will be the most loathed president ever to hold the office when he is booted out.

He has awakened a sleeping giant, the American people who never expected they would have to struggle to protect individualism, liberty, and limited government, and who now understand preserving those values is up to them.