{"id":8431,"date":"2015-05-22T06:14:43","date_gmt":"2015-05-22T13:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8431"},"modified":"2015-05-22T06:14:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-22T13:14:43","slug":"obama-and-hillary-are-all-too-happy-to-coerce-acceptance-of-their-agendas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-and-hillary-are-all-too-happy-to-coerce-acceptance-of-their-agendas\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama and Hillary Are All Too Happy to Coerce Acceptance of Their Agendas"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via NRO<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

W<\/span>hat happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively.<\/p>\n

Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, a sympathetic press, and allies in Hollywood, academia, unions, and philanthropic and activist foundations.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yet all that support was not sufficient to ensure \u201ccorrect\u201d public attitudes about Obama\u2019s agenda on health care, entitlements, taxes, guns, abortion, and cultural issues.<\/p>\n

In the 2010 midterm elections, the Democrats forfeited their majority in the House. In the 2014 midterms, they lost their Senate majority and also lost ground in state legislatures and with governorships across the country. Since early 2013, President Obama\u2019s approval rating has been consistently below 50 percent.<\/p>\n

How, then, do politically correct planners force the people to think and act properly when they push back?<\/p>\n

Extra-legal executive orders can help a president bypass supposed troglodytes in Congress and among the public.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we\u2019re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.\u201d
\n\u2014 President Obama<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obama granted blanket amnesties, proposed rules that would lead to the closure of many coal plants, and arbitrarily chose which health or labor statutes should be enforced and at what times. A filmmaker was even jailed on a trumped-up probation charge after making a video about Islam that was deemed unhelpful to the official administration Benghazi narrative. The IRS hounded nonprofit groups considered insufficiently progressive.<\/p>\n

In a recent rant about conservative Fox News \u2014 which has a fraction of the combined audience of the liberal mainstream networks ABC, CBS, and NBC \u2014 Obama warned that the media are going to have change the very way they report news. Presumably, Obama believes that Fox tricks the unknowing masses into thinking wrong thoughts, especially about the relationship between the poor and government assistance.<\/p>\n

As Obama put it: \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we\u2019re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, and how people\u2019s impressions of what it\u2019s like to struggle in this economy looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the First Amendment, how can the president \u201cchange\u201d the media? Should the Federal Communications Commission pick and choose acceptable news outlets in the same manner that Lois Lerner ran her exempt-organizations division at the IRS?<\/p>\n

Who would judge whether the media had changed to meet Obama\u2019s notion of correctness?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

H<\/span>illary Clinton is worried that too many people have incorrect thoughts about feminist issues. For those who oppose abortion, Clinton believes that these supposedly wrong thoughts must be policed. \u201cDeep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases,\u201d she warned, \u201chave to be changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

How, in a free society, does Clinton plan to alter the way religion and culture work? What sort of power would she need to rid us of these \u201cdeep-seated\u201d but unhelpful \u201ccodes and beliefs\u201d?<\/p>\n

How, in a free society, does Clinton plan to alter the way religion and culture work?<\/p>\n

Recently, Clinton declared that if elected president, she would pick Supreme Court nominees by the litmus test of demanding that they oppose the Citizens United<\/em> ruling. Clinton is apparently still furious at the high court\u2019s 2010 decision, which dismantled federal-election rules restricting independent political expenditures by nonprofit organizations.<\/p>\n

Citizens United, remember, was a conservative nonprofit group that produced an unflattering movie about Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission went to court to prevent the film from airing on TV before the 2008 Democratic primaries.<\/p>\n

In other words, Clinton wishes to judge the qualifications of future Supreme Court nominees on the basis of whether they agree that a nonprofit organization had no right to be critical of her in a documentary at election time.<\/p>\n

If Clinton is really worried about the role of big money in politics, she would have done better to have insisted that the Clinton Foundation did not solicit donations from foreign governments while she was the secretary of state. She might have ensured that her family\u2019s foundation distributed 90 percent of its expenditures \u2014 instead of a reported 10 percent \u2014 directly to the charities it claimed to help, especially given that it has raised close to $2 billion.<\/p>\n

Clinton might also have blasted former presidents seeking hefty lecture fees and family foundation donations from wealthy entrepreneurs who hope to buy access and influence from either a sitting secretary of state, a former president of the United States \u2014 or a future president.<\/p>\n

Or, Clinton herself might have cut back on lucrative speaking fees, often paid by wealthy corporations seeking influence. Bill and Hillary Clinton have pulled in $30 million in lecture cash in just the last 16 months. Mysteriously, the closer Hillary Clinton got to announcing her bid for the presidency, the more frequent and the more lucrative the Clinton duo\u2019s lecturing became.<\/p>\n

When news organizations, judges, or Americans in general do not think or speak in the correct fashion, then elite progressives believe they must do whatever is necessary to silence them \u2014 while making themselves exempt from their own agendas.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a9 2015 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively. Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[185],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2bZ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8293,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillary-or-bust\/","url_meta":{"origin":8431,"position":0},"title":"Hillary or Bust!","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 17, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"She\u2019s weighed down with negatives, but do the Democrats have a choice? by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Hillary Clinton will not run in 2016 on the slogan of continuing the hope-and-change policies of Barack Obama. The president has not enjoyed a 50 percent approval rating since a brief\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"466520736-676x450","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/466520736-676x450-500x333.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8592,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillary-clinton-reactionary\/","url_meta":{"origin":8431,"position":1},"title":"Hillary Clinton, Reactionary","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media\u00a0 Amid the Trump psychodramas, the public has forgotten not just Hillary Clinton\u2019s latest contortions over her emails, but Mrs. Clinton herself. 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