Obama and the left

Of course, an Obama administration is a great day for race relations, and a sad day for freedom. It means a dramatic assault on economic liberty, an expansion of government that will make the past administration seem tame, and a federal judiciary dominated by judges who think just about anything Congress does is constitutional. (The same, of course, could have been said of a McCain administration, but at least he would have been checked by a Democratic Congress.)

I have little to add to the tsunami of punditry. Just two things. I think it’s interesting how, regardless of his ideological fixation on using the government to steal from those who earn and give to those who do not, his rhetoric is very strongly individualist—more so than Clinton’s, I think, and definitely moreso than Bush’s. Rhetoric does matter. His beliefs are very anti-individualistic in practice, but he insists in his speeches that he believes strongly in individual freedom and individual flourishing. I think that rhetoric will serve as a significant block (if used correctly by the opposition) to some of the more dramatic attacks on freedom that are to be seen in the next four years.

Second: here’s job number one for Obama: deal with Guantanamo Bay. Do it immediately. Find some way to give these people trials or to release them. A “temporary” detention center, purposely created to avoid the imperatives of American law, where people sit for seven years, is not tolerable in our Constitutional order.