Barack Obama will go down in history as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln...

The eight year reign of Barack Obama will go down as the most important in American history since Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln led the United States at the single most important decision point in its history. At stake was no less than the question of whether the country would continue as a single nation or would it split in two as Manifest Destiny was fulfilled. Would there be a largely agrarian, slaveholding Confederate States of America bordering on a largely industrial and free United States of America or would a single, free and economically mixed United States emerge? At no point in the subsequent century and a half did the United States ever face a more foundational question.

Six years into Barack Obama’s presidency - and looking with much trepidation at the “last” two - one can’t help but wonder what kind of a nation will emerge on the other side. “History” said Winston Churchill, “is written by the victors” and like it or not, Barack Obama is the victor. Not sure about that? Take a look at the latest capitulation by his supposed opposition, Boehner and McConnell, the GOP leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively. In what is only the most recent example of obsequiousness they have vociferously attacked their own base in order to allow Obama to continue with his patently unconstitutional amnesty.

And what is it that Barack Obama has done to merit such distinction? He has opened the Pandora’s Box of unprecedented, omnipresent, government intervention. And like the evils escaping from Pandora’s Box, once government intervention is put in place you can’t get rid of it. With Obamacare he decreed that the government can tell Americans what they must buy, for their own good. With his NLRB appointees and the nationalization of General Motors he has eviscerated private property rights. With his using the IRS to muzzle opposition and his FCC taking over the Internet, he has taken a sledgehammer to concept of free speech and free markets.

In addition, his regulatory bonanza and welfare policies have cut the legs out from the basic premise of hard work being the key to success in America. By making entrepreneurship and job creation more difficult and by providing a seemingly endless array of benefits, he has driven the labor participation rate down to levels not seen in four decades.

And of course it’s not just the laws. He has set black against white as he constantly invokes racism in places where it simply doesn’t apply. What’s more, he has essentially told black Americans, those who are at most risk of being victims of crime, that the police are their enemies. He has set the poor and middle class against the rich as he assails the successful as robber barons who earned their success on the backs of others.

The country was far from perfect when Barack Obama took office and you can make the argument that it was already heading in a troubling direction when he came along. But the difference is, unlike Abraham Lincoln, who sought to save the Union, Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform it. And that he has… from a place where individual initiative was the key to overcoming challenges, achieving success and finding happiness to a place where the first instinct of many is to look for someone to blame for their lack of success or happiness, or to try and figure out which arm of government to look to provide them.

Combine that entitlement / victim mentality with a legion of regulatory diktats and unconstitutional decrees – that no one in power seems willing to fight – and you have a recipe for a banana republic where power is held by whoever bribes the largest number of people and creates scapegoats to fuel populist furor. And so it goes as a nation of giants transforms into a nation of beggars and a government limited by the Constitution becomes a one limited only by a president’s appetite.

No president in 150 years has changed America more. Not Roosevelt, not Kennedy, not FDR not Reagan. Such is the transformation Barack Obama promised and delivered. Most Americans won’t view it as success, but the left does. Therefore, if history is indeed written by the victor – or in this case by his lefty sycophants in the media – Barack Obama will go down as the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln. And at this point it might be useful to think of something Churchill’s enemy, Adolph Hitler, said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

On Leadership: Winston Churchill & Ted Cruz

In May 1940 the world faced a menace unlike any it had ever seen. After a decade of economic body blows, much of the world was weary. With the carnage of WWI only 20 years past few people had the stomach to fight for much of anything. It was only with great reluctance that in September 1939 the British and the French declared war on Germany after they invaded Poland with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, even after the declaration, after years of appeasement most British felt that there was little they could do to stop Adolph Hitler.

Things were indeed bleak and spirits were low. On May 10th Winston Churchill would become Prime Minister, and on that same day the Germans would invade and soon overrun Britain’s main ally, France. And so began the most important chapter in the life of the most important leader of the 20th Century.

That chapter had followed many others however. Winston Churchill spent years in the “wilderness” of British politics between the two world wars. For most of that time he had been ridiculed as a war monger for his constant warnings about the growing menace of, first, the Communists, then Hitler and the Nazis. He was considered a crack pot… what some today might call today a “Wacko Bird”.

Nonetheless, Churchill persisted, despite the fact that much of the enmity towards him came from those within his own party… particularly for his advocacy of free trade. By 1940 many in Britain were not sure that the Nazi juggernaut could be stopped.

A funny thing happened on the way to takeover of the entire world however. One man rallied the people of the one country that stood between Nazi dominance of the entire continent: Winston Churchill.

One month after becoming Prime Minister, Churchill gave a speech that laid out clearly why the fight was worth fighting:

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim?
I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

This speech, and many others inspired the people of his tiny nation to not only survive the Battle of Britain and deal Hitler his first significant defeat, but to go on and play a leading role in the victory over the Axis powers.

Barack Obama is not Adolph Hitler, the Democrats are not Nazis, and Ted Cruz is not Winston Churchill. Barack Obama is however a statist who seeks to replace free markets and individual freedom with state control and government mandates. The Democrats do however seek to control virtually every aspect of an American’s life. And Ted Cruz understands that victory demands a willingness to say things people may not want to hear, the conviction to stand behind principals worth fighting for, and perhaps most of all, the need to articulate why the fight is being undertaken in the first place.

Churchill was a pariah within his own party and ridiculed from both sides of the aisle, yet he continued to take to the floor of the Parliament and say the things that needed to be said, particularly when few others were perceptive enough to recognize the dangers or had the courage to face them. Eventually the British people recognized that Churchill had been right all along and that he was the man to lead them through their darkest hour. Ted Cruz is not Winston Churchill, but perhaps he carries the spirit of the “Last Lion” with him and if we’re lucky his voice will lead the country past the mortal danger posed by a government that has become too powerful, too dysfunctional, too secretive and too coercive for liberty to survive.