There is one line of Obama’s Wednesday night speech that keeps bothering me.
 
During the speech I, like many others, was frustrated by the president’s lies, manipulations and petty partisanship. But those feelings ebbed in the hour or so after the joint session address.
 
But there was one part, unrelated to health care specifically, that keeps popping into my head. Near the end of the speech the president said: “We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.”
 
The line was not at the end of loud rhetorical flourish, signaling the time for applause, yet the chamber erupted in cheers. A certain energy seemed to fill the room as the liberals listening to the speech inwardly realized the magnitude of the president’s statement. Their hearts began to race and their eyes grew wide as a new awareness of the tangibility of their power began to sink in.
 
When the president and his cohorts embrace the idea that the course of the country should be fashioned by their brilliance or benevolence, they embrace the mindset of the totalitarian. It is a belief that a few should rule over the rest.
 
Obama and the Democrats (or any elected official) are not in Washington to shape the future, but to preserve the past while individuals Americans decide their own future. The presidential oath is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
 
The ‘shape the future’ phrase explains Obama’s mindset in a way his other 5,500 words couldn’t. Underneath it all, the speech wasn’t really about insurance, medical care or bipartisanship. The address was about a misshapen idea that, when espoused, changes the president from a citizen protector of Constitutional rights to a despotic destroyer of those rights; all in the name of “shaping the future.”