COLUMN: OBAMA’S VISION OF “SHARED PROSPERITY” AND REPUBLICAN MYOPIA by John P. Flannery

President Barack Obama addressed the democratic convention last Thursday evening advocating a “new vision of America in which prosperity is shared.”

That’s democracy, small “d,” the sentiment that “we are all in this together.”  Our inscribed nation’s seal bears the inscription, “e pluribus unum,” meaning, “out of many, one.”  Our American constitution embraces, “We the people of the United States,” meaning all of us.  We formed a Constitution because the confederation of separate states lacked the shared strength for this nation’s survival and the need to provide and promote for its general welfare. 

Our government is a reflection of our human condition, as John Donne said, that “no man is an island, entire of itself,” and that each of us “is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

That’s why I was taken aback by the Republican reaction to the President’s vision of “shared prosperity.”

Driving east of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina past a tobacco field on our way toward Creedmor, we heard a local Republican Congressional Challenger for the Fourth Congressional District, Tim D’Annunzio, attack the President’s “vision” in a freshly minted radio ad.

D’Annunzio said the President’s “vision” was a “deceptive way of saying his future includes more socialism.  And it’s a perverted version of the American Dream.” (Listen for yourself: http://www.timvote.com/media/ )

My wife, Holly, and step-daughter, Alex, couldn’t imagine how our constitutional principles could be considered a “deceptive way.”

D’Annunzio nevertheless insisted that the President’s vision of “shared prosperity” would lead us “to national decline, chronic unemployment and the cannibalization of national wealth.” 

D’Annuzio’s fractured view is that, when the Declaration of Independence says we have “the right to pursue happiness,” we are otherwise on our own.  Tim should have read the Declaration of Independence more carefully including the rudimentary principle that “Governments are instituted among Men…” in order “to secure these rights” including the right to pursue happiness.

Cognitive dissonance is a term from psychology where a person or party holds conflicting beliefs, irreconcilably contradictory, at the same time, causing a feeling of guilt or anger. 

We know Republican leaders, as well as friends and neighbors, who say they can do it on their own without government but, in their individual daily lives, that’s not what they do; they seek out other friends and neighbors to share responsibility to mutual advantage on an array of projects.

How do our leaders and friends reconcile claiming they need no help from government but expecting aid and comfort from friends and neighbors? 

More to the point, how are they able to disregard the fact that they accept and expect help from the government as well.

When we consider more closely all these individuals who claim they can exist native, rugged, without any government assistance, we see that they drive on highways we all pay for, use water and waste systems shared with others, enjoy community supported fire and police protection, their children attend public schools, are protected by our national defense, use weather and satellite information, and so many other services they take for granted, seemingly  ignored as factually irrelevant, by atomistic Ayn-Randish citizens, who insist they need no one else, but especially no government.

This cognitive dissonance, they call independence, is really about indifference to our national challenges.

Consider the contradictory Republican messages this presidential season when Republican leaders and supporters claim they are for creating jobs by forgiving taxes to the wealthy who have created no jobs previously while they otherwise resist any jobs program that would get this nation back to work.  They say they care for the unemployed, the homeless and the hungry, but lift not a finger to lighten their load, even slandering families that feed their families with food stamps.  They are the party of women we are told even as they dictate to women what they may do with their own bodies.  They support the right to vote but suppress it with legislation calculated to restrict access to the voting booth among seniors, minorities, students, and the poor.   They are for an all-inclusive nation but resist pluralism and would cast out immigrant children who have never lived elsewhere.   They proclaim proudly, in one breath, how this nation is exceptional, and, in the next, they bash and trash our nation top to bottom.

We can’t expect a winning plan for our nation from a party that doesn’t know its own mind.  Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, said, if elected, he’ll take 8 years to balance the budget.  President Obama has a head start on a plan in place to clean up the mess that President Bush created.  Let’s stay the course.