President Barack Obama will feature eight “citizen co-chairs” at his second inauguration festivities, each of whom has purportedly benefited from policies he enacted in his first term. As with the use of children at his announcement of new gun control proposals, the purpose of the co-chairs is nakedly political: to provide concrete examples to counter conservatives’ arguments about abstract concerns such as the debt and the Constitution.
As the Associated Press points out, the use of anecdotes in presidential addresses is not new. However, the sharply partisan nature of these particular tales exceeds the norm for inaugural addresses, which typically attempt to strike a tone of national unity and historic perspective. Obama wants to reinforce the belief, which he articulated before his first inauguration, that “only government” can solve our biggest problems.
The list of “citizen co-chairs,” and their individual stories, are worth examining in detail:
Ida Edwards of Petersburg, Va., a retired nurse and advocate of Obama’s health care law who lived through the civil rights movement that inspired Obama’s career.
The civil rights movement does not belong to Obama, much less the Democratic Party, which ran the segregationist governments of the Jim Crow South. It is not clear what Ms. Edwards has done to earn the honor, aside from backing ObamaCare. But her personal story is being told in a way that reinforces Obama’s argument that health care is a “civil right” and not a service subject to the normal laws of supply and demand.
[…]
