Payne: 'Fundamentally transforming the United States of America'

Give President Obama his due. He is fulfilling his campaign promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Some myopic commentators have expressed surprise claiming that Obama sold himself as a moderate – but they weren’t paying attention. From his radical, patronizing 2007 speech to the Detroit Economic Club promising that he would force them to build hybrid cars to his 2007 promise of “universal health care by the end of my first term” to Joe Biden in 2008 pledging “no new coal plants here in America,” this is a Democratic ticket that has consistently believed that America needed an Extreme Makeover.

This week, that transformation was in full view as Obama’s nationalization of the health sector clashed with Constitutional principles before the Supreme Court and as Obama’s EPA decreed an end to coal power.

This is sweeping stuff. And yes, Obama has exercised disturbing, authoritarian means to get there including procedural sleight-of-hand to ram through the partisan health care bill, an unconstitutional individual mandate, and now executive branch emissions edicts that bypass the legislative process.

But liberals have not been shy that transformation includes end-running democratic process. Most famously, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, one of the leading intellectual influences on the Obama White House and author of “Hot, Flat, and Crowded,” has been openly jealous of Chinese Communist rule as a way of quickly imposing societal makeovers that force green technologies.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for,” President Obama said of his victory in 2008. He promised “change” and America is getting it good and hard.