George Will wrote a column recently entitled, “Historically Incorrect.” In it he recounts the interview last month in which the President was asked why he thought that he was so unpopular in the State of Texas. Obama replied: “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.”


The statement is inadequate, and that is being kind. In point of fact, it is, well, historically incorrect. Texas seceded with the Lower South in 1861 and, for historic reasons, was part of the Solid South after Reconstruction—meaning that it was solidly Democrat. Will argues the president reflects a conceit of so many baby boomers, who view the world entirely from when they began, and not from any larger historic context or perspective. For most of President Obama’s adult political life then, Texas has been Republican.


Deeply Protestant, Texas voted in the presidential election for Republican Herbert Hoover, against a Catholic Democrat from New York, Al Smith in 1928. It didn’t vote for a Republican again, however, until 1952 and 1956 when Texas went for Republican and war hero Dwight David Eisenhower. It didn’t do that again until 1972 when Texas voted for Richard M. Nixon. Four years later, the State reverted back to Democrat roots supporting fellow Southerner, Jimmy Carter.


Texas didn’t elect a U.S. Senator who was a Republican until 1961 (John Tower), or a second until 1984 (Phil Gramm). There were never so many as three Republicans in the U.S. House delegation from Texas until 1968, and Republicans did not comprise a majority of U.S. Congressmen from Texas until 2005!


The kind of error in the president’s statement is perhaps only academic, but he is after all Harvard educated. It is more likely politically motivated and expedient to simply substitute the codeword “Republican” for the word conservative and by stereotypic inference, white home rule. It reminds one of another Democrat in the White House not too long ago, and equally gifted with elastics and gymnastics of language, such that, he argued against the common understanding of the word “is.”


Society at large no longer attributes rigorous meaning to words, and so text does not mean what it says. Students no longer memorize poems or preambles, because the words are meaningless anyway. Moreover, in history they stopped memorizing the dates and facts a generation or more ago. There is therefore no chronology to know or to reference. Events become as meaningless and as detached, as the words there are to describe them. Western logic is lost, and if this situation is not intentional it is at least convenient.


The President also said recently of Paul Ryan (R-WI), that his budget proposal “would lead to a fundamentally different America… than what we’ve known throughout our history.” Ryan’s plan reduces federal spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from the 2009-2011 average of 24.4% to 19.9% in 10 years. It was not until 1934 that peacetime federal spending topped even 10% of GDP! With the war preparations attendant to World War II, federal spending only reached 12%. Of course, I suppose the metrics which our president intended, depends upon the definition of the word “fundamentally” (whatever that is, is).


Rep. Ryan’s plan alters Medicare, but Medicare has existed in its current configuration for just 46 years of the nation’s 235 years. Moreover, even with increases according to the Ryan plan for out of pocket expenditures by some seniors, the total in every category is less than it was under President Kennedy. Ryan’s plan expands states’ discretion in the administration of Medicaid, but state discretion is historically where all healthcare programs and issues reside. Qualitatively the plan amounts to some slight recognition of the Founders’ Original Intent, and also to what the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights in its text actually says.


The president is either stupid or intentionally deceiving. If the latter, he might be called a liar. George Will makes it sound more clinical, that baby boomer politicians have this mental handicap or “inability to think beyond the straight-line continuation of programs from the second and third quarters of the last century.” He explains, “Liberals think Medicare and Social Security as they exist are ‘fundamental’ to the nation’s identity. But [they] think the Constitution—which the Framers meant to be fundamental, meaning constituting, law—should be construed as a ‘living’ document, continually evolving to take different meanings under whatever liberals consider new social imperatives.”


The cautionary lesson to be gleaned is that knowledge and a full and accurate accounting of U.S. History, provides a much better and more complete set, as well as sense of the political possibilities. It is very important what we know and reference and that we know and reference. Sadly we cannot count on our leaders to be truthful or to communicate fairly and objectively. American history is being sacrificed and contorted regularly by the Obama Administration in the interest of its ideological and perhaps generational conviction, that whatever government programs exist should forever exist, because they have always existed in their limited, though self-magnified and self-important temporal lifespan.

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary and is currently Chairman of the Central Texas Tea Party and State Director of Republican Freedom Coalition (RFC). Email: Wes@WesRiddle.com.