Obama’s ‘Fundamental Transformation’ Began at Mizzou

Obama’s statement in October 2008 that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” is well-known.

Less well-known is the fact that he said it at Mizzou–the focus of the campus upheaval now sweeping the nation.

Conservatives point to that phrase as an early clue of Obama’s radical agenda for the nation–one he kept carefully hidden through most of the election, one that the media took little interest in exploring, one it took a question from “Joe the Plumber” to extract.

In the years since, Obama has distanced himself from the remark. In 2014, he told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News that he merely meant the phrase to refer to the non-controversial, shared yet neglected idea that “in America, if you work hard, you can get ahead.”

But if that were true, Obama would have spoken of “restoring” America–not “transforming” it.

The truth was that Obama wanted his presidency to change America forever by exploiting the economic crisis to pass a series of radical left-wing policies years in the making. The idea was that the public would become more accepting of radical changes once it had experienced a few of the more popular reforms–or that resistance from conservatives and from business interests would at least have been broken, politically.

The chaos at the University of Missouri, which caused the university president to resign last week and has led to a wave of copycat protests across the nation, is essential to Obama’s strategy.

Indeed, that is why the White House endorsed the Missouri protests–despite the fact that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by university administrators, despite the fact that demonstrators were breaking the law and violating freedom of the press, and despite the fact that Obama himself had criticized political correctness earlier in the year.

Obama, ever the community organizer, relies on a permanently agitated, divided and aggrieved population to create the sense of crisis that is the only context in which people are willing to accept radical change.

That is why what began at Mizzou still goes on.