Romney and His Plans

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – What I’m hearing is basically that whether they’re conservative or liberal, people want their king to lead them, whether it’s King Obama or King Mitt.  That disturbs me.  Why do you want the king to lead you?  Why do you want the king to take over things that the king never should have been given authority over or dominion over to start with?  You people that are running around with pocket Constitutions in your hands and quoting Article I, Section 8, why don’t you read Article II again?  How about reading Article II and disavowing yourself of this counterproductive argument that in the American system, as consecrated under the compact known as the Constitution, the president doesn’t get the choice to plan anything other than a war, should we have our legislature vote to get us in one.  He executes the laws.

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I can tell you this: I heard an awful lot of central planning yesterday, and I heard an awful lot of bombast and boast about the governor’s skills in central planning, that if you let him centrally plan the economy and him centrally plan the education, that all will be right with the world, kids will learn, they’ll all get the greatest jobs in the history of man.  They’ll all be the smartest kids they could ever be, yada, yada, yada.  It’s all because he has these plans, a five-point plan that he laid out, a charter school plan, this, that and the other.  They’re all still plans.  They’re all still manifestations of the same thing, an out-of-control executive and a people that want to elect an out-of-control executive for all the wrong reasons.  This is not what presidents are supposed to do.

What I’m hearing is basically that whether they’re conservative or liberal, people want their king to lead them, whether it’s King Obama or King Mitt.  That disturbs me.  Why do you want the king to lead you?  Why do you want the king to take over things that the king never should have been given authority over or dominion over to start with?  You people that are running around with pocket Constitutions in your hands and quoting Article I, Section 8, why don’t you read Article II again?  How about reading Article II and disavowing yourself of this counterproductive argument that in the American system, as consecrated under the compact known as the Constitution, the president doesn’t get the choice to plan anything other than a war, should we have our legislature vote to get us in one.  He executes the laws.

The reason we’re in trouble and the reason people feel so much despair is because we’ve had an entire century and a half of central education, cultural, thought planners calling themselves presidents.  All the while, those little points of light, as George Bush, Sr. called them, those little liberty points of light, they keep getting snuffed out.  The limits and checks on the president’s power keep being extinguished.  Let me just give you an example.  Let’s listen to some of these central economic plans from yesterday.

[start audio clip]

Mitt Romney: Many live in neighborhoods filled with violence and fears and empty of opportunity.  Their impatience for change is understandable.  They’re entitled to feel that life in America should be better than this.  They’re told even now to wait for improvements in our economy and in our schools, but it seems to me that these Americans have waited long enough.  The point is, when decades of the same promises keep producing the same failure, that it’s reasonable to rethink our approach and consider a new plan.  I’m hopeful that together we can set a new direction in federal policy, starting where many of our problems do start, with the family.

A study by the Brookings Institution has shown that for those who graduate from high school, who get a fulltime job and wait until 21 before they marry and then have their first child, the probability of becoming poor is two percent.  If those factors are absent, the probability of being poor is 76 percent.  Here at the NAACP, you understand the deep and lasting difference that family makes.  Your former executive director, Dr. Benjamin Hooks, had it exactly right.  The family, he said, “remains the bulwark and the mainstay of the black community.  That great truth must not be overlooked.”  [Mike: It’s hard to have families, governor, when a third of parenting-age black males are in prisons.]  Any policy that lifts up and honors the family is going to be good for the country, and that must be our goal.  As president, I will promote strong families and I will defend traditional marriage.

As you may have heard from my opponent, I’m also a believer in the free enterprise system.  I believe it can bring change where so many well-meaning government programs have failed.  I’ve never heard anyone look around an impoverished neighborhood and say, there’s just too much free enterprise around here, too many shops, too many jobs, too many people putting money in the bank.  What you hear, of course, is how do we bring in jobs?  How do we make good, honest employers want to move in, stay in?  With the state the economy is in today, we’re asking that question more and more.

Free enterprise is still the greatest force for upward mobility, economic security and the expansion of the middle class.  We’ve seen in recent years what it’s like to have less free enterprise.  As president, I’ll show the good things that can happen when we have more free enterprise, more business activity, more jobs, more opportunity, more paychecks, more savings accounts.  On day one, I’ll begin turning this economy around with a plan for the middle class, and I don’t just mean for those who are middle class now.  I also mean for those who have waited so long for their chance to join the middle class.

[end audio clip]

Mike:  What is this obsession with joining and being in the middle class?  You hear every politician alive — this is an ideology word here, middle class.  All you have to do is say “middle class” and all is forgiven.  It doesn’t even matter what it is.  There’s more of this where he lays out his five-point central economic planning platform.  You heard it there.  You hear the bravado about free enterprise, which is all good and I’m glad he says it.  Then you finish it off with, okay, it’s not really free enterprise, governor, if you have plans on how you’re going to plan some of the allocation of the resources, whether it’s through tax codes, whether it’s through adjustments to regulations.  That’s not free enterprise.  Free enterprise is exactly what it is.  It’s free and it’s enterprise, meaning that there is exchange in between willing participants.  There’s no third guy that’s a referee.  The referee is the consumer.  Why can’t people get this through their heads?  The reason he can’t say things like I just said is because your average person that does not listen to this mainstream radio broadcast every day is of the opinion that their king is the referee, not the consumer.  It is their king’s job to set all that is wrong and make it right.

I’m reminded of that scene in Talladega Nights where Gary Cole plays Will Ferrell’s dad when they’re eating as a reunited happy family at the Applebee’s.  Gary Cole decides that he’s got to get out of the family.  He’s going to start hollering and screaming at the waitress for putting onions on his Bourbon Street steak.  He ultimately decides, “I think y’all trying to put them onions on my Bourbon Street steak.”  The end result is that Gary Cole, the dad, winds up being thrown out of the Applebee’s restaurant.  They can throw Gary Cole out of the Applebee’s restaurant because there was some free enterprise going there.  They could choose whether or not to serve him.  If there was a government referee there, they would not have been able to throw Gary Cole out, unless there was a government policy that said that they could.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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