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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Obama should do some fact-checking of a president with a superior record
by Jarrett Stepman
In an energy speech in Maryland on Thursday, President Barack Obama decided
to take a whack at a former Republican president who drew Democratic ire for
“stealing” an election.
While blaming former President George W. Bush has been a pastime for Obama,
he had to reach farther back and make even wilder claims to explain the
country’s reluctance to embrace his energy policies.
“One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said
about the telephone: 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use
one? He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward. He's explaining why
we can't do something instead of why we can do something,” Obama said in
his energy speech on Thursday.
Obama then insinuated that Rutherford B. Hayes, the Civil War general from
Ohio, was a particularly poor president and was backward-looking, along with
the Republican Party.
“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama said of Hayes.
Obama was not only being unfair in attacking the late 19th century president
, but he also badly misrepresented Hayes’s views and record.
While Hayes had many detractors during his own time, including one of
America’s greatest historians, Henry Adams, a descendent of the Founding
Father, John Adams, who called Hayes “a third rate nonentity, whose only
recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one,” Hays was never accused
of being “anti-technology.”
Hayes was no backwards Luddite as Obama suggested, but a man intensely
interested in cultivating new technologies and using them to expand the
effectiveness of the presidential office itself. Hayes was the first
president to use a telephone and a typewriter in the White House and said
when he used the telephone for the first time, "that is wonderful."
Hays was also the first to travel to the West Coast, which would have been a
difficult task for a president if he couldn’t use trains and the recently
finished Transcontinental Railroad for transportation.
Not only was Hayes a friend to technology, but he was also the friend of a
man who is given credit for inventing some of the most world-changing
technologies, Thomas Edison. Edison brought a phonograph, which is used to
record sound, into the White House in 1878. Hayes eagerly embraced the new
technology.
What is strange is that President Obama and his administration didn’t do
any fact-checking of Hayes before trashing him. Perhaps it is because of the
official White House profile of Hayes, which strangely never mentions his
love of technology and instead focuses on the charge that Republicans stole
the presidency in 1876.
The charge that Hays had stolen the 1876 election is nearly as shaky as the
accusation that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election against former Vice
President Al Gore.
Even though it is probable that some of Hayes’s supporters did try to rig
the results of elections in many new, western states, Samuel Tilden, who was
his Democratic opponent, was accused of trying to bribe electors in Florida
, South Carolina and Oregon. This accusation came out several years after
the election in the so-called, Cipher Dispatches. Also, Democrats had
frequently intimidated black voters in the South from voting for Republicans
which kept many states solidly Democrat.
The point is that Hayes won a contest in which both sides were most likely
cheating to some extent.
Obama’s stab at the old Buckeye State president for not being on Mount
Rushmore is even worse when you compare their records. Hays only served one
term and didn’t run again, but before that time the country was in much
better shape than today, especially considering that it was just over a
decade after the most devastating war in American history, the American
Civil War.
Hayes was successful in curbing inflation and getting government spending
under control, residing over budget surpluses every year in office and
helping repair and economy that had been devastated in the Panic of 1873.
Unlike Obama, who presided over an America with a downgraded credit rating,
Hayes restored the credit of the United States.
Hayes slashed a great deal of government bureaucracy; he specifically
cracked down on the New York Customs House, which was extorting money from
hard-working merchants.
Hays took even bolder action when he called upon federal troops to put down
a massive railroad strike in 1877 that took place across six states and
threatened to shut down the train traffic throughout the Northeast and
Midwest. It was a movement that bore incredibly similar comparisons to the
communist movements that were growing in Europe.
Given Obama’s comments it must be assumed that he knows relatively little
about former President Hayes, but perhaps he should take notes on a
president who was unlikely to acquiesce to such inflationary policies as
quantitative easing, the creation of new bureaucracies like the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau and would certainly not have shut down the
Keystone Pipeline project that could create jobs for thousands of Americans
and make the country more energy independent.
Rutherford B. Hays may not be great enough to put on Mount Rushmore, but
President Obama has a long way to go to be as good as the Republican general
from Ohio.
Jarrett Stepman is a staff writer at Human Events and a contributor to The
Chase 2012 section. He is a graduate of UC Davis, where he studied Political
Science. |
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