Kevin Burns, University of Dallas News: Obama Community Labor.
Shortly after his election, President-elect Obama set up a new website, change.gov, to promote his future agenda. While most of this website contains the usual political jargon about innovative plans and hope, the section on community service has raised quite a few eyebrows. “The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges … Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year…”
You read that correctly. Obama apparently wants to institute forced community service for students from middle school to college.
This may seem too ridiculous to believe. After all, couldn’t this be a mistake made by a webmaster or low-level spokesperson? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Obama’s original plan, found on his campaign website reads, “Obama and Biden will set a goal that all middle and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year, and will establish a new tax credit that is worth $4,000 a year in exchange for 100 hours of public service a year.” Why the change? (pun fully intended) Is this actually the difference between campaign and post-election? Why didn’t the Obama campaign simply copy-and-paste the old text and make a few minor changes? They did, eventually, but not before the blogosphere had gone wild with the issue for 24 hours.
It is possible that this was no simple mistake. Obama’s new chief of staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (IL), wants to institute three months of “Universal Civil Defense Training” for college-aged Americans. The general idea is that these trained young people would be able to provide aid in the case of a national disaster. Sounds nice, until you realize that, “It’s required of everybody, 18 to 25, three months.” An interviewer from the New York Daily News discussed the issue with Emanuel, who gave hazy answers on uniforms and barracks. I’m not even kidding, you can listen for yourself on YouTube. He argued that this mandatory service was necessary, “because we have a lot more challenges.”
Simply put, this level of incompetence, if that’s what it is, is completely inexcusable. Either Barack Obama or his staff have problems understanding the principle of liberty. Sarah Palin was ripped for saying she could see Russia from her house. Obama has gotten away, unscathed by the national media, for suggesting the 13th Amendment be nullified.
Obviously, the Obama plan received enough negative press that it had to be altered - or corrected. There is no chance that Obama and the newly elected Democratic Congress could institute mandatory service for America’s youth. The country simply wouldn’t stand for it. However, the fact that such a thing may have been considered by the Obama campaign, and is being considered by Obama’s new chief of staff is, to say the least, extremely disconcerting.
Examiner: Obama’s Compulsory Service Proposal.
Heritage Foundation: “A proposal for American Serfdom.”