How Obama tries to rewrite our founding texts
It's a simple trick: describe something strange and radical as if it is traditional and familiar.
Obama is no longer into "transforming" America; he's into "restoring" it. From the State of the Union:
It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country – the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love.
That is a wonderfully utopian idea that has more in common with the Soviet constitution than the U.S. Constitution. Neither the word "freedom" nor the idea of liberty figures in Obama's founding vision.