Ed Feulner's Address to the Fall President's Club Meeting
November 10, 2009| By Edwin J. Feulner
Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner delivered these remarks on November 9 to open the fall 2009 President's Club meeting at the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington, D.C.
Good afternoon!
On behalf of The Heritage Foundation it is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to Washington, DC for the fall meeting of our President's Club.
Many of you are new members who are joining us for the very first time. Please stand and be recognized!
Welcome aboard!
And to those of you who have been loyal friends and generous supporters of The Heritage Foundation for so many years, welcome back!
I am especially delighted to welcome so many members of our Young President's Club. You make up an astounding 20 percent of this meeting's overall attendance. That's a total of 185 young conservatives representing the next generation here today.
Please stand as well! Congratulations!
I also want to send a special greeting to everyone in America who has signed on to MyHeritage.org to watch this event as it happens live on their computers. Welcome!
The Heritage Foundation thanks all of you for your participation. We are honored that more than 900 of you have traveled from all across our great Nation to make this one of the largest President's Club Meetings in our 37 year history.
What an extraordinary achievement!
Then again, these are not ordinary times.
According to our friend Newt Gingrich, the current madness of the modern Left could lead to "the end of American civilization as we know it."
When we last met, President Obama had just completed the first 100 days of his administration.
Looking back, conservatives saw that the groundwork had been laid for the most massive growth of government in American history. A new era of federal bailouts, nationalized industries, and stifling tax burdens had fallen upon us.
Looking ahead, we knew that the worst was yet to come--and we were right. Through both their words and their deeds, the Obama administration has made it clear that not only is government the definitive solution--they see freedom itself as the problem.
Following the Progressive agenda set by Woodrow Wilson and then pursued by FDR, Obama views the American founding as "deeply flawed" and the Constitution irrelevant to meeting today's societal demands.
But even Wilson understood that "America was established...to discover and maintain liberty among men." In Obama's world, the term "liberty" and his vocabulary are complete strangers.
Historically, every wave of progressivism has had a leader--a so-called visionary!--and every leader has had his own vision of what "progress" would entail. Obama's vision is crystal clear, and he has openly articulated it on countless occasions: "The remaking of America."
Yesterday's consensus has been rendered obsolete.
Tomorrow's possibilities remain limitless.
Far left-liberalism has resurged in a new guise and the stakes are higher than ever. We conservatives are now engaged in a new kind of battle on brand new ground.
As Claremont scholar Charles Kesler wrote this summer:
All of conservatism's past victories and defeats have brought us to the threshold of another epic struggle--a battle for America's soul--a battle that will determine whether free government will survive.
We did not seek this conflict; the President's radical ambitions have left us no choice but to fight it.
America's founding spirit and intent have come under devastating attack and urgently require a firm and forceful defense.
The potential outcome of this battle indeed hits very close to home for all us, including myself.
My wife Linda and I do not want to saddle our grandchildren with a mortgage that totals $188,000 but comes with no house.
That is the estimated cost of the unfunded liabilities we are passing on to each of them!
Let there be no mistake: the United States is at a crossroads. The future of America's course and character is being determined as we meet.
The good news is that we conservatives have the right ideas and the past 233 years of history to support them.
The bad news is for the Left: They may currently have the power, but Americans have the common sense to see where we are heading and the voice with which to object. And that is what we have done!
Last Tuesday's elections were only the beginning.
As long as any government seeks to expand and dominate a free society, there will be people who resist. And we stand with them, wherever they struggle.
Since the end of World War II, modern conservatism has upheld its task by standing athwart the forces of liberalism, yelling "Too big," "Too expensive," "Too intrusive," or simply, "No!"
We opposed whenever necessary, and stood for freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society at every corner, in every battle, against any foe, at any cost.
And by the dawn of this new millennium, conservatives had thus far succeeded in preserving the last best hope of man on earth so that our children and our children's children would enjoy a thousand years of light, not darkness; liberty, not despotism; hope, not despair.
The great tale of the 20th Century is a story of liberty's triumph over every form of tyranny. Conservatives not only witnessed the battles and debates but participated in them as the engineers behind freedom's victories. And since 1973, The Heritage Foundation has been there on the frontline.
We shifted the American consensus away from collectivism and toward greater independence; away from the regulatory State, towards freer markets; away from malaise and toward a renewal of confidence in an exceptional America.
We rallied the world to reject the totalitarian fate that Communism promised and restored the breath of democracy to those who yearned for it.
Thanks to freedom's resolve, ensured by an America led by Ronald Reagan, millions of Germans on this day in 1989 defiantly walked freely from East to West in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.
Starting the next day--twenty years ago tomorrow--piece by piece, that wall was torn down.
By the 1990's, conservative ideas had decisively won the debate.
Bill Clinton declared the era of Big Government over; the budget was balanced; welfare as we knew it came to an end. And Madeline Albright rightly called America the world's "indispensable nation" that would "stand tall...for freedom, democracy, and the American way of life" then and "into the future."
Eventually the future arrived, and the 21st Century immediately presented us with a new challenge in a suddenly dark and more dangerous world.
That challenge--the war between peace and terror, democracy and tyranny--is still with America, and Afghanistan is now the central front. It will only be resolved by our courage, determination, and leadership.
With our economy still floundering at home, our obligations abroad appear more costly than ever.
During previous times of grave challenge, when history called upon America to defend the future of freedom, we saw great leaders rise to the occasion to answer that call and preserve liberty.
Our current President has ignored history's call and is deliberately hindering America's ability to answer it.
Hence, one New York Times columnist recently saw fit to write that: "America, forced by circumstance, is cashing out."
Addressing our Nation's so-called decline, Charles Krauthammer observed that it stems from Obama's world view, which is:
...rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.
If America is indeed in a temporary state of decline, Obama is doing nothing to reverse it. Frankly, he is exacerbating it.
Rather than opting to defend the American way of life at home, Obama is busy trying to "remake America" into a land where free enterprise gives way to a long-discredited system of "spreading the wealth"; where equality of opportunity is replaced by equality of outcome; where even our health care is a government-controlled "right" to be administered by unelected bureaucrats.
Away from our shores, Obama is doing everything in his capacity to ensure that we pull up our drawbridge, shed our armor, and become just another citizen in a naively-imagined community of nations.
Under the fool's notion that George Bush made the world the way it is, Obama ignores the truth about the world's naturally evil actors and their victims.
In order to parade himself about as the very antithesis to Bush, Obama has purged the historically bipartisan American ideals of "freedom," "liberty," and "democracy" from all of his teleprompters! While our enemies are left unscathed and emboldened, our friends are left to suffer and wonder, "What happened to America?"
When thousands of Iranian dissidents risked their lives and braved great injury to take to their streets this summer, America chose not to "meddle" and looked the other way.
When our alliance with Poland and the Czech Republic interfered with Obama's cave-ins to Russia, America denied our Eastern European allies their promised missile defense shield--on the very day of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland!
When the Congress, courts, and military of Honduras carried out the constitutionally-mandated impeachment of its President, America sided with Castro and Hugo Chavez against the Honduran people.
And while Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this week, the President of the United States will not be there. Invited to attend, he shamefully declined.
Does this sound like the America you know and love?
Despite a nuclear Iran, our President insists on extending an open hand to the clenched fists of the mullahs of that once proud nation.
Despite the continually expressed hatred and intentions of Islamic extremist groups and governments, Obama continues to scold Israel while giving Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PLA a pass.
Not even the Dalia Lama could sidetrack Obama's useless quest to charm the Chinese--regardless of their egregious offenses to human dignity and human rights.
Obama may get a standing ovation from the UN General Assembly and even a Nobel Peace Prize for his methods of appeasement, but at what cost to America, to the world and to freedom?
I say this: No number of handshakes, photo ops, or smiles from tyrants afar is worth the security of our people or the devaluation of our principles!
Certainly Ronald Reagan would agree.
At CPAC in 1978, he proudly proclaimed that:
[O]ur fundamental aim in foreign policy must be to ensure our own survival and to protect those others who share our values. Under no circumstances should we have any illusions about the intentions of those who are enemies of freedom.
And Ronald Reagan was not afraid to celebrate America's special place in world history. He knew that faith to our founding principles was non-negotiable, and that because of it:
This constitutional republic, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, prospered and grew strong. To this day, America is still the abiding alternative to tyranny. That is our purpose in the world--nothing more and nothing less.
Simply put: Ronald Reagan believed in America.
Barack Obama believes in Barack Obama.
We have heard him speak of pushing a metaphorical "reset button" to wash away America's allegedly polluted past, so that he may redeem us of our history and "start fresh."
But America does not need to be redeemed anymore than it needs to be "remade." Our history is undeniably noble. And our history did not begin on that cold election night in Chicago last November. If it did, then we must ask ourselves:
Should we rebuild that statue of Saddam?
Should we pull the Iron Curtain back over Eastern Europe?
Should we wipe our footprint off the moon?
Should we un-plant our flag at Iwo Jima?
While we're at it, should we take down the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument?
Should we tear the Constitution from our law books?
Should we throw away the Declaration of Independence?
The answer, of course, is a resounding "No!"
But the Left would have us forget our history so that they can dictate our future. Only then could they truly "remake" our country into the European-style socialist state they so desperately crave.
That is why, with so-called "progress" on their mind, Obama and his allies in Congress have launched an unprecedented attack on the founding principles of our nation.
Radical ideas more than a century old have resurfaced within the inner sanctums of our government.
America is now suffering from the most leftist leadership it has ever seen. Like a disease, the symptoms are worsening as time goes by.
The policies of the last nine months are rapidly making us less free, less safe, and less like the world leader we ought to be.
Our national identity as the beacon of liberty and hope is dimming toward a flicker.
Our Shining City on a Hill is caught in a fog.
And our leaders in government are not curing this condition. They are encouraging it.
But hope is not lost!
In his just-released book, We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future, our own Matthew Spalding writes that recent events have made clear as never before the choice we now face:
"To continue our lurch toward the soft despotism Tocqueville warned about, or to rediscover our principles and renew the cause of liberty."
In a recent visit to The Heritage Foundation, Professor Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College insisted that "Obama is a great gift to those who want to restore Constitutional government to the United States" and that "when you have a party in power that is going to shove things down people's throats" the way this President and Congress are trying to do, "the American people get riled up!"
The grassroots eruption of ordinary American citizens over the past year is something that none of us have seen before in our lifetime. It arose after those in charge of our government set out to remake an America that, at its core, loves and respects its traditions and everything that it has stood for. It does not wish to be remade.
By their own will and on their own dime, millions of people have assembled across our country to tell Washington that the federal government has become too damn big, too wasteful, and too interfering in the lives of those who pay for it all.
Last spring, Americans protested on Tax Day.
This summer, Americans confronted their elected representatives face to face at televised town hall meetings.
And this fall, Americans marched by the hundreds of thousands here in our Nation's capital in an historic 9/12 Tea Party.
The Left has pushed their radical agenda and Americans are pushing back!
And they have now begun to make their voices heard where it really counts--at the ballot box.
Still, our mission to rescue America is far from over. It is only beginning!
Waging a successful counter-revolution against the Left's attack on our Nation's First Principles will require the promotion of stronger ideas and the right means to convey them. That's where we come in! Your Heritage Foundation.
At a time when Americans are shouting out that they can no longer depend on this federal government to preserve the most awesome experiment in human liberty, The Heritage Foundation stands as the alternative.
We are now freedom's most important advocate here in Washington. And through our leadership for America, The Heritage Foundation will restore the timeless principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution to their rightful place in the policies that affect our Nation.
Remember Feulner's 6th Law: There are no permanent victories in Washington... but there are no permanent defeats either.
We have it in our power to turn this new liberal era into a brief, lamentable moment. That mission depends on the strength and support of all us here.
With freedom's future hanging in the balance, this is truly an exciting time to be a conservative!
And as we gather here today, I am proud to report that, thanks to all of you, The Heritage Foundation has never been stronger or more determined.
When we first began our Leadership for America campaign in 2007, our goal was to recruit 1,000,000 members by 2017. At our last meeting in May--just six months ago--I reported to you that our number reached 440,000. Six months later, we now have more than 545,000 dues-paying members of The Heritage Foundation! We will have to move to a bigger room next May!
Our staff and scholars are working harder than ever to sustain our success and to keep us conservatives equipped with the most powerful and far-reaching research from the best think tank in the world.
Our message is being spread on every front: television, radio, internet, newspapers, books, policy pamphlets, and film.
Our audience now includes the media, the military, academia, members of Congress and their staff, and of course, the American people.
Soon, The Heritage Foundation will be moving even closer to the action on the Hill when we open our new four-story House Annex on Pennsylvania Avenue--just a block away from the House of Representatives!
Back at our Senate-side headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue, Heritage is currently hosting a breathtaking art exhibit known as The Gulag Collection. It is a series of paintings depicting the horrifying reality of the Soviet Gulag and the deadly torment it inflicted on its prisoners.
Indeed, they are portraits of pure evil.
But they are also reminders of what we are so blessed to have, and what so many other men and women have been denied for so long: Freedom.
It is not only our highest ideal, it is our founding purpose. An America that is not committed to liberty is not truly America. The Heritage Foundation is not only leading our Nation during these tumultuous times--we are fighting for our national future.
When our heroes fighting overseas return home, we want them to recognize this country! Their country--the country they love!
Americans are born into liberty because brave men long ago fought and died to win it for us. But it is our task to keep it.
This country will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave. And it is the responsibility of The Heritage Foundation to make sure that every brave citizen has at his and her disposal the right tools and ideas necessary to win our unending fight for freedom.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is a great patriot and a friend of freedom. He said at The Heritage Foundation just two months ago: "Presidents will come and go, but there will always be The Heritage Foundation." That will only remain true because of committed conservatives like you.
With your support, we will show the Left that we are fighting back!
In conclusion, my dear friends, when you come into The Heritage Foundation, I want to call your particular attention to two things. The first is the magnificent Saint-Gauden's bust of Abraham Lincoln that our former Trustee, Lew Lehrman, gave us. The brooding Lincoln looking down on us will be the subject of my final quote.
I also want to call your attention to an inlay in the front lobby floor. The inlay specifically reads, "This chandelier illuminated the birthplace of the American Constitution, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1924-1972."
There is a story behind that chandelier. Eighteen years ago, Linda and I came across it while rummaging around an antiques shop in Philadelphia. It was tarnished, dirty and non-functioning. The owner of the small shop told us its history, and we knew where it had to be. I called a significant Heritage donor who, on the spot, made a commitment for the price of that chandelier--as I recall, it was about $12,000 in its current condition.
We had it restored and it now has pride of place in the lobby of our Founders' Hall. There hangs one of the three chandeliers that illuminated the long room at Independence Hall for more than 70 years during the last century. And that illumination extends over to the bust of Abraham Lincoln.
So, right at Heritage, we have direct links back to our Founding Fathers and to America's 16th President who I will quote now in conclusion:
The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.
As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.
We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history....
The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation....
We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth....
The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Thank you.
