BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

There has been much written about President Obama’s speech in Roanoke, VA, on July 13. What drew so much attention was this: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet…”

There is some discussion as to what “that” refers, whether it is the small business or the “unbelievable American system”. But semantics is a distraction.

The debate should be over the speech itself, not its sentence construction.

He said what he said; whether he meant what he said is smoke in a windstorm.  It’s easy to see through it.

I went to the White House website and read the entire speech. It was at times disjointed, and at other times reminiscent of the skillful populist prose of 2008. It defined Barack Obama well and it said a great deal about his view of the last four years and what the next four would look like in an Obama second term.  His address served up many of his major campaign themes, but the main message was his signature: We are a nation divided between victims and villains, and it is by the hand of the public sector that the villains must be regulated and the victims emancipated.

The speech was a reaffirmation of President Obama’s belief that government is the embodiment of social justice, economic equality, and basic fairness. According to him, it is the public sector, therefore, that really makes possible the benefits derived from American’s entrepreneurial spirit and the capitalist marketplace. In other words government regulation does not constrain business, it enables it.

According to President Obama, if it weren’t for government, there would be no running water in the store, no sidewalk out front, no fire department down the street, and no roads on which the owner and the employees get back and forth to work and, therefore, no small business. He should have been born a hundred years earlier so he could have taken up arms and megaphone in the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Obama message is not new, of course, and not even in this election cycle. It was introduced many months ago in the campaign thematic of ultra-liberal Elizabeth Warren, President Obama’s kindred spirit, who is challenging Republican Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

The President’s speech in Roanoke, VA, does what the press and political pundits are always clamoring for in political campaigns and then don’t recognize it when they see and hear it–the core issues or beliefs that both define and distinguish the candidates. The media and paid pundits are too preoccupied with when Mitt Romney left Bain Capital or when and if he will release more income tax returns, or whether the President has spent enough time on the job or whether the Obama campaign has raised enough money. They obsess over dogs on car rooftops and where candidates spent their summer vacation.

They spend way too little time opening those doors and into how our leaders will make decisions. President Obama opened the door a little farther in that southern Virginia college town. He said stuff that should make a lot of us nervous,

He was correct that America is a country of community, common interest and mutual aid, but it is by no means that in the communal sense of which Mr. Obama spoke. We are more fundamentally, a society of individuals who still cherish the freedom and independence our forefathers fought for. We live together, but we think and act too independently to ever be able to conform to the Obama vision.

The community is not us. We are the community.

We all benefit from the roads, the bridges, the schools and the water lines, but we do not derive them through the benevolence of the socialist republic the President sees in our future. The people provide those public necessities in a democratic republic form of governance in which the government is not the enabler, but merely the facilitator. It is a form of governance under which the people never relinquish their control of the power or the purse. President Obama rejects American republicanism, which is a weak presidency and a strong legislature, a limited government and diluted power. He has done everything he can to cement power in the executive thereby usurping the prerogatives of the people and the Congress, which is the people’s house.

It is worth mentioning here, too, that those top one percent that Obama insists upon engaging in class warfare, pay 37 percent of the tax dollars that build those bridges and schools. The top 10 percent of taxpayers pay 70 percent of the total. So when the small businessman is asked to keep in mind who built the sidewalk out front, all he/she has to do is look in the mirror.

Barack Obama is a product of the public sector and he is its greatest champion. He has lived a different life than 99 percent of us, the beneficiary of an Ivy League education and tutoring.  He is a political activist, turned state legislator, turned national legislator, turned President, all in the blink of an eye. He has been and remains the captive of his own environment, unable to maneuver outside it and therefore unable to govern us effectively.

He is not to be faulted. He is only to be understood.

His is a legitimate vision of governance. It has as much right on the table of public discourse as any other. But if you buy into his vision, let the buyer beware. It is still what it was four years ago, a major transformational change from where we are and who we are as a nation and a people. President Obama made it clear, as he has done in many interviews on many occasions, where his first term came up short was not in its policy direction or the philosophy behind it, but in its lack of proper articulation.

The mistake he is making is the same mistake Republicans are making in articulating their view of the role of government.  His view doesn’t have much context in the lives of most Americans. They are tired of the back and forth over the size of government and even the role it should play in their lives, which neither side seems to get right.  Americans  just want a government that works, and are hard pressed to find political leaders who know how to do that.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.