{"id":25847,"date":"2012-01-26T07:22:10","date_gmt":"2012-01-26T13:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=25847"},"modified":"2012-01-26T07:22:10","modified_gmt":"2012-01-26T13:22:10","slug":"defining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=25847","title":{"rendered":"Defining"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As it happens, APM&#8217;s &#8220;Public Insight Network&#8221; is\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicinsightnetwork.org\/preview\/form\/american-public-media\/6246bc4bbfaf\/the-defining-issue-of-our-time\">asking about the same bit fof the State of the Union that stuck in my craw the other night<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In his State of the Union Address to Congress, President Obama talked about what he called &#8220;the basic American promise&#8221; &#8212; that if people worked hard, they could afford a home, college for their kids and some savings for retirement.<\/p>\n<p>Is that still YOUR expectation of America?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They&#8217;ve put it in the form of a survey question.<\/p>\n<p>My answer went a little something like this: \u00a0It&#8217;s one of the questions that defines the difference between conservatives and liberals.<\/p>\n<p>In my world, America isn&#8217;t defined by our government <em>or <\/em>any material possessions or financial status symbols. \u00a0It&#8217;s about opportunity and liberty; the\u00a0opportunity\u00a0to succeed by dint of my merits and talents (or fail through the lack of them).<\/p>\n<p>My &#8220;expectation of America&#8221; is that the government that I elect will shut up and get out of the way and let private enterprise &#8211; me &#8211; take care of things.<\/p>\n<p>That pretty much covers it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As it happens, APM&#8217;s &#8220;Public Insight Network&#8221; is\u00a0asking about the same bit fof the State of the Union that stuck in my craw the other night. In his State of the Union Address to Congress, President Obama talked about what he called &#8220;the basic American promise&#8221; &#8212; that if people worked hard, they could afford [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-universe-and-everything","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25847"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25861,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25847\/revisions\/25861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}