Andrew Malcolm gives a bad grade to Barack Obama’s commencement address at The Ohio State University:

 Obama feels forced to talk about how things are decaying, and not just those rusting bridges. How politically dysfunctional and divided is the capitol city he vowed to fix way back what now seems an eternity ago. How the country really needs to be so much better to live up to his expectations.

Obama’s telepromptered rhetoric is still steeped in the combative, corrective, community organizer language of radically changing the nation that he didn’t grow up in and that scores of millions of citizens are really pretty happy with, even as they acknowledge collective national faults to work on as generations have before.

“People who love their country can change it for the better,” the president informed a partially-filled stadium of Ohio State enthusiasts on Sunday. They thought they’d come to celebrate what they or a loved one had just accomplished in academe.

They got brief celebratory commencement political yada-yada about this being an important day in their own lives. But with Obama there’s always an undercurrent of unhappiness and discontent, of dissatisfaction with whatever anyone has just accomplished. NBA, NCAA, NASCAR champs yes, that’s OK.

That’s never enough, however. Don’t go feeling too good. You didn’t build that yourself. You really have to do something else, help somebody else, build something else. As if everyone grew up fatherless and must spend an entire futile life proving something. …

Seriously? This Democrat is peddling victim-hood to new college graduates? That awful raw deal they’re enduring graduating from a world-renowned university on the brink of bountiful lives in the freest land in the history of the planet? Dear God, please help them live through this terrible time of trial and tribulation!

Or how about this Obama claim?

“Now, if we’re being honest with ourselves,” Obama declared dishonestly, “as you’ve studied and worked and served to become good citizens, the fact is that all too often the institutions that give structure to our society have, at times, betrayed your trust.”

No, he wasn’t talking about a major party leader betraying all the promises he made in 2007-08 about balancing the budget, cutting the deficit, closing Guantanamo, bringing Washington together.

He wasn’t blaming Wall Street capitalists for donating so much of their profits to his campaigns. He was blaming them for trying to make so much money without regard to others. If you can imagine such a thing in a competitive free society. …

According to Obama, the United States of America that he sees in all of his expensive excursions aboard Air Force One for one or two photo ops per week is not much interested in patriotism or citizenship. (His next trip comes Thursday, by the way, down to Texas to celebrate its (Republican) job growth.)

“We don’t always talk about this idea much these days — citizenship — let alone celebrate it,” bemoaned the man, who as a new candidate didn’t bother with the tedious hand-over-the-heart thing during the National Anthem.

“Sometimes, we see (citizenship) as a virtue from another time, a distant past, one that’s slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition above all else; a society awash in instant technology that empowers us to leverage our skills and talents like never before, but just as easily allows us to retreat from the world. And the result is that we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share as one American family.”

Can you believe this bunkum? What “larger bonds” have you noticed disappearing from America, not counting the fiscal discipline thrown under Obama’s armored bus?

A troubled nation that “celebrates individual ambition above all else”? Like, say, a mixed race freshman senator out of the nation’s most crooked political machine convincing himself that he should be the first black president of the United States? And enough voters buying his promises to put him and his Chicago cronies there? Tawdry, presumptuous individual ambition like that?

What Obama didn’t say in his Ohio commencement address — but more of us need to remember — is that people who love their country can also fight to keep it as good as it always has been. Which, among other things, involves opposing this guy’s relentless efforts to keep its vaunted social elements divided and to sow suspicions of its once-revered institutions at every opportunity in order to ease their radical transformation by his hand.

Roger Pilon adds:

The country’s Founders trusted citizens with “awesome authority,” he told the assembled graduates. Really?

Actually, the Founders distrusted us, at least in our collective capacity. That’s why they wrote a Constitution that set clear limits on what we, as citizens, could do through government.

Mr. Obama seems never to appreciate that essential point about the American political order. As with his countless speeches that lead ultimately to an expression of the president’s belief in the unbounded power of government to do good, he began in Columbus with an insight that we can all pretty much embrace, at least in the abstract. Citizenship, Mr. Obama said, is “the idea at the heart of our founding—that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities—to ourselves, to one another, and to future generations.”

Well enough. But then he took that insight to lengths the Founders would never have imagined. Reading “citizenship” as standing for the many ways we can selflessly “serve our country,” the president said that “sometimes, we see it as a virtue from another time—one that’s slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition.” And “we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share, as one American family.”

Not for nothing did he invoke the family, that elemental social unit in which we truly are responsible to one another and to future generations—by law, by custom, and, ideally, in our hearts. But only metaphorically is America a family, its members bound by tendrils of intimacy and affection. Realistically, the country is a community of individuals and private institutions, including the family, with their own interests, bound not by mutual love but by the political principles that are set forth in the Constitution, a document that secures and celebrates the freedom to pursue those interests, varied as they might be.

Alas, that is not Mr. Obama’s vision. “The Founders left us the keys to a system of self-government,” he went on, “the tool to do big and important things together that we could not possibly do alone.” And what “big and important things” cannot be done except through government? On the president’s list are railroads, the electrical grid, highways, education, health care, charity and more. One imagines a historical vision reaching as far back as the New Deal. Americans “chose to do these things together,” he added, “because we know this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition.”

Notice that twice now Mr. Obama has invoked “individual ambition,” and not as a virtue. For other targets, he next counseled the graduates against the “voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works.”

The irony here should not go unnoticed: The opponents that the president disparages are the same folks who tried to save the country from one of the biggest pieces of gum now in the works: Mr. Obama’s own health-care insurance program, which today is filling many of its backers with dread as it moves toward full implementation in a matter of months.

None of that darkens Mr. Obama’s sunny view of collective effort. What does upset him, still, is the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis: “Too many on Wall Street,” he said, “forgot that their obligations don’t end with their shareholders.” No mention of the Federal Reserve, or Fannie Mae,Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, or the many other “big and important things” government undertook before the crisis hit, things that explain the disaster far better than any Wall Street greed. None of that fits in Mr. Obama’s morality play. For that matter, neither do the Constitution’s checks and balances. When the president laments that “democracy isn’t working as well as we know it can,” he is not talking about those big, misbegotten public projects but about the Washington gridlock that has frustrated his grander plans. …

A more inspiring message might have urged graduates not to reject their own country, where for two centuries far more than a lucky few have prospered under limited constitutional government—and even more would today if that form of government were restored.

Jan. 20, 2017 cannot come soon enough.