House Speaker John Boehner was asked yesterday why President Obama didn’t mention the notion of “American exceptionalism” in his State of the Union address. Boehner replied: “You can’t get the left to talk about it. They don’t — they reject that notion.”
Boehner was on CNN’s Parker Spitzer, and Kathleen Parker asked him about the speech: “But I didn’t hear him say it and I thought at a time when you’re building a speech around sort of defining the common purpose of America, that seemed to me a rather — you know, a simple direct line, fairly — pretty much a no-brainer, but he didn’t say it.”
Boehner replied:
Well, they — they’ve refused to talk about America exceptionalism. We are different than the rest of the world. Why? Because Americans have — the country was built on an idea that ordinary people could decide what their government looked like and ordinary people could elect their own leaders.
And 235 years ago that was a pretty novel idea. And so we are different. Why is our economy still 20 times the size of China’s? Because Americans have had the freedom to succeed, the freedom to fail. We’ve got more innovators, more entrepreneurs, and that is exceptional but you can’t get the left to talk about it. They don’t — they reject that notion.
When asked why, Boehner said: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re afraid of it, whether they don’t believe it. I don’t know.”
Here’s the video, at about the 5:10 mark:
