Emptying Out the Right's Ideological Baggage

President Barack Obama ended his first prime time press conference on the "I" word.

"When I hear people just saying we don't need to do anything...then what I get a sense of is that there is some ideological blockage there that needs to be cleared up."

The ideological blockage the President's talking about is about as big as it gets.

Whose nation is this, what's its treasure to be used for and who gets to decide? Essentially, that's the "blockage" we're talking about and it's the baggage our nation's been carrying around since its start.

When an earlier senator from Illinois gave what came to be known as the Gettysburg Address conservatives hated it.

As Willmoore Kendall, a leading conservative from the mid 1900s, wrote of Abraham Lincoln: "he attempted a new act of founding, involving a startling new interpretation of that principle of the founders which declared that all men are created equal."

"We should not allow him...to 'steal' the game," Kendall wrote. Kendall's quoted in Mike Lux's new book, the Progressive Revolution, just out.

As Lux points out, what conservatives hated about Gettysburg was the proposition that equality was a central principle of US government. They didn't like the idea of a government by a single people, rather than a collection of elites. They certainly rejected the notion that US government should be a government of the people, by the people for the people. They didn't like that.