Obama’s previous visit to Alaska was to an AFB. He never actually visited any other parts of the state.President Obama is declaring that Mt. McKinley henceforth shall be named Mt. Denali, after the Athabascan tribal name despite the fact that legislation to do so has failed. The New York Sun editorializes:
…legislation has been before Congress to change the name, but the Congress has decided not to do so. If the Supreme Court has been clear about anything it has been that the failure of Congress to act doesn’t amount to license for the other branches to act. (snip)
[Denali is] the name the state’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, sought to attach to the mountain via legislation she earlier this year introduced, to no effect. Legislators from Ohio understood better, and moved to block the measure. William McKinley may never have been to the mountain, but he was an important and assassinated president.
As my colleague Rick Moran points out, the Department of the Interior routinely renames natural points of interest all the time, so legislation may not be necessary. But Obama’s motives are purely political, pandering to leftist sentiment that regards everything pre-European as holy, and everything accomplished by white males as illegitimate.
For those who don’t know, William McKinley was an immensely popular Republican president, as the Sun reminds us:
From his front porch in 1896, he ran one of the most remarkable campaigns in American history, defeating the Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, who ran for the free coinage of silver — a campaign of inflation — by attacking the Jews. It was one of the few anti-Semitic campaigns in American history. McKinley defeated it handily and gained passage in 1900 of the Gold Standard Act, which set the stage for the great boom of the 20th century.
