◼ He does not understand the sources of economic mobility. - Rich Lowry/National Review
A haze of ugliness hung over Pres. Barack Obama earlier this week in Osawatomie, Kan., where he delivered a speech as malodorous as an Occupy Wall Street encampment and about as thoughtful.
...We should endeavor to create the conditions for economic growth, transform education fundamentally, and champion the bourgeois virtues at every opportunity. But President Obama only wants shiny new wrapping paper for his same old proposals — taxes on the rich, infrastructure spending, and regulation. This familiar litany is now supposed to be the answer to complex, decades-long trends. It’s good to know he takes himself so seriously; no one else should.
◼ Obama’s campaign for class resentment - Charles Krauthammer/Washington Post
In the first month of his presidency, Barack Obama averred that if in three years he hadn’t alleviated the nation’s economic pain, he’d be a “one-term proposition.”
When three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track” and even Bill Clinton calls the economy “lousy,” how then to run for a second term? Traveling Tuesday to Osawatomie, Kan., site of a famous 1910 Teddy Roosevelt speech, Obama laid out the case.
It seems that he and his policies have nothing to do with the current state of things. Sure, presidents are ordinarily held accountable for economic growth, unemployment, national indebtedness (see Obama, above). But not this time. Responsibility, you see, lies with the rich.
...In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!
Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.
This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?
He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.
What’s left? Class resentment. Got a better idea?
