The Heart of Obama

Here is an article by Daniel Henninger that appears in the Wall Street Journal this morning. It gets to the heart of Obama's purpose and THE MAJOR REASON I stand four-square against him as President of the United States. What the article below does not pursue are the wider implications of Obama's policy and direction. Obama's campaign is not just a campaign against wealth, it is a campaign against success - each and every success. Why?

Obama is not distinguishing between those who earned their money honestly, providing a valued product that people want. If he were to do so, his attack would be against the crooked wealthy and uphold the social principle that no man has the right to initiate force or fraud against another. No. His attack is against success without qualification, period!

What does success depend on? It depends on the abilities one has to produce products of widely seen value - value so great that many, many people want to buy what has been produced. Production is not just the production of a material product. It is also, and in fact, depends upon intellectual productions including ideas and art.

All production from the making of a bowl of soup to an airplane depends upon man's basic means of survival - his mind. It depends upon being able to excell in math or history or medicine or surgery or building or reading (even remembering what your mother said) in any of a thousand pursuits. Beyond that, great financial success depends on grasping how to get those products out to many people. Thus it depends on marketing and salesmanship and negotiations of all kinds. The really successful are good at many things or they understand and apply the principles which attract to their organizations those who have those talents.

All of the standard of living we enjoy is dependent upon this. Obama is attacking all of this - your children's success in school, your success in cooking a meal, success of any kind.

It doesn't look like that especially if you are blinded by Obamamania or envy. However, if I say "Men are stupid," I have included myself. If I say "Men are greedy," I have included myself. If I say "Men are evil," I have included myself. If I say "The world sucks," I have included my world. In other words anything we say is also part and parcel of the larger concept and thereby applies to me, my friends, my family, my work associates. If I think my cat is devious and say "Cats are devious," I apply it to all cats. If I say at home, "Money is the root of all evil," then I am telling my children to not earn money unless you want to be evil.

Human beings who indulge a compartmentalized mind make a psychological error which results in an intellectual mistake, actually a MORAL mistake, that the values they seek are not connected to wider values. If a man cannot succeed then why be good at math? Or production? Or marketing? Or networking? Why be good at anything? In Obama's world it won't matter because you will be punished if you succeed.

Now the truth is, The Obama Principle cannot be practiced. If you were to attempt it, you would have to screw up you evening meal, turn every social interaction into a bummer, add 2+2 and get something other than 4, miss every basketball shot and screw up driving your car from point A to point B.

Since it cannot be practiced and one live at all, what does it do? To the extent one likes Obama and his programs and doesn't consciously reject him/them, he lives within them and, by osmosis, takes on guilt for his successes. And this is the big bonanza of the Obama Administration. If a person accept an unearned guilt, once he does, Obama has him by the you-know-what. Now he can play him like a fiddle. He is attacking him at his root and he will have diminished his self-esteem.

Is there any possiblity that this is an error in Obama's thinking and he has no vicious intent? Whatever I could say positive about Obama, this is not such a thing. Why? From his teenage years onward, he has dwelt in the halls of revenge - the erroneous philosophy of Karl Marx. Add to this the maliciousness of Alinsky and later the Broward-Piven strategy, and it all adds up to what we are seeing. Listening to the 20-year hatred of Reverend Wright is no mistake in Obama's life. Perhaps in the 30s when it was thought that Marxism could work, it would have been possible to forgive him this. But this is not the 30s and millions of lives, probably nearing a hundred million, have been starved and slaughtered due to precisely this idea.

This is exactly how evil he is. I see no evidence for him playing you and me any other way. Further I don't care how smooth he is, how calm he is in the middle of a crisis, how physically attractive he is, the man is pure poison given his position. There is no hope for Obama nor his policies unless he has a transformational moment. It ain't gonna happen.

Obama is the interstate highway back to the Dark Ages and the morality of duty. Duty means to follow a moral law because you cannot relate to it. It means to follow it whether there is any pleasure or benefit in it for you or not. In fact, you are unable to prove that you are moral under this injunction unless you get no pleasure or positive result from it. This is the spiritual dead end of human being. It is the adoption of failure because it is failure. It is adoption within yourself of the bad, the corrupt, the immoral, the unhappy, the weak, the handicapped, the losers, the beggars and the depraved because they are that. It is to hold up the opposite of achievement, happiness, love, joy, success, wealth, winning, strength and skill as the moral ideal. It is the worship of death.

I won't stand for this because I cannot - without immediately committing spiritual, and ultimately physical, suicide.

America is asleep. Wake up!!


• MARCH 12, 2009
The Obama Rosetta Stone
• By DANIEL HENNINGER


Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography -- "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone's life: "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise. The President's Budget and Fiscal Preview" (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it's a must read.

Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.

One finds many charts in a federal budget, most attributed to such deep mines of data as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The one on page 11 is attributed to "Piketty and Saez."

Either you know instantly what "Piketty and Saez" means, or you don't. If you do, you spent the past two years working to get Barack Obama into the White House. If you don't, their posse has a six-week head start on you.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists, are rock stars of the intellectual left. Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration."

Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer's was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.

As described in Mr. Obama's budget, these two economists have shown that by the end of 2004, the top 1% of taxpayers "took home" more than 22% of total national income. This trend, Fig. 9 notes, began during the Reagan presidency, skyrocketed through the Clinton years, dipped after George Bush beat Al Gore, then marched upward. Widening its own definition of money-grubbers, the budget says the top 10% of households "held" 70% of total wealth.

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute criticized the Piketty-Saez study on these pages in October 2007. Whatever its merits, their "Top 1%" chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.

Turn to page five of Mr. Obama's federal budget, and one may read these commentaries on the top 1% datum:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."

"Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected."

"There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."

Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.

The "top 1%" isn't just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth -- no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.

Complaints have emerged recently, on the right and left, that the $787 billion stimulus bill will produce less growth and jobs than planned because too much of it goes to social programs and transfer payments, or "weak" Keynesian stimulus. The administration's Romer-Bernstein study on the stimulus estimated by the end of next year it would increase jobs by 3.6 million and GDP by 3.7%.

One of the first technical examinations of the Romer-Bernstein projections has been released by Hoover Institution economists John Cogan and John Taylor, and German economists Tobias Cwik and Volker Wieland. They conclude that the growth and jobs stimulus will be only one-sixth what the administration predicts. In part, this is because people anticipate that the spending burst will have to be financed by higher taxes and so will spend less than anticipated.

New York's Mike Bloomberg, mayor of an economically damaged city, has noted the pointlessness of raising taxes on the rich when their wealth is plummeting, or of eliminating the charitable deduction for people who have less to give anyway.

True but irrelevant. Mayor Bloomberg should read the Obama budget chapter, "Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities." The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart.

The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, "it is our duty to change it."

If you care to, write to henninger@wsj.com