Less than two weeks before Americans finally have a chance to vote him out of office, President Obama has begun shouting at campaign rallies: “I’ve got a plan!”
It’s really a slogan, not a plan, referring to a 20-page pamphlet that is about as plausible as Obama’s notorious June 2008 boast that his election would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Difficult as it may now be to recall, there were once “spiritually advanced people” who looked at this Chicago machine politician and saw “a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being… who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” Obviously, none of these “advanced” people read The American Spectator, but many of them are still out there awaiting this “new way of being,” which is the only possible explanation for the crowds who show up to cheer their hero as he reads his lines from the teleprompter screens.
“We’ve got a long way to go, Iowa, but we’ve come too far to turn back now,” Obama declared at a rally Wednesday in Davenport. “We can’t afford to go back to what got us into this mess. We’ve got to stick with policies that are getting out of this mess. That’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States of America.”
The idolatrous horde burst into applause and began chanting, “Four more years!” And their idol hadn’t even told them about The Plan yet. The following passage differs from the official transcript in that it has been punctuated to convey more accurately the cadence of the Lightworker’s delivery: “Now, the good news is I’ve got a plan! That will actually create jobs! That will actually reduce the deficit! That will actually create middle-class security! And unlike Mitt Romney, I’m proud to talk about what’s actually in my plan! Because my math actually adds up!”
Spiritually advanced people don’t usually get too excited about math, but for a Lightworker, they’re willing to make an exception. The transcript indicates that the Davenport crowd interrupted to applaud the president’s speech more than 35 times and, before considering any of the specifics of The Plan, we should pause to ask a few questions: Where do they come from, these thousands of True Believers who show up for Obama rallies and applaud such nonsense? What precise combination of resentment and credulity is necessary to believe that Obama now has The Plan that can accomplish in the next four years what he has so spectacularly failed to do in the past four years?
Their credulity is perhaps best explained by a recent study that found America’s faculty lounges remain a bastion of intellectual diversity where political opinion ranges from moderate Bolshevism to the more progressive views historically associated with such leaders as Idi Amin, Bela Kun, and Pol Pot. The left-wing hegemony in academia has made discredited socialist theories as fashionable as Che Guevara T-shirts on campus, creating a ready market for the type of trendy hokum that once inspired George Orwell to remark, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Credulous as they are — exactly the kind of suckers whom P.T. Barnum said should never be given an even break — the Obamaphile masses are even more remarkable for their boundless resentment of The Rich. The Democrat Party nowadays is a Coalition of Hate and Envy, held together by a paranoid nightmare vision of hedge-fund managers and venture capitalists plundering the helpless middle class. And the dastardly villain in this economic melodrama, conveniently enough, is a Republican named Mitt Romney, whose malicious schemes the Lightworker heroically opposes.
“Folks at the very top get to play by a very different set of rules than you do,” Obama said, explaining to the Davenport crowd what he called the “one-point plan” of his GOP challenger. “They can keep paying lower tax rates than you do, keep their money in off-shore accounts. They can buy up a company, load it up with debt, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, send the jobs overseas — and they still make a big profit while the middle class gets stuck with the bill.… That was his philosophy in the private sector. That was his philosophy as governor. That’s his philosophy now.”
Attributing systematic and deliberate unfairness to Republicans as The Party of the Rich has been the basic message of the Democratic Party for as long as any living soul can remember. It is their raison d’être, their stock in trade, their Fundamental Article of Faith. There are jihadis in Waziristan and snake-handlers in Appalachian hollows less zealous in their beliefs than are Democrats in the grip of a class-warfare revival, and Obama is their Elmer Gantry. Watching his Davenport sermon on TV, you almost expected to see someone leap up in the audience, fling away his crutches and shout, “Hallelujah! I can walk!”
The gospel tract of this Democratic crusade is The Plan, the greatest promise of which is that it “will cut the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years,” as Obama told his Davenport congregation, “but we’re going to do it in a balanced way. We’re going to cut out spending we don’t need, but we’re also going to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a little bit more.” None of his cheering admirers would dare question that claim — for surely a Lightworker would never lie to them — but the infidels at the Wall Street Journal did the math and found that Obama’s tax hike on the rich “increases revenue only between $50 billion and $80 billion a year, a rounding error in the $1 trillion-plus deficit era.”
Such is the unavoidable problem with The Plan. However much it may satisfy the class-warfare fervor of the Democratic faithful, taxing the rich won’t fix the deficit. As for Obama’s promise to “cut out spending we don’t need,” it is impossible for any honest and intelligent person to take seriously such a promise coming from the man who recklessly squandered taxpayer money on “green energy” boondoggles like Solyndra.
But it is a rare thing these days to encounter a Democrat who is both honest and intelligent. It has become a party of fools misled by clever liars, and the factual deficiencies of The Plan won’t dissuade any Democrat who still believes in the rainbows-and-unicorns fantasy of Obama the Lightworker. We’ve come to expect such delusions among the intelligentsia. What is astonishing is that any ordinary man could still be such a fool.
