Barack Obama: The Eternal Emotional & Intellectual Sophomore

Richard Epstein does an stunningly effective line-by-line takedown of Barack Obama's "American Jobs Act", also known as "Porkulus II", "Stimulus Jr.", and "The Obama Re-election Bill".  But it's his point about Obama's thought pattern - becoming more and more obvious -  that hit home:

This bill, he [Obama] said, will "put more people back to work and put more money in the pockets of working Americans. And it will do so without adding a dime to the deficit." How? Why, by closing "corporate tax loopholes" and insisting that the wealthiest American’s pay their "fair share" of taxes.


What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures.

That's pitch-perfect.  Obama is a juvenile intellectual, whose thought process never got past the tired cliches of the college-aged wanna-be socialist rage.  No wonder liberal journalists nod sagely at the president's words, no wonder the netroots swoon when he descends into class-warfare anger and dime store revolutionary sloganeering - he is talking to them at their level of comprehension.

The Fountainhead gave us the character of  Ellsworth Toohey - one of Rand's most  prescient creations, a smooth-talking socialist, perhaps most comparable to Barack Obama (Having no true genius, Toohey's mission is to destroy excellence and promote altruism as the ultimate social ideal....He falsely styles himself as representative of the will of the masses...) - who says, while sneering at the common man, "The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder."

One can certainly say the same about the perception of Barack Obama, as well as his followers.

Quite honestly, if the president wants to feel at home, amongst his emotional and intellectual equals, he should be here in New York City, "occupying" Wall Street with his own kind.  The ones the New York Post describes as over-educated, undermotivated yuppie larvae... urchins....anarchist wannabes...

These are your people, Barack Obama...