Barack Obama has recently provided us with some interesting insights into his character (he doesn’t keep his word), his regard for certain Americans (they are easily fooled when their fortunes are down) and his own willingness to do the fooling (on trade, for instance, or CEO salaries).
This past year, Obama made a promise. He said that if he were the Democratic nominee for president, he would eschew private campaign contributions and instead sign up for the federal system using tax dollars. His only condition was that his Republican opponent do the same. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, would happily do the same, but quick, look — who is that racing away from the deal?
Why, it’s speedy Obama, who has discovered that he can pull in tens of millions a month by risking the supposed contamination of money from private hands. The sum is far more than the limit imposed by the federal system. Why handicap himself, or bother with keeping his integrity intact, when he can instead explain that he now favors a “parallel public financing system,” by which he means Internet solicitations?
Maybe the voters will be taken in by this word game, and maybe, too, if he should make it to the Oval Office, Mr. Change-and-Hope can evade a host of campaign promises by further sleight of tongue. He apparently thinks some Americans are easily deluded, such as small-town yokels encountered in Pennsylvania. By his lights, joblessness has made them “bitter.” He says that, “as a way to explain their frustrations,” they have been clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment.”
He now says he regrets those words, and I guess he should, seeing as how they reveal condescension toward citizens whose votes he needs. They also reveal agreement with a Karl Marx-style notion of beliefs deriving from material circumstance, as in the famous Marx formula that religion is the “opiate” of capitalist-oppressed people. The truth is that rich and poor alike can be against gun control or illegal immigration, although it is obviously true that just about anyone can misidentify the causes of social problems, and that some politicians will invariablycapitalize on the errors.
In this connection, it is enlightening that Obama should list “anti-trade sentiment” as a misguided reaction to the distress of unemployment. Turning his back on mountains of evidence that free trade creates additional net jobs in the economy, he has railed against free-trade agreements as an enemy of domestic well-being. He has also engaged in whipping-boy rants about CEO salaries, even though they have no significant impact on the economy or average incomes, as he surely knows.
Obama says shareholders should get a nonbinding vote on those salaries, and fine, good, as long as all those helping to support the University of Chicago Hospitals get a nonbinding vote on his wife’s salary as a vice president there. After he was elected to the Senate, Michelle Obama got a promotion and a salary bump from a reported $121,910 to $316,962, far less than the salaries of top CEOs, but far more than median annual household income of under $50,000. Some people might wonder why Obama once sought $1 million in federal funds for the operation out of hundreds of million of dollars in earmarks he proposed over a three-year period. McCain has sought no earmarks for his state for more than two decades, it might be noted. In a number of interesting ways, he is the candidate Obama pretends to be.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected].
