Dartblog

The more one hears from the Obamas the more their words stale; the more detailed their addresses become, the more obviously doctrinaire do they appear. This is an unfortunate development for the hundreds of thousands of workaday Republicans who were contemplating voting for Mr. Obama: he is not a consensus candidate for whom one can feel a certain self-pleasure in supporting. He is, instead, thoroughly typical. The notion that Barack Obama is anything other than a machined leftist possessed of the conviction that if only he could arrange peoples’ lives peoples’ lives would be well arranged—that’s just miles off.

Here, as reported by Byron York, is Michelle Obama speaking recently in the woebegone town of Zanesville, Ohio:

“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service. “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

This is something like a revelatory moment. It is one of those instances one early on begins to recognize: in a negotiation, or in a debate, one’s opponent lets on that he has been misrepresenting himself by saying something, by lapsing some tic, by using some phraseology, that no one would ever use were he genuinely of the position or the character he has been holding himself out to be.

Here we learn that Michelle Obama believes that the financial industry does not help people. She believes that the labor market sums to zero—that a new banker equals negative one doctor. She believes that there exists a ‘helping people’ industry apart from all others, and considers that the world of professional medicine exists only because some early prime mover, in his unexplained beneficence, undertook to create pharmaceuticals, surgeons, medical schools, and hospitals. She believes that the physics of supply and demand had nothing whatever to do with all that. She believes that it is her role to sway children away from certain incorrect industries and toward others. And she believes that from the seat of power toward which she and her husband are striving she could enforce those preferences even more strongly, setting up a dike against the forces of free choice, which in her estimation lead inexorably to blight.

This is what the Obamas believe; we may put confidence in our inference because Mrs. Obama’s thoughts could never have traipsed near what she said in Zanesville, Ohio unless her political philosophy privileged the idea of statism to just the extent described here. Alas and alack!—but at least all of this business about the Obamas boning up on substance is proving to be profitable.