Divider-in-Chief (6 page)

When he was elected, Obama told interviewers that his greatest concern about the presidency was “living in the bubble.” David Axelrod, Obama's closest adviser, told journalist Ron Suskind that Obama's “greatest fear” was “that he'll lose touch with the people.”
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But that's exactly what he's done (if he was ever “in touch” with them to begin with). The
New
York Times
reported in December 2011 that Obama is increasingly isolated, spending “his down time with a small—and shrinking—inner circle of aides and old friends.”
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Some critics have charged that Obama has spent an inordinate amount of time on the golf course. The president has played more than 100 rounds of golf during his first term.
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Others were willing to give Obama a pass—even presidents need to relax. But that was a concession Obama's closest adviser wasn't willing to extend to George H. W. Bush. In June 2012, a 1994 video surfaced of David Axelrod calling former President George H. W. Bush “out of touch” for playing golf while trying to convince voters that the economy is improving. “Bush tastelessly did it, often from the ninth hole, and from the cigar boat and other places,” Axelrod said, adding, “The impression you got was that he was out of touch.”
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Obama's isolation from regular, working Americans shows. When Obama said in June 2012 that the private sector was “doing fine,” it was yet more evidence of how out of touch the president had become.
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It brought to mind an earlier incident in which Obama was pressed by a woman at a townhall event to explain why he was extending visas for foreigners to come to the United States and take engineering jobs when her husband, an unemployed semiconductor engineer, was unable to find work. Obama responded that he found it “interesting” that her husband could not find work, because “the word that we're getting is that somebody in that type of high-tech field, that kind of engineer, should be able to find something right away.”
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The image of Obama as a president out of touch with the middle class is reinforced by his celebrity lifestyle. In May 2009, the Obamas flew to New York City for a “date night” consisting of dinner and a Broadway show. The trip included two helicopter rides, a flight on Air Force One, and a motorcade procession through streets closed to traffic.
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The pricey trip was ill-timed. The Republican National Conference released a press statement ahead of the trip stating: “As President Obama prepares to wing into Manhattan's theater district on Air Force One to take in a Broadway show, GM is preparing to file bankruptcy and families across America continue to struggle to pay their bills.”
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The trip reinforced the notion that Obama was too eager to waste other people's money and too out of touch to judge the mood of the country.

The Obamas have spent an unprecedented amount of time hosting elaborate state dinners, appearing on comedy talk shows, and attending White House parties with A-list celebrities. According to one estimate, they have taken seventeen taxpayer-funded vacations, including a 2009 trip to Spain that cost the taxpayers nearly half a million dollars.
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President Obama has also spent an inordinate amount of time raising money for his re-election campaign. By one count, Obama held 124 fundraisers in his first three and a half years, more than the ninety-four held by the previous five U.S. presidents combined.
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Most Americans will never hear about Obama's fundraising prowess. Instead, they'll continue to hear Obama rail against the money in politics. As the
Daily Mail
's Toby Harnden wrote in 2012: “In his State of the Union speech in January, Obama bemoaned the ‘corrosive influence of money in politics.' The following month, he reversed course and announced he was allowing cabinet members and top advisors to speak at big money events for so-called super PACs—unaccountable outside groups raising money for his re-election.”
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Obama seems to enjoy the company of celebrities much more than that of ordinary Americans or wounded warriors. The list of A-list actors, athletes, comedians, and musicians Obama hasn't spent time with is probably shorter than the one of those he has. He's flown in Lebron James and Tobey Maguire for basketball and held private chats in Los Angeles with Jessica Alba and George Clooney. He's had Alicia Keys, Mick Jagger, and Cee Lo Green over to perform and given Jon Bon Jovi a ride on Air Force One.

Obama has partnered with Hollywood elites to host numerous fundraisers. In June 2012 the Obama campaign launched a political ad with
Vogue
editor-in-chief Anna Wintour making a pitch to ordinary Americans to ante up to win a “New York Night” with the president, first lady, Wintour, and actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who hosted a $40,000-per-person fundraiser at her multi-million-dollar West Village home. Actress Meryl Streep and fashion designer Michael Kors also attended the event, which banked about $2 million for the campaign. The fundraiser was announced the same day as reports that the unemployment rate had risen to 8.2 percent.
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On the same evening as the Parker event, Obama attended a fundraiser hosted by singers Mariah Carey and Alicia Keys. The 250-person dinner yielded the Obama campaign at least $2.5 million.

Obama has traveled so often to Los Angeles to raise money that California-based Democratic consultant Bill Carrick told Fox News in June 2010, “There's a reason it feels like he's been here every two weeks for the last two years. Every time we turn around, there's someone on the radio telling you that you have to drive around the motorcade traffic.”
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In his campaign to divide and conquer America's electoral map, Obama will continue to invoke his support for the middle class. But in reality, he thinks of the middle class as the L.A. drivers who need to pull over to let his motorcade through so he can wine and dine with the elite and flatter them with all they do for the poor. Of course, what they celebrate is not their own charitable donations, but tax dollars taken from the hardworking private sector employees and small businessmen who are allegedly doing just “fine.”

A
June 2012 Gallup poll showed Mitt Romney leading President Obama 49 percent to 45 percent among voters with household incomes between $36,000 and $89,000.
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If Obama loses middle class voters in 2012, it won't be because he hasn't talked about them enough. Obama casts himself as a warrior from and for the middle class. He constantly reminds the public that he is “struggling to defend” a middle class that is “under assault” by conservatives and others who care only about the rich.

As evidence of this commitment to the middle class, Obama established a “Middle Class Task Force” a few days into his term, chaired by Vice President Biden. “The strength of our economy can be measured by the strength of our middle class. That is why I have signed a memorandum to create the Task Force on Middle-Class Working Families—and why I have asked my Vice President to lead it,”
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Obama said in announcing the task force. “This is a difficult moment. But I believe, if we act boldly and swiftly, it can be an American moment—when we work through our differences and overcome our divisions to face this crisis.”
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It was ironic that Obama mentioned “overcom[ing] our divisions” as the key to reviving the middle class, because to Obama, rebuilding the middle class means tearing down successful Americans and stoking class resentment. It means dividing America by class.

Obama has always been extremely class conscious. His first job out of college in 1983 was working for a publishing and consulting group that collected data on international business and finance. Working in the financial services industry bothered Obama, and it left him feeling contempt for the worlds of finance and commerce.

“Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand,” Obama wrote in
Dreams from My Father
, “and for a brief second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.'”
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Obama's mother wrote that Obama called his job “working for the enemy.”
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Obama often tries to create solidarity with his middle class audiences by telling them that it took him years to pay off his student loans. He'll also say things like “I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” to contrast his childhood experience from that of Mitt Romney.
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In a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in December 2011, Obama referred to the “middle class” more than two dozen times as he drew a distinct line between what he refers to as “the wealthy” and the working class.
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He said that the economic downturn had created a “make-or-break moment” for the middle class and touted more government as an answer to the “you're on your own economics” of Republicans.

Obama's answer to the troubles of the middle class has been to call for a soak-the-rich policy of high tax rates for the wealthy, a policy that's founded on his conception of “fairness.” The rich must pay their “fair
share,” Obama insists, because the “breathtaking greed of a few” is crushing the middle class.

Other than “I,” “me,” and “mine,” few words are uttered more frequently by Barack Obama than “empathy” and “fairness.” In
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama writes:

The rhetoric of empathy—the ability to understand and be sensitive to the feelings and experiences of others—drives Obama's policy agenda; unfortunately, the practice of empathy does not.

Obama seems to believe that just by declaring that he values empathy he will automatically be able to employ it properly. But Obama practices his empathy very selectively, and has often chosen to “see through the eyes” only of people who will aid his ideological agenda or election prospects.

Obama touted the ability to empathize as a major consideration in selecting federal judges. As a presidential candidate, he said that he would appoint justices to the Supreme Court who have the “empathy... to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.”
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While searching for a replacement for retiring Justice David Souter
in 2009, Obama said he would “seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book.” He added, “I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”
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That's why Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, who had, Obama claimed, “experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune; experience insisting, persisting, and ultimately overcoming those barriers. It is experience that can give a person a common touch of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live. And that is why it is a necessary ingredient in the kind of Justice we need on the Supreme Court.”
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Empathy and fairness are important values, but they are not meant to take the place of constitutional law. Our liberties are secured by our being a nation of laws, not a nation of feelings where judges make decisions based on emotional whim. Obama's empathy talk is another means by which he divides the country, pitting empathetic, fair, liberal Americans against allegedly unfeeling, unfair conservatives.

For instance, Obama has framed the debate over Obamacare as fundamentally about fairness and empathy. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, defending Obamacare, ended the administration's oral arguments before the Supreme Court with a plea to empathy, citing the millions of Americans suffering from injury or ailment who would receive insurance coverage under Obama's plan.

The president, too, touted empathy, urging the public not to neglect the “human element” of the debate. He said that if the law were overturned, millions of children and adults with pre-existing conditions would be left without care.

Obama's calls to fairness and empathy ignore large segments of people with whom Obama cannot seem to empathize. How fair is it for the government to compel citizens, many of whom simply cannot afford it, to buy health insurance? How fair is it for the government to force some Americans
to pay higher insurance premiums? How fair is it to impose, de facto, an onerous tax on employers who might otherwise use the money to hire more workers?

What is fairer: letting people make their own health care decisions or having the government decide for them? How fair is it to force religious institutions, or religious individuals or business owners, to pay for abortion-inducing drugs or contraceptives or sterilizations that they believe are morally wrong, forcing them to violate their consciences and perhaps, in their view, risk their souls?