Does President Obama truly believe that he can castigate and condemn Wall Street on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and then secure its cooperation on the other days of the week?

Does he not understand that when he ignites a public furor over AIG bonuses and then incites Congress to pass a punitive tax that he sends shivers down the spines of every other corporate executive who makes a lot of money?

Does he seriously believe that Wall Street investors will not worry that their winnings, should they join the Treasury as partners in risky investments, would be subject to public abuse, publicity and confiscatory taxation?

Of course he realizes that his rhetoric makes it unlikely that his program will succeed. He obviously gets it that the entire concept of a public-private partnership is impossible amid a climate of class warfare, taxing the rich and heaping contempt on anyone who makes money. The president is quite bright and certainly understands that you cannot shake hands with your right while you launch a roundhouse swing with your left.

So why does Obama persist in his aggressive rhetoric? Why does he continue to treat Wall Street as something out of Dante's Inferno?

Because he's just not that into you! He doesn't really care if the public-private partnerships work out.

He sends Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner out to announce the program because he doesn't want to make it his own. When he announces a stimulus plan or a new spending bill, it's Obama's moment before the teleprompter. But the public-private partnerships he leaves to his treasury secretary to announce.

The most rational explanation for Obama's puzzling conduct -- sabotaging his own program by his own rhetoric -- is that he truly wants to be forced to nationalize the banks in pursuit of his ultimate goal of a socialist economy. Continued...