Barack Obama got caught.
It wasn’t a flip-flop on the order of John Kerry’s “I voted for the war before I voted against it” moment. But Obama did, for an instant, back away from his own buzz words and “hate speech“ (I‘ll explain the “hate speech“ below), and contradicted himself. This begs an important question: how far will the buzz words and hate speech propel him in a general election cycle?
Let’s first examine the buzz words. Whenever economic issues are a topic of conversation, Obama and other current-day Democratic politicians usually draw from a couple of carefully-honed categories of terminology. One of these categories is devoted to terms that describe America’s “victims,” the other describes America’s “assailants.”
Rarely with the Democrats is there any discussion of the collaborative nature of our economy, the beauty and dignity of human labor, or the unprecedented level of upward mobility that our nation offers its citizens. Forget the stories, both past and present, of immigrants who entered our country with nothing and became wealthy and successful. If you participate in the U.S. economy, you are either a victim, or a victimizer, and there will be no economic justice until Democrats take away money and power from the “bad guys” and give it to those who are deserving.
As for America’s economic victims, Democrats will most often describe these people as “working Americans,” or ‘working families,” or “middle-class Americans.“ This is absurdly broad, and is almost as silly as singling-out “breathing Americans.” Given adequate physical capacity, most Americans breathe, all on their own. Similarly, most able-bodied Americans work - - regardless of our race, socio-economic status, family history, religion, or education - - and most of us are middle-class as well.
But the Democrats’ use of this broad, far-reaching terminology sets-up an interesting political paradigm. By implication, it implies that there are some participants in our American economy who don’t “work” - - they just “get rich” off of other people’s toil. And who would these people be? This leads us to the Democrats’ second category of economic terminology, the “victimizers” category.