When worlds collide on the campaign trail

NY Times:

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Senator Barack Obama listens to a mother who lost a son in Iraq, and a father who cannot afford health insurance. Then he tightens his tie knot and sets off to elegant fund-raisers.

The eternal verity of presidential politics is that candidates can talk all they like about the impoverished and the struggling, but everyone must put in long hours scrounging up money from the terrifically wealthy. Mr. Obama puts the dissonance into words in his book “The Audacity of Hope” (Crown Publishing, 2006).

“I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met,” he wrote, “in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population.”

Some days, those worlds nearly collide.

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He goes on to hear one of those perfect Democrat sob stories from a woman who with her husband is over extended on their double wide. While it is easy to feel compassion for her situation, and it might be too glib to suggest that they should have gotten a single wide or continued to rent, you find little appeal to personal responsibility in the story. Instead they are presented as being taken advantage of. So the guy who tries to help them fulfill their dream of a double wide is presented as some one who took advantage of them.

Obama careens from that encounter to a gathering of wealthy donors. It never seems to occur to him that these successful people also work hard for their success and make better choices with their investments. Nor would it ever occur to him or them that he might be trying to take advantage of them so he could make them less wealthy too with his liberal policies.

Being less wealthy is actually pretty easy. They could donate their money directly to the woman whose having trouble making the double wide payment instead of to a candidate who wants to make us all less wealthy. There are a lot of economic sinkholes out there and liberals are intent on plumbing them all.