Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was grounded in meaningless platitudes, such as “hope and change.” His 2012 re-election effort is grounded in meaningful platitudes centered in the destructive politics of class warfare.

Despite his best efforts to paint his abominable economic record in a favorable light, Obama simply cannot run on it, unless he succeeds in completely changing the traditional yardsticks by which we have always measured economic success: growth, unemployment, inflation and general prosperity.

No, I’m not referring to the ludicrous yardstick of “saved or created” jobs, which Obama has pushed way beyond its sell-by date. There’s a limit even to the liberal media’s ability to convince credulous Obama supporters that down is up and depression is prosperity.

He could conceivably boast that he has indeed created jobs, as long as we understand that he’s talking about public-sector jobs, many of which have been formed at the expense of those in the private sector. But he won’t dare bank on the American people’s sympathy for that argument.

Instead, he’ll continue to milk his militant class-warfare theme, hoping to shift our focus from the unemployment, economic stagnation and thunderous debt he’s orchestrated to our baser instincts of jealousy, greed and envy.

For those stubbornly slow on the uptake, I ask you: Could it be any clearer now what Obama meant when he promised that he was going to fundamentally change America? Those moralizing idealists might have had a plausible excuse for their obtuseness before, but they can no longer be blind to Obama’s grandiose scheme to restructure America.

To be sure, Obama has paid lip service to America as a land of opportunity, just as he assured us he was a fierce advocate of the free market. But he has labored to convert America from a land of equal opportunity to one where the government equalizes economic outcomes. He has set out to achieve his goal not through a process of gentle persuasion, but by polarization and intense demonization of those who have enjoyed economic success.

If you listen to him or any number of his advisers and associates, you can’t help but notice a marked contempt for big corporations, bankers, the “wealthy” and every other symbol of business and capitalism that he can incite the “proletariat” against.

Obama knows he’s stoking the flames of class warfare almost every time he opens his mouth today. He knows that the lion’s share of his economic policies are not even geared toward promoting economic growth and prosperity. They are designed to grow government and increase its control over our lives and to “spread the wealth around.” That’s his vision for America, which explains why in his view, under his perverse yardsticks, he is not failing, though America, by any conventional measure, manifestly is.

Obama’s senior adviser and alter ego, Valerie Jarrett, recently declared that government’s role is to create jobs – not in the sense of getting out of the way, but with artificially manufactured make-work jobs that central planners deem desirable. She believes that it’s government’s role to equalize results rather than to remove barriers against equal opportunity.

Jarrett said: We need to be “creating a country that’s a country for everybody, not just for the very, very wealthy. … (Obama is) not willing to balance our budget on the backs of the least of these.” He’s not willing to hurt Medicare or Social Security “while the very wealthy and the corporations that are the most profitable are not paying their fair share.” Democratic senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren similarly informed us, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”

Liberals such as Obama would have us believe that they enthusiastically embrace the American ideal and that they just want to expand the safety net a little bit to help the poor. They are the champions of the middle class.

Sorry, with their decades-long track record of failure, they no longer get a pass for their allegedly good intentions. Obama is a human wrecking ball single-handedly destroying our economy and bankrupting the nation. Hardest hit: the middle class. For him to masquerade as the grand protector of the middle class is like Winston Churchill passing himself off as a pacifist.

Obama’s rhetoric might be appropriate in pre-revolutionary France, where the nobles were exempt from the taille, France’s chief tax, and an overwhelmingly disproportionate burden was falling on the peasants, artisans and ordinary merchants. But we’re in America, and last time I checked, the bottom 47 percent of income earners aren’t even paying income tax.

In 2012, American voters are going to have a clear choice of whether America will restore itself as a glorious land of individual liberty and equal opportunity or continue down Obama’s suicidal path of poverty and tyranny.

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