Divider-in-Chief (7 page)

The limits of Obama's empathy are interesting. He can empathize with the feminist lobby that wants abortion-on-demand, and comment that he wouldn't want his daughters “punished with a baby.” But Obama has, obviously, little empathy for the unborn baby in the womb. This is not surprising given that he has displayed shockingly little empathy for babies born alive after botched abortions. As an Illinois state senator, Obama voted against a law to give those babies life-saving care.
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He can empathize with Muslim victims of intolerance on the rare occasion that such intolerance occurs in America. But he apparently has little empathy for the female victims of Islam's Sharia law around the world. He has empathy for homosexuals suffering persecution abroad, but not for persecuted Christians in other countries.

The president sold the “stimulus” by asking Americans to try and understand what it's like to be unemployed. But Obama's incontinent spending ignores future generations, which will pay for today's record-breaking deficits with higher taxes, a lower standard of living, and an economy whose future is mortgaged and whose prospects are limited by crushing debt.

Obama has often mentioned fairness in his various pushes for immigration reform. When announcing his June 2012 executive order to stop deportations of young illegal immigrants, Obama said, “This morning, Secretary Napolitano announced new actions my administration will take to mend our nation's immigration policy, to make it more fair, more efficient and more just, specifically for certain young people sometimes called
DREAMers.”
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But immigration amnesty can be profoundly unfair to American workers unable to find jobs, because illegal immigrants work for less pay. Amnesty also penalizes immigrants who did things the right way, waiting years and paying a fortune in legal fees to have a shot at citizenship.

Obama clearly lacks empathy for the views of conservatives, who represent a plurality of the American people. Instead, he accuses them of being “hostage-takers.”
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He calls them members of the “Flat Earth Society.”
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And he charges them with embracing “social Darwinism.”
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Obama is not the only Democrat who uses incendiary rhetoric against Republicans. When congressional Republicans unveiled their energy bill in June 2012, California House Democrat Henry Waxman accused Republicans of “getting away—literally—with murder” because of their record on the environment.
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Obama has made “fairness” a focal point of his 2012 campaign. He works the concept into almost every speech, especially as a way to contrast his economic program from Mitt Romney's. “When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it's not because they envy the rich,” Obama told a joint session of Congress. “It's because they understand that when I get a tax break I don't need and the country can't afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference.”
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While both liberals and conservatives may have an easier time being empathetic toward those of like mind, empirical research has shown that liberals in particular have a difficult time understanding conservative values.

In 2011, Jesse Graham of the University of Southern California and Brian A. Nosek and Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia published a study called “The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Divide.” They concluded that: “The largest inaccuracies were in liberals' underestimations of conservatives' harm and fairness concerns, and liberals further exaggerated the political differences by overestimating their own such concerns.”
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The essential divide between the left and the right in America is not, as Obama would have us believe, between empathetic liberals who value fairness and uncompassionate conservatives who care only about the rich and powerful. The divide is rooted in distinct definitions of fairness. Liberals define fairness as equality of outcomes, while conservatives define it as equality of opportunity and equality under the law.

Most Americans don't see their country as inherently unfair. In a 2005 Syracuse University poll, researchers asked a cross section of Americans if they believed that “everyone in American society has an opportunity to succeed, most do, or only some have this opportunity.” Seventy-one percent said that all or most Americans can get ahead.
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Unlike most Americans, Obama believes he needs to force fairness on an otherwise unfair country. He believes in his moral values but seems unwilling to grant that those who oppose him have moral values equally worthy of consideration and respect. When it comes to fairness, Obama is decidedly unfair in judging his opponents.

On April 30, 2012, Obama delivered one of his classic class warfare speeches. He warned union members that Republicans would rather give “rich folks” more tax breaks than invest in the American worker.
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“Republicans in Congress would rather put fewer of you to work rebuilding America than ask millionaires and billionaires to live without massive new tax cuts on top of the ones they've already gotten,” Obama told union workers.
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Obama added that the Republicans' economic plan depended on tax cuts for the rich and “dismantling your unions.”
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He added, “After all you've done to build and protect the middle class, they make the argument you're responsible for the problems facing the middle class.”
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Obama's deficit reduction plan would hurt not only the oft-targeted “millionaires and billionaires.” It includes letting the Bush tax cuts expire
for couples earning $250,000 a year, a de facto tax hike for many small business owners. And it is not the rich but the middle class and the poor who will suffer most when Obama's taxes on the most successful Americans divert money that would otherwise be invested in jobs to filling the coffers of the government.

The wealthy already pay more than their fair share in taxes. The top 1 percent of earners pays nearly 40 percent of income taxes. The effective tax rate of the well-off is about twice that of middle income earners. Half the country pays no federal income tax at all. The
Weekly Standard
's Jeffrey Anderson put things in stark relief: “[T]he top 0.1% paid more toward the workings of government than the bottom 80% did,” he wrote in 2011. “That's despite the fact that the bottom 80% collectively made more than six times as much money as the top 0.1% did.”
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These and other statistics show that Obama's rhetoric and policies aren't really about fairness. The sad truth is that, thanks in part to Obama and his media allies, millions of voters believe the wealthy pay not just a lower rate on their taxes, but less in net taxes than do middle-income earners. Polls show that most Americans support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. But a Resurgent Republic poll found that 65 percent of American voters say that “the maximum percentage that the federal government should take from any individual's income should be 20 percent or lower.”
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It would then surely be news to many Americans that the average federal income tax rate of those earning between $1 million and $10 million was nearly 30 percent in 2009. Add in state and local taxes, and many are giving more than 40 percent, with new tax hikes scheduled just after the election, on January 1, 2013.

Many of Obama's liberal allies have taken the anti-success rhetoric a step further, predicting, and perhaps even encouraging, violence against wealthy Americans. Filmmaker Michael Moore said:

In February 2012, President Obama released his 2013 budget. A White House press release stated:

The budget itself is an exercise in divisive class warfare. The budget included numerous layers of tax hikes on successful investors and small business owners. It raised the capital gains tax from 15 percent to 24 percent, and the dividends tax from 15 percent to nearly 40 percent. It repealed the Bush tax cuts for top earners and included a 30 percent “Buffett-rule” minimum tax on millionaires. The carried-interest tax for private equity, hedge funds, and other investment partnerships was more than doubled, from 15 percent to 40 percent. The death tax jumped to 45 percent.
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A press statement released from Representative Paul Ryan called the budget a $1.9 trillion tax hike, with $47 trillion in government spending over the next decade and the fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits.
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In March, Obama's budget was voted on in the Senate, where it failed 99 to 0.
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A December 2011 Gallup poll found that “Americans are now less likely to see U.S. society as divided into the ‘haves' and ‘have nots' than they were
in 2008, returning to their views prior to that point. A clear majority, 58%, say they do not think of America in this way, after Americans were divided 49% to 49% in the summer of 2008.”
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One reason Obama's class warfare rhetoric is a bust is that Americans have never seen themselves as being divided by class. We are a fluid society, inherently open to the ability of individuals to move up or down the income and wealth scale.

Even self-identified Democrats were less likely (by three percentage points) in 2011 to see America as divided between “haves” and “have nots” than three years earlier.
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Most Americans do not buy into Obama's divisive rhetoric pitting economic classes against one another. And they have enough empathy to know that “fairness” is often in the eye of the beholder.

T
he story of Barack Obama's first term is the story of a president whose preoccupation with the government takeover of large segments of the American economy has come at the expense of America's average, hardworking people.

America's economic troubles have many causes that can't be blamed on President Obama, including globalization, an aging population, and the bursting of the housing bubble. But the president certainly can be blamed for deepening the economic crisis, slowing the recovery, and laying the groundwork for the decline of the middle class for years if not decades to come.

As an indication of how far the middle class has fallen in recent years, consider these two statistics. A 2011 report by Pew Charitable Trusts found that nearly one in three Americans who grew up in the middle class has moved downward.
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And a Federal Reserve report released in June 2012 revealed that between 2007 and 2010, the median net worth of American families dropped by an astonishing $50,000, from $126,400 to $77,300—a
39 percent decline that brought the median figure all the way back to where it was in 1992.
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Obama has spent three years pushing policies that either ignore or aggravate the structural problems in the economy.

Obama supports allowing Bush-era tax cuts to expire for those making more than $200,000 a year, a policy that would raise tax rates from 35 percent to 40 percent on thousands of small business owners who are taxed as individuals. From the start of Obama's presidency until December 2012, 2.5 million homes were lost to foreclosure, and millions of others were in the foreclosure process or seriously delinquent. Home values continue to plummet.
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Obama has not helped make things better. “‘Every [federal housing] program has fallen far short of goals. I can't think of one that's been largely successful,' John Dodds, director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, a non-profit that's been involved in foreclosure prevention for decades,” told
USA Today
in December 2011.
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In
The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery
, Noam Scheiber describes how Obama chose to pursue nationalized health care instead of concentrating on the economic recovery. Obama saw health care as a greater long-term accomplishment, according to Scheiber, who wrote: “There was a strain of messianism in Barack Obama, a determination to change the course of history. And it was this determination that explained his reluctance to abandon his presidential vision.”
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Former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers told Scheiber, “I always admired the president's courage for recognizing that fifty years from now people would remember that all Americans had health care. And even if pursuing health care affected the pace of the recovery, which was unlikely in my view, people wouldn't remember how fast the recovery from this recession was.”
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Perhaps that's true. Perhaps fifty years from now people will remember Obama's takeover of the health care industry more than the slow recovery. But Obama wasn't elected to be president of the America of 2062. Long-term vision is fine, but Obama was voted to be president of America today. And for the moment, Americans want a president who will address the slow pace of the so-called recovery.