The Barack Obama Nation

She has subsequently spun a story that she was only referring to the political process that she is at long last seeing manifest in America in her lifetime (I’m not buying it), but this slip of the tongue is going to cause Obama some trouble–in fact, it could likely come back to haunt him again and again throughout the general election, as Cindy McCain has already picked it up and run with it, saying, “I’m proud of my country. I don’t know about you, if you heard those words earlier. I’m very proud of my country.”

But more than a harmful gaffe, it’s among the very first cracks and fissures to appear in the undeservedly messianic veneer of Barack Obama. And Michelle Obama’s mistake is probably more telling than her husband would like anything to be anytime between now and the 5th of November.

For her husband’s take on the United States is gloom and doom, and he is leveraging that to his personal political ends FDR-style, and by all indications with FDR’s almost total economic incompetence in tow to bear on all of his ideas.

According to Barack Obama in one of his most anti-business and most-run TV advertisements, there are U.S. CEOs earning more money in 10 minutes than the average American worker earns in an entire year.

Besides the fact that he does not acknowledge that some careers and professions demand more responsibility or leadership or specialized skills and talents or intelligence than on average, and thus deservedly earn their role players more money than the average worker earns (just like Obama himself does), he gives forth a mathematical gaffe.

If we begin with the reasonable assumption that the average full-time worker in the U.S. earns $40,000 per year, then that means a typical CEO, working eight hours per day with weekends and a couple of major holidays off and two weeks’ paid vacation (and it seems to me that the typical CEO works more than this), earns close to $500,000,000 per year in weekly salary checks. The reality? The average annual compensation package (which is not necessarily nor even usually all weekly paycheck money) for the CEOs heading up the biggest 20 of the Fortune 500 corporations is $36 million. A fat sum of money, indeed, but a far cry less than Obama tells you–and, with the CEO being responsible to thousands or tens of thousand or even millions of shareholders with stakes in the company, and answerable to a board of corporate governors who want to see a company grow, and holding hundreds or thousands of employees’ positions in his hands, pray tell me why he’s not entitled to that money? It is in corporations’, and hence employees’ and shareholders’, best interests to give super incentives to these captains of industry, to weed out and attract the very best and to give that crop-cream every possible incentive to perform at peak level.

If the worker is worthy of his wages (and he certainly is), then why isn’t a CEO, who not only works but who causes so many average workers’ wages and American shareholders’ returns to materialize? It’s the old, old story, the 1930s socialistic and demonstrably incompetent Brains Trust resurrected, along with McGovern early-1970s malaise and foreign relations defeatism to top it off.

Tellingly, Obama does not reveal the cost of producing his 30-second TV advertisement. But you can be quite certain of one thing: it cost him much more to produce than the average American worker makes in a year.

There’s more to Obama’s math gaffes, too. Steve Moore at the Wall Street Journal has calculated the cost of Obama’s tax plans, which he is finally beginning to give a little definition to. Moore has found that the plans will add up to a 39.6 percent personal income tax, an equal level of dividends tax, a 28 percent capital gains tax, a 52.2 percent combined income and payroll tax, and for the finale a 55 percent estate tax.

This is the same “charismatic” man who in response to the Northern Illinois University shooting tragedy publicly said that he supports Americans’ Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms…yet at one and the same time said that he supports the D.C. gun ban and also backs the rights of the states to enact any gun control legislation that they deem appropriate. This is just like saying that he supports American citizens’ First Amendment rights, just as long as no-one says or publishes anything that a state government or the feds don’t want to hear.

This is a new hope? What a gaffe!