Theory about Barack Obama as candidate here: he’s the first Starbucks candidate. He speaks to the condition of the Starbucks fan. “You guys,” he addressed Chi Trib editors and reporters gathered 3/16 to hear him explain Rezko etc. McCain, on the other hand, calls reporters “jerks” with a grin.
O. is also liked by those, Starbucks fans or not, who are congenitally suspicious of business success. He’s married to one of these. She warned low-income working mothers in Ohio in February against money-making (wealth-creating) pursuits, while herself making big bucks as a hospital executive — much more since her husband vastly increased his political influence by getting elected to the U.S. Senate.
“Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”
This would be the Mrs. O’s formula — leverage influence (clout) in a non-profit public service job where clout can make a big difference. Consider Rezko and the state hospital board.
Viewed this way, she has parlayed her bitterness at being born black in modest circumstances, not into a clinging to God and guns — her God connection being grossly political anyhow, putting religion as it does at the service of ethnic complaints — but into a turning and clinging to a (wealth-consuming or -redistributing) government-public service source.
Hey, religion itself pays, as we know from her pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s golden parachute in his gated enclave mansion in a white suburb.
Whatever her Ohio working-woman audience should do, however, it should not be in the (wealth-creating but still evil) corporate world. She was clear on that.