In every con game, there comes a moment when even the dumbest sucker in the world will ask, "Why me?"
"What makes me so special that I should get $2 million from a secret Romanian bank account in return for a mere $11,000?"
Usually the mark waits to ask this burning question until the con man has accumulated sufficient information to give an answer that's convincing enough for someone who already feels very special.
"I chose you," says the con man, "because you understand European royalty!"
"Yes, I am a genius," the mark thinks to himself, and hands over $11,000 to Princess Elrood of Romania.
"Why me?"
I remembered this archetypical sucker's question a couple of days ago when I read Caroline Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama in the New York Times, but not because Ms. Kennedy is the mark for Obama's Big Con. Caroline Kennedy already knows why she's special, but in her endorsement she spoke for a whole generation that nobody ever recognized as special before Barack Obama.
Ms. Kennedy says Obama can "get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible."
Reach for that Romanian bank account, Young America! You have just as much chance of inheriting the palace of Princess Elrood as you have of cashing in on all those amazing promises from Barack Obama.
What Generation Caroline really needs is a cynical old man to pour a bucket of cold water over their pointy little heads before they squander their votes on hot air, and who better to perform this salutory function than the irascible Spengler of Asia Times Online, who recently deconstructed the South Carolina victory speech of Obama 2008:
He promised to "stop giving tax breaks to rich companies and instead put the money in the pockets of struggling homeowners who can't pay their mortgages", and at the same time stop the export of American jobs overseas, while raising everyone's wages.
The crowd chanted, "Yes we can! Yes we can!" Excuse me: No, you can't. You can't keep inefficient American factories open without massive tax breaks to corporations, in the form of tariffs or otherwise.
You can't blame America's trading partners for the loss of manufacturing jobs, and at the same time persuade them to replace the misspent capital of the American banking system. You can't persuade the world to fund hundreds of billions of dollars a year of American home mortgages, and protect the employment of a few hundred workers at Maytag.
"We cannot afford another year without decent wages because our leaders could not come together and get it done."
What precisely does that mean? "The teacher who works another shift at Dunkin' Donuts needs us to reform the educational system to raise her pay." Is the Federal government planning to subsidize teachers' salaries, which in America are paid by local school boards with city and state taxes? Is he really planning to raise corporate taxes and subsidize mortgage payments?
Even if Obama were elected President, and even if he believed his own spiel to the point of walking around with a hallucination of Princess Elrood constantly before his eyes, it lies beyond the power of the Presidency to convert the United States into a high-tariff, high-tax country like France, and how else does candidate Obama propose to pay for anything?
The borrowing power of the United States is at an end. Financial markets are collapsing all around us, and bond insurers have been teetering on the verge of defaults in the range of $26 trillion for months.
We can't borrow any more money to raise salaries or subsidize mortgages, and Mr. Obama's refusal to set a date for ending the occupation of Iraq means that even with Obama in the White House, the United States would continue to bleed billions of dollars per week into that miasma, and that's real money out of current revenues. A marginal tax increase on the top brackets would be gone before it ever bought anything except burned-out Humvees in the Big Sandbox.
Paul Krugman's column in tomorrow's New York Times is another wake-up call for Obama's marks.
If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.
It just won't happen. There is no bank account, there is no Princess Elrood, there's only a new generation of suckers hoping to receive empowerment like a demographic door-prize for the audience of Oprah.
(In view of dozens of comments on similar diaries, it's probably worth mentioning that I would vote for any Democrat instead of McCain, Romney, or any other Republican goon, and almost any other Democrat instead of Hillary Clinton.)
(It may also interest some commenters to know that Obama's pledge to gradually withdraw "combat troops" covers a whopping 23% of our total deployment in Iraq.)