Here at the Salzburg Festival, I met up with an old friend yesterday. Very successful American businessman. Started and was involved in a variety of enterprises. Made a pile. Has had kind of a side career in charity. Has given away a fortune, yes, to such organizations as the Salvation Army. But he has given his time to such organizations too. Plus, he has started up new charitable groups. Furthermore, he has counseled many people, just privately — people who are down on their luck.
Jack is a one-man point of light, to borrow Bush 41 language.
At lunch yesterday, he was saying how important it was to defeat President Obama. “He has made everything worse. He has spent us into the poorhouse. He doesn’t know anything about an economy: what it takes to employ people, what it takes to generate growth, what it takes to keep a society dynamic. He seems to regard businesspeople as the enemy. And he doesn’t seem to respect American traditions and values very much. Apparently, he wants us to be yet another European-style social democracy. Why would America want to go down that path?”
Later in the day, I was thinking about what Team Obama would do to Jack — I mean, Axelrod, Plouffe, the “Priorities” PAC, and all them. They would tear him to bits, call him a prince of privilege, a plutocrat, a 1-percenter, a hater of the poor.
I know something of Jack’s “story” — I’m hoping he will put it into a little memoir. He was born in very comfortable circumstances, it’s true: Beverly Hills. His father was a big wheel there. But then the Depression came, and wiped him out. Jack watched his father unravel — not easy for a boy. They wound up on a farm in the Upper Midwest, where Jack worked his backside off. He then struck out on his own, without a penny.
He has seen a lot, done a lot, absorbed a lot — understood a lot.
But would Team Obama acknowledge or appreciate any of this? If Jack were in their political crosshairs, wouldn’t they make him out to be a “Let them eat cake” type? When I thought about what they would do to him — how they would portray him, what they would say about him — it made me burn.
I wager, my friend knows more about hardship and work and economics and the human spirit than all of Team Obama put together. Those “Occupy” people, the ones who defecate on police cars and so on? I’m sure they think they care more about people than a man like Jack does. They don’t have a clue.
It has been so long since I became a conservative, sometimes I have trouble remembering why I did. And then something will happen, and I’ll remember. A big part of it was the sheer nastiness of the Left — the “totalist” instinct, as WFB would say. The sheer, destructive viciousness. There is a debate to be had about statism versus free enterprise. It is an important debate, and people have long had it. They always will. But the Left seems to need to make the rest of us out to be monsters.
In coming years, there will be monuments to Barack Obama. There will be none to Jack, this splendid American gentleman — none except in the hearts of those who knew him. I certainly know which man I admire more.