Was anybody else appalled by Barack Obama’s approving invocation last night of his mother’s having been on food stamps at one point in his childhood? Obama’s mother was not a poor, uneducated sharecropper in Mississippi, the sort of person for whom the food stamp program was designed. She was a hippie dippy grad student bumming around the world, reportedly discovering the superiority of other cultures (i.e., the ones that weren’t providing her with food stamps) to that of her native land. She did, in a way, foreshadow the perfect Obama voter: the callow grad student, critical of the U.S. but nevertheless unashamed to enjoy its beneficence.