To: calgal who wrote (58757 ) 5/28/2012 6:17:40 PM From: calgal 1 Recommendation Respond to of 59480 The Real Obama The budget of a left-wing progressive. Feb 27, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 23 • By FRED BARN r Text Alerts President Obama’s budget for 2013 is pure Obama. How do we know? Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, was once asked how to become a budget expert. “You have to read the budget,” he said. To know Obama, it’s similar. You have to read the speeches and look over the budgets. Gary Locke For the past year, they’ve told the same story. No, the real Obama is not a pragmatist or a frustrated moderate or a well-intentioned but weak politician forced by political circumstances to take positions he’d rather not. Only sympathizers, notably media types, believe any of those notions. The truth is not hidden. One merely has to digest the new budget Obama unveiled last week, his budget last year, and his four major speeches since last April, and the real Obama comes into focus. He turns out to be a left-wing progressive who rejects many of the mainstream political and economic ideas of post-World War II America. This is not an entirely new take on Obama. Others have identified him as such, Stanley Kurtz in particular. What’s new is that Obama has been so revealing in his own words. Only occasionally do you have to read between the lines to discover what he truly thinks. I’ve gleaned his views from the two budgets and from the “reducing the budget” speech in April 2011, the address to a special session of Congress on jobs in September 2011, the speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, last December, and the State of the Union address last month. Here’s what the president not only believes but is committed to: (1) America is an unjust and deeply unfair country. “The basic bargain that made this country great has eroded,” Obama said at Osawatomie. “Hard work [has] stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success.”