Barack Obama - Do as I Say, not as I do

Though it was now twenty years ago, I remember like it was yesterday the high school youth groups I attended at various churches around Orange County. One theme was consistent across all of them - there was always some "youth pastor" or "youth director" telling us 14-17 year old boys what we were not supposed to do with girls, while that same "youth pastor" or "youth director" inevitably followed their moral exhortation with some personal testimonial that went something like this: "I only wish that when I was your age, I had followed the advice I am now giving all of you." In other words, the high school youth pastor fooled around with girls when he was in high school, and then five or ten or twenty years later was back in youth group to warn us about doing the same. It was classic. I was entertained by it then, and I am frankly a bit amused by it now as well.

I do not find the multi-millionaire, Barack Obama, to be quite so amusing. In fact, I find his speech at Wesleyan College's graduation ceremony over the weekend to be downright frightening. At least the high school youth pastors were probably giving a good message twenty years ago, even if it was wrapped in an all-too-convenient hypocrisy. Obama, on the other hand, is hand-delivering us good old-fashioned class warfare, and doing it as a rank hypocrite at the same time. I am not sure what I find more distasteful - hypocrisy, or socialism. Since we have had plenty of Presidents over the years who were guilty of hypocrisy, I think it is the message coming from this hypocrite that bothers me even more.

The Obama family had adjusted gross income of $1 million in 2006 ($983k, to be exact). They have not released their 2007 numbers yet, which are expected to be over $1.2 million. In 2005, their adjusted gross income approached $1.7 million. They have not made less than $200,000 in any one calendar year in nearly a decade. Until 2005, they had not so much as given even 1.5% of their income to charity. In 2002, when they made $260,000, they gave $1,050 to charity. With generosity like this, I can see why some may be attracted to the welfare state that he endorses. After all, someone has to help the needy.

But Obama being a cheap fraud is not the subject of my article. Well, actually, Obama being cheap is not the subject of my article. The fact that he is a fraud if very germane to the subject on which I write. For if any speech ever encapsulated the old adage, "Do as I say, not as I do," it was this one.

Obama used the podium as the commencement speaker on Saturday to proclaim that "individual salvation depends on a collective salvation." Despite the fact that this is perversely wrong, and somewhat incoherent, it is also a bit scary. Because collectively, if I am relying on people who give $1,000 per year to support charity, my individual salvation in society is in great jeopardy. His "collective" contribution has been evaluated, and found to be sorely lacking. He urged the graduates to repudiate the "big houses and nice suits" that are all too common today, though he did not specify if his $1.65 million home in Hyde Park counted as "big" or not. He urged the graduates to not look to what their endeavors can accomplish for them, but what they can accomplish for society. Again, presumably his book, The Audacity of Hope, accomplished plenty for society on its own, because the royalties sure didn't - 100% of them are reflected in the 2005 income of $1.66 million.

Obama wants to tout his time as a "community organizer", but since he doesn't remember the sermons his hate-mongering Pastor gave in the community for twenty years, I am skeptical as to what he was really organizing. And while his wife serves on a hospital board, her salary of $320,000 per year would suggest that it is not as philanthropic as one may believe at first glance. My suggestion to Obama is to remember the Biblical verse about our "reward being in heaven," and to lay off the earthly and public boasting of his good works. For a guy who is averaging 1-2% per year in annual giving to charity (even in the year he took home $1.66 million, he only gave $77,000), I think he can spare us the pathetic stories about what a good citizen he is.

Telling young people that leaving college to go out and try and pursue a better life for themselves and make as much money as possible, while maintaining their principles and ethics, is the right message at a commencement speech. Telling them that they should abandon such jobs and instead focus on bureaucracy and forced community is antithetical to the principles our nation was founded on. If anything is clear post 9/11 and post-Katrina, it is that the most charitable and most philanthropic among us come from the most successful and productive in society. Obama's message is wrong in so many ways, I do not know where to start. It is incoherent, it is self-righteous, it is sociologically confused, and it is theologically abhorrent.

And beyond that, coming from this man, it is complete and total hypocrisy.