Biff: He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong.

Charley: He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine...A salesman's got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.

Yes, like everyone else, a salesman's got to dream. But few will accept his dream simply because he couches it wearing a smile and sporting a shoeshine. Instead, as they do in all cases, people will evaluate it through the hard eyes of reality and their principles.

Those thoughts associated with Miller's play come to mind because this past week a politician who is a master of employing vague, vacuous language to express his dreams for the nation got down and dirty and very specific in lecturing every woman, man, and child in this country that "if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own."

In fact, absent the controlling force of his teleprompter, President Barack Obama got down so dirty regarding his hectoring of "successful Americans" that, rapturously caught up in his pompous expression of a politically expedient half truth, he repeated "You didn't get there on your own" before going on to issue an illustration whose intellectual content is as infantile as its style:

"I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires."

Though it's tempting to say something about Obama's torrid love affair with the term "organize," it is important to get right to the reality that this ostensibly brilliant, transformative president astonishingly discusses the notion of success in one simple dimension, as exemplified by a stream of consciousness that runs exclusively to images of government built "roads and bridges" and even the Internet, created by "government research."

It's enough to make us think that whatever smatterings of ink might be laid before the man, he'd reply he sees something governmental.

Not, mind you, in the form of a strictly constitutional executive, but an imperial Oval Office in which the president routinely rules by autocratic decrees euphemistically described as "executive orders."

Nor a cautious, frugal Congress, but an ironically "progressive" body that regards mountainous piles of reeking pork and suffocating debt as ingredients essential to conjuring up a national elixir of life.

Nor a forbearing judiciary devoted to the principle of federalism but one populated by "empathic" liberal activist judges whose job, as Justice Stephen Breyer has asserted, is to decide everything.

Nor a humble federal bureaucracy but one raging with power maddened zealots for whom doing the people's work means threatening a citizen with draconian fines for daring to build a home on land, a tiny portion of which is flooded an inch deep one day a year.

Nor politicians dedicated to the principles of the Constitution and common sense traditions established over centuries but those of the ilk of Nancy "The Nanny" Pelosi or Michael "The Manny" Bloomberg who begin with federalizing healthcare and banning sodium, sucrose, and soda on their way to controlling or prohibiting . . . everything.

No wonder, then, that when Barack Obama discusses success, his vision is all about roads and bridges with not a mention of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, individualism, personal responsibility, the development of God-given talents, American initiative, Einsteinian inspiration, Edisonian perspiration, and (because he claims the subject lies a trillion years beyond his pay grade) the power of faith.

Making matters infinitely worse, however, is that the rotted, discredited collectivism beloved by left-wingers keeps them from getting even half their story straight.

That is exactly the case with respect to the president, who fervently speaks of the importance of external realities regarding achievement and success without mentioning and commenting upon the most important one of them all: the loving, caring, nurturing institution that is the family, the fundamental unit of human society.

That failure represents an error so egregious it threatens to boggle our minds, until we realize just how all-encompassing is a leftist's devotion to the ugly, statist elitism that mocks Jefferson and Thoreau as it pronounces, "That government is best which governs most."

It comes to us, too, that in addition to the effects of ideological rigidity, political expediency motivates Obama to keep silent about the importance of family structure regarding success of all kinds.

Specifically, the card-carrying member of the Chicago Political Machine meticulously avoids saying anything that will cause the public to focus on how the family-destroying policies of the nation's most corrupt liberal organization, reinforced mightily by those issued at state and federal levels, represent the fundamental reason for the transformation of the former "Shoveling/Wrecking/Planning/ Building, breaking, rebuilding/ City of the Big Shoulders" into a bloody hell where success is celebrated when, on a given day, no child's name adds to the long list of the murdered.

We should, however, be happy that in making his preposterous pronouncements about achievement and success, Barack Obama revealed this to every person willing to keep ears, eyes, and mind wide open:

His dream for the nation lies in the reality that the hugely larger, more intrusive, more costly federal government he has larded into reality by borrowing an astounding $5.2 trillion in three and a half years represents only a down payment toward transforming America from a nation built on the principle of the supremacy of We the People to that of We the Politicians, Judges, and Bureaucrats of the Federal Government.

As he did four years ago, he delivers his vision vaguely and vacuously with a smile and a shoeshine, hoping to keep the public from hearing the frightful but truthful screams of History, warning us that the dream is false, unspeakably dangerous, and therefore wrong, all, all wrong.


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