In what other ways will Obama secure the dream in this “defining” moment? Is the middle class going to be salvaged by raising the top marginal tax rates a few points on 1-percenters and adding $1 trillion to the federal budget in 10 years (equal to one year of federal deficit spending)? Or is the middle class going to rise again on the strength of a temporary tax holiday from programs it actually uses?

Surely, that won’t do. If not, what are you talking about exactly, Mr. President? Give us the big plan. What program have you devised that offers middle-class Americans more opportunity, not just more dependency? How have you expanded the fortunes of the bitter, occasionally clingy bourgeois in the past three years — by adding $4 trillion to their offspring’s tab?

Smart people can grouse all they want about the supposed zealotry of the tea party or the conservative presidential field (and sometimes, they might be right), but Obama‘s mimicking Teddy Roosevelt’s end-of-career hard left turn tells us a lot about the president’s worldview. In his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Obama dropped almost all pretenses and made the progressive case against an American free market system, which he called “a simple theory … one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. … And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work.”