For Barack Obama, 21st-century Americans live with a wolf at every door: “One study shows that more than half of Americans will experience poverty at some point during their adult lives. Think about that.”

But what’s he done about it? He cites ObamaCare, which he says is “built on market-based ideas of choice and competition in the private sector.”

An unavoidable thought on all this: The president of the U.S. for nearly five years has been Barack Obama. The current down-in-the-dumps mood about the future showing up in opinion polls reflects economy, not what someone else did 40 years ago.

The inequality speech reflects Mr. Obama’s habit of burying everyone in listening distance beneath some vast, vague and unanswerable guilt. Yes, it’s done out of political calculation and to distract from ObamaCare. But it’s also belief. This president has a dark, reductionist view of the U.S. system in place for nearly 200 years before he graduated high school in 1979.