Obama is ratcheting up his class warfare to levels that would make Marxists blush.

A president who believed that America's greatness is recoverable and expandable - a chief executive determined to lead us back to national restoration - would reject the crippling notions of national impotency that Obama has embraced.

Democrats have always wanted to grow government with revenues from our society's producers. They aren't sincere about reducing the deficit, because they will not abandon their addiction to spending other people's money.

We have to have structural entitlement reform, major spending cuts and not tax increase-retardants on economic growth to reverse our current course toward national bankruptcy, but Obama steadfastly remains on the wrong side of all these solutions.

Republicans are already on seriously thin ice, having presided over an era of unprecedented spending and consistently failing to articulate conservative principles on a wide variety of issues. But what Obama has in store will make President Bush appear, in retrospect, like a libertarian.

One might reasonably wonder whether any amount of failed results would cause liberals to reevaluate the wisdom - and even fairness - of their proposals.

If you understand liberals at all, you know that they'll never agree to market-based solutions for ideological reasons and because an expanding dependency class is their most essential power source.