Written by Richard Butrick   

It’s the oldest one out there: bait-and-switch. Unlike the Arpege version, “Promise them anything but give them Arpege”, the product you end up with in the Obama model is not an openly desired product. The Arpege line could be used with any top of the line product. “Promise them anything but give them a BMW,” The Obama bait-and-switch is used to sell a product few Americans outside of academe want: “Promise them anything but give them BigOgov.org.” How about, “Promise them anything but give them an Edsel.”

Obama and team feel morally justified because even though the American public is too dense to embrace Socialism à la mode Obama [1] they know it is the best product for them and they will eventually be grateful. They are doing us dunderheads a big time favor.

The poster child for the Obama sell model is Cass Sunstein. Professor Sunstein, of Harvard Law, was Obama’s Czar of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the promulgator of the “nudge” model that is the paradigm for the Obama MO. As an article in Salon [2] notes, “Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.” In the Sunstein model it is the intellectually and morally superior (i.e., Ivy League academics and their protégé’s) that must nudge the hapless citizenry to the promised land.

Actually, the model, in all it’s unlovely allotropes, has been around since the Fabian Socialists which boast such famous names as Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and even briefly, Bertrand Russell. The Fabian Society was named after the Roman general Fabius Maximus. His strategy advocated tactics of harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal.

The Obama Fabian Socialist connection is not new news. That the President is, or might as well be in the Fabian Socialist camp, has been argued [3] in Forbes magazine. Some other lovelies who were or are in the Fabian camp include Alinsky and Soros.

Like the Fabians, the President is propelled a by a sense of moral superiority. Just look at his slightly uptilted poses during his admonitory speeches. And like a parent that tells “fibs” to their child for their own good, his fibbing is morally justified.

For Obama and camp, it is not really lying in the sense that there is any moral opprobrium to the fiction they spin. They are not doing it to swindle us out of something they want. They are doing it because we are too dumb to want that which is for our own good and happiness.

Like the Edsel, the Obama label is turning out to be a lemon. Increasingly the American people aren’t buying [4] his product or his promises. And as for the centerpiece of his creepy-assed neo-socialist [5] agenda, ObamaCare - no more cash for clunkers.

[1] [http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/what-kind-of-socialist-is-barack-Obama/]
[2] [http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/]
[3] [http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/03/obama-fabian-socialist-oped-cx_jb_1103bowyer.html]
[4][http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/10/21/john_dickerson_obama_headed_toward_credibility_death_spiral_over_obamacare.html]
[5] [http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/189583/what-neo-socialism/jonah-Goldberg]