Message I sent to Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal, on the occasion of yet another WSJ column devoted to waiting for President Obama to finally do a Clinton on the fiscal-cliff issue:

“I continue to hope that you will eventually stop treating the President as though he were, at his core, a politician who will eventually come to his senses and start making deals and compromises.  I lump you with your editor, Mr. Gigot, and most of the other conservative commentators who cannot seem to bring themselves to accept what they must know in their hearts, which is that the President is a thoroughgoing Marxist.  I know, I know, name-calling is counterproductive in public life, etc., etc.  I am not suggesting you start calling the President a Marxist, I am suggesting you start treating him as one.

“The fundamental divide between the evolved versions of the Left and the Right in this country is quite simple, and it has little to do with social issues or national defense and everything to do with economic theory.  The Left believes, as a matter of de facto religious belief, that economics is about doing the right thing, the moral thing; the Right believes that economics is about doing the thing that maximizes economic prosperity.  Lefties want economic and social re-distribution in order to compensate for the fact that America is not Lake Wobegon and that half of us are born below-average; Conservatives want to make America more prosperous, because they know that below-average people fare better in a prosperous country than in an un-prosperous country.  You might as well be waiting for Godot as waiting for President Obama to give up on even the tiniest bit of his utopian dream of total redistribution via central planning; he will go down in flames before compromising in any meaningful way.  Wasting time on fiscal-cliff strategery is just wasting time.”

I sincerely hope I am wrong about the President.  Maybe vanity will finally break the ideological spell.