Obama's Blather About Income Inequality Is Just His Most Recent MacGuffin

On Friday I wrote about the MacGuffinization of American politics, a state in which the things we talk about in the national conversation, and pretend to be important, are not at all important to those pushing them upon us (the Left). Like a MacGuffin in a movie, these things are merely plot devices to motivate an audience's interest in the Hero -- Barack Obama, of course.

Mickey Kaus talks about this a little in discussing Obama's latest distraction, income inequality.

4 Things the MSM Won’t Tell You About Obama’s Inequality Speech:

Now that the excitement has died down You have to admire President Obama for choosing to give a speech declaring that the fight against “growing inequality”–specifically economic inequality–is “the defining challenge of our time” and the “focus” of “all our efforts”–given that:

a. Five years into his presidency he so far hasn’t done anything to stop growing income inequality–the problem has gotten worse on his watch.

b. He doesn’t have any proposals (“It’s time to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act”) that come close to solving the problem as he defines it.

c. His one big previous initiative to reduce inequality–the Affordable Care Act–may now be hopelessly screwed up due to his own inattention and non-competence.

d. His remaining big domestic initiative–”comprehensive” immigration reform–would almost certainly make inequality worse by vastly increasing the number of unskilled workers bidding down wages at the bottom of the income scale, with the profits from the cheap labor going to business owners at the top.

Kaus observes that income inequality is the perfect MacGuffin for a long-running melodramatic serial: Because it's a MacGuffin that can never actually be attained.

Greater income equality–quintile shares, Gini coefficients and the rest–is the Great MacGuffin of the Democratic base. It’s a goal they will never reach. Deep down they know they will never reach it. But that doesn’t matter because the goal itself holds their coalition together and gives them a reason to go on.

So the audience will just have to keep coming back, week after week, to be eternally teased that satisfaction is finally at hand, only to discover, once again, that the Cigarette Smoking Man's identity has once again been obscured.

posted by Ace at 04:02 PM

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