Obama is in Elkhart, Indiana today touting his stimulus. I am told by a native that this harried place was once a center of RV manufacture. Big old honking gas-guzzlers made to be driven on long trips down dusty highways and thundering interstates. But that industry has been declining for some time, and this Great Recession has routed it further.

So Obama comes to this place and promises that his program will stimulate its economy. At the same time, of course, his party and his administration are pushing a project to inaugurate a vast elaborate system of taxation design to enforce economic decline on industries which do things like — well, like make big old honking gas-guzzlers that drive on long trips down dusty highways and thundering interstates.

In other words one of the industries that will be beggared by cap and trade, is the very industry from which Elkhart draws its economic sustenance.

So at the same time that Obama is claiming to be working for these people, he is pushing a bill that could deliver the death blow to their livelihood.

Perhaps we can for a moment consider these facts in light of the favored Marxian formulas of many on the Left, like a certain columnist at, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps we should ask the dread question, What’s the matter with Elkhart? Many of these poor fools voted for this man. They embrace their own economic doom. How have so many of them been persuaded to vote against their social interest?

Well, that would be having some fun at the expense of bad columnists, when this is deadly serious business. The best business of Elkhart is slated for destruction. The same is being prepared for many more towns and communities; and this hard of the heels of the hardship wrought by the Recession, which our countrymen already endure with admirable stoicism, even as their pleas and remonstrations in town hall meetings across the country are jeered and dismissed, and they are compared by the President and his party to a rabblerousing mob who are somehow being paid for the privilege of being angry at their Congressmen.

For a number of complicated reasons, Obama did much better in Indiana than many people expected when the general election campaign began.  Whatever might be said about the lofty rhetoric of Obama’s campaign, the actions of his administration have spoken clearly to places like Elkhart, Indiana.  They will not be blinded again.