James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal switches from excellent journalist/commentator to psychiatrist, and his “patient” doesn’t come out well:

The Romney campaign is out with a very effective new ad illuminating and responding to President Obama’s disparagement of individual achievement. The ad constructs a dialogue between Obama and Jack Gilchrist, a political independent who is president of Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Co., a small industrial concern conveniently located in the swing state of New Hampshire. …

Gilchrist: “My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company? Did somebody else take out the loan on my father’s house that financed the equipment? Did somebody else make payroll every week and figure out where it’s coming from? President Obama, you’re killin’ us out here. Through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business. Why are you demonizing us for it? We are the solution, not the problem. It’s time we had somebody who believes in us–someone who believes that achievement should be rewarded, not punished. We need somebody who believes in America.”

That somebody, obviously, is Mitt Romney, who delivers his rebuttal to “You didn’t build that” (we quoted it yesterday). …

For it seems to us that Obama’s generalities about success being undeserved are absolutely true in one particular case: that of Barack Obama. Unearned success is the central theme of his life story. …

In 1995, Obama published an autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” substantial portions of which turn out to have been fictional. Just how substantial has become clear since David Maraniss published his heavily reported biography, but it had not gone unnoticed before, as evidenced by this 2008 piece from the New York Times’s Janny Scott …

And he would not have been elected president in 2008 without a series of lucky breaks. As Joshua Green noted in The Atlantic Monthly, strategic errors by Hillary Clinton’s campaign made it possible for the junior senator from Illinois to eke out a narrow victory over her …

What gave his campaign much of its appeal also was not what he had done, but what he was. As Janny Scott put it in that 2008 piece: “Out of his story, he has also drawn the central promise of his campaign: if a biracial son of a Kenyan and a Kansan could reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable in himself, a divided country could do the same.” …

Obama recently said his biggest shortcoming as president was that he has failed to tell the electorate “the story that tells us where he’s going.” But he’s certainly told a story: a story in which he has personally achieved great things, like saving Detroit and killing Osama bin Laden, whereas everything that’s gone wrong is the fault of somebody else–George W. Bush, congressional Republicans, corporate jet owners, etc.

The problem with this story is that it is manifestly untrue. Obama not only has failed to deliver on the extravagant promises–world peace and racial harmony and receding oceans and free medical care for all. He has fallen short even of a minimal standard of political and governmental competence.

What is the root of Barack Obama’s ressentiment? Why does he insist that men like Jack Gilchrist don’t deserve their success? Not because they are successful. Even if Obama loses in a landslide, he will have enjoyed more success than most people can dream of in a lifetime.

No, Obama resents their modest success precisely because they did earn it.

This self-inflicted wound isn’t going away. As I said last week, every bit of “help” a business gets is earned. The business has to prove its worth to financial institutions and investors. The business has to prove its value to its customers, or it loses its customers. Even advice a business owner gets from other business owners is usually delivered with a pay-it-forward expectation, as happened to me when we bought half of a newspaper 20 years ago. (And I’ve tried to do that since then.)

What has Obama earned? (Other than a vote for someone not named Obama Nov. 6.)