Apparently Barack Obama’s comment about business owners not earning their success struck  a nerve with  Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass:

When President Barack Obama hauled off and slapped American small-business owners in the mouth the other day, I wanted to dream of my father.

But I didn’t have to close my eyes to see my dad. I could do it with my eyes open.

All I had to do was think of the driveway of our home, and my dad’s car gone before dawn, that old white Chrysler with a push-button transmission. It always started, but there was a hole in the floor and his feet got wet in the rain. So he patched it with concrete mix and kept on driving it to the little supermarket he ran with my Uncle George.

He’d return home long after dark, physically and mentally exhausted, take a plate of food, talk with us for a few minutes, then flop in that big chair in front of the TV. Even before his cigarette was out, he’d begin to snore.

The next day he’d wake up and do it again. Day after day, decade after decade. Weekdays and weekends, no vacations, no time to see our games, no money for extras, not even forMcDonald’s. My dad and Uncle George, and my mom and my late Aunt Mary, killing themselves in their small supermarket on the South Side of Chicago.

There was no federal bailout money for us. No Republican corporate welfare. No Democratic handouts. No bipartisan lobbyists working the angles. No Tony Rezkos. No offshore accounts. No Obama bucks.

Just two immigrant brothers and their families risking everything, balancing on the economic high wire, building a business in America. They sacrificed, paid their bills, counted pennies to pay rent and purchase health care and food and not much else. And for their troubles they were muscled by the politicos, by the city inspectors and the chiselers and the weasels, all those smiling extortionists who held the government hammer over all of our heads. …

If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that? Somebody else made that happen?

Somebody else, Mr. President? Who, exactly? Government?

One of my earliest memories as a boy at the store was that of the government men coming from City Hall. One was tall and beefy. The other was wiry. They wanted steaks.

We didn’t eat red steaks at home or yellow bananas. We took home the brown bananas and the brown steaks because we couldn’t sell them. But the government men liked the big, red steaks, the fat rib-eyes two to a shrink-wrapped package. You could put 20 or so in a shopping bag.

“Thanks, Greek,” they’d say.

That was government.

We didn’t go to movies or out to restaurants. Everything went into the business. Uncle George and dad never bought what they could not afford. The store employed people, and the workers fed their families and educated their children and put them through college. They were good people, all of them. We worked together and worked hard, but none worked harder than the bosses.

It’s the same story with so many other businesses in America, immigrants and native-born. The entrepreneurs risk everything, their homes, their children’s college funds, their hearts, all for a chance at the dream: independence, and a small business of their own.

Most often, they fail and fall to the ground without a government parachute. But some get up and start again. …

Obama’s changed. Gone is that young knight drawing the sword from the stone, selling Hopium to the adoring media, preaching an end to the broken politics of the past. These days, he wears a new presidential persona: the multimillionaire with the Chicago clout, playing the class warrior, fighting for that second term.

Tell me again why anyone should vote for Barack Obama.

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.)