Jim Geraghty has an excellent piece at NRO today in which he addresses point by point Barack Obama's 'campaign speech' during the NATO press conference yesterday -- attacking Bain Capital, private equity, profit, Romney ... while essentially giving a lecture on the job of a president (This, coming from the 'expert' president that 'occupied' the Oval Office as our nation suffered its first credit downgrade in history, suffered its largest government spending spree in history, and is now deeper in debt (and rapidly growing ever deepter) than at any point in its history).

First, here's the president's annoying, aggravating, nanny state spiel that caught Geraghty's (and many others):

And when you're President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining. Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses. Your job as President is to think about how do we set up a equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.

ain argument for how to grow the economy is I knew how to make a lot of money for investors, then you're missing what this job is about. It doesn't mean you weren't good at private equity, but that's not what my job is as President. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.Geraghty's point-by-point response to the president's spiel not only lays bare the ideology of Obama's statism, it serves as a lesson (for Obama) in what the job of the president should be:

1) While the job of the president is not to maximize profits, a president would ideally be attempting to instill within the government some sense of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, budgetary discipline, waste reduction and elimination, and other ways of avoiding runaway spending; with $5 trillion in new debt run up in less than four years, all of these traits have been absent from Obama's presidency.

about profits, Mr. President. We're worried about stopping an endless string of catastrophic losses.

2) "Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining." Indeed, Mr. President, and the vast majority of federal retraining programs are expensive, ineffective, and redundant: "A newly released Government Accountability Office (GAO) report exposes a broken web of federal job training and employment programs. Nine federal agencies spent approximately $18 billion annually to administer 47 separate employment and job training programs. Many of the programs are duplicative, but GAO's most shocking revelation is that "little is known about the effectiveness of most programs."

3) "Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses." But those decisions are best made by local communities, not having the federal government selecting the sites for those clusters with earmarks and preferred companies like Solyndra (which just coincidentally donate a lot of money to your reelection campaign). As Obama's economic adviser Larry Summers pointed out, the federal government makes a lousy venture capitalist.

4) "My job is to take into account everybody, not just some." Except that Obama likes to forget about some people, like GM bondholders, the taxpayers who footed the bill for the GSA junkets, Catholic institutions who are forced to violate their principles, competitors of firms that get big contracts after making large donations to the president's campaign, competitors of firms and institutions that are granted waivers under Obamacare, the coal industry, potential Boeing employees in South Carolina, the privacy of donors to groups that disagree with him ... Read the rest here.

During the NATO presser, Obama used the very revealing phrase -- "how do we CREATE an economy..." that, as Monica Crowley points out, speaks volumes about everything he's done and about his vision of America. He doesn't believe in the free market, or in individuals pursuing their economic interests and their dreams. He believes in a redistributive socialist state enforced through government coercion.

THAT is the kind of economy he is trying to CREATE. Pay close attention to what he says because he's telling you what he's doing and where he's taking the country, if only your ears and eyes are open enough to hear and see it.

For Obama and others on the extreme Left, economic (and religious) freedoms are discredited theories that need to be disgarded and replaced with their vision of government-enforced redistributionism and the nanny state.

And yes, Bain does matter, as does Romney's business experience. Both stand for the knowledge and understanding of how businesses and markets work and thrive in a free market AMERICAN economy, how to manage budgets (something the Democrats completely ignore), how to manage operations effectiently ... and perhaps most of all that which Barack Obama is ideologically incapable of understanding -- the basic reasons why government should be limited. Reasons such as:

(Limited government) maximizes opportunity, enterprise and creativity ... permits individuals to go as far as their talents, ambitions, and industry can take them ... enables people to dream and to have the room to bring those dreams to fruition -- for themselves and their families ... strengthens the institutions of civil society that tend to shrink as government grows--institutions such as the family, church, synagogue, mosque, community, and the many voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized as the bedrock of American liberty and self-reliance ...

And through thousands of years of experience with government ... we've learned that it ought properly to be confined to certain minimal, but critical, functions and otherwise leave us the hell alone.

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