Too large for the comment protocol. If you could post it, I would be much obliged:

Chuck:

My point though is that this seems to be a "damned if he do" situation. Joe's question was about his taxes. Joe keeps bringing up his "American Dream" (and I am sorry for the repeated use of quotations, but there is so much he said she said in this particular line of debate) but this really doesn't have anything to do with the questions that he is asking Obama. It certainly cuts to the issue at the center of the difference that Joe seems to have with Obama, ideologically (or at least to Joe's take on those differences), but I am trying to say, as I meant to assert in my first response, that if progressive taxation is per se smug or superior, then there is no headway for me to make here. I don't think this is the case, and I think that you are reading this "unintended" "superiority" in as a matter of ideal, and not as a matter of Obama's actions or words.

I think that that the analogy of the discussion with your wife is off base because the question of governance and taxation is very necessarily one of the control of a person by another. I know that neither of us think of our marital relationship as one of the husband controlling the wife, and I am also fairly sure that neither of us believes in a proper libertarian view of governance that could mean that the feds could never tell us what to do. By your example here, the government would be guilty of this same indiscretion by simply demanding the payment of taxes at all. Government can do some things better than private citizens can: that is why our society is built around it. When someone disagrees with the government's taxation of his or her income, the government's insistence that such taxes must me paid is not a condescending assertion that "here is the way that you should think about this." If you want to get into the specifics of the tax plan and of the economic ethos of the government, then I think we are back to the point in my first post that your problems with this piece of video are ideological and not attached to Obama the man as he interacts with Joe. In my viewing of this video, Obama isn't hoping to pretend to tell Joe how to think; he is telling him how he plans to run his tax system. And he says addresses this very point at the end of the clip when he acknowledges that he might not get Joe's vote.

As for the "dressing down," I think that what was expressed here by Joe AND Obama was two different ideological views of government, with Joe focusing on the application as to him and his ambitions and with Obama saying in a very matter-of-fact manner how he plans to run his tax system and how that tax system will affect Joe. I will agree to disagree that this was a teacher/student encounter (adding that I think Joe very well may have left feeling that he is the one that schooled Obama by forcing him to acknowledge that his taxes will go up and that this is "against the American Dream" – see the press circus that Joe has embraced), but in the end I see here a honest interaction between a potential president and an American. My man Obama is doing something that few liberals of power have done by not trying to obscure the fact that he is making a tax plan for the majority of people at the (ed note: minor and acceptable) cost of the top 5 percent. He does think that the government is superior in its ability to benefit its people through taxation and, yes, through wealth-spreading, but this does not mean that he treated Joe this way. Humbly, Daniel 2:56am