Rich Karlgaard‘s latest column for Forbes probes the president’s recent statements about American success stories.
Winning a lottery doesn’t make a person worthy of respect. A lottery winner wins despite engaging in an impulsive act. A lottery winner wins only because others lose. A lottery winner who won’t give back, therefore, is a lucky bastard.
A winner, on the other hand, is worthy of respect. He or she studied a discipline, risked time and capital, met market needs, learned from mistakes and likely worked very hard to achieve success.
This little example of how “lottery” changes an entire sentence’s meaning would be trivial but for one fact: President Obama said it–”lottery” and all–while speaking on a poverty panel last month.
What to make of this? Was it an unintentional slip to call successful Americans “lottery winners,” or was it a window into the President’s worldview on wealth, poverty and injustice? If it’s the latter, we’re in new territory. I don’t recall another American President who had such a sarcastic view of success. President Franklin Roosevelt thought and said that big business and bankers opposing his New Deal were “malefactors of great wealth,” but he stopped short of making snarky comments about successful people being lucky. Woodrow Wilson thought entrepreneurs were a passing fad to be replaced by scientific consortiums of big business and big government. But he didn’t call Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers lottery winners.
Intended or not, President Obama’s use of the words “lottery winners” instead of “winners” was in really poor taste.
