Questioning a religion’s underpinning can be hazardous. Best not to suggest Mohammed was a war monger, or that Buddha was awfully fat for someone so perfectly detached, or that Al Gore is a crackpot. To Obama fanatics, the gospel truth is that he is a master orator. Even his political enemies concede this point, but what if all of them are wrong? What if Pres. Obama is a poor speaker?

To be sure, Obama is an effective speaker, stumping his way to the Oval Office with no qualifications or experience of consequence. He draws thousands to hear his words in person, when they sound exactly the same on TV. People like him; his popularity as a person far outstrips the popularity of his policies. And in comparison to his dullard opponent, Sen. McCain, candidate Obama really was a brilliant star. Still, does that make him a Churchill, Reagan, or Blair? No, not even close.

Contrary to the reporting of MSNBC, Obama is a boor of a speaker. When deprived of his teleprompter, Obama is a mess. Every third word is ‘um,’ and he stammers and blurts as if he has no competence with the topic at hand. Obama sounds like a mix of Captain Kirk and Ken from A Fish Called Wanda. His blurbs are tedious and predictable generalities. He never sounds the depths of actual policy. He is overly cautious, unwilling to make a commitment until consulting his staff (is repressing Iranian protestors wrong? I’ll get back to you on that). The reason Obama favors the teleprompter is because he is lost without it.

Obama’s ponderings are sugar sweet and equally without substance. We can have it all, and someone else will get the bill. Some big, ugly outsider is to blame for everything. As Obama’s honeymoon ends, he is still giving stump speeches, devoid of the details that burdened Pres. Clinton or Pres. Bush (41). Contrary to all common sense, Obama expects Congress to hammer out his policies. When the Democrats hold every lever of power in Washington, triangulation is just a cop-out.

So, why the adulation? Racism, probably. Then presidential candidate Joe Biden was amazed that Obama was a “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Why would Biden find such a combination unique? Perhaps he was more used to the drug slurred speech of rap stars, or sweaty linebackers mouth-breathing a thanks to God after winning the Super Bowl. Of course people listen to pop stars and sports idols more often than politicians, but come on Biden, open your eyes.

What of Sec. Condoleezza Rice? What of Justice Clarence Thomas? What of Sec. Colin Powel, Rep. J.C. Watts, or Michael Steele? Since Biden cited all of human history, what of Frederick Douglas? All of these are articulate, bright, and clean. Had Biden never heard of these people? The problem is that they are not really black because they are Republicans (Powel notwithstanding). Real black leaders had to be Democrats like Sharpton, Jackson, or Randall, sadly corrupt and sleazy. So, because of Biden’s biases, Obama seemed unique.

Biden is far from alone in his biased expectations. Chris Matthews is famous for his tingling leg during Obama speeches, like a dog having its belly rubbed. The entire mainstream media uses Obama’s alleged speaking skills as a foil to evade the ugly underbelly of his real agenda. People need to avoid this snow job. People need to close their eyes and imagine if Pres. Bush (43) had talked in such meaningless generalities – the press would have torn him apart, which they did.

Republicans currently lack a talented orator for their ideas (in fact they are a bit weak on ideas as well). Someone will step forward soon enough, but the first step in fighting Obama’s evil world vision is to deprive him of his most powerful weapon – his all-powerful microphone. Stop condoning the gospel that Obama is a brilliant orator. Stop conceding ground for nothing. Obama started well, but his speechmaking has not transitioned from the stump to the pulpit well at all. For eight years, Democrats lambasted Bush’s inarticulate speech instead of confronting the substance of his policies. Obama, contrary to the common view, is vulnerable to the same tactic, and it is well past the time to fight.

V.P. Biden famously declared paying higher taxes is a patriotic duty. Lou Dobbs bombasts that relocating a company outside the US is treason. Pres. Obama wants a special tax on US companies with foreign operations. These three, along with many others, reflect an ugly conceit that the US government is somehow an institution greater than the people who originally authorized it. Also, they make the policy error of assuming that businesses and the wealthy can be forced to remain in the US, that the taxman can squeeze them mercilessly without consequence. Of course none of that is true, and using “patriotism” as a foil only reveals their moral bankruptcy.

An underlying error to the Biden / Dobbs / Obama worldview is that a job is a thing that can be kept and exploited. In fact a job is an agreement between two individuals to exchange services for money. The agreement evaporates as soon as either party becomes dissatisfied. A job cannot be contained, it moves where it creates the most benefit. What Lou Dobbs sees as treason is Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work.

Indeed, companies that move jobs out of the US are a rarity compared to jobs that evaporate in the US and are reconstituted overseas. It is far more common for an inefficient company to downsize while a more efficient competitor grows than for a company to explicitly relocate operations. For example, GM did not move from Detroit to Tuscaloosa, but as GM failed, manufacturing jobs moved just as if GM had relocated. Jobs react to the marketplace much faster than inefficient corporations.

A job knows no boundary, owes no allegiance to any government, and cannot be contained. Despite calls of patriotic duty, goods will be manufactured where cheapest. Jobs will migrate to where Obama and Biden cannot tax them and Dobbs cannot shame them. One only needs to consider Socialist Europe, where unemployment is at recession levels permanently, to see that government efforts to “save” jobs can never work.

Politicians of all stripes react to these market realities in the same way: protectionism. Obama wants to tax goods from low cost countries to protect his high cost energy tax regime. Pres. Bush, like many before him, taxed steel imports to protect inefficient domestic producers. Such moves are a tax on the consumer and reduce overall production by forcing up prices. What these protectionists forget is that the world is perfectly willing to prosper and leave the US out of the party. If the US effectively outlaws the import of Chinese steel, the rest of the world only benefits more and grows faster. The endgame of protectionism is economic stagnation while free trade countries flourish.

So, while Biden claims that driving up costs is patriotic, the opposite is true. When Dobbs calls companies that react to the US’s unfriendly business environment traitors, his ire is misplaced. People who want to kill US jobs through regulation, taxation, and protectionism are in fact unpatriotic and traitorous themselves. They want to turn the US into a kind of prison where the outside freedoms of trade and investment are banned. Prosperity and liberty cannot be separated, so the true patriot will reject the perverted brand of patriotism slung about by Biden, Obama and Dobbs.