Vin Suprynowicz

The current president, George W. Bush, is not a gifted orator.

Oratory seems to be one of those things no one thinks matters much in a president — until it goes missing.

Those who dislike the current president may cite any of a dozen policy issues. But they rarely fail to mention how they cringe when that marble-mouth begins to speak.

Freshman Sen. Barack Obama is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president on a platform of “change.” One big change under an Obama presidency, make no mistake, would be the fact that the senator is a gifted orator, as he proved again Tuesday in his speech on America’s racial divide.

But skilled oratory can help reveal and explain the concrete steps a candidate would take to confront an issue, or it can be used the way a fan dancer uses her fans, to tantalize, to lead us on, while never quite delivering the goods.

Take just one section of that much-discussed speech in Philadelphia, which Sen. Obama titled “A More Perfect Union.”

After discussing the grievances of black Americans, Sen. Obama, who was raised in an all-white family, said “A similar anger exists within segments of the white community. … They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. … In an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed … resentment builds over time. …

“Just as black anger often proved counterproductive,” the senator continued, “so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze — a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns — this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.”

That’s impressive. A black politician has just acknowledged that the resentment of some whites over affirmative action — legalized discrimination against whites designed to give black Americans “a good job or a spot in a good college” for which a white or Asian person was actually better qualified — should not be “wished away” or “labeled as misguided or even racist,” because such resentments are “grounded in legitimate concerns.”

Well, hallelujah. Whereupon the candidate proceeded to shock some of his black supporters by saying he will propose legislation to end such legal discrimination against whites and Asians during the first year of his presidency, and — should Congress fail to enact it — simply order his cabinet officers to suspend such programs as blatant violations of the Constitution. Right?

Wrong. Candidate Obama said nothing of the sort.

Here we see the genius with which Sen. Obama uses our current narcissistic cultural fixation — promoted through two generations in the public schools, reinforced through all those shelves of “self-help” books and magazines, characterized by the self-referential “And how did that make you feel?”; “This is how it makes me feel when you say that”; “I hear what you’re saying”; “I feel your pain”, etc.

It sure SOUNDED like he said he was going to do something about the injustice of legally imposed reverse discrimination. But he didn’t.

In fact, what he said was that such white resentments merely “distract attention from the real culprits” — greedy businessmen who exercise their right to petition him in Washington, and “economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

Presumably the senator — who has the furthest-left voting record of anyone currently serving in the U.S. Senate, remember — refers to an income tax that currently requires the top 10 percent of American wage-earners to pay 68 percent of all income taxes (according to Stephen Moore, a senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial board, November 2007), while the bottom 50 percent — those below the median income level — now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the taxes.

(They actually garner more than that — “earn” would hardly be the right word — since government handouts and subsidies to the drunken, the drug-addled, the illegal and the illegitimate don’t get counted as “income.”)

But to Sen. Obama, a politically correct socialist who has never stood up against a significant affirmative action quota or set-aside in his life, that system “favors the few over the many.”

It would be interesting to know how much more would have to be looted from the productive and given to the shiftless to please Sen. Obama — and how on earth he thinks that’s going to stop anyone with any money left from investing it in less overregulated “job creation” overseas.

But Sen. Obama is much too smart for that. He’s not saying.