Dakota Beacon

Editor’s note: A longer version of this article appears at today’s American Spectator.

If Mitt Romney gets the GOP nomination, prepare for a season of class warfare in America unlike any before. Not only has President Obama been pushing class warfare unceasingly for three years now, but his chief strategist, David Axelrod, has been employing precisely this tactic against Romney, and well before Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry started harshly criticizing Romney’s Bain Capital work.

Axelrod, of course, is the Chicago-based consultant who got Obama elected. He was the chief architect of Obama ’08, right down to the very words “hope and change.” The Los Angeles Times correctly calls him the “keeper” of the Obama message. The New York Times dubs him “Obama’s Narrator.” Axelrod honed the Obama image, got him elected, and changed this nation. Then, after two years as a presidential adviser, he went back to Chicago to strategize on reelecting Obama. “I have one campaign left,” Axelrod told a reporter, “and it is going to be to try to elect a guy who I think is a great president.”

Which Republican stands in the way? The leading candidate is Mitt Romney, who happens to be the candidate Axelrod and Obama want to run against. “Ax” is slicing up Mitt for an Occupy Wall Street feast. He sees Mitt as a hunk of red meat for the Occupy movement, the poster-boy for Wall Street greed.

“Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession—a sort of political Gordon Gekko,” reported an August 2011 Politico piece, titled, “Obama plan: Destroy Romney.” The article quoted Axelrod: “He [Romney] was very, very good at making a profit for himself and his partners but not nearly as good [at] saving jobs for communities. He is very much the profile of what we’ve seen in the last decade on Wall Street.”

This, mind you, was still before Occupy Wall Street exploded in September and October.

The Politico quoted a “prominent Democratic strategist” close to the White House: “Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney.”

Well, indeed, Obama and Axelrod will run on Romney—tire-tracks and all.

Axelrod has steadily maintained this caricature of Romney. “He says he represents business,” Axelrod told MSNBC in October, “but he really represents the Wall Street side of business.”

Last Sunday, Axelrod told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Romney is “rooting” for economic decline. He described Romney as a nefarious outsourcer of “tens of thousands of jobs,” who “closed down more than 1,000 plants, stores, and offices” and “took 12 companies to bankruptcy.” As this rapacious profiteer cheerfully destroyed companies and businesses and shops and shop-owners and the poor and the meek and the downtrodden and the crippled and the lame, “he and his partners made hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“He is not a job creator,” scowled Axelrod. “He is a corporate raider.”

Axelrod frames this Romney way as the sinister “Bain mentality.”

And if you thought the Occupy movement was worked up last fall, you ain’t seen nothing yet. If Romney is the nominee, the Occupiers will go bananas this coming fall, especially if prodded by the Obama campaign.

With Barack Obama at the helm, and David Axelrod charting the course against Mitt Romney, this nation will set sail into a poisonous sea of class hatred. “Bain” Capital will be “Bane” Capital, as in evil. “Venture capital” will be “vulture capital.”

This November’s election might boil down to a fundamental debate between the merits of markets vs. central planning and wealth redistribution; that is where the rhetoric is headed.

If I were Mitt Romney, I would be prepared to carefully explain to Americans what venture capital is, and why someone with such economic experience is arguably perfect for the White House given today’s economy. I would bone-up on Friedman, Hayek, Mises, Hazlitt, Laffer, and, most of all, Marx. Oh, and I might Google the word “agitprop,” understanding that I’ll be thus targeted.

If Romney (as the nominee) does this right, he has a chance not only to win Americans’ votes but to educate them about the free-market system that has made their nation the marvel it is. An ugly campaign of class envy could become a valuable teachable moment.

— Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and “Dupes:How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century”.

If you follow professional sports, and especially if you are a football or hockey fan, you undoubtedly are aware of the rash of concussions that have rendered players unfit to play. Now there's a rash of lawsuits being filed against the National Football League, the latest of which includes a group of 106 retired football players, all alleging that the NFL should have done more to protect them from known risks.

We here in western Pennsylvania are acutely aware of this phenomenon. The Pittsburgh Steelers' linebacker, James Harrison, was suspended for a game after concussing Colt McCoy with a helmet-to-helmet hit on the defenseless Cleveland quarterback. On December 13, I attended my first hockey game in years, watching the Detroit Red Wings beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4-1. It was an exciting, well-played hockey game that I enjoyed, but would have enjoyed more if two Penguins' stars, Sidney Crosby and Kris Letang, had not been sidelined by concussions.

The question has arisen: Should the NFL and National Hockey League tighten the rules to protect players from concussions? Opponents argue that these sports are inherently risky and violent, and that to curtail the action in any way would diminish, if not ruin, the game. I respectfully disagree.

It's time for the owners and commissioners to exercise leadership and take decisive action to reduce the incidence of concussions.

Let me offer the Detroit-Pittsburgh hockey game as Exhibit A in support of my case. I wish you could have been there. The game was a magnificent display of athletic skill and intense competition. The players' wizardry on skates was accompanied by hard checks, collisions, and knockdowns on open ice, against the boards, and in the goalmouth. In other words, it was a clean game—tough, physical, without a whiff of wimpiness, but also without a single cheap shot.

This game was hockey as it was meant to be—artistic, fast-paced, and rugged. The play-making skill of Henrik Zetterberg, the power and precision of Evgeni Malkin's booming shot, the magician-like stick of Pavel Datsyuk, the acrobatics of goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, were a wonder to behold.

Such displays of skill make hockey a great spectator sport—not goon-like thuggery where a player takes a shot at an opponent's head. The hockey game I saw was physical enough to satisfy anyone other than a macho sadist. It had "manliness" without crossing a line where players' lives were at risk from gratuitous and dangerous head-hunting.

I'm sure the commissioners and team owners are currently calculating whether the potential premature end of the careers of a sport's marquee superstars (and the tens of millions of dollars that owners have invested in them) are worth risking to appease an appetite for mayhem. Even fans must think it would be a shame if the best players' careers were abbreviated by brain damage. But the discussion needs to go beyond the welfare of star players. Every professional athlete, even a rookie just called up from the minors to make his major league debut, is a precious human being. None of these athletes should have to go through life brain-damaged because the leagues are unwilling to police headshots.

A sickness has crept into our culture. Some sports fanatics think that cheap shots that can result in brain injuries are a legitimate part of sports. This warped mentality brings to mind James Caan's 1975 movie, "Rollerball." In that futuristic world, the powers-that-be kept loosening the rules of the fictitious sport rollerball until players eventually were allowed to kill their opponents, so that victory would go to the team that survived—literally.

We seem ominously close to starting down the same senseless slippery slope as dramatized in "Rollerball." In pagan societies, life is cheap and individuals are expendable. Think of the blood-thirsty Roman crowds in the Coliseum who derived perverse pleasure from seeing gladiators not just defeated, but destroyed.

Call me a wimp, if you wish, but it's time for the owners, players, commissioners, etc., to rein in the headshots. It's one thing in sports to want to physically dominate an opponent and "whup 'em." It's something totally different to inflict brain damage on another human being for life.

— Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.