Politics & Power Quote by Charles Krauthammer

“Obama is a leveler” is doing more than describing a policy agenda; it’s cueing a moral panic. Krauthammer reaches for an old, loaded verb - to level - that evokes not reform but flattening, as if prosperity itself is a skyline threatened by the bulldozer of egalitarianism. The line is constructed to make redistribution feel like retaliation.

The subtext hinges on a shrewd inversion: “fairness,” a word with broad civic appeal, is recast as an alien imposition. Krauthammer doesn’t argue against specific programs; he argues against a governing ethic. By framing fairness as Obama’s “ultimate social value,” he suggests a zero-sum worldview where any push to narrow inequality must come at the expense of earned success, merit, or freedom. “Imposing it upon the American social order” is the tell. It implies that the existing order is natural, legitimate, even organic - and that attempts to correct it are ideological intrusions rather than democratic choices.

Context matters. This comes from the early Obama era, when stimulus spending, the Affordable Care Act, and debates over taxation and regulation collided with a post-2008 backlash and the rise of Tea Party politics. Krauthammer, a conservative columnist with a talent for moral clarity and political shorthand, is translating complex economic arguments into a character diagnosis: Obama isn’t just wrong on policy; he’s driven by a quasi-messianic “mission.” That move turns ordinary governance into a crusade - and makes opposition feel like defense of the American script itself.