RUSH: Stanley Kurtz has an article adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. And he’s very blunt about this. I have the book as a powerful, influential member of the media. My book is right over there, Spreading the Wealth. I have a copy. “President Obama is not a fan of AmericaÂ’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them.” Now, Kurtz believes that this is an excellent way to campaign against Obama, that you don’t need to be Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. You just need to tell people that live in the suburbs that no matter what they are, Obama’s coming for ’em, that he has been raised to believe that it was flight from the cities that led to all of the horrible economic conditions, the rotten schools and all of this that plague America’s cities.

It’s all about people fleeing, wanting a better life, and leaving behind their poor neighbors about whom they cared nothing. How basically the suburbs are made up of a bunch of selfish, greedy people who don’t care about their fellow man. That’s how Obama was raised. And, indeed, it is what many leftists believe. And I have to tell you, folks, the constant push by Democrats to get us into mass transit is all about destroying the cities. Let’s take a look. In California, Moonbeam Brown, the governor, is intent — what are they, $16 billion in debt? $16 billion state deficit, right? Maybe even higher. And what are they focusing on? What is one of Governor Brown’s primary objectives? This bullet train, a speed train from nowhere to nowhere.

Why? Mass transit. And the key word in mass transit is “mass.” As far as liberals are concerned, leader liberals, central planners, we are the masses. I remember Reagan I think in that famous Goldwater speech in 1964 made a point of saying how much it offended him to be considered a member of the masses, that we don’t have masses in America, that we are made up of beautifully, wonderfully free individuals, pursuing happiness and liberty. That we’re not a nameless, faceless conglomerate. We’re not “the masses” under state control. And yet this is the dream of the American left. That’s what Kurtz is writing about. Mass transit. I mean all these light rail trains, every time I see one there’s hardly anyone on ’em. Mass transit cannot support itself in most cities. There’s no interest in it. America still has its love affair with the automobile.

But Kurtz writes here that “Obama is not a fan of AmericaÂ’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administrationÂ’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of ‘regionalism,’ the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.”

Now, you’ll note in that paragraph, you don’t read the word “Republican” or “Democrat” or “conservative” or “liberal.” This is strictly geography.

“ObamaÂ’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of AmericaÂ’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer ‘flight’ to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, ObamaÂ’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban ‘sprawl.’ From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentorsÂ’ anti-suburban activism.

“The alliance endures. One of ObamaÂ’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building ONE America, which continues GamalielÂ’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the ‘anti-sprawl’ movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform,” that are designed to basically penalize people for where they live, in the suburbs.

“Since the failure of Lyndon JohnsonÂ’s War on Poverty and the collapse of federal urban policy, leftist theorists of community organizing have advocated a series of moves designed to quietly redistribute tax money to the cities. Health-care reform and federal infrastructure spending (as in the stimulus) are backed by organizers as the best ways to reconstitute an urban policy without directly calling it that.” These people can’t admit that this is what they’re doing. They have to speak in code. So when Obama goes out and attacks white working families, or when he refers to the bitter clingers, when he talks about not caring about the votes of white working families, it’s the suburbanites. This is how he was raised. This is what he was taught, is the problem. It’s what he has been led to believe is the big problem facing America — well, among many. Suburban sprawl.

“A campaign against suburban ‘sprawl’ under the guise of environmentalism is the next move. Open calls for suburban tax-base ‘sharing’ are the final and most controversial link in the chain of a reconstituted and redistributive urban policy. President Obama is following this plan. Middle-class suburban supporters of the president take note. It isnÂ’t just the pocketbooks of the ‘1 percent’ heÂ’s after; itÂ’s yours.”

Now, Kurtz has written a whole book about this, if you care to delve into it further. Indeed, it’s called Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. And if you look at their attacks on environmentalism, you’ll find that most, it is very subtle, but most of the human activity that they blame for causing climate change or global warming, it doesn’t happen in the cities, does it? All the SUVs and all the automobiles and all the cars being driven around and all the development and all the cutting of the natural environment, clearing forests to build housing, all of this stuff is happening in the suburbs. The suburbs is where the destruction of the planet is taking place. Essentially, growth, wherever there’s progress, wherever there is growth, that’s where the problem is.

Why doesn’t Obama, why don’t the Democrats close these disastrous inner-city schools? They don’t want people leaving them. They don’t want the parents of students in those schools to have any options. They want those schools open. They want those neighborhoods as is. They want to force people back into them. That’s why they don’t get rid of the teachers there. That’s why they don’t close down the schools. That’s why Obama opposes vouchers. It’s why he opposes school choice, or practically any other human free choice that people want to make. Because he has a plan, he and his leftist buddies.

Now, folks, for some people I know this is very hard, as is a lot of Obamaism, it’s hard to get your arms around and understand. Why would anybody hate suburbia? What does it matter where people live? You have to understand who they are. You have to understand Central Planning, what it is, command-and-control economics, what it is. And it all descends from a central belief that the average man or woman is incompetent. They can’t be trusted to do the right thing for society, for themselves, for the culture. Any expressions of individuality in this regard are a threat to command-and-control types. And the more they have you in mass transit, the more they have control over where you can and can’t go.

I firmly believe that they have plans involving cell phones. I think cell phones, to them, represent a potential uprising. It’s a way for people to communicate with themselves without the government being involved in the whole thing. It’s where, for lack of a better word, revolution could be fomented, could be discussed. Now, we’re nowhere near to that point, that I know of, but trying to explain the way these people think. Kurtz writes a book, I come here to tell you about the book. The central premise is, Obama wants to tax people out of the suburbs. “What does he care, Rush? You can’t be serious that these people really don’t like people just because they live in the suburbs.” They don’t. It’s not a personal dislike for the individuals who live there, although when you listen to Obama talk about ’em when he’s under the belief he’s off record, bitter clingers and all this kind of thing, he does have contempt. All liberals do.

What is this constant push for mass transit? Why all these bullet trains that go nowhere, high-speed rail? They want you to depend on the government wherever you go, how you get there. And they want to be able to control where you go. I know. Hard to believe. It’s hard to accept. It’s hard to understand. Why in the world would a president be animated by an enmity for people that live in the suburbs? “Rush, come on.” Just remember how you reacted when I told you they were gonna come for your SUV or any other outlandish prediction I made over the years that later turned out to be true. How are they gonna do it? Taxation. Kurtz spells it out. They’re gonna make it expensive as they can to live in suburbia and they’re gonna make it as impossible to build and develop in suburbia.

It’s a long-term project. They’re not gonna be able to do this in four years or two, but they’re going to be able to make the effort, and once they get their hands on tax policy for this and once you give Obama a second term where there is no accountability, he doesn’t have to face reelection again, doesn’t matter how mad people get, then Katie, bar the door. See, suburbanites aren’t paying their fair share. Suburbanites have taken from the cities. In suburbia, that’s where the good schools are. That’s where the clean malls are. That’s where upscale living, by comparison, is. They can’t have that. Remember, the rich are to blame for everything. The achievers, those who succeed on their own, they are the ones to blame for all of these problems. You fled the inner cities when they needed you most. You took your money and you took your life and you took everything to the suburbs, and you left those who couldn’t afford to go with nothing. Well, it’s time to get you or your money back. Interesting idea to campaign on this basis. Stanley Kurtz profoundly believes that it would be profoundly effective.