Pat Sajak spells it out.

Defining Moments

Pat Sajak · 22 hours ago

It's as if President Obama climbed into a tank, put on his helmet, talked about how his foray into Cambodia was seared in his memory, looked at his watch, misspelled "potato" and pardoned Richard Nixon all in the same day. It's fun to imagine the hand-wringing that must be going on within the White House as staffers try to figure out how to undo the damage their boss has done with his anti-entrepenurial riff. Defining moments in politics are strange beasts. Sometimes they're only recognized in hindsight, while sometimes they throw the train off the tracks before a sentence has been completed. Sometimes their effect can be contained and minimized, while sometimes their effect on the political narrative mestastasizes. This one is very bad for the White House.

These defining moments take hold most devastatingly when they confirm what a large portion of the electorate already believes. Taken alone, it seems unfair that a single moment, an unguarded remark or a slip of the tongue can carry such weight. They're often dismissed as "gotcha" moments, but when voters are able to nod and say, "I knew it," these moments stick and do terrible damage. We have witnessed such a moment.

Source.

On which point, James Taranto delves into the psychology of Obama's resentment of earned success:

Meanwhile, @BarackObama tweets a quote attributed to somebody identified only as "Jacob, Michigan": " 'President Obama had the courage to step up and save General Motors, and because of it, I have a job today.' " William C. Durant didn't build GM, but Barack Obama saved it.

The claim that Obama saved GM is fraudulent. What he did was use political muscle to intervene in a bankruptcy process in order to ensure a settlement on terms favorable to his supporters, the United Auto Workers union, at the expense of taxpayers (or "freeloaders," in the president's parlance) and bondholders. It would be more accurately characterized as an act of larceny than salvation.

Yesterday's column discussed the philosophy behind Obama's belittlement of the successful. Today we'd like to examine the psychology behind it. For it seems to us that Obama's generalities about success being undeserved are absolutely true in one particular case: that of Barack Obama. Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.

Let's run through the list of Obama's achievements.

"The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today," the New York Times reported Feb. 6, 1990. Obama himself understood his election to be a product not of unusual ability but of luck: "It's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks," he told the Times. "You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance."

He was lucky to be privileged and he was lucky to be black. But for the former, in his own telling, he never would have had the opportunity. But for the latter, his election would scarcely have been noticed outside Harvard Yard. In an interview with the Times, Peter Yu, Obama's predecessor as law review president, used apophasis to raise the possibility that the honor was undeserved: "Mr. Yu said Mr. Obama's election 'was a choice on the merits, but others may read something into it.' "

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