Blue-collar workers, especially those connected with labor unions who mine coal, drill for oil and gas, build pipelines, and toil in all those related areas of genuine economic activity, must be appalled. Barack Obama won re-election largely on the willingness of those types of unions to put aside their doubts about his real commitment to economic growth and to turn out by a two-to-one margin for him.

That was decisive in states with large industrial unions: Ohio (18 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Iowa (6 electoral votes), New Hampshire (4 electoral votes), and Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). Obama's margin of victory in Florida was so tiny that without labor support, its 29 electoral votes would almost certainly have gone to Romney. Not only did unions deliver the electoral college majority to Obama, but if union voters had given Obama only a small majority, then Romney would have won the popular vote as well.

Now with the arrogance of the Ancien Régime of France, whose members led luxurious and insulated lives built on the work and sweat of their countrymen, Obama is effectively telling the growing class of poor Americans whose drop from the middle class is the consequence of leftist elitism that instead of recharging the American economy by real means -- using our vast amounts of coal and also oil and gas to create employment, providing federal and state governments with income (royalties) which do not require taxes, and making reducing the flow of dollars out of our nation -- that they should be content with the panacea of windmills, solar energy, and other impractical schemes.

Marie Antoinette was reported as saying, "Let them eat cake" in response to reports that Frenchmen had no bread. Likewise, Obama tells Americans who have no jobs, "Let them eat wind." The mansions and salons of our capital, which comfortably provide out of tax dollars fantastic extravagance showing blithe indifference to the real hardships outside the cocoon of Washington, look remarkably like their predecessors in 1789 Paris.

It does not matter at all to Obama and his entourage if his notional "answers" to the problems of ordinary Americans works or not. The rot is greater than just Obama. Nancy Pelosi has never worked in a real job or even lived in a community of Americans who actually worked in productive jobs and created consumable wealth. Dick Durbin, who also lived his whole adult life in places that produce only court cases and laws, has no clue about what makes America tick.

As I noted in my 2008 American Thinker article on "The Lawyers Party," almost everyone connected with Obama's party is a lawyer, and when I revisited the issue last August, this stark divide between Democrats and Republicans had grown sharper in four years. More than that, Democrats are the Government Party, the Washington Party, and not the party of working people.

The whole of their lives, these leftist elites lecture helpless college students, threaten businessmen with litigation and other similar shakedowns, and advance proposals to create wealth by the failed mechanism of taking money from those who engage in useful work and giving that money to those who do not -- after, of course, a healthy "piece of the action" for leftist cadres.

Do they grasp, I wonder, just how real people feel now? All across America, once great cities are turning into bankrupt cesspools, once happy lands like California are turning into savage and alien wastelands, once working couples -- whatever their notional partisan affiliation -- looked forward to comfortable retirement.

Effete, lazy men like Obama, between processions through luxurious places on the taxpayers' dime, wonder what all the fuss is about. Like the queen who lost her head, they cannot grasp that the cake they eat was made by other men who have no cake, nor even bread. They lecture Americans who ask only to dig the coal we need to bake that bread about the hypothetical glories of windmills. They have no more notion of honest work than the dukes and counts of Versailles understood the labors of ordinary Frenchmen two centuries ago. The question more and more, it seems, is not whether Americans will rise up, but when.