Over the weekend, on the campaign trail, President Barack Obama let his mask slip again.  The president's offhanded remark that voting is the best revenge betrays the anger in the man - and not just anger about a reelection in jeopardy. Under the carefully crafted façade of a healer and unifier, Barack Obama harbors resentments.  Millions of voters saw the president's smoldering anger and resentment breakthrough in his televised debates with Mitt Romney.  Aren't hardships and trials supposed to bring out the best in a man? 

The issue becomes one of character when a politician's public persona is so divergent from the real man. 

There are complex reasons for Mr. Obama's desire to "transform" America (to essentially overturn the Reagan Revolution and make America a corporatist approximation of Western Europe), but one reason - and not minor - is his desire to punish the successful and productive; to "level" Americans who aspire to more; who cherish their independence and who desire fulfilled lives for themselves and their families on their terms.  (For more on the latter, checkout this Breitbart article on Mr. Obama's war on the suburbs).

Anger and revenge fuels the American left, of which Mr. Obama is a part.  But anger and a desire for revenge aren't assumed once one identifies with the left; these qualities are brought by many of its followers to the left.  The left's credo of revolution (however achieved) stokes anger and resentments in its adherents, but it only stokes fires that were burning long before its adherents found an outlet in leftism.            

But there is more than anger and fraudulence in the Obama image that betrays the president's character.

There's mendacity, cheap political calculation, and ideologically blinkeredness - and, perhaps, fecklessness.  The Benghazi debacle reveals the nation's 44^th president's character - and character, as we all have learned regardless our stations or pursuits in life, personal and professional, shapes our actions. 

When the full story eventually comes out about Benghazi, the president will be revealed as a man whose decisions permitted four patriots to die without so much as an attempt by the nation's chief executive to save them, much less heed earlier, frequent warnings about the dangers of Benghazi.  When the subsequent cover-up perpetrated by the president - aided and abetted by administration officials and the mainstream media - is laid bare, the lengths to which Mr. Obama has gone to remove blame from himself will be the stuff of history books (when there are historians at a future time unafraid to write the truth). 

Men and women of character - and that would include politicians - make mistakes and miscalculations.  But they own up to their mistakes or poor judgments and seek to make amends.  They don't resort to stonewalling, misdirection, and lying to evade responsibilities. 

And there's much more in the Obama record (and his life before politics) that shows that Mr. Obama has never been the man he claims to be. 

But better to close on a quote from Peggy Noonan's enduringly superb study of Ronald Reagan [i](When Character Was King).  Wrote Noonan:

He [Reagan] had courage.  He always tried to do what he thought was right.  And when doing what was right demanded from him great effort or patience or tenacity, or made him the focus of attacks and criticism, he summoned from within patience and tenacity and courage to face it all. [i]     

President Obama's character is deficient.  Character informs actions.  If any of your family, friends, or neighbors are undecided about tomorrow's presidential election, make them aware that character is king - for paupers and presidents.

[i] Peggy Noonan, When Character Was King (Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc, 2001), 325.