It's pretty well-known that leopards cannot change their spots and that animals, whether human or otherwise, when overwhelmed, will tend to revert to those behaviors which served them best in the past.

So, we come to Barack Hussein Obama and his desperate desire to be re-elected.  Here is a man who was swept into the presidency with the thinnest résumé of any in the nation's history -- one who many believe is in reality a "front" for shadowy special interests like George Soros and who knows whom else, public service labor unions, and crony capitalist backers (think, for instance, Jeff Immelt of General Electric).

When "The One" mesmerized voters with oratory and slogans, he hadn't much of a record on which to be judged -- and much of that was murky and hidden from public view.  We know that he smoked pot and bummed around in college, although we don't know his grades, courses, or anyone who remembers him personally from those days.  We do know that, as president of the Harvard Law Review, he published nothing in that journal, a highly unusual record.

He was a lecturer for a while at the University of Chicago Law School and spent a few desultory years as an Illinois state senator, during which time he became best-known for regularly voting "present."  Next on to the U.S. Senate, where he did little or nothing remarkable for less than a full term before being whooshed into the White House.

But now there is a record -- and it's a very bad one.  From the January in which Obama took office until right now, his has been a totally failed presidency.

In foreign policy, we have mismanaged every relationship, insulting our friends and feeding our enemies' bad feelings toward America.  In domestic matters, there has been a sharp and dangerous run-up of national debt, failed attempts to ameliorate high unemployment, and obstructionism regarding development of energy resources available to lower fuel costs and reduce our dependence on unfriendly foreigners.  There have been extensive moves to exercise regulatory powers as a means of bypassing the legislative authority of Congress; dozens of appointed "czars" unaccountable to anyone; and massive expansion of government control and micromanagement of large sectors of the financial, banking, automotive, food, and pharmaceutical industries.  Add to that the forcing through Congress of the disastrous ObamaCare legislation, still not fully understood by anyone and against the clearly expressed will of the American people.

How to run on such a record?  It must be overwhelmingly daunting even for the narcissistic Obama, let alone for the powerful political interests behind him, to contemplate what a good GOP candidate can do to that record -- even with the mainstream press covering and cheerleading.

In such a situation, as I noted, one reverts to whatever worked best in one's past.  In Obama's case, that was his service as a rabble-rouser (euphemistically known by some as "community organizer") in the slums of Chicago.

And, thus, we have Obama making it clear -- through a buildup of statements denouncing the "millionaires and billionaires," giving a wink and a nod of approval to the "Occupy" mobs in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere, and his Tuesday speech in Kansas -- that class warfare will be the central them of his bid for a second term.  "Community organizing" means getting the losers and the lazy together to badger the successful and productive for an undeserved share of the wealth the latter have attained.  "Tax the rich" is another name for program.  "I'm doing it for the middle class who are being oppressed" is the lie that's used to justify it.

Obama and his henchmen believe that the only shot they have at winning is to gin up anger among the 50% or so of American families who pay no federal income taxes and/or are receiving federal bounty.  Tell them that a handful of people control most of the nation's wealth.  Tell them that those one-percenters are the reason for their own lack of success.  Tell them that the likes of Vikram Pandit and Jamie Dimon spend the day in luxurious office suites (when they're not gallivanting around on corporate jets), scheming to gobble up the poor folks' money and houses -- and when they're not doing that, they are scheming about how to screw the middle class.

Obama is an expert at turning people's hatred toward the Snidely Whiplashes he wants them to see out there.  It's what he did and does best; he has a great track record with the class warfare ploy.  He's lousy at everything else.

And it could be a good strategy for him.  After all, we have created a huge population section with little or no skin in the game -- and some of our pols have promised them that they are entitled to all sorts of freebies from their government, from a college education to food stamps, and all sorts of things in between.  They need their government to take ever more away from those "fat cats" and funnel it into more free stuff, bigger salaries, and lusher bennies for government employees, and government backing for donors' schemes.

Getting people angry at those who have more than they is an old -- and sometimes very effective -- political tactic.  So is buying their votes by promising to give them benefits financed by grabbing larger shares of what the fat cats wrongfully have amassed.

The campaign theme has already begun and will get louder and more strident as the month go by.  But it is, of course, built on a whopping lie.  The real upper echelon -- those so-called "one percent" -- haven't enough among them, even were it taxed at confiscatory levels (we once had marginal income tax rates as high as 90% in this country), to finance the utopian schemes Obama and his cronies promise.

No, my friends -- as the Europeans are now being forced to learn, the broad middle classes -- you and I -- are the ones that will be soaked to pay for the Democrats' socialist beliefs and vote-buying strategies.  This is the election that can drastically change America's social and financial structures into a European-style "social democracy" far beyond all that the New Deal did in the '30s and '40s.  We are plainly warned, and we'd better do something about it during the campaign and at the ballot box next November.