https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html
Daniels spoke six days after Barack Obama told Howard University’s class of 2016: “Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of mine: people who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky. That God may have blessed them; it wasn’t nothing you did.”
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Daniels was not responding to Obama, but he could have been when he told his graduates, “I hope you will tune out anyone who, from this day on, tries to tell you that your achievements are not your own.” He conceded the obvious: “I’m not saying that luck never plays a part; of course it can.” But unless it is tragically bad luck, “it almost never decides a life’s outcome.” Although you cannot eliminate luck from life’s equation, “you can tilt the odds in your favor” with common-sense behavior — making healthy choices, getting and staying married, and, especially, working hard.
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Daniels’s words to the Class of 2016 clarify why the 2016 presidential campaign offers an echo, not a choice. The presumptive Democratic nominee is a progressive committed to government ambitious enough to iron the wrinkles of luck out of life, and to distribute equity to life’s victims, meaning to everyone. The presumptive Republican nominee is a world-class whiner (a victim of debate moderators who are meanies, and most recently of a “rigged” judicial system) who is telling Americans that they are comprehensively victimized (by wily Chinese exporters, manufacturers making Oreo cookies abroad, freeloading allies, etc.). Purdue has the president the nation needs.
