What is America About?

Well according to Barack Obama, it is this:

“What’s happened to the bargain? What’s happened to the American deal that says, you know, we are focused on building a strong middle class?”

This is the reason people accuse Obama of not "getting" America.

There never was such a deal. America is (or at least used to be) about providing equal opportunity and treating all citizens equally under the law, i.e., the exact opposite of trying to "build" a "class". The American social strength is that we do not really care about class; we want everybody to be treated equally with respect to their legal rights. Those legal rights do not include, for example, the right to own a house, to achieve academic and economic parity with all other ethnic groups, or to have ones income rise every year while doing the same job.