Steyn explains it:

The senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed nonrelevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice”. Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around – hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf ‘n’ turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.

The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama’s writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston.

In his Wednesday night infomercial, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.” Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why couldn’t he send him a $10 bill and nearly double the guy’s income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother’s keeper, and his aunt’s keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

More on those ward-o-the-state relatives the Obamacommie is too busy feeding his massive, megalomaniac ego to bother with “keeping”:

Barack Obama’s aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public housing in Boston, is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago, The Associated Press has learned.

Zeituni Onyango, 56, referred to as “Aunti Zeituni” in Obama’s memoir, was instructed to leave the United States by a U.S. immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss Onyango’s case.

Personally, I had the same first thought about this that Michelle did:

Just you watch: After sitting silent as Joe The Plumber’s records were rummaged by Ohio government employees, the fairweather privacy rights crowd will wake up and start making noise over this.

Yep, guar-o-nteed. And one of Malkin’s commenters had this to say:

So let me get this straight. Millionaire Obama doesn’t use his wealth to help his poor illegal alien Aunt get out of public housing, but if I complain about Obama wanting to raise my taxes to ’spread the wealth around’ I’m the selfish one?

That’s about the size of it, yeah. Limousine-liberal hypocrisy, summarized: government ought to be responsible for caring for the weakest among us, because we’re damned sure not going to roll up our sleeves, man the soup kitchens and emergency rooms, and do it ourselves. And if you don’t agree that it’s the government’s appropriate and rightful function, then you’re “selfish” — more selfish than the pious hypocrites who lecture incessantly on the plight of the less fortunate, while gliding right by them on their way up the ladder of a sort of capitalist success they’d deny to those left longingly staring up from the ground. Those supposedly compassionate types pull that ladder up after themselves, and toss a few crumbs of government largesse down to the wretched masses as a way of assuaging their guilt. It’s “let ‘em eat cake” all over again, only with the added insult of smug contempt for anyone who dares to disagree.

Ah, but incredible as it may seem, there’s more. Up until the Second Coming, we had the Constitution to help see to it that the anti-American depredations of two-bit tyrants like Obama, enabled by the elitist sanctimony of the better-than-thou’s who prefer their compassion doled out from the muzzle end of Big Government rather than directly applied to society’s exit wounds, couldn’t strangle the life out of the Republic. If he manages to steal this election, the supreme law of the land, which he regards as an inconvenient nuisance, will be little more than a memory. And you bitter, clingy, selfish types will be told to bend over, shut the hell up, and foot the bill for it all.

Update! Well, I’ll be danged. Completely forgot to title this sucker. Fixed now, obviously.