Richard Epstein analyzes Obama’s speech at the close of the Democrat convention and dubs Obama the “preacher-in-chief.”

Epstein’s post at the Hoover Institution should be read in full.  Here are the best lines, the first after a review of both the written speech and the oral one Obama gave last Thursday night, in which he spelled out his goals for the economy without giving any coherent statement of exactly what he would do or how he will make any of it happen:

It is not possible to have such a thin and immature understanding of how an economic system is put together by accident. That can only arise from the failure to adopt the right premises in the first place. It is worth recalling, yet again, that the president’s muse is Franklin Roosevelt, whose “bold, persistent, experimentation” sets the Obama gold standard.

Obama’s plan remains as incoherent as it was in 2008 when he said, “We’re going to keep trying a bunch of stuff until something works.”

Epstein closes his essay this way:

The great vice of Obama’s rhetoric is that he appropriates for his own use the ideals and ideas that have long served as symbols for the positions that he refutes. Yet even as he speaks, the sand continues to slip away underneath his feet. The job numbers that came out on Friday were disappointing. Forget the soaring rhetoric. Our president does not understand that his own policies are the source of our current malaise.