Forget Stepping Up Security
The real problem, wrote Barack Obama a few years back, is that terrorists lack empathy! And then, yawn, he blames that lack on poverty. Um, except, there have been numerous debunkings showing that many terrorists are upper middle class and foreign university educated. Robert Spencer chokes Obama's psychobabble over at HumanEvents:

...Obama declares that "the essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others." This lack of empathy isn't, he says, "unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity." Rather, it grows "out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

In other words, poverty causes Islamic jihad. Obama reiterated this point last July during a CNN interview, when he related the rise of jihadist sentiment in Indonesia to poverty: "And now in Indonesia, you see some of those extremist elements. And what's interesting is, you can see some correlation between the economic crash during the Asian financial crisis, where about a third of Indonesia's GDP was wiped out, and the acceleration of these Islamic extremist forces."

...If poverty causes terrorism, why is Pakistan aiding the Taliban, and edging ever closer to implementing the strictest possible version of Islamic law, so many billions of dollars later?

In fact, the poverty-terror connection has been debunked many times. Fortune magazine, for example, reported in March 2007 that "of the 50 poorest countries in the world...only Afghanistan (and perhaps Bangladesh and Yemen) has much experience in terrorism, global or domestic." The 9/11 hijackers were "middle-class sons of Saudi Arabia and many were well-educated. And Osama bin Laden himself is from one of the richest families in the Middle East."

Fortune noted that a 2003 study of Palestinian terrorism found "higher-status respondents (merchant, farmer or professional)" were significantly more likely than "those lower down the ladder (laborer, craftsman or employee)" to agree that there were "circumstances under which you would justify the use of terrorism to achieve political goals." And Harvard professor Albert Abadie studied 1,776 terrorist incidents, only to find no connection between poverty and terrorism: "When you look at the data" to find such a connection, he said, "it's not there."

If Barack Obama is elected president, will he continue to operate according to these failed paradigms, or will he face hard realities and adjust his policies accordingly? The lack of even the smallest shift in his views on poverty and terrorism between 2001 and 2008 do not bode well for the answer to this question.