I think Atlas Shrugged came out after I graduated from college, and I read it while in graduate school. It was pretty long (over 1000 pages), and long-winded, and I skipped some of it while trying to find out who the heck John Galt was. I did like the main character, Dagny Taggert, and would liked to have found a girl like her. I read it a long time ago, and skipped around some so my recollection may not be entirely correct.

Ayn Rand depicted a time in the future when the US was sinking into a dictatorship, and it appears that time has come. To me, Obama is the leader of the "corporate looters and the moochers" from Atlas Shrugged. He uses a crisis created by the government to impose new restrictive laws and regulations and to reward corrupt corporate leaders (looters) and the irresponsible underclass (moochers). (It could be argued that Bush did the same thing to a lesser extent, but he was clearly not the leader of either the looters or the moochers.)