Capitalism + Democracy = Peace

Beijing, not Beizhing.

2012-02-13T23:30:00.003-10:00

I'm continually surprised by the number of high-paid TV anchors and correspondents who cannot pronounce correctly the name of China's capital city. Here's the correct pronounciation:

My list of people who need to watch the video:

Bret Baier, FOX News

Coming Apart

2012-02-07T16:29:00.009-10:00

“I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.”

--David Brooks, New York Times

“Coming Apart is a must-read for [mainly] its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism.”

--Heather Wilhelm, “RealClearBooks”

We have already discussed Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (here and here). Now raves are beginning to pour in. To David Brooks, Murray has shown that America’s “real social gap” is between “the top 20% and the lower 30%.” Brooks chides liberals for “latch[ing] onto [the] top 1% narrative” that the financial elite is our biggest problem. Liberals do so because it “excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.” Excellent point.

Yet Brooks himself says,

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

Good old Brooks, again quick to defend his elite.

Brooks’ solution for Murray’s sharp division is oh so 1970s: a National Service Program that would “force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together.” Right. How exactly does that bring people together once national service is over? How did that work out for the last draft (or national service) generation, once Vietnam was over?

Heather Wilhelm, as her above quote states, is struck by how committed Murray is to moving life beyond materialism:

"If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life -- achieve happiness," Murray writes, "the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith." The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are "the institutions through which people live satisfying lives." This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class.

Wilhelm seems to agree with Murray’s jaundiced take on the upper class. She quotes him writing,

the new upper class . . . don't mind the drift toward the European model, because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience -- much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens.

Charles Murray himself, in a recent TIME essay, concentrates on the “new upper class,” which he defines as well under 100,000 nationally, as well as a “broader set, numbering a few million people, who hold comparable positions of influence in the nation’s major cities.” This “upper class” is the “Gated Country” we earlier wrote about, and much smaller than the upper-middle class 20% (over 60 million) college graduates who make up Murray’s fictional “Belmont” (though the “Belmont” folks are culturally similar to the upper class, echo their politics, and aspire to join them).

The “Gated Country”-“Belmont” distinction is one both Brooks and Wilhelm seem to miss. Murray’s especially unhappy with those at the top,

so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. [They can] completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.

Oh Yeah. The Economy May Help Obama.

2012-02-04T17:16:00.004-10:00

The stock market is hitting highs not seen since early 2008, and in the case of the NASDAQ, since 2000. Our FOX Index, which measures “healthy” as a total above a Dow of 12,000, an S&P 500 of 1,300, and NASDAQ of 2,500—total, 15,800—is at its all-time (Index began in August 2008) high of 17,113, or plus 1,313 (see chart).

And why not? Job creation for January came in at 243,000, against estimates as low as 121,000, and the unemployment rate dipped to 8.3%. The rate was 8.9% as recently as October. Moreover, the payroll increase for December was revised up to 203,000 from 200,000, and November’s figure was revised up to 157,000 from 100,000. The U.S. has added an average of 183,000 jobs a month in the past five months.

Please see the chart below, a version of which we have run every month since last May. If job growth continues at 180,000 a month over the next 8 months, Obama will sail past his minimum target of replacing all jobs lost during his administration. And if the unemployment rate falls only as much in the next 8 months as it has fallen in the last 4 months, Obama will have America back to the unemployment rate when he took office. A rough four years, yes. But recovery under way? You bet.

Pyrrhic Victory?

2012-02-01T11:45:00.003-10:00

“Those of us who believed that a primary fight would toughen Mr. Romney up have little to show for it. Far from sharpening his proposals to reach out to a GOP electorate hungry for a candidate with a bold conservative agenda, Mr. Romney has limited his new toughness to increasingly negative attacks on Mr. Gingrich's character. It's beginning to make what we all assumed was a weakness look much more like arrogance.”

--William McGurn, Wall Street Journal

William McGurn and the Wall Street Journal are establishment and behind Romney. But as we have noted and as McGurn writes above, the Wall Street Journal wants Romney to co-opt tea party reservations about his conservative bona fides and more specifically, to back a bold tax reform proposal. Romney has time to respond, but thus far, arrogance instead.

In the meantime, conservative disgust with Romney’s campaign is broad and deep enough to help kill Mr. Romneycare’s general election chances. Listen to unhappy conservative voices:

Newt, Romney supporters crow, is a loser and "embarrassment." But what about their own candidate? . . . He has been taught how to play a semi-conservative Republican on TV, but his deepest instincts remain liberal. Hence, his dogged pride in Romneycare, legislation that Barack Obama himself would have fathered had he governed the Bay State. . . the GOP will pay a severe price for the Faustian bargain of "electability" . . . A party that chooses power over principle will lose both.

--George Neumayr, American Spectator

In Florida, the Republican empire is striking back. Somewhere. . . is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Gingrich may be an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support. . . but in truth, if you connect the dots between the ideals of the Reagan Revolution, Gingrich’s Republican Revolution and the Tea Party movement, you get a straight line. The GOP establishment is right to fear Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, just as they once feared Ronald Reagan.

--Milton Wolf, Washington Times

conservatives throughout the country are now keenly aware of the opinion the Establishment has of them, as well as what has been going on behind the curtains in Washington. The current Republican nominating process has further exposed the true nature of the Establishment and their self-centered concerns. . . Mitt Romney has been chosen to be the next Republican nominee for president [and will] fall in line with what is expected of a Republican insider.

the collective and coordinated vitriol and false or misleading accusations against Newt Gingrich by virtually all in the Establishment, led by the so-called conservative media, is unprecedented. . . the fact that he has been successful in fighting for conservative ideals but in an unorthodox and often contentious, and at times unreliable, fashion has the Establishment in near hysterics. . . Never has the Republican Establishment trained its guns on any one candidate in such an unbridled and unrestrained way. The Establishment could not have made a more strategic blunder. . . the damage they have inflicted upon themselves is approaching irreversible. The public now sees the length to which the Establishment will go to make certain their hand-picked candidate is chosen.

--Steve McCann, American Thinker

ordinary voters . . . don’t like and don’t trust the Establishment. They remember that the Establishment supported Dole and McCain (both of whom endorsed Romney). And they want an electable reformer, not a cautious moderate. Those endorsements signal that Romney is not a Reagan, but (at best) a Ford. . . electability is not one of the [reasons to vote for him.] Romney needs to present some dramatic reform plans, starting with income-tax cuts and ending pointless government agencies. If he succeeds without these things, the “Reagan Revolution” is dead. That may be why so many Republicans oppose Romney. . .

--Richard Miniter, Forbes

Romney is being boxed in as the establishment candidate. I think [the Dole and McCain] endorsements are limiting for Romney overall, because you have a a tea party that has largely sat out between Romney and Gingrich -- but when they see all the [establishment] people coming out for Romney, who they blame for the problems in the first place….it pushes them toward Gingrich. He’s not a perfect vehicle at all for any of them, but they really don’t like Romney.

--Eric Erickson, “Redstate”

conservatives will under-vote for president in 2012 rather than support another Bush-Dole-Bush clone in the White House. Heck, there are lots of positive things to say about the Bushes and the Doles, but little good to say about Romney. He’s Bush-Dole without character. But give him this: The guy really, really wants to be president.

--John Ransom, “Townhall”

there needs to be some understanding of the reckless accusations that have become part of the all-out attempt to destroy Newt Gingrich, as so many other political figures have been destroyed, by non-stop smears in the media. . . the poisonous practice of irresponsible smears is an issue that is bigger than Gingrich, Romney or any other candidate of either party.

The[se] practices may well have something to do with the public's dissatisfaction with the current crop of candidates in this year's primaries . . . Character assassination is just another form of voter fraud. There is no law against it, so it is up to the voters, not only in Florida but in other states, to punish it at the ballot box -- the only place where punishment is likely to stop the practice.

--Thomas Sowell, Stanford’s Hoover Institution

[Romney] is the weakest candidate who can face Obama and will go into the general election with a fractured base, thanks to his own character flaws, which are now on display, and his tactics of personal destruction. Moreover, while Romney can swamp his Republican opponents by 3 to 1 or more in every state with his spending advantage, Barack Obama will be raising more and spending more to beat him in the general election, meaning Romney's financial advantage will be non-existent.

--Mark Levin, conservative talk radio host

America’s Damaged Working Class

2012-01-31T13:23:00.008-10:00

In “The Gated Country,” we repeated Charles Murray’s description of how the upper class lives so differently from the rest of us. Murray, however, has documented another profound division below the top: that between upper middle class college graduates and a lower class whose education stopped with high school.

Murray examined only non-Latino whites in order to clarify how broad and deep U.S. cultural divisions have become. And he looked only at those between the ages 30 to 49 to show the trends aren’t explained by ages of marriage or retirement.

To represent the 20% of whites between 30-49 who are college graduates working as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media, Murray has created the fictional community of Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston).

And to represent the 30% of whites between 30-49 with no degree beyond high school, who if they work, are in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist, he invents Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution—see picture).

In his examination of differences, Murray emphasizes single parenthood because he believes children born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than those raised in intact families, an unwelcome reality even after controlling for parents’ income and education. And he justifies his look at religiosity by noting that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors.

Below, a chart that lays out the differences between Belmont and Fishtown:

________________
* = “de facto secular” is someone who professes no religion or attends a worship service no more than once a year.

Murray’s statistics portray two starkly different worlds within the U.S. below the upper class “gated country” at the top. “Belmont” is aspirational, upper middle class, and part of an America that works. “Fishtown” presents a problem Murray sees as cultural, a lower class caught in a downward spiral of deterioration because 1960s social policy made it economically more feasible to have a child without a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let government handle community problems you and your neighbors formerly took care of.

Murray doesn’t see any easy solution to closing a gap that was smaller in 1960, and is gigantic today. But, he says:

There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.[emphasis added]

Innovative, exceptional. America.

2012-01-30T13:23:00.004-10:00

In the Wall Street Journal, Mark P. Mills and Julio M. Ottino have given us an optimistic look at where our country is going. Here’s the condensed version:

we [are] on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

➢ Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free.

➢ Smart manufacturing (picture). . . we are just entering an era where the very fabrication of physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science.

➢ Finally, there is the unfolding communications revolution where soon most humans on the planet will be connected wirelessly. Never before have a billion people . . .been able to communicate, socialize and trade in real time.

. . .consider three features that most define America, and that are essential for unleashing the promises of technological change: our youthful demographics, dynamic culture and diverse educational system.

➢ demographics. By 2020, America will be younger than both China and the euro zone, if the latter still exists. Youth brings . . . the ineluctable energy that propels everything.

➢ [Our c]ulture . . . is . . .high inertia. . . distinguished by . . . open-mindedness, risk-taking, hard work, playfulness, and, critical for nascent new ideas, a healthy dose of anti-establishment thinking.

➢ American higher education[‘s] most salient features are flexibility and diversity of educational philosophies, curricula and the professoriate. . . a dizzying range of approaches . . . Good. One size definitely does not fit all.

to help usher in this new era of entrepreneurial growth [we need l]iquid financial markets, sensible tax and immigration policy, and balanced regulations . . . But the essential fuel is innovation.

The Gated Country

2012-01-28T12:18:00.006-10:00

“liberals often argue that the real enemies of average Americans aren’t bureaucrats and Harvard-trained technocrats; they are the financial wizards, evil corporations and plutocratic tycoons. Maybe so, but at this point the argument doesn’t convince many people. Besides, why can’t both be enemies? After all, many elite liberal Democrats, in office and out, have been exceedingly Wall Street-friendly.”

--Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

We have a sharply divided nation. Because conservatives are represented at the top of our liberal-dominated power and wealth social structure where most national dialog takes place, we mistakenly believe conservative/business v. liberal/knowledge represents the true national division.

In fact, the American upper class not only has its schools, its residences, even its entire lifestyle in common, but also shares its separation from, and its fear of, America’s less-favored super-majority. Credit for this understanding Charles Murray, whose Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 documents our profound class divisions.

Our upper class is nationwide gated America physically separated from the rest of us. Murray, in his own words:

the top of American society. . . run the country, meaning that they are responsible for the films and television shows you watch, the news you see and read, the fortunes of the nation's corporations and financial institutions, and the jurisprudence, legislation and regulations produced by government. They are the new upper class, [highly] detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans . . .—not just socially but spatially as well. The members of this elite have increasingly sorted themselves into hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite ZIP Codes. . . SuperZIPs.

If you are invited to a dinner party by one of Washington's power elite, the odds are high that you will be going to a home in Georgetown, the rest of Northwest D.C., Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac or McLean, comprising 13 adjacent ZIP Codes in all. If you rank all the ZIP Codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that 11 of these 13 D.C.-area ZIP Codes are in the 99th percentile and the other two in the 98th. Ten of them are in the top half of the 99th percentile. Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation's other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation's power elite [lives in a] culturally rarefied and isolated [world].

Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into [this] world. [T]hey have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

Insulated. Isolated. And afraid.

The Lost Nation

2012-01-26T09:56:00.006-10:00

"Today, General Motors is back on top as the world's number one automaker. . . What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries. It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh."

--President Barack Obama, 2012 State of the Union speech

"The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. . . But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age."

--Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

“The future ain't what it used to be.”

--Yogi Berra

In truth, it’s unlikely manufacturing will yield substantial job growth in America.

Adam Davidson’s “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, captured the New York Times editorial room Monday, on the eve of Obama’s State of the Union. Both Thomas Friedman and David Brooks based their columns on Davidson’s article. Quoting Davidson, Friedman wrote that advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution are replacing U.S. labor with machines or foreign workers, with employers finding above average yet cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Said Davidson:

In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.

Friedman added that unemployment for Americans over 25 years old with a high school degree is 8.7%, dropping to 4.1% for those with bachelor’s degree or higher (but note: the unemployment rate for college graduates, historically around 2%, is now above 4% for the first time in record-keeping history).

Brooks’ treatment of the Davidson article went to the causes of a less competitive American workforce. Wrote Brooks:

millions of mothers can’t rise because they don’t have adequate support systems as they try to improve their skills. Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.

Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things. Over the past 40 years. . . median incomes of men have dropped 28% and male labor force participation rates are down 16%.

Brooks blames the male income decline on “the deterioration of the moral and social landscape” surrounding men. But while Brooks points to social causes for unemployment, like Friedman, Brooks remains as fixed as ever on the “government do something” mode of problem solving. Friedman’s big recommendation is a “G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.” That could be expensive.

Brooks suggests government simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible, balance the budget, support training programs like Job Corps, coordinate better between colleges and employers, pay superstar teachers more, and expand child care and early childhood education. Whew.

What about Walter Russell Mead, whose quote above calls for a post-big-government approach to our unemployment problem? What’s his “do something”? Mead wants “a project that can capture the best energies of our rising generations, those who will lead the United States and the world to new and richer ways of living.”

OK, but. . .

The Great Debates

2012-01-24T13:38:00.005-10:00

“[In t]he general election . . [i]t is unlikely that the debates. . .will matter. . . much; they rarely do.”

--National Review editorial

The National Review is in the tank for Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich’s strong point is debates, and he believes that if nominated, he can beat Barack Obama in presidential debates this fall. In discounting the decisiveness of debates, the National Review is rewriting history. Presidential debates played a major or dominant role in deciding 8 of 10 (80%) of the elections during which they took place.

Here are the presidential debates that mattered:

1960: First debate ever. Kennedy holds his own, looks better than Nixon, emerges as presidential, wins debate and election. Debate so consequential that no debates take place in 1964, 1968, or 1972.

1976: Second debate of three. Ford unaccountably and inaccurately proclaims Poland is not under Soviet domination, in spite of moderator’s effort to help him say otherwise. Ford loses debate and election.

1980: Only Reagan-Carter debate, held week before election. Reagan (picture) parries Carter attacks with “There you go again” and concludes by asking voters, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Reagan wins debate and election in a landslide. Debate so consequential subsequent final debates all held at least two weeks before election.

1984: Second debate of two. In first debate, Reagan stumbled and showed his age. In second, Reagan crushed age issue by saying, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." Mondale threat effectively collapsed at that point.

1988: Second debate of two. Asked if he would still oppose capital punishment if his wife were raped and murdered, Dukakis replied by statistically documenting the ineffectiveness of capital punishment. Dukakis lost the debate and the election to Bush 41.

1992: Second debate of three between Bush 41, Clinton, and Ross Perot. In first ever town hall format debate, an apparently bored Bush was caught on camera looking at his watch during audience-candidate discussion of the weak economy. Symbolized Bush’s detachment from the economy and helped cost him the election.

1996: None. Clinton kept his lead over Dole through two debates.

2000: First of three debates. Gore caught audibly sighing several times during Bush 43 answers, a demonstration of condescension that voters disliked, helping cost Gore a very close election.

2000: Third of three debates. Gore walks up to Bush while Bush is answering a Gore question, invading Bush’s personal space, a demonstration of disrespect that voters disliked, helping cost Gore a very close election.

2004: Third of three debates. Kerry publicly calls out Vice President Chaney’s lesbian daughter to make the point that homosexuality is inherent, not acquired, crossing a personal-political line to which the Chaneys strongly objected, likely costing Kerry votes in a close election.

2008: None. Obama kept his lead over McCain through three debates.

The Iron Lady

2012-01-20T17:38:00.003-10:00

“The Washington Post-ABC poll just out produced an extraordinary 57% disapproval of the economic stewardship of Barack Obama, whose life goal seems to be to reverse the policies of 1980-2000.” [emphasis added]

--Daniel Henninger, Wall Steet Journal

Margaret Thatcher ruled Britain from 1979 to 1990, leading her Conservative Party through three election victories.

I have seen the odd movie, “Iron Lady.” Do you think race hurt Obama’s election prospects more than it helped? Me neither. Thatcher became Britain’s leader in part because she was a woman and because she was a grocer’s daughter.

Still, as I have suggested and as we all know, Thatcher was bigger than “woman prime minister.” She was a transformative, revolutionary political leader, big enough to stand right alongside the transformative, revolutionary Ronald Reagan. The two were larger than the sum of their parts. Thatcher-Reagan. Roosevelt-Churchill. Dominant English-speaking duos of the 20th Century.

Millions in Britain still hate Thatcher for the way she transformed their country, much as Obama and millions of others quietly curse Reagan for the changes he brought America. The British left is very important to the world of Meryl Streep and her team, who correctly viewed a Streep portrayal of Thatcher as a pretty direct path to an Oscar. So how to handle the Thatcher story in a way that doesn’t alienate the left?

First, dwell on Thatcher’s dementia, not her strong leadership. Streep’s convincing portrayal of Thatcher in advanced decline really is Oscar-winning acting, a brilliant—and wonderfully pro-left—move from Streep and her team. At the same time, there is just enough of Thatcher in her youth and prime to keep the story interesting (of course a much better movie would have focused on what Thatcher called “the Downing Street years.”)

Second, deflect leftist criticism by playing up (in interviews, not in the movie) Thatcher’s less-than-conservative side. From Jen Vineyard’s story on the movie, carried in “Indywire” (Canada):

Streep pointed out, Thatcher was a fiscal conservative, not a social one. "She was pro-choice, she was an early proponent of global warming, and she had no beef against personal lives, homosexuality," the actress said. "She would have been drummed out of the conservative party in America."

Third, defame conservative powerhouse Maggie as a less-than-adequate mother. Virginia Postrel, in “Bloomberg,” calls the “Iron Lady” movie:

the Gospel According to Anna Quindlen, the [New York Times] writer and columnist who enshrined [her gospel’s] maxims in . . . the best-selling book A Short Guide to a Happy Life. “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office,” she instructed. “Don’t ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: ‘If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.’” The film presents Thatcher as just such a rat -- a woman who too zealously pursued public achievement and spent way too much time at the office.

1-2-3. Hollywood reduces Thatcher to a sad old lady who alienated the people she most cared for, and who Streep tells us was a closet liberal to boot.

Here’s a taste of the real Margaret Thatcher, from a 1979 campaign speech:

The Old Testament prophets did not say “Brothers, I want a consensus.” They said, “This is my faith; this is what I passionately believe; if you believe it too, then come with me."

With that passion and drive, Thatcher between 1979 and 1987 reduced the number of British civil servants by 22.5% (732,000 to 567,000). That's a career-justifying accomplishment.

Liberal Elite, Center-Right Country

2012-01-17T11:40:00.010-10:00

“Those who underestimate the conservative movement are the same people who always underestimate the American people.”

--Ronald Reagan (1988)

1965. The last year it was great to be a liberal. The year of the Great Society’s Voting Rights Act and Medicare, as well as the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened U.S. immigration to the increasingly important non-European, nonwhite world. 1965 also brought sustained U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the introduction of U.S. combat troops into full-scale combat in Vietnam, doubling of the draft to 35,000 a month and Pentagon requests for an escalation to 400,000 troops. The war’s escalation in turn led throughout the nation to teach-ins, mass demonstrations, draft card burnings, and the first American self-immolations. 1965. The first year it was bad to be a liberal.

From 1965 on liberals had little to celebrate, as Republicans made major gains in the 1966 elections, then elected Nixon president in 1968 and 1972. In 1976 Democrats barely beat Gerald Ford following Watergate with an inept and increasingly unpopular Jimmy Carter, who presided (1977-81) over an energy crisis, rising unemployment, slow growth, inflation (“stagflation”), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iran hostage crisis.

Ronald Reagan’s successful presidency (1981-89) turned the nation away from liberalism, led to the elections of Bush 41 and Bush 43 (1989-93, 2001-09), and even under “New Democrat” Bill Clinton (1993-2001) yielded up GOP control of congress over Clinton’s final six years, including his 1998 House impeachment for perjury.

The 1997-99 impeachment fight marked a turning point for Democrats, even though Republicans did control both the White House and Congress for most of 2001-06. In 1997, Southerner Clinton gave up on being “GOP lite.” He instead embraced progressive Democrats, who provided Clinton the one-third of the Senate he needed to stave off a perjury conviction and early removal from office.

Southern conservative abandonment of the Democratic Party, complete by 2000, made the surviving Democratic core more purely progressive. At the same time, Democrats had solidified their domination of America’s ruling class, the government-connected elite fighting to hang on to the power they seized during liberalism’s growth years. Elites play by different rules—their rules. To elites, words are weapons, truth is relative, the law is flexible, and God is a myth created for the masses. Smarter, richer, better educated, elites know what’s best for us.

Bush 43’s failed presidency, abetted at every step by liberal domination of government, the media, academia, entertainment, and the arts—the knowledge economy—led by 2006 to Democrats controlling Congress for the first time since 1994. Democrats then recaptured the entire country in 2008 with Barack Obama’s smashing victory and further Democratic congressional gains.

Democrats have subsequently moved us toward a European-style social democracy of big government, higher taxes, crony capitalism's tamed businesses, and masses dependent on bureaucratic largesse centered on universal health care. Progressives want equality not of opportunity, but of results. It helps Democrats that the people who benefit most in such a society are the national elite, the ones who run the show.

The progressives’ coalition—a knowledge-economy head, a dependency underbelly—importantly rests upon minorities and unmarried women. They along with educated young people (our future knowledge economy) provided the 2008 votes that truly returned progressivism to power for the first time since 1965.

Valerie Jarrett (picture), we learn from New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s biography The Obamas, is a very important person in today’s progressive coalition. Jarrett touches every coalition base. She is African American, unmarried (divorced), from an elite family, born in Iran, a graduate of Stanford and Michigan law school, and Barack and Michelle Obama’s closest confidante. In the conservative Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti paints this revealing miniature of Jarrett:

Jarrett told author David Remnick that the reason she bonded with Barack Obama was that “he and I shared a view of where the United States fit in the world, which is often different from the view people have who have not traveled outside the United States as young children.” Remnick goes on to write that Jarrett viewed America “as one country among many, rather than as the center of all wisdom and experience.”

Do progressives feel isolated in a center-right nation? Not really, for they know, as Valerie Jarrett knows, they live in a larger world that like their coalition is nonwhite and majority female, and looks to them for leadership.

Within the U.S. though, as the 2010 elections demonstrated, progressives remain a minority. Here’s John Feehery in The Hill:

Among all whites, now just 35% approve of [Obama’s] performance and 58% disapprove. . . the Obama White House has made the decision that it doesn’t need those white voters to win. That may be true in 20 years, but it is not true today. The swing vote in this next election is the same as it has been in the last six elections. It is the white working-class voter.

More facts on progressive weakness from conservative Nile Gardiner, writing in The Telegraph (UK):

in 2011, . . . 40% of Americans continu[ed] to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. . .conservatives have become the single largest group, consistently outnumbering moderates since 2009 and outnumbering liberals by 2-to-1.

As Gallup’s surveys show, Americans’ fear of big government is now at near-record levels, with nearly two thirds of Americans identifying it as the greatest threat to the country:

The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession.

One would think this Democratic coalition, importantly built upon minority votes, would cater to minority demands. But Joel Kotkin, in Forbes, asks “does the progressive agenda actually support minority upward mobility?” Kotkin believes that

From its inception the Obama administration’s focus has been on the largely white information economy, notably boosting universities and the green-industrial complex based in places like Silicon Valley. The Obama team’s decision to surrender working class whites to appeal to what Democratic strategists call the “mass upper middle class” makes political sense but could lead to problems for an American working class that is itself increasingly minority.

I think Kotkin is understating the political cost of such a strategy. If Democrats are giving up on the white working class, they really are giving up on the working class of all colors, and of both sexes. That could well be a prescription for minority status.

The Romney Fix: Conservatives Speak Out

2012-01-10T10:13:00.007-10:00

"Democrats do believe that Romney is eminently beatable, the perfect foil for President Obama, in fact. . . from the start, it’s been clear that Romney is the choice of the Beltway GOP establishment, which regards conservatives and Tea Partiers as the grubby unwashed. Meanwhile, Democrats and their media allies have been busy measuring Romney for the Occupy Wall Street/One Percenter memorial bad-guy suit. They can’t wait to rip him apart over his background as a corporate turnaround specialist who may have saved some golden parachutes but put ordinary folks out of work."

--Michael A. Walsh, New York Post

"[Republicans’] non-Mitt mood just won't go away. Indeed, it's intensifying. [People] doubt whether he is in fact the best candidate to beat President Obama. For instance, you hear conservatives wondering more and more whether all of the attention from the White House is a head fake. Romney certainly makes a convenient foil for a presidential campaign already in populist overdrive."

--Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times

"Today's historical moment is one shaped by recession and belt-tightening. It's also shot through with outrage. The American people are animatedly angry at their political and corporate elites. Romney is both a political and corporate elite, and it's difficult to imagine him animated about anything, much less angry. All the open shirt collars and appearances on Letterman can't . . . blot that damning picture from Bain Capital, where Romney grins as dollar bills flutter downwards [see above]."

-- Matt Thomas, American Spectator

"What most pundits think of as 'electable,' a safe candidate attractive to moderate voters, has historically been highly unlikely to unseat an incumbent president. In the five elections since World War II in which the party out of power has picked a 'safe' candidate to take on a sitting president, the result was defeat[--Tom Dewey (1948), Adlai Stevenson (1956), Walter Mondale (1984), Bob Dole (1996), John Kerry (2004). Safe] choices have been zero-for-five at unseating incumbents.

--Lawrence B. Lindsey, Weekly Standard

Comment: I made the same point here.

"Romney’s establishment Republicans, . . . like the Bourbons of France, forget nothing, and learn nothing. Since 1896, only Republicans who have campaigned on a pro-growth platform have been elected. Mitt Romney, instead of being the most electable, is firmly in the tradition of Thomas Dewey, Jerry Ford, Bob Dole, and John McCain."

--Peter Ferrara, Forbes

"What may unite Republicans more than anything else is their desire to oust President Obama from the White House, and that may be enough to propel Romney or another Republican to a general election victory. But banking on that strategy is risky business."

--Brian Calle, Orange Country Register

"Romney’s biggest challenge, [said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California:] 'He just doesn’t ring authentic. Charisma is good, but better is authenticity or a perception of authenticity by the voters. And I think that is where Romney fails and that is part of what the Obama campaign is going to focus on.'”

--George E. Condon Jr., National Journal

The Fix: Democrats Want Romney.

2012-01-09T22:47:00.009-10:00

“Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.”

--George Will, Washington Post

In Communist societies, mostly withering carcasses today, the operating ideology was redistributionist. And socialists, as George Will suggests, rule through an elite of major beneficiaries, known variously as the “inner party” (1984), the nomanklatura (USSR), the “New Class” (Yugoslavia), or “the princelings” (today’s China).

A version of this Socialist/Communist redistributionist ideology survives today in Democratic Party America. Republicans can either accept the ruling class’s chosen Republican for retaining elite power—Mitt Romney—or they can fight the elite’s preferred candidate with all the energy left at their disposal.

Why is the Republican nominating process thus far yielding up Romney? In part, it’s because the entire Democratic establishment has nothing to do this season but mess with the Republican nomination. Here’s how liberal “messing around” in the GOP selection process is benefiting Romney:

First, Democratic involvement has meant money for Romney, media concentration on Romney, and a systematic effort to knock off every conservative rival to Romney as that rival emerges. Conrad Black, writing weeks ago in the conservative National Review, described the Democratic blowback after Newt Gingrich had emerged as the latest conservative alternative to Romney:

The Obama administration . . . character-assassination squads, though their ranks are now so deep they are the largest such work party since the scores of people who crowded into the firing squad to execute the Ceausescus, [cannot] believe their good fortune. [In] a replication of the 25-battleship sustained bombardment of Okinawa[, they are now going all-out to bring] Newt down.

Second, as we have said, the conservative rump of the ruling class—GOP intellectuals working in the Northeast—truly believe one of their own is most likely to stop Harvard law’s Obama. That would be Harvard law and Harvard business school graduate Romney. The conservative elite has therefore done its best to bring down Romney’s opponents in succession—Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and now Santorum, while leaving Romney’s undistinguished Massachusetts governor record largely unexamined.

Third, the media have held a huge series of debates featuring such a large number of candidates that it is difficult to bore in on serious issues, and relatively easy to knock down participants through “wrong” responses to “gotcha” questions, responses that nevertheless fail to keep the minor candidates from returning again and again, and confusing the succeeding debates. Debates quite obviously also favor candidates such as Romney who are intellectually superior and who benefit from previous campaign experience.

Fourth, the media and Democrats have quietly helped along Ron Paul by treating him as a serious candidate, while hiding his overwhelming dependence on young people—essentially Democrats—attracted to his extreme anti-war and pro-drug legalization platform. Republican Paul is receiving the same kid glove treatment the media gave Obama in 2008. Like Romney, Paul additionally benefits in debates from having previously gone through them. Paul’s presence is complicating the conservative effort to find a single alternative to Romney, as is Jon Huntsman’s candidacy.

Fifth, Democrats and the media are playing a deep game that has confused conservatives about exactly what’s going on. Here’s FOX News anchor Chris Wallace talking to Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz this past Sunday:

WALLACE: Republicans are just beginning to pick . . . their nominee [and already] your party is putting out ad after ad targeting Mitt Romney. And, in fact, during the debate last night, the DNC sent out several e-mails going after Romney but no one else. Why all of the focus by your party on Mitt Romney?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Mitt Romney has earned that scrutiny. He had spent his entire campaign relentless attacking President Obama, distorting his record, decategorizing his record.

WALLACE: Forget about distorting. That fact is all of the Republicans are going after Obama. But you guys are going after Mitt Romney.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Well, Mitt Romney is one of the candidates who was near the top, or at the top. . .

If Democrats like Romney, why are they attacking him? Do they in fact fear Romney? As we noted earlier, conservative radio king Rush Limbaugh thinks Democrats are indeed attacking Romney, even though they want him to be the GOP nominee, because they want to delay the nomination as much as possible and force Romney to waste resources now that won’t be available to fight Obama later.

Limbaugh, having to defend his Machiavellian thinking against disbelievers, has just seized upon former Democratic Party chair Donna Brazile’s frank statement, on CNN, that Democrats do indeed want Romney to win:

BRAZILE: Mitt Romney won tonight because no one touched him -- and for Democrats, you know what? It was good news for us.

Limbaugh calls Brazile’s comment “a major faux pas.” Rush:

The line that's supposed to come out of the Democrat Party is they're scared of Romney. The line is, "Oh, no, they don't want to face Romney. Romney is the toughest guy." [But] the Democrats know that our experts are stupid enough to believe that the Democrats will be honest and tell us who they really don't want to face.

Confused? Wallace says Democrats are out to stop Romney, and Limbaugh says the opposite. I think Limbaugh is largely right. Democrats want the fight to go on and waste Romney’s resources. But they also want Romney to win, and are quietly working for that outcome. They want Romney to win because they want the election to be about which party is more compassionate, and certainly not about whether business or government does better at job creation.

Romney’s reluctance to engage in “class warfare,” a reticence based on his Wall Street background and his being born with “a silver spoon in his mouth,” makes beating him easier than taking on a non-elitist. Romney also largely forfeits the GOP’s ability to attack Democrats on Obamacare; after all, Romney is the father of Romneycare. More generally, Romney’s meritocracy background puts the election battle on a field upon which Democrats are comfortable winning, the same way John Kerry’s decision to battle George Bush in 2004 on national security gave comfort to Republicans.

Democrats do sincerely believe the Republican extremist candidates are easier to beat than Romney, but they also see a real risk in fighting on a new battlefield, not only for them, but for the country as a whole. The country cannot afford Gingrich/Santorum/Perry. Better the devil you know than a truly awful outcome, such as Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980.

200,000 jobs. Look at that!

2012-01-07T01:49:00.002-10:00

The good economic news for Obama keeps coming. Yesterday’s report of 200,000 new jobs in December means payroll growth in the U.S. beat consensus forecasts by 45,000. At the same time, as the economy kicked off 2012, the unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly to 8.5%, its lowest level in almost three years. The 200,000-job increase did follow a November gain revised down to 100,000, smaller than estimated last month. Still, in another positive development, averages rose of both hours worked and weekly earnings, measurements that indicate future job growth.

Below is how, with 9 months left, Obama is doing gauged against his two most important employment targets: the unemployment rate and total number of jobs when he took over in January 2009. For the first time since we began charting the gap between current totals and the targets, it seems possible Obama may actually reach at least one. While December’s total of 200,000 jobs created may not repeat itself nine more times in succession, job creation could indeed theoretically average 200,000 (actually, only 185,000) a month over that same period.

Yearend Reading: Romney, GOP

2011-12-31T13:15:00.030-10:00

“What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.”

--Thomas Sowell, Stanford’s Hoover Institution

"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."

--Daniel Patrick Moynihan (via Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times)

"Raise a Banner of Bold Colors, Not Pale Pastels!"

--Ronald Reagan

Culture is a way of life that evolves to support economic survival. Rules that emphasize caring for one’s family, hard work, getting along with others, avoiding destructive behaviors. Hunting, farming, food on the table, clothes, shelter.

In dealing with modern American culture, I have seized upon the insight of Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), about how societies evolve. Diamond is a political outsider (his fields are physiology, biophysics, ornithology, environmentalism, ecology, geography, evolutionary biology, and anthropology) who flatly asserts that government equals kleptocracy—theft from the people.

In simple terms, the U.S. used to have a culture based upon lots of farmers and a small government. Then liberal Democrats used politics from 1933 to 1968 to replace the old culture with one supporting big government, government as your friend. Conservatives who prefer the old culture want smaller government. They want a free enterprise economy that once again works.

Looking at the quotes above, Sowell writes about government theft, Moynihan wrote about liberal use of politics to overturn the culture we had, and Reagan said the country must fight back, battling today’s status quo.

Mitt Romney, Mr. Pale Pastel, isn't the leader Republicans need now. Listen to Steve McCann, who writes in the conservative American Thinker:

As with so many others previously christened by the establishment, [Romney] is a candidate who would maintain the status quo in Washington -- the most important agenda item for the ruling class.

McCann showed his open distaste for the GOP elite when he added:

the Republican primary voters are being told by the Republican establishment and many "conservative" pundits that [Romney] is in his heart a real conservative. . . It is expected of the mainstream media to cover for Barack Obama but for the so-called conservative media to ignore Romney's record is outright betrayal.

Conservative Jonathan Tobin, in Commentary, similarly argued:

Romney is the candidate of his party’s elites. . . the epitome of the notion that the best and brightest deserve the highest rewards. . . He is at his best when fixing broken things–-be it companies, Olympic games or budgets. But as a standard bearer for a movement or as someone who can exercise the vital task of articulating moral leadership, Romney seems out of place.

Romney has alienated himself from populist Republicans, as ABC News’s Matt Negrin recently found:

“There is a huge anti-Romney sentiment,” said Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation. [Phillips] said that surveys of Tea Party Nation members show that as many as half of them say they’ll refuse to vote for him in a general election because he’s too “liberal.”

Asked if she could see the tea party coming together to support Romney, Amy Kremer, the chairwoman of the Tea Party Express, said, “I don’t know where the tea party’s going to go.” “I think it’s going to be a very bumpy ride, and it could get pretty ugly,” said Kremer, who hasn’t endorsed a candidate yet.

We have the GOP elite against the rest of the party, the non-elite (“tea partiers”) who don’t fall in line behind Romney and the elite leadership the way they should. Here’s elitist George Will, venting his frustration with the uncontrollable Newt Gingrich:

[Gingrich] is thoroughly anti-conservative. He disdains the central conservative virtue, prudence, and exemplifies progressivism’s defining attribute — impatience with impediments to the political branches’ wielding of untrammeled power. He exalts the will of the majority. . .

Atop the Republican ticket, Gingrich would guarantee Barack Obama’s reelection, would probably doom Republicans’ hopes of capturing the Senate and might cost them control of the House.

Is Will right? Are Republicans likely to win only with elite candidate Mitt? The Eastern seaboard world Will lives in thinks so. GOP intellectuals understandably have a high opinion of the ruling class that dominates their Eastern neighborhood, and that has only grudgingly made a place at the table, though far from the center, for articulate Republicans with proper leadership credentials like Will. If Mitt’s the nominee, the election might become a competence debate Obama could lose. From Will’s perspective, "tea partiers" on the other hand seem likely to lead the GOP down the 1964 Goldwater path to crushing defeat.

Gingrich, Perry, and others are bold colors, Romney is Mr. Pale Pastel, and Will, who once embraced Reagan, now wants pale pastel.

Karl Rove is from Texas but has lived among the Washington, D.C. elite for a decade, and works now for the conservative elite FOX News and Wall Street Journal. His current analysis reveals the “pale pastel” of “inside baseball” politics, missing the “bold colors” of a revolution that liberates capitalism from government’s yoke and fuels economic expansion:

a Gallup poll of Nov. 28-Dec. 1 shows that fewer Americans (45%) now believe income inequality "represents a problem that needs to be fixed" than believed that in 1998 (52%). . . Republicans can argue that Democratic class warfare would penalize achievement and diminish prosperity. That Mr. Obama's goal is redistribution, not success. That over the past three years this approach has resulted in persistently high unemployment, anemic growth and economic hardship.

Would you be excited about income inequality bothering "only" 45% of the people instead of 52%--nearly half the country still with Obama's big issue? And what about “persistently high unemployment, anemic growth and economic hardship”? Is that really a problem of “the past three years” as Rove says, or did it begin under Rove’s man George Bush? Rove skips past the real issue: big government's gigantic growth under Obama, growth that began under Bush. Conservatives are focused on big government crushing economic growth. Rove isn’t.

Elsewhere, Rove predicts Obama’s defeat because:

Scandals . . . will metastasize, demolishing the president's image as a political outsider. By the election, the impression will harden that Mr. Obama is a modern Chicago-style patronage politician, using taxpayer dollars to reward political allies and contributors.

Really, Mr. Rove. You think the upcoming election will turn on scandals, even though people personally like Obama? Bold colors, Mr. Rove, bold colors.

Former Reagan/Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, has provided her personally revealing look at conservative elite concerns. Writing about the movie “Iron Lady,” a portrayal of former British prime minister and conservative hero Margaret Thatcher, Noonan fixes on Thatcher’s sex:

Thatcher's very presence was an insult to the left because it undermined the left's insistence that only leftism and its protection of the weak and disadvantaged would allow women to rise. She rose without them while opposing what they stood for.

Women of Thatcher’s and Noonan’s generation certainly did battle to rise in a man’s world. And it was an even bigger challenge for conservatives, because liberals do favor women because they’re from a disadvantaged class government seeks to protect. But what about Thatcher? Wasn’t she first and foremost a “bold color” revolutionary, less significantly a female, unlike Noonan, who goes for “pale pastel” Romney?

Daniel Henninger, member of the conservative Wall Street Journal elite editorial board and a Romney backer, has at least noticed how strong is the opposition to Romney, with Mitt’s support numbers constantly stuck at 25%. That means 75% of Republicans want someone else. Henninger writes:

[Romney] should be worried. These Republican protest fish have sharp teeth. Unless fed something soon, they may tear the Romney campaign to pieces. And there are a lot of them. Political commentary sometimes refers to . . .second-tier candidates as appealing to "the tea party vote." This is intended as condescension—you know, it's those people. . .

This vote has been building in the depths of the American political ocean since the spending spree of the second Bush term. These people see the upward spending trend in annual outlays and accumulated commitments not as a "problem," as the Beltway prefers, but as a threat to their well-being.

The Romney campaign may assume that this vote must land by default in their man's lap. . . But if [Romney] doesn't reach out pretty soon to the Paul-Perry-Bachmann Republican protest voters, he may never get them. The longer he waits, the more pressure will build for a third-party challenge that will cost him the election.

It’s unfortunate Republicans seem stuck with Romney. Here’s from CNBC’s Larry Kudlow’s interview of Paul Ryan, the House budget chair and one of the non-candidates who would have been able to unite the whole party:

[Ryan] believes “there is a shift to the right” in the country, “toward free-market approval. . .The country will not accept a permanent class of technocrats that will diminish freedom, enhance crony capitalism, and allow the economy to enter some sort of managed decline.”

Ryan talks about . . . “fighting paternalistic, arrogant, and condescending government elites who want to equalize outcomes, create new entitlement rights, and promote less self-government by the citizenry.” . . Ryan wants “the right to rise” [and rejects a] “ruling system of big business, big government, and big-government unions [that] does violence to the notion of entrepreneurial capitalism. . .Whether it’s TARP, Fannie or Freddie, cap-and-trade, or Obamacare, this must be stopped.”

Ryan stands against what he calls “the moral endgame to equalize outcomes. No consolidation of power into a permanent political class. Equality of opportunity, not result.” Drawing from the Declaration of Independence, Ryan believes that individual citizen power in a democracy comes from God and natural rights [and flows] directly to the people. It complements what Reagan always said: Government works for the people, the people don’t work for government.

Yes.

Yearend Reading: Obama Happy, Economy Up

2011-12-28T12:27:00.010-10:00

“the major media aren't in the news business. They're political activists abusing their power to propel Obama to re-election”

--Jed Babbin, American Spectator

“People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.”

-- Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)

Obama’s poll numbers are back in re-elect territory. For the first time since his “bin Laden bounce” last Spring, the RealClearPolitics average has his approval ratings at 47%, historically, the minimum level that makes re-election possible. Obama is also within about 1% of being “right-side up” in the polls, meaning his approval rating would exceed his disapproval rating.

How is this possible?

The only issue that matters is the economy. Democrats, we thought, wanted power because they believed they knew how to make the economy create jobs. Democrats have the brains. Democrats know how to pull Washington’s levers of power. Democrats are the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton, presidents who created jobs. And Obama is failing to create jobs, to generate growth. Surely Democrat Obama is headed for defeat, based on poor job performance. Or so one would think.

Ah, but the fight for power, not so simple. First, we have a unified national elite, a meritocracy that has fought its way to the top and will do anything to remain on top. This elite, this minority, rules through the Democratic Party, which links to millions who believe they are dependent on big government—bureaucrats, unmarried women, minorities.

Second, the national elite, anti-business, pro-big government, controls the national dialog through its media, arts, and entertainment. They lie, and talk to those who believe their lies (Muggeridge above). They are absolutely committed to Obama’s re-election (Babbin above). And, shockingly to me, they don’t really care about competence. As Rush Limbaugh perceptively noted, "the left doesn't want to be judged on the results of anything they do. They only want to be judged on their good intentions."

The deck is stacked. The game is fixed. Yes, and what’s new? You play politics with the house’s cards. That’s life.

So setting aside the stacked deck, why is Obama surging?

Answer: some good economic news. The stock market is ending the year in “healthy” territory, which according to our FOX Index, is a Dow of 12,000, an S&P of 1,300 and a NASDAQ of 2,500—total 15,800. Right now, the Index is plus 191 (see chart). The unemployment rate is down to 8.6%, after being over 9% for most of Obama’s term. Weekly unemployment claims fell by 4,000 last week to 364,000, the third straight weekly drop, bringing the four-week average of claims down for the 11th time in 13 weeks to its lowest level since June 2008.

Furthermore, the economy added at least 100,000 jobs each month from July through November, the best five-month streak since 2006. And the Conference Board's index of leading economic indicators rose strongly in November for the second straight month, with the economy on track to grow at a 4% percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, something it hasn’t done since the first quarter of 2006. And the price of gasoline is lower. Actual evidence that people are feeling better comes from increased retail sales this Christmas season.

On the other hand, government revised the GDP downward in the third quarter from 2% to 1.8%, and GDP growth for the full year will almost certainly stay below 2%. Housing prices continue to fall, with the Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 leading markets showing a 3.4% decline over the past year. The Euro crisis remains unsettled; it's a potential threat to U.S. growth in 2012.

On next year, Robert Samuelson, in the Washington Post, quotes economist Barry Eichengreen, a leading scholar of the Great Depression:

Given low interest rates and the still-weak U.S. economy, it will be tempting for the U.S. government to continue running deficits and issuing additional debt. At some point, however, investors will recognize this behavior for the Ponzi scheme it is. ... If history is any guide, this scenario will develop not gradually but abruptly. Previously gullible investors will wake up one morning and conclude that the situation is beyond salvation. They will scramble to get out. Interest rates in the United States will shoot up. The dollar will fall. The United States will suffer the kind of crisis that Europe experienced in 2010, but magnified.

A sober warning indeed. But should the economy continue to improve, Obama, according to the New York Times, does have a narrow path to re-election:

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

The very coalition we pointed to above, except that for some unknown reason, the New York Times left out unmarried women.

Yearend Reading: Women on Top

2011-12-20T13:12:00.004-10:00

In an article titled, “Women on Top, Men at the Bottom,” Philip Brand, a New Hampshire writer, has reviewed Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women is Turning Men into Boys. Hymowitz believes that when male students graduate -- if they do -- they tenaciously hold to uncertainty, glancing off jobs and relationships, undecided about what to do and whom to love for a decade or so as "preadults," Hymowitz’s term for an unflattering metamorphosis.

Preadulthood is a consequence of two related economic trends that are reshaping both men and women. The first is the extended period of training -- college and beyond -- deemed necessary to the modern economy. The second is women's flourishing in the new economy, two developments that make Hymowitz's book so timely.

Hymowitz says economic changes drive cultural ones. She puts economic conditions first -- along with the increasing professional accomplishments of women. “Preadulthood” is "an adjustment to huge shifts in the economy, one that makes a college education essential to achieving or maintaining a middle-class life."

Hymowitz points to the lifetime earnings gap separating college graduates from those who have only a high school diploma. But a changing economy more friendly to the educated is also "very, very female friendly," offering women more career choices. Last year, women became a majority of the workforce: "At the heart of preadulthood is women's determination to achieve financial independence before marriage."

Right now, the "second sex" dominates higher education from attendance data to graduation statistics. After graduation, young single women out-earn men in nearly every U.S. city, and they are more than twice as likely to own real estate. More education typically means delaying marriage. The average college-educated woman now waits until 28 to wed. And what goes for the goose has to go for the gander. Forty years ago, 80% of men aged 25-29 were married. Today it's 40%.

Why do men suffer in “preadulthood”? Libertarian scholar Charles Murray blames government social programs that slam non-college males. Welfare state programs have had a devastating effect in many inner-city communities. Murray says that when “the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that [man’s] status goes away.”

Journalist Hanna Rosin, writing in the same vein, describes a group of men in Kansas City she calls "casualties of the end of the manufacturing era."

The 30 men sitting in the classroom aren't there by choice: Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. Like them, [the social worker running the class] explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical "white picket fence" -- one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. "Well, that check bounced a long time ago," he says..."All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain't even that...What is our role? Everyone's telling us we're supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It's toxic, and poisonous, and it's setting us up for failure." He writes on the board: $85,000. "This is her salary." Then: $12,000. "This is your salary. Who's the damn man? Who's the man now?" A murmur rises. "That's right. She's the man."

In his book Manliness, Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield wrote to become a man is to develop a sense of duty, which means responding productively to life's challenges. Mansfield points to a U.S. Navy ad that shows men jumping from helicopters into the ocean on a rescue mission to "answer the call."

Today, however, men are unemployed, and the cause, Mansfield believes, is modernity, which relies on technology more than duty to satisfy our needs and protect us. The economy's productivity and the government's programs provide a baseline level of security that is the "very antithesis of manliness... The entire enterprise of modernity could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed."

Jonathan Rauch is another writer who like Hymowitz believes shifting economics is reshaping the American family. Rauch says the new model is delayed marriage and delayed family formation, as men and women pursue their education. This leads to new gender roles, with fatherhood redefined to include children's emotional well-being, and motherhood including bringing home a paycheck.

But Rauch is speaking to college graduates. Next year Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart will argue that American behavior in the core areas of marriage and family is dividing along class lines to an unprecedented extent. For the educated upper middle class, Rauch’s new model may work fine. But in the working class, intact families are an endangered species.

Murray compares the extent of marriage in the upper-middle class relative to the working class for those in the prime of life (ages 30-49). In the 1960s, 88% of those considered upper-middle class and 83% of those considered working class were married. In 2010, the figures were 83% and 48%. That 35 percent gap "amounts to a revolution in the separation of classes in this country...Marriage has collapsed in the working class." And the rate of out-of-wedlock births has skyrocketed. In 1960 only 6% of children of working class parents were born out-of-wedlock. Today the number is nearly 50%. (Note: Murray looks only at data for white Americans to underscore his argument that class, not race, is what divides us.)

A new Pew study has figures similar to Murray’s. In 1960, nearly three-fourths of those 18 and older were married. By 2010, that number had plummeted to 51%. Four in 10 births were to unmarried women. In 1960, the most- and least-educated adults were equally likely to be married. Now, nearly two-thirds of college graduates are married, compared with less than half of those with a high school diploma or less. And those with less education are less likely to ever marry and more likely to divorce if they do. Looking at the figures, Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution concluded that “family structure is a new dividing line in American society.”

Comment: On top, married, educated women. On the bottom, unmarried, uneducated men.

Some Things To Think About (#1)

2011-12-16T10:06:00.004-10:00

U.S. still welcomes business.

Here’s some good news to focus on at Christmas, during admittedly rough economic times. According to the World Bank, the U.S. ranks #4 in “ease of doing business,” behind only Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand, that is, behind a city, a Chinese “administrative region,” and a country that—combined—have only 16 million people (click on chart to enlarge).

The World Bank, once known for massive loans to under gird massive infrastructure projects, has come to appreciate the valuable work entrepreneurs perform in generating economic growth. So it now focuses assistance on helping nations improve their own business climate through laws that encourage business formation and a predictable, level playing field. Of its ten “ease of doing business” criteria, only “getting electricity” is infrastructure-related.

The U.S. certainly could do better, however. On “ease of paying taxes,” another of the ten indicators, America ranks a lowly #72.

No! Not Newt!

2011-12-12T20:37:00.004-10:00

Newt Gingrich “embodies almost everything disagreeable about modern Washington.”

--George Will

As we just said, the New York-Washington D.C. Republican establishment is appalled at Newt Gingrich’s apparent lead over Mitt Romney. Here’s the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, in his column, “Romney’s the One”:

there is a limit to how much political risk conservatives should want a president allied to them to take. Most of the time conservative activists should be trying to reduce the risks of advancing conservative initiatives rather than to goad elected officials to political recklessness. Conservatives should, that is, point the way for ambitious politicians to advance good ideas that can command the support of a national center-right majority.

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, at the liberal website “Politico,” provide their take on the angst hitting the GOP establishment:

the pro-Romney Republican donor and operative class has been taken aback by Gingrich’s rise, mystified as to why conservative activists would want to nominate a candidate they view as a sure-fire loser against President Barack Obama. The GOP conversation now in New York and Washington is ablaze with talk of the former speaker’s 1968-style Nixon comeback and whether it will last. Some Republican insiders are intrigued by it, others nothing short of horrified. [emphasis added]

But Milton R. Wolf, writing at the less-respected, non-elite Washington Times, points out that Romney, the ex-Massachusetts governor:

was elected initially in 2002 but couldn’t crack 50% of the popular vote. By the end of his first and only term, he had an anemic 34% approval rating and a 65% disapproval rating. Survey USA ranked Romney’s popularity 48th out of the 50 governors. With that, the supposedly electable Mitt Romney walked away rather than face the voters.

And Charles Hurt, in the same, apparently anti-Romney Washington Times, wrote that “the problem for Mitt is that these are not normal times. These are desperate times. We don’t need competence. We need a revolution. And this is where Newt shines.”

“We need a revolution.”

Christian Whiton at FOX News has caught exactly the same point—Gingrich, the Gingrich candidacy, threatens not only the Obama legacy but also the GOP junior elite:

Gingrich has the audacity to imagine that Washington can be run without his own party’s establishment. Their assumption of dominating the next Republican administration is not safe if it is Gingrich. He is not proposing to replace the Democratic piano player at the brothel that is Washington with a slightly sterner-sounding Republican. Instead, he claims he will close the brothel. And the establishment of his own party just knows that can’t happen. In their lives, it never has. And where are they then to go for their pork and porking?

“A revolution.”

It’s ironic, but the GOP junior establishment’s animosity toward Newt may actually push him toward the party’s nomination. As ex-Reagan-Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan recently noted, “The antipathy of the establishment not only is not hurting [Gingrich] . . . it may be helping him. It may be part of the secret of his rise.”

What happened to the wooden stake?

2011-12-12T20:07:00.007-10:00

"cream rises to the top"

--English idiom

There is a junior establishment in the Washington D.C.-New York power axis. And it is quietly going crazy because of Newt Gingrich’s rise. This junior establishment is like a shadow cabinet in Britain—people from the opposition party with all the credentials and the qualifications to take over when the opposition regains power. They expect power. They have earned it; cream risen to the top based on merit.

The junior elite’s voices are conservatives with credentialed publications—David Brooks at the New York Times, George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post, Peggy Noonan and Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal. They believe in elite rule, a nation guided by our “best and brightest.” They just all believe, in sharp contrast to liberal orthodoxy, that the best brains since William Buckley founded National Review in 1955 are in the establishment’s junior, less respected, conservative branch.

Just as Democratic elitists tolerate the lower-class, government-dependent voters whose support provides their only path to power, so do Republican elitists tolerate the less-educated rubes who make up the GOP majority. Naturally, however, the junior elite use all powers at their fingertips, including their few national media allies, in a determined effort to keep Republican party control in the elite’s hands.

The GOP elite have been perplexed by what they see as a dangerously thin field of qualified Republicans seeking the presidency in 2012. Preferred candidates Jeb Bush (ex-Florida governor), Paul Ryan (House budget chair), John Thune (South Dakota senator), Mitch Daniels (Indiana governor), and Chris Christie (New Jersey governor) all (along with the feared and detested Sarah Palin) declined to run, while Tim Pawlenty (ex-Minnesota governor) and John Huntsman (ex-Utah governor) failed to catch on. That left the current group, which fortunately includes the wealthy, steady, handsome, and qualified Mitt Romney. For months, it’s been Romney or bust.

And all Romney, until now. Romney has remained in first or second spot in the polls through the boomlets for Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. But now comes Newt Gingrich, the out-of-control ex-House speaker who self-destructed in 1997-98 with his losing effort to shut down the federal government in 1995, followed by his disastrously ill-timed ethics and personal problems at the height of the Republican effort to impeach President Clinton.

Gingrich, forced out as Speaker, resigned from the House in 1998. As we have said, Democrats successfully demonized Gingrich in the 1990s—he became the face of all that was wrong with Republicans. Our junior elite remembers those days well and loathes Gingrich, partly for what he did to the GOP brand.

Gingrich tried to come back earlier this year, but self-destructed again in May when he attacked Paul Ryan’s budget-balancing plan as “right wing social engineering,” followed by a two-week Greek island cruise with his third wife (a women who has benefited from Gingrich’s $250,000-$500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s), an ill-timed vacation that led to the June mass resignation of most of his campaign staff.

Now Newt’s back again, stronger than ever, much to the delight of a Democratic elite that believe Gingrich will be easily demonized once again, and to the abject terror of the Democrats' elite Republican opponents, who are asking, “Where was that wooden stake when we needed it most?”

Some Things To Think About (#2)

2011-12-10T09:20:00.008-10:00

Hatred of business is killing us.

As Friedrich Hayek put it, socialism’s “fatal conceit” is believing that always-flawed markets can be fixed by bright people with good intentions. Not so. People who understand business create jobs, while those who act on the “fatal conceit” treat business at the enemy, and destroy jobs as a result.

George Will, in the Washington Post, uses the Carl’s Jr. story to point out how business helps the people progressives profess to favor, and how progressives respond by killing jobs. Of Carl’s Jr. managers, 84% are minority and 67% are women. And in business-friendly Texas, Carl’s Jr. will open 300 outlets over the next decade, versus nearly 0 in California, dominated by progressive, anti-business laws.

Will ends with a quote from Barack Obama’s autobiography. In it, the president tells us that during his very brief sojourn in the private sector, he felt like “a spy behind enemy lines.”

After listening to a recent Obama “screed” against entrepreneurial success, former congressional budget office chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin asks, “Why attack that which you need most?” Why indeed, if not because business is the enemy.

So which party is the enemy of job creation?

Some Things To Think About (#3)

2011-12-08T22:09:00.007-10:00

1990s v. 2010s

In 2008, Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton and the era of which she was a part. The ‘90s, a time of partisan division, a time of narcissistic greed—the excesses of Hillary’s husband Bill Clinton and his crony capitalist pals, and a time of Democratic triangulation, instead of standing up for the disadvantaged.

Oh how different it all looks now. We look back on the 1990s as years of booming growth and balanced budgets; the last time America really worked (both meanings). Years of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Can Newt ride those memories to the GOP nomination? Byron York, in the Washington Examiner, writes:

when outsiders think of the two greatest policy achievements of the Clinton years -- a balanced budget and welfare reform -- they know Gingrich can legitimately claim a lot of credit for both. So what if he was abrupt with colleagues? Or, for that matter, if he was the target of a Democratic-driven ethics attack?

America worked then, as it doesn’t work now.

Some Things To Think About (#4)

2011-12-07T12:39:00.003-10:00

Christie to Newt

We wanted Chris Christie for president, and alas, it didn’t happen. Today, while Christie supports Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, in a larger sense, Christie is running interference for Newt’s presidential image (pictures).

Big Success, No News: World Poverty Cut in Half

2011-12-06T17:05:00.003-10:00

You didn’t know, did you? In 2000, the United Nations set a “millennium development goal” of cutting in half between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people living in poverty. The share of those in poverty in 1990 was 45% of the world’s population. The target, a proportional one, was to reduce from 45% to 23% by 2015 the share of those living in poverty. The actual number in developing countries living on less than $1 a day, the definition of extreme poverty, in 1990 was 1.8 billion.

The UN now estimates that by 2015, the share of the world’s people living in poverty won’t be 23%, it will be down to 15%! And in absolute numbers, which was not the target goal, the 1.8 billion in the developing world living in extreme poverty will be down to 900 million, meaning that in a larger world with more people, the absolute number living on $1.25 a day (the new definition of extreme poverty; it accounts for inflation) will have been cut in half. This is an amazing success.

East Asia is responsible for the sharpest reduction in poverty, particularly China, along with India to its south. The number of people living in extreme poverty in both countries fell by about 455 million between 1990 and 2005, and 320 million more people are expected to join their ranks by 2015. In that year, India’s poverty rate will be down from 51% in 1990 to just 22%, and China’s will be down to a mere 5%! Shouldn’t we be celebrating, and let me be blunt, capitalism’s success? (Download the “The Millennium Development Goals Report, 2011" here.)

Some Things To Think About (#5)

2011-12-06T11:06:00.006-10:00

Clinton to Newt

It’s passing strange to our Washington-New York chattering class that Newt Gingrich might actually grab the GOP presidential nomination from the well-prepared and packaged Mitt Romney. In her column “The Comeback Kid of 2012,” ex-GOP speechwriter Peggy Noonan refers to what is known as “the baggage problem”—Gingrich’s past errors and foibles. It’s supposed to finish Newt. But, Noonan asks, what about Clinton’s past?

“the baggage problem”[‘s] impact on voters is [hard] to predict, in part because many [voters] have lived through and fully experienced the past 40 years in America. Bill Clinton, if he ran for president tomorrow, would probably win in a landslide, and he has enough baggage to break the trolley carts of 10 Amtrak porters.

Clinton has made it easier for voters to accept an older, wiser Newt.

Unemployment Drop to 8.6% is Wow

2011-12-04T17:11:00.005-10:00

Unemployment is down to 8.6%. As TIME’s Stephen Gandel writes:

The unemployment rate in November dropped faster than it has in more than 11 years. You have to go back to September 2000 to get a quicker decline. What's more, the jobless percentage, which fell to 8.6% in November from 9.0% a month before, was the lowest it's been in two and a half years.

The big unemployment drop, of course, is soft, based as it is on a drop in those searching for work (they have instead given up), and an early Thanksgiving that pushed 2011 Christmas hiring gains into November. Still, any large drop in unemployment is good news. Especially for Obama. Conservative Don Surber at the Charleston Daily Mail says the 8.6% rate is “a godsend for the president” and only half-jokingly adds the number should send Obama’s approval rate above 50% (it’s currently at 43%).

And at the same time, stocks ended a “stellar week,” with Dow up 7%, its biggest weekly gain since July 2009, the S&P 500 up 7.4%, its best weekly performance since March 2009, and the Nasdaq up 7.6%, its second-best weekly rise this year. Our FOX Index with a Dow at 12,019, an S&P of 1,244, and a NASDAQ at 2,627 has at a total of 15,890. The Index arrived back in “healthy” territory (a Dow of 12,000, an S&P of 1,300 and a NASDAQ of 2,500—total 15,800) at plus 90 (see chart), after mostly being in an “unhealthy” range since July.

Here below our look at how, with 10 months left, Obama is doing measured against his two most important employment targets: the unemployment rate and total number of jobs when he took over in January 2009:

ABM (Anybody but Mitt)

2011-11-29T16:54:00.004-10:00

"I don't claim to be the perfect candidate. I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney and a lot more electable than anybody else."

--Newt Gingrich

As I said, the media are “joined at the hip” with government leaders who have the capacity to put in place the media agenda. And I now realize that the national media as we know it—the networks, TIME, national columnists such as Walter Lippmann and Scotty Reston, the national reach of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—all came to life and grew along with the federal government’s rise under Franklin Roosevelt and successive Democrats. It has been, from the beginning, a symbiotic relationship. And since World War II, academia and non-profits have become increasingly dependent on federal money. It’s one big, mutually-dependent family.

Today, now, that big glob no longer works. Former GOP presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, is guessing at the reason Obama fails to see the crisis his presidency faces:

the most harmful aspect of the president's leadership style is that all of his political instincts were honed and settled before 2008, when he was rising. What he learned before he reached the presidency is what he knows. But everyone else in America knows the crash and the underlying crisis it revealed—on our current course, we are bankrupt—changed everything. Strangely, inexplicably, the president thinks the old political moves apply to the new era. They do not.

Noonan would write Obama off—the president missing in action as America’s economic crisis enters year four—except that she senses the underlying strength of the Democratic coalition, including its grip on our entertainment and arts.

The Democrats have . . . going for them [that] American culture, high and low, is governed and run by the entertainment industry. And the entertainment industry is, and has been since the New Deal, firmly rooted in the Democratic Party. It was invented by the ethnics of the East. . . who joined the Democratic Party as soon as they got here. And they let everyone in America know, and they do it to this day, that the Democratic Party is the cool party, and the Republican Party is the one [not cool], the one that seems like a character flaw to belong to. . . Democrats were, through most of the 20th century, better at propaganda.

“Propaganda.” The power of a unified media, pushing a single message.

“The ethnics.” First came the Irish, Italians, and Jews. Then other white ethnic groups, African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, other nonwhites, and women, especially those without husbands, of any color or background. The Democratic Party is their home, their family. Even though Democrats have royally screwed up, how are Republicans to beat this powerful coalition?

Noonan and her fellow media- and New York/Washington-based intellectual friends know, not think but know, that Mitt Romney is the only Republican capable of beating the mighty Democratic coalition they live with and eat among every day. Here’s Noonan on Mitt:

A big Romney virtue is the calm at his core. The word unflappable has been used[;] a nation in trouble probably wants a fatherly, or motherly, figure at the top. . . Romney’s added value is his persona. . . like the father in one of those 1950s or ‘60s sitcoms . . . Robert Young in “Father Knows Best,” or Fred MacMurray in “My Three Sons: You’d quake at telling him about the fender-bender, but after the lecture on safety and personal responsibility, he’d buck you up and throw you the keys. . . The Republican Party is going to make Mitt Romney work for it. They’re going to make him earn it. They’re going to make him suffer. Because that’s what Republicans do.

But in the end Noonan believes that if Republicans care about winning, they will nominate Mitt.

We have already recorded our objection to Romney—he’s unlikely to provide the depth of change this country requires to overcome addiction to big government. Noonan doesn’t see it our way. But we can’t win with Mitt, because he is “Democratic lite,” relatively untroubled by big government. He's the Republican mirror of Democrat John Kerry in 2004, who ran and lost as "national security lite."

People want the real thing, so if it’s big government they want, they will vote Obama, not Romney. As Stanford’s Hoover Institution conservative Thomas Sowell points out, there have been a long string of Republican presidential candidates who, like Mitt, fought for the center. They lost.

Look at the following chart. In the past, even GOP “extremists” have done better than GOP moderates such as Mitt. But the winning choice is a conservative—they do best.

Middle Way Won't Work

2011-11-28T12:29:00.012-10:00

the best thing that the Government can do is to get out of the business of running (or subsidising, or initiating, or incentivising) things altogether – not just in the interests of saving money, but because the effects of such interference are counter-productive. What the economy is suffering from is not an insufficiency of overweening, fussy, bureaucratic initiatives that inevitably unleash an avalanche of unintended consequences, but a lack of cash in the hands of people who might spend it in ways that would actually create wealth and stimulate (in the proper sense of the word) economic growth.

--Janet Daley, Telegraph (U.K.)

In a nutshell, big government’s time is over. Not only the failed bigness of Hitler, Mao, and the Soviet Union, but the failed broad bureaucratic reach of welfare state Western Europe, of industrial Japan (no longer #1), and even of “Blue Model” America. But don’t tell our leading pundits.

Our media are wired directly to activist government. The two are “joined at the hip.” Why bother writing policy recommendations to an audience larger than a president able to execute the enlightened one’s recommendation with one shouted command? Why would these journalists opt instead for slowly winning over millions of people? Scribes prefer the efficiency of talking to the guy at the top who gets it done.

Matt Welch of the libertarian Reason has insightfully gone after the pragmatism by which our elite commentariat profess to live. Elite writers claim to sit in the middle between the small government ideologues of the right and the left’s virtual socialists (Moveon.org and public sector unions). It’s no small coincidence that pundits outside government, just like the policymakers inside, frame their recommendations to the president as a favored middle option between two deliberately undesirable extremes.

Libertarian Welch oozes contempt for America’s so-called “problem solvers” in the middle:

Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail. . . American discourse is saddled with a large and influential do-something school of political punditry, a cadre of pragmatists from Meet the Press to your local editorial board who are forever seeking to solve the country’s problems by transcending ideology, demanding collective citizen sacrifice, and—always—empowering authority. . . [David] Brooks and [Thomas] Friedman [pictures] may be the most prominent practitioners, but the do-something school is evident just about anywhere the political class is talking shop.

Do-something punditry means almost never considering the possible benefits of getting the government out of the way of a given issue, since that would be “ideological” and require walking away from the world’s largest problem-solving tool. Pragmatism also means never having to say you’re sorry about the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation, the capture by industrialists of the regulators who were supposed to constrain them, or even the basic failure of government action to produce the promised results. By the time such flaws make front-page news, there is always a new crisis requiring urgent intervention. And if all else fails, you can blame it on the competence of the government that followed your advice.

Welsh appreciates that our “non-ideological” problem-solvers do in fact have an ideology of their own:

it involves increased taxes (especially on energy), short-term spending boosts, long-term entitlement cuts, and roughly the same foreign policy commitments as today. It calls for renewed citizen engagement, a return to political civility, and a rejection of coarse cynicism. Better teachers, trained workers, and cleaner air. Although advocated by pundits from all over the traditional political spectrum, the program is remarkably uniform when it comes to giving the government more power. Just don’t call it ideological.

The middle ground is a false choice. In a time of “fish or cut bait,” those who believe in better government come down on the side of big government. They reject less government, the choice America should make in 2012.

We coulda had an agreement.

2011-11-24T09:35:00.006-10:00

The Congressional “supercommittee” couldn’t agree on how to cut $1.2 trillion from our national debt. In the aftermath of failure, two columnists, one from each side, are both recommending Washington go for real cuts and some revenue increase, thereby grabbing the vital middle and success.

The New York Times’ Tom Friedman believes “the best way” for Obama to win next year is by declaring he “made a mistake in spurning his own deficit reduction commission,” and “is now adopting Simpson-Bowles” as his fiscal plan. Friedman rightly notes that any Obama-like short-term “stimulus” (tax cuts) won’t work, because “nobody knows what is waiting around the corner, after the stimulus runs out.”

Obama should instead back a deficit-cutting plan “with substantial tax reform and revenue (i.e., tax) increases. . . and cutbacks to both Social Security and Medicare. . . Simpson-Bowles.” Friedman adds that in times of crisis, “leaders jump first, lay out what truly needs to be done to fix the problem, not just to win re-election.”

His pitch to a higher goal, along with Friedman’s saying “I voted for Barack Obama, and I don’t want my money back” and “the Republican Party has gone nuts” are part of his effort to win back Obama’s ear, a task he gave up on earlier when he advocated finding a third-party candidate for president. No third party? No matter. The point here is Obama should embrace Simpson-Bowles—major, long-term cuts in the budget combined with some tax increase.

Over in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr has pushed the same line, advocating that Obama should take GOP senator Pat Toomey's tax-reform plan and “pick it up and run with it, instantly redeeming the super-committee ‘failure’ with an act of presidential leadership.” Like Simpson-Bowles, Toomey’s plan emphasized getting economic growth through budget-cutting fiscal responsibility, combined with “a big revenue hike on ‘the rich.’”

Comment: Unfortunately, Toomey’s plan hit “the rich” by taking away $250 billion worth of their deductions, not by raising tax rates, the campaign pitch to which Democrats and Obama seem deeply wedded. Note that Simpson-Bowles similarly proposed raising revenue by closing loopholes, and specifically recommended lowering, not raising, tax rates.

Friedman talks to Democrats, so he quotes Simpson-Bowles, the commission Obama created. Jenkins talks to Republicans, so he quotes GOPer Toomey. Yet Friedman, Simpson-Bowles, Jenkins, and Toomey are all in the same place, with Obama somewhere else. I wrote earlier that Obama must advocate tax rate increases before the election, if he is to raise taxes enough on everyone after the election to keep the budget at its gigantic, current 25% of GDP.

Remembering JFK

2011-11-23T13:25:00.012-10:00

"I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me."

--Ronald Reagan

My thoughts on the 48th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, and after watching Greg Kinnear’s pitch-perfect portrayal of him last night in the little-seen (Reelz TV, what?—Netflix has the episodes) miniseries, “The Kennedys.” Kennedy was a hero and in the consensus, post-war evaluation of our leaders, a “near great” president kept from greatness by his untimely death. I loved him and his brother Robert (“Bobby”).

After JFK, things went bad for Democrats. Republican Reagan is the best president we’ve had since; his really the only presidency after Kennedy’s that succeeded. Clinton was not a hero; he was blessed with post-Soviet Union peace and a dot.com prosperity bubble and he blew it anyway. Clinton’s last presidential act was pardoning international tax-cheat and fugitive Marc Rich.

I look back on the Kennedy era, “Camelot,” with nostalgia, but it was a very dangerous time. The Chinese under Liu Shaoqi (the internally-focused Mao pushed into the background) were competing with the Soviets to expand Communism throughout the newly-independent Third World, and making real headway in Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Laos, and Indonesia. The Soviets were ahead in the space race. Castro was turning Cuba into a Communist beachhead 90 miles off our shore. Eisenhower had been inept, allowing a “missile gap” to develop and a U-2 spy plane with a pilot who wouldn’t take his own life to be shot down over the Soviet Union, leading to a major summit cancellation. Bad, bad world.

Kennedy was the president to turn this world around. An authentic war hero, son of the ambassador to our most important ally, a Pulitzer-prize winning Harvard graduate who wrote Why England Slept, Kennedy was well-prepared to lead the U.S. at the height of the Cold War to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Kennedy made mistakes, and learned from them. In 1961, he allowed the ill-conceived and executed Bay of Pigs invasion to go forward, then publicly took responsibility for its failure while more privately reorganizing and professionalizing the CIA. He was faced down by Khrushchev at Vienna that summer and allowed the Berlin Wall to go up, but had the sophistication to appreciate that Berlin was, as Khrushchev said, a “bone in my throat,” and it was best to get the bone out.

Under Robert McNamara, the Pentagon not only closed the missile gap (which turned out to be mostly fiction), but with the rapid development and deployment of the solid-fueled Minuteman ICBMs and with Polaris missiles in nuclear submarines off the icy Soviet coast, turned the strategic balance strongly in the U.S.’s favor.

In 1961, Kennedy made the bold pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And we met that pledge. What a different time.

By 1962, the Soviets were so worried about U.S. strategic superiority that they attempted to sneak Soviet medium-range missiles into Cuba and close their missile gap. Kennedy’s response was among America’s finest hours. He rejected the aggressive options recommended by the military and CIA, and instituted a blockade that avoided direct military action. He secretly offered to pull obsolete Jupiter medium-range missiles out of Turkey and Italy if the Soviets would pull back from Cuba, providing Khrushchev a face-saving way to back down. He avoided World War III.

In 1963, he negotiated a limited test-ban treaty with the Soviets, the first big step back from the brink of nuclear war. In 1964, Khrushchev lost his job, in part because of his failed Cuban confrontation with Kennedy, however much the defeat had been downplayed in public.

In 1962, Kennedy recommended lower tax rates, and the reduced tax rates triggered domestic prosperity that lasted throughout the 1960s.

Vietnam undid the Cold War Democrats Kennedy so ably led. We don’t know how Kennedy would have handled Vietnam after 1963, but we do know he was far more able than Lyndon Johnson to maneuver through international crises. Moreover, his assassination deprived Kennedy of the opportunity to sue for peace in Vietnam during his 1965-69 second term, when he would have no longer faced re-election. Johnson couldn't stop believing that failure in Vietnam would cost him re-election in 1968, so would not consider a real peace agreement. (In the end, Vietnam cost Johnson re-election anyway.)

I have argued that McNamara had given up on Vietnam by 1966—wouldn’t Kennedy have too? Most casualties came after 1966. I also believe the true turning point in Southeast Asia came with the failed Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965, an event the significance of which Kennedy would have appreciated far better than Johnson did.

Kennedy, Reagan. Not Johnson, Carter, Clinton. Not Obama.

Romney or a Conservative?

2011-10-19T10:58:00.002-10:00

It remains unclear who the final anti-Romney Republican will be. But Victor Volsky, writing in the conservative American Thinker, provides a to-me-persuasive pitch against nominating Romney. Volsky says Obama

has steered the country onto the road to socialist hell, and if his "accomplishments" are not undone, America will find itself in mortal peril. Assuming that in 2012 Obama goes down to defeat, as seems increasingly likely, it is paramount that the next U.S. president be as much a counter-revolutionary as Obama is a revolutionary. Zeal must be countered with zeal, persistence with persistence. For the U.S. public, ordinarily cautious and wary of dramatic moves, instinctively grasps the gravity of the situation and clamors for boldness.

The 2012 election will be that rare instance when the American people will tolerate -- indeed, demand -- decisive, visionary action to arrest the country's seemingly inexorable slide toward the abyss. Tinkering around the edges won't do. What is required now is an all-out counterattack to roll back the socialist onslaught. In short, what the country needs is a transformative president. Does Mitt Romney meet the specification? I am afraid not.

If you are for Romney, you believe strongly Obama will be hard to beat; only moderate Romney can get the job done. Romney is Rockefeller in 1968, Bush 41 in 1980, McCain in 2000 and 2008 (oops!)—the moderate to nominate because he can win. Yet Nixon (1968), Reagan (1980), and Bush 43 (2000) all won the nomination as conservatives, then won anyway in November.

Did not know: Fox dominates news industry.

2011-10-18T13:49:00.004-10:00

Look at what the Pew Research Center found when it asked people about their views of the media. The “news organization” people thought of first is cable news, specifically CNN and Fox. People named the two cable channels more than twice as often as “lesser” outlets NBC, ABC, and CBS, and 10 times more often than the New York Times or NPR. Wow.

According to Pew:

The public’s top two sources of news remain television and the internet. Two-thirds of Americans (66%) say television is where they get most of their news about national and international events, while 43% say they turn to the internet. . . The top sources of TV news are the Fox News Channel, cited by 19% of the public, CNN (15%), and local news programming (16%).

Fox is the top news source!

Deroy Murdock, writing in the conservative magazine Newsmax, says Nielsen Media Research data shows the top 13 programs in cable news air on Fox. Its audience accounts for 48% of the prime-time cable-news market, compared to CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined total of 34%. Murdock adds that Fox News is now the crown jewel of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, which, as of September, had a market valuation of $44 billion. Fox News makes more money than CNN, MSNBC, and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC, and CBS combined.

Is that amazing, or what?

Jobs and Jobs

2011-10-16T17:07:00.007-10:00

Describing Steve Jobs’ influence after his death, the Economist wrote that Jobs “empowered millions of people by giving them access to cutting-edge technology,” adding

innovation used to spill over from military and corporate laboratories to the consumer market, but lately this process has gone into reverse. Many people’s homes now have more powerful, and more flexible, devices than their offices do; consumer gizmos and online services are smarter and easier to use than most companies’ systems. . .

Notice the Economist’s quiet dig at Obama-type industrial policy, the idea that innovation begins with big government (or big business—“military and corporate laboratories”)? As George Will recently pointed out:

government of the sort progressives demand — supposed “experts,” wiser than the market, allocating wealth and opportunity by supposedly disinterested decisions — is not just susceptible to corruption, it is corruption. It is political favoritism with a clean conscience. [emphasis added]

Elsewhere, Will added:

It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity. Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation.

Will makes such a crucial point. Devolve decision-making to the lowest possible level, and society captures the grandest possible aggregate of intelligence, expertise, and self-interested commitment. Get government out of the way. Here’s Reason’s Deirdre McCloskey’s caution with her simple definition of a job:

Jobs are deals between workers and employers, and so “creating” them out of unwilling parties is impossible. The state, though, can outlaw deals, and has.

Government can’t create jobs, but it can kill them. We are, as Joel Kotkin tells us in “Politico,” living through an awful, job-crushing period:

The situation [has been terrible] for small businesses — with serious consequences for job creation. The number of start-ups with employees — the traditional source of new jobs — has dropped 23% since 2008. Most entrepreneurs, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, expect the job market to weaken and unemployment to stay high for the foreseeable future.

Kotkin blames the president, then suggest a remedy:

the administration displays relatively little support — and passion — for the many middle-income Americans who depend, directly or indirectly, on industries like oil and gas, warehousing, construction and, except for the bailed-out auto firms, manufacturing. . .

So how best to [encourage] serious economic growth beyond Wall Street[? With a] flatter tax system with fewer exemptions, limiting trusts and foundations and ending the preference for capital gains[, forcing] the wealthy to re-engage the economy. They would have fewer ways to hide their money. Sweep aside both subsidies for oil and gas companies and the renewable industry, regulate sensibly and market forces can drive exploration and development.

The Steve Jobs experience. The advice of many non-progressives, liberals in the word’s original, Jeffersonian meaning. Liberate a billion wealth creators. China. India. The U.S. too.

Obama Campaign Can’t Wait: Already Targeting Romney

2011-10-12T12:10:00.004-10:00

The Washington Post reports top Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod (picture) used a 30 minute conference call with reporters to lay into GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the day after popular New Jersey governor Chris Christie endorsed Romney. Pushing his attack on Romney for flip-flopping to near its logical limit, Axelrod said,

I will give [Romney] this. He is as vehement and as strong in his convictions when he takes one position and he is when he takes diametrically opposite positions. ... The comedian George Burns once said all you need for success in show business is sincerity and if you’ve got that, you’ve got it made. Maybe that’s true in politics sometimes. But not in a presidential campaign. People want to know who you are, what you believe in, what you stand for.

Axelrod’s comments follow what conservative Rush Limbaugh called an “obvious” leak—NBC reporter Michael Isikoff’s story that White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three Romney health-care advisers who helped shape the health care reform law Romney signed in 2006, with one meeting “in the Oval Office and presided over by Barack Obama.” One Romney advisor said the White House “really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model.”

Now Limbaugh thinks the Obama team is hoping to run against Romney because he is so beatable as a flip-flopper married to Obamacare’s Massachusetts’ sister, so he asks rhetorically why would the White House at this time, with the Republican nomination battle still undecided, be leaking material damaging to Romney? What gives? Limbaugh guesses the reason: Obama and company expect Romney to emerge as the eventual nominee, but hope that’s only after a long and drawn-out campaign that slows Romney’s momentum.

I think Limbaugh is onto something. Slowing down the Romney express allows more time for Republicans to beat him up inside the train, so that when he finally arrives at the nomination station, he’s in poor shape to take on Obama.

Oh my.

September Jobs Gains Better, Not Good Enough

2011-10-09T23:45:00.004-10:00

Employers hired more workers than expected in September and job gains for the prior months were revised higher, according to Friday’s monthly jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls rose 103,000; economists had expected an increase of only 60,000. And the economy added 99,000 more jobs in July and August than initially reported, as hourly earnings rebounded and the average workweek rose. All good news.

The unemployment rate, however, remains stuck at 9.1%. Also, as the chart below shows, Obama must create 186,000 jobs a month every month for 12 months straight just to get jobs by next year's election back to where they were when he took office in January 2009—never mind that the country has added 8 million people since. Reaching an average of 186,000 new jobs a month for a whole year won't be easy. Monthly job growth over the past 12 months has averaged only 110,000.

Republicans: No Ronald Reagan

2011-10-07T12:41:00.008-10:00

“You can’t beat somebody with nobody.”

--“Nobody” (maybe Nicholas Murray Butler)

So Chris Christie won’t run. Christie, the man with a Reagan-like ability to talk straight and make people laugh. And Rick Perry, the big-state governor with an impressive job-creation record and strong conservative credentials, the guy who looks like Reagan did when Reagan was 61? Well, we found out that when the TV lights are on, he can’t string complete sentences together. So Republicans in 2012 won’t have the next Reagan riding in on his horse to take care of Obama. Reality sets in.

Does that make Mitt Romney the GOP guy, in the pattern of George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, each one a “last man standing” in their time, all of who lost (H.W. in 1992 after first winning in 1988)? Is Romney truly it? Jon Stewart Wednesday used a string of old clips to go after Romney, an all-world flip-flopper. Stewart even found Romney flipping himself into the middle class!! The funnyman just gave us a great preview of how Democrats will skewer Romney. Oh my.

Let me offer 5 observations:

1. Republican hero-presidents are rare—4 in 150 years. The GOP had Lincoln (1860), Teddy Roosevelt (1901), Eisenhower (1952), and Reagan (1980—Reagan seemed an ersatz hero who only played heroes in movies, yet was a true hero who saved dozens of lives as a high school lifeguard). Republican heroes only come along once a generation. Of course, that means the party is due.

2. Weak Republicans do win. Best example of a weak two-term winner: Nixon. He won in terrible times when Democrats fought an internal civil war over Vietnam. George W. Bush sort of won twice, though he lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000.

3. Herman Cain wouldn’t be the first Republican nominated for president who never held major elected or appointive office or high military rank. That honor goes to Wendell Willkie, nominated by Republicans in 1940. Of course, Willkie lost 38 states and 85% of the electoral vote to Franklin Roosevelt.

4. This is no time for an objective read on the GOP field. Democrats are fighting a life-or-death struggle to preserve big government. The media are the Democrats’ powerful air force, and are strafing and bombing every single Republican candidate who sticks his/her head out of a foxhole. In the fall of 2011, the only battle underway is for the GOP nomination, so the media are working over any Republican who looks like a threat to Obama. Meanwhile, that small portion of the New York/Washington punditry calling themselves Republican have picked Romney, and are piling on media attacks aimed at Romney’s GOP opponents. Once the caucuses and primaries begin, voters take over from the media in picking winners.

5. Republicans need to redefine the presidency. Perry moved in that direction when he said he wanted to make Washington as “inconsequential” as possible. We don’t need a hero. We need a president who will work hard to get government out of the way, so that business can create jobs.

And at the same time, Republicans should claim the word “compassion.” A compassionate government wouldn’t look like Obama’s, constantly getting in the way of entrepreneurs. A compassionate government would focus on the dignity and individual worth, as well as the shared prosperity, that comes from holding a job. Harry Truman believed in full employment as a national objective. He just failed to appreciate that business creates the jobs, with government on the sidelines keeping the competition fair.

Compassion = jobs.

Democrats: Obama goes for the base.

2011-10-05T16:46:00.003-10:00

“Right after Mr. Obama’s election, David Plouffe, his senior political strategist then and now, declared America was no longer a center-right country, but had turned center-left.”

--Brit Hume, FoxNews “Special Report”

Let’s correct Plouffe. America is a center-right country. But Plouffe and the Obama team realize that Obama’s base isn’t confined to the left side of the political spectrum. It includes more conservative minority voters and unmarried women, with a large share of both groups believing Obama, Democrats, government itself is on their side while Republicans aren’t.

The latest Fox News Poll found that while respondents believed by 45% to 26% Obama has done more to hurt the economy than help it, the same people believe Republicans are worse, hurting the economy over helping it by 50% to 15%! The Republican brand remains weak.

As we earlier wrote, Obama is trying to mobilize his base against a Republican enemy the way Harry Truman successfully mobilized the country against a “do-nothing 80th Congress” in 1948.

But others are skeptical of Obama’s efforts to channel Truman. Political guru Stuart Rothenberg, writing in Roll Call, pointed out that the times have changed:

President Harry Truman did successfully run against Congress in 1948. But the differences between Truman’s situation and Obama’s are striking. The New Deal coalition was solidly in control back then, so Truman needed merely to activate it against the GOP. The president has a much more difficult job now. . . Running against a dangerous Republican presidential nominee, of course, would be [a] better [strategy].

Similarly, Jay Cost, in the Weekly Standard, wrote:

Truman went hyper-partisan against the Republicans in 1948 because he believed that, deep down, the country was still way more Democratic than Republican (and he was right about that). Obama is [doing the same] because he believes that, deep down, there are still way more Obama supporters than opponents. Let’s keep in mind that this president’s “arrogance to excellence” ratio has always been staggeringly high.

In mobilizing Obama’s base for victory in 2012, Democrats are intrigued by a "Colorado Strategy.” In 2010, a bad year for Democrats nationally, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet won election in a swing state by doing extremely well among minorities, college educated liberals, independent women, social moderates, and environmentalists.

As Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler report in the New York Times:

what buoys Democrats are the changing demographics of formerly Republican states like Colorado, where Democrats won a close Senate race in 2010, as well as Virginia and North Carolina. With growing cities and suburbs, they are populated by increasing numbers of educated and higher-income independents, young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans, many of them alienated by Republicans’ Tea Party agenda. . . Terry Nelson, a campaign adviser to George W. Bush, John McCain and, this year, the former candidate Tim Pawlenty, [noted that] “Obama needs fewer white voters in 2012 than he did in 2008.”

The latest nationwide New York Times/CBS News poll this month showed that . . . independents with household incomes above $100,000 approved of [Obama’s] job performance by 50% to 43%.

Yet the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar believes Obama’s class warfare pitch is turning off the very higher-income, college-educated independents the “Colorado strategy” seeks to attract:

winning diverse, white-collar battleground states like Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina—more-affluent states with growing numbers of independents[—isn’t helped by] the president’s latest rhetoric, pitting the affluent against the middle class[. It] threatens to turn off the very independents he’s seeking to win back.

We said Obama’s reach covers 63.7% of the electorate. To win, to obtain 50% of the total vote therefore, Obama under a “play to the base” strategy must win 78.5% of his base. Let’s round that off to 80% of the base. (Obama’s theoretical base includes non-citizens as well as citizens from groups—Blacks, Hispanics, youth—with historically lower-than-average turnouts, meaning his voter base is really less than 63.7%, probably less than 60% of those who will show up at the polls, and 50/60 is 83.3%, higher than 80%, so it’s actually being conservative to round off his base-win target to 80%).

In a down economy where jobs are scarce to non-existent, will unmarried females, Blacks, Hispanics, other minorities, white liberals, and youth vote 80% combined, across-the-board to re-elect Obama? Seems a tall order. Obama will win votes beyond his base, but not all that many in a campaign thus far overwhelmingly focused on the base.

You know that holding his base won’t be easy, when even Obama’s long-time adviser David Axelrod calls the upcoming election a “titanic struggle.”

One Side Must Lose (II)

2011-10-03T00:59:00.004-10:00

the G.O.P. is no longer a “conservative” party, offering a conservative formula for American renewal. The G.O.P. has been captured by a radical antitax wing.

--Thomas Friedman, New York Times

We have discussed why Republicans oppose tax increases. Holding the line on taxes is the most effective way to halt government growth, and to begin reducing an unsustainably high debt level. Raising taxes, on the other hand, enables government expansion to continue.

But since holding the line on taxes takes the oxygen away from government, the government party, and the national elite that rules through government, Democrats wage a life-or-death struggle to increase taxes. Democrats fear smaller government. They will—as we have repeatedly noted—fight harder to hold onto what they have than will Republicans fight to gain new territory.

The hyperbole of their language tells us how much Democrats know their fate is tied to big government, and how much they feel the epic challenge to their continued rule:

• From Katrina vanden Heuvel, Nation editor and publisher:

the [GOP] attempts to roll back not simply Obama’s reforms but the Great Society and the New Deal — indeed much of the progress made in the 20th century. . . it would be a grave mistake to give up on government; instead it’s time to clean up our politics and rebuild a fair economy.

• From Congressman Harry Waxman (D-CA):

The Republicans want us to repeal the 20th century, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, to turn us back to the robber barons running the country, and to eviscerate the environmental and other regulations to protect public health and safety. And to cut spending in ways that would be very harmful to people who rely on government.

• From Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker:

Republicans are lunatics dedicated above all to destroying the Obama Presidency.

Democrats are so determined to raise taxes on the wealthy they will do so even if it doesn’t yield additional revenue, notes Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer:

asked [in 2008] about his support for raising capital gains taxes, given the historical record of government losing net revenue as a result[,] Obama [responded: “]what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” A most revealing window into our president’s political core: To impose a tax that actually impoverishes . . . the U.S. Treasury is . . . nothing but punitive. It benefits no one — not the rich, not the poor, not the government. For Obama, however, it brings fairness, which is priceless.

But Krauthammer’s argument misses the mark. Obama and Democrats aren’t about just raising taxes on the rich. They truly want the revenue that comes from raising taxes on everyone. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) catches that point in his Wall Street Journal review of The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known development economist at Columbia. Ryan writes

Sachs is honest enough to acknowledge that the "rich" are not nearly rich enough to pay for his ever-expansive vision of government. We're told that "each of us with an above-average income" (i.e., $50,000 per household) must "understand that . . . we can make do with a little less take-home pay."

Ryan notes Sachs wants more taxes even as Sachs admits, "Yes, the federal government is incompetent and corrupt—but we need more, not less, of it."

Republicans: no new taxes. Democrats: new taxes on everyone. A zero-sum war; winners and losers. The people decide.

One Side Must Lose (I)

2011-09-28T15:39:00.003-10:00

49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.

--Gallup

Look at the chart. It’s at the foundation of our current political struggle. Two sides are fighting about the growth and size of government spending—unsustainable unless taxes go up on everyone—and what to do about it.

Yes, government held a larger share of our national wealth in World War II (1942-46), and yes, it surged to another peak during the Korean War (1951-54). But aside from those two wars, after government grew sharply under Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt (1930 to 1935), it then more slowly and steadily expanded from 1940 (10% of GDP) to 1983 (23.5%). These were the years of the “Blue Model,” the big government-business-labor consensus dominated by Democrats that had frayed by the 1970s.

Reagan’s 1980s “revolution” capped government growth and actually sent it into reverse, as the economy boomed under Reagan/Bush 41 (1984-93) and under Clinton, who mostly governed with a Republican Congress (1995-2001). Economic growth yielded a larger economy, which reduced government’s share of GDP. In a tougher economy, Bush 43 held government’s size steady at 20% of GDP until 2008. Now comes Obama, and the dramatic surge of government to 25% of GDP, even as revenue fell below its historical 18% of GDP average. That 7-8% gap is unsustainable. The gap must close.

Republicans want to return government spending to 20% of GDP or lower, close to the historic revenue collection level. Obama and the Democrats can’t say before the 2012 election what they know: taxes have to rise on everyone if we are to maintain a government that’s 25% of our GDP. The national elite realize Americans must pay dramatically higher taxes to cover the rising medical expenses of our aging population, as well as to sustain the balance of a progressive agenda held in check between Reagan’s 1980 election and Obama’s 2008 victory.

Obama’s “no retreat” insistence on raising taxes on those making over $250,000 a year is his indispensable first step to raising taxes on everyone, most likely with a European-style Value Added Tax (national sales tax), the tax that props up national health insurance in Europe. Only if Obama insists before the election on raising taxes on wealthy people can he then use his re-election to justify later tax increases on everyone (equity, after all).

Democrats must attempt an election-season tax increase. Republicans who want to trim government back to its historical 20% of GDP must say “No!” to any tax increase, including one on the “idle rich.” No room for compromise. It’s war.

Democracy + Capitalism

2011-09-25T16:13:00.003-10:00

"the left doesn't want to be judged on the results of anything they do. They only want to be judged on their good intentions."

--Rush Limbaugh

Put another way, hold us to our words, not our deeds.

You’d think it’d be different, that the progressives with all the brains and all the folks dying to serve in Washington D.C. would be out there under bright lights saying “Judge us on our performance; we know and live good government!!” But that’d be wrong. The elite with brains, living at the top, leading a vast army of victims, including millions of bureaucrats organized into militant public sector unions, can’t be responsible for asking its victims to deliver!

How are liberals supposed to make the economy work, anyway? That’s what business does. Democrats are government, and government in capitalism only fixes the excesses; it doesn’t own the means of production. Democrats know, as we discussed earlier, that government doesn’t create economic development—it is a parasite living off business.

Here’s Bill Clinton, an admired former Democratic president, talking about about what being president means to him:

[Rick Perry]’s saying “Oh, I’m going to Washington to make sure that the federal government stays as far away from you as possible — while I ride on Air Force One and that Marine One helicopter and go to Camp David and travel around the world and have a good time.” I mean, this is crazy.

I mean, this IS crazy—being president is about the perks of the office?! What? It’s not about doing what you can to get the economy working, to create growth? Democrats don’t believe in job performance because they don’t expect to deliver (see Limbaugh, above).

Listen to progressive Steve Kornacki, writing in “Salon” about the helplessness of our Democratic president:

the White House [believes] two grim realities: (1) The economy is not recovering and may soon slip into another recession; and (2) There’s very little that Obama can now do about it. . . The correlation between economic anxiety and the failure of presidents to win reelection is well-established. [S]ince he can’t enact policies that will generate economic momentum in the next year, Obama’s only recourse is to . . . convince swing voters that their anxiety [stems from] Republican obstructionism.

[Passage of Obama’s jobs plan is] beside the point. . . The goal here is to highlight Obama’s desire to do something with the GOP’s preference for doing … nothing. So [the] reelection strategy [is] redirecting swing voters’ intense anxiety, frustration and anger . . . onto the GOP. Obviously, there’s not much inspiring about this.

From Franklin Roosevelt forward, we looked to government to fix the economy for us. We used to believe in government. No longer. Top-down, “bright people will do it for us” doesn’t work as advertised. We need a working free market, millions of individual decision-makers, with smaller government helping from the sidelines, not doing economics itself.

Ronald Reagan was right. “Government is the problem.” Now we need the solution he reached for, but grasped only partially. We need government out of the way of working capitalism. We need democracy (in the form of elections) freeing up capitalism.

Solyndra green jobs ≈ “Soylent Green”

2011-09-23T12:21:00.002-10:00

I remember vividly the horrifying futuristic movie, “Soylent Green.” It was filmed in 1973, starred Charlton Heston, and was set in 2022 New York City, population 40 million, a time when we had run out of food, including plankton from the ocean and were reduced to eating green wafers passed off as plankton but actually reprocessed human corpses.

I couldn’t figure out why name of the fraudulent green job producer—Solyndra—gave me an upset stomach. It’s subliminal. Soylent Green. Solyndra green.

European debt crisis foreshadows coming American revolution.

2011-09-21T12:33:00.010-10:00

€
"Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression."
--Otto von Bismark

Facts about a Greek default: analysts note Greek debt is far above earlier national defaults, so ripple effects could be far more serious. Total Greek public debt is about $500 billion. By comparison, Argentina’s debt was $82 billion when it defaulted in 2001; when Russia defaulted, in 1998, its debt was $79 billion.

Charles Kadlec (picture), writing in Forbes, not only links Europe’s failing elite to their cousins in Washington, but also guesses any trans-Atlantic elite failure improves Republican (called “Tea Party”) prospects:

The looming Greek default and the nascent financial crisis in Europe is a symptom of . . . governing elite [failure]. At risk is the background consensus that supported the expansion of government to the point that public spending now accounts for roughly half of all economic activity among the 17 nations in the eurozone [up from 28% of Western Europe’s GDP in 1965].

A destruction of that consensus would imply a massive loss of power by the elites who for decades have declared that given the power, they could produce an economy with less risk and more fairness than free market capitalism. . . The promises broken during this adjustment will betray the fundamental belief by many in the wisdom of the governing elites and the benevolence of government.

The pending failure of the governing elites to deliver on their most basic promises is setting off alarm bells in Washington[, raising] concern that Europe’s failure will tarnish America’s governing elite, providing additional energy to the Tea Party’s call for restoring limited, constitutional government in the U.S.

Superpower of One (Part 2)

2011-09-19T21:27:00.007-10:00

Look at the chart (again). Note how the European nations—Great Britain, Germany, France in the 1870 column—are all gone by 2010. Parag Khanna and Mark Leonard, two scholars at the European Council on Foreign Relations, may have never seen the chart. They nevertheless object strongly to all the current talk of a “Chimerica” world, dominated by a U.S.-China duopoly. Writing in the New York Times, Khanna and Leonard assert:

In fact, we live in a “G-3” world — one that combines U.S. military power and consumption, Chinese capital and labor, and European rules and technology. The United States, the European Union (E.U.) and China are the three largest actors in the world, together representing approximately 60% of the world economy — with the E.U. being the largest of the three.

Khanna and Leonard further maintain that Europe may have more in common with China than does the U.S.:

Europe, not America, is China’s role model for its state welfare systems, social democracy, low inequality, infrastructure, and commitment to sustainability. There are far more Chinese students in Europe than in America, and far more delegations of Chinese technocrats visiting European capitals.

The chart does fail to treat the E.U. as a single, and therefore powerful, economic unit. But should Europe be treated as unified, given that European unity is under such stress? Here’s Janet Daley of The Telegraph (U.K.):

we are up against the unavoidable contradiction of the European federal project. . . The imperatives of federalism . . . come bang up against the basic principle of democracy: that elected governments should be answerable to their own electorates. . . Federalism cannot allow democracy to disrupt its objectives, and democracy will not permit federalism to ignore its anger and frustration.

[German Chancellor] Angela Merkel . . . cannot commit herself to endless bail-outs and the under-writing of infinite Mediterranean debt, just as the Greek government cannot deliver the European Union’s austerity measures—because the people of both these countries do not wish it. The irresistible force has met the immovable object[, meaning Europe must choose] between abandoning [democracy], or [abandoning] the euro.

If the E.U. hangs together with its euro—not certain—any “G-3” today would certainly include Europe in place of Japan. But the “eclipse” that Arvind Subramanian sees in our future will in any case embrace the rise of India (on the chart by 2030) and Asia, not just China, with the region gaining at the expense of the West including Europe, not just the U.S.

Superpower of One (Part 1)

2011-09-19T11:44:00.003-10:00

China’s power is changing the world. Look at the above chart. It’s based upon Eclipse, a new book by Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Subramanian writes China will account for over 23% of world GDP by 2030, with America accounting for less than 12%. China will dominate trade, with twice America’s share of imports and exports, outpacing the U.S. not only because its own economy will grow faster, but also because its neighbors will grow faster than America’s neighbors.

Subramanian’s assumptions are actually conservative, projecting China’s per-person income will grow by only 5.5% a year over the next two decades, 3.3% slower than the past 20 years. Subramanian has found that after Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Taiwan, Greece, and South Korea developed to a stage comparable to today’s China, they all grew faster than 5.5% per head over the subsequent 20 years.

Whatever China’s growth rate, the U.S. is already making room for the world’s single Superpower. Word comes that, as we wrote earlier, the U.S. has decided not to sell Taiwan the advanced F-16 fighters the island feels it needs. Many in the U.S. believe Taiwan should be able to buy the F-16s. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-IN), ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for example, earlier called for the F-16 sale, saying Taiwan’s defense needs are legitimate, and its “existing capabilities are decaying.”

One sign of how sharply the U.S. is breaking with its previous defense of Taiwan’s right to peaceful reunification with China comes from the Financial Times (U.K.). The paper reports that last week, a “senior US official” warned that Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwan Democratic Progressive party (opposition) leader who was visiting Washington, had sparked concerns about “stability” in the Taiwan Strait, an area the official called “critically important” to the U.S. “She left us with distinct doubts about whether she is both willing and able to continue the stability in cross-Strait relations the region has enjoyed in recent years,” the official said.

The “senior official’s” on-the-record comments constitute blatant U.S. interference in Taiwan’s internal affairs. An election in which Tsai is the leading candidate against current Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou is just 4 months away. By openly siding with China-friendly Ma against Tsai while simultaneously declining to sell F-16s to Taiwan, the U.S. is letting China know that whatever tensions China’s rising power brings to U.S.-China relations, they will no longer revolve around Taiwan.

The Father of Globalization

2011-09-16T18:37:00.003-10:00

Keith Tantlinger, recently honored in a Telegraph (U.K.) obituary, developed the technology that launched containerized shipping. That means Tantlinger helped redraw the global economic map. Partly because of Tantlinger’s invention, Asia became the world’s workshop, pouring finished goods into retail markets worldwide. Containerization did for shipping and Asia what Henry Ford’s assembly line did for car production and the U.S.

Tantlinger, who died last month at 92, was born in Orange, California in 1919. He graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and during World War II worked for Douglas Aircraft designing tools that built B-17 bombers.

Tantlinger patented several dozen container-related inventions. His most important design feature was the slotted eyelet at each corner of the container into which a lock, called a twist-lock, could be dropped, which stabilized stacked containers. By 1957, the container ship Gateway City had taken its first shipload of cargo along the U.S. East Coast. But major progress in containerization only came after 1965, when the American Standards Association adopted a national standard based on Tantlinger’s design that did away with the many competing designs copied from Tantlinger’s invention.

Hoobama

2011-09-12T18:32:00.005-10:00

“History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes.”

--Mark Twain

Is there a “rhyme” to the presidencies of Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover, as we earlier suggested? Consider the most significant parallel. Hoover ended a major sweep in U.S. history, the 1865-1933 post-Civil War domination of American politics by a Northern, business-friendly Republican Party. That era lasted 70 years. It’s possible that Obama is the president who will end the era of Democratic big government, which began with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1933, a period of now nearly 80 years.

Republicans before Hoover, whatever you felt about them, delivered business-led growth with rising prosperity. When Republicans produced a Great Depression instead, they were finished. Democrats before Obama were willing to be measured by government-led job creation. Once the job growth stopped, why elect Democrats?

Hoover: Great Depression. Obama: Great Recession.

Hoover’s political troubles had become obvious by 1930, two years into his presidency, when the nation threw out a Republican House and replaced it with Democrats. In 2010, two years into Obama’s presidency, America replaced a Democratic House with Republicans.

Hoover, with 14 months to go before the end of his term and very worried about his prospects for re-election amidst horrible economic conditions, launched a new program historians now call the “Hoover New Deal of 1932.” It consisted of 9 separate projects to spur economic growth.

Obama, with 14 months to go before the next election and very worried about his prospects amidst poor economic conditions, launched a new program called the “American Jobs Act.” It consists of 15 separate points to spur job growth.

One of Hoover’s projects was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a government institution that by providing loans to financial institutions, aimed to spur growth. Hoover provided the Corporation with $2 billion, which would be $27.5 billion today.

One of Obama’s “Jobs Act” points is creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, charged with financing job-growing projects. Obama plans to provide the Bank $10 billion.

Hoover’s “little New Deal” didn’t work. Here’s why Obama’s “American Jobs Act” seems doomed, even if it could get past a Repubican House. As Milton Friedman has taught us (via Wikipedia and James Pethokoukis), consumer choices regarding consumption— and recall that consumer spending accounts for roughly 70% of economic activity—are determined not by current income but by the consumers’ longer-term income expectations. Friedman’s key conclusion is that transitory, short-term changes in income have little effect on consumer spending behavior.

And as CNBC’s Larry Kudlow has observed about the “American Jobs Act’s” impact on hiring:

while more than half of the president's new package is called "tax cuts," the reality is that these are temporary tax cuts. . . just for one year. . . Businesses like to look ahead at least three to five years for their employment planning. And they're already worried about the tax and regulatory mandate costs of Obamacare, which has become a great deterrent to job creation.

We already know temporary tax cuts don’t work. Obama in 2011 seems lost in the economic hard times. Like Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Big Government Apologist David Brooks No Conservative

2011-09-06T12:57:00.007-10:00

“He who is not with me is against me.”

--Jesus (Matthew 12:30)

New York Times’ house conservative David Brooks knows government doesn’t work, but chooses to defend it anyway. Such writing groups him with the enemy, assuming we are waging a revolutionary struggle against big government.

In his latest column, Brooks rebukes (mildly, politely) Obama-type efforts to create green jobs. Brooks instead recommends a different approach, one more in line with conservative thinking:

[In Boulevard of Broken Dreams,] Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School [endorses] government efforts to set the table for entrepreneurial activity[--]building an underlying context for innovation: funding academic research, establishing clear laws, improving immigration policies, building infrastructure and keeping capital gains tax rates low.

Brooks’ recommendation follows his earlier writing that under past and present administrations, government has

sucked resources away from the most productive parts of the economy — innovators, entrepreneurs and workers — and redirected it to the most politically connected parts. The byzantine tax code and regulatory state has clogged the arteries of American dynamism.

Such writings suggest Brooks “gets it,” that in the words of Ronald Reagan, “Government is the problem.” Not so. Brooks is an open defender of government. In the column quoted above, Brooks also writes, “The United States became the wealthiest nation on earth primarily because Americans were the best educated.”

That is quite a statement. Now we have American exceptionalism reduced to elite private and public high schools like Radnor on Philadelphia’s Main Line, where 93% of graduates go on to college, and elite universities like the University of Chicago. Brooks graduated from Radnor and the University of Chicago.

I think Brooks truly believes our educated elite, mostly running the U.S. since Stanford engineer Herbert Hoover became president in 1929, is responsible for our wealth. Canadian-born Brooks, 50, the same age as ex-University of Chicago faculty member Barack Obama, didn’t arrive in the U.S. until well after our educated elite had taken over.

I don’t agree with Brooks that education is “primarily” responsible for our success. The educated elite, after all, are the folks who cannot bring us out of our current economic mess, and who—contrary to Brooks’ most fervent wish—must be removed from power. I go with conservative Thomas Sowell’s rebuttal of the importance of education:

How [is it] possible that transferring decisions from elites with more education, intellect, data and power to ordinary people [leads] consistently to demonstrably better results? One implication is that no one is smart enough to carry out social engineering. . .

[E]xperience trumps brilliance. Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they pre-empt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.

Brooks does want change. But he instructs us that change

can’t be done without leadership from government [take that, Reagan]. Just as the Washington and Lincoln administrations actively nurtured an industrial economy, so some future American administration will have to nurture a globalized producer society. [emphasis added]

So much wrong here. Washington saw the need for roads and Lincoln supported railroads, though privately built and run. It’s dishonest, however, for Brooks to associate either with the all-intrusive state we face today, marching toward cradle-to-grave socialism.

And it’s also dishonest for Brooks to talk about “administrations” as if big government’s been around since Washington. While the federal government did provide land for state-run agricultural colleges under Lincoln, neither president, for example, could ever have imagined the current federal government’s intrusive role in directing public and even private education from preschool (Head Start) through graduate school.

George Washington, father of big government? It’s a stretch too far.

Zero Job Growth

2011-09-04T02:39:00.005-10:00

When it comes to jobs, it looks like the Obama presidency may be stuck with the Peggy Noonan-coined sentence, “He made it worse.” No job growth whatsoever in August. June and July job growth numbers lowered by a combined 58,000 jobs. That means over the last three months, job growth has averaged only 48,300 a month. It needs to reach 200,000 a month to generate real economic growth.

The chart below shows what should be Obama’s minimum job growth and unemployment rate targets: the totals for January 2009, the month he took office. He has 13 months, until the October 2012 final pre-election jobs report, to hit those targets. It is going to be difficult. As the chart states, Obama will have to average 187,000 new jobs a month, every month, for 13 months. By comparison over the previous 13 months, job creation has averaged only 92,300 a month, less than half the 187,000 average he needs, starting now.

“He made it worse.”

Media the Status Quo’s Strike Force

2011-08-31T15:43:00.008-10:00

No secret we are headed for an awful political war in 2012, one in which the media will lead the attack. Here’s the conservative “Big Journalism’s” John Nolte:

Obama cannot win re-election, and furthermore, the media knows this. Obama is a failed president who failed in a way no president before him ever has.

For two years he could and did get absolutely every piece of legislation passed he wanted passed and as a direct result[--prolongation of] The Great Recession. . . Nope, Obama cannot win re-election. The media, however, can win it for him, and the only way they can do that is to toxify our candidates into something unelectable. [emphasis added]

This is a bitterly partisan war being waged by a media disguising themselves as “objective.” They are our real political enemies in 2012, [and] you haven’t seen anything yet. This is merely the tip of the spear, the 2012 warm up.

The evidence of bias is everywhere. By 20-to-1, the TV networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) apply ideological labels to Republicans over Democratic presidential candidates. Comparing treatment of Republican candidates from January 1 to July 31 this year to that of Democratic candidates over the same period in 2007, the Media Research Center found the networks branding Republicans “conservative” 62 times, but calling Democrats “liberal” only 3 times.

Liberal Democratic candidates John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were never once called “liberal” on any of the networks, while CBS and NBC never tagged Barack Obama as liberal, even though Obama’s arguably the most rigidly liberal president in history. Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty was identified as “conservative” the day he announced, Newt Gingrich as a “conservative’s conservative,” Rick Perry as having “strong conservative credentials,” Michele Bachmann as a “take-no-prisoners conservative,” Bachmann and Sarah Palin as “soul mates — unbending conservatives,” and Rick Santorum as the “strongest social conservative in the bunch.”

The uniformly progressive networks see no reason to label the like-minded, but feel compelled to warn viewers whenever a candidate opposed to liberalism comes smiling down the path.

More evidence. California Democrat Micky Kaus, whose “KausFiles” was one of the first political blogs, recently (August 15) wrote:

The [New York] Times is a struggling new media company now, and in new media the readers, viewers and dollars go to those who tell committed partisans and ideologues what they want to hear. So why not tell your mainly Dem readers that the other side is “on the defensive”? They’ll eat it up. They might even subscribe. Better yet, throw in some macho chest-thumping: The GOP is not just “on the defensive. Their “boasts” are “ringing hollow”! Yeaaaghh! If the Republicans nevertheless inexplicably win the next election–hey, deal with that then.

Still more evidence. Charlotte Allen, in the conservative Weekly Standard, reports on a study and a book by UCLA professor Tim Groseclose. The study, co-authored by Chicago professor Jeffrey Milyo, was published November 2005 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Harvard University publication regarded as one of America’s top four scholarly economics journals. The study found most major American news outlets reflected a liberal bias. Allen wrote:

The media not only skewed left in terms of the political leanings of their personnel, but they could not report about a controversial issue—whether the issue was George W. Bush’s tax cuts, global warming, partial-birth abortion, or the effects of affirmative action on college-campus demographics—without loading the piece in ideological ways that made it a completely different story from that which a conservative, or even a centrist, might tell.

The Groseclose-Milyo study devastatingly undercut the prevailing wisdom, held dear by the press and its apologists, that yes, most reporters may pull the Democratic lever in the voting booth, but they bend over backwards to frame their news stories in a nonpartisan and evenhanded fashion that disguises their personal ideological leanings. As Groseclose and Milyo concluded, that doesn’t happen.

Groseclose’s book, Left Turn, is just out. It shows liberal bias has made American voters considerably more liberal than they would otherwise be. That, Allen says, “cracks wide open the prevailing wisdom, subscribed to even by many conservatives[,] that New York Times [readers] automatically correct for the Sulzberger slant, saying to themselves, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the New York Times.’”

It’s not news here, and probably not news even among the general public, that biased media are deeply committed to bringing Barack Obama back for another term. Nevertheless, it helps to have facts supporting the conventional wisdom. And exposing the media for what they are—conscious, dedicated agents of the Democratic war machine.

Taiwan’s Darkened Future

2011-08-30T10:19:00.009-10:00

“China may soon be able to . . . demand the United States get out of its back yard.”

--David Cohen, The Diplomat

Cohen means China is approaching the point where it can be confident that the U.S. won’t interfere with China’s Number One foreign policy goal: regaining control over its lost province of Taiwan.

The U.S. intends to decide by October 1 what to do about Taiwan’s request—strongly opposed by China—that the U.S. upgrade Taiwan’s aging aircraft inventory by selling the breakaway province 66 F-16 fighter jets. Reportedly, the U.S. has already come down against the sale.

As for any future administration’s approach to Taiwan, Texas Governor Rick Perry yesterday told the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention:

I do not believe that America should fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism. We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened and we should always look to build coalitions . . . It’s not our interest to go it alone.

In the same speech, Perry did say America should be willing to “tak[e] the fight to the enemy, wherever they are, before they strike at home.” But does he mean attacking China to defend Taiwan? Not likely.

At a time of weak U.S. economic growth, traceable in part to our exploding deficit, a time when Republicans are looking at allowing large defense cuts rather than accept budget growth in both domestic and defense accounts, Perry’s more noteworthy comment was his caution against “military adventurism.” And that phrase could describe any U.S. military effort to stop China from reclaiming Taiwan.

It’s a fact that while our ability to defend Taiwan declines, China’s offensive military capabilities are on the rise. Richard Weitz, writing
in the Asian-focused journal Diplomat after reviewing the Pentagon’s recent re-evaluation of Chinese military power, chose these words to summarize the current U.S.-China balance of forces:

China’s development of ballistic missiles and other anti-access, area denial, and asymmetric capabilities is challenging US primacy in the sea and air near China. . . The Chinese apparently aim to disrupt US space satellites, computer systems, and . . . degrade US military capabilities . . . to establish a fait accompli, such as the occupation of Taiwan.

Similarly, the National Review’s Michael Auslin concluded:

When we [cut] hundreds of billions of dollars from the budgets of our Navy and Air Force, which keep the big peace in Asia, then the Chinese seem to be making a pretty good calculation that they just have to wait us out for a while before we’re too weak to oppose whatever whim they have on a given day.

Taiwan seems left with little beyond hopes and prayers. Andrew N.D. Yang, the Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan) Vice Minister (Policy), Ministry of National Defense, wrote in a recent Brookings Institution paper:

the ROC [Taiwan] is now proceeding toward volunteer forces . . . in an attempt to [modernize and] safeguard national security . . . It is hoped that the United States . . . will continue to support the ROC and expand exchanges and cooperation . . . Eventually, it is expected that United States will sell advanced defensive weapons to the ROC for self-defense.

While giving up the draft in favor of a volunteer army might seem an odd way to “modernize” one’s power, it does keep one’s military viable even after a country’s rising prosperity has built resentment against the draft. At least Taiwan can “modernize” ground forces on its own. But Yang’s wish that the U.S. will in the future sell Taiwan the planes it needs to hold off China remains just that—a wish.

Taiwan’s current government has placed the bulk of its security hopes in its Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China. The ECFA has significantly lowered economic barriers between the two, and tariffs on hundreds of products will be eliminated over time. John Lee of Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies, however, believes the ECFA “is all about politics.” Lee adds that in China’s view “this is about enmeshing the two economies in such a way that Taiwan’s future is tied to China’s.”

Nevertheless, says Doug Bandow (in the Forbes article that quotes Lee):

Economic integration, exemplified by ECFA, is the centerpiece of the [ruling Kuomintang’s] policy. President Ma [Ying-jeou] declared: “We have transformed the Taiwan Strait from a danger zone into a peace corridor.” And the process is not over. [According to Ma associate] Chao Chien-min[,] “if President Ma is reelected [in January,] the current pace will be continued.”

For better, for worse. We had earlier hoped, in a calmer time when the U.S. seemed stronger and more solidly behind Taiwan, that Ma’s approach might indeed work.

Forty years ago, the U.S.-China relationship came out of its cold war deep freeze when Mao Zedong invited a U.S. ping pong team to play in China under the banner, “Friendship first, competition second.” It's so different now says Brook Larmer, writing in the Washington Post about this month’s Georgetown-Chinese army basketball “game”:

So how did it go so wrong. . . degenerating into all-out hostility early in the fourth quarter — sparking a bench-clearing, chair-heaving, game-ending brawl? [Was] this fight a grand metaphor for an emerging superpower seeking to supplant an established one[? After all, t]he 2008 Beijing Olympics were portrayed not just as another Games, but as incontrovertible proof, for all to see, that China had arrived as a world power.

Reprise: business, not government, creates jobs.

2011-08-24T08:58:00.011-10:00

"Prosperity is just around the corner."
--Herbert Hoover (1932)

"When I said 'Change we can believe in,' [w]e knew this was going to take time."
--Barack Obama (2011)

Reprise: how bad it is.

From Fortune’s Nina Easton:

• a quiet cultural crisis brews as one out of five American men stop collecting paychecks -- getting by instead on unemployment or disability checks, the incomes of friends and family, and . . . illicit activity.

• There are now 6.2 million Americans (more than 44% of the unemployed) who have been out of work for more than a year -- and are dead last on any list of employers seeking to fill positions. These are people whose skills have rusted in a fast-paced global economy, along with twentysomethings who haven't even developed the habit of work.

• Safety nets, built to protect people in trouble, are actually contributing to their long-term unemployment -- and thereby hurting their job prospects. A study by the Chicago Fed suggests people go back to work -- and unemployment drops -- when unemployment insurance is set to run out.

Reprise: how wrong current policies are.

More from Nina Easton:

The Obama team resists a pro-growth tax and regulation agenda that business leaders insist would give them the confidence to invest their growing profits in an expanded U.S. workforce. . . Washington spends more than $18 billion a year on 47 different training programs -- spread across nine agencies. What has all that bureaucracy and money bought? Employers who complain that they can't find qualified workers -- even in this market (one out of three employers, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute survey). As many as 3 million jobs in this country are sitting unfilled.

Reprise: we need business, not government, creating jobs.

From Canadian David Warren (Ottawa Citizen):

Most moral issues [aren’t about] distinguishing between right and wrong. [They are about] finding a way to justify doing the wrong thing. And once you think you have found it, the people still arguing for doing the right thing may be dismissed as "simplistic."

[“Simplistic:”] If what we want is a functioning, even flourishing economy, and therefore jobs, jobs, jobs, then the policies of Texas make sense. They are, as Rick Perry says, low taxes, minimal regulation, the avoidance of debt, and business-friendly attitudes. It is a political culture [focused] on the political questions (law, order, and so forth), [leaving] economic questions to the free market.

The Truman Show

2011-08-18T12:14:00.006-10:00

Barack Obama is channeling Harry S. Truman. His Midwest bus tour, denouncing Congress at each stop, is a virtual carbon copy of Truman’s whistle-stop denunciation of the 80th Congress. And as such, it’s in line with American Enterprise Institute moderate Norman Ornstein’s recommendation to Obama, published in the New Republic:

the President can [follow] a precedent from 64 [sic] years ago: Harry Truman’s campaign for reelection in 1948—successful, despite a poor economic climate, and a polarized electorate—offers a promising path for Obama’s reelection. . . the Republicans [a]s historian William Leuchtenburg put it, “veered so sharply to the right that they alienated one segment of the electorate after another. They antagonized farmers by slashing funds for crop storage; irritated Westerners by cutting appropriations for reclamation projects;” and, . . . by pushing the anti-union Taft-Hartley legislation over Truman’s veto, they drove a labor movement furious with Truman back into the president’s arms.

[Truman realized] that the hyper-partisan Congress was as much a political boon as it was a political liability. Truman seized upon the conservative over-reaching and openly fought against what he dubbed the “Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress.” That rhetorical strategy paid dividends, as voters rebelled against the ideologues and the Democratic base was energized to elect a president they had long disparaged and opposed. . . “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Truman remarked years later, “was the Eightieth Congress.” [For Obama,] the absence of an energized and angry president demanding better of the do-nothings in Congress can only lead to something worse.

To me, it looks like Obama is jumping the gun a bit. Truman didn’t coin the term “do-nothing” Congress until after the congressional special session he called adjourned August 7, 1948, and his whistle-stop train tour denouncing the Congress didn’t begin until September 17, 1948, six weeks before the election (David McCullough, Truman, pp. 652, 654). Obama’s bus tour is 14 months before the election, and much closer to Congress’s opening than to its close. Shouldn’t the president wait a bit? Or is he just too eager for the “Truman Show” to end, the one that closed with “Give ‘em Hell” Harry’s all-time upset presidential win?

Conservative Michael Barone, in a Washington Examiner article entitled “Harry S. Obama?”, also takes on the Obama-Ornstein parallel to Truman, but from a different, more substantive, angle. Barone writes about the agricultural policy (in a time when much more of the country lived in farm areas) and foreign policy advantages 1948 Truman had over our current president.

Tax reform doesn’t mean tax increase.

2011-08-17T12:11:00.005-10:00

"Tax reform is the political fulcrum for addressing the growth shortage, the fiscal crisis and our runaway health-care prices problem. It's the one idea that reaches across the partisan divide. It might be the only thing that could save the Obama presidency."

--Holman Jenkins, Wall Street Journal

Two conservatives just recently jumped on the idea that tax reform that lowers rates while simultaneously eliminating loopholes is something both liberals and conservatives can endorse. Why not, when lower rates help do what everyone wants, boost economic growth? The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore pushed tax reform in a column entitled, “Tax Reform's Moment? Where else is the growth going to come from?” And syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer similarly argued that “Debt-Reduction On Grand Scale Is Within Reach.”

Neither Moore nor Krauthammer recommend an overall tax increase (Krauthammer specifically rejects it). But neither do they call for an overall tax reduction. They favor tax reform, a more efficient taxing system that begins with the same level of overall tax revenue, but by lowering rates, promises to spur growth.

Since then, familiar partisan divides have emerged. Conservatives have made it crystal clear that overall taxes cannot go up. And progressives are just as insistent taxes must increase. Here’s liberal Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post about last Thursday’s Republican presidential debate:

every single GOP candidate on the stage agreed that they would reject a budget deal that was $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. Even Fox News’s Bret Baier couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. . . A world in which the GOP will not agree to deficit reduction with a 10:1 split between spending cuts and tax increases is a world where entitlement reform can’t happen. It’s a world where the “supercommittee” fails and the trigger is pulled, and thus a world in which $1 out of every $2 in cuts comes from the Pentagon. . . The losers in tonight’s debate were anyone who wants to see the sort of compromise necessary for the political process to work.

As we wrote earlier, progressives are determined to secure some sort of tax increase, a tax increase of any size, because they desperately want validation at the polls in 2012 for the big tax increases they hope await America from 2013 onward. Of course, neither Klein or the president will say this openly. Conservatives are just as equally determined to deny progressives the tax increase validation they seek.

In resisting compromise settlements that allow for even slight tax increases, conservatives refer back to when Ronald Reagan compromised with Democrats in 1982, and it backfired. From Heritage Foundation scholar Lee Edwards:

Reagan “admitted that his failures to cut federal spending absolutely and to balance the federal budget were his ‘biggest disappointments’ as president.”

Reagan went along with . . . chief of staff James Baker, who persuaded the president to accept the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 . . . $98 billion [in tax increases] over the next three years. . . Baker assured his boss that Congress would approve three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase. To Reagan, [the 1982 act] looked like a pretty good "70%" deal. But Congress wound up cutting less than 27 cents for every new tax dollar. What had seemed to be an acceptable 70-30 compromise turned out to be a 30-70 surrender. Ed Meese described [the 1982 act] as "the greatest domestic error of the Reagan administration."

Nevertheless, the progressive “teeny, weeny tax increase” net cast over the Washington pundit world has caught at least one conservative fish, a catch that complicates conservative efforts to hold the line against tax increases. Commentary’s Peter Wehner recently wrote of the $10-cuts-for-$1-increase proposal:

this thought experiment has to do with (a) a real spending cuts deal and (b) a compromise plan, not what one believes to be an ideal one. It is hard for me to imagine that any serious conservative who wants to limit government wouldn’t accept such a deal. The alternative, after all, would not be to reduce the size and scope of government without tax increases; it would be to keep Leviathan at its current size instead of significantly cutting it at the cost of a relatively small tax increase. . . if taxes cannot be raised under any circumstance — then we have veered from economic policy to religious catechism.

Harsh. And hurtful to the cause of halting federal growth.

The Berlin Wall

2011-08-15T12:45:00.009-10:00

On a quiet August weekend 50 years ago, with world leaders all off on vacation, the Berlin Wall went up. Writing about the then-president’s “Berlin blunder” in his latest column, George Will quotes the New York Times’ Scotty Reston saying at the time that Kennedy “talked like Churchill but acted like Chamberlain.” In Will’s view,

Tens of millions of East Europeans might have been spared those years of tyranny, and the West might have been spared considerable dangers and costs, if Kennedy had not been complicit in preventing the unraveling of East Germany.

I don’t see it that way. Kennedy understood that the entire Soviet empire, not just East Germany, was bleeding through the Iron Curtain cut that was Berlin, where anybody could take a subway or just walk from east to west (Communist authorities were able to control access from East Germany into East Berlin). Khrushchev had to do something about Berlin, which he called a "bone in my throat."

East-West tensions dropped once the bleeding stopped. The U.S. came out on top a year later, when the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in failure for Khrushchev, who was attempting to upend the balance of terror that was fast turning against the Soviet Union, as the U.S. brought Polaris-missile nuclear submarines and Minuteman intercontinental missiles rapidly online. By decade's end we were on the moon, the ultimate symbol of our technological superiority. In time, no East Germany. In time, no Soviet empire.

The U.S. overreach in Vietnam, a product of hubris as much as weakness, delayed our post-Cuban Missile Crisis victory in the Cold War. Vietnam was an unnecessary venture, at least following the far more important 1965 anti-Communist take-over in Indonesia. America did not regain its post-Vietnam debacle footing until Reagan’s election in 1980. Reagan’s muscular foreign policy then helped bring the Berlin Wall down in 1989, after 28 too-long years.

My version of history. Thank you Mr. Will.

[Stuff] they say about Rick Perry.

2011-08-13T10:52:00.006-10:00

“Obama . . . will have to 'kill' Romney."

--A “prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House”

Should Rick Perry, not Romney, win the nomination, substitute the word “Perry” for “Romney.” The “oppo” (opposition research) on Perry, in fact, is already underway, as the following comments reveal:

Compared with most other large states, Texas. . . has fewer public services, lower public benefits, greater income inequality and a higher rate of medically uninsured.

--Karen Tumulty, Washington Post

According to researchers in the [quietly progressive] Texas Legislative Study Group, 17.3% of the state's population lives in poverty, 4.26 million people[,] 66% of Latino children and 59% of black children live in low-income families, compared to 25% of white children. 28% or 6.1 million of the population of Texas is uninsured, the largest share of uninsured in the nation. . . In 2010, the average monthly benefit for Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) recipients in Texas was $26.86, the lowest in the country. . . Texas is 50th in workers' compensation, 50th in percent of women receiving prenatal care, 50th in percent of non-elderly women with health care, 50th in per capita spending on mental health, 49th in per capita state spending on Medicaid.

--James Moore, “Huffington Post”

previous Perry controversies [include] his now-infamous 2009 suggestion that Texas might consider seceding from the union [and] an earlier furor when rock musician Ted Nugent played at his 2007 inaugural ball clad in a Confederate-flag T-shirt and with machine guns as props.

David Axelrod, a senior advisor to President Obama, told CBS’s “Early Show” Friday that the Lone Star State’s strong performance had little to do with the governor’s decisions. “He’s been the beneficiary down there of the boom in oil prices ... and in increased military spending because of the wars,” Axelrod said.

--Niall Stanage, “The Hill”

state taxpayers [have paid $700,000] for rent, utilities and upkeep on [a] five-bedroom mansion . . . which Perry had moved into in the fall of 2007 while renovations were being done on the governor's mansion. In 2008, a fire [attributed to] arson partially destroyed the mansion, [so] Perry has continued to live in the rental home. . . valued [at around] $1 million.

--Scott Conroy, “RealClearPolitics”

[As a Democratic state representative, Perry supported] the $5.7 billion tax hike in 1987, signed by Gov. Bill Clements, a Republican, opposed by most Republican members. The bill passed the House by a 78-70 vote. Even without adjusting for inflation, the legislation triggered the largest tax increase ever passed in modern Texas.

Perry was also the co-author of legislation aimed at tripling the amount of money state legislators are paid[. At the time, they were making] $7,200 as part-time lawmakers. Voters rejected the proposal in a statewide referendum.

--Jay Root, New York Times

In 2007, the governor of Texas earned $1,092,810. According to his IRS form, he gave $90 of that total to his church. He was a tad more generous in 2008 when the governor's adjusted gross income was $277,667 and he donated $2,850 to his church. Perry was feeling less magnanimous in 2009 when he earned $200,370 but shows all zeroes as a line item for church donations. For the years 2000-2009, Governor Perry's adjusted gross income on his tax returns adds up to $2,694,253 and church donations are $14,293.

--James Moore, “Huffington Post”

A source in Texas passed The Huffington Post Perry's transcripts from his years at Texas A&M University. The future politician did not distinguish himself much in the classroom. While he later became a student leader, he had to get out of academic probation to do so. He rarely earned anything above a C in his courses -- earning a C in U.S. History, a D in Shakespeare, and a D in the principles of economics. Perry got a C in gym. Perry also did poorly on classes within his animal science major. In fall semester 1970, he received a D in veterinary anatomy, a F in a second course on organic chemistry and a C in animal breeding. He did get an A in world military systems and “Improv. of Learning” -- his only two As while at A&M. "A&M wasn't exactly Harvard on the Brazos River," recalled a Perry classmate in an interview with The Huffington Post. "This was not the brightest guy around. We always kind of laughed. He was always kind of a joke."

[Transcript is from 1968-72, before and shortly after the May 1970 Kent State massacre led to a nationwide university shut-down followed by professors instituting draft discouraging grade inflation at Ivy League and other schools (when did grade inflation reach A&M?). Perry’s university GPA was a “gentlemanly” 1.94 (C). BTW, where are Barack Obama’s Occidental College, Columbia, and Harvard Law transcripts?--GF]

--Jason Cherkis, “Huffington Post”

Perry said, "Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me."

Oran Smith, the president of the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative, family-values organization in South Carolina, . . . said he has been bombarded with emails from activists over the past 48 hours about Perry's comments -- with mixed responses. . . Smith said he believes that Perry's comments will give conservative voters pause about the Texas governor's possible candidacy, and if he doesn't explain himself, those comments may make them hesitant to support him.

"It's the way he said it," Smith said, noting that Perry said he was "fine" with New York's new law. He explained that if by "fine" he means he's happy about it, that won't sit well with evangelical voters, but if he's approaching it as a constitutional lawyer would, it may not be so bad.

At the same time, Smith said he's concerned that Perry's comments suggest he could be "slippery" on other issues. "And he may be perceived as stumbling out of the gate because of a poor choice of words," he said, indicating that such a stumble could hurt Perry in the early voting states of Iowa and South Carolina, where he would need to do well.

--Scott Conroy and Erin McPike, “RealClearPolitics”

Perry has been . . . dismissive of Democrats and fond of political maneuvers that put the heat on moderates within his own party. And in the legislative session that just wrapped up, he presided over a budget that cut $4 billion from public schools. . . Perry is a hard man. He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved—or respected. And he has gotten his wish.

-- Paul Burka, Texas Monthly

[The Perry-Mike Toomey] relationship will be scrutinized if Mr. Perry runs for president: Mr. Toomey was a lobbyist for Merck when Mr. Perry issued a 2007 executive order requiring sixth-grade girls in Texas to be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, the leading cause of cervical cancer. At the time, the only approved vaccine was Gardasil, made by Merck. The Legislature overrode the executive order, and some attributed the flap to the close ties between Mr. Toomey and the governor.

--Ross Ramsey, New York Times

"We are tired of being told how much salt to put on our food, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own [and] what kind of prayers we are allowed to say," [Perry] writes. [But] his list of complaints against the federal government [isn’t fact-based], unless you count Agriculture Department brochures about salt.

Perry wears his evangelical Christian faith on his sleeve, which will help him with some voters but not others. In April, he called for three days of prayer for divine intercession to end Texas' drought. (It didn't work.)

--Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times

does he have the stamina for a long campaign? He has been examined by Democrats and the Texas media but will undergo a vetting unlike anything he’s seen in the past. How will he react to the inevitable stories critical of him, his record, his policies, his exercise of power and his connections?

He knows his message and sticks to it — and sticks to it and sticks to it and sticks to it. That can be an asset or, if it appears he doesn’t have answers beyond his main message, a potential liability. What he will be like in debates and on the Sunday shows is another question. He avoided debates in the last campaign and also declined to sit for interviews with editorial boards, saying he knew he wasn’t going to get their endorsements so it wasn’t worth bothering.

. . . will Rick Perry be remembered as some of his Texas predecessors, John Connolly and Phil Gramm among them, as a candidate who came into the race with high expectations but who never found his footing or his audience? Texans say Perry has been underestimated many times. But he’s never faced what will await him if he does jump in.

--Dan Balz, Washington Post

His statements related to possible Texas secession actually helped him in his recent race in 2010, and will help him in a national campaign in the Republican primaries and caucuses. [But] this talk will hurt him in a general-election race. Moderate voters in the Midwest will see it as off-putting.

Perry has never been fully vetted by the media. . . Perry and some of his staffers are known to have thin skins. They will need to grow calluses if they are to succeed in the [big] show. . . Perry has never lost a race. While many immediately list this as a positive, losing at some point in your career makes you better when the inevitable problems hit. . . The real question is: Can he suffer defeat and rise to the next battle?

--Matthew Dowd, National Journal, who has known Perry for 25 years.

Perry appears to be the anti-Obama in many ways. Unlike the deliberate incumbent, Perry has used his powers aggressively through his appointments (some opponents even call it political revenge) While the current president has talked about unity and bipartisanship, Perry once (jokingly?) suggested secession. While Obama was an Ivy League star and head of the Harvard Law Review, Perry was a C- and D-student from Texas A&M. . . Perry represents [Republicans’] sharpest contrast with Obama. And chew on this: The more vulnerable Obama looks, GOP voters might be more concerned with ideological purity and likeability than electability. Think heart over head.

--Chuck Todd, NBC News

can [Perry] present his ruggedly conservative views in a way that will appeal to voters far from Texas? The conventional wisdom is that he's too conservative, too controversial and maybe not as book smart as the men he'd be running against. But that's what they said in 1980, when the candidate was Ronald Reagan.

[Ex-California Republican Party chair] Shawn Steel. . . isn't sure that Perry can pull off a Reagan-style victory. [Reagen], he noted, could "take controversial positions and make them sound like ice cream. Can Perry do that?" Right now, Perry's rawboned conservatism doesn't sound much like ice cream. It's more like strong tea, with no sweetener.

--Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times

“I am haunted and humbled by the legend of [Jimmy] Carter supporters saying we want [Ronald] Reagan. And I think everybody in politics ought to be.”

--Paul Begala, Top Democratic operative

Rick Perry-Marco Rubio

2011-08-12T17:41:00.009-10:00

“I can’t think of anything that’s brighter, that’s more positive for the future of America than creating this environment where people know they can get up every day, go to work, have a job and take care of family.”

--Rick Perry

We wrote that Rick Perry’s run for president is handicapped by his being from the South, the region where Republicans are already strongest. I wish to seemingly compound Perry’s problem by endorsing Florida’s Marco Rubio as Perry’s running mate. A Southwest-South team to run against the Midwest-Northeast Obama-Biden team, base against base.

Doesn’t seem to make sense. Sean Theriault, a University of Texas political science professor, says that Rick Perry "speaks the Tea Party language." And Marco Rubio was the (winning) Tea Party candidate for Florida senator. Loading the ticket with two Southern Tea Party conservatives hardly seems the way to appeal to the non-Southern independents who will decide next year’s presidential contest. As Theriault concludes, "I think the Republican nomination for [Perry] would be much easier than the general election."

Of course, the reason for Perry-Rubio isn’t that Rubio is from the South or from Florida, even though Florida is a state Republicans must carry. Of course, it’s that Rubio is Hispanic, and would be in position to become America’s first Hispanic president. Of course, Rubio would help boost the Hispanic GOP vote up to at least the 40% share Bush-Cheney carried in 2004. Of course, winning Hispanic votes cuts painfully into the Democratic base vote Obama is counting on, a base that we earlier documented.

In 2004, Hispanic votes helped Bush-Cheney carry Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, heavily Hispanic states in addition to Florida the GOP lost to Obama in 2008. A Perry-Rubio ticket would certainly aim to recapture those Hispanic-influenced states.

Also, there are two states outside the South and West that went to Obama in 2008 that Perry-Rubio would likely carry next year. They are Indiana, where Obama’s approval rating in June was already down to 42%, and New Hampshire, where it had dropped even lower, to 40%.

If Perry-Rubio carried every Southern and Southwestern state, Alaska, all the interior West and Great Plains states including Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico that Bush-Cheney carried in 2004, plus Indiana and New Hampshire, the ticket would have enough electoral votes to prevail in 2012 without having to win in a single other Pacific Coast, Midwestern, or Northeastern state of any size (hit to enlarge map below):

President Perry

2011-08-10T08:11:00.012-10:00

"For the very first time in my life, I feel compelled to stand up and to speak out for the man who I believe has a new vision for America. I am here to tell you, Iowa, he is the one. He is the one!" [emphasis added]

--Oprah Winfrey (2007)

O.K. We don’t want to go down that road again. But Rick Perry is already the best presidential candidate Republicans have seen since Ronald Reagan in 1980 (Reagan was a bit old by 1984). Better than George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani, and better than Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, and Sarah Palin.

Not even close, really.

Perry looks like a president. He has a terrific bio, including Eagle Scout and service as an Air Force pilot. He is three-term governor of America’s second largest state. That’s experience. His budgets are in surplus even though Texas has no income tax. His pro-growth policies are even more important than his budget balancing. In the last two years (Obama’s years as president), Texas has created 40% of the new jobs in America.

Tea Party economic conservatives love Perry’s budget-balancing, job-creating record. But social conservatives have just as much reason to love Perry, who wears his Christianity on his sleeve, and Saturday presided over a 30,000-person Houston prayer rally he himself organized. It seems highly likely that in these troubled times, Perry’s message of faith and hope will reach well beyond the evangelical Christian community, a core group that is, nevertheless, crucial to winning two of the early Republican contests—the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary (whose winner since the primary's 1980 inception then wins the GOP nomination).

Politics tells you Democrats should never nominate a candidate from their Northeast-Midwest base, and Republicans should stay away from their Southern core. In politics, after all, you always want to expand beyond your base. I favored Northeasterner Chris Christie. But maybe what worked for Obama in 2008—give ‘em the progressive intellectual your party truly is and truly fix the country—will work in 2012 for the other side, now that country is still broke and broken. Hope. Change. Rick Perry. President.

Jobs: surface gains, deep troubles continue.

2011-08-06T19:13:00.009-10:00

Economist Heather Boushey of the progressive Center for American Progress writes July’s jobs report produced a positive headline: jobs up 117,000, May and June totals revised upward by 56,000, the unemployment rate down from 9.2% to 9.1%. The Dow responded accordingly, up 61 points from Thursday.

Nevertheless, the Dow, S&P 500 and the NASDAQ all fell massively over the Thursday-Friday combined period, with the total of a Dow at 11,445, an S&P of 1,199, and a NASDAQ at 2,532 reaching just 15,176. That means the FOX Index (which measures “healthy” as a Dow of 12,000, an S&P of 1,300 and a NASDAQ of 2,500—total 15,800) is deeper in “unhealthy” territory at minus -624 (see chart).

Despite the positive job growth headline, Boushey is negative about the current jobs picture. She notes the share of Americans at work fell to 58.1%, lower than at any other point in 28 years; the share of adult men with a job fell to 66.7%, and prior to the Great Recession, that share had never fallen below its previous low of 70.5% in 1983; the share of adult women with a job was 54.9% in July, up slightly from 54.8% in June, its lowest level in eight years; temporary help, a leading indicator firms may hire, added no new jobs in July with little change over 2011; hours of work and overtime were flat in July, at the same level as they have been for months, indicating employers feel no pressure to hire; though the unemployment rate fell to 9.1%, this is the 25th month the rate has been at or above 9%, a post-war era record; nearly 7 million workers are out of the labor force so are uncounted, but currently want a job; long-term unemployed — actively searching for work for at least six months — are at 44.4% of total unemployed, only slightly below all-time highs; wages are failing to keep pace with inflation, with wage growth at 2.8% in July against an inflation rate of 3.4%.

Each month, we measure Obama’s employment record against two benchmarks that will be important in November 2012—the unemployment rate and the number of jobs in January 2009, when Obama took office. Here’s the chart measuring his progress:

The New Revolution: America Turns Right

2011-08-04T13:06:00.008-10:00

The National Journal’s Major Garrett writes that the debt crisis has left behind “five permanent truths.” I like his idea, but not his list. Garrett’s “permanent truths” are: 1. a new precedent that ties debt-ceiling increases to deficit reduction; 2. continued bipartisan entitlement protection; 3. Congress's continued back-loading of spending cuts; 4. Speaker John Boehner’s wobbly but continued upright stance, and; 5. Given all the financial back-loading, a likely explosive 2013.

Garrett’s cynical list suggests not much happened but “kicking the can down the road.” In contrast, and after reading the thoughts of others besides Garrett, I see a more meaningful “three permanent truths:”

1. The revolution is underway.

Obama promised to fundamentally transform America, and he and his party have managed to increase the federal government's share of gross domestic product from 21% to 25%-- a huge policy change. They are striving now to keep it at that level permanently.

Republicans want to reverse that enormous policy change, [but t]o achieve the changes they want and that voters endorsed in 2010, they need to win again in 2012. The deal that gets them closer to that is what they ought to be seeking now.

--Michael Barone, Washington Examiner

Comment: Barone is making two points. First, that we are engaged in a “politics as war” struggle to turn back government’s massive growth, one pitting those who want resources shifted to the private sector against our national elite. Under Ronald Reagan, we reduced taxes as a way to put a lid on government, and it has been difficult to raise taxes since. Revenue has held at around 19% of GDP. Now we are focused on step two, cutting the annual deficit and reducing debt. Tuesday’s agreement for the first time links, dollar-for-dollar, any increase in the debt ceiling to equal spending reductions (Garrett’s—see above—first and only “permanent truth”). It’s a big new collar around government growth.

Second, the battle is unfinished; in fact, it’s only just begun. Republicans will have to gain control of the Senate and the White House in 2012 if government’s size is to return to even 21% of GDP, where it was in 2008. Here, Barone has an implied criticism of extremists who want to win the revolution today, not take the fight step by step. Former Bush 43 speechwriter Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post, more pointedly criticizes Tea Party-like extremists:

a significant minority of House conservatives has no interest in actually governing. The dissenters made no serious strategic case for their actions. They apparently view public office as a chance to periodically display their purity. It is the political philosophy of the peacock. [emphasis added]

Having lived through the 1960’s and having been distressed by my more radical anti-war friends, I think I understand the truth of Gerson’s words. During a revolution, the political spectrum gets chopped off at the middle, and extremists gain influence over the remaining rump. They are dangerous. They are also an inevitable part of the spectrum, and their extremism does move the debate in their direction. Hey guys, it’s a revolution!

2. Democrats lack an effective defense.

After signing the debt-ceiling increase bill Tuesday, President Obama said,

since you can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts, we’ll need a balanced approach where everything is on the table. Yes, that means . . . reforming our tax code so that the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share. And it means getting rid of taxpayer subsidies to oil and gas companies, and tax loopholes that help billionaires pay a lower tax rate than teachers and nurses.

Comment: The president isn’t going to be able to raise taxes before November’s election, another “permanent truth” to emerge from the debt ceiling fight. Obama does, however, understand that to maintain his big government status quo, taxes must go up, and so he has to make tax increases an election issue he can ride to tax increases in 2013. The battle lines are drawn. It’s all about the size of government. And the debt ceiling fight has brought the battle into sharp perspective.

Is Obama right that people want a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, spending cuts balanced by “revenue enhancement”? Karl Rove doesn’t think so:

Mr. Obama . . . claimed that a "clear majority" of Republicans and "80%" of voters want "balanced" deficit reduction that includes higher taxes and spending cuts. But a July 10 Gallup Poll, for example, found that fewer than one in three people surveyed support reducing the deficit "equally with spending cuts and tax increases."

The biggest choke collar of all on government growth is popular resistance to tax increases.

3. Democrats lost while nobody was looking, when national security dropped off the Republican agenda.

My respect goes to progressive blogger Peter Beinart at the “Daily Beast” for educating us all on why Democrats turned out to be defenseless in the debt ceiling debate. Beinart realized, before anyone else I have seen, that because Republicans no longer believe in massive defense spending, they don’t have to compromise with Democrats by increasing the budget. Democrats say, “If you don’t play ball and allow us to increase revenue, you’ll be hit with automatic defense cuts.” And Republicans reply, “So?”

It’s a new Washington.

Here’s Beinart:

the Tea Party is now running Washington. How did this happen? Simple: This is what American politics looks like when there’s no . . . war. . . newly elected Republicans are indifferent. . . to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re happy to cut the defense budget [when it leads to] larger cuts in domestic spending.

It’s the reverse of the Cold War dynamic. During the Cold War. . . conservatives accepted that overall spending would go up in order to ensure that some of that increase went to defense. Today, conservatives accept defense cuts in order to ensure that overall spending goes down. [This has] ended whatever hopes liberals once entertained that roughly 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, roughly 75 years after the New Deal and roughly 50 years after the Great Society, we were living in another great age of progressive reform.

Economic Troubles Intensify, Stocks Buried

2011-08-03T07:23:00.002-10:00

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 266 points yesterday, or 2.2%, its worst one-day loss since June 1. The Dow’s eight-day losing stretch was the longest since October 2008, a stretch that followed the collapse of Lehman Bros. at the peak of the U.S. credit crisis. The S&P 500 posted a new closing low for 2011 and has turned negative for the year. This all on a day when the market instead should have bounced up, since Washington had finally overcome the debt ceiling crisis that has gripped the city for months. Political uncertainty was responsible for much of the previous seven-day fall.

In mid-January, our FOX Index of a healthy stock market moved into positive territory for the first time in its three-year existence. The Index defines “healthy” as 15,800, a total formed from adding a Dow of 12,000, an S&P 500 of 1,300, and a NASDAQ of 2,500. Now the FOX Index is back in negative territory once again, with the Dow at 11,867 and the S&P at 1,254, both below their “healthy” levels. While the NASDAQ is still “healthy” at 2,669, overall the Index’s 15,790 total is a negative -10 (see chart).

A reported June drop in consumer spending, the first such decline in almost two years, sent the market down yesterday, but the real drag comes from both last Friday’s downward revision of the GDP, and the hangover from June’s terrible jobs report. The market will be on pins and needles at least until Friday’s July jobs and unemployment report.

Debt, Economy, and a Possible Turning Point

2011-07-30T23:11:00.018-10:00

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: "Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev." Beneath the tattered banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats' dependency agenda is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

--George Will

Last January, we wrote about a column by the Los Angeles Times’ Doyle McManus (picture) that offered his progressive readers reassurance that House Republicans could over-interpret their 2010 election victory and overplay their hand. In the January article, McManus suggested Republicans might reach for too much during the anticipated debt ceiling increase fight:

Boehner[‘s] biggest test will come in March [sic], when the federal government is expected to bump up against the debt ceiling . . . Boehner[‘s] goal will be to use the debt ceiling to force Obama to cut spending without precipitating a federal government shutdown (a gambit that backfired on Gingrich in 1995) or, worse, a default that would be disastrous for financial markets.

At the time, I commented,

Republicans know (as McManus says they do) that the debt ceiling will have to rise. They also want to use the battle to extract spending concessions from Democrats. Is McManus predicting Republicans won’t force even a single concession? We’ll see soon enough.

Did McManus remember his January implied prediction that the threat of a government shutdown would turn back House Republican efforts to force spending cuts? I think he may have, because earlier this month, he wrote,

Obama has an opportunity to improve his standing among independent voters — many of whom deserted the Democrats in the 2010 midterm election — by working with Republicans toward bipartisan deficit-reduction measures. . . The 2012 presidential election could be won or lost in the next three weeks.

So 6 months later, McManus has shifted gears, first implicitly conceding House Republicans had forced budget cuts on Obama, but second, seeing the turn as benefiting Obama, because it allows him to demonstrate flexibility to independents. That means when one is forced to back off a previous hard position, one can always claim the forced flexibility is a virtue. Nice.

Unfortunately for both McManus and Obama, events thus far are not working out for the president. Poll ratings go up and down, but closely watched as they are, polls have a tremendous impact on the tone commentators bring to public discourse. And right now, Obama’s Gallup poll ratings are his lowest ever at 40% approval, 50% disapproval.

Furthermore, Obama’s low numbers came before we learned the nation’s GDP grew only 0.4% in the first quarter of 2011, and 1.3% in the second quarter, with revised figures showing current GDP below even where it was in 2008 (see chart). This is terrible economic news.

Solve the debt crisis, and Obama’s approval numbers will rise again. But given today’s grim economic realities, perhaps Obama can only hope that the McManus July prophesy that “The 2012 presidential election could be won or lost in the next three weeks” turns out to be wrong, and that the latest bad economic news doesn't doom the Obama presidency right here, now, in these "three weeks."

“The piercing pitch of our political debate.”

2011-07-29T12:35:00.002-10:00

Quote without Comment:

"The more pressing question, is . . . whether we will begin to re-evaluate the piercing pitch of our political debate in the wake of Saturday’s [Arizona] shooting."

--Matt Bai, New York Times, 1.8.11

"If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission." [emphasis added]

--Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 7.26.11

"I [blame] the Republicans for the needless debt-ceiling fracas, especially the Tea Party-era House Republicans . . . The debt-ceiling showdown represents hostage-taking, plain and simple."

--James Fallows, Atlantic, 7.28.11

"The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage." [emphasis added]

--Paul Krugman, New York Times, 7.28.11

Pundits and Presidents

2011-07-25T17:13:00.010-10:00

In a column titled, “Make Way for the Radical Center,” New York Timesman Tom Friedman (picture, right) continues his quixotic pursuit of a third party 2012 presidential option. Friedman recommends a third-party effort called “Americans Elect” that will nominate online a presidential ticket it hopes to put on the ballot in all 50 states. The group, Friedman writes, will soon submit 1.6 million signatures supporting its effort to get on California’s ballot, then go after the remaining 49 smaller states. It will later draw up a platform and nominate finalists, all online, with the people who vote online making all decisions.

The political impact of third parties is to deny election to one of the big parties' candidates. John Anderson hurt Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ross Perot hurt George H.W. Bush in 1992, and Ralph Nader hurt Al Gore in the tight 2000 election. So anybody who cares about Obama’s re-election has to be alarmed at Friedman’s third-party advocacy. And for whatever reason, perhaps integrity actually playing a role, Friedman has chosen not to get close to Obama.

I wrote earlier that Charles Krauthammer is the sage to Republicans the way Walter Lippmann and Scotty Reston once were to establishment Democrats. In 1980, a 39-year-old George Will (picture) hosted a dinner for Ronald Reagan, thereby linking the ex-California governor to the Eastern establishment. Will then hosted another dinner just before Reagan’s 1981 inauguration. Will was important to Reagan, who wanted to become familiar with the relatively small group of Republican intellectuals centered in Washington D.C., so Will was in a position to help the future president. In turn, Will clearly benefited from the close relationship he formed with the popular conservative.

The New York Times’ David Brooks (top picture, left) must have aspired to a close and mutually-beleficial relationship with the up-and-coming Barack Obama that would be similar to Will's ties to Reagan. Democrats eager to get close to the new Illinois senator were everywhere, but Brooks the conservative stood out in Obamaland. Brooks offered Obama access to an entirely different slice of the political spectrum.

Brooks, I believe, saw his opening after he became almost physically attracted to Obama when the two first met in 2005. Brooks later said of the meeting, “I remember distinctly an image of—we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” Since then, Brooks has had a difficult time separating himself from the President’s agenda.

Little doubt that George Will, a fellow conservative to Brooks who hardly shares Brooks’ high opinion of the president, took notice of Brooks’ efforts to worm his way into Obama’s inner circle. One can almost see the “perfectly creased pant” image resting in Will’s brain as he wrote of the president yesterday, “Obama [is] a demagogue for an age of smooth surfaces; Huey Long with a better tailor.”

Obamacare Kills Jobs

2011-07-22T18:01:00.004-10:00

Disturbing facts from former labor secretary (2001-09) Elaine Chao:

➢ Canada created more net new jobs last month (28,400) than we did — and we have nine times their population.

➢ weekly initial unemployment claims [have now run] higher than 400,000 . . . for the last 13 weeks. The weekly initial claims figure must drop to [the] mid- to low-300,000 range. . .before significant job growth can occur.

➢ First-quarter GDP growth was [1.9%]. In contrast, coming out of the 1981-82 recession, we had five straight quarters of 7%-to-9% GDP growth.

➢ creation of new businesses — the traditional engine of job growth — was down 23% in 2010 from 2007.

But the most disturbing job fact of all comes from a story by the Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey H. Anderson. He writes that since the June 2009 official end of the recession, the percentage of Americans who are employed has actually dropped, while most Americans who are employed are now making less money than they were during the recession. Why?

Anderson quotes the Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk:

Private-sector job creation initially recovered from the recession at a normal rate. . . Within two months of the passage of Obamacare, [however,] the job market stopped improving.

[Obamacare] discourages employers from hiring in several ways:

• Businesses with fewer than 50 workers have a strong incentive to maintain this size, which allows them to avoid the mandate to provide government-approved health coverage or face a penalty;

• Businesses with more than 50 workers will see their costs for health coverage rise — they must purchase more expensive government-approved insurance or pay a penalty; and

• Employers face considerable uncertainty about what constitutes qualifying health coverage and what it will cost. They also do not know what the health care market or their health care costs will look like in four years. This makes planning for the future difficult.

Here’s Sherk’s chart, which shows dramatically how Obamacare stopped job growth:

Krauthammer Solution to Debt Ceiling Crisis

2011-07-21T14:52:00.003-10:00

Charles Krauthammer, conservative sage, is the person who is today to Republican leaders what Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Scotty Reston (1909-1995), and David Broder (1929-2011) were in succession to the liberal establishment. Now Krauthammer is telling anyone who will listen that House Republicans should advance to the Senate a bill that raises the debt ceiling only $500 billion, but matches the ceiling increase with $500 billion in spelled-out spending cuts.

Washington should then use the five months relief such a debt ceiling increase provides to negotiate more comprehensive tax reform, one that lowers rates while closing loopholes. Krauthammer is silent on whether or not he would accept tax increases as part of the later agreement, but his short-term plan contains no tax increases.

A likely solution?

James C. Capretta, 2001-04 associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, writes a National Review article generally sympathetic to the House Republicans’ efforts to cut spending. But even Capretta ends up cautioning the House Tea Party faction that the debt ceiling will have to be raised. It’s significant that without naming Krauthammer, Capretta fully endorses the Krauthammer recommendation:

The conservatives in the House who say they will never, ever vote to increase the debt limit need to realize they are handing all of the leverage to President Obama. To begin with, the budget they support — the Ryan budget that the House Republicans voted for nearly unanimously in April —requires a large debt-limit increase. Indeed, there’s no conceivable budget plan out there that doesn’t require one. Moreover, there is a strong chance that going past August 2 without an increase could completely backfire on the GOP.

[Conservatives] should move immediately to pass a small debt-limit increase, on the order of $500 billion, coupled with a reasonable set of spending cuts, including caps on discretionary spending. They should then send that to the Senate as the starting point for discussions. . . at this late stage, there’s a very real chance it would become the vehicle for getting past August 2.

The 5% ($.75 trillion a year) Question

2011-07-21T00:40:00.012-10:00

"One of the virtues of being on the liberal side of politics is that total obedience isn't required. . . If ever there was a time to stand behind the captain, this is it. . . [L]ike Churchill calling upon a coalition cabinet in the depth of the war years, it’s paramount that we see the greater danger for what it is. . .We need to remember that if [he were to lose], it wouldn't be because President Obama made too many mistakes or failed to pass a sufficiently liberal agenda. The reason would be that all of us forgot the thirty-year reign of reactionary administrations (minus the Clinton years) and the power of debased politics to keep coming back, again and again."

--Deepak Chopra

Why is President Barack Obama so darn adamant about raising taxes?

That’s the question James Pethokoukis of Reuters asks, before offering the answer himself:

realize the long game [Obama]’s playing: Big Taxes to fund Big Government. Decade after decade. See, it’s an almost universal belief among left-of-center journalists, economists, policymakers and politicians that Americans must pay higher taxes in coming years to cover the medical expenses of its aging population – not to mention all sorts of brand new social spending and green “investment.” Dramatically higher taxes. On everybody. And if we have a debt crisis, maybe those tax increases come sooner rather than later.

According to Pethokoukis, taxes since World War II have averaged of 18.5% of GDP, and the highest level of taxes ever taken was 20.9% in 1944. Yet progressives now want a sustained level of taxation 5% higher than the post-World War II average.

Pethokoukis has unearthed a chart (below) from the Center for American Progress (CAP), headed by ex-President Clinton aide John Podesta. The chart shows how to bring federal revenues and expenditures into balance at 24% of GDP. Progressives are deadly serious about raising the taxes needed to sustain our currently unsustainable level of federal spending. For now, they need any tax increase. But after winning on the tax increase issue in 2012, then-lame-duck Obama will go for the major tax increases needed to support the progressives’ gigantic government.

The progressive target for federal spending at 24% of GDP contrasts with GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” which seeks to reduce spending to 19% of GDP, the historic American level of tax collection. The 5% difference works out to $733 billion a year; a yearly difference worth 3/4ths of a trillion dollars.

As we have said, and as the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone recently wrote, “in the debt limit struggle. . . what's at stake is fundamental. . . whether we should have a larger and more expensive federal government.”

Did you see that? Wall Street Journal gives up.

2011-07-19T14:49:00.006-10:00

The earth moved last Wednesday. Before the tectonic shift, the Wall Street Journal stood firmly behind the House Republican majority’s position that 1) any debt ceiling increase had to be matched by real spending cuts of an equal or larger amount, and 2) tax increases of any kind were off the table.

After the shift, the Journal argued against the House Republican position, supporting Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposal to allow Obama to have his debt ceiling increase without budget cuts, but with Republicans allowed the fig leaf of being able to vote against the increase.

A Wall Street Journal earthquake. The Republican defense collapses.

Here are the details.

1. On July 11, the Wall Street Journal carried an article by Carol E. Lee, John D. McKinnon, and Naftali Bendavid reporting the inside story of secret discussions between the President and House Speaker Boehner to solve the debt ceiling impasse:

Messrs. Obama and Boehner began to seriously negotiate a $4 trillion deficit-reduction deal the week of June 27, when the speaker indicated he was open to raising revenues through the tax code, a senior administration official said.

To generate the revenue Mr. Obama needed to make a $4 trillion deal palatable for Democrats, Mr. Boehner agreed to explore letting the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire as scheduled in January 2013, while extending the cuts for Americans making under $250,000 a year.

In exchange, Mr. Obama would agree to significant savings in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and comprehensive tax reform to simplify the tax code and lower rates by early 2012.

Whoa! Boehner agrees to exactly what Obama is fighting for, tax increases on the wealthy? Really?

2. Venting unhappiness with its own correspondents’ story, the Journal immediately penned an editorial, making sure the newspaper’s official position appeared in the very edition carrying the story of Boehner’s willingness to support a tax increase. The editors laid down their displeasure with Boehner in crystal-clear language:

a non-exhaustive list of ObamaCare's tax increases [totals] $438 billion in new revenue over 10 years. But even that is understated because by 2019 the annual revenue increase is nearly $90 billion, or $900 billion in the 10 years after that. Yet Mr. Obama wants to add another $1 trillion in new taxes on top of this.

Last November Republicans won the House and landslide gains in many states in large part because of the deep unpopularity of the stimulus and ObamaCare. Mr. Boehner has a mandate for spending cuts and repealing the Affordable Care Act. If Republicans instead agree to raise taxes in return for future spending cuts that may or may not happen, they will simply be the tax collectors for Mr. Obama's much expanded entitlement society.

3. Two days later, McConnell’s proposal collapsed GOP determination to tie a debt increase to real budget cuts and no tax increases. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff went along with McConnell, leaving the House Republican position isolated, alone, on the other side of the fault line. How else to read this editorial?

Obama is trying to present Republicans with a Hobson's choice: Either repudiate their campaign pledge by raising taxes, or take the blame for any economic turmoil and government shutdown as the U.S. nears a debt default. . . This is the political context in which to understand [McConnell's proposal] to force Obama to take ownership of any debt-limit increase. If the President still insists on a tax increase, then Republicans will walk away.

[T]he blogosphere [called] this a sellout. . . [But if] Obama insists on a tax increase, and Republicans won't vote for one, then what's the alternative. . .? [V]oters [now opposed to] a debt-limit increase will turn on a dime when Americans start learning that they won't get Social Security checks. Republicans will then run like they're fleeing the Pamplona bulls, and chaotic retreats are the ugliest kind.

The entitlement state can't be reformed by one house of Congress in one year against a determined President and Senate held by the other party. It requires more than one election.

Journal to House Republicans: "Give up! We did."

I know what happened. I don’t know why.

Media shape politics. Just ask the media.

2011-07-18T17:01:00.005-10:00

How powerful are the media?

Notice that when the media talk about the opposition rather then themselves, they unintentionally reveal the control they believe they have over politics. Here’s Robert Marquand, writing about Rupert Murdoch’s (picture) empire in the Christian Science Monitor:

The New York Times was once described . . . as "the kingdom and the power." But . . . the title applies more to the global empire of Rupert Murdoch, whose massive media octopus of $60 billion in assets spans [continents]. . . Murdoch's US-based Fox News network is described in a 2010 News Corp. report as "unstoppable." Murdoch's clout is such that Tony Blair's first trip as British leader was to Australia for an audience with the mogul. If being feared is a requirement for British power, says Oxford writer Timothy Garton Ash, Murdoch has been more powerful than the previous three prime ministers.

But looking at the U.S., how can Murdoch’s ownership of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and FOX News compare to the combined influence of the rest of our print and broadcast outlets, almost uniformly liberal? The media don’t talk about that; about their crucial role in electing Barack Obama.

Now with the task shifting to retaining Obama in power, Princeton historian Julian Zelizer is willing to allude to the media’s ability to support the president, though only by comparing unfavorably the media’s current influence to the power media enjoyed before Ronald Reagan. Writing at CNN.com, Zelizer blames Obama's present-day troubles on a regulatory decision made late in Reagan's presidency:

the current structure of the media has emasculated the [president’s] bully pulpit. Regardless of how good a president is on the stump, it is almost impossible for him to command public attention, because there is no singular "media" to speak of. Instead, Americans receive their media through countless television stations and websites. . . .

With the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the media were also able to shed the appearance of neutrality and objectivity. Every perspective did not have to receive equal time. On many television and radio stations, objective reporters have been replaced with openly partisan commentators. Any presidential message is quickly surrounded by polemical instant commentary that diminishes the power of what he says.

Making matters worse, on the Internet, presidents can't even fully control the time they have as they must compete with live blogs and video commentary as they try to share their message. Even within most households, the era of the single family television is gone. Now in many middle-class families everyone has their own media and is watching their own thing.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, who highlighted Zelizer’s efforts to blame the Fairness Doctrine for Obama’s troubles, mentioned several other reasons for the monolithic media’s decline, including that the Doctrine applied only to broadcast TV and radio, that new media--cable, satellite, Internet--would have developed anyway, and that broadcast TV networks haven’t changed with the times.

Taranto doesn’t appreciate Zelizer’s “unattractively authoritarian attitude” in bemoaning rather than celebrating the 25-year proliferation of media outlets challenging the president. Zelizer longs for the ‘60s and ‘70s, the high point of media power when the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the three major TV networks could almost by themselves destroy two (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon), maybe three (Gerald Ford), even four (Jimmy Carter) presidencies in a row.

Zelizer’s comments reveal how much he wants that awesome power fully available and employed to keep Obama in office. And I believe Zelizer speaks for an entire class, our ruling elite including the media.

Bastille Day: "C'est une révolution."

2011-07-14T21:47:00.002-10:00

Today is Bastille Day in France—the anniversary of the world’s first revolution. The U.S.’s Revolutionary War, which produced a revolutionary form of government and involved the sacrificing of thousands, was, as it is more correctly known, a War of Independence.

France’s revolution overthrew the established order, a class war from within, a real revolution, one that still inspires revolutionaries throughout the world.

The American ruling class is under attack today for mismanaging the economy, and it is fighting with all power at its disposal to hang on. The forces lined up against it are out to destroy the state as we know it. The transformation the revolutionaries seek is undoing the massive federal government produced by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and the federal government’s current Europeanization drive. And as Mao Zedong said, “a revolution is not a dinner party.”

The two seminal events in U.S. history are the Civil War and the Great Depression. The Civil War divided the country North and South, and those divisions remain. The Great Depression created a new ruling order of big government linked to the people dependent on government. Under the new order, the others are losers, the figurative descendents of those who thrived under the Northern business economy from Civil War’s end to the Great Depression.

When the ruling class re-ignited the Civil War’s divisions during the the ‘50s and ‘60s civil rights struggle, it drove the Southern losers and the big government losers together enough for Republicans to hold the White House for all but 12 years between 1969 and 2009. On the other hand, conservatives controlled two branches of government only during 1953-55, 1981-83, and 2003-07, just 8 years out of 58.

The country is divided. And now the country is not working, literally. We need change. We need a revolution that results in a free economy, run by free people. “To the barricades!”

What Price More Debt?

2011-07-13T19:47:00.005-10:00

“Obama has an opportunity to improve his standing among independent voters — many of whom deserted the Democrats in the 2010 midterm election — by working with Republicans toward bipartisan deficit-reduction measures. . . Obama has to thread a needle between his new centrist position and his old liberal base; on that front, this month's battle over the debt ceiling offers both opportunity and peril. The 2012 presidential election could be won or lost in the next three weeks.”

-- Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times

Only trouble is, McManus misreads where the real resistance lies to a compromise agreement. It is where David Brooks said it was a week ago—with House Republicans. Brooks and most of the chattering class think the Republicans are crazy, acting like children, separated from reality. It’s better to understand where they are coming from. As CNBC’s Larry Kudlow points out:

IBD/TIPP pollsters have just released an incredible result. Get this: The public rejects a debt-ceiling increase by a huge 58% to 36%. That includes 59% of independents and even 38% of Democrats. . . Tea party populists are saying no, no: We can still make good on our debt, but this debt bill is the only leverage we have to force Washington to cut spending.

So this crazyness is larger than the House tea party caucus. It includes the general public.

Still, why would House Republicans resist what to me seems a great deal, match the debt increase total of $2 trillion (amount needed to get the country's spending past 2012) with $2 trillion in budget cuts, while taking tax increases off the table? Isn’t that everything Republicans want?

Writing in the conservative National Review, Andrew Stiles explains why such a deal isn’t enough. It’s because many Republicans view last Spring’s budget cut negotiated with the president as mostly smoke and mirrors. As Stiles reports,

Rep. Tom McClintock (R., Calif.) warns that there is still “great concern” among members who felt extremely let down by the budget deal negotiated in April, which turned out to be full of phony spending cuts and gimmicks. He said the bad taste left over from that deal could make members more hesitant to support a deal negotiated with the White House. “I think there’s a general belief that we learn from our mistakes,” he says.

These Republicans want a balanced budget amendment, the passage of which would lead us away from deficit spending—permanently. Of course, it takes a 2/3rds vote to get a constitutional amendment out of the House, and Republicans don’t have those votes.

To me, it’s more realistic for Republicans to agree on the real budget cuts themselves—no negotiating with the White House—and pass the cuts over to the Senate as a fait accompli. Then let the Senate send the country into default.

Horrible Jobs Report

2011-07-08T15:01:00.007-10:00

"America is in a slump, with 9% of the workforce unemployed, another 7% underemployed and the economy growing at a tepid 1.8%."

--Pat Buchanan

“The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers.”

--David Plouffe, senior political adviser to the president

Reuters reported nonfarm payrolls rose only 18,000 in June, the weakest reading since last September and below even the most pessimistic forecast in its poll of economists. And the separately-calculated unemployment rate climed to a six-month high of 9.2%. Adding to the weak report, the economy created 44,000 fewer jobs in April and May than previously thought. Two years after the recession ended, employment is still nearly 7 million jobs below its January 2008 peak.

Reuters noted that the average workweek length fell from 34.4 hours to 34.3 hours, and temporary hiring fell for a third straight month. Increases in both are leading indicators of future hiring, so the picture going forward looks bleak as well.

While David Plouffe may downrplay the importance of these basic numbers (see quote and picture above), we see jobs and the unemployment rate as key matrices of Obama’s re-election prospects (see chart below). According to economist Matt McDonald, Obama will have to create 255,000 jobs a month until election to get unemployment below 8%.

No Global Warming since 1998

2011-07-07T18:05:00.005-10:00

Quotes without Comment:

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

-- 2009 Climategate email from Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann

“The temperature hasn’t increased for over a decade. For there to be any faith in the underlying scientific assumptions the world has to start warming soon, at an enhanced rate to compensate for it being held back for a decade.”

-- Dr. David Whitehouse, Global Warming Policy Foundation

It really is about government’s size.

2011-07-06T07:07:00.009-10:00

“If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases. . . The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates[, just asked] to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures.”

--David Brooks, New York Times

Nominal Republican Brooks, who looks ever more like someone from the New York Times newsroom’s progressive hothouse, calls Obama’s “deal of the century” the “mother of all no-brainers.” But Brooks is pessimistic, because Republicans don’t accept “the logic of compromise,” nor do they accept “the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.”

This is the Brooks we encountered earlier this year, when he lamented the passing of power from a certified elite to clueless masses. I won’t knock Brooks, for his traditional conservative views do fit with our Democratic elite, who believe in rule by the credentialed. And no surprise Brooks implicitly sides with Obama’s effort to make the rich pay their “fair share,” since noblesse oblige is a conservative virtue.

More importantly, Brooks shifts the focus away from government’s overbearing size, this election’s signal Republican issue—freedom v. government. Brooks instead sides with government, enlightened ones running the show, wise rule by philosopher kings. Top-down authority. Traditional conservativism. Today’s liberalism.

At the same time Brooks was going after Republicans in the New York Times, over at the Washington Post, conservative-leaning Robert Samuelson was uncorking his own “straw man” argument against Republican leaders:

Conservatives have become radical by seeking "drastic political, economic or social reform." Their obsession with tax cuts when even today's taxes don't cover today's spending implies radically shrinking government programs that are woven into America's social fabric. . . Since 1971, federal taxes have averaged about 18% of GDP. There is no believable plan to reduce federal spending below that level, even with sizable cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. So promises of more tax cuts either border on dishonesty or imply huge unspecified spending cuts that would devastate national defense, states and localities, and the poor. . . Republicans won't concede the necessity for higher taxes.

Samuelson is attacking a “straw man.” Spending is at an unsustainable 25% of GDP. Republicans want that spending back down to its historic 21% of GDP, a Herculean task under current circumstances, but a worthy objective. They are not advocating “tax cuts” as a way to get there. Conservatives do, however, strongly oppose tax increases, firmly believing such increases will inhibit the economic growth that best boosts revenue.

As we said, Democrats very much want tax increases on the wealthy. They are desperately trying to save big government by changing the subject, a cause both Brooks and Samuelson abet by wrongly attacking Republican budget cutters.

I give Samuelson a lot of credit, however. Even with his whack at Republicans, he correctly reads today’s political war:

We are now engaged in a messy debate over big budget deficits and the size of government. The struggle nominally pits liberals against conservatives, but this is misleading. The real debate involves reactionaries versus radicals. Many liberals are reactionaries. [emphasis added]

A reactionary is someone who, says Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, desires "a return to an earlier system or order." This defines many liberals. They "pine," writes Michael Barone in The Wall Street Journal, for "the golden years of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s (when) ... Americans had far more confidence in big government." Modern liberals want yet-bigger government to enhance social justice. They defend virtually all Social Security and Medicare benefits. Everything can be financed, they suggest, by cutting defense or increasing taxes on the rich.

But cutting defense and taxing the rich won’t raise enough money. Progressivism is out of options, at the end of its road.

Collapse: Al Gore and the Green Movement

2011-07-05T16:35:00.008-10:00

This blog noted that Walter Russell Mead had hit something big, when he likened Al Gore’s fight against global warming to guilty Hollywood celebs absolving themselves by taking on public crusades. The Mead essay was the first of three about Al Gore, and dealt with Gore the private carbon burner, embracing a public cause that assuages his guilt.

In the second essay, Mead takes on Al Gore’s Green Movement itself, a force that had it succeeded, would have moved us closer to world government. How could such an ambitious cause gain such non-critical, widespread support? The intellectuals involved truly believe they have the answer to the world’s problems, and the answer is their superior wisdom. Mead takes exception to such uncritical thinking:

The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s. The idea that the nations of the earth could agree on an enforceable treaty mandating deep cuts in their output of all greenhouse gasses is absurd. A global treaty to meet [Al] Gore’s policy goals isn’t a treaty: the changes such a treaty requires are so broad and so sweeping that a [global green treaty] is less a treaty than a constitution for global government. Worse, it is a constitution for a global welfare state with trillions of dollars ultimately sent by the taxpayers of rich countries to governments (however feckless, inept, corrupt or tyrannical) in poor ones.

The green movement’s core tactic is . . . to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.

In the third and final essay on Al Gore, Mead ties him to the American progressive movement, which flourished in the early 20th century. It floundered after the collapse of Woodrow Wilson’s effort to get us into Wilson’s League of Nations and with the progressive-dictated failure to impose prohibition on Americans’ private lives. But the collapse of unfretted capitalism following the 1929 crash gave progressivism a second chance, and it came back stronger than ever under Roosevelt’s New Deal, carrying on in some form through subsequent Democratic administrations.

Now Mead believes Al Gore and progressivism have truly reached the end of their road:

Al Gore . . . comes at the tail end of [the progressive] tradition; he is a living example of what you get when a worldview outlives its time. He presses the old buttons and turns the old cranks, but the machine isn’t running any more. . . Like President Obama watching a universal healthcare program that he thought would secure his place in history turn into an electoral albatross and a policy meltdown, Al Gore thought that in the climate issue he had picked a winning horse.

Today growing numbers of Americans resent and reject the tutelage of well meaning elites — and they view with suspicion the claims of ‘experts’ to be dispassionate and disinterested custodians of the public good. They don’t see civil servants as unselfish and apolitical experts who can be trusted to regulate and rule; they see them as a lobby like any other, a special interest more interested in preserving fat pensions and easy working conditions — and at foisting their own ideological hobby horses and preferences on the public at large.

It seems Mead has a clear view of the country's seasonal change. The progressive era, its Indian Summer has passed.

An Exceptional Country

2011-07-04T11:45:00.003-10:00

Quote without Comment:

“No other nation’s founding could be so happily, indifferently, noisily, diversely, inspiringly, mawkishly, carelessly, embarrassingly, or fervently celebrated, because no other nation—no other nation—can claim to be what we are. As Archibald MacLeish once put it, we Americans are ‘the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created people in the history of the world.’

“Somehow, despite slips here and there, we have managed to balance in the main that combination of ‘private rights and public happiness’ so proudly extolled by James Madison. Despite all the encroachments on our freedoms, despite all the insidious growth of our government at every level, we remain more free than anyone, anywhere, and in an ineffable way that no one else but an American or would-be American can completely understand. We are the people of a fabulous country, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, ‘the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.’

“July Fourth. Independence Day. It is the exceptional day of an exceptional country; whether celebrated or ignored, it is the bright and happy measure of our freedom within the security, the plenty, the enduring challenges of this astounding enterprise, the United States of America.”

--Ralph Kinney Bennett, The American

Guilt (Hatred) (Fear)

2011-06-30T22:58:00.014-10:00

I’m no psychoanalyst or pop psychologist. So why am I now tackling guilt, after writing about hate and fear?

I think these strong emotions have a profound impact on what’s happening in our country today.

Walter Russell Mead (picture) writes 3000-word essays three times a week, and they are informed, provocative, and thoughtful. It helps that often, we find the wisdom he presents distilled in a single paragraph, such as the following excerpt from a piece about Al Gore:

[Gore] shares an illusion common amongst the narcissistic glitterati of our time: that politically fashionable virtue cancels private vice. The drug addled Hollywood celeb whose personal life is a long record of broken promises and failed relationships and whose serial bouts with drug and alcohol abuse and revolving door rehab adventures are notorious can redeem all by “standing up” for some exotic, stylish cause. . . Gore is sincere, as the fur-fighting actresses are sincere, as so many ’causey’ plutocrats and moguls are sincere. It is perhaps also true that the fundraisers who absolve them of their guilt in exchange for the donations and the publicity are at least as sincere as the indulgence sellers in Martin Luther’s Germany.

Mead is onto something big. What is “noblesse oblige” anyway, but “absolving” the rich “of their guilt”? They feel guilty about living off the backbreaking labor of peasants in the surrounding fields, so host a harvest festival for the village, and give workers a goose at Christmas. Our modern elite go to charity balls, plant trees, defend gays, protect seals, oppose U.S. imperialism, seek scholarships for illegal aliens, and support the Democratic Party, all while leading their comfortable lives. And their good deeds give them the right to look down on small business people, retail clerks, Republicans, churchgoers, and until recently, police and military officers.

Here’s something I found on the Internet in my attempt to understand better the projection of guilt. It’s by Kathleen Basi, a blogger from Missouri with a Down syndrome daughter who writes church music:

[G]uilt really gets bad rap, unfairly so. Guilt, after all, is the sign of an active conscience. It’s generally the first alert that I’ve done something damaging to myself or to another person. It makes me uncomfortable until I do something to remedy the damage. It . . . makes me a better person.

“Guilt makes me a better person.”

Now I understand why there is so much moral force behind our national elite’s collective effort to improve the lives of the rest of us. It is, partly at least, the power of guilt, projected.

First principle of economics: understand the problem.

2011-06-30T12:54:00.018-10:00

“I’m extraordinarily proud of the economic record that we were able to produce.”

--Barack Obama, June 20, 2011

Really?

There is a weekly measure of our (lack of) economic progress. And initial claims for unemployment benefits came in today at 428,000, after economists had forecast claims dropping to 420,000. The total marks the 12th straight week claims have been above 400,000, dismal news since 400,000 is the level below which claims must fall to show progress on job creation. June’s continued string of 400,000+ weekly unemployment claims suggests this month’s job growth total, due July 8, may be around 90,000. That would be below the 167,000 needed just to keep pace with population growth.

Unemployment is the most visible sign of economic trouble. Another is the size of public debt both here and abroad, debt generated by out-of-control welfare states. Using Bank for International Settlements figures previously unfamiliar to me, Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson sums up the horrible data on our international debt crisis:

We've arrived at a historical reckoning of the post-World War II welfare state, burdened with aging populations and huge debts. Germany's gross public debt is 87% of its economy; Japan's, 213%; Britain's, 89%; and the United States', 101%. . . Greece is not alone. [And remember,] The United States, Europe and Japan [are] half the world economy.

To reach a solution, you must first understand the problem. Conservaties consider the size of government—its gigantic footprint on the national economy—to be 1) our biggest economic problem, and 2) the reason Obama cannot address our problem.

We earlier noted that job growth in the U.S. today occurs primarily in government, and especially in two government-dominated sectors, education and health care. Now Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute and Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute, both conservative think-tanks, have published in National Affairs a lengthy, documented attack on government domination of education and health care. Kling and Schultz tell us:

The commanding heights of our economy today are . . . education and health care. These are our foremost growth sectors — the ones most central to employment and consumption; the ones that, increasingly, drive our economy. And it is in precisely these two sectors that the case for extensive government intervention and planning, if not outright control, is dominant — and becoming ever more so.
. . it will simply not be possible to maintain a genuine free market — or a thriving, innovative, growing economy — if our education and health sectors are controlled by the government.

Bureaucratic monopolies don’t work, while competition—the competition small businesses are forced to endure, the competition that liberated our airline industry after 1979—generates economic growth. As Walter Russell Mead writes:

The bureaucratic state is too inefficient to provide the needed services at a sustainable cost – and bureaucratic, administrative governments are by nature committed to maintain the status quo at a time when change is needed. For America to move forward, power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large.

Of course, it’s exactly that transfer of power threat our national elite of bureaucrats, experts, and professionals fight so hard to stop.

But there is hope. Mead reminds us:

American society is the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do. . .It is power of a free people more than the brilliance of our intellectual and social establishment that has brought the United States this far; in that truth lies the secret of our revolution and of our success. [emphasis added]

Guilt Perverting American Foreign Policy

2011-06-27T21:47:00.003-10:00

Quote without comment:

“[S]ome people feel guilty for anything done by rulers who are our friends. Our intelligentsia, like our enemies abroad, call our friends our ‘puppets’ and blame us for what they do, or are said to do. . . It is the opposite with regimes that are unfriendly to us; we feel able to ignore our guilt for their crimes, no matter what our role in creating or sustaining them.

“Is it motivated only by feelings of guilt for ‘our’ sins, or by aggressiveness against our society, which is called ‘us’ but viewed as the enemy? Is there an element of projection, expiating a sense of personal guilt by punishing one’s society at large?

“The phenomenon was analyzed decades ago by several major scholars. Prof. Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her essay ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards.’ James Burnham, former philosophy professor, in the chapters on ‘Guilt’ and ‘The Dialectic of Liberalism’ in The Suicide of the West: how recent liberal doctrine implies an inexpiable Western guilt before the Third World; how liberal society tends to identify with the Left as ‘us,’ feeling bad when crossing the Left, feeling good when attacking the Right and the West, proposing indirect strategies for the West that consist in the here and now of attacking the interests of ‘our side.’ Prof. Paul Hollander, in Understanding Anti-Americanism: our cultivation of negative self-image, which affects the society’s future. Prof. Lewis Feuer, a Freudian socio-psychologist, in The Conflict of Generations and subsequent books: the inward redirection of the normal stock of societal aggressiveness; the alienation of the societal superego to the Left; the inducing of guilt in the mainstream.”

--Ira Strauss, National Review, 6.13.11

Exiting Afghanistan

2011-06-26T17:07:00.015-10:00

What do you think of President Obama’s decision to end the American combat offensive in Afghanistan? We suspected Obama might use Osama bin Laden's death as an excuse to get out.

Obama is pulling the surge troops out smack in the middle of next year’s fighting season--disrupting the military’s plan to win in Afghanistan’s South then shift resources to the East--and instead encouraging “a battered Taliban to hang on [until we leave], rather than bargain for a truce.”

Washington insider Leslie Gelb is fine with Obama’s pull-out, writing

now is not the time for another nation-building crusade abroad, but rather for nation-building here at home. My main regret about Obama's speech on Wednesday was that [he talked] about restoring our domestic economy—without beginning to tell us how he would fight and win that crucial war. [emphasis added]

I had not realized that Obama’s call for “nation-building at home,” the president’s excuse for pulling resources out of Afghanistan, had become the subject of such conservative derision. Reason’s Matt Welch almost chokes on the phrase:

Like all vacuous Thomas L. Friedman metaphors, "nation building at home" dissolves long before contact with reality. After all, the president is not advocating [in the U.S.] "the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring transition to democracy."

As I pointed out [last November], Friedman had invoked domestic "nation-building" 34 times across 14 columns since June 2008, [none grappling] with the great unmentionable [truth] : Just about everything government provides has gotten too damned expensive, because government is a definitionally corruptible monopoly, and as a result there is [little] left over to pay for whatever shiny new government-monopoly [Friedman and friends want.]

. . . the Wall Street Journal[‘s] James Taranto notes that Friedman has only used [nation building at home] once since then, and concludes, “How can anyone take seriously Barack Obama's status as the World's Greatest Orator when he uses Friedmanisms that have become so Friedmanistic that even Friedman avoids them?”

Bing West, a combat marine veteran of Vietnam, Reagan’s International Security Affairs assistant secretary, and a military affairs writer who chronicled the success of the Iraq surge after 2006, is sour on America’s war in Afghanistan, and supports Obama’s troop pull-back. West writes:

[Create] a 20,000-member Adviser Corps. . . We need more advisers at the point of combat to call in fire, so that the Afghan soldiers gain a sense that they can win. [We should] bolster the size of the adviser teams from about 20 to 60. . .
replace . . . combat units with enlarged adviser teams. Currently, there is one American in Afghanistan for every two Afghan soldiers. [We need] one American for every 10 Afghan soldiers.

In addition, for the next 10 years, the U.S. should pay members of the Afghan army directly, without going through unreliable civilians in Kabul to do so. If there is a negotiated settlement, the Taliban will emerge as an armed faction of subversion within the state. But without a settlement, the Afghan army faces a long war. Either way, the Afghan army must be confident of direct U.S.support -- at a cost of $10 billion a year, even when our forces are gone.

The West approach takes strategy way back to the Vietnam war’s beginning, 1961-64, when we fought insurgency with an advisors corps imbedded in South Vietnamese army (ARVN) units. West apparently thinks that was a winning approach, and would have worked had we circumvented the highly corrupt South Vietnamese superstructure, instead paying and dealing directly with the ARVN troops themselves.

Who knows? The White House reportedly doesn’t think much of West, but at least he provides a way out that doesn’t equal total defeat.

On the economy, Tom Friedman doesn’t get it.

2011-06-23T19:56:00.008-10:00

New York Times sage Thomas Friedman is unhappy, warning us June 22:

There is no way that America can remain a great country if the opportunities for meaningful reform are reduced to either market- or and climate-induced crises and 100 working days every four years. We need a full-time government.

Frustrated that Obama has accomplished so little since his first 100 days, Friedman recommends forming a third party for next year’s election. But look at Friedman’s proposed party platform: 1) pass a short-term stimulus, 2) enact the Simpson-Bowles agenda of balancing the budget by raising $1 in new taxes for every $3 of budget cuts, 3) shrink our presence in Afghanistan, 4) raise automobile mileage standards, and 5) impose a gasoline tax to pay for a massive increase in government-supported scientific research, and a carbon tax to pay for new infrastructure and stimulate clean-power innovation.

Let’s see. That’s 1) spend, 2) raise taxes to cover one-third the cost of cuts, 3) cut Afghanistan war costs (cutting part of a $100 billion a year total, peanuts next to our $14 trillion debt), 4) increase government regulation, and 5) tax and spend and tax and spend. It’s a tax-and-spend Democratic Party agenda that would take votes from Obama should such a third party emerge, which it won’t. Friedman in his head knows government's got to shrink, but his heart still loves big government.

I’m sorry to see this Friedman tax-and-spend column, because ten days earlier, Friedman wrote suggesting he understood what Republicans believe—job creation is a job for business not government, so we should just help business. According to Friedman:

The [McKinsey Report, An Economy That Works: Job Creation and America’s Future,] concludes, “Progress on dimensions is needed: . . . finding ways for U.S. workers to win ‘share’ in the global economy” [—] encouraging more foreign investment in the U.S.[—] “encouraging innovation, new company creation, and scaling up of industries in the United States, and removing unnecessary impediments that slow business investment and job creation.” [emphasis added]

Friedman continued:

[D]o not underestimate uncertainty as a silent jobs killer. . . Investors and companies who have to make hiring decisions have no clue. “The economy is paying a high uncertainty premium right now,” says Mohamed El-Erian, the C.E.O. of the world’s largest bond fund, Pimco. “With such uncertainty, people delay as many decisions as possible.”

To help business, remove the uncertainty of threatened new taxes, of increasing government spending and debt, of expanding regulation, and reduce big government so business has room to grow and create jobs. I thought Friedman had gotten it.

But no.