CONTENTS OF THIS PAGE:  or just click on pictures below to take a more right-brained review of the news!




TABLE OF CONTENTS TO THIS PAGE:  within each area, items in reverse chronological order.  Prescient cartoon?
  1. TWO VISIONS, January 25, 2011:  State of the Union Address by President Obama;  GOP response.  Six months later...August 2011 brings AAA to AAplus from S&P;
  2. Financial melt down.
  3. "During the general election" articles here. 
  4. What went before the end of Primary Season...
  5. Issues '08.


All the news that fits we print...here's more!  Remember "take cover" drills?

This page began when the photo on the left was an April Fool's Day joke;  theories of God and man, and cows (who are wary of this as well as walking off the edge of a cliff).


Holding China to Account
NYTIMES
By PAUL KRUGMAN
October 2, 2011

The dire state of the world economy reflects destructive actions on the part of many players. Still, the fact that so many have behaved badly shouldn’t stop us from holding individual bad actors to account.

And that’s what Senate leaders will be doing this week, as they take up legislation that would threaten sanctions against China and other currency manipulators.

Respectable opinion is aghast. But respectable opinion has been consistently wrong lately, and the currency issue is no exception.

Ask yourself: Why is it so hard to restore full employment? It’s true that the housing bubble has popped, and consumers are saving more than they did a few years ago. But once upon a time America was able to achieve full employment without a housing bubble and with savings rates even higher than we have now. What changed?

The answer is that we used to run much smaller trade deficits. A return to economic health would look much more achievable if we weren’t spending $500 billion more each year on imported goods and services than foreigners spent on our exports.

To get our trade deficit down, however, we need to make American products more competitive, which in practice means that we need the dollar’s value to fall in terms of other currencies. Yes, some people will shriek about “debasing” the dollar. But sensible policy makers have long known that sometimes a weaker currency means a stronger economy, and have acted on that knowledge. Switzerland, for example, has intervened massively to keep the franc from getting too strong against the euro. Israel has intervened even more forcefully to weaken the shekel.

The United States, given its special global role, can’t and shouldn’t be equally aggressive. But given our economy’s desperate need for more jobs, a weaker dollar is very much in our national interest — and we can and should take action against countries that are keeping their currencies undervalued, and thereby standing in the way of a much-needed decline in our trade deficit.

That, above all, means China. And none of the arguments against holding China accountable can stand serious scrutiny.

Some observers question whether we really know that China’s currency is undervalued. But they’re kidding, right? The flip side of the manipulation that keeps China’s currency undervalued is the accumulation of dollar reserves — and those reserves now amount to a cool $3.2 trillion.

Others warn of bad consequences if the Chinese stop buying United States bonds. But our problem right now is precisely that too many people want to park their money in American debt instead of buying goods and services — which is why the interest rate on long-term U.S. bonds is only 2 percent.

Yet another objection is the claim that Chinese products don’t really compete with U.S.-produced goods. The rebuttal is fairly technical; let me just say that those making this argument both overstate the case and fail to take the indirect effects of Chinese currency policy into account.

In the last few days a new objection to action on the China issue has surfaced: right-wing pressure groups, notably the influential Club for Growth, oppose tariffs on Chinese goods because, you guessed it, they’re a form of taxation — and we must never, ever raise taxes under any circumstances. All I can say is that Democrats should welcome this demonstration that antitax fanaticism has reached the point where it trumps standing up for our national interests.

To be fair, there are some arguments against action on China that would carry some weight if the times were different. One is the undoubted fact that inflation in China, which is raising labor costs in particular, is gradually eliminating that nation’s currency undervaluation. The operative word, however, is “gradually”: something that brings the United States trade deficit down over four or five years isn’t good enough when unemployment is at disastrous levels right now.

And the reality of the unemployment disaster is also my answer to those who warn that getting tough with China might unleash a trade war or damage world commercial diplomacy. Those are real risks, although I think they’re exaggerated. But they need to be set against the fact — not the mere possibility — that high unemployment is inflicting tremendous cumulative damage as we speak.

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said it clearly last week: unemployment is a “national crisis,” with so many workers now among the long-term unemployed that the economy is at risk of suffering long-run as well as short-run damage.

And we can’t afford to neglect any important means of alleviating that national crisis. Holding China accountable won’t solve our economic problems on its own, but it can contribute to a solution — and it’s an action that’s long overdue.

The Bankers and the Revolutionaries
NYTIMES
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
October 1, 2011

AFTER flying around the world this year to cover street protests from Cairo to Morocco, reporting on the latest “uprising” was easier: I took the subway.

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has taken over a park in Manhattan’s financial district and turned it into a revolutionary camp. Hundreds of young people chant slogans against “banksters” or corporate tycoons. Occasionally, a few even pull off their clothes, which always draws news cameras.

“Occupy Wall Street” was initially treated as a joke, but after a couple of weeks it’s gaining traction. The crowds are still tiny by protest standards — mostly in the hundreds, swelling during periodic marches — but similar occupations are bubbling up in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington. David Paterson, the former New York governor, dropped by, and labor unions are lending increasing support.

I tweeted that the protest reminded me a bit of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and that raised eyebrows. True, no bullets are whizzing around, and the movement won’t unseat any dictators. But there is the same cohort of alienated young people, and the same savvy use of Twitter and other social media to recruit more participants. Most of all, there’s a similar tide of youthful frustration with a political and economic system that protesters regard as broken, corrupt, unresponsive and unaccountable.

“This was absolutely inspired by Tahrir Square, by the Arab Spring movement,” said Tyler Combelic, 27, a Web designer from Brooklyn who is a spokesman for the occupiers. “Enough is enough!”

The protesters are dazzling in their Internet skills, and impressive in their organization. The square is divided into a reception area, a media zone, a medical clinic, a library and a cafeteria. The protesters’ Web site includes links allowing supporters anywhere in the world to go online and order pizzas (vegan preferred) from a local pizzeria that delivers them to the square.  In a tribute to the ingenuity of capitalism, the pizzeria quickly added a new item to its menu: the “OccuPie special.”

Where the movement falters is in its demands: It doesn’t really have any. The participants pursue causes that are sometimes quixotic — like the protester who calls for removing Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill because of his brutality to American Indians. So let me try to help.

I don’t share the antimarket sentiments of many of the protesters. Banks are invaluable institutions that, when functioning properly, move capital to its best use and raise living standards. But it’s also true that soaring leverage not only nurtured soaring bank profits in good years, but also soaring risks for the public in bad years.  In effect, the banks socialized risk and privatized profits. Securitizing mortgages, for example, made many bankers wealthy while ultimately leaving governments indebted and citizens homeless.

We’ve seen that inadequately regulated, too-big-to-fail banks can undermine the public interest rather than serve it — and in the last few years, banks got away with murder. It’s infuriating to see bankers who were rescued by taxpayers now moan about regulations intended to prevent the next bail-out. And it’s important that protesters spotlight rising inequality: does it feel right to anyone that the top 1 percent of Americans now possess a greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent?

So for those who want to channel their amorphous frustration into practical demands, here are several specific suggestions:

¶Impose a financial transactions tax. This would be a modest tax on financial trades, modeled on the suggestions of James Tobin, an American economist who won a Nobel Prize. The aim is in part to dampen speculative trading that creates dangerous volatility. Europe is moving toward a financial transactions tax, but the Obama administration is resisting — a reflection of its deference to Wall Street.

¶Close the “carried interest” and “founders’ stock” loopholes, which may be the most unconscionable tax breaks in America. They allow our wealthiest citizens to pay very low tax rates by pretending that their labor compensation is a capital gain.

¶Protect big banks from themselves. This means moving ahead with Basel III capital requirements and adopting the Volcker Rule to limit banks’ ability to engage in risky and speculative investments. Another sensible proposal, embraced by President Obama and a number of international experts, is the bank tax. This could be based on an institution’s size and leverage, so that bankers could pay for their cleanups — the finance equivalent of a pollution tax.

Much of the sloganeering at “Occupy Wall Street” is pretty silly — but so is the self-righteous sloganeering of Wall Street itself. And if a ragtag band of youthful protesters can help bring a dose of accountability and equity to our financial system, more power to them.




Sunburned
National Review editorial
September 1, 2011 4:00 A.M.

Solyndra, a manufacturer of solar panels, is bankrupt, which is inconvenient for the Obama administration, which extended half a billion dollars’ worth of loan guarantees to the firm as part of the president’s stimulus effort. The inconvenience extends to the 1,100 Solyndra employees who have just lost their jobs and to the U.S. taxpayers who may be on the hook for the bankrupt firm’s loans. The project was indeed “shovel ready,” as the president likes to put it; unhappily, in this case, the shovel belongs to the gravedigger. Perhaps the gravestone could read: “Another project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

Solyndra was an irrestibly juicy piece of bait for stimulus-happy progressives. President Obama, like all Democrats, labors under a special challenge when it comes to economic affairs: His economically illiterate base spends its time decrying “corporations,” but urban-gardening cooperatives don’t create a lot of jobs, and community-based nonprofits by definition don’t create any profit, and therefore no investment capital, and therefore no economic growth. You want to see some real, sustainable, long-term jobs created, your best bet is to look to a “corporation”—“corporation” simply being the word for a business that has grown large enough or profitable enough to require the legal organization of its affairs. But if you’re Barack Obama, not just any corporation will do: It has to be just the right sort of corporation.

And boy, was Solyndra just right: It made solar panels, a product so green that Democrats could almost forget that this was a profit-oriented corporation, backed by venture capitalists, oil money, and private-equity funds, and led by a former Intel executive. The firm was in Nancy Pelosi’s back yard, and it was looking to expand, with plans to build a factory for the mass production of its photovoltaic cells. But the firm was not thriving, and those venture capitalists were not eager to put their own money on the line for that new facility. So they put your money on the line, instead.

The Government Accountability Office would later single out the Solyndra deal as an example of the government’s failing to fully vet such arrangements before approving the loan guarantees. With all those stimulus dollars burning a hole in its pocket, the Obama administration was overeager to get them spent. “If you don’t have really strong processes in place, and if you’re under pressure to get a lot of these dollars allocated, you can make unproductive decisions and ones that ultimately put taxpayers’ dollars at risk,” GAO analyst Franklin Rusco said. In fact, the administration announced its commitment to the loan guarantees before the required outside reviews were even in hand.

And as those who have followed the machinations of T. Boone Pickens know, when there’s a green-energy plan looking for a federal backstop, there’s an Oklahoma oil man behind the curtain. In the case of Solyndra it was billionaire George Kaiser, a Democratic donation bundler and a major financial supporter of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Mr. Kaiser was heavily invested in the firm. Other Democratic bundlers received similarly generous treatment under the guise of green jobs, stimulus, and other expressions of President Obama’s magical thinking. It’s easy to spend several hundred billion dollars of somebody else’s money in a hurry; it’s hard to spend it well or wisely.

So, the indictment reads: wasteful, inefficient, non-transparent, irregular, unseemly, and, finally, bankrupt. The thousands of jobs the Solyndra project was supposed to create have not appeared, and more than a thousand jobs have just disappeared. The president is planning a big speech about jobs, and perhaps he’s had enough law-school Latin to know what mea culpa means.

Structural Economic Problems More Worrying than Cyclical Ones
Weekly Standard
Irwin M. Stelzer
August 13, 2011 12:00 AM

President Obama blames the recent turmoil in financial markets on floods in Japan and Republicans who won’t raise taxes. Republicans blame roiling markets on the president and Democrats who won’t cut spending. The Europeans blame short-sellers. Stock traders blame the problem variously on Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade America’s credit rating, the unsafe condition of French banks, the Federal Reserve Bank’s failure to give the economy a boost, the Fed’s insistence on giving the economy a boost by announcing that near-zero interest rates will be maintained past the presidential elections in November of 2012, and the fact that this week contains a Friday, a day on which traders shun risk lest their weekends be fraught. And if it rains on Monday….

You get the idea. The economic news mucks around in an attempt to explain short-term share price movements, ignoring the longer-term phenomena that will dictate the future course of the American and, because of linkage, European and world economies.     

I don’t mean to imply that these matters are trivial: When a plunge in share prices wipes out some $3 trillion in assets in a few days, businesses and households get hurt. But there is little that policymakers can durably do about these shifts in investor sentiment, short of passing the baton to others, and much they can do to affect the underlying trends that are there for the discerning eye to find.

The first relates to the labor market. All eyes are focused on the 9.1 percent unemployment rate. That focus leads to calls for monetary easing, infrastructure construction, and other Keynesian solutions, few of which can have any affect so long as consumers and businesses are retrenching in the face of news that economic growth is likely to be somewhere between zero and negative in the near future. The longer-term problem is revealed not in the figure for the unemployment rate, or even in the far higher figure that includes workers too discouraged to continue pounding the pavements in search of work, and those involuntarily working short hours. It is revealed in the fact that over 6.5 million workers, 44 percent of those counted as unemployed, have been out of work for more than 27 weeks. At the end of the last recession in November 2001 that figure was 13.9 percent.

Even if the economy starts to grow at an acceptable rate, many of those long-term unemployed will not find work or, if they do, only at jobs paying far less than the ones that disappeared. Skills atrophy, or become obsolete in the face of technological change; traditional American jobs migrate overseas; increased efficiencies discovered in the recession-induced hiring clampdown enable manufacturers to produce more with smaller staffs; a large pool of unemployed available workers permits subtle discrimination against older workers, reducing their chance of being rehired. 

Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate, says that the so-called natural rate of unemployment—the rate prevailing when the economy is growing at a rate unaffected by a cyclical downturn—has jumped to about 7% from 5.5% in the mid-1990s. That means that two million more workers will be out of work when times are good than would have been the case a decade or so ago, barring any change in a host of economic variables. Unfortunately, the hunt for quick fixes by the Fed and the administration is ignoring this structural change in the work force, perhaps best revealed by the pleas of many employers to ease restrictions on the granting of visas to skilled immigrant workers, despite the millions of American workers looking for jobs.

A second long-term problem left unattended is the massive debt burden that will sooner or later have to be addressed. No, not the mere $14 trillion-and-rising debt recorded on the books of the U.S. Treasury. The trillions more that are not reflected on the nation’s ledgers. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who have studied what they call “eight centuries of financial folly,” note: “public obligations are often ‘hidden’ and significantly larger than official figures suggest. In addition, off-balance-sheet guarantees and other creative accounting devices make it even harder to assess the true nature of a country’s debt until a crisis forces everything out into the open.” Think of the massive debt burden that came with recognizing that the federal government is the guarantor of the debt of mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and of the viability of banks that are too big to fail.

For many companies, this debt mountain is no abstraction, and the conversion of Uncle Sugar into Uncle Scrooge is a harsh reality. The government is a key customer of defense firms such as Lockheed Martin, health care firms such as Humana, equipment suppliers such as Dell—to mention a few on the list compiled by the Wall Street Journal. They and their shareholders will have to look elsewhere for growth. And those shareholders—the “rich”—also have to worry that the president is intent on raising their taxes. They just might make the second half of the year less happy than the first for Ralph Lauren, Tiffany, and other high-end employers of swarms of retail clerks. This will have a profound effect on the retail sector, which has been heavily dependent for much of its recent growth on sales at the luxury end. Indeed, we are witnessing the end of credit-fuelled consumerism. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s decision to keep interest rates low is putting pressure on bank profits, pressure they can do without as they confront the new risk of dealing with European banks whose books are loaded with IOUs from Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and other not-so-solid borrowers, and whose reluctance to lend to each other is causing scary talk of a 2008-style freeze-up in interbank lending. Even if that fear proves unfounded, shrinking profits and new regulations will reduce the banks’ ability to lend—the words “credit crunch” are again heard in the land, especially from small businesses.

Meanwhile, consumers no longer can be counted on to borrow and spend as they did in past decades. Yesterday’s report that the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment is at its lowest level since May 1980 is a warning shot across the bow of retailers who are counting on a big back to school season, and wondering how much to spend on inventory in advance of the Christmas shopping season. Combine that pessimism with consumers’ need to restore their balance sheets to something approaching pre-binge levels, and it is not unreasonable to assume that when the recovery comes it will not be consumer led.

These are only a few of the underlying trends that will in the end matter more than share price gyrations: A mismatch of the unemployed and available jobs, the withdrawal of government purchasing power as a source of growth, and banks less able to lend and consumers less willing and able to borrow. These will be with us long after calm replaces panic on the world’s stock markets.

The System Works
National Review
Charles Krauthammer
August 12, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Democratic politics was never meant to be an exercise in aesthetics.

Of all the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom in today’s Washington, the most lazy, stupid, and ubiquitous is that our politics is broken. On the contrary. Our political system is working well (I make no such claims for our economy), indeed, precisely as designed — profound changes in popular will translated into law that alters the nation’s political direction.  The process has been messy, loud, disputatious, and often rancorous. So what? In the end, the system works. Exhibit A is Wisconsin. Exhibit B is Washington itself.

The story begins in 2008. The country, having lost confidence in Republican governance, gives the Democrats full control of Washington. The new president, deciding not to waste a crisis, attempts a major change in the nation’s ideological trajectory. Hence his two signature pieces of legislation: a near–$1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in galactic history; and a health-care reform that places one-sixth of the economy under federal control.

In a country where conservatives outnumber liberals 2–1, this causes a reaction. In the 2010 midterms, Democrats suffer a massive repudiation at every level. In Washington, Democrats suffer the greatest loss of House seats since 1948. In the states, they lose over 700 state legislative seats — the largest reversal ever — resulting in the loss of 20 state chambers.  The tea-party-propelled, debt-conscious Republicans then move to confront their states’ unsustainable pension and health-care obligations — most boldly in Wisconsin, where the new governor proposes a radical reorientation of the power balance between public-sector unions and elected government.

In Madison, the result is general mayhem — drum-banging protesters, frenzied unions, statehouse occupations, opposition legislators fleeing the state to prevent a quorum. A veritable feast of creative democratic resistance.  In the end, however, they fail. The legislation passes.

Then, further resistance. First, Democrats turn an otherwise sleepy state-supreme-court election into a referendum on the union legislation, the Democrats’ candidate being widely expected to overturn the law. The unions/Democrats lose again.  And then last Tuesday, recall elections for six Republican state senators, three being needed to return the senate to Democratic control and restore balance to the universe. Yet despite millions of union dollars, the Republicans hold the senate. The unions/Democrats lose again.

The people spoke; the process worked. Yes, it was raucous and divisive, but change this fundamental should not be enacted quietly. This is not midnight basketball or school uniforms. This is the future of government-worker power and the solvency of the states. It deserves big, serious, animated public debate.

Precisely of the kind Washington (exhibit B) just witnessed over its debt problem. You know: The debt-ceiling debate universally denounced as dysfunctional, if not disgraceful, hostage-taking, terrorism, gun-to-the-head blackmail.  Spare me the hysteria. What happened was that the 2010 electorate, as represented in Congress, forced Washington to finally confront the national debt. It was a triumph of democratic politics — a powerful shift in popular will finding concrete political expression.

But only partial expression. Debt hawks are upset that the final compromise doesn’t do much. But it shouldn’t do much. They won only one election. They were entrusted, as of yet, with only one-half of one branch of government.  But they did begin to turn the aircraft carrier around. The process did bequeath a congressional super-committee with extraordinary powers to reduce debt. And if that fails, the question — how much government, how much debt — will go to the nation in November 2012. Which is also how it should be.

The conventional complaint is that the process was ugly. Big deal. You want beauty? Go to a museum. Democratic politics was never meant to be an exercise in aesthetics.

Not just ugly, moan the critics, but oh so slow. True, again. It took months. And will take more. The super-committee doesn’t report until Thanksgiving. The next election is more than a year away. But the American system was designed to make a full turn of the carrier difficult and deliberate.  Moreover, without this long, ugly process, the debt issue wouldn’t even be on the table. We’d still be whistling our way to Greece. Instead, a nation staring at insolvency is finally stirring itself to action, and not without spirited opposition. Great issues are being decided as constitutionally designed. The process is working.

Notice how the loudest complaints about “broken politics” come from those who lost the debate. It’s understandable for sore losers to rage against the machine. But there’s no need for the rest of us to parrot their petulance.

A Tottering Technocracy
Here and in Europe, the financial meltdown exposes the hollowness of our elites.
National Review
Victor Davis Hanson
August 9, 2011 4:00 A.M.

We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.

The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.

The financial meltdown here and in Europe revealed symptoms of the technocracy’s waning. On this side of the Atlantic, Geithner, Orszag, Summers, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer apparently assumed that some academic cachet, an award bestowed by like kind, or a long-ago-granted degree should give them credibility to advocate what the tire-store owner, family dentist, or apple farmer knew from hard experience simply could not be done — borrow or print money on the theory that insular experts, without much experience in the world beyond the academy or the New York–Washington financial and government corridor, could best direct it to productive purposes.

But now they have either left government or are no longer much listened to — and some less-well-certified accountant will be left with the task of finding ways to pay back $16 trillion. Abroad, at some point, German clerks and mechanics are going to have to work a year or two past retirement age to pay for those in Greece or Italy who chose to stop working a decade before retirement age — despite all the sophisticated technocratic babble that such arithmetic is reductive and simplistic.

In the devolution from global warming to climate change to climate chaos — and who knows what comes next? — a small group of self-assured professors, politicians, and well-compensated lobbyists hawked unproven theories as fact — as if they were clerics from the Dark Ages who felt their robes exempted them from needing to read or think about their religious texts. Finally, even Ivy League and Oxbridge degrees and peer-reviewed journal articles could not mask the cooked research, the fraudulent grants, and the Elmer Gantry–like proselytizing about everything from tree rings and polar-bear populations to glaciers and the Sierra snowpack. A minor though iconic figure was the truther and community activist Van Jones, the president’s “green czar,” who lacked a record of academic excellence, scientific expertise, or sober and judicious study, assuming instead that a prestigious diploma and government title, a certain edgy and glib disdain for the masses, and media acclaim could permit him to gain lucre and influence by promoting as fact the still unproven.

Higher education is no longer affordable for many families, and does not guarantee well-rounded, well-educated graduates. A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club. An administrator is deemed successful largely for promoting “diversity” — rarely on the basis of whether costs stabilized, graduation rates increased, the need for remediation declined, or post-graduation jobs were assured on his watch. This warped system, which grew out of the bountiful 1960s, is now a vestigial organ, an odd-looking thing without an easily definable purpose. When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?

Kindred media elites in Europe and the United States lauded supposed technocratic expertise without much calibration of achievement. Indeed, to examine the elite media is to unravel the incestuous nature of power marriages and past loyal service to heads of state. Those who praised Obama as a god or attributed their own nervous tics to his omnipresence or reported on his brilliant policies often either had been speechwriters to past liberal presidents, enjoyed family connections, or were married to other New York or Washington journalists or powerbrokers. Their preferences about where to send a kid to school, where to vacation, and what to think were as similar to those they reported on as they were foreign to those who were supposed to listen to them. Like wealthy people in the Middle Ages who bought indulgences instead of truly repenting their sins, the more our elites preached about egalitarian politics for the fly-over upper middle classes, the less badly they felt about their own mannered conniving for privilege and status.

A generation ago, we were supposed to be grateful that a few gifted and disinterested minds were digesting our news for us each day on cash-rich ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, summarized periodically on weekend network discussion groups and in newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek. Now the market share of all these enterprises is shrinking. Some exist only because of government subsidy, rich parent companies, or like-minded wealthy benefactors.

The technocratic pronouncements from on high — that Barack Obama was “sort of GOD,” or at least “the smartest president in history”; that a Harvard-trained public-policy wonk alone knew how to save us from a roasting planet — are now seen by most as laughable. An education-age Reformation is brewing every bit as earth-shattering as its 16th-century religious counterpart.

There are also generic signs of the technocracy’s morbidity. It deeply distrusts democracy, most recently evidenced by John Kerry’s rant that the media should not even cover the Tea Party, and by the European Union’s terror of allowing the public to vote on its intricate financial bandaging. It is no accident that technocratic journalists love autocratic China — with its ability to promote mass transit or solar panels at the veritable barrel of a gun — while hating the Tea Party, which came to legislative power through the ballot box.

So the elites’ furor grows at those who seek and obtain power, exposure, and influence without the proper background, credentials, or attitude. How else to explain why a Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin earns outright hatred, whereas a Mitt Romney or John McCain received only partisan disdain?

There is an embarrassing lack of talent and imagination in the last generation of the technocrats. One banal memo about a “tea-party downgrade” or a “jihadist” takeover of the Republican party is mimicked by dozens of politicians and journalists who cannot think of any more creative phraseology. Calls for civility are the natural accompaniment to unimaginative slurring of those outside the accustomed circle. When Steven Chu exhorts us that gas prices should match European levels or assures us that California farms will blow away, should we laugh or cry? Do learned attorneys general call the nation “cowards,” refer to fellow minority members as “my people,” or really believe that they can try the self-confessed terrorist architect of 9/11 in a civilian court a few yards from the scene of his mass murder? Was Timothy Geithner really indispensable in 2009 because other technocrats swore he was?

We are living in one of the most unstable — and exciting — periods in recent memory, as much of the received wisdom of the last 30 years is being turned upside down. In large part the present reset age arises because our political and cultural leaders exercised influence that by any rational standard they had never earned.

Obama Makes History (of Our AAA Credit)
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE - The Editors
August 8, 2011 4:00 A.M.

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats are betting their political futures on the hope that the American electorate is ignorant and forgetful, and hence the memo has gone out to functionaries hither and yon, from David Axelrod to John Kerry: This is to be called the “tea-party downgrade.” That this is said with straight faces bespeaks either an unshakable contempt for the mind of the American voter or an as-yet unplumbed capacity for Democratic self-delusion.

Let us revisit the facts. The original debt-ceiling deal put forward by the Democrats totaled $0.00 in debt reduction. This would have fallen approximately $4 trillion short of the $4 trillion in debt reduction the credit-rating agencies suggested would constitute a “credible” step toward maintaining our AAA rating and avoiding a downgrade. This $0.00 program was the so-called “clean” debt-ceiling bill — the one that contained not a farthing of debt reduction. Bad as it was, Republicans agreed to give Democrats a vote on it. Some 82 Democrats and every Republican voted against it, and for good reason: Doing nothing at all is hardly a “credible” program.

The Democrats have suggested that Republicans’ refusal to accede to tax hikes is the main reason Standard & Poor’s felt it necessary to issue a downgrade, the first in American history, last Friday evening. In their assessment of Standard & Poor’s reasoning, the Democrats are acutely at odds with Standard & Poor’s. The credit-rating agency did not call for tax hikes in its assessment: “Standard & Poor’s takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.’s finances on a sustainable footing.” No position on tax hikes. But S&P, along with the other credit-rating agencies, has long taken a position on one aspect of our fiscal troubles: entitlement reform. From S&P again: “The plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.”

As anybody who has looked at our long-term deficit projections knows, entitlement spending is the major driver of our future deficits. With unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare already running into trillions of dollars — many multiples of our GDP — it is implausible that taxes would be raised sufficiently to meet those obligations. Sustaining present spending levels over coming decades while maintaining current levels of debt would mean nearly doubling every federal tax: income, payroll, inheritance, excises, etc. To repeat: That’s to maintain current debt levels, not to reduce them. Even if the political will existed to inflict such tax increases on the American people, doing so would prove economically ruinous. Entitlement reform, then — not taxes, not President Obama’s fictitious “balanced approach” — is rightly understood, as S&P argues, as the “key to long-term fiscal sustainability.” Tea-party leaders, far from being a barrier to entitlement reform, have demanded it.

The main obstacle to reform is the gentleman who lives at at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his legislative enablers down the street. Recall: Though Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives from 2008–10, and therefore could have forced through any budget they saw fit, they left the nation with no budget at all — much less a reformed or balanced one — never bothering to pass one in the year before they lost their House majority. Though congressional Democrats could not be bothered, President Obama did submit a 2011 budget. It contained $0.00 toward entitlement reform. He soon disavowed his own budget proposal. The president later gave a speech in which he said he’d like to see $4 trillion in deficit-reduction, but submitted no budget or other legislation to accompany that rhetoric. The head of the Congressional Budget Office, a Democrat, was moved to observe dryly that his agency “does not score speeches.”

But the CBO does score legislative proposals, and gave good marks to a bipartisan proposal offered by the president’s own hand-picked deficit-reduction panel. The presidential commission offered a credible plan, one that even included the tax increases so beloved of this administration. Naturally, the president disavowed his own commission’s proposal, just as he would disavow his own budget proposal. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared it “dead on arrival” in the House. The plan was angrily rejected by congressional Democrats precisely and specifically because it contained modest entitlement-reform proposals. Likewise, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, which would have brought health-care entitlement spending down to sustainable levels while making key reforms to improve the performance of those programs, passed the House only to be rejected out of hand by Sen. Harry Reid and his Democratic colleagues, precisely because it contained entitlement reforms. It would have cut some $4.4 trillion off of the deficits over a decade, well beyond the $4 trillion mark suggested by the credit-rating agencies. But Democrats would have none of it.

The deal that finally did pass would have contained significantly more in deficit-reduction, except for the fact that Democrats categorically refused to consider — is this sounding familiar? — entitlement reform, the most important issue.

Content to offer blind opposition, the Obama administration never put forward a detailed plan of its own, though it insisted it had one, a fact that resulted in a moment of unintentional comedy when White House press secretary Jay Carney irritatedly asked unconvinced reporters: “You need it written down?” When it comes to the Obama administration and spending restraint, the American people have every reason to demand that the president put it in writing.

And so we are led to this sorry pass. We are sympathetic to protests that S&P may have reacted more strongly to the political drama surrounding the debt-ceiling debate than was justified by the underlying economics: Despite the troubles in the eurozone, which are quite severe, Germany and France currently boast of higher credit ratings than that of the United States, a nation that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s economic output. But even those who believe S&P has overreacted must concede that the finances of the United States have been considerably weakened since 2008. Obama’s deficits have been unprecedented in peacetime, and this downgrade is unprecedented for our nation, at war or at peace. Its effects remain unknown at this time, but its causes do not: S&P spelled out its reasoning quite clearly.

Entitlement reform is the “key issue.” The Tea Party is not standing in the way of entitlement reform. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are. Democrats believe that they have discovered a cartoon villain in the Tea Party, and they are hoping that American voters are gullible enough to be distracted by the political theatrics. Come November 2012, Americans should keep in mind both the insult and the injury — to the nation and its credit. President Obama has indeed “made history,” as he promised, but not the sort that we might have hoped for.

The Debt-Ceiling Divide
National Review
Charles Krauthammer
July 28, 2011 8:00 P.M.

We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic versus limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.

The sausage-making may be unsightly, but the problem is not that Washington is broken, that ridiculous, ubiquitous cliché. The problem is that these two visions are in competition, and the definitive popular verdict has not yet been rendered.

We’re only at the midpoint. Obama won a great victory in 2008 that he took as a mandate to transform America toward European-style social democracy. The subsequent counterrevolution delivered to that project a staggering rebuke in November 2010. Under our incremental system, however, a rebuke delivered is not a mandate conferred. That awaits definitive resolution, the rubber match of November 2012.

I have every sympathy with the conservative counterrevolutionaries. Their containment of the Obama experiment has been remarkable. But reversal — rollback, in Cold War parlance — is simply not achievable until conservatives receive a mandate to govern from the White House.

Lincoln is reputed to have said: I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. I don’t know whether conservatives have God on their side (I keep getting sent to His voicemail), but I do know that they don’t have Kentucky — they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the White House. And under our constitutional system, you cannot govern from one house alone. Today’s resurgent conservatism, with its fidelity to constitutionalism, should be particularly attuned to this constraint, imposed as it is by a system of deliberately separated — and mutually limiting — powers.

Given this reality, trying to force the issue — trying to turn a blocking minority into a governing authority — is not just counter-constitutional in spirit but self-destructive in practice.

Consider the Boehner plan for debt reduction. The Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm calls it “regrettably insufficient.” Of course it is. That’s what happens when you control only half a branch. But the plan’s achievements are significant. It is all cuts, no taxes. It establishes the precedent that debt-ceiling increases must be accompanied by equal spending cuts. And it provides half a year to both negotiate more fundamental reform (tax and entitlement) and keep the issue of debt reduction constantly in the public eye.

I am somewhat biased about the Boehner plan because for weeks I’ve been arguing (in this column and elsewhere) for precisely such a solution: a two-stage debt-ceiling hike consisting of a half-year extension with dollar-for-dollar spending cuts, followed by intensive negotiations on entitlement and tax reform. It’s clean. It’s understandable. It’s veto-proof. (Obama won’t dare.) The Republican House should have passed it weeks ago.

After all, what is the alternative? The Reid plan with its purported $2 trillion of debt reduction? More than half of that comes from not continuing surge-level spending in Iraq and Afghanistan for the next ten years. Ten years? We’re out of Iraq in 150 days. It’s all a preposterous “saving” from an entirely fictional expenditure.

The Congressional Budget Office has found that Harry Reid’s other discretionary savings were overestimated by $400 billion. Not to worry, I am told. Reid has completely plugged that gap. There will be no invasion of Canada next year, no bicentennial this-time-we-really-mean-it 1812 do-over. Huge savings. Huge.

The Obama plan? There is no Obama plan. And the McConnell plan, a final resort that punts the debt issue to Election Day, would likely yield no cuts at all.

Obama faces two massive problems — jobs and debt. They’re both the result of his spectacularly failed Keynesian gamble: massive spending that left us a stagnant economy with high and chronic unemployment — and a staggering debt burden. Obama is desperate to share ownership of this failure. Economic dislocation from a debt-ceiling crisis precisely serves that purpose — if the Republicans play along. The perfect out: Those crazy tea partiers ruined the recovery!

Why would any conservative collaborate with that ploy? November 2012 constitutes the new conservatism’s one chance to restructure government and change the ideological course of the country. Why risk forfeiting that outcome by offering to share ownership of Obama’s wreckage?

Downgrade Blues
NYTIMES
By MAUREEN DOWD
August 6, 2011

WASHINGTON

BARACK OBAMA must wonder sometimes if his luck has run out.

Maybe he used it all up in 2008.

“Yes, we can!” has devolved into “Hey, we might.”

“When I said, ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow,’ ” he told an audience at a Chicago fund-raiser on Wednesday. “Not, ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time, because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

True enough, but not F.D.R.-inspiring to a deflated and desperate nation that may face higher borrowing rates after the shock of the first credit downgrade in United States history.

Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.

The dissonance of his promise and his reality is jarring.

When he had power, he didn’t use it. He wanted to be a “transformational” president like Ronald Reagan, but failed to understand that Reagan’s strategic shows of strength allowed him to keep the whip hand without raising his voice.

And now, just when the high school principal in the Oval has been browbeating Congress to help create jobs, he is once more distracted from that task as he tries to save his own.

He goes to fund-raisers to tell people to stick with him, but he seems to be trying to reassure himself.

“I have to admit,” the president said in Chicago, “I didn’t know how steep the climb was going to be.”

At the large fund-raiser in his hometown, he tried to reassure disillusioned liberals about “unfinished business” to help those in need. Later, at a smaller $35,800-a-head dinner, he defended the unpopular debt package like a proud fiscal conservative.

The president talks fondly of George Bush the elder, just as Bush the elder does of him. Obama thinks Bush is a poignant figure because he did the right thing, breaking his tax pledge to fix the deficit, even though he got punished for it with one term.

It is clear that the once cocky Obama is feeling that same poignancy about his own presidency. Left in a giant pickle by the hot-dogging Bush the younger, the president who gloriously made history is now stuck in Sisyphus mode.

He thinks he’s doing the right things to crawl out of W.’s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly.

The one clear-cut, chesty victory that Obama has had may have come too late for beleaguered Americans to much care.

When the president is asked what it felt like to kill Osama, he’s low-key and modest, even though he personally refocused the mission to capture the 9/11 architect after W. dropped the ball.

He has told people what a thrill it was to meet Seal Team 6 — and the dog Cairo — which pulled off the hit, noting that the men looked less young and fearsome than he expected, and more like guys working at Home Depot.

But while Obama takes the high road, his aides have made sure there are proxies to exuberantly brag on him.

The White House clearly blessed the dramatic reconstruction of the mission by Nicholas Schmidle in The New Yorker — so vividly descriptive of the Seals’ looks, quotes and thoughts that Schmidle had to clarify after the piece was published that he had not actually talked to any of them.

“I’ll just say that the 23 Seals on the mission that evening were not the only ones who were listening to their radio communications,” Schmidle said, answering readers’ questions in a live chat, after taking flak for leaving some with the impression that he had interviewed the heroes when he wrote in his account that it was based on “some of their recollections.”

The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.

It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.

Just like W., Obama is going for that “Mission Accomplished” glow (without the suggestive harness). At least in this president’s case, though, something has been accomplished.


The Late Show
What happens when a president wants to make every decision himself
National Review
Elliot Abrams
July 18, 2011 4:00 A.M.

On Friday, July 15, the White House announced that the president would meet with the Dalai Lama. This was after weeks of speculation, and only one day before the Dalai Lama’s long-planned week in Washington was scheduled to end. In other words, the White House waited until the last minute and thereby squandered much of the good will such a meeting can engender.

On the same day, it was announced that the United States would finally recognize the Transitional National Council in Libya as the country’s legitimate government. This step has been urged upon the White House for months, and there is no good explanation for why it was the right thing to do on July 15 but not on July 1 or June 1. As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, “Libya’s rebellion began five months ago. NATO started to bomb Gadhafi’s forces on March 19. Twenty-six other countries recognized the TNC before the U.S. did. Luxembourg roared its approval on Wednesday, and the U.S. followed.”

Just a few days earlier, the Obama administration appeared to have broken, finally, with the Assad regime in Syria, strengthening its rhetoric and abandoning the notion that Assad might lead a transition to democracy.

What all three examples have in common is that the administration was too slow to act. All three decisions were good ones, but came so late as to diminish the benefit to the United States and to the administration itself. And in the Libyan and Syrian cases, the delay may have actually cost lives.

What’s unclear is why the White House’s decision-making is this dilatory. The administration would no doubt argue “prudence,” but that is a hard case to make. There is no real reason why the announcement of the meeting with the Dalai Lama had to come on the day before he left town, nor why the Libyan TNC was not sufficiently legitimate on June 14 but became so the next day. In the Syrian case, the administration appears to have been moved by the attack on our embassy in Damascus — no casualties, very little property damage — rather than by the astonishing and continuing acts of murderous violence perpetrated by the Assad regime against the people of Syria. To many Syrians, many Americans, and others around the world, that will seem to be an odd scale of values.

The more likely answer is a kind of overload — too much happening all around the world to permit timely decisions on all of it — but that is an excuse. That would not happen unless every decision were being made by the president, as appears to be the case. The administration’s legal position on the War Powers Act was similarly, we are told, made not at the Department of Justice but by the president himself.

There are two problems here: the president’s belief in his omnicompetence, and the resultant inability of his administration to get its act together in a timely fashion. The consequence is that even when the White House makes the right decision, it gets there when much of the good from reaching that decision has been lost. Better late than never, to be sure, and better late and correct than early and wrong. But those ought not to be the only options for the world’s most important country. If the president were to surround himself with people he thought extremely smart (indeed, as smart as he thinks he is himself, if that is possible), and were to let them do their jobs, decisions would come faster and our government would not be The Late Show.

Mike's reform dud
New York Post
By NICOLE GELINAS
Last Updated: 3:28 AM, July 15, 2011
Posted: 10:13 PM, July 14, 2011

City Hall sent Deputy Mayor Bob Steel yesterday to a Citizens Budget Commission breakfast to pitch public-pension reform. Steel gave a commanding presentation -- but couldn't overcome the timidity of his boss' plan.

As Steel explained, the situation is dire: Since 2001, yearly pension costs have skyrocketed from $1.4 billion to $8 billion-plus -- a 20 percent annual growth rate. Pensions cost more than fire, police and sanitation combined. They cost more than debt service, which pays for the roads and schools we need.

"Instead of investing, we're simply spending," he warned, and risk "sliding back" to the 1970s.

To avert the crisis, Mayor Bloomberg is pushing the same fixes he's been suggesting for months. New workers who aren't police officers, firefighters, corrections officers or sanitation workers would have to wait until age 65 to retire, up from 55 now (with 25 years in).

And all workers would have to pay 6 percent of their pay toward their pensions, while no one could count huge overtime hours in their last work years toward their permanent retirement payments.

These steps might do if this were the 1970s, and we had decades to change gradually. But we've made similar reforms before -- and seen them undone, until we're back facing another fiscal pickle.

As one audience member asked Steel, why not move new workers into a 401(k)-style plan -- in which they and the city would save up in the worker's personal account, rather than in a taxpayer-guaranteed pension pot?

"Those might be ambitions," Steel allowed. But the mayor's way is a "more likely way to make progress."

What's wrong with being ambitious? After all, the mayor wants to be out front on national issues, and there's a chance here to help fix the US private-sector retirement system -- which is a mess, with people not saving enough and confused by complex plans whose high fees suck up their money.

Bloomberg could use the power of a huge, diverse, 290,000-strong workforce to show how a 401(k) should work: high matching contributions (from the city) to get people to save; super-low fees; rules to protect people who might invest too heavily in one stock, plus lifespan protection -- i.e., a much smaller guaranteed pension, so that nobody outlives the money they've saved.

Instead, the mayor's merely asking the state to do the kind of reforms it often does in a crisis (and often undoes later). Plus, he's compounding this meekness with distractions.

One distraction is Bloomberg's ongoing request that Albany let the city negotiate benefits directly with unions, rather than be dependent on state law. Practically, this makes little sense: In 10 years in office, the mayor has yet to show he can win big labor savings at the bargaining table.

But it does make sense politically: The mayor wants people to think that today's high pensions are Albany's fault for setting benefits too high, not his fault for giving away big raises -- which later increase pensions -- without asking unions in return to support pension reform in Albany.

Steel showed the flaw in this yesterday: Pension increases based on wage hikes aren't the city's fault, he said, because "it's impractical to think wages won't go up. Wages likely will go up . . . because of inflation and the need to attract talent."

Gee, that's a good way to tell the unions that they don't have to give ground on pension reform, because wages just have to rise anyway.

Steel added a new distraction, too: He said Albany should change a law that restricts pension-fund investments so that the city can achieve higher returns with international stocks. Every percentage point in return saves the city $1 billion, he noted -- and if there's one thing that New York has "an abundance of, it's investment expertise."

Abundance, yes -- though "investment expertise" also got us the 2008 financial meltdown. Anyway, getting pension-benefits changes is tough enough already: It's not a good idea to give the anti-reform crowd the excuse that better "asset management" can solve the problem.

One final note: Policies aside, the mayor's choice of point man here is telling. Steel seems honest and personable, but he's Wall Street through and through -- a vet of Goldman Sachs, the Paulson-era US Treasury on the eve of TARP, and head of Wachovia during its rescue drama.

If Bloomberg insists that he can get reform by bargaining with the unions, he's going to need someone who can actually win labor's trust as a negotiating partner on these issues.

That's another problem -- when it comes to reform, the unions still make Bloomberg look like a wild-eyed radical.

Avoiding the Credit Cliff
As our debt nears 90 percent of GDP, now is the time to act.
National Review
Paul Ryan
June 22, 2011 5:00 P.M.

The shadow of an oncoming debt crisis is hindering job growth today and threatening our fiscal and economic future. The latest warning came today from “The Long-Term Budget Outlook,” an annual report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which details the state of the nation’s finances. This year’s news is grim. We are on the verge of leaving the next generation with an unsustainable debt burden and a less prosperous nation.

According to economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, who have studied sovereign debt extensively, debt-to-GDP ratios of over 90 percent are associated with lower economic growth and increased risk of a severe debt crisis. According to the CBO, total U.S. debt will race across that tipping point and surpass 100 percent of the economy by the end of this year.

President Obama has asked Congress to raise the statutory debt ceiling, which sets a legal limit on federal borrowing. But this debt ceiling should not be confused with the bigger threat — a credit cliff, beyond which global confidence in the U.S. government would enter into a freefall.

The CBO’s warning on this point is clear: “Growing debt . . . would increase the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget and the government would thereby lose its ability to borrow at affordable rates.” We are rapidly approaching the cliff’s edge, and there are three main reasons that a course correction cannot be delayed.

The prospect of a debt crisis tomorrow is contributing to the jobs crisis today. The refusal of many in Washington to advance real solutions for avoiding this crisis isn’t just threatening the future of our economy — it is hurting our economy today. The problem is simple: Businesses are holding back on hiring and investment today partly because they are worried that we are headed for a future of permanently higher taxes, much higher interest rates, severe currency devaluation, or all three.

If we wait until it’s too late, the consequences would be devastating. In the event of a serious crisis, no entity on the planet would be large enough to bail out the U.S. government. Families and businesses would bear the brunt of the crisis in full. Much higher interest rates on government debt would translate into much higher interest rates on all kinds of consumer debt. Higher borrowing costs would also have a chilling effect on business investment, because companies would face a much higher hurdle for profitability on potential expansion plans. And if the nation ultimately experienced a panicked run on its debt, it would be forced to make immediate and painful fiscal adjustments (like the austerity program that has provoked riots in Greece). This would mean massive tax increases on working families and steep benefit cuts that hit our most vulnerable citizens the hardest.

Each day Washington fails to act, policymakers increase the risk of a sudden crisis. Advocates of more deficit spending, and those who counsel delay in the face of mounting debt, point to low yields on U.S. bonds as evidence that the market isn’t worried about our long-term budget problems. But credit-rating agencies and major bond buyers have expressed growing concerns about our fiscal trajectory, with Standard & Poor’s issuing another warning just this week. Moreover, as the latest news from Europe shows, such doubts can intensify quickly, causing investor sentiment to turn — and interest rates to spike — almost overnight. Our government’s troubling reliance on foreign creditors has left us especially vulnerable to an abrupt loss of confidence.

Responsible leadership is required to address both the statutory debt ceiling and the credit cliff on the horizon. House Republicans have offered a simple proposition on the debt ceiling: For every dollar we raise the debt ceiling, we should cut more than a dollar in spending.

But the greater challenge remains avoiding the credit cliff. To that end, the House of Representatives passed a budget, “The Path to Prosperity,” which would put us on a path to balanced budgets and save critical programs such as Medicare — without resorting to growth-killing tax hikes. Meanwhile, the president has yet to put forward a serious budget, and it has been 784 days since the Senate passed any budget at all.

Despite the current leadership deficit in Washington, I am optimistic that we will avoid the most predictable crisis in our history. Americans are well-aware of the dangers of out-of-control spending and rising debt, and they have been for some time. They are demanding leaders who will be honest about the solutions required.

As Warren Buffett said, “There’s no way you can bet against America and win.” Investors know this instinctively, which is why markets are still giving us time to get this right. But our window of opportunity is closing quickly. Let’s work together now, before it’s too late, to put America’s budget on a sustainable path, grow the economy, and leave the next generation with a better country than the one we inherited.

— Rep. Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district.

Pundit Under Protest
NYTIMES
By DAVID BROOKS
June 13, 2011

I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.

This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from that anxiety.

The election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle, but the core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality.

The number of business start-ups per capita has been falling steadily for the past three decades. Workers’ share of national income has been declining since 1983. Male wages have been stagnant for about 40 years. The American working class — those without a college degree — is being decimated, economically and socially. In 1960, for example, 83 percent of those in the working class were married. Now only 48 percent are.

Voters are certainly aware of the scope of the challenges before them. Their pessimism and anxiety does not just reflect the ebb and flow of the business cycle, but is deeper and more pervasive. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. Large majorities think the country is on the wrong track, and have for years. Large pluralities believe their children will have fewer opportunities than they do.

Voters are in the market for new movements and new combinations, yet the two parties have grown more rigid.

The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible. Gigantic tax cuts — if they were affordable — might boost overall growth, but they would do nothing to address the structural problems that are causing a working-class crisis.

Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal. Republicans have taken a pragmatic policy proposal from 1980 and sanctified it as their core purity test for 2012.

As for the Democrats, they offer practically nothing. They acknowledge huge problems like wage stagnation and then offer... light rail! Solar panels! It was telling that the Democrats offered no budget this year, even though they are supposedly running the country. That’s because they too are trapped in a bygone era.

Mentally, they are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity. They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won’t be for decades. Democrats dream New Deal dreams, propose nothing and try to win elections by making sure nobody ever touches Medicare.

Covering this upcoming election is like covering a competition between two Soviet refrigerator companies, cold-war relics offering products that never change.

If there were a Hamiltonian Party, it would be offering a multifaceted reinvigoration agenda. It would grab growth ideas from all spots on the political spectrum and blend them together. Its program would be based on the essential political logic: If you want to get anything passed, you have to offer an intertwined package that smashes the Big Government vs. Small Government orthodoxies and gives everybody something they want.

This reinvigoration package would have four baskets. There would be an entitlement reform package designed to redistribute money from health care and the elderly toward innovation and the young. Unless we get health care inflation under control by replacing the perverse fee-for-service incentive structure, there will be no money for anything else.

There would be a targeted working-class basket: early childhood education, technical education, community colleges, an infrastructure bank, asset distribution to help people start businesses, a new wave industrial policy if need be — anything that might give the working class a leg up.

There would be a political corruption basket. The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country. It’s time to drain the swamp by simplifying the tax code and streamlining the regulations businesses use to squash their smaller competitors.

There would also be a pro-business basket: lower corporate rates, a sane visa policy for skilled immigrants, a sane patent and permitting system, more money for research.

The Hamiltonian agenda would be pro-market, in its place, and pro-government, in its place. In 2012, on the other hand, we’re going to see another clash of the same old categories. I’ll be covering it, but I protest.

Tyrannous Regulation
Equality before the law disappears in rule by regulation.
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE                 
Mark Steyn
May 28, 2011 6:00 A.M.

Cass Sunstein is head of something called the “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.”  I’ve seen enough conspiracy thrillers to know that when someone has so obvious a blandly amorphous federal-job description as that, it means he’s running some deeply sinister wet-work operation of illegal targeted assassinations in unfriendly nations that the government spooks want to keep off the books and far from prying eyes.

Oh, no, wait. Actually, Covert Operative Sunstein passes his day doing more or less what the sign on the door says: He collects information about regulatory affairs. More specifically, he is charged by the president with “an unprecedented government-wide review of regulations” in order to “improve or remove those that are out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome or in conflict with other rules.”

How many has he got “removed” so far? Well, last week he took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to crow that dairy farmers will henceforth be exempted from the burdens of a 1970s EPA-era directive classifying milk as an “oil” and subjecting it, as Professor Sunstein typed with a straight face, “to costly rules designed to prevent oil spills”. But Ol’ MacDonald and his crack team of Red Adair–trained milkmaids can henceforth relax because now, writes Professor Sunstein, Washington is “giving new meaning to the phrase, ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk.’”

That’s a federally licensed joke from Sunstein’s colleagues at the Agency of Guffaw and Titter Regulation, so feel free to laugh.

Did you know milk was an oil? It is to the federal government, and, if a Holstein blows in the Gulf of Mexico and beaches from Florida to Louisiana are suddenly threatened by a tide of full-fat crude, they want to know you’ve got the federally mandated equipment to deal with it. With hindsight, the president’s remark in the early days of the BP oil spill that he was meeting with experts “so I know whose ass to kick” was not just a bit of vulgar braggadocio but the fault of early Department of Energy findings that the spillage was caused by asses’ milk from BP (Burros & Poitous Ltd., a member of the Big Ass cartel). “Your ass is on the line!” as the president told BP’s Tony Hayward after his donkey was found wandering down the first 38 billion-dollar stretch of the federally funded high-speed-rail track.

Whoops, sorry, I made the mistake of hiring Cass Sunstein’s federally accredited “spilled milk” gag writer. Where was I?

Oh, yeah, federal regulation. So this EPA directive requiring milk to be treated the same as petroleum for the purposes of storage and transportation has been around since the ’70s and it’s only taken the best part of four decades to get it partially suspended even though it’s udderly insane? Hallelujah!

At that rate of regulatory reform, we’ll be . . . well, let Sunstein explain it. Aside from his crowing over spilled milk, he cites other triumphs: The Departments of Commerce and State are “pursuing reforms”; the Department of Health and Human Services “will be reconsidering burdensome regulatory requirements”; and the Department of the Interior will be “reviewing cumbersome, outdated regulations.”

Wow! “Pursuing,” “reconsidering,” and “reviewing”? Meanwhile, back at the Department of Bureaus and Agencies, they’re pursuing a review of their reconsideration of reforms. That’s great news, isn’t it? I’ll take a wild guess and bet that the upshot of this frenzied “pursuit” will be a ton of new regulations about streamlining regulatory oversight and improving regulatory harmonization: The big growth area in America’s post-modern Republic of Paperwork is regulations about regulating regulations. For example, in New York City, applying for the “right” to open a restaurant requires dealing with the conflicting demands of at least eleven municipal agencies, plus submitting to 23 city inspections and applying for 30 different permits and certificates. Not including the state liquor license. Recognizing that this could all get very complicated, the city set up a new bureaucratic body to help you negotiate your way through all the other bureaucratic bodies.

And, for every little victory, there are a zillion crankings of the government vise elsewhere. Plucked at random from the Obamacare bill:

“The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.”

“Tooth-level surveillance”? Has that phrase ever been used before in the entirety of human history? Say what you like about George III, but the redcoats never attempted surveillance of General Washington’s dentures. Why not just call it “gum control”?

The hyper-regulatory state is unrepublican. It strikes at one of the most basic pillars of free society: equality before the law. When you replace “law” with “regulation,” equality before it is one of the first casualties. In such a world, there is no law, only a hierarchy of privilege more suited to a sultan’s court than a self-governing republic. If you don’t want to be subject to “tooth-level surveillance,” you better know who to call in Washington. Teamsters Local 522 did, and the United Federation of Teachers, and the Chicago Plastering Institute. And, as a result, they’ve all been “granted” Obamacare “waivers.” Rule, Obama! Obama, waive the rules! If only for his cronies. Americans are being transferred remorselessly from the rule of law to rule by an unaccountable bureaucracy of micro-regulatory preferences, subsidies, entitlements, and incentives that determine which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-the-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into.

And yet Americans put up with it. According to the Small Business Administration, the cost to the economy of government regulation is about $1.75 trillion per annum. You and your fellow citizens pay for that — and it’s about twice as much as you pay in income tax. Or, to put it another way, the regulatory state sucks up about a quarter-trillion dollars more than the entire GDP of India. As fast as India’s growing its economy, we’re growing our regulations faster. Oh, well, you shrug, it would be unreasonable to expect the bloated, somnolent hyperpower to match those wiry little fellows back at the call center in Bangalore. Okay. It’s also about a quarter-trillion dollars more than the GDP of Canada. Every year we’re dumping the equivalent of a G7 economy into ever more ludicrous and wasteful regulation.

As my fellow columnists Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson like to point out, decline is not inevitable; it is a choice. The voters of New York’s 26th district chose it just the other day, presumably on the basis that it will be relatively pleasant, as it has been in certain parts of Continental Europe. But genteel Franco-Italian decline is not on the menu. As those numbers suggest, the scale of American decay is entirely different: a trillion-and-three-quarter dollars in regulatory costs, a trillion dollars in college debt, four-and-a-half billion dollars spent by Washington every single day that we don’t have, 70 percent of which the United States government “borrows” from itself because nobody else wants to lend it to us — and a governing party whose Senate leader boasts about not passing a budget and whose plan for Medicare is not to have a plan at all and whose crusading regulatory reformer’s greatest triumph is getting Daisy the cow moved out of the same federal classification as the Exxon Valdez.

Stand well back, that Holstein’s about to blow.

Borderline Treachery
Obama proposes leaving Israel indefensible.
National Review
Andrew C. McCarthy
May 21, 2011 4:00 A.M.

Would that the president of the United States were as worried about Arizona’s border as he is about “Palestine’s.”

There was less fanfare about this latest Obama oration on the future of the Middle East, staged at Foggy Bottom, than there was about his 2009 Cairo speech. It was, however, every bit as delusional, and twice as treacherous.

As for the delusional, “Arab Spring” devotees are thrilled that the president has morphed into his predecessor on the Democracy Project — the enterprise in which future generations of American taxpayers go deeper into hock as our tapped-out government borrows more Chinese billions in order to stimulate the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the few shovel-ready projects President Obama has managed to find (and as a union, the Brothers make the SEIU look like the Jaycees). There is cruel irony in the Arab Spring hallucination, though, evidenced by this bit of rhetorical flourish: “Through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in six years.”

As the president utters his paeans to nonviolence, Egyptians and Iraqis continue slaughtering their religious minorities, and Bashar Assad, the “reformer,” murders his Syrian subjects in the street with the help of his friends at Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization whose day job is running the Lebanese government. The democracy fetish that gave Hezbollah and Hamas thugs the patina of political legitimacy is about to place Egypt under the thumb of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is itching to deep-six the treaty that has kept peace with Israel for 30 years. Speaking of Israel, it is recovering from a weekend in which thousands of “peaceful protesters” stormed four of its borders. Meanwhile, Iraq, which is touted by Arab Spring enthusiasts — and now even the Obama Left — as a Democracy Project success story, just announced that it will show its gratitude to American soldiers and taxpayers by expanding military ties with Iran, the world’s leading facilitator of Islamist terror. Pakistan, when not holding memorial services for Osama bin Laden, is exploding in bloodshed. The Obama administration is pleading with the Taliban to come to the negotiating table; you may recall that the Taliban is the reason our troops are still in Afghanistan preventing the collapse of its fragile “democracy” and the reopening of a safe haven for al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda’s current safe haven, Yemen, is the site of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So much for nonviolence.

The president stumbled into a bracing truth when he compared the change achieved by the people in the region, on the one hand, and by terrorists on the other. The change both are seeking is the same: the creation of sharia societies. Obama and Democracy Project promoters like to frame the Arab Spring as the ultimate rejection of al-Qaeda. But it is, at most, a discovery that there are better tactical routes to the promised land than al-Qaeda’s crude brutality. That promised land is not Western liberalism; it is Islam in all its repression of free speech, religious liberty, and equality — American principles the president spoke of his boundless determination to promote, while avoiding a single mention of Islam or sharia, which make achieving those principles a pipedream in this region.

Speaking of the promised land, the real one, Israel, is apparently getting smaller. This was Obama’s news-making treachery, and its ramifications are impossible to predict, other than that they bode ill.

For the first time in history, an American president explicitly called for a settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict premised on the 1967 borders — i.e., the 1949 armistice line, the tenuous state of play before Israel captured the West Bank (actually, Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in the Arab war of aggression to destroy the Jewish state. To be sure, Obama said that there would also have to be territorial “swaps” to satisfy security concerns. This caveat, though, is cold comfort for Israel, America’s only true ally in the region.

To begin with, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to point out, the 1967 borders are “indefensible.” That is why they have never been the starting point of U.S. policy, even though they always hover over negotiations. In its implacable hostility to Israel, the “international community” chooses to forget how and why the Arab side first grabbed, then lost, the territory in question. For nearly a half century since the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 242, the Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff explains, American administrations of both parties have called for eventual Israeli withdrawal to “secure and recognized” borders, a phrase interpreted as “not synonymous with the pre-1967 boundaries.”

By his new articulation, President Obama would deny Israel crucial negotiating leverage. If there is to be a peace settlement (which there cannot be until there are two parties that want peace), Israel must have the latitude to make territorial concessions in exchange for reliable concessions on security and other matters. It cannot be coerced into accepting an Obama-imposed fait accompli that leaves it fatally vulnerable to enemies whose ferocity is only encouraged by this bullying.

Bear in mind that what are called the “1967 borders” were never agreed-upon national boundaries. The Jewish claim on Judea and Samaria has roots in antiquity. This fact was intentionally obfuscated by Obama’s earlier suggestion in Cairo that Israel’s creation was an ill-conceived payback for the Holocaust, as it is by the convention of referring to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank,” the name Jordan gave them when it seized and occupied them at the conclusion of Israel’s war of independence. The Arabs, of course, never created a Palestinian state when it was within their power to do so. Thus, the final disposition of this territory has never been resolved. It is a subject for negotiations, not predetermined Palestinian sovereignty.

When, in the decades after the 1967 war, Israelis built homes in Judea and Samaria, they were building on ancient Jewish land. Hundreds of thousands of them now live in the thriving communities that the world, in its glossary of delegitimization, calls “settlements.” But recognizing how dramatically conditions on the ground had changed since 1967, President Bush declared in 2004 that that there could not realistically be “a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” As the Washington Times’ Eli Lake reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu — who was sandbagged by Obama’s newly announced policy only a day before his scheduled meeting with the president — will now press for a reaffirmation of this U.S. commitment, reminding Obama that Bush’s conclusion was overwhelmingly supported by Congress.

Not only is Obama’s new position on the borders a sellout of this American commitment to Israel; it is an adoption of Hamas’s position. This is palpably alarming for several reasons. The first involves rewarding terrorism, the Islamic practice of which Obama purports to be eradicating. Hamas (i.e., the Palestinian branch of the same Muslim Brotherhood that is poised to take the reins in neighboring Egypt) remains pledged to Israel’s destruction. In his speech, Obama paid lip service to the pie-in-the-sky assumption that Hamas will ultimately come to see terrorism as futile (even as the jihadists reap the benefits of practicing terror). But he did not demand that Palestinians convincingly renounce terror and accept without reservation Israel’s permanent existence as a Jewish state. This president’s demands are made only on Israel; Hamas gets hopey-changey cajoling.

Because it will never recognize Israel’s right to exist, Hamas’s support for the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders does not translate into support for the dreamy two-state solution. It is a way station to Hamas’s goal of a one-state solution. This is to be reached by an inside/outside strategy: The newly formed “Palestine” would continue to pressure Israel with terror attacks from without, while within Israel, Islamists would exploit democracy, assembling the critical mass of Israeli Arabs, leftists, and returned Palestinian “refugees” needed to destroy Israel’s character as a Jewish state.

Then there is the matter of timing. The president chose to announce his new position on the 1967 borders only days after the Palestinian Authority — run by Fatah, the “moderates” who maintain their own terrorist wing, the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades — formed a unity government with Hamas. Again, while from one side of his mouth the president claims the Arab Spring is a rejection of terror, from the other he tells the terrorists that their methods work.

In the course of insisting that the Palestinians must have their own sovereign state, Obama also slipped in the stipulation that it must be a contiguous state. Oughtn’t it to go without saying that Gaza does not abut Judea and Samaria? You can’t make them “contiguous” without ceding to the Palestinians the swath of Israel that would be needed to connect them.

To be fair, Obama is not the first to use this disturbing formulation. Bush State Department officials, who often seemed every bit as eager to placate the Palestinians, used to say “contiguous,” too. Still, hearing this word from a U.S. president who has already called for a territorial contraction that would make their country indefensible, and who seems decidedly blasé about its contiguity, Israelis cannot be blamed for wondering whether the land “swaps” Obama has in mind will carve Israel into separate slices.

For all the appalling things Obama did say, however, the worst was what he didn’t. In the greater scheme of things, borders are a subordinate issue, and they’d be a trivial one were it not for Israel’s existential security problems. Many rival countries have territorial disputes, but they either live with them or settle them because they do not question each other’s right to exist as sovereign nations. The Palestinians, by contrast, do not accept Israel’s existence. They do not want peace and they will not renounce terror. And why would they? Terror is serving them quite well, the “international community” having embraced the terrorists while making pariahs of the region’s only true democracy and beacon of human rights.

An American president who really wanted to outline the only worthy settlement of this intractable conflict could have given a very short speech. The Palestinians must accept Israel, they must convincingly renounce terrorism (none of this “resistance” legerdemain), and they must drop the ludicrous demand for a right of return that would effectively overrun Israel. If they did those three things, the territorial boundaries would take care of themselves, and Obama could go back to not worrying about America’s borders.

Chasing wealth away
New York Post
By NICOLE GELINAS
Last Updated: 3:20 AM, May 12, 2011
Posted: 10:35 PM, May 11, 2011

This afternoon, the "May 12 Coalition" will take to the streets of Lower Manhattan with a demand for Mayor Bloomberg: "Make Big Banks and Millionaires Pay." But we'd all pay: The coalition's plan centers on a massive tax hike that would send jobs and wealth away from the five boroughs.

The group comprises the usual suspects -- the United Federation of Teachers, the Transport Workers Union, the big health-care unions, the Coalition for the Homeless, etc.

No surprise: People who depend on big government want bigger government. The $49.7 billion that Bloomberg will spend next year -- up 11.2 percent from the year before -- isn't enough. The coalition has catalogued every "devastating" budget cut, from the $515 million the mayor would save by cutting 6,000 teachers to $250,000 off a "homeless prevention fund."

The coalition has a "solution": Sock it to the wealthy. They want a return of the state's temporary "millionaire's tax," which Gov. Cuomo allowed to expire. A year from now, the coalition says, the higher tax rate would bring in $5 billion -- with about $1.9 billion going to the city.

Not so fast. When you tax something, you get less of it -- sometimes so much less that a higher tax rate brings in fewer tax dollars.

Remember 2002, the last time the city and state faced budget crises? The mayor and the state Legislature enacted huge tax hikes, including on cigarettes -- which now give us a neat illustration of how all of this works.

In January 2002, the city and state levied $1.19 in taxes on each cigarette pack. Six months later, it was $3. In 2008 and 2010, the state hiked its butt tax again, bringing the combined levy to $5.85.

At first, it was a cash cow: From 2002 to 2003, the city's tax take from cigarettes quadrupled to $160 million.

But since then it's fallen by 56 percent, to a projected $70 million per year

What happened? People did what they do when faced with a higher tax: They changed their behavior. Today, New Yorkers buy little more than 100 million cigarette packs a year -- less than a third of their purchases before the tax hikes. Some folks stopped smoking -- good! Some roll their own -- or buy out of state, or from vendors who illegally sell "imported" cigarettes. Some go to Indian reservations, which refuse to collect taxes.

From a revenue perspective, all that matters is that taxing an activity -- buying cigarettes in New York -- resulted in less of it. Smokers are addicts but they still respond to much higher costs.

Today, the behavior that the advocates would tax out of existence is . . . earning six figures and higher while living in New York.

The tax hike is a whopping 31 percent increase on the rate paid by people earning more than $550,000 in adjusted gross income. Moreover, this top rate applies to all income, not just extra income over, say, $100,000. So a couple earning $1 million in taxable income would pay $89,700 a year for the privilege of living in-state (city residents owe another $36,000 or so in city taxes, too).

Further below $1 million, less aggressive tax hikes would kick in at $200,000 for single earners. "It's odd to think you need to make $1 million every year to be a 'millionaire,' " a coalition spokesman told me yesterday.

Faced with such a sharply higher permanent tax rate, people will change their behavior.

Wealthy earners -- who, after all, aren't addicted to New York -- would spend fewer days here, or none. (Yes, the state does charge by the day.) A higher tax would hurt New York's efforts to attract millionaires who aren't on Wall Street. Tech entrepreneurs would see that as much more reason to head to Austin and pay no income tax.

An 8.97 percent state tax rate wouldn't end it. Gotham's budget deficit is $4.8 billion a year from now. An extra $2 billion from Albany wouldn't close it. Doubt that this coalition's solution would be an even higher tax?

These are people who refuse to admit that public-sector pensions and benefits now consume more than a third of every dollar in revenue that the city takes in, harming social services.

In fact, a middle-aged teacher looking forward to a cushy retirement has little in common with Jake Carlson, a transit rider who told the coalition that "I often have to bike where I need to go to avoid the subway/bus fare, leaving me tired and sweaty."

The protesters are performing a public service -- reminding New Yorkers how politically tough Cuomo's job is in not raising taxes, and how taxpayers need to stand behind him.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Insti tute's City Journal.

The Fog of Fog
The administration cannot get its bin Laden story straight.
National Review
Michelle Malkin
May 6, 2011 12:00 A.M.

The official White House account of Osama bin Laden’s demise has seen more slapdash cosmetic surgery over the past week than your average Real Housewives reality-show star. President Obama’s allies attribute the bungled “narrative” (their word, not mine) to the “Fog of War.” But each passing day — and each new set of hapless revisions — shows that what really ails the administration is the Fog of Fog.

Errors happen. Miscommunications happen. Confusing the name of which of bin Laden’s myriad sons died (Hamza, not Khalid), for example, is no biggie.

But the hourly revamping of key details of Sunday’s raid suggests something far beyond the usual realm of situational uncertainty that accompanies any military operation. The Navy SEALs did their job spectacularly. The civilians tasked with letting the world know about the mission, however, have performed like amateur dinner-theater actors in a tragi-comic production of Rashomon Meets the Blind Men and the Elephant Meets the Keystone Kops.

Incapable of straightforward answers, Team Obama’s clarity-challenged civilians have led nauseated news-watchers through more twists and turns than San Francisco’s Lombard Street.

Take your Dramamine, and let’s review.

Take One: Bin Laden died in a bloody firefight.

On Sunday night, Obama dramatically told the world that “after a firefight,” our brave men in uniform “killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Embellishing the story the next morning, White House deputy national-security adviser John Brennan said at his briefing that bin Laden “was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. . . . And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know. . . . It was a firefight. He, therefore, was killed in that firefight.”

Take Two: Bin Laden did not engage in a firefight.

The day after Brennan disclosed these vivid details, White House press secretary Jay Carney walked them back Michael Jackson–style. Bin Laden, he said in version 2.0, “was not armed.” Brennan had clearly implied that bin Laden “resisted” with arms. Carney amended the narrative by insisting that “resistance does not require a firearm.” How exactly bin Laden resisted, Carney would not say.

It’s been all downhill, uphill, K-turns, and 180s ever since. Fasten your seatbelts:

Take Three: Bin Laden’s wife died after her feckless husband used her as a human shield.

Take Four: Bin Laden’s wife did not die, wasn’t used as a human shield, and was only shot in the leg. Someone else’s wife was killed, somewhere else in the house.

Take Five: A transport helicopter experienced “mechanical failure” and was forced to make a hard landing during the mission.

Take Six: A top-secret helicopter clipped the bin Laden compound wall, crashed, and was purposely exploded after the mission to prevent our enemies from learning more about it.

Take Seven: The bin Laden photos would be released to the world as proof-positive of his death.

Take Eight: The bin Laden photos would not be released to the world because no one needs proof, and it’s more important to avoid offending the peaceful Muslims who supposedly don’t embrace bin Laden as a true Muslim in the first place.

Take Nine: Bin Laden’s compound was a lavish mansion.

Take Ten: Bin Laden’s compound was a glorified pigsty.

Take Eleven: Bin Laden’s compound had absolutely no television, phone, or computer access.

Take Twelve: Bin Laden’s compound was stocked with hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs, and computers galore.

Take Thirteen: Er, remember that statement about bin Laden’s being armed? And then not armed? Well, the new version is that he had an AK-47 “nearby.”

Take Fourteen: A gung-ho Obama spearheaded the “gutsy” mission.

Take Fifteen: A reluctant Obama dithered for 16 hours before being persuaded by CIA director Leon Panetta.

Take Sixteen: Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and close advisers watched the raid unfold in real time — “minute by minute,” according to Carney — and a gripping insider photo was posted immediately by the White House on the Flickr picture-sharing website for all to see.

Take Seventeen: Er, they weren’t really watching real-time video “minute by minute,” because there was at least nearly a half-hour during which they “didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta clarified. Or rather, un-clarified.

Take Eighteen: Stalwart Obama’s order was to kill, not capture, bin Laden.

Take Nineteen: Sensitive Obama’s order was to kill or capture — and that’s why the SEAL team gave him a chance to surrender, upon which he resisted with arms, or actually didn’t resist with arms, but sort of resisted without arms, except there was an AK-47 nearby, sort of, or maybe not, thus making it possible to assert that while decisive Obama did tell the SEALs to kill bin Laden and should claim all credit for doing so, Progressive Obama can also be absolved by bleeding hearts because of the painstakingly concocted post facto possibility that bin Laden somehow threatened our military — telepathically, or something — before being taken out.

Take Twenty: “We’ve been as forthcoming with facts as we can be,” said an irritated Carney on Wednesday.

And they wonder why Americans of all political stripes think they’re blowing smoke.

The War Continues
Bin Laden’s death is an inflection point, not the end of the war.
National Review
Charles Krauthammer
May 6, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Two months and a day before 9/11, terrorism expert Larry C. Johnson published “The Declining Terrorist Threat,” a New York Times op-ed that decried the fact that “Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism,” when, in reality, “the decade beginning in 2000 will continue the downward trend” in lethal terrorism.

Not quite.

A decade later, Osama bin Laden is dead and the old chorus of pre-9/11 complacency has returned. The War on Terror is over — yet again, it seems. Bin Laden was but “a distraction,” writes Peter Beinart, and the War on Terror “a mistake from the start.” 9/11 was nothing more than “an isolated case,” argues Ross Douthat. And “bin Laden was always the weak horse.”

The new post–bin Laden dispensation is that the entire decade-long War on Terror was an overreaction — as shown by the bin Laden operation itself, which, noted one critic, looks a lot like police work, the kind of law enforcement John Kerry insisted in 2004 was the proper prism through which to address the terror threat.

On the contrary. The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the War on Terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, war-like infrastructure that the Bush administration created after 9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda, and made bin Laden a fugitive.

Without all of this, the bin Laden operation could never have happened. Whence came the intelligence that led to Abbottabad? Many places, including from secret prisons in Romania and Poland; from terrorists seized and kidnapped, then subjected to interrogations, sometimes “harsh” or “enhanced”; from Gitmo detainees; from a huge bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and eavesdropping. In other words, from a Global War on Terror infrastructure that critics, including Barack Obama himself, deplored as a tragic detour from American rectitude.

It was all not just un-American, now say the revisionists, but also unnecessary.

Really? We could never have pulled off the bin Laden raid without a major military presence in Afghanistan. The choppers came from our massive base at Bagram. The jump-off point was Jalalabad. The intelligence-gathering drones fly over Pakistan by grace of an alliance (unreliable but indispensable) forged with the U.S. to fight the war in Afghanistan.

Even the war in Iraq played an (unintended) role. After its rout from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda chose the troubled waters of Iraq as the central front in its war on America — and suffered a stunning defeat, made particularly humiliating when its fellow Sunni Arabs rose up to join the infidel Americans in subduing it.

Bin Laden declared war on us in 1998. But it was not until 9/11 that we took him seriously. At which point, we answered with a declaration of war of our own, offering the brutal, unrelenting, and ferocious response that war demands and that police work prohibits.

Including bin Laden’s execution. It’s clear there was no intention of capturing him. And for good reason. Doing so would have been insane, gratuitously granting him a second life of immense publicity on a worldwide stage from which to propagandize.

We came to kill. That is what you do in war. Do that in police work — and you’ve committed murder. The Navy SEAL(s) who pulled the fateful trigger would be facing charges, not receiving medals.

You want to say we’ve now won the war? Fine. It’s at least an arguable proposition. After all, the War on Terror will end one day, and we will return to policing the odd terrorist nutcase. I would argue, however, that while bin Laden’s death marks an extremely important inflection point in the fight against jihadism, it’s far too early to declare victory.

Now, it is one thing to have an argument about whether it’s over. It’s quite another to claim that our reaching this happy day — during which we can even be debating whether victory has been achieved — has nothing to do with the War on Terror of the previous decade. Al-Qaeda is not subsiding on its own. It is not retiring from the field, having seen the error of its ways. It is not disappearing because of some inexorable law of history or nature. It is in retreat because of the terrible defeats it suffered once America decided to take up arms against it, a campaign known as the War on Terror.

The Obama Doctrine: Leading from Behind
A foreign policy of hesitation, delay, and indecision.
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE         
Charles Krauthammer
April 29, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.”

 — Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, May 2 issue

To be precise, leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine. Doctrines involve ideas, but since there are no discernible ones that make sense of Obama’s foreign policy — Lizza’s painstaking two-year chronicle shows it to be as ad hoc, erratic, and confused as it appears — this will have to do.

And it surely is an accurate description, from President Obama’s shocking passivity during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution to his dithering on Libya — acting at the very last moment, then handing off to a bickering coalition, yielding the current bloody stalemate. It’s been a foreign policy of hesitation, delay, and indecision, marked by plaintive appeals to the (fictional) “international community” to do what only America can.

But underlying that style, assures this Obama adviser, there really are ideas. Indeed, “two unspoken beliefs,” explains Lizza. “That the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”

Amazing. This  is why Obama is deliberately diminishing American presence, standing, and leadership in the world?

Take proposition one: We must “lead from behind” because U.S. relative power is declining. Even if you accept the premise, it’s a complete non sequitur. What does China’s rising GDP have to do with American buck-passing on Libya, misjudging Iran, appeasing Syria?

True, China is rising. But first, it is the only power of any significance rising militarily relative to us. Russia is recovering from levels of military strength so low that it barely registers globally. And European power is in true decline (see their performance — except for the British — in Afghanistan and their current misadventures in Libya).

And second, the challenge of a rising Chinese military is still exclusively regional. It would affect a war over Taiwan. It has zero effect on anything significantly beyond China’s coast. China has no blue-water navy. It has no foreign bases. It cannot project power globally. It might in the future — but by what logic should that paralyze us today?

Proposition two: We must lead from behind because we are reviled. Pray tell, when were we not? During Vietnam? Or earlier, under Eisenhower? When his vice president was sent on a good-will trip to Latin America, he was spat upon and so threatened by the crowds that he had to cut short his trip. Or maybe later, under the blessed Reagan? The Reagan years were marked by vast demonstrations in the capitals of our closest allies denouncing America as a warmongering menace taking the world into nuclear winter.

“Obama came of age politically,” explains Lizza, “during the post–Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment.” But the world did not begin with the coming to consciousness of Barack Obama. Cold War resentments ran just as deep.

It is the fate of any assertive superpower to be envied, denounced, and blamed for everything under the sun. Nothing has changed. Moreover, for a country so deeply reviled, why during the massive unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria have anti-American demonstrations been such a rarity?

Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and that shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu (including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn); the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street.

It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind — diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness — is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s.

Other presidents take anti-Americanism as a given, rather than evidence of American malignancy, believing — as do most Americans — in the rightness of our cause and the nobility of our intentions. Obama thinks anti-Americanism is a verdict on America’s fitness for leadership. I would suggest that “leading from behind” is a verdict on Obama’s fitness for leadership.

Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron. Yet a sympathetic journalist, channeling an Obama adviser, elevates it to a doctrine. The president is no doubt flattered. The rest of us are merely stunned.

Losing the Future:  Vegas is no longer the world’s biggest gambling resort; America is.
NATIONAL REVIEW
Mark Steyn
April 16, 2011 4:00 A.M.

I always enjoy the bit in Planet of the Apes where a loinclothed Charlton Heston falls to his knees as he comes face to face with a shattered Statue of Liberty poking out of the sand and realizes that the eponymous simian planet is, in fact, his own — or was. Also the bit in Independence Day where Lady Liberty gets zapped by space aliens. And in Cloverfield when she’s decapitated by a giant monster. And in The Day After Tomorrow when she’s flash-frozen after polar-ice-cap melting brought on by a speech from Dick Cheney. I’ve been enjoying such moments since, oh, the short story “The Next Morning” in the 1887 edition of Life, illustrated with a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless statue with the smoldering rubble of the city behind her. The poor old girl was barely off the boat from France, and she’d already been pegged as the perfect visual shorthand for societal collapse.

But the United States Postal Service has now gone the Hollywood apocalyptics one better and produced a somewhat subtler image of civilizational ruin. The other day the post office apologized for its new stamp honoring Lady Liberty. Due to an unfortunate error, the stamp shows not the 19th-century Statue of Liberty that stands in New York Harbor but the 1990s replica that stands at the New York–New York Casino in Las Vegas.

An ersatz statue of pseudo-liberty standing guard over the world’s biggest gambling operation: What better way to round out a week in which the Republicans pretended to pass the most historically historic budget cut in history while the president pretended to come up with a plan to address the debt? All while pretending to wage a war in Libya whose most likely outcome seems to be that the only Arab dictator to sleep soundly in his bed at night during these turbulent times will be doing so under cover of a NATO no-fly zone for the rest of his 75-year term of office. In such a world, the USPS, bless ’em, has come up with a far more plausible emblem of societal devastation than Hollywood’s space monsters and climate-change fairies.

After the revelations that the $38.5 billion 2011 budget cut will in reality either cut a mere $352 million from the 2011 budget or, in fact, increase it by $3 billion, it might be easier just to build a replica White House, Capitol, and Congressional Budget Office at the new Beltway Casino next to Caesar’s Palace. Vegas is no longer the world’s biggest gambling resort; America is. Barack Obama says we need to “win the future,” and one more roll of the dice should do it: a trillion dollars of chips on the stimulus came up empty but let’s pile another couple trillion on Obamacare, and “high-speed rail,” and “green jobs,” and “broadband access” . . . And all the while Wayne Newton is singing “Danke Schoen” in Chinese. But don’t worry, we’re not just throwing our money away. We’re playing to a system! The president calls it “investing in the future.”

How do you “invest in the future”? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That’s what the government of the United States is doing. It’s spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour of every day of every week — all for your future!

Most of the “futures” we’ve “invested” in are already at record levels of spending. Obama and his speechwriters are among the laziest men in the republic, so they cite the same dreary examples every time. In all three of his State of the Union addresses, he’s brought up the highway system, and he did so again in Chicago at the end of the week. If the Republicans get their way, he said, “We can’t invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail. I mean, we would be a nation of potholes.”

That’s the choice, is it? Multi-trillion-dollar government “investment” or a nation of potholes? America “invests” a lot in roads. It has more highway signs than almost any other country: not just mile markers but fifth-of-a-mile markers; not just “Stop” signs, but four-way “Stop” signs, and “Stop Sign Ahead” signs, and one day soon “Stop Sign Ahead Sign Ahead” signs. America also has the worst automobile fatality rate in the developed world, in part because there’s so much fascinating reading material on the shoulder. Our automobile fatality rate is three times that of the Netherlands, about the same as Albania’s, down at 62 in the global rankings, just ahead of Tajikistan and Papua New Guinea. But don’t worry, if we ever do become “a nation of potholes,” you can bet there’ll be federally mandated “Pothole Ahead” signs in front of each one.

Anything else? “Our airports,” continued the president, “would be worse than places that we used to call the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure.” Maybe he should get out of the motorcade once in a while and swing by LAX or LaGuardia: They’re already decrepit cheerless dumps, mainly because they’ve been lavishly governmentalized into bureaucratic holding pens through which the citizenry dutifully shuffle while armies of crack TSA operatives poke around in the panties of six-year-old girls.

Oh, and let’s not forget “education.” “We should invest in education,” says the president. But we have done, spectacularly. We spend more per pupil on “education” than any other developed nation except Switzerland, and our math scores barely make the global Top 40, scraping in at big hit sound No. 35 between Azerbaijan and Croatia, the former of which was a Commie dictatorship until 20 years ago while the latter was reduced to rubble in the Yugoslav civil war. Maybe, when it comes to “investing in the future,” civil war gives you more bang for the buck.

Government is not alone in “investing” in “the future.” The New York Times reported last week that in 2010, for the first time, student-loan debt topped credit-card debt. This year, college debt is projected to be over a trillion dollars — a spectacular increase in just the last decade. America is now dumping two-thirds of Canada’s or India’s GDP not into overall debt but into one small niche market of debt. Yet, in a nation with a trillion dollars of student debt, 40 percent of Americans work in minimal-skill service jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology, while our elites dream of following Michelle Obama into leisurely gigs as $350,000-a-year diversity-outreach consultants.

Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you’ve spent it and no longer have one?

That the president’s rote recitation of tired catchphrases can still be taken seriously is a bleak glimpse into the scale of this nation’s structural problems. But hey, relax! Maybe we can win the future by investing in highway signs for the crowd-facing side of his prompter: “Warning: Lame Cobwebbed Brain-Dead Sloganizing Ahead.”

This Is Just the Start
NYTIMES
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
March 1, 2011

Future historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the Arab/Muslim world. We know the big causes — tyranny, rising food prices, youth unemployment and social media. But since being in Egypt, I’ve been putting together my own back-of-the-envelope guess list of what I’d call the “not-so-obvious forces” that fed this mass revolt. Here it is:

THE OBAMA FACTOR Americans have never fully appreciated what a radical thing we did — in the eyes of the rest of the world — in electing an African-American with the middle name Hussein as president. I’m convinced that listening to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech — not the words, but the man — were more than a few young Arabs who were saying to themselves: “Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.” I’d put that in my mix of forces fueling these revolts.

GOOGLE EARTH While Facebook has gotten all the face time in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, don’t forget Google Earth, which began roiling Bahraini politics in 2006. A big issue in Bahrain, particularly among Shiite men who want to get married and build homes, is the unequal distribution of land. On Nov. 27, 2006, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Bahrain, The Washington Post ran this report from there: “Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings and their children, said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens of thousands of mainly poor Shiites were squashed together in small, dense areas. ‘We are 17 people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,’ he said. ‘And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.’ Bahraini activists have encouraged people to take a look at the country on Google Earth, and they have set up a special user group whose members have access to more than 40 images of royal palaces.”

ISRAEL The Arab TV network Al Jazeera has a big team covering Israel today. Here are some of the stories they have been beaming into the Arab world: Israel’s previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had to resign because he was accused of illicitly taking envelopes stuffed with money from a Jewish-American backer. An Israeli court recently convicted Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav on two counts of rape, based on accusations by former employees. And just a few weeks ago, Israel, at the last second, rescinded the appointment of Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant as the army’s new chief of staff after Israeli environmentalists spurred a government investigation that concluded General Galant had seized public land near his home. (You can see his house on Google Maps!) This surely got a few laughs in Egypt where land sales to fat cats and cronies of the regime that have resulted in huge overnight profits have been the talk of Cairo this past year. When you live right next to a country that is bringing to justice its top leaders for corruption and you live in a country where many of the top leaders are corrupt, well, you notice.

THE BEIJING OLYMPICS China and Egypt were both great civilizations subjected to imperialism and were both dirt poor back in the 1950s, with China even poorer than Egypt, Edward Goldberg, who teaches business strategy, wrote in The Globalist. But, today, China has built the world’s second-largest economy, and Egypt is still living on foreign aid. What do you think young Egyptians thought when they watched the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics? China’s Olympics were another wake-up call — “in a way that America or the West could never be” — telling young Egyptians that something was very wrong with their country, argued Goldberg.

THE FAYYAD FACTOR Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad introduced a new form of government in the Arab world in the last three years, something I’ve dubbed “Fayyadism.” It said: judge me on my performance, on how I deliver government services and collect the garbage and create jobs — not simply on how I “resist” the West or Israel. Every Arab could relate to this. Chinese had to give up freedom but got economic growth and decent government in return. Arabs had to give up freedom and got the Arab-Israeli conflict and unemployment in return.

Add it all up and what does it say? It says you have a very powerful convergence of forces driving a broad movement for change. It says we’re just at the start of something huge. And it says that if we don’t have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages all this change.

Commentary from newspapers prior to re-election campaign...

The Anti-Reform Party
National Review
Mona Charen
February 25, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Democrats seem to respect the results of elections only when they favor Democrats.

It’s hard to imagine the level of outrage that would be flowing in the direction of the Republican party today if Republicans had behaved the way the Democrats have over the past week. Who can doubt that the New York Times, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the left-wing choir would be chorusing “anti-democratic,” “obstructionist,” and “radical”?

In early 2009, when the Democrats were triumphant in Washington, President Obama dismissed Republican objections to his stimulus bill (now estimated, by the way, to have cost $821 billion — $34 billion more than initially projected) with a pithy “we won.” Elections have consequences, he explained, and there were limits to his openness to ideas from the defeated opposition.

Fair enough. But Democrats seem to respect the results of elections only when they favor Democrats. In Wisconsin, 14 Democratic senators, a minority, fled to Illinois in order to deny the state senate a quorum of 20 for conducting business. The Republicans, who have a majority of 19 senators, cannot pass their legislation in the absence of a quorum.

What this amounts to, though no one is characterizing it this way, is a move to shut down the government if Democrats cannot get their way. What it says is that Democrats will not abide by the democratic process. If they win, it’s majority rule. If they lose, they refuse to participate.

Where is President Obama’s timely reminder about the importance of elections — or, in fact, about fealty to the rule of law?

And if a Republican “activist” had impersonated a big Democratic donor, say, George Soros, in a phone call to a Democratic governor, wouldn’t the chorus be demanding a criminal investigation of the fraud? Instead, Common Cause is demanding an investigation of Gov. Scott Walker for the things he said to an impostor. Amazing.

Now legislators from Indiana and Ohio are copying the Wisconsin playbook. All but three Democrats in the Indiana House fled their jobs and the jurisdiction in order to prevent a vote on legislation they oppose. According to the Indianapolis Star, “Democrats are headed to Illinois, though it was possible some also might go to Kentucky. They need to go to a state with a Democratic governor to avoid being taken into police custody and returned to Indiana.” A “media director” for the House Democrats told an Indianapolis website that “I cannot confirm or deny any reports about where the members of the Democratic caucus are, because I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” said John Schorg. That’s public service for you!

There’s an opportunity here for an entrepreneurial type: A bus or train service for Democratic officeholders. They could call it the Fleedom Train, or Project Run Away.

The Democrats in Indiana are not just opposing right-to-work legislation, but also a series of reforms that may just unfreeze the stale status quo in education. The Republicans, having achieved majorities in both houses as well as the governorship in Indiana, are proposing to expand charter schools, permit parents to use state funds to send their kids to private schools in some circumstances, link teacher pay to student performance, forbid contracts that reward seniority instead of effectiveness, and limit collective bargaining to wages and benefits. Teacher quality, Governor Daniels noted in his state-of-the-state address, “is 20 times more important than any other factor, including poverty, in determining which kids succeed. Class size, by comparison, is virtually meaningless. . . . Today, the outstanding teacher . . . whose kids are pushed and led to do their best, is treated no better than the worst teacher in the school.”

Daniels is right about class size. It’s a myth popularized by teachers’ unions that small classes lead to better results. The unions push it because it requires the hiring of more teachers. But there’s no evidence that it works. As the Mackinac Center for Public Policy summarized, “Pupil-teacher ratios have shrunk nationally for at least the last six decades, yet there have been no quantifiable improvements to student achievement nationally or in individual states.”

Democrats in Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere are lining up foursquare with public-employee unions and against budget sanity and education reform. Not a bad tee-up for 2012.

The Rubicon of Wisconsin
Recklessly principled Republicans are tackling our fiscal crisis.
National Review
Charles Krauthammer
February 25, 2011 12:00 A.M.

The magnificent turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and, remarkably, our muddled, gridlocked, allegedly broken politics has yielded a singular clarity.

At the federal level, President Obama’s budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform. Simultaneously, in Wisconsin and other states, Republican governors are taking on unsustainable, fiscally ruinous pension and health-care obligations, while Democrats are full-throated in support of the public-employee unions’ crying, “Hell no.”

A choice, not an echo: Democrats desperately defending the status quo; Republicans charging the barricades.

Wisconsin is the epicenter. It began with economic issues. When Gov. Scott Walker proposed that state workers contribute more to their pension and health-care benefits, he started a revolution. Teachers called in sick. Schools closed. Demonstrators massed at the capitol. Democratic senators fled the state to paralyze the legislature.

Unfortunately for them, that telegenic faux-Cairo scene drew national attention to the dispute — and to the sweetheart deals the public-sector unions had negotiated for themselves for years. They were contributing a fifth of a penny on a dollar of wages to their pensions and one-fourth what private-sector workers pay for health insurance.

The unions quickly understood that the more than 85 percent of Wisconsin not part of this privileged special-interest group would not take kindly to “public servants” resisting adjustments that still leave them paying less for benefits than private-sector workers. They immediately capitulated and claimed they were only protesting the other part of the bill, the part about collective-bargaining rights.

Indeed. Walker understands that a one-time giveback means little. The state’s financial straits — a $3.6 billion budget shortfall over the next two years — did not come out of nowhere. They came largely from a half-century power imbalance between the unions and the politicians with whom they collectively bargain.

In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largesse in the next election. It’s the perfect cozy setup.

To redress these perverse incentives that benefit both negotiating parties at the expense of the taxpayer, Walker’s bill would restrict future government-union negotiations to wages only. Excluded from negotiations would be benefits, the more easily hidden sweeteners that come due long after the politicians who negotiated them have left. The bill would also require that unions be recertified every year and that dues be voluntary.

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Private unions have shrunk to less than 7 percent of the working population. The Democrats’ strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

Hence the import of the current moment — its blinding clarity. Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang onto the gains of their glory years — from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking.

Obama’s Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no.

We have heard everyone — from Obama’s own debt commission to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — call the looming debt a mortal threat to the nation. We have watched Greece self-immolate. We can see the future. The only question has been: When will the country finally rouse itself?

Amazingly, the answer is now. Led by famously progressive Wisconsin — Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level — a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?

Apocalypse Now: Wisconsin vs. Big Labor
In bankrupt and near-bankrupt states, fiscal discipline can’t wait.
National Review
Michelle Malkin
February 18, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Let us pray it does not go the way of the decrepit welfare states of the European Union.

The lowdown: State-government workers in the Badger State pay piddling amounts for generous taxpayer-subsidized health benefits. Faced with a $3.6 billion budget hole and a state constitutional ban on running a deficit, new Republican governor Scott Walker wants public unions to pony up a little more. He has proposed raising the public-employee share of health-insurance premiums from less than 5 percent to 12.4 percent. He is also pushing for state workers to cover half of their pension contributions. To spare taxpayers the soaring costs of byzantine union-negotiated work rules, he would rein in Big Labor’s collective-bargaining power to cover only wages unless approved at the ballot box.

As the free-market MacIver Institute in Wisconsin points out, the benefits concessions Walker is asking public-union workers to make would still maintain their health-insurance-contribution rates at the second-lowest among Midwest states for family coverage. Moreover, a new analysis by benefits think tank HCTrends shows that the new rate “would also be less than the employee contributions required at 85 percent of large Milwaukee area employers.”

This modest call for shared sacrifice has triggered the wrath of the White House–Big Labor–Michael Moore axis. On Thursday, President Obama lamented the “assault on unions.” AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union bosses dubbed Walker the “Mubarak of the Midwest” while their minions toted posters of Walker’s face superimposed on Hitler’s. Moore goaded thousands of striking union protesters to “shut down” the “new Cairo” while the state’s Democratic legislators bailed on floor debate over the union reform package.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan spurned the opportunity to condemn thousands of Wisconsin public-school teachers for lying about being “sick” and shutting down at least eight school districts across the state to attend capitol protests (many of whom dragged their students on a social-justice field trip with them). Instead, Duncan defended teachers for “doing probably the most important work in society.” Only striking government teachers could win federal praise for not doing their jobs.

Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that bringing American union workers into the 21st century in line with the rest of the workforce is tantamount to dictatorship.

Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that by walking off their jobs and out of their classrooms, they are “putting children first.”

If ever there were proof that public unions no longer work in the public interest, this is it. Big Labor dragoons workers into exclusive representation agreements, forces them to pay compulsory dues that fatten Democratic political coffers, and then has the chutzpah to cast itself as an Egyptian-style “freedom” and “human rights” movement.

Meanwhile, union leaders elsewhere are quietly forcing their low-wage members to share the sacrifice in order to preserve teetering health funds. In New York State, Skidmore College campus janitors, dining-service workers, and other maintenance employees received late notice from the SEIU that 4.15 percent of their gross earnings will now be deducted from their paychecks to cover the cost of the health plan provided through the behemoth 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund. (If the name sounds familiar, it’s because this is one of several privileged SEIU affiliates that have received an Obamacare waiver.)

These workers are forced to join the union in order to preserve their jobs, and unlike non-union workers, they are locked into a single health plan. The SEIU has now decreed that they must pay new fees to include spouses on their plans and has hiked employee co-pays for doctor visits and prescription drugs.

What’s necessary for New York union workers is necessary for Wisconsin union workers — and for the rest of the protected union-worker class in bankrupt and near-bankrupt states across America. The “persuasion of power” so ruthlessly and recklessly exercised by the SEIU and its thuggish allies must be broken by the moral courage of fiscal discipline. It’s now or never.

Debt Be Not Proud
Weekly Standard
Yuval Levin and William Kristol
January 17, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 17

As the 112th Congress begins its work this month, it must take up some unavoidable unfinished business left behind by its predecessor. In their frantic, sloppy struggle to advance big-ticket items on the liberal agenda, the Democratic leaders of the 111th Congress not only failed to produce a budget for the current fiscal year, they also failed to address the fact that the federal borrowing necessary to fund their spending binge was quickly nearing the legal debt limit.

That means the new Congress, with a Republican House and a narrowly Democratic Senate, must pass an appropriations measure for the rest of the fiscal year by early March, when the temporary continuing resolution now in effect runs out. And it means the new Congress must raise the debt ceiling—to allow for federal borrowing necessary to cover expenses already incurred by President Obama and the last Congress, regardless of what the new Congress does about spending.

On their face, these hardly seem like ideal conditions in which to begin reining in government. But if Republicans resist the urge to deny the reality of these circumstances, and instead seek ways to turn them into opportunities to advance their agenda, they might find that they have quite a strong hand after all.

If Republicans are not careful, both the budget and debt-limit debates threaten to devolve into games of chicken in which each side tries to blame the other for failing to avert a government shutdown (if not a default on America’s debt). In such a confrontation, President Obama would have the advantage. He and his party have nothing to lose from a government shutdown. The public knows that the Democrats, as the party of big government, do not desire a shutdown, and so would blame the impasse on Republicans. Concern over absent government services and benefits, undoubtedly magnified by the press, would create pressure that, over time, would divide the Republicans but unite the Democrats. Obama could let such an impasse continue indefinitely, and would gain from every passing day, as Bill Clinton did in 1995.

Furthermore, if the debt ceiling, and not just the budget, is at the heart of the showdown, the costs will be not just political but economic. The Treasury could, for a time, move money around the various government trust funds to avoid actually hitting the debt limit—though such moves, especially if they involve Social Security or Medicare, would be politically unpopular. But within a few months at most, the government would be unable to repay existing debt and interest and would confront default.

The exact implications of this are hard to predict. But none of them are good. The Treasury probably would have to prioritize debt repayment and entitlement checks and arbitrarily slash other spending, all while turning away potential lenders, unnerving the bond markets, and sending interest rates upward—thereby increasing the cost of our debt even more.

None of this is what our ailing economy needs as it struggles to recover, and none of it is what the voting public wants to see. It would all inevitably end with Congress raising the debt ceiling (as Republican and Democratic Congresses have done ten times in just the last decade), but on terms far less friendly to Republicans, who will have used up a great deal of political momentum and capital for naught.

It is easy to understand the frustration of Republicans confronted with the task of cleaning up after the Democrats’ orgy of spending. They want to get right into the work of restraining government excess and unleashing growth. A vote for raising the debt limit—however inescapable the necessity—feels too much like acquiescence in the binge they were elected to end.

But it need not be. Rather than revolt against the circumstances they have been handed, Republicans in Congress should turn these Democratic loose ends into opportunities to begin changing the spending culture of Washington, and to strengthen their position in the bigger fights to come this year.

The 2010 election has given Republicans a stronger bargaining position, but it has not made them supreme in Washington. They have the power to stand athwart any further lurches toward European-style social democracy, and they will surely do so. The hyperactive period of the Obama presidency is over. The question for Republicans is whether their situation—controlling the House but not the Senate or the White House—also allows them to advance a positive agenda of their own, while persuading the public to give them the power to do more in 2012. The answer is surely yes, if Republicans use their improved bargaining position wisely and reinforce rather than deflate the public mood that got them here.

That means picking fights they can win rather than forcing confrontations they are sure to lose. It means offering serious reforms and spending reductions that the public will deem reasonable and the Democrats will find difficult to reject, and so creating the conditions for further improvement.

The Democrats’ unfinished business offers Republicans the opportunity to do this early, if they act quickly to define the budget and debt-ceiling debates, and if they recognize that the decisive battle of this Congress will be the fight over the 2012 budget—which begins with the president’s State of the Union address next month and the Republican budget resolution in March. The remnants of the previous Congress, therefore, should be dispatched quickly, and in a way that sets the stage for the main event.

Early in the winter, perhaps even before the president’s State of the Union address, the House should pass a single measure that enacts the unavoidable increase in the debt limit (attaching to it strict spending discipline measures, as proposed below, to make sure that future increases can be avoided) and puts in place a continuing resolution for the remainder of the 2011 budget year. That resolution should disburse domestic discretionary spending for the rest of fiscal 2011 at 2008 levels, thereby reducing such spending by more than $50 billion over the rest of this year and paving the way for even more significant reductions in 2012.

The bill should also require that all unused stimulus money, unused prior-year earmark money, unobligated balances in agency budgets, and repayments of TARP and bailout funds be directed immediately and exclusively to debt reduction. And it should require every agency of the executive branch to report to Congress by May 1 on exactly how it will adjust its operations—line item by line item—to return to its full-year 2008 spending levels next year and to even lower levels over the rest of the decade.

President Obama and the Democrats would of course recoil from such cuts. But legislation like this would be difficult for them to oppose. It would represent a modest spending freeze at levels deemed adequate just three years ago, in the midst of the Great Recession, and it would only be a temporary measure as the 2012 budget debate begins. Obama and the Democrats would find it difficult to paint such a measure as reckless or unreasonable. For Republicans, this measure would offer many advantages beyond its sheer spending reductions. It would tie the increase in the debt limit made necessary by the reckless spending of the past few years to concrete efforts to reverse that spending and reduce the debt. It would send a clear message that spending is going down, not up. It would take the possibility of a government shutdown off the table.

It would, in other words, move the debate onto ground that favors Republicans rather than Democrats. Following the debt-ceiling/continuing resolution legislation, Republicans could introduce a series of rescission measures that make further cuts in 2011 spending—for instance, enacting a hiring freeze for the federal workforce and reducing or terminating funding for public broadcasting, various corporate subsidies, Amtrak subsidies, and the like. Some of these will make it through the Senate, others will not. Some will be vetoed, while some might be enacted. No matter the outcome, Republicans will be fighting on friendly turf—championing the sort of sensible spending restraint they were elected to advance even as the 2012 budget fight proceeds, and keeping the president and Senate Democrats on the defensive all year, rather than engaging in dramatic standoffs that favor the White House.

If Republicans resist getting caught up in the heat of the moment, if they understand that the 2012 budget fight must be the real focus of their energies, they have a chance to make a virtue of necessity, and to begin the new Congress by scoring some serious gains and building momentum for more.

‘The Enemy Within’ From the December 20, 2010, issue of NR
December 14, 2010 12:00 A.M.
Iain Murray & F. Vincent Vernuccio

In the early 1980s, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher emerged victorious from a war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands that propelled her to a landslide victory in the 1983 general election. On July 19, 1984, she gave a speech to the assembled legislators of her Conservative party, in which she said that she had defeated “the enemy without,” but that “the enemy within . . . is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.” She was referring to government-sector unions, and specifically the mineworkers’ union, which was then attempting to hold Britain hostage. (In Britain, the mines had been nationalized, hence their workers had a government-sector union.)

The union was able to attempt that because generations of socialist governments — including nominally Conservative ones — had increased the size and scope of the state and allowed the unions to acquire privileges that put them beyond the law. Today, with America’s prosperity already hobbled under the weight of bigger and more expansive government, we see that pattern replicating itself here. We must confront this enemy within before it crushes us.

Like their British counterparts then, American government-union members today get paid more than the workers in the private sector, enjoy better benefits, and are increasingly exempt from laws that govern everyone else. These unions are bankrupting states with lavish pay and benefit costs.

Public-sector unionism is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States. In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to allow its public employees to unionize, and other states then followed suit. In 1962, Pres. John F. Kennedy issued an executive order allowing federal employees to join unions. Since then, union membership in the public sector has grown by leaps and bounds. In January of this year, for the first time, government-sector union membership was larger than union membership in the private sector. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 22.2 million government workers in the U.S. Almost 8 million of them are unionized, compared with only 7.4 million in the private sector. These unions are at the forefront of the movement for more expansive and expensive government. They use forced dues to lobby for greater pay and better benefits.

The Center for Responsive Politics lists the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) as second on its list of top all-time political donors. The Wall Street Journal has reported that AFSCME was the largest outside spender of the 2010 election. The 1.6-million-member organization spent almost $90 million — a stunning amount given that the union had only $97.4 million in assets in 2009. AFSCME was forced to use a $16 million emergency account and take out a $2 million loan to pay for its political activities. Before the election, Larry Scanlon, head of AFSCME’s political operations, reinforced the weight of the union’s political giving, saying: “We’re the big dog.” AFSCME president Gerald McEntee also commented on the size of the contributions: “We’re spending big. And we’re damn happy it’s big. And our members are damn happy it’s big — it’s their money.”

The National Education Association (NEA) is eighth on the all-time political-donors list, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is eleventh, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) comes in at 13th. The NEA and AFT spent over $75 million on politics and lobbying in the 2009 fiscal year alone. In short, public-sector unions constitute a permanent, well-funded, self-supporting lobby for bigger government. The teachers’ unions’ investment paid off in August, when the House of Representatives prematurely reconvened to pass the Education Jobs Fund — which added $10 billion to the $53.5 billion Congress had already approved to bail out unionized teachers.

Both government and private-sector unions were gambling on Democrats’ staying in control in Washington. After the election, Scanlon told the Wall Street Journal that unions will be “more in a holding pattern than advancing anything. . . . We’re very disappointed with the results, certainly in the House.” With a Republican-controlled House, the party may end for government-employee unions. Left-leaning lawmakers passed the 2009 stimulus and other legislation, which sent $160 billion in federal tax money to the states. Much of the spending helped prevent government-sector layoffs. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) has already signaled he will introduce a resolution in January to oppose any federal bailout of state and local government-employee pension funds. At the end of November, President Obama, in what can only be described as an acknowledgment of the political winds and public sentiment, even proposed a freeze on federal employee pay. The move falls short of Republican proposals of reducing the size of the federal work force or pay cuts but is a step, although a very small one, toward reducing the pay gap between private and government workers.

Unions, both government and private, demand — and often get — exemptions from the laws and regulations government imposes on the rest of us. Examples abound. For instance, in a show of hypocrisy brazen even by teachers’-union standards, the New York City chapter of the AFT, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), received an exemption from the mandatory minimum of coverage imposed by Obamacare — a bill that, incidentally, the AFT supported.

The health-care law orders that companies that provide insurance must offer a minimum of $750,000 in coverage to each employee in 2011, $1.25 million in 2012, $2 million in 2013, and an unlimited amount by 2014. The law would adversely affect businesses that offer small health-insurance plans known as mini-meds, mostly to hourly-wage temporary workers. In some cases, premiums for these businesses could double. McDonald’s, which employs thousands of hourly workers, has already announced that it will have to cut health-care benefits to workers because of the law. Other employers could well follow suit.

In response — and probably because, for political reasons, it did not want a million minimum-wage workers kicked off their health-care plans weeks before an election — the Obama administration granted 30 waivers in the beginning of October; by mid-November that number grew to over 111. The waivers are good for one year and cover about 1 million people. The largest waiver went not to a corporate giant like McDonald’s, but to the UFT. It requested a waiver for 351,000 members in its welfare fund. These teachers are not necessarily on the breadline and wanting for medical help: The UFT welfare fund covers up to $100,000 for their prescriptions, while New York City covers hospital and primary-care-physician treatments for them and their families. Without the waiver, though, the union would need either to pay drastically increased premiums or cut the prescription-drug benefit.

The UFT lobbied heavily for the very health-care bill that its president, Michael Mulgrew, now claims may cost too much. Mere months ago he was singing a different tune. The New York State UFT website even featured a “myth vs. fact” advocacy piece promoting the health-care bill. Here’s a sample:

    Myth: Health care reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors.

    Fact: You can keep your existing insurance; reform will expand your medical options, not eliminate them.

It seems Mulgrew’s staff got the myth and fact mixed up; without the waiver, the teachers could not have kept their existing insurance.

And this isn’t the first time unions have received special treatment under Obamacare. The president’s “compromise” with Big Labor earlier this year exempted union health plans from the excise tax on high-end “Cadillac” plans until 2018.

As bad as they are, such federal exemptions and carve-outs are only the tip of the iceberg. As Heritage Foundation labor analyst James Sherk has found, federal workers earn a nominal 22 percent more per hour than their private-sector counterparts — and when benefits are included, the difference rises to 40 percent. Moreover, federal employees enjoy much greater job security (their employment has risen even during the recession). Small wonder federal workers quit their jobs at a rate only a third of that in the private sector. Many of the public-sector unions’ greatest privileges are found at the state and local level, where they have used their political muscle to gain extremely generous compensation packages at taxpayers’ expense.

Such outlandish public-employee compensation is economic folly and bad policy — so why has it gone on for so long on such a massive scale? Quite simply, because government employees have, for years, cared more about their compensation than most taxpayers have. As public-choice theory shows, organized constituencies that stand to gain concentrated benefits have a great incentive to agitate politically for those benefits. Meanwhile, the large, unorganized general population that has to pay the taxes to support those benefits has much less of an incentive to oppose them, because the costs are diffused among a much larger number of individuals, each of whom bears only a small fraction of the total.

This results in a vicious circle. Politicians kowtow to government-employees’ unions, who in turn support their election campaigns. Once those pro-union candidates are elected, they can provide more pay and benefits to the unionized government employees. The union then collects dues from its members, which enables it to give more political support to the politicians, and the cycle goes on.

But politics can only trump economic reality for so long. Ultimately, such an arrangement is not sustainable. And the American people are now waking up to the fact that they’re getting a very bad deal. A Washington Post poll in early October found that over half the population believes federal workers are overpaid; 49 percent believe they do not work as hard as their private-sector counterparts.

With state- and local-government budgets under increasing financial strain, the dangers of legally entrenched benefits to an overpaid special interest have become impossible to ignore. Cities around the country are feeling the pinch. Vallejo, Calif., was forced into bankruptcy in 2008 after all other efforts to control costs proved futile. The city spent two years trying to negotiate pay and benefit cuts with its police and firefighter unions. Those two departments made up 74 percent of the city’s $80 million budget. The unions refused to contemplate any changes, arguing that cuts would compromise public safety. And their generous compensation packages came with a built-in political defense mechanism: Vallejo’s 100 firefighters were paying $230 in dues a month, and its 140 police officers $254 a month — which means that the city was paying almost three-quarters of a million dollars each year to fund the war chest with which the unions fought budget cuts.

While Vallejo is an extreme example, many cities face similar problems, and are careening toward a similar fate. And to make things worse, the salaries and benefits that states and cities must pay today are not the only obligations threatening to bankrupt them. While there is a limit — however high — to how much governments can spend at any time, there is no limit to what pro-union politicians can promise their public-employee-union supporters. As a result, many state and local governments face enormous liabilities in the form of severely underfunded public-employee pensions.

In early October, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management showed that America’s 50 largest cities have combined pension underfunding of $574 billion. This is in addition to the liabilities already owed by the states, estimated at between $1 trillion and $3 trillion by various analysts (in our opinion, the former figure is too conservative). The taxpayers, of course, have to pay for it all. And when the bill comes due, the politicians who promised those lavish pensions are long out of office, and the pension promises are somebody else’s problem.

This cannot go on. We are now at a point similar to the one at which the U.K. found itself in the early 1980s. Fortunately, we can learn something from that example. When Margaret Thatcher went to battle with the public-sector unions, she pursued a two-pronged strategy: First she removed the unions’ privileges; then she undermined their power base by privatizing functions wherever possible, fragmenting the unions’ bargaining monopolies. If America is to shake off the burdens imposed by the public-sector-union behemoth, both of these remedies will need to be deployed, in that order.

— Iain Murray is vice president for strategy and F. Vincent Vernuccio is labor-policy counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. CEI editorial director Ivan Osorio also contributed to this article, which originally appeared in the December 20, 2010, issue of National Review.

Obama abdicates to Bill Clinton, lunacy
NYPOST
By JOHN PODHORETZ
Last Updated: 5:08 AM, December 12, 2010
Posted: 12:28 AM, December 12, 2010

The surreal week in Washington was brought to a fitting climax on Friday when Barack Obama handed the presidency over to Bill Clinton for 20 minutes. “I’m going to take off,” he said.

“You’re in good hands,” the president informed the press corps, patting his predecessor on the back. And take off the president did.

It wasn’t an official, unofficial or illicit transfer of power in any way, of course. But it somehow felt like it.

What happened here has, to my knowledge, never happened. When the president finishes speaking, whenever the president finishes speaking, the event ends. Period.

Not any longer.

President Obama can change the rules of etiquette governing his White House if he wants. The problem for him is that those rules of etiquette exist for a reason. They are intended to enforce the standing of the presidency itself. By breaching them, Obama did harm to his own standing, and at a time when he can ill afford to lose any more of his authority.

What’s more, by doing so, he overshadowed the purpose of his joint appearance with Bill Clinton by letting Bubba hold court. And hold court Clinton did, in a revelatory monologue masquerading as a press availability.

Like many retirees trying to stay active, he’s apparently taking classes. He says he spends “an hour a day trying to study this economy. And I’m not running for anything, and I don’t have a political agenda. I just — I try to figure out what to do.”

You see, “I’m out of politics now,” he said, only moments after declaring he had done “133 events” for Democratic candidates in 2010. And asked if he preferred kibitzing inside the White House to running things, Clinton said, “Oh, I had quite a good time governing.”

He even seemed to suggest that, had he defended the Democratic position in 2010 more effectively, his party would have done better at the polls.

“I don’t think I did a good enough job in this election season, obviously,” he said, a statement that initially sounds self-critical but which, at second glance, indicates that the depths of Clinton’s narcissism simply cannot be fathomed.

He even turned a question about whether he had been contacting Democrats to support the tax deal into a “there aren’t enough hours in the day” moment.

“As soon as the election was over, I took my foundation trip to Asia,” Clinton related. “I just got back from the West Coast, doing my annual trip out there . . . I flew overnight to get here today. And I have to leave again tonight . . . He asked me to come down today, because he knew I was going to — Hillary and I were appearing before the Brookings Saban Forum on the Middle East tonight.”

In case you were wondering whether he’s busy or not.

The whole business was simultaneously soporific — I had forgotten how boring Clinton could be when talking about policy — and riveting as a piece of political theater.

What was Clinton doing there, exactly? Could it be news to anyone that Clinton would support the deal, especially since it seems to come straight from the his political playbook? Not to mention that, let’s face it, Obama is his wife’s boss.

The event gobsmacked the political class. On Twitter, ABC News political director Amy E. Walter wrote, “Obama just ceded the podium to Clinton. This. Is. Awesome.” Christina Bellantoni of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call used the same punctuation trope: “This is Un. Real.”

Washington froze in wonder at this momentary trip into the past. The sheer strangeness of the sight of Clinton alone at that podium crystallized the sense that the American political system (or more specifically, the Democratic party) had spun out of control over the course of the week.

The week began with the announcement of the grand budget deal on Monday, triggering rage from Obama’s base that he had somehow “caved” to Republicans — conveniently forgetting that the Democratic party in DC had been decimated only a month earlier in the midterm election.

That led to Obama’s angry comparison on Tuesday in that same room of the Republicans with whom he had negotiated the deal as “hostage takers.” And after he was done with them, he turned to his fellow left-liberals, lecturing them on the costs of their own “sanctimony.”

On Friday, down the Mall from the White House inside the Capitol, came the weird effort to restage the climax of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with a Brooklyn-accented Vermont socialist playing James Stewart’s part.

Bernie Sanders launched a one-man filibuster against the tax deal. The problem was that Sanders had no legislative or political strategy to derail it. Instead, he just talked and talked. An hour after Clinton had finished his psychodrama, Sanders concluded his 8 hour, 32 minute peroration. “I would yield the floor,” he said, and did. I guess we know what Passover is like at the Sanders household.

The budget deal will surely go through, and the events of the past week will be forgotten. But Obama’s cavalier handling of the institutional prerogatives of the presidency will leave it a little less grand, making his own job as he goes forward a little bit harder — and, through the entirely avoidable self-inflicted error, making himself seem a little bit smaller.

Freezing Out Hope
NYTIMES
By PAUL KRUGMAN
December 2, 2010

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

About that pay freeze: the president likes to talk about “teachable moments.” Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false.

The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.

So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.

Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do. Just ask Federal Reserve officials, who have lately been more or less pleading for some help in their efforts to promote faster job growth.

Meanwhile, there’s a real deficit issue on the table: whether tax cuts for the wealthy will, as Republicans demand, be extended. Just as a reminder, over the next 75 years the cost of making those tax cuts permanent would be roughly equal to the entire expected financial shortfall of Social Security. Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.

But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

There were no comparable gestures from the other side. Instead, Senate Republicans declared that none of the rest of the legislation on the table — legislation that includes such things as a strategic arms treaty that’s vital to national security — would be acted on until the tax-cut issue was resolved, presumably on their terms.

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

So what are Democrats to do? The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they’ll have to strike out on their own. In particular, Democrats in Congress still have the ability to put their opponents on the spot — as they did on Thursday when they forced a vote on extending middle-class tax cuts, putting Republicans in the awkward position of voting against the middle class to safeguard tax cuts for the rich.

It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs.

Thus Does the Economy Grow
National Review
Keith Hennessey
November 17, 2010 4:00 A.M.

The American people did not give power to congressional Republicans; they took it away from congressional Democrats. Republicans now have an opportunity to prove that they deserve majority status — that they can operate not just as an opposition party, but as responsible leaders who are willing to make hard choices and solve problems.

The goals of an ideal economic-growth agenda are simple and well known: a large and thriving private sector and a small government; reduced government spending, which means lower taxes (or at least not higher ones) and smaller deficits; open trade and investment; taxes and regulations that don’t distort decisions, discourage capital formation or work, or provide rents to the politically powerful; deep and flexible labor markets; a reformed financial sector that channels savings to where they can do the most good; a society in which education and innovation flourish, and the most talented people in the world want to become Americans; a stable, low-regulation legal environment, in which monetary policy is sound and business decisions issue from customers and competitors rather than regulators and judges.

Practical policymaking is about moving incrementally in the right direction rather than trying to achieve the ideal all at once. It’s easy for elected officials to distract themselves with simplistic partisan fights that are politically advantageous but either make little headway toward the goal or distract from more important underlying problems. Progress on a practical growth agenda requires recognizing the limits of policy and taking political risks.

Here, then, are ten practical tips for elected Republican officials, who are torn between trying to govern as a majority party and trying to oppose President Obama’s agenda as a minority party.

One. Prioritize medium-term problems caused by the government rather than trying to push businesses to expand more rapidly. The economic-deleveraging process is painful, slow, and necessary. Tools to mitigate the pain or accelerate the recovery have failed. So, refocus: Stop trying to mess with the economy’s natural process of rebalancing. You’re only making it worse with unintended consequences. Don’t restore the homebuyer tax credit or try to put a floor on housing prices. Instead of stimulating particular types of investment, or encouraging businesses to hire, or searching for chimerical shovel-ready projects, spend your time fixing the medium-term problems caused by flawed policies. It takes political courage to admit that the short-term economic-adjustment process will be slow and painful, but additional policy distortions will only make things worse.

The government needs to worry less about the private sector and get its own house in order. There is plenty of work to be done: cutting government spending; preventing tax increases; replacing the failed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a competitive private market; enacting free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea; and undoing the worst regulatory excesses of the past two years.

Two. Set the right goal: creating the conditions for growth rather than trying to create growth. Policymakers need to get the policies right and let business leaders decide how to run their firms. Corporate leaders are sitting on unprecedented piles of cash, waiting to see what Washington will foul up next. Take Washington out of their decision-making by creating a stable, predictable, low-cost business environment. They will then decide how best to hire, invest, and expand. Your job as an elected official is not to create economic growth or jobs, it is to create the conditions under which the private sector creates growth and jobs. Stick to your lane and let business leaders stick to theirs.

Three. Spending is now even more important than taxes. Every dollar spent by the government comes from current or future taxes. If you focus your legislative energy on keeping current taxes low and do nothing to slow future spending growth, you merely shift taxes to the future. Without a spending-reduction plan, a “no-tax-increase” strategy is incomplete. Don’t let the president raise taxes now or ever, and develop your own credible and specific spending plan. Convince voters, taxpayers, business leaders, and investors that, if given more power, you would use it to solve our entitlement-spending problem. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” is a good start — federal spending should not exceed 20 percent of GDP. (I’d prefer much less.)

Four. Don’t waste all your time on nickels and dimes and process reforms; instead, slow entitlement-spending growth. Yes, it’s good to cut stimulus spending. To eliminate earmarks. To cut discretionary spending back to 2008 levels or lower, and to wage the usual Left–Right appropriations battles. These are important for restoring confidence in government, for undoing some of the worst spending excesses of the past two years, and for atoning for Republican spending sins. Such actions will be popular with many who voted to remove Democrats from power. Yet they are quantitatively insignificant in the long run.

With the retirement of the first baby boomers, the demographic wave begins to swamp us. Further delay of entitlement reform guarantees that tax increases will become part of a future solution. In Greece and France, citizens rioted because their benefits were being cut. In America, the new political force wants smaller government. Ignore the AARP’s bleats and tell the truth about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We must make new, more modest, sustainable promises to younger workers, who already know that the old promises are bogus.

We should raise the eligibility age for collecting full benefits to keep up with demographic changes. We should transform these programs from forced-savings vehicles into strong safety nets that protect future seniors from poverty. We should tell younger workers that they must start saving now to supplement that safety net, and that they will be responsible for a greater portion of their retirement and health-care costs than their parents and grandparents were for their own. We should apologize to these young Americans and their children for waiting so long and letting it get this bad, and we should permanently restructure these programs so that government does not expand over time.

Some Republicans will want to duck this political risk, to shirk their responsibility and instead fight about millions in outrageous earmarks rather than hundreds of billions in popular entitlement promises. Because we have waited too long to act, we must now either grasp the nettle or allow America to drift into European levels of taxation. Any congressman who rejects the Roadmap and refuses to propose a quantitatively comparable alternative is implicitly endorsing massive future tax increases. That’s irresponsible and anti-growth. The politics of this issue are hard but the decision should be easy.

Five. Tax levels and tax structure are both important, but levels are a higher priority. Republicans and conservatives love to debate the ideal tax reform. Structural reform is good, necessary, and very hard to enact. By all means push for an improved tax code, but not at the cost of higher tax levels or of failing to develop a credible long-term spending plan. A perfectly structured tax code that collects 25 percent of GDP is worse than a flawed tax code that collects 18 percent of GDP. Beware the siren call of the money-pump VAT.

Six. Don’t delink income-tax rates. The strategy we developed in 2001 and 2003 worked. Forced by reconciliation rules to sunset the tax cuts, we set them all to expire on the same day. President Bush reframed the top income-tax rates as small-business tax rates. This argument won the day in 2003 and 2010 and will win again as long as the expiration dates remain synchronized. Don’t fall for the trap of temporarily extending the top rates and permanently extending the others. This would guarantee future increases in the top rates.

Seven. Offer to help the president expand free trade and open investment. Rebuild the center-right free-trade coalition. The president will need to deliver a few Democrats to offset the protectionist Republicans (darn them). You can fight economic isolationism, raise American standards of living, help American allies in Latin America and Asia, cooperate with the president, and split congressional Democrats. That’s a five-part win.

Eight. Offer to help the president fight the teachers’ unions and improve elementary and secondary education. You agree more than you disagree with the president on education. He has shown a limited willingness to take on the teachers’ unions, and you need him to deliver Democratic votes to overcome a Senate filibuster. Encourage the president and reward him when he takes these risks. Prioritize education-reform legislation and pull him farther than he’s willing to go. Treat this as an opportunity for imperfect incremental improvements in law rather than perfect message bills that die in the Senate. Education is a long-term economic issue of paramount importance.

Nine. Now that cap-and-trade is dead, build a supermajority to stop the EPA from pretending it is a legislature, and then cut a deal. After the Copenhagen implosion and the death of a domestic economy-wide carbon price, the president cannot block the EPA from fouling up the economy without something to show for it. Offer a little more money to further subsidize carbon-reducing-technology R&D in exchange for legislatively stopping the EPA from taking over much of the economy. Its unchecked use of regulatory authority would create uncertainty and be a significant threat to future economic growth.

Ten. Lay the groundwork for repeal of the Obama health-care laws in 2013. Develop multiple alternatives. Pass repeal in the House. Pressure in-cycle Senate Democrats to take a stand, and make repeal a centerpiece of the 2012 policy debate. In doing so, stop playing the Medicare card. While the health-care legislation cuts Medicare spending in the wrong way, to prevent fiscal disaster we need even more Medicare and Medicaid cuts than were enacted in those laws. If you use Medicare to scare seniors and repeal Obamacare but, as a result, cannot address Medicare’s unsustainable spending path, you have made things worse, not better.

It will be tempting to cherry-pick the easy partisan fights from this list and postpone the politically risky elements for later. Republicans should instead treat voters like adults. Explain the mess we’re in and stress that the solutions will not be painless. Show the American people that you deserve the responsibility provisionally granted to you.

— Keith Hennessey, former senior White House economic adviser to Pres. George W. Bush, blogs at KeithHennessey.com. He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at Stanford Business School and Stanford Law School. This article originally appeared in the November 29, 2010, issue of National Review.

Connecticut Bucked Republican Revival
Hartford Courant
Kevin Rennie
November 7, 2010

NOW YOU KNOW

If Democrat Dan Malloy's tiny margin of victory in the race for governor holds, no elected Connecticut Republican will have a meaningful voice in state or federal government. Widespread anxiety over the economy and the future has not caused the state's voters to embrace Republican candidates in the first post-Bush election.

In the end, Connecticut voters did not attach economic travails to the oppressive cost and role of government. The Constitution State likes a lot of government. We'll know if that love affair will continue as the bill to sustain government confronts the next governor on the day he takes office in January.

Activist government has been Richard Blumenthal's calling card during his five terms as attorney general. He translated that record of press releases and news conferences into a seat in the U.S. Senate. His victory was not close to the 41-point lead he enjoyed as the campaign began, but it was convincing enough to allow him to give a graceless victory speech on Tuesday.

In two months, he'll be a 64-year-old freshman called upon to take some tough votes in the closely divided Senate. He may find that a touch harder than taking on tobacco companies.

Republican Linda McMahon sounded like a she was at the beginning, not the end, of a political career when she congratulated Blumenthal on his victory. McMahon passed an important test in her first run at public office: She could land a punch and take one, too. The Republican bench is mighty thin in Connecticut and McMahon made many friends among the faithful. She's not going back to professional wrestling, so she'll have time to court the women of Connecticut, who voted in large numbers for Blumenthal.

Republicans in the Northeast scored some big congressional race victories in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New Hampshire. Two seats in western Connecticut were on many lists of possible-to-likely Republican pickups. Democratic incumbents Jim Himes and Chris Murphy won solid victories, especially notable in a year when voters gave the boot to dozens of their Democratic colleagues.

In the 4th Congressional District, Republican Dan Debicella did everything a successful challenger needs to do in a year when the incumbent party has some explaining to do. He had enough money and help from the outside. His plan was to win the Republican and competitive towns of the district and build a lead that incumbent Himes could not overcome with Democratic votes from Bridgeport.

It didn't happen. Debicella lost Norwalk and Westport. He got trounced in Stamford. He barely won the Republican redoubt of Fairfield. The result means it will get harder to field a talented Republican challenger against Himes if he continues to seek re-election.

The 5th Congressional District was worse. State Sen. Sam Caligiuri lost his hometown of Waterbury by a staggering 10 percent in his contentious contest with Democrat Chris Murphy. Even the Farmington Valley has ceased to be a reliable pocket of Republican voters. This in a year when in other places Republicans were scoring stunning victories.

State government looks like it will be in the complete, unchallenged control of Democrats. Republicans in the General Assembly will have to find satisfaction as noisy spectators. They can expect to be ignored in the Capitol village. Maybe a heaping helping of a coalition government of Democratic elected officials and public employee unions is the only way to restore a two-party system to the state.

Many Republicans fell short on Tuesday. None leaves the field as damaged as Democratic Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz. The voting disaster in Bridgeport, where officials failed to order a sufficient number of ballots to accommodate voters, will cling to Bysiewicz if the chronic candidate tries to return to the arena.

The ambassador of democracy announced that her office had made many preparations for the day when voters go to the polls and cast ballots. It's not a new habit. We do it every year. On Monday, the former candidate for governor and attorney general (and that's just this year) declared in a long press release, "Our office and local election officials across Connecticut have been preparing for this election for over one year and we are ready."

Whatever she was ready for, it wasn't voters. She added to the chaos every day, and that will be her sorry legacy.

Divided We Fail
NYTIMES
By PAUL KRUGMAN
October 28, 2010

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?

No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

Start with the politics.

In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.

After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.

Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.

Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.

True, Mr. McConnell did say that he might be willing to work with Mr. Obama in certain circumstances — namely, if he’s willing to do a “Clintonian back flip,” taking positions that would find more support among Republicans than in his own party. Of course, this would actually hurt Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election — but that’s the point.

We might add that should any Republicans in Congress find themselves considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next spring.

Beyond the politics, the crucial difference between the 1990s and now is the state of the economy.

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the U.S. economy had strong fundamentals. Household debt was much lower than it is today. Business investment was surging, in large part thanks to the new opportunities created by information technology — opportunities that were much broader than the follies of the dot-com bubble.

In this favorable environment, economic management was mainly a matter of putting the brakes on the boom, so as to keep the economy from overheating and head off potential inflation. And this was a job the Federal Reserve could do on its own by raising interest rates, without any help from Congress.

Today’s situation is completely different. The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.

But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.

So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Great Campaign of 2010
The beauty of this year's campaign is that it actually has a point.
National Review
Charles Krauthamer
October 29, 2010 12:00 A.M.

In a radio interview that aired Monday on Univision, President Obama chided Latinos who “sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.’” Quite a uniter, urging Hispanics to exact political revenge on their enemies — presumably, for example, the nearly 60 percent of Americans who support the new Arizona immigration law.

This from a president who won’t even use “enemies” to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America — but the United States of America.

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution. Nice.

Yet press secretary Robert Gibbs’s dismay is reserved for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and the “disappointing” negativity of his admission that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

McConnell, you see, is supposed to say that he will try very hard to work with the president after the election. But it is blindingly clear that nothing of significance will be enacted. Over the next two years, Republicans will not be able to pass anything of importance to them — such as a repeal of Obamacare — because of the presidential veto. And the Democrats will be too politically weakened to advance, let alone complete, Obama’s broad transformational agenda.

That would have to await victory in 2012. Every president gets two bites at the apple: the first 18 months when he is riding the good-will honeymoon, and another shot in the first 18 months of a second term before lame-duckness sets in.

Over the next two years, the real action will be not in Congress but in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Democrats will advance their agenda on Obamacare, financial reform, and energy by means of administrative regulation, such as carbon-emissions limits imposed unilaterally by the Environmental Protection Agency.  But major congressional legislation to complete Obama’s social-democratic agenda? Not a chance. That’s why McConnell has it right. The direction of the country will be determined in November 2012 when either Obama gets a mandate to finish building his “New Foundation,” or the Republicans elect one of their own to repeal it, or whatever (by then) remains repealable.

Gibbs’s disapproving reaction to this obvious political truth is in keeping with the convention that all things partisan or ideological are to be frowned upon as “divisive.” This is pious nonsense. What is the point of a two-party democracy if not to present clear, alternative views of the role of government and, more fundamentally, the balance between liberty and equality — the central issue for any democracy?

The beauty of this year’s campaign, and the coming one in 2012, is that they actually have a point. Despite the noise, the nonsense, the distractions, the amusements — who will not miss New York’s seven-person gubernatorial circus act? — this is a deeply serious campaign about a profoundly serious political question.

Obama, to his credit, did not get elected to do midnight basketball or school uniforms. No Bill Clinton, he. Obama thinks large. He wants to be a consequential president on the order of Ronald Reagan. His forthright attempt to undo the Reagan revolution with a new burst of expansive liberal governance is the theme animating this entire election.

Democratic apologists would prefer to pretend otherwise — that it’s all about the economy and the electorate’s anger over its parlous condition. Nice try. The most recent CBS/New York Times poll shows that only one in twelve Americans blames the economy on Obama, and seven in ten think the downturn is temporary. And yet, the Democratic party is falling apart. Democrats are four points behind among women, a constituency Democrats had owned for decades; a staggering 20 points behind among independents (a 28-point swing since 2008); and 20 points behind among college graduates, giving lie to the ubiquitous liberal conceit that the Republican surge is the revenge of lumpen know-nothings.

On November 2, a punishing there will surely be. But not quite the kind Obama is encouraging.

My prediction: The Dems lose 60 House seats, eight in the Senate. Rangers in seven.

Referendum Day
Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010, is no ordinary Election Day.
National Review
Dennis Prager
October 26, 2010 12:00 A.M.

It may be commonplace for commentators to announce that every election is “the most important election in our lifetime” or something analogous. But having never said that of a presidential election — let alone an off-year election — this commentator cannot be accused of crying wolf when I say that this off-year election is not simply the most important of my lifetime. It is the most important since the Civil War.

The reason is that unlike all previous elections, this one is actually a referendum on the direction of the United States of America.

If the Democrats win:

The American people have announced, consciously or not, that they support the Democratic party’s “fundamental transformation” — those were President Obama’s words when he campaigned, and he has lived up to them — of America from a liberty-based state of limited government into an equality-based welfare state with an ever-expanding government.

America will change from a country that emphasizes producing wealth to a country that emphasizes redistribution of wealth.

The Left has never been primarily interested in creating wealth. Its primary goal always and everywhere has been to redistribute it. That so many businessmen and much of Wall Street are only now awakening to this fact is only a testament to the staggering lack of wisdom in big business.

America will produce increasingly narcissistic citizens.

For proof, just look at the virtual shutdown of much of France and the ubiquitous rioting of vast numbers of its citizens over a tiny change in its welfare state — raising the age of retirement from 60 to 62. The idea that one will work two more years before receiving benefits until death so offends vast numbers of French — including young people who have every reason to believe they will live until the age of 100 — that they are fighting it as if their very lives were in jeopardy. That is the self-centeredness that all welfare states engender in their citizens.

America will further reinforce the conviction that minorities are victims who must be protected from their fellow Americans by the state.

Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, gays, and vast numbers of women have been told by the Left and its political party that they are all persecuted by a country that is SIXHIRB — Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, and Bigoted. That America is the least SIXHIRB country in the world is a fact that has been all but drowned out by the left-wing domination of television- and print-news media, all the entertainment media, and the high schools and universities.

America will continue to undermine its unique ability to Americanize people of all ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds.

With a Democratic victory, the country’s very motto — E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One” — will continue to erode, as ethnic and racial identities rather than one American identity are increasingly celebrated. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has just announced that Germany’s experiment with multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” but the Left and its political party, the Democrats, have redoubled their efforts to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.

America will continue its economic slide.

With a Democratic victory, unsustainable debts will mount, wealth-producing companies will continue to flee from higher taxes and more regulations, energy use will be taxed in the name of environmentalist utopianism, and the government will continue to print dollars.

America will become increasingly secular.

With a Democratic victory, the Left’s goal of rendering America’s other motto — “In God We Trust” — an anachronism will come closer to fruition. Leftism is a jealous god. As in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian roots of this country are ceasing to play the indispensable moral role they have played since before America’s Founding.

And what would constitute a Democratic victory next Tuesday? Anything other than a Republican landslide. Any other result will be trumpeted by the media and by Democrats as solely a result of an economic recession and the normal losses the dominant party experiences in off-year elections.

In other words, the only way to ensure that the electoral results are interpreted as a repudiation of the growth of the state and other Democratic and leftist goals is through an enormous Republican victory. Only then will America understand that this election was not first about jobs. It was, above all, about America.

About That ‘Ditch’
President Obama speaks as if he’s had nothing to do with our economic woes.
National Review
Mona Charen
October 19, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Here’s a technique they don’t teach in campaign school: Patronize the voters. President Obama, speaking at a fundraiser in Boston, said, “People out there are still hurting very badly, and they are still scared. And so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared, and they have good reason to be.”

He might as well have reminded his listeners that you can expect little else of people who “cling” to their Bibles and guns and hostility to those who are different. If the people of the United States are losing confidence in President Obama, he wants it clearly understood that he is losing confidence in them as well. If they are considering voting for candidates of whom Obama disapproves, it’s because fear has paralyzed their capacity for reasoned judgment.

That must be it. It couldn’t be that voters gave Mr. Obama a chance and are now holding him accountable for his failures.

The recession that began in December 2007, the National Bureau of Economic Research reports, ended in June of 2009. It was the longest recession since the end of World War II. The recovery has accordingly been underway for 16 months. But unlike previous recoveries from steep downturns, this one has been barely distinguishable from the recession itself. As Michael Boskin noted, “Compared to the 6.2 percent first-year Ford recovery and 7.7 percent Reagan recovery, the Obama recovery at 3 percent is less than half speed. The unemployment rate would now be 8 percent or lower at those higher growth rates.”

As the economy has failed to rebound robustly, President Obama has persisted in speaking like a campaigner instead of an executive. Though he and his party have been in complete charge for two years, his rhetoric has scarcely changed. During the campaign, he told voters that he understood what had gone wrong and could fix it. “Our falling GDP is a direct result of eight years of the trickle-down, Wall Street–first, Main Street–last policies that have driven our economy into a ditch,” he explained in June 2008. The recession was “the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”

But that “philosophy” was replaced, was it not, by the “spread-the-wealth-around,” “leave-everything-to-Washington” approach of the liberal Democrats? Did not Mr. Obama promise, just after the 2008 victory, “a plan big enough for the challenges we face” that would bring “new ideas and new reforms that will create jobs and fuel long-term economic growth”? Did he not promise that “we’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead”? Did the Pelosi-Reid Congress not cooperate?

Those jobs have failed to materialize, but President Obama doesn’t for a second consider that his massive stimulus program, health-care overhaul, and financial regulation may have been failures. He remains stuck on blaming Republicans. The “mess” he inherited was far worse than he first realized, he explains. In fact, his metaphor hasn’t even changed: “You had a group of folks who drove the economy, drove the country, drove our car into the ditch,” he told Los Angeles Democrats in August.

President Obama thinks Americans have been stupefied by fear. But far from clouding their judgment, fear may have clarified things. They are afraid that if liberal Democrats continue to heap layers of taxes, uncertainties, and mandates on American businesses; if they continue to treat businesspeople like public enemies; if they chase fantasies like “green jobs” rather than permitting entrepreneurs to seek opportunities on their own; and if they continue to burden already weary taxpayers with ever escalating debt, the American economy — the greatest engine of prosperity in the history of the world — could be shriveled into a pathetic shell of its former self, unable even to pay the interest on its totally avoidable debt.

Mrs. Obama is right. This is “a serious moment for the country, with so much at stake.”

Public debt and payback at the polls
NYPOST
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Last Updated: 4:39 AM, October 14, 2010
Posted: 9:53 PM, October 13, 2010

We'll learn in November just how angry the public is about many things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment.

But the popular uproar pales in comparison to the sense of humiliation that we Americans are quite broke. In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits. Under a supposedly conservative administration, the deficit nearly doubled from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion.

Barack Obama apparently never figured out that he'd been elected in part because that massive Republican borrowing had sickened the American people. So he took Bush's last scheduled budget deficit of more than $500 billion -- in a Keynesian attempt to get the country out of the 2008 recession and financial panic -- and nearly tripled it by 2010.

Obama's new red ink will add more than $2.5 trillion to the national debt -- with near-trillion-dollar yearly deficits scheduled for the next decade. All of that will result in a US debt of more than $20 trillion.

What exactly is it about big deficits and our accumulated debt that is starting to enrage voters?

First, the public is tired of the nonchalant way that smarmy public officials take credit for dishing out someone else's cash without a thought of paying for it. Each week, President Obama promises another interest group more freshly borrowed billions, now euphemistically called "stimulus." But the more public money he hands out, the more voters wonder where he's getting the cash. The next time a public official puts his name on yet another earmarked federal project, let him at least confess whether it was floated with borrowed money.

Second, there's a growing sense of despair that even vastly higher income taxes can't cover the colossal shortfalls. At least the old Clinton tax rates of the 1990s balanced the budget. But should we bring them back, we'd still run a deficit of more than $1 trillion in 2011 -- given the vast rises in federal spending.

That bleak reality creates hopelessness and anger among voters, who feel elected officials are taking them for fools. The public opposes tax hikes not because they don't wish to pay down the debt, but because they suspect the revenue will be a green light for even greater deficit spending.

Third, it does no good for Beltway technocrats to explain how deficits are good at "stimulating" the economy, or why they do not really have to be paid back. Voters know that such gibberish doesn't apply to their own mortgages and credit-card bills.

Voters feel relieved when they can pay off debt and become depressed when they can't. When the government last balanced the budget in 2000 under Clinton and the GOP Congress, the country experienced as much of a psychological high as it is now experiencing humiliation over being ridiculed as a spendthrift borrower.

So national reputation and sense of self also matter. Americans are tired of hearing about inevitable Chinese ascendency and US decline.

Fourth, there is real fear that something terrible will soon come from this unsustainable spending. Interest rates are at historic lows. But if they should rise, just servicing the debt would cost even more hundreds of billions in borrowed dollars. Soon, we'll face a bleak choice of either slashing national defense or Social Security (or both).

In the coming election, all the old political pluses -- years of incumbency, entrenched seniority and pork-barrel earmarks -- are proving to be liabilities. The more public officials admit to being in control when trillions of dollars were run up, the more Americans want them gone.

We are humiliated by what we owe. If we can't pay it back, we'll at least want political payback. It's that simple this year.

Obama’s Outsized Ego:
It’s become impossible to miss the president’s high self-regard.
National Review
Jonah Goldberg
October 13, 2010 12:00 A.M.

‘That’s all right, all of you know who I am,” President Obama joked last week when the presidential seal fell off his podium during a speech in Pittsburgh.

Even though the incident made headlines for no discernible journalistic reason, it was noteworthy as a succinct example of Obama’s arrogance problem. Rather than make a self-deprecating joke, he opted to make a self-inflating one, as if to say that the title mattered less than the man.

The good news is that it’s apparently not racist to call Obama arrogant anymore. Not long ago, Keith Olbermann and other gargoyles on the parapets of establishment liberalism insisted that if you were to call attention to the fact that Obama ostentatiously holds himself in very high regard, you were really calling him “uppity,” if you know what I mean.

Now, what was once taboo has become undeniable. Even the New Yorker’s David Remnick, author of a loving biography of Obama, tells Der Spiegel, “Obama has a considerable ego.”

And here’s Time’s Mark Halperin: “With the exception of core Obama administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusion: The White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.”

Halperin’s diagnosis was inevitable, given Obama’s conviction that he represented a movement that was larger than politics or even the presidency. After all, this was the man who, as a candidate, descended on Berlin as the leader of a worldwide cause that transcended national borders. And when asked in a debate what his greatest weakness was, he plumbed his soul and answered that he was disorganized. “My desk and my office doesn’t look good,” he said. When a man runs as a national redeemer and says his biggest failing is a messy desk, that should be a warning sign that he likes himself a bit too much.

Of course, all presidents have healthy egos. You cannot become president, or even think you’re qualified to run, if you don’t think highly of yourself. Obama’s arrogance problem isn’t a matter of psychology but of strategy.

When Arkansas Democratic congressman Marion Berry complained that health-care reform felt like a replay of the Hillarycare debacle, Obama explained that the big difference between then and now was “me.” In other words, the White House’s plan for making everything work out was an unyielding confidence in the power of Obama’s own cult of personality. That’s why that cult’s high priest, David Axelrod, pursued a strategy of greeting every problem as if it were an excuse for Obama to give another big speech.

Now that the strategy has proved catastrophic, the self-pity is pouring out. Joe Biden, in a rare interregnum of lucidity, assailed his own base as whiners. Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago’s backrooms, said, “I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing — not to mention 9/11 — might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own “transformational” vanity projects.

There’s an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they’re bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they’re smaller than the honor that has temporarily been bestowed upon them, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink.

Last week, the president of the United States attacked Karl Rove by name — twice! — in a speech. He recently begged a crowd of black supporters not to “make me look bad” by staying home from the polls. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he scolded young voters that if they don’t vote, it will be proof they “weren’t serious in the first place.”

It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.

“You know, I actually believe my own bull—,” Obama told the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Richard Wolffe.

Exactly. And that’s why he’s gotten into this mess.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Broken promises
New York Post
By MICHAEL TANNER
Last Updated: 12:38 AM, October 12, 2010
Posted: 10:19 PM, October 11, 2010

This month, McDonald's warned that the health-care reform law passed in March could force it to drop health coverage for some 30,000 workers. A few days later, 3M announced that starting in 2013 it will no longer provide health-insurance coverage to its retirees.

That came on the heels of a decision by Harvard Pilgrim, Massachusetts' second-largest insurer, to drop its Medicare Advantage health-insurance program at year's end, forcing 22,000 senior citizens in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine back into traditional Medicare. Then there's the Principal Financial Group, which recently decided it was getting out of the health-insurance business. Roughly 840,000 people will likely lose their insurance as a result.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

During the debate over health-care reform, President Obama told us nearly every day that if you had health insurance now and were satisfied with it, you'd be able to keep it. It should be clear by now that that statement was, well, less than accurate.

In fact, it's becoming harder to find anyone who can keep their current insurance.

As is well known by now, the health-care reform law con tains both an individual and an employer mandate. By 2014, employers with 50 or more workers must provide insurance or pay a fine. Individuals who don't get insurance through work or a government program must buy it on their own or they, too, will be fined.

And not just any insurance will do: To qualify, a policy must meet a host of new regulatory requirements and offer a minimum, government-devised, set of benefits.

It now looks like the secretary of Health and Human Services will grant McDonald's a waiver, so those 30,000 workers won't lose out thanks to ObamaCare. If so, the company will join the teachers unions and other politically connected winners of exemptions.

But other businesses that offer limited-benefit plans known as "mini-meds" may not be so lucky. Those plans have cheaper premiums because they, among other things, restrict the number of covered doctor visits or impose a maximum on insurance payouts in a year. They are particularly popular with part-time, seasonal and low-wage workers in the restaurant and retail industries.

But ObamaCare's new regulations will all but eliminate those plans, so more than a million of those vulnerable workers will likely lose their current insurance. Some could be forced into Medicaid, while others will have to buy much pricier policies than they have today.

It may or may not be true that such plans are "crappy," as Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic put it in defending ObamaCare. (A lot of McDonald's employees may think they are better than nothing.) But the point is that, contrary to the Obama administration's repeated promises, those workers won't, in fact, be able to stick with their current insurance.

Even more extensive health plans may fail to meet the law's requirements.

An internal Health and Human Services Department study estimates that more than two-thirds of companies could be forced to change their coverage. For small firms, the total could reach 80 percent.

Meeting the new requirements will likely drive up what many businesses pay for insurance. If they drive those costs high enough, companies may decide it's cheaper to drop coverage and pay the penalty. In fact, a number of large companies -- including Verizon, AT&T, Caterpillar and John Deere -- are reportedly considering such a move.

The math is fairly simple: AT&T, for example, paid $2.4 billion last year in medical costs for its 283,000 workers. If it dropped insurance and instead paid the penalty, $2,000 per year for each uninsured employee, the fines would total less than $600 million -- for a savings of about $1.8 billion a year.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least 10 million workers could lose their employer-provided insurance because firms decide it's cheaper to "pay" than to "play."

People who buy policies on their own, rather than get ting them through work, are better off -- but only slightly. Individuals who have insurance are "grandfathered in," meaning they won't have to change their insurance to meet the new minimum-benefit requirements. But if they make any changes to their current plan, they lose that grandfathered status and must bring their plan into compliance with the full range of federal rules, even if that makes the new plan more expensive or includes benefits the person doesn't want.

Worse, the grandfathering may not last long -- because insurers may stop offering the old policies. After all, they can't enroll new customers in them (aside from spouses and kids added to a "grandfathered" individual) -- and "holdover" products quickly become a burden to any company. Over time, most noncomplying plans will simply fade away.

As the Harvard Pilgrim example also makes clear, millions of seniors are also at risk of losing their current plan.

Some 10.2 million seniors -- 22 percent of all Medicare recipients -- are enrolled in the Medicare Advantage program, which lets them get their Medicare coverage via private plans and enjoy benefits not included in traditional Medicare.

The ObamaCare law slashes federal payments to insurers for offering Medicare Advantage plans. Naturally, many insurers are expected to stop participating in the program. Estimates suggest that a quarter to half of all seniors using the program could be forced out of their plan and back into traditional Medicare.

Also at risk are the more than 45 million Americans who use Health Savings Accounts, Flexible Spending Accounts and Health Reimbursement Accounts -- each of which looks to be undercut, in one way or another, by the ObamaCare law.

Finally, starting in 2018, so-called "Cadillac insurance plans" -- policies with an actuarial value in excess of $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for families -- get hit with a 40 percent excise tax. That tax is specifically designed to force employers to reduce benefits in plans that the government considers too generous.

That first year, an estimated 12 percent of all workers will have policies hit by the tax. And the tax is designed to cover more health plans each year -- meaning that every year more and more workers will find their insurance plans falling subject to the tax and their benefits reduced.

Given how demonstrably false the "keep your insur ance" promise turned out to be, it is no wonder that Americans are more than a bit skeptical when Democrats tell us how great ObamaCare will ultimately be.

Michael Tanner, a Cato Institute senior fellow, is co-author of "Healthy Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It."

Visigoths at the Gate? Democrats demonize the tea party at their peril.
National Review
Charles Krauthammer
September 24, 2010 12:00 A.M.

When facing a tsunami, what do you do? Pray, and tell yourself stories. I am not privy to the Democrats’ private prayers, but I do hear the stories they’re telling themselves. The new meme is that there’s a civil war raging in the Republican party. The tea party will wreck it from within and prove to be the Democrats’ salvation.

I don’t blame anyone for seeking a deus ex machina when about to be swept out to sea. But this salvation du jour is flimsier than most.

In fact, the big political story of the year is the contrary: that a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement with no recognized leadership or discernible organization has been merged with such relative ease into the Republican party.  The tea party could have become Perot ’92, an anti-government movement that spurned the Republicans, went third party, and cost George H. W. Bush reelection, ending twelve years of Republican rule. Had the tea party gone that route, it would have drained the Republican party of its most mobilized supporters and deprived Republicans of the sweeping victory that awaits them on November 2.

Instead, it planted its flag within the party and, with its remarkable energy, created the enthusiasm gap. Such gaps are measurable. This one is a chasm. This year’s turnout for the Democratic primaries (as a percentage of eligible voters) was the lowest ever recorded. Republican turnout was the highest since 1970.

True, Christine O’Donnell’s nomination in Delaware may cost the Republicans an otherwise safe seat (and possibly control of the Senate), and Sharron Angle in Nevada is running only neck and neck with an unpopular Harry Reid. On balance, however, the tea-party contribution is a large net plus, with its support for such strong candidates as Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Joe Miller of Alaska, and Mike Lee of Utah. Even Rand Paul, he of the shaky start in Kentucky, sports an eight-point lead.

Nonetheless, some Democrats have convinced themselves that they have found the issue with which to salvage 2010. “President Obama’s political advisers,” reports the New York Times, “are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by tea party extremists.”

Sweet irony. Fear-over-hope rides again, this time with Democrats in the saddle warning darkly about “the Republican tea party” (Joe Biden). Message: Vote Democratic and save the nation from a Visigoth mob with a barely concealed tinge of racism.

First, this is so at variance with reality that it’s hard to believe even liberals believe it. The largest tea-party event yet was the recent Glenn Beck rally on the Mall. The hordes descending turned out to be several hundred thousand cheerful folks in what, by all accounts, had the feel of a church picnic. And they left the place nearly spotless — the first revolution in recorded history that collected its own trash.

Second, the general public is fairly evenly split in its views of the tea party. It experiences none of the horror that liberals do — and think others should. Moreover, the electorate supports by two to one the tea-party signature issues of smaller government and lower taxes.

Third, you would hardly vote against the Republican in your state just because there might be a (perceived) too-conservative Republican running somewhere else. How would, say, Paul running in Kentucky deter someone from voting for Mark Kirk in Illinois? Or, to flip the parties, will anyone in Nevada refuse to vote for Harry Reid because Chris Coons, once a self-described “bearded Marxist,” is running as a Democrat in Delaware?

Fourth, what sane Democrat wants to nationalize an election at a time of 9.6 percent unemployment and such disappointment with Obama that just this week several of his own dreamy 2008 supporters turned on him at a cozy town hall? The Democrats’ only hope is to run local campaigns on local issues. That’s how John Murtha’s former district director hung on to his boss’s seat in a special election in Pennsylvania in May.

Newt Gingrich had to work hard — getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America — to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-tea-party campaign would do that for the Republicans — nationalize the election, gratis — in 2010. As a very recent former president — now preferred (Public Policy Polling, September 1) in bellwether Ohio over the current one by 50 percent to 42 percent — once said: Bring ’em on.

Deep in the Obama Bunker
Amidst a potentially historic revolt against the status quo, the former agent of change offers only more of the same.
Rich Lowry, National Review
September 8, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Who is trapped in a deeper, more inaccessible bunker? The 33 Chilean miners getting food, water, and messages from the outside world through a tiny borehole, or Rahm Emanuel and the fellas at the White House who have apparently not yet received word that the American public is summoning itself for a shattering rejection of the administration’s spending?

Pres. Barack Obama floated another $50 billion in infrastructure spending in a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee to union supporters as part of his highly touted, long-delayed “pivot to jobs.” But this is not a pivot, let alone to jobs, and makes you wonder if the Obama team realizes it’s not February 2009 anymore.

The administration already lavished more than $100 billion on infrastructure in its first stimulus bill. This new round of proposed spending is supposedly different because it will be “fully paid for,” in Obama’s words, but Congress has been struggling to reauthorize the transportation bill that expired more than a year ago precisely because it’s so hard to cover its costs. As for jobs, only the handful of believers in the “summer of recovery” will think that another shot of infrastructure spending will do anything for the job market soon, if ever.

During the past week, the entire political-media establishment awakened to the catastrophe awaiting Democrats in the fall. A CNN poll found that among voters who dislike both parties — one in five voters — Republicans now lead by 38 points. That’s a landslide, among voters who don’t even like them!

Among independents, according to CNN, Republicans lead by an outlandish 62 to 30. Polls are routinely picking up unheard-of GOP leads of roughly ten points in the generic ballot. To give you an idea of the scale of that advantage, if Republicans lead the generic ballot by “just” five points, Alan Abramowitz of Emory University forecasts a Republican pickup of 49 House seats, ten more than what’s needed to take the majority.

To beat back the coming wave, Obama is resorting to tactics and arguments that will only augment it. He wants to write George W. Bush’s name onto the 2010 ballot, even though he’s been safely retired back to Texas for two years. In a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, 58 percent think Republicans will pursue different policies from Bush. Obama’s insistence otherwise smacks of backward-looking blame-shifting.

The other day, Obama congratulated himself on his campaigning ability. But his signature strength on the stump is derision. He doesn’t just say that Republicans drove the proverbial car into the ditch; he says they’re sipping a proverbial Slurpee while Democrats work to get it out. In Milwaukee, he said his opponents have been talking about him “like a dog,” a line that both demeaned the arguments of the opposition and revealed an unflattering flash of self-pity.

Obama is not even pretending anymore to represent a different kind of politics. On anything not involving foreign policy, it’s slashing partisanship all the time. For the first time in the Washington Post/ABC News poll, a majority says he has not brought needed change to Washington, once his trademark promise. The White House counts on Obama’s fired-up and contemptuous riffs playing to the base. What about the rest of the country?

Obama’s domestic program has become one enormous wedge issue, the classic definition of which is anything that drives a “wedge” between the bulk of the electorate and a politician’s core supporters. While most people want less of Obama’s program, his base wants more. Obama could ease off his spending to try to take the edge off the brewing backlash, but that would anger his supporters. Instead, he promises his union-member allies yet more infrastructure projects. His new proposals for business-tax breaks are paid for not with spending cuts, but with countervailing business-tax increases, lest the Left throw a fit.

Amidst a potentially historic revolt against the status quo, the former agent of change offers only more of the same.

Our Distracted Commander-in-Chief
Some presidents may not like being wartime leaders. But they don’t get to decide; history does.
NATIONAL REVIEW
Charles Krauthammer
September 3, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Many have charged that President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan ten months from now is hampering our war effort. But now it’s official. In a stunning statement last week, Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Conway admitted that the July 2011 date is “probably giving our enemy sustenance.”

A remarkably bold charge for an active military officer. It stops just short of suggesting aiding and abetting the enemy. Yet the observation is obvious: It is surely harder to prevail in a war that hinges on the allegiance of the locals when they hear the U.S. president talk of beginning a withdrawal that will ultimately leave them to the mercies of the Taliban.

How did Obama come to this decision? “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser at the time told Peter Baker of the New York Times. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate congressmen, pass health-care reform, and thereby maintain a president’s political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out.

But Obama sees his wartime duties as a threat to his domestic agenda. These wars are a distraction, unwanted interference with his true vocation — transforming America.

Such an impression could only have been reinforced when, given the opportunity in his Oval Office address this week to dispel the widespread perception in Afghanistan that America is leaving, Obama doubled down on his ambivalence. After giving a nod to the pace of troop reductions being conditions-based, he declared with his characteristic “but make no mistake” that “this transition will begin — because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”

These are the words of a man who wants out. Most emphatically on Iraq, where from the beginning Obama has made clear that his objective is simply ending combat operations by an arbitrary deadline — despite the fact that a new government has not been formed and all our hard-won success hangs in the balance — in order to address the more paramount concern: keeping a campaign promise. Time to “turn the page” and turn America elsewhere.

At first you’d think that turning is to Afghanistan. But Obama added nothing to his previously stated Afghan policy while emphatically reiterating July 2011 as the beginning of the end, or more diplomatically, of the “transition.”

Well then, at least you’d then expect some vision of his larger foreign policy. After all, this was his first Oval Office address on the subject. What is the meaning, if any, of the Iraq and Afghan wars? And what of the clouds that are forming beyond those theaters: the drone-war escalation in Pakistan, the rise of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the danger of Somalia falling to al-Shabaab, and the threat of renewed civil war in Islamist Sudan as a referendum on independence for southern Christians and animists approaches?

This was the stage for Obama to explain what follows the now-abolished Global War on Terror. Where does America stand on the spreading threats to stability, decency, and U.S. interests from the Horn of Africa to the Hindu Kush?

On this, not a word. Instead, Obama made a strange and clumsy segue into a pep talk on the economy. Rebuilding it, he declared, “must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.” This in a speech ostensibly about the two wars he is directing. He could not have made more clear where his priorities lie, and how much he sees foreign policy — war policy — as subordinate to his domestic ambitions.

Unfortunately, what for Obama is a distraction is life or death for U.S. troops now on patrol in Kandahar province. Some presidents may not like being wartime leaders. But they don’t get to decide. History does. Obama needs to accept the role. It’s not just the U.S. military, as Baker reports, that is “worried he is not fully invested in the cause.” Our allies, too, are experiencing doubt. And our enemies are drawing sustenance.

The Last Refuge of the Liberal: 
Labeling all opponents “bigots” allows the Left to forgo real debates.
National Review Online
Charles Krauthammer
August 27, 2010 12:00 P.M.

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

● Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness, and debt, as represented by the tea-party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

● Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

● Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

● Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage, and reject a Ground Zero mosque.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the tea party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless, and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the Left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) Illegal immigration should be illegal; (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty; and (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible ground for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence of a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

Who Makes the Laws, Anyway?
The difference between administrators and legislators has been blurred.
National Review
Charles Krauthammer
August 6, 2010 12:00 A.M.

 
Last week, a draft memo surfaced from the Homeland Security Department suggesting ways to administratively circumvent existing law to allow several categories of illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and, indeed, for some to be granted permanent residency. Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed “in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves.

Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate. Administrators administer the law; they don’t change it. That’s the legislators’ job.

When questioned, the White House downplayed the toxic memo, leaving the impression that it was nothing more than ruminations emanating from the bowels of Homeland Security. But the administration is engaged in an even more significant power play elsewhere.

A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions if it could demonstrate that they threaten human health and the environment. The Obama EPA made precisely that finding, thereby granting itself a huge expansion of power and, noted the Washington Post, sending “a message to Congress.”

It was not a terribly subtle message: Enact cap-and-trade legislation — taxing and heavily regulating carbon-based energy — or the EPA will do so unilaterally. As Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch noted, such a finding “is likely to help light a fire under Congress to get moving.”

Well, Congress didn’t. Despite the “regulatory cudgel” (to again quote the Post) the administration has been waving, the Senate has repeatedly refused to acquiesce.

Good for the Senate. But what to do when the executive is passively aggressive rather than actively so? Take border security. Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) reports that President Obama told him about pressure from the political left and its concern that if the border is secured, Republicans will have no incentive to support comprehensive reform (i.e., amnesty). Indeed, Homeland Security’s abandonment of the “virtual fence” on the southern border, combined with its lack of interest in completing the real fence that today covers only one-third of the border, gives the distinct impression that serious border enforcement is not a high administration priority absent some Republican quid pro quo on comprehensive reform.

But border enforcement is not something to be manipulated in return for legislative favors. It is, as the administration vociferously argued in court in the Arizona case, the federal executive’s constitutional responsibility. Its job is to faithfully execute the laws. Non-execution is a dereliction of duty.

This contagion of executive willfulness is not confined to the federal government or to Democrats. In Virginia, the Republican attorney general has just issued a ruling allowing police to ask about one’s immigration status when stopped for some other reason (e.g., a traffic violation). Heretofore, police could inquire only upon arrest and imprisonment.

Whatever your views about the result, the process is suspect. If police latitude regarding the interrogation of possible illegal immigrants is to be expanded, that’s an issue for the legislature, not the executive.

How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country’s nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.

So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.

Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was) and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That’s bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.

That’s called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people’s representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.

Minimize It, Don’t Supersize it
The voters want supersized government put on a crash diet.
National Review
August 2, 2010 12:00 A.M.
 
Let’s put government on a diet. That’s what voters seem to be saying in response to the Barack Obama Democrats’ vast expansion of the size and scope of government.

Evidence comes from pollster Scott Rasmussen. He asked likely voters — his usual sample, which tilts more Republican than all adults — whether increased government spending is good or bad for the economy.

The results were unambiguous. Good for the country? Twenty-eight percent. Bad for the country? Fifty-two percent.

He got similar results when he asked whether increasing the federal debt is good or bad for the economy. Likely voters believe it’s bad for the economy by a 56 percent to 17 percent margin.

There is some dissent, from the voters Rasmussen labels the Political Class. These are voters who trust the judgment of America’s political leaders over that of the American people, who do not believe the federal government has become a special-interest group, and who don’t believe government and big business work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

In other words, they’re the people the New York Times’s David Brooks refers to as “the educated class.” Or those voters in Cambridge and Brookline who stuck with the Democratic nominee in the Massachusetts special Senate election last January.

Two-thirds of Rasmussen’s Political Class voters believe that increased government spending would be good for the economy. These voters are the sort John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he wrote: “Practical men, who believe themselves quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

The defunct economist in this case is Keynes himself, who argued in the 1930s for the government to hire some men to dig holes and others to fill them up. Political Class voters, who wouldn’t dream of digging holes themselves, still think this is a good idea. Most Americans don’t.

Further evidence comes from a poll conducted by Magellan Data and Mapping Strategies in the always key state of Ohio, where unemployment is well above the national average and job growth has been minimal for a decade.

Registered voters were asked to choose responses to Ohio state government’s $8 billion budget deficit. Only 16 percent favored increasing taxes, while 27 percent wanted to cut government services and a whopping 50 percent favored reducing the compensation packages of government workers.

Critics might complain that that third alternative is a false choice, in that salary and benefit cuts would not eliminate the deficit by themselves. But even when voters were given a second choice among the three alternatives, only 16 percent more favored increasing taxes. Which is another way of saying two-thirds of Ohio voters are dead set against tax increases.

These responses suggest a vivid awareness of the fact that while some 8 million private-sector jobs have been lost in the recession, the number of public-sector jobs has remained almost completely steady. The Obama Democrats’ stimulus package, which directed one-third of its money to state and local governments, in effect insulated the public sector from the economic hurricane that has swept through the private sector.

#pageIt’s time, Ohio voters seem to be saying, for government workers to share the pain the people who pay their salaries have been suffering.

Rasmussen’s likely voters have similar views. By a 69 percent to 15 percent margin, they believe cutting taxes is a better way to create jobs than more government spending. By a 65 percent to 23 percent margin, they believe that decisions made by business owners seeking to grow their businesses will do more to create jobs than decisions by government officials.

Over the last 18 months, Americans have watched as government takes months or years to create public-orks jobs, and over the last three months, we have watched government’s plodding response to the BP gulf oil spill.

Government has grown vastly more expensive but has not acted with the speed and suppleness that it did under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. The parasite is growing, while the host has been losing weight.

In the meantime, Democrats are preparing to let the George W. Bush tax cuts on high earners — on investors and job creators — expire. They want more revenue to feed the government beast.

Most voters take a different view. They want to put government on a diet — to slim it down, make it more lithe and limber, and stop it from choking off the recovery of the private-sector economy.

Baked in the Cake:  Everything you needed to know about Obama could have been learned from his campaign.
Weekly Standard
BY Peter Wehner
For August 2, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 43

During the 2008 campaign, it was clear that Barack Obama would govern as a liberal on several important issues. But it seemed possible that, at least in other areas, he might govern as what he insisted he was: something of a centrist, pragmatic and reasonable, nonideological and relatively bipartisan.

It was not to be. And it turns out that there were several moments in the campaign that revealed what an Obama presidency would be like. They were not the result of grand policy pronouncements or statements made in major speeches. Rather, they were more often than not words spoken off-the-cuff, in a more informal setting, and in several instances they were not meant to be made public. But they were; and they provided an insight into Obama’s core beliefs, a sneak preview of coming attractions.

 Here are three such moments.

‘I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.’

Obama said those words to Joe Wurzelbacher in an unscripted exchange in Ohio on October 14, 2008. They opened a window into Obama’s view of the role of government and his conception of social justice. He seems to be inclined toward equality of results, not just equality of opportunity—and he sees government as the instrument to bring that about.

Like many modern-day liberals, Obama seems to resent wealthy people—or at least those wealthy people who don’t support him or who earned their wealth through enterprises other than, say, multimillion dollar movie deals. Taxing the well-to-do is not simply an economic policy; Obama views it as a moral good, a social virtue, a noble sacrifice. The role of the state is to reduce inequality even if it comes at the expense of growth and prosperity.

The president and his administration’s unyielding attacks on the “rich,” on CEOs, corporations, and wealth creation, are therefore predictable and inevitable. They are a manifestation of his economic and social views. Although it was late in coming around, the Chamber of Commerce has finally realized that Obama’s policies constitute a “general attack on our free enterprise system.”

‘For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.’

These words were uttered not by Barack Obama but by his wife Michelle in a campaign appearance in Milwaukee on February 18, 2008, in support of her husband’s presidential bid. It’s reasonable to conclude, however, that this statement represented both of their worldviews.

We have seen their attitude toward America play out in different ways, most especially in Obama’s worldwide apology tour, where he criticized America for actions past and present, for reasons real and imagined. He has criticized America on everything from committing “torture” to dragging our feet on global warming, from our selective promotion of democracy to unilateralism, from disrespecting Europe to showing lack of respect to the Muslim world. Even the attacks on September 11, 2001, count against America. According to Obama, they “led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. All this has bred more fear and more mistrust.”

The belief that America is run-of-the-mill is also reflected in Obama’s April 2009 statement in France when he was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” Obama said, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” That is a skillful politician’s way of saying he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism.

When the Iranian regime was crushing the freedom movement, Obama explained his reluctance to “meddle” in the affairs of Iran because of what America did there more than a half-century ago. And so it is no surprise to find a critical view of America reflected in the words of Obama diplomatic aides such as Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner who, when asked if he brought up the Arizona immigration law in his discussions with the Chinese, said, “We brought it up early and often. It was mentioned in the first session, and as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination, and that these are issues very much being debated in our own society.”

What’s more, Obama constantly places himself above his country; the text and subtext of his remarks send an unmistakable message: President Obama understands the grievances other nations (including our sworn enemies) have against America, and he’s acting as swiftly as he can to move us from darkness into light. If we “occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals,” Obama has said, “that strengthens our hand.” But the president’s more-than-occasional confessions are why dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez have applauded Obama’s portrayal of America.

‘It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.’

Obama made this off-the-record comment about people in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest to a group of wealthy donors in San Francisco on April 6, 2008. What we learned is that Obama is an elitist. He feels superior to and sorry for the unenlightened masses. And sometimes, when they oppose his policies, he and his top aides get downright nasty.

Consider the White House and Democratic reaction to the town hall meetings in the summer of 2009, when Americans registered their strong opposition to Obamacare. These citizens were described as “angry mobs,” as Nazis and clones of Timothy McVeigh, who employed “un-American” tactics. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said the contrast between Obama—whom Emanuel described as “reasoned, calm, looking like an adult in the room”—and the protesters would work to the administration’s advantage. “I think the public looks at screaming, swastikas, attacks.  .  .  .  It’s not a persuasive argument,” Emanuel said. “If anything, it is the opposite.”

Then, in August 2009, a USA Today poll showed that the town hall meeting made Americans more, not less, sympathetic to the protesters’ views—with the margin a staggering 2-to-1 among independents. In response White House adviser David Axelrod questioned the survey’s methodology.

Obama’s comments in San Francisco also revealed a man who views small town Americans as somewhat crude and bigoted, harboring racist sentiments. When things don’t go well for them, they turn on “people who aren’t like them.” Obama’s party has displayed this attitude in responding to the Tea Party movement, which it has repeatedly attempted to link to racism.

The view from Obama and his team seems to be that no rational person could possibly oppose his policies; they are self-evidently and by definition right and wise. And so there must be some other explanation for what is happening—ignorance, foolishness, partisanship, bigotry, or some combination of these. Obama clearly believed it was his job, if he became president, to lead people out of their benighted state to broad, enlightened uplands.

Doubtless many factors have contributed to shaping the Obama outlook. But if there is one thing above any others that explains it, it is that he is a product of the academy—in his case Columbia University, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago.

It is hardly a secret that the ethos of modern universities is hostile toward America and in favor of redistributing wealth and centralizing power. The academy is inhabited by people of considerable, if insecure, arrogance. They are often closed to alternative points of view. The predominant view among academics is that we should transcend country, nationality, and religion. They tend to be contemptuous of mainstream American values and of the general public.

By academic standards, Barack Obama is mild in his views. He is no Ward Churchill or William Ayers. No successful national politician could be. Still, Obama’s years on elite campuses left a deep imprint on him. They helped shape his attitudes, his mindset, and his presuppositions. And so it is not surprising that Obama is drawn to a negative narrative of America’s history and its role in the world; that he has an instinctive antipathy toward business and the free market; and that he is emotionally distant from, and in his unguarded moments somewhat contemptuous of, small-town Americans—the kind of folk who cling to their guns and their Bibles in times of distress.

The warning signs were all there.

Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy
Everyone knew most of the press corps was hoping for Obama in 2008. Newly released emails show that hundreds of them were actively working to promote him.

By FRED BARNES
22 July 2010

When I'm talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.

My response has usually been to say, yes, there's liberal bias in the media, but there's no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn't be the case.

Now, after learning I'd been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I'm inclined to amend my response. Not to say there's a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.

My guess is that this and other revelations about JournoList will deepen the distrust of the national press. True, participants in the online clubhouse appear to hail chiefly from the media's self-identified left wing. But its founder, Ezra Klein, is a prominent writer for the Washington Post. Mr. Klein shut down JournoList last month—a wise decision.

It's thanks to Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller website that we know something about JournoList, though the emails among the liberal journalists were meant to be private. (Mr. Carlson hasn't revealed how he obtained the emails.) In June, the Daily Caller disclosed a series of JournoList musings by David Weigel, then a Washington Post blogger assigned to cover conservatives. His emails showed he loathes conservatives, and he was subsequently fired.

This week, Mr. Carlson produced a series of JournoList emails from April 2008, when Barack Obama's presidential bid was in serious jeopardy. Videos of the antiwhite, anti-American sermons of his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had surfaced, first on ABC and then other networks.

WSJ.com Columnist John Fund reports on a media scandal. Also, Columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady breaks down the President's pledge to end bailouts and analyzes the Fed Chairman's latest visit to Capitol Hill.

JournoList contributors discussed strategies to aid Mr. Obama by deflecting the controversy. They went public with a letter criticizing an ABC interview of Mr. Obama that dwelled on his association with Mr. Wright. Then, Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent proposed attacking Mr. Obama's critics as racists. He wrote:

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. . . . This makes them 'sputter' with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

No one on JournoList endorsed the Ackerman plan. But rather than object on ethical grounds, they voiced concern that the strategy would fail or possibly backfire.

Among journalists in general, there's always been a herd instinct. Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator and Democratic presidential candidate, once described political writers as birds on a telephone wire. When one bird flew to the wire across the street, they all did. In Mr. Ackerman's case, I'm glad none of the birds joined him across the street.

We've often seen media groupthink in campaigns. In 1980, most of the media decided that President Jimmy Carter was being mean-spirited in his re-election effort with his harsh denunciations of Ronald Reagan, his Republican opponent. The media turned the meanness issue into major story. In 1992, journalists treated the economy as if it were dead in the water, though a recovery from a mild recession had begun early the previous year. I could go on.

I think JournoList is—or was—fundamentally different, and not simply because one of its members proposed to make palpably false accusations. As best I can tell, those involved in JournoList considered themselves part of a team. And their goal was to make sure the team won. In 2008, this was Mr. Obama's team. More recently, the goal seems to have been to defeat the conservative team.

Until JournoList came along, liberal journalists were rarely part of a team. Neither are conservative journalists today, so far as I know. If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.

My experience with other conservative journalists is that they are loners. One of the most famous conservative columnists of the past half-century, the late Robert Novak, is a good example. I knew him well for 35 years. He didn't tell me what stories he was working on nor ask what I was planning to write. He never mentioned how we might promote Republicans or aid the conservative cause, nor did I.

What was particularly pathetic about the scheme to smear Mr. Obama's critics was labeling them as racists. The accusation has been made so frequently in recent years, without evidence to back it up, that it has little effect. It's now the last refuge of liberal scoundrels.

The first call I got after the Daily Caller unearthed the emails involving me was from Karl Rove. He said he wanted to talk to his "fellow racist." We laughed about this. But the whole episode was also sad. I didn't sputter at the thought of being called a racist. But it was sad to see what journalism, or at least a segment of it, had come to.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Obama’s Second Act
If he wins another term, he’ll only get worse.
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
Charles Krauthammer
16 July 2010 

In the political marketplace, there’s now a run on Obama shares. The Left is disappointed with the president. Independents are abandoning him in droves. And the Right is already dancing on his political grave, salivating about November, when, his own press secretary admitted Sunday, Democrats might lose the House.

I have a warning for Republicans: Don’t underestimate Barack Obama.

Consider what he has already achieved. Obamacare alone makes his presidency historic. It has irrevocably changed one-sixth of the economy, put the country inexorably on the road to national health care, and, as acknowledged by Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus but few others, begun one of the most massive wealth redistributions in U.S. history.

Second, there is major financial reform, which passed Congress on Thursday. Economists argue whether it will prevent meltdowns and bailouts as promised. But there is no argument that it will give the government unprecedented power in the financial marketplace. Its 2,300 pages will create at least 243 new regulations that will affect not only, as many assume, the big banks, but just about everyone — including, as noted in one summary (the Wall Street Journal), “storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, homebuyers and credit bureaus.”

Third is the near $1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in U.S. history. And that’s not even counting nationalizing the student-loan program, regulating carbon emissions by EPA fiat, and still-fitful attempts to pass cap-and-trade through Congress.

But Obama’s most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, and the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed.

These are not mere temporary countercyclical measures. They are structural deficits because, as everyone from Obama on down admits, the real money is in entitlements, most specifically Medicare and Medicaid. But Obamacare freezes these out as a source of debt reduction. Obamacare’s $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $600 billion in tax increases are siphoned away for a new entitlement — and no longer available for deficit reduction.

The result? There just isn’t enough to cut elsewhere to prevent national insolvency. That will require massive tax increases — most likely a European-style value-added tax. Just as President Reagan cut taxes to starve the federal government and prevent massive growth in spending, Obama’s wild spending — and quarantining health-care costs from providing possible relief — will necessitate huge tax increases.

The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious, and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years as president, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. (Typical Washington Post headline: “For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over” — and that was six months into his presidency!) Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo — the list is long. The critics don’t understand the big picture. Obama’s transformational agenda is a play in two acts.

Act One is over. The stimulus, Obamacare, and financial reform have exhausted his first-term mandate. It will bear no more heavy lifting. And the Democrats will pay the price for ideological overreaching by losing one or both houses, whether de facto or de jure. The rest of the first term will be spent consolidating these gains (writing the regulations, for example) and preparing for Act Two.

The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education, and “comprehensive” immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.

That’s why there’s so much tension between Obama and the congressional Democrats. For Obama, 2010 matters little. If the Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will likely have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as his foil for his 1996 reelection campaign.

Obama is down, but it’s very early in the play. Like Reagan, he came here to do things. And he’s done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do, he knows, must await his next 500 days — those that come after reelection.

So 2012 is the real prize. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans. Republicans underestimate him at their peril.

Calling O's deficit bluff
NYPOST
By ERIC CANTOR
Last Updated: 1:16 AM, July 6, 2010
Posted: 12:58 AM, July 6, 2010

Catching flak from our European allies at last month's G-20 Summit over our failure to rein in spending, President Obama once again pointed his now-familiar finger elsewhere.

"Next year, when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country," he asserted, "I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt step up -- because I'm calling their bluff."

Coming from a president who two years ago captured the minds and imaginations of millions by promising to unite the country, this divisive rhetoric is self-defeating. It's also profoundly ironic.

Since the president was sworn into office, America has run up red ink at an astounding rate of $4.9 billion a day. Yet the president continues to kick the can down the road -- and there's not much road left.

The president could have come clean to the American people about the serious nature of Washington's spending problem, could have discussed the need to build consensus around some tough but reasonable spending cuts. Instead, he ducked any debate on spending by promising to "call the bluff" of a straw man of his own creation.

The president's bravado suggests that he is laying the groundwork to justify sweeping new tax hikes hitting small businesses and the middle class. If the past is prologue, the administration will brand those who oppose these tax increases as opponents of deficit reduction.

Nothing could be further from the truth. When we need private industry to grow and the American people to invest and spend, it's far more reasonable to close the deficit with sensible spending reductions than with tax hikes.

Republicans were fired from the majority years ago largely because we failed to live up to our own standard of being wise guardians of taxpayer dollars. That was then. Today, a new generation of conservative leaders is ready to make the genu inely tough choices necessary to pull our country back from the fiscal cliff.

To set the wheels in motion for effective deficit reduction, Republicans over the last five weeks have brought over $115 billion in spending cuts to the House floor. But the Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, rejected them.

We're not going to give up. In fact, I challenge the president, Pelosi and Hoyer to work together with us to cut spending now:

* Start by scheduling a clean up-or-down vote on each of the program terminations that Obama recommended in his budget this year. Not every member will agree with each proposal, but they each deserve a fair debate and a fair vote. Can't a Democratic Congress even give fair consideration to spending cuts proposed by a Democratic president?

* Second, announce a bipartisan agreement that we will not proceed with any new "stimulus" spending that is not paid for with spending cuts somewhere else. For example, rather than just spending another $34 billion on unemployment benefits, let's pay for it by cutting other, less important, spending. (It's the refusal of congressional Democrats to find offsetting cuts that is now preventing the extension of jobless benefits.)

* Third, freeze the pay of federal civilian employees for one year. Millions of private-sector workers have taken pay cuts; there's no reason why the government can't impose its own measure of austerity. This proposal already has bipartisan support: 18 House Democrats recently supported a similar measure offered by Republicans.

I can already hear the critics saying that all this would have only a small impact on our deficit. But that's just the thinking that got us into this mess. Yes, these are small steps toward getting our fiscal house in order -- but each is long overdue, and it's a start.

Perhaps if both parties demonstrate the courage to take a few small steps to restrain spending today, we can take a few bigger steps tomorrow.

Our nation is at a crossroads. We have to do everything we can to leave our children and grandchildren a better America than the one left to us. Our way of life is being threatened by an economy with too much debt because of a government that spends too much and taxes too much.

We can turn things around. But we have to start taking action today. Mr. President, we aren't bluffing; we're sincere about cutting the deficit immediately. We hope you are, too.

Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is the House Republican whip.

Barack Obama, Dreamer in Chief:  Vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.
Charles Krauthammer, nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010, The Washington Post Writers Group.
June 18, 2010 12:00 A.M.
 
Pres. Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic-mitigation accounting. It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new clean-green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command, and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol — which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot — as with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions?

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean-energy industry. That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.

There’s a reason petroleum is such a durable fuel. It’s not, as Obama fatuously suggested, because of oil-company lobbying, but because it is very portable, energy-dense, and easy to use.

But this doesn’t stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate a superior substitute into being. His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?

Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of clichés comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless. The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it. Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.

Similarly, we don’t know how to make renewables that match the efficiency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deepwater) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama decried in Tuesday’s speech.

“Part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Obama, is “because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”

Running out of places on land? What about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the less-known National Petroleum Reserve — 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope, near the existing pipeline and designated nearly a century ago for petroleum development — that have been shut down by the federal government?

Running out of shallow-water sources? How about the Pacific Ocean, a not-inconsiderable body of water, and its vast U.S. coastline? That’s been off-limits to new drilling for three decades.

We haven’t run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We’ve been run off them by environmentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future “even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.” Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions, and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which.

That’s why Tuesday’s speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The Gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations. That passes for vision, and vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

$7-a-gallon gas?
NYPOST
By BEN LIEBERMAN
Last Updated: 4:22 AM, June 18, 2010
Posted: 12:02 AM, June 18, 2010

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.

That's a Harvard University study's estimate of the per-gallon price of the president's global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.

So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?

Good question, because such measures wouldn't do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.

The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now-famous words, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste -- and what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."

That sure was true of global-warming policy, and especially the cap-and-trade bill. Many observers thought the measure, introduced last year in the House by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), was dead: The American people didn't seem to think that the so-called global-warming crisis justified a price-hiking, job-killing, economy-crushing redesign of our energy supply amid a fragile recovery. Passing another major piece of legislation, one every bit as unpopular as ObamaCare, appeared unlikely in an election year.

So Obama and congressional proponents of cap-and-trade spent several months rebranding it -- downplaying the global-warming rationale and claiming that it was really a jobs bill (the so-called green jobs were supposed to spring from the new clean-energy economy) and an energy-independence bill (that will somehow stick it to OPEC).

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) even reportedly declined to introduce their new cap-and-trade proposal in the Senate on Earth Day, because they wanted to de-emphasize the global-warming message. Instead, Kerry called the American Power Act "a plan that creates jobs and sets us on a course toward energy independence and economic resurgence."

But the new marketing strategy wasn't working. Few believe the green-jobs hype -- with good reason. In Spain, for example, green jobs have been an expensive bust, with each position created requiring, on average, $774,000 in government subsidies. And the logic of getting us off oil imports via a unilateral measure that punishes American coal, oil and natural gas never made any sense at all.

Now the president is repackaging cap-and-trade -- again -- as a long-term solution to the oil spill. But it's the same old agenda, a huge energy tax that will raise the cost of gasoline and electricity high enough so that we're forced to use less.

The logic linking cap-and-trade to the spill in the Gulf should frighten anyone who owns a car or truck. Such measures force up the price at the pump -- Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs thinks it "may require gas prices greater than $7 a gallon by 2020" to meet Obama's stated goal of reducing emissions 14 percent from the transportation sector.

Of course, doing so would reduce gasoline use and also raise market share for hugely expensive alternative fuels and vehicles that could never compete otherwise. Less gasoline demand means less need for drilling and thus a slightly reduced chance of a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon spill -- but only slightly. Oil will still be a vital part of America's energy mix.

Oil-spill risks should be addressed directly -- such as finding out why the leak occurred and requiring new preventive measures or preparing an improved cleanup plan for the next incident. Cap-and-trade is no fix and would cause trillions of dollars in collateral economic damage along the way.

Emanuel was wrong. The administration shouldn't view each crisis -- including the oil spill -- as an opportunity to be exploited, but as a problem to be addressed. And America can't afford $7-a-gallon gas.

A great big gusher of presidential goo
By JONAH GOLDBERG
NYPOST
Last Updated: 8:50 AM, June 16, 2010
Posted: 11:56 PM, June 15, 2010

In a peculiar instance of synchronicity, President Obama's Oval Office speech to the nation last night resembled the very calamity it was intended to address: Like the oil spewing into the Gulf, it began as a focused and narrow stream of words -- and quickly spread out into an amorphous cloud of goo.

What started as a just-the-facts-ma'am explanation quickly got caught up in political currents -- by the end we were treated to bromides about the Greatest Generation and putting a man on the moon and preposterous insinuations that the Red Chinese will turn Green before us. (China, mind you, is the country where the rivers burn, the air is crunchy and the government is building a new, filthy, coal-fired power plant every 10 days for the next decade).

Last night we saw just the latest installment of "Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste," written by Rahm Emanuel and performed by The One. The immediate goal: to create the political climate where BP will bend over and say "thank you sir, may I have another" in perpetuity. Beyond that, to browbeat the public and Congress into accepting some version of cap-and-trade legislation that will export jobs and raise energy prices in the middle of a recession.

If we could defeat Hitler, we can hike your utility bills! If we could put a man on the moon, we can put an American manufacturing job in India! Yes, we can!

This points to the intractability of the political mess Obama is in. The White House desperately wants to focus on job creation and fiscal responsibility, or at least appear that way. But Obama's agenda incontinently blows in the opposite direction, and every other direction as well.

The president spoke movingly about the lost livelihoods of fishermen in the Gulf. "You know, for generations, men and women who call this region home have made their living from the water. That living is now in jeopardy. I've talked to shrimpers and fishermen who don't know how they're going to support their families this year. I've seen empty docks and restaurants with fewer customers . . ."

All too true. But what about the tens of thousands more Gulf residents who will see their jobs and customers vanish thanks to Obama's drilling moratorium, which may send offshore rigs to Africa for years to come? People have been working in those fields for generations, too.

Obama, in a now tiredly familiar attempt to blame the government's failures on the Bush administration, insisted last night that the government won't see oil companies as a "partner" anymore. I'm all for breaking the clinch between big government and big business -- but is Barack Obama, the de facto CEO of two car companies and an insurance firm, really the one to be tut-tutting such incestuousness?

Never mind the irony that BP was one of the original boosters of cap-and-trade, what to make of his rousing defense of the energy legislation passed by the House? Huzzah, quoth Obama, it "makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America's businesses."

Translation: Government will subsidize the likes of GE and Archer Daniels Midland to produce energy in ways that aren't profitable in the market. The "profits" will all come from the taxpayer.

Every calamity, according to the president, proves that his prepackaged campaign agenda is exactly what America needs to fix things. He somehow managed to convince a lot of people that we needed to overhaul health care in order to deal with the financial crisis. Now he wants us to believe that switching to a "green economy" will somehow ensure that we won't have environmental disasters like this anymore.

This is, quite simply, absurd. And it's also sad. The Obama presidency itself is becoming diffuse and amorphous -- because it is becoming clear the president is in over his head.

He admitted last night that he has no clue how we'll switch from fossil fuels to the new clean-energy nirvana. He conceded we don't "what that looks like" and we don't "know how to get there."

All he knows how to do is to keep talking.

JonahNRO@Gmail.com

The Blame Goes Back to Bubba
NYPOST
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Last Updated: 12:25 AM, June 15, 2010
Posted: 12:10 AM, June 15, 2010

The Gulf oil spill that's so bedeviling President Obama has its roots back in the Clinton years.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed the Outer Continental Shelf Deepwater Royalty Relief Act, which exempted oil wells drilled deep in the Gulf from the normal royalty payments to the government.

Usually, these payments amount to between 12 percent and 16 percent of their revenues, so the exemption did a great deal to catalyze drilling in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Deepwater Horizon well, where drilling began in 2001, was one of those catalyzed by the Clinton legislation. Overall, deepwater oil production in the Gulf shot up from 42 million barrels in 1996 to 348 million in 2004.

The latter figure represents about 6 percent of total US oil consumption and about 15 percent of domestic production. Natural-gas production from deepwater Gulf drilling increased tenfold during the same period.

The legislation was pushed avidly by Republicans in Congress, particularly those representing the very Gulf states now engulfed by the BP spill.

Unfortunately, the Clinton administration -- and the Bush and Obama administrations that followed -- failed to consider seriously what to do if things went wrong.

In contrast to the licensing of nuclear power plants, which we require to spend vast amounts of time and money to develop failsafe systems, very little thought was given (obviously) to how to stop an explosion that would trigger a vast spill, how to plug the hole or how to stop the oil from reaching Gulf and Atlantic coast beaches. Instead, the industry took its cue from Washington and went full speed ahead into drilling and production in deepwater wells.

This decision to embark on vast Gulf oil drilling was, of course, the correct one. But the failure to think through how to avert a disaster like what's now on our hands is the height of irresponsibility.

All three administrations -- Clinton, Bush, and Obama -- bear the blame for this abject failure. None took the danger of a massive spill seriously or sought to hold up the massive expansion of offshore drilling until failsafe measures could be developed.

Ironically, the crisis that arguably put Obama in the White House was also rooted in the Clinton era: The road to the mortgage meltdown begins with the '90s drive to greatly loosen mortgage-lending standards in the pursuit of increasing homeownership.

As we suffer now for past failures of foresight and planning, perhaps it's time to start taking closer looks at what Washington's doing now that may lead to future disasters.

Since the only job growth is in government jobs...
Another 'job offer'
By KIRSTEN POWERS
NYPOST
Last Updated: 4:37 AM, June 4, 2010
Posted: 11:53 PM, June 3, 2010

After first stonewalling, the White House yester day confirmed that it tried to lure Andrew Romanoff out of the Colorado Senate primary with an administration job, to help its preferred candidate, incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet.

Sound familiar?

The Denver Post ran a story on the rumored job offer last September -- but White House spokesman Adam Abrams said then, "Romanoff was never offered a position within the administration."

Under the Bill Clinton standard, that's true: There was no formal "offer." But Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina's e-mail outlined in great specificity three government jobs that happened to be open, should Romanoff (who'd previously been denied an administration job) decide not to run.

The White House's reasoning is migraine-inducing: It insists it didn't offer a job -- but also that the president has an interest in influencing party primaries. But if the president wasn't offering a job, then what was he doing to prevent a primary contest?

He was offering a job. Stop insulting our intelligence.

But that's not the worst. To justify the presidential interest in influencing party primaries, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs yesterday noted, "We went through a contested primary, and they aren't fun things." Huh?

By that logic, Obama should have been pushed out of the 2008 primaries to avoid a contentious fight and give the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, a walk to the nomination. At the outset, she was by far the favored candidate.  Does the White House not see the irony in trying to entice two insurgents (Romanoff and Pennsylvania's Joe Sestak) out of challenging the establishment choice?

Many Beltway talkers are claiming that the president actually has the "right," as head of the party, to clear the field in primaries. Sorry, the only people with the right to choose a nominee are primary voters. We live in the United States, not some Middle Eastern dictatorship (or, apparently, Chicago).

When I voted for Obama, I voted for him to be president, not for him to use government jobs or perks to drive out qualified challengers in Democratic primaries.

It's maddening to hear the claim that a president has a "right" to use taxpayer-funded jobs (or even an advisory-board post) to consolidate his political power. One of the most frustrating problems in American politics is the power of incumbency, which leaves our government a sewer of career politicians who are nearly impossible to depose once they get elected.

What the president has a "right" to do is to use his own time to help a candidate raise money or campaign. He has no right whatsoever to dole out to his cronies jobs that American taxpayers expect to be filled with qualified candidates.

Then there's the blather that voters don't care about this stuff or actually expect the president to behave this way.

Wrong again. In the last year, we've seen revolts against backroom deals over health reform (anger that may have been the final straw in electing Sen. Scott Brown). Here in New York, Democrats revolted when the White House tried to pressure Gov. Paterson from running to keep his job. Yes, Paterson later dropped out on his own -- but the Marist poll found 62 percent of voters and 51 percent of Democrats saying the administration should butt out.

Indeed, the recent revelations raise the question of just what offers the White House made to clear the way for Andrew Cuomo -- and for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Here's an idea for the Obama White House: Stop meddling. You do your job, and let the American voters do theirs.

A Storyteller Loses the Story Line
By MAUREEN DOWD, NYTIMES
June 1, 2010

WASHINGTON

It’s not a good narrative arc: The man who walked on water is now ensnared by a crisis under water.

One little hole a mile down on the ocean floor, so deep it seems like hell spewing up its sulfurous smoke, has turned the thrilling saga of “The One” into the gurgling horror of “The Abyss.” (Thank goodness James Cameron, the director of “The Abyss,” came to Washington Tuesday to help the administration figure out how to cap the BP well. What’s next? Sending down the Transformers and Megan Fox?)

With as much as 34 million gallons of oil inking the Gulf of Mexico, “Yes we can” has been downgraded to “Will we ever?”

It’s impossible not to feel sorry for President Obama, pummeled by the cascading disasters, at home and abroad, unleashed by two war-mongering oil men — plus scary escalations by Israel, Iran and North Korea. (Dick Cheney’s dark influence is still belching like the well. BP just brought on a new public relations executive: Anne Womack-Kolton, who served as Cheney’s campaign press secretary in 2004 and worked in W.’s White House and at the Energy Department.)

Obama wanted to be a transformative president and now the presidency is transforming him.

Instead of buoyant, he seems put upon. Instead of the fairy dust of hopefulness, there’s the bitter draught of helplessness.

His battle against water is taking on Biblical — even Job-like — proportions.

Besides the roiling water below, the skies opened from above and gusting, lightning-streaked rains drowned the president’s plans to give a Memorial Day speech at the Lincoln cemetery near Chicago. On the evening news, pictures of the president standing under an umbrella shooing people off the soggy field were a sad contrast to the wildly sentimental Joe Biden presiding, hand on heart, over a sunny and moving Memorial Day commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery.

After suffering more indignities — a S.U.V. in his motorcade blew a tire on I-55 outside of Chicago — a tired-looking Obama returned to Andrews Air Force Base at 7:30 Monday night and went to an area called the “tactical fitness center” to give his remarks to 150 or so subdued service members who had been rounded up by the White House advance team.

As The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut wryly wrote in her pool report: “It has been years since President Obama attended a rally like the one that took place here Monday night: sparsely attended, thrown together at the last minute, involving people who were not expecting to be there. We’re partying like it’s Obama circa 2005.”

The oil won’t stop flowing, but the magic has.

Barack Obama is a guy who is accustomed to having stuff go right for him. He’s gotten a lot of breaks: two opponents in his U.S. Senate race in Illinois felled by personal scandals; a mismanaged presidential campaign by Hillary Clinton; an economic collapse that set the stage for a historic win, memorably described by the satiric Onion newspaper as “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Reporters grilled Robert Gibbs at his White House briefing on Tuesday about the president’s strange inability to convey passion over a historical environmental disaster. This was underscored by Obama’s perfunctory drop-by to a sanitized beach in Grand Isle, La. Despite his recent ode about growing up near an ocean, he didn’t bother to meet with the regular folks who have lost their seafaring livelihoods.

After Gibbs asserted that his boss was “enraged” at BP, CBS News’s Chip Reid skeptically pressed: “Have we really seen rage from the president on this? I think most people would say no.”

“I’ve seen rage from him, Chip,” Gibbs insisted. “I have.”

Reid asked for an exact definition of what constitutes emotion for Obama: “Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do?”

Gibbs mentioned the words “clenched jaw” and the president’s admonition to “plug the damn hole.”

How does a man who invented himself as a force by writing one of the most eloquent memoirs in political history lose control of his own narrative?

In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama showed passion, lyricism, empathy and an exquisite understanding of character and psychological context — all the qualities that he has stubbornly resisted showing as president. It was a book that promised a president who could see into the hearts of other people. But there’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed.

This president has made it clear that he’s not comfortable outside whatever domain he’s defined. But unless he wants his story to be marred by a pattern of passivity, detachment, acquiescence and compromise, he’d better seize control of the story line of his White House years. Woe-is-me is not an attractive narrative.

The Great Consolidation
NYTIMES
By ROSS DOUTHAT
May 16, 2010

This feels like a populist moment. Americans are Tea Partying. Greeks are rioting. Incumbents are being thrown out; the Federal Reserve is facing an audit; Goldman Sachs is facing prosecution. In Kentucky, Ron Paul’s son might be about to win a Republican Senate primary.

But look through these anti-establishment theatrics to the deep structures of political and economic power, and suddenly the surge of populism feels like so much sound and fury, obscuring the real story of our time. From Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the first place.

Consider the European situation. For a week after Greece’s fiscal meltdown began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European Union, the folly of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the Continent’s governing class to anticipate the crisis.

But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble “the kind of thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car in the forest at the end of a bloody war,” in the words of the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. If the bailout succeeds, the E.U.’s authority over its member states will be dramatically enhanced — and a crisis created by hasty, elite-driven integration will have led, inexorably, to further integration and a more powerful elite.

This trajectory should be familiar to Americans. The panic of 2008 happened, in part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private interests for the latter to be allowed to fail. But everything we did to halt the panic, and all the legislation we’ve passed, has only strengthened the symbiosis.

From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a vast new array of public-private partnerships — empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.’s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never before.

A similar, quieter consolidation has taken place in the realm of national security. After campaigning against the Bush administration’s foreign-policy overreach, President Obama has retained nearly all of the war powers that George Bush took up in the wake of 9/11.

Yes, some of the previous administration’s more sweeping claims have been repudiated. But the basic post-9/11 architecture of executive power — expansive powers to detain, interrogate and assassinate, claimed for the duration of an open-ended war — looks destined to endure for presidencies to come.

Taken case by case, many of these policy choices are perfectly defensible. Taken as a whole, they suggest a system that only knows how to move in one direction. If consolidation creates a crisis, the answer is further consolidation. If economic centralization has unintended consequences, then you need political centralization to clean up the mess. If a government conspicuously fails to prevent a terrorist attack or a real estate bubble, then obviously it needs to be given more powers to prevent the next one, or the one after that.

The C.I.A. and F.B.I. didn’t stop 9/11, so now we have the Department of Homeland Security. Decades of government subsidies for homebuyers helped create the housing crash, so now the government is subsidizing the auto industry, the green-energy industry, the health care sector ...

The pattern applies to personnel as well as policy. If Robert Rubin’s mistakes helped create an out-of-control financial sector, then naturally you need Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers — Rubin’s protégés — to set things right. After all, who else are you going to trust with all that consolidated power? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich? Sarah Palin?

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

Pat Buchanan: End of La Dolce Vita
New Hampshire Union Leader
By PAT BUCHANAN
11 May 2010

Are Europe and America headed to where Athens is today?

To answer the question, consider what brought Greece to where she is -- running a deficit of 14 percent of gross domestic product with a debt approaching 100 percent, with Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Great Britain not that far behind.

How did this happen?

Protected by the United States through a half-century of Cold War, Europe cut back on defense and ratcheted up spending for La Dolce Vita. All of Europe adopted universal health care. All voted in a shorter workweek, a higher minimum wage, greater job security, earlier retirements and munificent pensions.

As the cradle-to-grave welfare states rose, an ever-increasing share of the labor force left the private sector for the security of the public sector.

Tax-consumers, the beneficiaries of the welfare states and the bureaucrats that ran them, grew in number, as taxpayers declined as a share of the labor force. Though Greece was far from the most productive nation in Europe, Athens led the parade.

After the baby boom ended, the pill arrived in the 1960s. Then came abortion on demand in the 1970s.

The fertility rate of Greece and every European nation fell below the 2.1 births per woman needed to replace an existing population. Greece's birth rate has been below zero population growth for three decades.

Result: In year 2000, Greece had just under 11 million people and a median age of 38. In 2050, Greece is projected to have just under 11 million people, but the median age will be 50.

Were Greece a company, the solution would be bankruptcy. But Greece is a country. And a bailout of $141 billion is being put together by the European Union and International Monetary Fund.

Why? Because should Greece decide not to take a chain saw to her welfare state, but walk away from her debts and default, she would blow a hole in the balance sheets of the biggest banks in Europe.

Then the banks would have to be bailed out.

Seeing Greece's bondholders being burned, terrified holders of Portuguese and Spanish debt would start dumping their bonds, forcing Madrid and Lisbon to pay a higher interest rate to sell new bonds and roll over the old ones coming due. Rather than savage their welfare state programs and risk riots in the streets and a massacre at the polls, Madrid and Lisbon, too, might look agreeably at default.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, though exasperated with the Greeks, is urging Germans to back the $141 billion bailout: "Nothing less than the future of Europe ... is at stake."

Merkel believes there is no alternative. But there is an alternative -- a restructuring of Greece's debt or a default where the holders of Greek bonds suffer the fate of the holders of bonds from Lehman Brothers and General Motors.

Inevitably, this is what is going to happen.

For how long will Greeks work longer, retire later and live on smaller pensions, so holders of Greek bonds can get their interest payments right on time?

The EU and IMF may, with the bailout of Greece, kick this can up the road. But the crisis will return. For the nations of Europe have made commitments beyond their capacity to keep, given their growing debts and aging populations.

And America is not all that far behind.

While the federal deficit is not 14 percent of GDP, it was 10 percent in 2009 and may reach 11 percent in 2010. Trillion-dollar deficits are projected through the decade, bringing the public debt -- held by citizens, companies, foreign governments and sovereign wealth funds -- close to 100 percent of GDP.

And the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and federal pensions rival those of Western Europe.

States like California and New York, larger than Greece, look a lot like Greece. Were it not for the scores of billions dished out to them by Obama's stimulus, some of these states would have come close to the brink New York City went over in 1975.

Many of these states are today laying off teachers, letting felons out of prison and looking hard at the salaries and pensions of civil servants. While the temptation is great for Washington to bail them out again, the United States government itself has begun to attract the concerned notice of holders of U.S. debt.

That we are witnessing Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" seems undeniable.

La Dolce Vita is coming to an end. The ever-expanding European and American welfare states of the 20th century will contract in the 21st. Some have already begun to shrink. A time of austerity is at hand.

Indeed, what is about to be tested is democracy itself.

Can democracies that attracted universal applause in the golden years of rising expectations impose upon their citizens the enduring and painful sacrifices necessary in a time of retrenchment?

We are about to find out.

EDITORIAL: In bed with Fannie and Freddie
Why 'financial reform' doesn't touch the troubled lenders
Washington Times
Monday, May 10, 2010

America's greatest economic liability is also the greatest political liability for the Democratic congressional leadership. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have exposed taxpayers to $5.4 trillion in risk from loan guarantees, with taxpayers already having covered $126 billion in losses. So far, Democrats have been reluctant to include tough reforms on the profligate government-sponsored enterprises in the financial regulation package currently making its way through the legislative process.

A group of Republican senators led by John McCain, Arizona Republican, last week proposed to give the housing market giants five years either to become self-sufficient or to go out of business. They would also reduce the total amount of losses that taxpayers would cover to $400 billion. Rather than debate the particulars of this idea, Democratic leaders appear more interested in burying any and all such changes.

And no wonder. Renewed scrutiny of the two institutions would remind the public that senior Democrats were in bed, sometimes literally, with Fannie and Freddie. House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts spent a number of years blocking various attempts to regulate government-sponsored enterprises, famously saying that that he did not see any "safety and soundness" problems worthy of note. There was good reason for Mr. Frank to look the other way, given his history of close association with Herb Moses, Fannie's assistant director for product initiatives from 1991 to 1998.

Many other top Democrats were friends with financial benefits from Fannie and Freddie. Franklin Raines, a former Carter- and Clinton-administration official, pocketed $90 million as Fannie Mae's CEO - a figure bolstered by the agency's overstated earnings. Former Clinton appointee Jamie Gorelick was paid $26 million as Fannie's vice chairman. Veteran Democratic honcho Jim Johnson, who led Sen. John Kerry's vice presidential search committee and temporarily led Mr. Obama's veep search, enjoyed $21 million. Mr. Johnson later resigned from the Obama team when he was identified as a "friend of Angelo" - one of those who were given below-market loans directly by Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo. Among other "friends of Angelo" were Mr. Raines, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. Fannie Mae was the biggest buyer of the outrageously risky mortgages that proved to be Countrywide's undoing.

Fannie and Freddie's campaign donations almost always have gone heavily to Democrats. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Barack Obama was the second-largest recipient of contributions from Fannie and Freddie sources during his brief Senate tenure. Former president Bill Clinton said it best in 2008. "I think the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

Congressional Democrats should drop their resistance to reform proposals and make a break from their sordid history with these toxic firms.

The populist-in chief's posh pals
New York Post
By MICHELLE MALKIN
Last Updated: 4:41 AM, May 1, 2010
Posted: 12:59 AM, May 1, 2010

President Obama spoke the most clarifying 10 words of his adminis tration this week: "I think at some point you have made enough money." Peddling financial regulatory reform at a rally in Quincy, Ill., Obama then ad-libbed peculiar definitions of what he called the "American way" and the profit motive: "[Y]ou can just keep on making it if you're providing a good product or providing good service. We don't want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy."

Fundamental lesson of Capitalism 101: Governments and bureaucrats don't make what people want and need. They only get in the way. It is individuals, working together without mandate or central design, who produce the world's goods and services. They make what people desire and demand for themselves, not what Obama and his imperial overlords ordain that the masses should have.

As usual, Obama's populist demagoguery is telling in its omissions and selectivity. While he lectures on the morality of salary caps for everyone else, his own cabinet is filled with fabulously wealthy CEOs and statist creatures who have parlayed government employment into private gain as lobbyists, consultants and advisers and then back again to public stints. Revolving doors have always grown the Beltway economy.

To wit: Austan Goolsbee, head of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is the 15th wealthiest member of the Obama administration, with assets valued at between $1,146,000 to $2,715,000. He also pulled in a University of Chicago salary of $465,000 and other wages and honoraria worth $93,000, according to the Washingtonian magazine.

What "good" did he provide? The government research fellow and Obama campaign adviser was a champion of extending credit to the un-creditworthy. In a 2007 op-ed for The New York Times, he derided those who called subprime mortgages "irresponsible." He preferred to describe them as "innovations in the mortgage market" to expand the pool of homebuyers. Now this wrong-headed academic who espoused government policies that fed the housing feeding frenzy is in charge of fixing the loose-credit mess he advocated. This is the "American way"?

After 16 years in Congress, four years in the Clinton administration as budget director and chief of staff and a lifetime of schmoozing in the halls of power, Obama's CIA director, Leon Panetta, cashed in big. He's sitting on up to $4 million in assets. While he has zero experience in intelligence matters, he has extensive experience in parlaying his past political tours of duty into lucrative speaking gigs, consulting fees and stock options.

By Obama's definition, First Lady Michelle Obama is a model capitalist. After serving with real-estate mogul Valerie Jarrett in Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, Mrs. Obama took a post at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Jarrett was serving as vice-chair of the medical center's board of trustees. Mrs. Obama was promoted in 2005 after her husband won his US Senate race with Jarrett's invaluable aid. As "vice president for community and external affairs" and head of the "business diversity program," her annual compensation nearly tripled from $122,000 in 2004 to $317,000 in 2005. Even after she went on leave in 2007 to help her husband on the presidential campaign trail, the hospital paid Mrs. Obama $62,709 in 2008, prompting one skeptic to ask: "We know this is Chicago, but isn't $63,000 quite a lot for a no-show job?"

Jarrett, of course, is now White House senior adviser to the chief spender of other people's money.

If there were any doubts left about the Obamas' ideological commitment to wealth redistribution and a command-and-control economy, those doubts have been thoroughly removed. We have a commander-in-chief who presumes to know when you have earned "enough," who believes that only those who provide what he deems "good" products and services should "keep on making it" and who has determined that the role of American entrepreneurs is not to pursue their own self-interest, but to fulfill their "core" responsibility as dutiful growers of the economy.

That famous mock-up poster of Obama as the creepy socialist Joker never seemed more apt.

States’ Rights (and Wrongs)
How about this: Your state can legalize “breathing while undocumented” if my state can legalize “breathing while uninsured.”
Jonah Goldberg, National Review
April 30, 2010 12:00 A.M.
 
I’ve got a proposal for you. I’d call it a “modest proposal” but, thanks to Jonathan Swift, when writers say that, it means they’re about to propose something absolutely bonkers to make a satirical point along the lines of “Let’s eat Irish babies!” or “Joe Biden should be president!”

My proposal might still be crazy, but it’s not satire.

Okay, okay, I can tell you’re keen to hear it.

But wait. First, a peeve.

The president and his party jammed through health-care legislation that was objectively unpopular with the American people. It remains unpopular. It stipulates that it is essentially illegal not to have health insurance. A dozen or so states are suing on the grounds that the federal government doesn’t have the right to force people to buy health insurance.

The response from backers of Obamacare has been one of sanctimonious outrage and derision. To pick just one example, the current issue of The New Republic features an essay claiming this legal effrontery marks a return of the Confederacy’s hated and racist doctrine of nullification. The “new nullifiers,” exclaims the preening liberal historian Sean Wilentz, “would have us repudiate the sacrifices of American history — and subvert the constitutional pillars of American nationhood.”

Forget that when George W. Bush was in office, standing athwart the government was all the rage without conjuring any Confederate demons. Liberals talked about Blue State secession from “Jesusland” with condescending glee. The New York Times ran a love letter to the “states’ rights left” by contributor Jim Holt arguing that “states’ rights has not always been the intellectual property of reactionaries.”

But forget all that. Consider that even now there are more than 30 so-called “sanctuary cities” that formally ban their own police from enforcing federal immigration laws or even cooperating with federal officers trying to enforce them. But not a peep about “nullification” from the Wilentzers.

Ditto when it comes to the countless, constitutionally dubious, hippy-dippy “Nuclear Free Zones” that dot the American landscape in defiance of the federal government’s fundamental rights to provide for the common defense and ensure interstate commerce.

But — and you know where this is going — when the state of Arizona opts to pass a popular law requiring Arizonan officials to comply with and enforce federal law, suddenly all of the usual suspects come completely unglued. Police will be allowed to ask people for their “papers”! Gird your loins for Götterdämmerung!

Forget being a throwback to the Confederacy; the sanctimony choir cries out that Arizona has rematerialized as 1940 Berlin, albeit with a drier climate. Ironic, since the requirement that legal immigrants carry their “papers” at all times was signed into law by FDR that very year.

Linda Greenhouse, longtime Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times and currently a Yale law professor, penned an op-ed for the Times in which she emoted that Arizona has become a Nazi-esque “police state” where it is a crime to be “breathing while undocumented.”

Now, I don’t want to dwell on Greenhouse’s gas, since she not only misread the law, she literally read the wrong law (an earlier draft that was changed before passage, actually).

But that bit about “breathing while undocumented” strikes a chord. Because, you see, under Obamacare, it is now something of a crime to “breath while uninsured,” too. In fact, if you really want to hear the government say “Deine papieren, bitte!” just wait until that law is fully implemented, assuming the “new nullifiers” fail.

So here’s where that wacky proposal I mentioned earlier comes in. Let’s throw it all back to the states. Arizona can be an illegal-immigrant-free zone and New York can hold an open house for everyone. The same goes for health care. States that want universal health care can provide it, including to illegal immigrants (or should I just say “immigrants”?). Other states can let the market rule. The feds would save piles of money that can go to paying off our credit cards (or to antiterrorism, to deal with undocumented New Yorkers/terrorists).

If it were up to me, the feds would still enforce basic civil rights, provide for the common defense and protect interstate commerce (sorry, nuke-free zones!), but beyond that, let freedom reign.

Unfortunately, for progressives who must always have their way, that’s crazier than a “Biden 2016” bumper sticker.

Obamacare: The new battles ahead
NYPOST
By MICHAEL TANNER
Last Updated: 12:55 AM, March 23, 2010
Posted: 12:07 AM, March 23, 2010

For better or worse (mostly worse), The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act is now law. After 14 months of bitter, divisive and partisan debate, Democratic leaders in Congress scraped together barely enough votes to pass the president's health-care bill. Whatever you think of the merits of the plan, it was an impressive legislative achievement.

But anyone who believes that we're done arguing about health-care reform just hasn't been paying attention. The battle now shifts to other venues.

The Senate: The only reason that many House Democrats voted for the bill was that they simultaneously passed another bill that amended the main bill. (Yes, it's confusing: House leaders made it that way on purpose to give their vulnerable members political cover.)

That bill now goes to the Senate, where Democrats will use a parliamentary tactic called reconciliation to avoid a Republican filibuster. But reconciliation entails its own arcane parliamentary requirements -- which may prove a bigger hurdle than the Republicans.

In fact, even as the House vote was taking place, Senate Republicans were pointing out that the bill reduced the deficit by using an increase in Social Security tax revenue -- something explicitly prohibited under reconciliation rules.

Other provisions are expected to run afoul of the "Byrd rule," which bars any provision that does not directly affect the budget. Democratic leaders, such as Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, have acknowledged that large portions of the bill may not survive parliamentary challenges.

This will surely disappoint House Democrats who voted for a bill they profoundly disliked based on assurances that it would be "fixed" in the Senate. They'll be even less happy to learn that, if the Senate alters even a single word of the House bill -- and it will -- the bill will have to go back to the House for still another vote.

Yes, House Democrats will have to do it all again.

The Courts: Before the ink dries on the president's signature, there will be a rush of lawyers filing legal challenges to almost every aspect of the reform. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli will be first in line, challenging the bill's mandate that every American purchase a government-approved insurance plan.

Last month, Virginia's Legislature passed a law rejecting such a mandate, and Cuccinelli has been practically salivating at the prospect of filing a challenge. Likely joining in will be the attorney general of Idaho, whose Legislature recently passed a law requiring their state to sue. Up to two dozen other states may pile on. Several private citizens and interest groups will likely file their own suits as well.

And there is at least some reason to believe they might succeed. The individual mandate is unprecedented in constitutional history -- a federal requirement that individuals, simply by reason of citi zenship, must purchase a specific product. Even the Congressional Research Service was unable to reach a definitive conclusion about whether the mandate met constitutional muster.

Other legal challenges will target the requirement that states set up government-run insurance "exchanges." There are several Supreme Court precedents that suggest the federal government cannot force state officials to act. Texas is reportedly ready to lead this challenge. There may also be challenges to some of the provisions that provide special benefits for specific states.

Thirteen state attorneys general promised to sue over the "Cornhusker Kickback," a provision that had the federal government paying Nebraska's Medicaid costs. That provision will likely be removed through reconciliation, but other special-interest provisions remain. They could be challenged as a violation of equal protection.

The Republicans: GOP leaders have made it clear that they will make repealing the bill a centerpiece of every campaign this fall. Seventeen House Democrats who voted for the health-care bill represent districts that supported John McCain in 2008. Dozens of others are locked in close races in marginal districts.

Even in Democratic-leaning states like Illinois, GOP senatorial candidate Mark Kirk is pledging to "lead the effort to repeal" the bill. Given the bill's unpopularity, Republicans can expect to reap significant electoral gains.

In reality, of course, there is little chance of the bill's repeal. Even if Republicans were to take both houses of Congress, they'd still face a presidential veto and a Democratic filibuster. But more importantly, once an entitlement is in place, it becomes virtually impossible to take away. Still, we can expect efforts to repeal many of the most unpopular aspects, ranging from the individual mandate to tax hikes.

President Obama may believe that "everything that can be said about health-care reform has been said," but there is a lot more speechifying yet to come.

Michael Tanner is a Cato Institute senior fellow.


To Democrats, It’s Monopoly Money;  Republicans now have a clear message to convey to voters: We will undo the damage.
National Review
Mona Charen
23 March 2010
 
It is America’s misfortune that at a moment in history that required sober, grown-up stewardship and a realistic appraisal of our fiscal trajectory, we elected (by large margins) the party of supplicants and whiners. How appropriate that one of the selling points of Obamacare was the guarantee that children up to the age of 26 can remain on their parents’ insurance plans — because the Democrats’ whole program is about extending adolescence.

Like teenagers, the Democrats are weak on long-term consequences, saving for the future, and planning for (entirely foreseeable) contingencies. They excel at demanding their allowance, but not so much at earning it. They are the “me” party. Health care, pronounced Nancy Pelosi, is a “right” to be financed by others, not a privilege.

A serious party would grapple with our mounting unfunded obligations. Each year the trustees of the Medicare and Social Security programs issue a report analyzing the costs of those programs. Last year’s report put the total unfunded liability of the two programs at $107 trillion, in 2009 dollars. The two programs now consume about 14 percent of tax receipts. By 2030, even without the new Obamacare entitlement, they will chew up half of all federal outlays. By 2060, they will swallow 75 percent. They are, to use the favorite Washington expression, “unsustainable.”

Particularly at a time when the battered economy is taking its first tentative steps toward recovery, a responsible government would seek to reduce debt, ease the burdens on businesses, and refrain from introducing more instability and putting unpredictable new burdens on taxpayers.

Instead, the Democrats have charged ahead with their social-democratic vision of a Europeanized America. The past several months have removed any doubt that the Democrats are willing to risk national bankruptcy in pursuit of their white whale — nationalized health care. They may yet compound the error by adding cap-and-trade to the ledger.

Consider the brief nod to fiscal responsibility they offered in February. Excoriating “a decade of profligacy,” President Obama signed “paygo” — a measure to require that new spending be balanced by cuts or tax increases so as not to increase the deficit. “It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits,” declared the president. “What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do.”

Or not. Paygo exempted some 50 federal programs, including (you guessed it) Social Security, the Medicare “doc fix,” and anything the leadership chose to label “emergency” spending. When the Democrats appropriated $10 billion for extension of unemployment insurance and COBRA insurance plans without any offsetting cuts or tax increases, Sen. Jim Bunning protested; he became a piñata for his trouble. Bunning unmasked the truth: To the Democrats, it’s all Monopoly money. That’s why they can rack up deficits in the trillions without batting an eye.

And they have the gall to claim that passing this 2,700-page monstrosity proves that “they can govern.”

This is a clarifying moment. By driving their agenda so relentlessly and to such extremes, the Democrats have redrawn the political map. No longer will it easily be said that there is no relevant distinction between the parties. No longer will conservatives easily disdain the Republican party. Yes, under President Bush, the U.S. accumulated $3.3 trillion in deficits. But based purely on his policies in his first year, Obama is projected to run deficits of $7.6 trillion over eight years — and that may be a low-ball estimate. Republicans now have a clear message to convey to voters: We will undo the damage. It seems likely now that all of the energy represented by the tea-party movement will flow into Republican, not third-party channels.

The Republicans acquitted themselves well throughout this long struggle. Articulate, well-prepared members such as Rep. Paul Ryan, Sen. Tom Coburn, Rep. Mike Pence, Sen. Lamar Alexander, Sen. John Kyl, and others made the case for sensible, market-oriented reform of the health-care system and against the reckless, corrupt, heavy-handed, bankrupting, choice-limiting scheme of the majority party.

When President Obama tilted his chin toward the sky at his inauguration and declared that “change is coming to America,” this is what he had in mind — a turn toward a European welfare state and away from the free-market model. The turn has begun. The voters will decide whether it is irreversible.

Now for the Slaughter:  On the road to Demon Pass, our leader encounters a Baier.

By PEGGY NOONAN
March 20, 2010

Excuse me, but it is embarrassing—really, embarrassing to our country—that the president of the United States has again put off a state visit to Australia and Indonesia because he's having trouble passing a piece of domestic legislation he's been promising for a year will be passed next week. What an air of chaos this signals to the world. And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America's back and been America's friend.

How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid's stuff.

You could see the startled looks on the faces of reporters as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who had the grace to look embarrassed, made the announcement on Thursday afternoon. The president "regrets the delay"—the trip is rescheduled for June—but "passage of the health insurance reform is of paramount importance." Indonesia must be glad to know it's not.

The reporters didn't even provoke or needle in their questions. They seemed hushed. They looked like people who were absorbing the information that we all seem to be absorbing, which is that the wheels seem to be coming off this thing, the administration is wobbling—so early, so painfully and dangerously soon.

Thursday's decision followed the most revealing and important broadcast interview of Barack Obama ever. It revealed his primary weakness in speaking of health care, which is a tendency to dodge, obfuscate and mislead. He grows testy when challenged. It revealed what the president doesn't want revealed, which is that he doesn't want to reveal much about his plan. This furtiveness is not helpful in a time of high public anxiety. At any rate, the interview was what such interviews rarely are, a public service. That it occurred at a high-stakes time, with so much on the line, only made it more electric.

I'm speaking of the interview Wednesday on Fox News Channel's "Special Report With Bret Baier." Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this newspaper, so one should probably take pains to demonstrate that one is attempting to speak with disinterest and impartiality, in pursuit of which let me note that Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane.

That having been said, the Baier interview was something, and right from the beginning. Mr. Baier's first question was whether the president supports the so-called Slaughter rule, alternatively known as "deem and pass," which would avoid a straight up-or-down House vote on the Senate bill. (Tunku Varadarajan in the Daily Beast cleverly notes that it sounds like "demon pass," which it does. Maybe that's the juncture we're at.) Mr. Obama, in his response, made the usual case for ObamaCare. Mr. Baier pressed him. The president said, "The vote that's taken in the House will be a vote for health-care reform." We shouldn't, he added, concern ourselves with "the procedural issues."

Further in, Mr. Baier: "So you support the deem-and-pass rule?" From the president, obfuscation. But he did mention something new: "They may have to sequence the votes." The bill's opponents would be well advised to look into that one.

Mr. Baier again: So you'll go deem-and-pass and you don't know exactly what will be in the bill?

Mr. Obama's response: "By the time the vote has taken place, not only will I know what's in it, you'll know what's in it, because it's going to be posted and everybody's going to be able to evaluate it on the merits."

That's news in two ways. That it will be posted—one assumes the president means on the Internet and not nailed to a telephone pole—should suggest it will be posted for a while, more than a few hours or days. So American will finally get a look at it. And the president was conceding that no, he doesn't know what's in the bill right now. It is still amazing that one year into the debate this could be true.

Mr. Baier pressed on the public's right to know what is in the bill. We have been debating the bill for a year, the president responded: "The notion that this has been not transparent, that people don't know what's in the bill, everybody knows what's in the bill. I sat for seven hours with—."

Mr. Baier interrupts: "Mr. President, you couldn't tell me what the special deals are that are in or not today."

Mr. Obama: "I just told you what was in and what was not in."

Mr. Baier: "Is Connecticut in?" He was referring to the blandishments—polite word—meant to buy the votes of particular senators.

Mr. Obama: "Connecticut—what are you specifically referring to?"

Mr. Baier: "The $100 million for the hospital? Is Montana in for the asbestos program? Is—you know, listen, there are people—this is real money, people are worried about this stuff."

Mr. Obama: "And as I said before, this—the final provisions are going to be posted for many days before this thing passes."

Mr. Baier pressed the president on his statement as a candidate for the presidency that a 50-plus-one governing mentality is inherently divisive. "You can't govern" that way, Sen. Obama had said. Is the president governing that way now? Mr. Obama did not really answer.

Throughout, Mr. Baier pressed the president. Some thought this bordered on impertinence. I did not. Mr. Obama now routinely filibusters in interviews. He has his message, and he presses it forward smoothly, adroitly. He buries you in words. Are you worried what failure of the bill will do to you? I'm worried about what the status quo will do to the families that are uninsured . . .

Mr. Baier forced him off his well-worn grooves. He did it by stopping long answers with short questions, by cutting off and redirecting. In this he was like a low-speed bumper car. In the end the interview seemed to me a public service because everyone in America right now wants to see the president forced off his grooves and into candor on an issue that involves 17% of the economy. Again, the stakes are high. So Mr. Baier's style seemed—this is admittedly subjective—not rude but within the bounds, and not driven by the antic spirit that sometimes overtakes reporters. He seemed to be trying to get new information. He seemed to be attempting to better inform the public.

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He's the president, this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off. The president—every president—works for us. We don't work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won't be. Either way it's revealing.

And so it ends, with a health-care vote expected this weekend. I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn't worth it—worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass.

Unprecedented:  Reconciliation ought not to be used for controversial, sweeping legislation.
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, www.nationalreview.com  
Michael G. Franc   
March 2, 2010 4:00 A.M.

With the dust settled on the health summit, it is clear that the president and his allies on Capitol Hill intend to plow forward with their sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s health sector. As the Los Angeles Times observed, it is also clear that “they will have to do it by themselves.”

And there’s only one way they can “do it by themselves”: an arcane budgetary procedure known as “reconciliation.” Reconciliation lets lawmakers “expedite” consideration of proposals to reduce projected budget deficits, and it allows Senate leaders to circumvent the filibuster — which normally enables a determined minority of 41 or more senators to block legislation. Under reconciliation, a simple majority rules the Senate.

Speculation that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will advance Obamacare in this manner has incited fevered debate over the procedure itself. Is it appropriate to use reconciliation on such a controversial and consequential bill?

Senator Reid says it is. He argues that the reconciliation process has been used many times over the last three decades — usually, he claims, at the instigation of Republicans. House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.) chimes in that reconciliation “is a normal thing to do in the Congress. It’s just simply a majority vote. It is nothing out of the ordinary.” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) characterizes reconciliation simply as “the way to govern with a majority.”

The Congressional Research Service reports that 19 reconciliation measures have been enacted into law since the procedure’s first use in the twilight of the Carter administration. It was attempted, but failed, a couple of times more. Reconciliation has been used for virtually all imaginable scenarios — save one: There is no precedent for using it to enact a once-in-a-generation rewrite of the relationship between Americans and their government that appeals exclusively to one side of the aisle.

Even the current Senate concurs that reconciliation ought not to be used for such mega-bills. Last April, 67 senators — including 26 Democrats and then-Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania — supported a resolution to prohibit reconciliation from being used to advance that other mega-bill lurking out there, the cap-and-trade climate-control bill.

Our custom has always been to subject such bigger-than-life bills to a rigorous vetting process that allows affected parties to scrutinize the pros and cons and examine alternatives before ultimately arriving at a broad and bipartisan consensus. For good or ill, this process produced such landmark legislation as our civil-rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid, the Clean Air Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement, welfare reform, and the Kemp-Roth tax cuts. On final reading, each of these legislative milestones received over 60 votes in the Senate and a comparable majority in the House.

NO PARTISAN PATTERN

“The party of reconciliation,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) maintains, “is the Republican party.” Not so. Past reconciliation actions reveal absolutely no pattern in this regard.

With reconciliation, it takes two branches to tango — Congress and the president. In its first use (1980), a defeated Pres. Jimmy Carter and a lame-duck Democratic Congress pushed through a modest package of tax hikes and spending cuts. Since then, reconciliation bills have been enacted under every conceivable combination of Republican and Democratic control.

All seven reconciliation bills enacted on President Reagan’s watch, for example, required the cooperation of a Democratic-controlled House. And after the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1987, the Gipper negotiated a reconciliation measure with an entirely Democratic Congress. Similarly, the first President Bush negotiated two reconciliation packages with Congresses controlled entirely by Democrats (in 1989 and 1990). His Democratic successor, Bill Clinton, negotiated a reconciliation measure with a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1993.

After the 1994 elections ushered in Republican majorities in the House and Senate, Clinton partnered with his new adversaries on three reconciliation bills. In 1997, he signed two reconciliation measures that cut taxes by $80 billion and spending by nearly $110 billion. Pres. George W. Bush worked with Republican-controlled Congresses on four reconciliation measures, including his dramatic tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. In 2007, he reached agreement on a relatively minor reconciliation measure with the newly elected Democratic majority led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid.

If you can decipher a pattern here, please let me know.

CONSEQUENTIAL AND POPULAR

In keeping with the American tradition of demanding that consequential legislation enjoy broad bipartisan consensus, the most ambitious reconciliation bills of the past have been widely popular on both sides of the aisle. In these cases, reconciliation was used for procedural reasons, not to force through a bill that couldn’t get 60 votes.

Consider President Reagan’s 1981 package of domestic-spending cuts, the so-called Gramm-Latta bill. It remains the bête noire of liberal acolytes of the welfare state. And that’s understandable. The measure reduced spending by $130 billion over three years on a wide array of federal domestic programs, including food stamps, Medicaid, dairy price supports, and even Social Security. Thirty years ago, $130 billion was real money. But though the Gramm-Latta spending cuts spiked the blood pressure in liberal salons and on the editorial pages of the New York Times, the tone was decidedly different on Capitol Hill. The cuts ultimately sailed through Tip O’Neill’s House on a voice vote. (Yes, a voice vote!) The legislation won an 80-vote majority in the Senate, including the support of 31 Democrats.

The 1996 rewrite of our welfare laws, also a reconciliation measure, prompted similar paroxysms of moral outrage and dire predictions from liberals. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan assailed the reforms as “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction” and predicted that “those involved will take this disgrace to their graves.” In fact, welfare reform proved to be the single most successful social-policy reform in decades. It garnered 328 votes in the House (98 of them from Democrats) and 78 in the Senate (25 from Democrats).

The two reconciliation measures negotiated between President Clinton and the Republican Congress in 1997 set in motion the economic boom of the late 1990s. They, too, attracted huge, bipartisan majorities. Eighty-five senators, including all but three Democrats, supported a package containing $118 billion in spending cuts. An even larger majority — 92 senators, including 37 Democrats — signed on to a reconciliation tax-cut package that included the $500 per child tax credit and a significant reduction in the top rate on capital gains. In the House, the support was similarly overwhelming: 346 votes for the spending cuts (including 153 Democrats) and 389 for the tax cuts (including 164 Democrats).

CONSEQUENTIAL AND CONTROVERSIAL

Several times in our history, reconciliation bills were both truly consequential and controversial. Here, the protections granted under the reconciliation process (i.e., requiring a simple majority for passage in the Senate) were absolutely essential.

As a general rule, reconciliation measures that raised taxes inspired considerable opposition.

In 1982, President Reagan agreed to rescind about $98 billion of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts from the previous year. That move prompted 47 senators (most of them Democrats) to oppose him, thus necessitating reconciliation. Then, in 1990, the first President Bush violated his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge and worked closely with a Democratic congress to enact $137 billion in tax hikes via the infamous 1990 budget reconciliation bill. It incited years of Republican fratricide and sowed the seeds of the Gingrich Revolution of 1994.

But, while the margins on final passage for both bills were quite narrow, the coalitions for and against them were decidedly bipartisan. That’s a marked and critical difference from the current situation regarding health care.

That leaves three reconciliation battles that were both high-stakes and highly partisan: President Clinton’s tax increase of 1993; the Gingrich Revolution’s pivotal package of tax and spending cuts in 1995; and the acceleration in 2003 of Pres. George W. Bush’s signature tax cuts.

In perhaps the closest analogy to today’s showdown over health reform, Pres. Bill Clinton proposed in 1993 what may still be the largest tax increase in history — a cool quarter-trillion dollars over five years. This tax hike turned out to be downright radioactive. The House passed it by the narrowest of margins, with a mere 218 votes. In the upper chamber, a bipartisan coalition of 50 senators (all 44 Republicans plus 6 Democrats) stood in opposition. Vice President Al Gore took a dramatic trip down Pennsylvania Avenue to cast the tie-breaking vote.

Ultimately, the process allowed a unified bloc of Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill to prevail. But the precedent cannot be reassuring to today’s Democratic leaders. Anyone remember the 1994 elections?

Buoyed by its historic success in those elections, the new Republican congressional majority bet the ranch on an equally historic reconciliation package. This one would downsize the federal government — cutting spending by $894 billion, slashing taxes by nearly $250 billion, and enacting sundry other reforms such as overhauling farm programs and opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

This exercise proved to be too much for our political system. President Clinton and his party resisted, prompting two government shutdowns and a presidential veto. The Congressional Quarterly concluded that “the new majority seemed to cram several years of work into one when crafting the reconciliation package, but at the end of that one year they had little to show for it.”

Lesson: If you’re going to ram through a mind-boggling package of spending and tax cuts, make sure your party controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

That is precisely what happened in 2001 and again two years later. Few recall now that in 2001, President Bush’s tax-cut agenda passed with respectable bipartisan support, including 28 House and 12 Senate Democrats. The 2003 package accelerating these cuts, however, was too much for the Democrats. Theatrics ensued, and another vice president had to venture into the Senate chamber to break a 50-50 deadlock.

This time, the political fallout was quite different. President Bush and his fellow Republicans actually prospered at the polls in the 2004 presidential election.

Reconciliation can yield political dividends, it seems. But only when it’s used to force through controversial and consequential tax cuts.

— Michael G. Franc is vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.

Ungovernable? Nonsense.
This isn’t structural failure; this is the system working the way it’s supposed to.
National Review
February 19, 2010 12:00 A.M.
 
In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board — and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills, and an ideological compass in tune with the public’s, the country was indeed governable.

It’s 2010, and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama’s two signature initiatives — cap-and-trade and health-care reform — lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years:  “America the Ungovernable.” So declared Newsweek. “Is America Ungovernable?” coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model and complaining that America can only flail about under its “two parties . . . with their duel-to-the-death paralysis.” The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.

Yet, what’s new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic — and, since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, such as the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

And then, of course, there’s the filibuster, the newest liberal bête noire. “Don’t blame Mr. Obama,” writes Paul Krugman of the president’s failures. “Blame our political culture instead. . . . And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable.”

“Ungovernable,” once again. Of course, it seems like just yesterday that the same Paul Krugman was warning about “extremists” trying “to eliminate the filibuster” when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate, with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure, is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a check against precipitous transformative change.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health-care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: “Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama’s (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. . . . But in this case there’s a simpler explanation: Barack Obama’s job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed.”

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise — expanded coverage at lower cost — led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes, and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them a political mandate and a legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public-opinion polls, then in elections — Virginia, New Jersey, and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That’s not a structural defect. That’s a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself — despite the special interests — through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010, The Washington Post Writers Group.


Feeling Lucky?
Weekly Standard
BY William Kristol
February 22, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 22

Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez was a 20-game winner four times in the 1930s. He led the league twice in wins, winning percentage, and ERA, and three times in shutouts and strikeouts. He was an awfully good pitcher. But he always said, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” It’s best to be both. But if the Obama administration continues to resist being good at national security policy, we need to hope they—and we—remain lucky.

Despite a systemic counter-terrorism failure, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to detonate his bomb. That was lucky.

Despite a perverse attempt to side with our enemies in Honduras, the Honduran people ignored us and ended up with a decent and democratic—and friendly—government. That was lucky.

Despite a foolish overhyping of the possibilities of an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, and an unseemly inclination to badger our close ally, nothing too damaging has happened on the ground in the region. That was lucky.

One could go on. And one could even argue that Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts was an insistence of Obama luck. By killing health care (assuming it did), it may have averted a massive outpouring of voter anger that Democrats would have faced in November as a result of having forced health care down our throats. Now the issue may recede sufficiently, and if the economy comes back in the short term—partly thanks to the death of Obama’s health care and cap and trade proposals—Democrats may only have a bad, rather than awful, election year. And that would be lucky.

But the real stroke of luck would be regime change in Iran. It’s the only alternative to either a jihadist regime with nuclear weapons, or war. The administration has been pathetically timid with respect to Iran. It can’t bring itself to do the smallest things to support the Iranian dissidents. But the Green revolution could still prevail.

It sometimes works this way: the hard and controversial work of a prior administration—Ronald Reagan’s in taking on the Soviet Union, George W. Bush’s in beginning the task of changing the Middle East—isn’t reversed by its successor. The effort still has momentum. And the big change  then happens on the successor’s watch.

So if Obama doesn’t throw away our achievements in Iraq, if he perseveres in Afghanistan, if he doesn’t entirely turn his back on the freedom doctrine for the Middle East—then the Iranian people have a chance to prevail, even without a champion in the White House.

But it would be easier if they had a champion.

Some in Congress are stepping up. The death last week of Charlie Wilson is a reminder of the difference that members of Congress can make. Most accounts of how the Soviet Union was brought down tend to emphasize the Reagan defense buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative, the deployment of the Pershings, Reagan’s moral and political support for dissidents, and his rhetorical assault on the evil empire. These were important. But one shouldn’t forget our aid to those fighting against the Soviet army in Afghanistan—and the impact in the Soviet Union of the forced withdrawal. That aid began in the Carter presidency and was spearheaded by Charlie Wilson.

It’s not clear Congress could do anything so dramatic for the Iranian protestors. But the legislation introduced last week by Senators John Cornyn and Sam Brownback at least pushes in the right direction. “The Iran Democratic Transition Act” would support—rhetorically and financially—efforts by Iranian opposition groups to remove the regime in Tehran and pave the way for a free and democratic government in Iran.

President Obama said early last week that he had “bent over backwards” to engage Iran. So he has. We’re lucky we haven’t paid a heavier price for this foolish policy. One that seems to have been driven by an odd combination of vanity and weakness. It would be good if the president now stood up straight and put the American government unambiguously and energetically on the side of the Iranians demonstrating against a dictatorship.

With all due respect to Lefty Gomez, and to the admittedly large role of fortune in human affairs—it’s nice to be lucky, but it’s safer to be strong. 

—William Kristol

Where the U.S. went wrong on the Christmas Day bomber
From the Washington Post
By Michael B. Mukasey
Friday, February 12, 2010; A27

It seems to me unlikely that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab will be known to future generations of lawyers for generating any groundbreaking legal principle or issue. But when it comes to illuminating our public discourse about the "global war on terror," he is right up there with Clarence Earl Gideon, Ernesto Miranda or even Jose Padilla. His case presents in one tidy package virtually all the issues that arise from the role intelligence plays in this struggle and compels us to examine what the law requires and what it doesn't.

When Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb concealed in his undershorts, he committed a crime; no doubt about that. He could not have acted alone; no doubt about that either. The bomb was not the sort of infernal device readily produced by someone of his background, and he quickly confirmed that he had been trained and sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen.

What to do and who should do it? It was entirely reasonable for the FBI to be contacted and for that agency to take him into custody. But contrary to what some in government have suggested, that Abdulmutallab was taken into custody by the FBI did not mean, legally or as a matter of policy, that he had to be treated as a criminal defendant at any point. Consider: In 1942, German saboteurs landed on Long Island and in Florida. That they were eventually captured by the FBI did not stop President Franklin Roosevelt from directing that they be treated as unlawful enemy combatants. They were ultimately tried before a military commission in Washington and executed. Their status had nothing to do with who held them, and their treatment was upheld in all respects by the Supreme Court.

If possible, FBI custody is even less relevant today in determining someone's status. In 1942 the FBI was exclusively a crime-fighting organization. After Sept. 11, 2001, the agency's mission was expanded beyond detection of crime and apprehension of criminals to include gathering intelligence, helping to prevent and combat threats to national security, and furthering U.S. foreign policy goals. Guidelines put in place in 2003 and revised in September 2008 "do not require that the FBI's information gathering activities be differentially labeled as 'criminal investigations,' 'national security investigations,' or 'foreign intelligence collections,' or that the categories of FBI personnel who carry out investigations be segregated from each other based on the subject areas in which they operate. Rather, all of the FBI's legal authorities are available for deployment in all cases to which they apply to protect the public from crimes and threats to the national security and to further the United States' foreign intelligence objectives."

"As with criminal investigations generally, detecting and solving the crimes, and eventually arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators, are likely to be among the objectives of investigations relating to threats to the national security. But . . . other measures needed to protect the national security . . . may include . . . providing threat information and warnings to other federal . . . agencies and entities; diplomatic or military actions; and actions by other intelligence agencies to counter international terrorism or other national security threats."

Contrary to what the White House homeland security adviser and the attorney general have suggested, if not said outright, not only was there no authority or policy in place under the Bush administration requiring that all those detained in the United States be treated as criminal defendants, but relevant authority was and is the opposite. The Supreme Court held in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that "indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized" but also said in the same case that detention for the purpose of neutralizing an unlawful enemy combatant is permissible and that the only right of such a combatant -- even if he is a citizen, and Abdulmutallab is not -- is to challenge his classification as such a combatant in a habeas corpus proceeding. This does not include the right to remain silent or the right to a lawyer, but only such legal assistance as may be necessary to file a habeas corpus petition within a reasonable time. That was the basis for my ruling in Padilla v. Rumsfeld that, as a convenience to the court and not for any constitutionally based reason, he had to consult with a lawyer for the limited purpose of filing a habeas petition, but that interrogation need not stop.

What of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," who was warned of his Miranda rights and prosecuted in a civilian court? He was arrested in December 2001, before procedures were put in place that would have allowed for an outcome that might have included not only conviction but also exploitation of his intelligence value, if possible. His case does not recommend the same procedure in Abdulmutallab's.

The struggle against Islamist extremists is unlike any other war we have fought. Osama bin Laden and those like-minded intend to make plain that our government cannot keep us safe, and have sought our retreat from the Islamic world and our relinquishment of the idea that human rather than their version of divine law must control our activities. This movement is not driven by finite grievances or by poverty. The enemy does not occupy a particular location or have an infrastructure that can be identified and attacked but, rather, lives in many places and purposely hides among civilian populations. The only way to prevail is to gather intelligence on who is doing what where and to take the initiative to stop it.

There was thus no legal or policy compulsion to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, at least initially, and every reason to treat him as an intelligence asset to be exploited promptly. The way to do that was not simply to have locally available field agents question him but, rather, to get in the room people who knew about al-Qaeda in Yemen, people who could obtain information, check that information against other available data and perhaps get feedback from others in the field before going back to Abdulmutallab to follow up where necessary, all the while keeping secret the fact of his cooperation. Once his former cohorts know he is providing information, they can act to make that information useless.

Nor is it an answer to say that Abdulmutallab resumed his cooperation even after he was warned of his rights. He did that after five weeks, when his family was flown here from Nigeria. The time was lost, and with it possibly useful information. Disclosing that he had resumed talking only compounded the problem by letting his former cohorts know that they had better cover their tracks.

The writer was U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009 and the presiding judge at initial proceedings against Jose Padilla in 2002.

The Real Obama: The man behind the "postpartisan" curtain
Weekly Standard
BY Matthew Continetti
February 1, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 19 

What does the Massachusetts special election tell us about President Obama? Nothing good. Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley not only ended the Democrats’ filibuster-proof Senate majority. It also exposed as false the White House’s preferred storyline about the president’s ideology, capacities, and temperament—what you might call the Obama Myth.

The Obama Myth rests on three assumptions: (a) Obama is a nonideological pragmatist; (b) Obama is an uncommonly powerful communicator; and (c) Obama has a gut connection with the people. All three are wrong. Only the Democrats’ fantasy that opposition to their agenda is limited to a lunatic fringe has blinded them from seeing the president’s liabilities. Let’s open their eyes. 

The False Pragmatist

Obama campaigned on a bipartisan platform of post-ideological problem-solving. The label has stuck: Joe Biden has referred to Obama as a “clear-eyed pragmatist”; David Brooks says the president suffers from a “voracious pragmatism.”

All of which might be true—if by “pragmatist” they mean a committed liberal who is willing to sign legislation passed by razor-thin, partisan margins. The stimulus became law with only three Republican votes—and one of those Republicans is now a Democrat. The House passed cap and trade with the support of only eight Republicans; the legislation is dead in the Senate. Health care got a single Republican vote.

Besides some aspects of education reform and the surge in Afghanistan, it is difficult to name a single conservative idea the president has co-opted. You sometimes get the impression that Obama truly believes in the strawmen he parades before the public: those wraith-like Republicans who want to “do nothing” when it comes to health care, the financial system, and the budget. Is he unaware that conservative think tanks and journals regularly propose reforms in these and other areas?

No, Obama’s problem is with the content of conservative proposals—for they tend to rely on decentralized markets and give economic growth priority over equity. Obama hasn’t dismissed conservatives because they lack ideas. He’s dismissed them because conservative ideas do not meet his ideological commitments. 

The Not-so-Great Communicator

“Obama is the Democrats’ Great Communicator, our Ronald Reagan,” the editor of Salon wrote in February 2009. A year later, that no longer seems to be the case (if it ever was). Again and again, the president has tried to persuade or cajole audiences to follow his lead. No such luck.

Forget about persuading Republicans—Obama doesn’t try, and most of them aren’t interested anyway. What about independents? Ask Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, and Martha Coakley. These three share at least two things: The president campaigned for all of them, and they all lost. Independents abandoned them in droves.

Democrats would like to pretend that Obama has not been a factor in the three statewide elections since he assumed office. And, granted, there were other issues in play. None of the candidates was particularly strong. Unemployment is at 10 percent. Nevertheless, “our Ronald Reagan” told Democrats and independents in all three states that his agenda would be imperiled if Republicans won. And in all three, those voters greeted his dulcet tones with a collective shrug.

Persuasive? In 2009 the president gave dozens of televised townhall meetings, speeches, and press conferences to muster support for the Democratic health care reform. Yet none of this frenetic activity did anything to improve the public’s opinion of his approach to health care. Quite the reverse: Opposition to the plan has increased.

The “international community” was also supposed to fall under Obama’s spell. Maybe that’s true, in some places. Not in Copenhagen. The president went there twice, to campaign for the 2016 Olympic games to come to Chicago and for a global treaty on climate change. He was denied both times. And don’t forget the deafness of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran to Obama’s words, as well. 

The Lecturer in Chief

In endorsing Obama for president, the Washington Post editorialized that he is “a man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues” whose “temperament is unlike anything we’ve seen on the national stage in many years.” True enough: Obama is cool, unflappable, intellectual. And yet the personality traits that made him attractive to so many as a candidate have not worn well as president.

Since 2008, there have been three moments when the man-of-the-people looked more like the lecturer-from-Hyde Park. The first was during the campaign, when Obama famously told fundraisers in San Francisco that the folks in “small towns in Pennsylvania” can “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The speech was pure liberal condescension.

Then there was Obama’s July 2009 remark that the Cambridge police had behaved “stupidly” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates on the porch of his own home. The public reaction to his comment, which tripped over race, class, and educational lines, forced the president to call his hastily arranged “beer summit” at the White House, with Gates, Officer Joe Crowley, and Biden as props. Ironically, it was probably Obama’s most successful summit.

More recently, when Obama appeared alongside Martha Coakley at a last-minute rally in Boston, the president ridiculed Scott Brown’s pickup truck: “Forget the truck,” he said at one point. “Everybody can buy a truck.” This isn’t the case, of course, as Brown pointed out the next day. In the Massachusetts campaign, Brown’s truck became a metaphor for his scrappy, can-do, underdog attitude. Obama mocked it and therefore became the voice of entrenched power.

Obama has fallen into a trap that ensnares many intelligent people. He is so convinced of his opinions that he dismisses all contrary thinking as bizarre, dishonest, or fake. In the liberal worldview, Brown is a phony, opposition to health care reform is based on lies or callousness, the Tea Party activists are nuts, racists, or worse, and the solution to most public policy issues can be found only in more regulation, more bureaucrats, and more centralized power.

In the liberal worldview, Scott Brown’s victory is not a signal that Democrats have overreached. It is that the American people are “angry” and “don’t understand” all the good liberals are trying to do for them. “The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” Obama told George Stephanopoulos last week, as if the American people are a bunch of emotional basket cases who have no grasp of public policy and no ability to distinguish between Bush Republicans and Obama Democrats.

And there you have another incorrect assumption that is key to the Obama Myth. Question is, will Obama and the Democrats learn their lesson? Or will the people be forced to give them another in November?


Op-Ed Columnist
Politics in the Age of Distrust
NYTIMES
By DAVID BROOKS
January 22, 2010

In November 2008, William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck wrote a report called “Change You Can Believe In Needs a Government You Can Trust.” Galston and Kamarck, who served in senior positions in the Clinton administration, threw up some warning flags for the incoming Obama administration.

Despite the Democratic triumph that month, they noted, public distrust of government remains intensely high. Historically, it has been nearly impossible to pass major domestic reforms in the face of that kind of distrust. Therefore, they counseled, the new administration should move cautiously to rebuild trust before beginning a transformational agenda.

The Obama administration interpreted the political climate in an entirely different way. As John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee wrote in a smart piece in Politico on Wednesday, the administration interpreted the 2008 election as a rejection of not only George W. Bush-style conservatism, but also Bill Clinton-style moderation. The country was ready for a New Deal-size change. It had a leader in Barack Obama who could uniquely inspire a national transformation.

As happens every four years, hubris defeated caution, and the administration began its big-bang approach.

As always, it backfired. Instead of building trust in government, the Democrats have magnified distrust. The country already believed Washington is out of touch with its core concerns. So while most families were concerned about jobs, Democrats in Washington spent nine months arguing about health care. The country was already tired of self-serving back-room deals, so the Democrats negotiated a series of dirty deals with the pharmaceutical industry, the unions and certain senators. Americans already felt Washington doesn’t understand their fears and insecurities. So at the moment when economic insecurity was at its peak, the Democrats in Washington added another layer of insecurity by threatening to change everything at once.

Instead of building a new majority, the Democrats have set off a distrust insurrection (which is not the same as a conservative insurrection). Republicans are enraged. Independents are furious. Democrats are disheartened. Health care reform is brutally unpopular. Even voters in Massachusetts decided it was time to send a message.

The Democrats now have four bad options. The first is what you might call the Heedless and Arrogant Approach. A clear majority of Americans are against the Congressional health care reform plan. Democrats could say: We know this is unpopular, but we think it is good policy and we are going to ram it through and you voters can judge us by the results.

The second route is what you might call the Weak and Feckless Approach. Democrats could say: We have received and respect the message voters are sending. We are not going to shove the biggest social transformation in a generation down the throats of a country that has judged and rejected it. We are not going to concentrate immense new powers in a Washington the country detests.

Instead, we will regroup and reorganize. Perhaps we will try incremental reforms. Perhaps we will use federal money to support a series of state reform efforts — like the one in Massachusetts — which are closer to the people. (In 2007, Russ Feingold, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, co-sponsored the State-Based Health Care Reform Act to spark this kind of local experimentation.)

The third approach is the Dangerous and Demagogic Approach. This begins with the presumption that what Americans really want is a bunch of pseudopopulists to tell them they can have everything for free. This would mean stripping the health bills of anything that might be unpopular — like Medicare cuts and tax increases — and passing the rest regardless of the cost.

The fourth approach is the Incoherent and Internecine Approach. This would involve settling on no coherent policy but just blaming each other for cowardice and stupidity for the next month. Liberals, who make up 20 percent of the country, could complain because they didn’t get their version of reform. The Senate and the House could bash each other. The intelligentsia could bash the public.

Right now, Incoherent and Internecine is winning, but the hard choice is between the first two approaches. Galston, ironically, now supports Heedless and Arrogant. It was a mistake to rush into health care, he believes, but now that the party is down the road it would be suicide to turn back. Democrats should stand for what they believe in. If the policy works, then public trust will follow.

I support the Weak and Feckless Approach. Trust is based on mutual respect and reciprocity. If, at this moment of rage and cynicism, the ruling class goes even further and snubs popular opinion, then that will set off an ugly, destructive, and yet fully justified popular rebellion. Trust in government will be irrevocably broken. It will decimate policy-making for a generation.

These are the choices ahead. Have a nice day.

Op-Ed Contributor
Taxing Wall Street Down to Size
NYTIMES
By DAVID STOCKMAN
January 20, 2010

WHILE supply-side catechism insists that lower taxes are a growth tonic, the theory also argues that if you want less of something, tax it more. The economy desperately needs less of our bloated, unproductive and increasingly parasitic banking system. In this respect, the White House appears to have gone over to the supply side with its proposed tax on big banks, as it scores populist points against the banksters, too.

Not surprisingly, the bankers are already whining, even though the tax would amount to a financial pinprick — a levy of only 0.15 percent on the debts (other than deposits) of the big financial conglomerates. Their objections are evidence that the administration is on the right track.

Make no mistake. The banking system has become an agent of destruction for the gross domestic product and of impoverishment for the middle class. To be sure, it was lured into these unsavory missions by a truly insane monetary policy under which, most recently, the Federal Reserve purchased $1.5 trillion of longer-dated Treasury bonds and housing agency securities in less than a year. It was an unprecedented exercise in market-rigging with printing-press money, and it gave a sharp boost to the price of bonds and other securities held by banks, permitting them to book huge revenues from trading and bookkeeping gains.

Meanwhile, by fixing short-term interest rates at near zero, the Fed planted its heavy boot squarely in the face of depositors, as it shrank the banks’ cost of production — their interest expense on depositor funds — to the vanishing point.

The resulting ultrasteep yield curve for banks is heralded, by a certain breed of Wall Street tout, as a financial miracle cure. Soon, it is claimed, a prodigious upwelling of profitability will repair bank balance sheets and bury toxic waste from the last bubble’s collapse. But will it?

In supplying the banks with free deposit money (effectively, zero-interest loans), the savers of America are taking a $250 billion annual haircut in lost interest income. And the banks, after reaping this ill-deserved windfall, are pleased to pronounce themselves solvent, ignoring the bad loans still on their books. This kind of Robin Hood redistribution in reverse is not sustainable. It requires permanently flooding world markets with cheap dollars — a recipe for the next bubble and financial crisis.

Moreover, rescuing the banks yet again, this time with a steeply sloped yield curve (that is, cheap short-term money and more expensive long-term rates), is not even a proper monetary policy action. It is a vast and capricious reallocation of national income, which would be hooted down in the halls of Congress, were it properly brought to a vote.

National economic policy has come to this absurd pass because for decades the Fed has juiced the banking system with excessive reserves. With this monetary fuel, the banks manufactured, aggressively at first and then recklessly, a tide of new loans and deposits. When Wall Street’s “heart attack” struck in September 2008, bank liabilities had reached 100 percent of gross domestic product — double the ratio of a few decades earlier.

This was a measurement of the perilous extent to which bad investments, financed by debt, had come to distort the warp and woof of the economy. Behind the worthless loans stands a vast assemblage of redundant housing units, shopping malls, office buildings, warehouses, tanning salons and fast food restaurants. These superfluous fixed assets had, over the past decade, given rise to a hothouse economy of jobs that have now vanished. Obviously, the legions of brokers, developers, appraisers, contractors, tradesmen and decorators who created the bad investments are long gone. But now the waitresses, yoga instructors, gardeners, repairmen, sales clerks, inventory managers, office workers and lift-truck drivers once thought needed to work at these places are disappearing into the unemployment statistics, as well.

The baleful reality is that the big banks, the freakish offspring of the Fed’s easy money, are dangerous institutions, deeply embedded in a bull market culture of entitlement and greed. This is why the Obama tax is welcome: its underlying policy message is that big banking must get smaller because it does too little that is useful, productive or efficient.

To argue, as some conservatives surely will, that a policy-directed shrinking of big banking is an inappropriate interference in the marketplace is to miss a crucial point: the big Wall Street banks are wards of the state, not private enterprises. During recent quarters, for instance, the preponderant share of Goldman Sachs’ revenues came from trading in bonds, currencies and commodities.

But these profits were not evidence of Mr. Market doing God’s work, greasing the wheels of commerce and trade by facilitating productive financial transactions. In fact, they represented the fruits of hyperactive gambling in the Fed’s monetary casino — a place where the inside players obtain their chips at no cost from the Fed-controlled money markets, and are warned well in advance, by obscure wording changes in the Fed’s policy statements, about any pending shift in the gambling odds.

To be sure, the most direct way to cure the banking system’s ills would be to return to a rational monetary policy based on sensible interest rates, an end to frantic monetization of federal debt and a stable exchange value for the dollar. But Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and his posse are not likely to go there, believing as they do that central banking is about micromanaging aggregate demand — asset bubbles and a flagging dollar be damned. Still, there can be no doubt that taxing big bank liabilities will cause there to be less of them. And that’s a start.

Health 'reform' vs. the Constitution
NYPOST
By GEORGE F. WILL
Last Updated: 7:41 AM, January 16, 2010
Posted: 12:31 AM, January 16, 2010

Although Democrats think their health-care legislation faces smooth sailing to implementation, there is a rock dead ahead -- a constitutional challenge to the legislation's core. Democrats who assume it is constitutional to make it mandatory for Americans to purchase health insurance should answer some questions:

Would it be constitutional for the government to legislate compulsory calisthenics for all Americans? If not, why not? If it would be, in what sense does the nation still have constitutional, meaning limited, government?

Supporters of the mandate say Congress can impose it under the enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. Since the New Deal, courts have made this power capacious enough to include regulating intrastate activity that "substantially affects" interstate commerce. Hence Congress could constitutionally ban racial discrimination in "public accommodations" -- restaurants, motels, etc. -- as an impediment to interstate commercial activity.

Opponents of the mandate say: Unless the Commerce Clause is infinitely elastic -- in which case, Congress can do anything -- it does not authorize Congress to forbid the inactivity of not making a commercial transaction, of not purchasing a product (health insurance) from a private provider.

"Congress can regulate commercial activities in which people choose to engage, but cannot require that they engage in those commercial activities." So says Sen. Orrin Hatch, who also notes that if Congress can mandate particular purchases in order to help the economy, there was no need for Cash for Clunkers: Congress could have ordered people to buy cars (with subsidies, if necessary). Why not the Anti-Couch Potato Act To Make Calisthenics Mandatory and To Impose a $50 Excise Tax on Cheeseburgers Because Unhealthy Lifestyles Affect Interstate Commerce?

Many liberals, says Hatch, spent eight years insisting that "the Constitution sets definite and objective limits that the president must obey." There are, however, no constitutional controls on Congress if there are no limits on its power to declare all its preferences "necessary and proper" for the regulation of commerce.

Stuart Taylor, a judicious analyst of legal matters, says (in National Journal) that the Supreme Court probably would uphold the constitutionality of the mandate, for two reasons: Because uninsured people create substantial economic effects by seeking free care from emergency rooms. And because the mandate is, in Congress' judgment, "necessary and proper" for financing health-care reform.

But if any activity, or inactivity, can be declared to have economic consequences, then anything can be regulated -- or required. Furthermore, judicial review, and the Constitution itself, is largely nullified by a doctrine of virtually unlimited judicial deference to Congress' estimates of what is "necessary and proper" for the regulation of commerce.

If Congress does something beyond its constitutional powers, that something does not become constitutional merely by Congress saying it is necessary for this or that.

Taylor also says that the alternative to upholding the mandate is for the court to strike down a president's "signature initiative -- something that no court has done in 70 years, for good reason." The reason is a general duty to respect government decisions arrived at democratically.

Which brings us to what conservatives must believe in order to believe that the Supreme Court should declare the insurance mandate unconstitutional.

Judicial review -- let us be candid: judicial supervision of democracy -- troubles people who believe, mistakenly, that the Constitution's primary purpose is simply to provide the institutional architecture for democracy. Such people believe that having government by popular sovereignty is generally much more important than what government does; hence courts should be broadly deferential to preferences expressed democratically. This is the doctrine of those conservatives who deplore, often with more vigor than precision, "judicial activism."

More truly conservative conservatives take their bearings from the proposition that government's primary purpose is not to organize the fulfillment of majority preferences but to protect pre-existing rights of the individual -- basically, liberty. These conservatives favor judicial activism understood as unflinching performance of the courts' role in that protection.

That role includes disapproving congressional encroachments on liberty that are not exercises of enumerated powers. This obligatory engagement with the Constitution's text and logic supersedes any obligation to be deferential toward the actions of government merely because they reflect popular sovereignty.

The latter kind of conservatives are more truly conservative than the former kind because they have stronger principles for resisting the conscription of individuals, at a cost of diminished liberty, into government's collective projects. So a constitutional challenge to the mandate serves two purposes: It defies a pernicious idea and clarifies conservatism.

Time to change course
NYPOST
By MICHAEL BARONE
Last Updated: 2:43 PM, January 9, 2010
Posted: 12:24 AM, January 9, 2010

A year ago, I was privileged to be one of several guests at a dinner with President- elect Obama. One thing that struck me and others, aside from his courtesy and fluency, was his air of self-confidence. The man who had risen in just four years from state senator to president of the United States seemed sure he could master the job.

I wonder if he is as sure now. It seems to me that two assumptions that Obama carried into the White House -- assumptions that were shared by many who hadn't voted for him -- have proved to be unfounded.

The first is that economic distress would lead more Americans to favor big-government policies. The second is that Obama's personal characteristics and his repudiation of many of his predecessor's policies would change the minds of America's critics and enemies.

Any doubts that these assumptions were mistaken were dispelled at Christmastime. On Christmas Eve, the Senate passed a huge health-care bill that according to every public opinion poll is opposed by most Americans. And on Christmas Day, Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab came close to destroying an airliner nearing Detroit.

The unpopularity of the stimulus package, cap-and-trade legislation and the various health-care bills probably surprised the congressional Democratic leaders who put them together and the president who, with surprising passivity, indicated he would sign them. After all, weren't these ways to spread the wealth to ordinary people, as Obama put it to Joe the Plumber?

But through most of our history, Americans have preferred policies that enable and help them to amass wealth rather than those that purport to transfer someone else's wealth to them. The biggest outpouring of political sentiment this year came from those who thronged to "tea parties" and denounced increases in the national debt as stirringly as did the first Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, who actually paid it all off.

On foreign policy, Obama imagined that confessing past American sins, announcing the closing of Guantanamo and abandoning enhanced interrogation techniques would make Islamist terrorists think better of America. He thought he could induce the leaders of enemy nations to change their ways by referring respectfully to regimes like Iran's and downplaying all talk of human rights abuses.

It turns out that just as the financial crisis and recession didn't much change Americans' fundamental attitudes on the balance between government and markets, so emollient talk and confessions of past American sins didn't much change the behavior of those who consider America a sworn enemy. The mullahs still want their nuclear bomb.

US officials could stop talking about a "War on Terror" and speak instead of "man-caused disasters." But that didn't disarm the Islamist terrorist who shot up the recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., or the Muslim psychiatrist who opened fire at Fort Hood or the pampered Nigerian who tried to bring down Northwest flight 253 over Detroit.

Obama did manage to abandon his statement that the Detroit bomber was an "isolated extremist" and admit that he was in touch with al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen. Yet the administration quickly sent him into the civilian-justice system, where he predictably clammed up.

We've all experienced the cognitive dissonance that comes when it turns out that the world doesn't work the way we assumed it would. It's hard to give up your assumptions and easier to believe that unexpected events were an aberration from norm that would quickly snap back to what we expected.

Midcourse corrections in these circumstances are often awkward and difficult to execute, the more so when all eyes are on you and any change in direction is the subject of universal comment and adverse criticism.

Getting elected president of the United States must be an enormously confidence-building experience: So many people wanted the job, and you got it. Being president can be more chastening when events don't turn out as you anticipated.

The great presidents -- Lincoln, FDR -- faced events no one expected and in response changed policies and priorities without ever, so far as we know, losing their nerve. Lesser presidents, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, did so as well. Will Barack Obama?


Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama Way
NYTIMES
By ROSS DOUTHAT
December 26, 2009

Every presidency is the subject of competing caricatures. But almost a year into his first term, there’s something particularly elusive about Barack Obama’s political identity. He’s a bipartisan bridge-builder — unless he’s a polarizing ideologue. He’s a crypto-Marxist radical — except when he’s a pawn of corporate interests. He’s a post-American utopian — or else he’s a willing tool of the national security state.

The press has churned out a new theory every week, comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, to George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — to every 20th-century chief executive, it often seems, save poor, dull Gerald Ford. But none of the analogies have stuck. We’re well into the Obama era, but neither his allies nor his enemies can quite get a fix on exactly what our 44th president really represents.

Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.

This is a puzzling combination, for many, because we expect our politicians’ principles to align more neatly with their approach to governing. Our deal-making Machiavels are supposed to be self-conscious “centrists” (think Ben Nelson or Arlen Specter). Our ideological liberals and conservatives are supposed to be more concerned with being right than with being ruthlessly effective.

It’s also puzzling because Obama promised exactly the opposite approach while running for the presidency. He campaigned as a postpartisan healer who would change the cynical ways of Washington — as a foe of both back-room deals and ideology-as-usual. But he’s governed as a conventional liberal who believes in the existing system, knows how to work it and accepts the limitations it imposes on him.

In hindsight, the most prescient sentence penned during the presidential campaign belongs to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. “Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama,” he wrote in July 2008, “is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.”

Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.

They’re wrong. Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.

The upside of this approach is obvious: It gets things done. Between the stimulus package, the pending health care bill and a new raft of financial regulations, Obama will soon be able to claim more major legislative accomplishments than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson.

The downside, though, is that sometimes what gets done isn’t worth doing. The assumption that a compromised victory is better than no victory at all can produce phony achievements — like last week’s “global agreement” on climate change — and bloated, ugly legislation. And using cynical means to progressive ends (think of the pork-laden stimulus bill or the frantic vote-buying that preceded this week’s Senate health care votes) tends to confirm independent voters’ worst fears about liberal government: that it’s a racket rigged to benefit privileged insiders and a corrupt marketplace floated by our tax dollars.

At the same time, Obama doesn’t enjoy the kind of deep credibility with his base that both Reagan and Kennedy spent decades building. When Kennedy told liberals that a given compromise was the best they could get, they believed him. Whether the issue is health care or Afghanistan, Obama’s word doesn’t carry the same weight.

This leaves him walking a fine line. If Obama’s presidency succeeds, it will be a testament to what ideology tempered by institutionalism can accomplish. But his political approach leaves him in constant danger of losing center and left alike — of being dismissed by independents as another tax-and-spender, and disdained by liberals as a sellout.

How O says he's about to mislead
NYPOST
By JACOB SULLUM
Last Updated: 12:17 PM, December 19, 2009
Posted: 12:08 AM, December 19, 2009

'There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits . . . and investing in job creation and economic growth," President Obama said last week. "This is a false choice."

During the same speech, he asked his audience to "let me just be clear" that his administration, having racked up the biggest budget deficits ever, is embracing fiscal responsibility, as reflected in his vow that "health-insurance reform" will not increase the deficit "by one dime."

For connoisseurs of Obama-speak, the address featured a trifecta, combining three of his favorite rhetorical tropes. There was the vague reference to "those who" question his agenda; the "false choice" they use to deceive the public; the determination to "be clear" and forthright, in contrast with those dishonest naysayers.

These devices are useful as signals that the president is about to mislead us.

Obama says his opponents wrongly insist that we choose between "paying down our deficits" and "investing in job creation and economic growth." But that is not the way his real critics -- as opposed to the imaginary, nameless ones who appear in his speeches -- would frame the issue.

The real critics question the premise that the spending Obama supports, which he says ultimately will boost tax revenues and curtail outlays for public-assistance programs, should be considered an investment at all -- and, if so, whether it is a better use of this money than the market would have found.

Copying his predecessor by throwing more money at education, for example, is a dubious strategy for spurring economic growth, since there is no clear relationship between spending and student achievement.

Likewise, Obama's promise that health-insurance subsidies won't expand the deficit may be "clear," but it's not realistic, since it's based on accounting tricks and wishful thinking. Congressional Democrats avoided counting a $240 billion Medicare "fix" by putting it in a separate bill and assumed reimbursement cuts that probably will never materialize.

Here are some other things Obama has asked us to let him be clear about: "Earmarks have given legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects"; the US government "has no interest in running GM"; Medicare cuts will be made "in a way that protects our senior citizens" from changes in benefits or costs; and a "public option" for health care, which would invite businesses to offload their medical costs onto taxpayers and could drive private insurers from the market, "would not impact those of you who already have insurance."

From now on, when you hear Obama speak, try replacing "let me be clear" with "let me lie to you," and see if it makes more sense.

Speaking of making sense, some of the "false choices" Obama has identified in the last year are more puzzling than misleading. "I reject the false choice between securing this nation and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars," he declared in March. So according to Obama, we can secure the nation and waste billions of taxpayer dollars. Actually, that sounds about right.

Obama's depiction of his critics is a bit further removed from reality. In the health-care debate, he says, "there are those who simply don't believe Washington can bring about this change"; "there are those who will say that we do not go far enough"; "there are those who would have us try what has already failed, who would defend the status quo"; "there are those who will oppose reform no matter what"; and "there are those who want to seek political advantage."

What about those who don't like the status quo but have a different vision of reform, not because they want to go farther than Obama does but because they want to go in a different direction, toward more choice, more competition and less government involvement? In Obama's world, they don't exist.

Instead we have his bold yet achievable plan, pitted against socialist utopianism and blind partisan intransigence. Let me be clear: This is a false choice.

Kristol: Did the Medicare Buy-In Just Die on Face the Nation?
Sunday, December 13, 2009 @1:25pm blog post

On Face The Nation, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson made it pretty clear they weren't inclined to support the Reid "compromise" featuring a Medicare buy-in. Nelson said he thought such a buy-in is a bad idea, and Lieberman noted that on "the so-called Medicare buy-in -- the opposition to it has been growing as the week has gone on. Though I don't know exactly what's in it, from what I hear I certainly would have a hard time voting for it because it has some of the same infirmities that the public option did."

Reid might be able to arrange to get a jerry-rigged Congressional Budget Office score Monday or Tuesday that seems acceptable (the preferred way of doing this so far has been to have the legislation feature ten years of (alleged) spending cuts and (real) taxes and pay-ins, and then only five or six years of benefits). But it sounds as if Lieberman and Nelson aren't willing to play along with the notion that the way to save Medicare is to expand the number of subsidized, adversely-self-selected people in it.

But who's going finally to just say no? There must be a dozen moderate and/or red-state Democrats who would love for Reid's bill to die, but it's hard to be the one who definitively goes first. Lieberman and/or Nelson could do it. Or it might be that the easiest way for everything to collapse in the next couple of days would be for a gang of six (or whatever) to emerge--say, Lieberman, Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, and John McCain, Olympia Snowe, and Judd Gregg--who would agree to work together in the new year on bipartisan legislative efforts to pass sensible incremental reforms with substantial bipartisan support. Word leaking out of one meeting of such a group would put the Reid legislation out of its misery.

If moderate Democrats could say in good faith that the failure of Reid's bill now doesn't mean there won't be health care reform this congressional session--and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to say that, as there would be huge pressure on both parties next year to deliver something--then Democrats would have an easier time breaking ranks. Indeed, they could say such an outcome would be more in their party's, and their president's, interest, than jamming though a startlingly unpopular and incoherently bloated piece of legislation on a party-line vote. And they would be right.


Obama’s Wheel of Fortune: The president’s luck has changed — and he doesn’t seem to have noticed.
National Review
By Victor Davis Hanson
December 11, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

No one in the Obama throng has ever believed much in the Roman concept of a “wheel of fortune” — rota fortunae — so often alluded to by the likes of Cicero and Boethius.

But that metaphor for changeable fortune reminds us that at times we all enjoy inexplicable good luck — and therefore must brace for the moment when the wheel turns, and inevitable adversity follows.

Of course, the downturn is always worse for those who were flippant on the upturn — or so medieval moralists reminded haughty royalty. All cultures are aware of the fickleness of fortune — whether exemplified through the morality tale of Job, the polarities of hubris/nemesis, or the notion of karma.

Any student of the 2008 campaign could have seen that Obama’s messianic persona would not last — given the human propensity to tire of flashy neon signs that advertise empty trifles. Candidate Obama said nothing of real substance — even as he advised the wowed crowds that there were first-aid provisions for those who would soon faint in ecstasy at his very words.

That his platform was vague and disingenuous, contradicted much of what he had said in the past, and remained inconsistent mattered little. Any suspicions of the inexperienced community organizer from Chicago were trumped by popular fury at the Wall Street meltdown, weariness with eight years of the Bush administration, and the promise that the ascension of Obama would, on the cheap, wash away the guilt of the American suburbanite.

Remember his energy policy, such as it was?

When candidate Obama was pressed, he reluctantly mentioned nuclear energy, coal, oil, and natural gas. But these were castoff concessions. They were offered as sops until the popular anger over gas-price hikes subsided — and they were to become no more than mere bookends to soaring rhetoric about “millions of new green jobs.”

Infatuated voters apparently bought this fantasy. Our deserts and mountain passes would be scarred with ugly panels, turbines, and access roads, as millions of newly hired government construction workers rushed out to ensure that we could obtain 5 percent of our current power needs from such green salvations.

A charlatan like Van Jones (cf. the remarks of Valerie Jarrett, “Oooh. Van Jones, all right! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him . . . ”) surely knew more about America’s energy needs than did the CEO of Exxon.

But now, on the wheel’s downturn, President Obama must brace for spiraling energy costs when the world economy rebounds. Soon the sobering electorate will turn and ask why Obama did not push for nuclear power and encourage more exploitation of newly discovered natural-gas fields.

Ditto the war. For much of 2007–2009, “hope and change” masked the absurdity of Obama’s “I’m for the good war/Bush did the bad war” dichotomy. So now the wheel turns again, and hokey rhetoric cannot mask reality.

The bad war is relatively quiet. The good war has heated up — more Americans were killed in Afghanistan in Obama’s first ten months than in any of the Bush years. And the good-war president now addresses the nation with the look of “This is really not supposed to happen to Nobel Peace Prize winners!” and “Remember, Bush did it!” and “Where are the American people who used to support the Afghan war?” Had candidate Obama empathized with bad/worse choices in every war, rather than simplistically demonizing his predecessor, the public might be more sympathetic to his present plight.

Candidate Obama did not worry much about a creepy cast of characters that kept surfacing around him — Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Father Pfleger, Tony Rezko, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In the aggregate, they appeared as a coterie of unhinged, anti-American, and quite unpleasant people. Someone should have reminded Obama that he was running to be president, not a Chicago ward boss.

The lesson went unlearned. And so the cast was updated with the likes of Van Jones, Anita Dunn, and Kevin Jennings. Instead of “God d*** America,” we got George Bush was in on 9/11, the mass-murdering Chairman Mao was an inspirational political thinker, and homosexuality is merely an alternative lifestyle choice for our teens. The revolving planets change, but the pull of their sun remains the same.

On fiscal policy, candidate Obama could not quite explain who “they” were, who were to be skinned for the sins of Wall Street. Those who made over $150,000? Or was it $250,000, or perhaps $200,000?

In Obama’s never-never land, these amorphous “they” had all sorts of money from stealing bonuses, getting exorbitant tax cuts, or unnecessarily taking out tonsils or cutting off limbs. What was so hard about having “them” cash out a few of their hidden bank accounts to pay for green jobs and comprehensive health care?

So President Obama went on demonizing the productive classes, promising more taxes, gratuitously slurring the Chamber of Commerce and the town-hallers. And now suddenly there is surprise on the downturn that we are on the verge of what John Kerry once said of a 5.3 percent unemployment rate under George W. Bush  — “a jobless recovery.”

“Bush did it” was the repeated campaign message. Those soaring cadences of castigation silenced worries that a first-term senator and former Chicago community organizer did not know much about the world around us.

Apparently, Obama was convinced that apologies, bows, concessions to Iran, Putin, Latin American Marxists, and the Arab world would wow them all the way his tropes had mesmerized upscale suburbanites in Palo Alto and Greenwich. After all, Obama had as many suspicions about America’s past as did our enemies and rivals whom he courted.

But then Obama learned that — unlike professors, stockbrokers, lawyers, and teachers — the likes of Ahmadinejad and Putin did not care about his Kenyan father. They had not read his Dreams from My Father. Their names are even more exotic than his. Instead such thugs interpret his showy magnanimity as innate weakness, and men like these will manipulate it rather than show deference.

Soon Putin will flex his muscles in Russia’s backyard. In a year or two Iran will announce that it has the bomb. And we will witness more anguished debates over the motives of the next Major Hasan, more Khalid Sheik Mohammeds contextualizing their mass murders live from New York, and more terrorist plotting on the assumption that the new administration is more interested in shutting down Guantanamo Bay than putting the fear of God into radical Islamists bent on our destruction.

So the wheel turned, and now most of the country disapproves of President Obama — in the greatest crash of approval ratings of any first-year-presidency in recent history.

Will the wheel turn again? Not for a while, given Obama’s reaction to his downturn.

Foreign policy? It is still “Bush did it,” not reflection on his own rookie errors.

The economy? Jobs saved by borrowing are better metrics than the old unemployment statistics. Blame Bush again, tinker with the stats, and print more money.

Small businesses? Employers are still “they,” who must and will pay higher income and payroll taxes, and higher premiums for medical insurance. They won’t be thanked for their greater contributions; rather, they owe a sort of penance for doing well and creating the nation’s wealth.

Energy? President Obama is on his way to Copenhagen — oblivious to Climategate. He ignores the paradoxes of a planet the last decade slighting cooling, when it is supposed to be radically heating. And he does not worry at all about the effects of new green taxes on the country — when the productive classes may soon be paying 65 percent of their incomes in state and federal taxes and increased insurance premiums.

Spending? Obama, if given his way, will run up debts to match the aggregate red ink of all prior presidents combined. So far, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” has not been repudiated. Instead, Obama continues to blame Bush and the Republicans for causing the recession, rather than wondering whether his massive borrowing and disbursement are making things far worse.

In other words, a very human President Obama still does not grasp that events are catching up to him and that even his empyrean rhetoric cannot allow him to escape. For now, the wheel has turned, and it is still heading downward. If he does not change, his luck won’t either.


Good riddance to bipartisanship
National Review
By JONAH GOLDBERG
Last Updated: 9:37 AM, November 28, 2009
Posted: 2:19 AM, November 28, 2009

I hereby forfeit my claim to a right-wing- conspiracy-decoder ring by offering two cheers for the Democrats. I congratulate them on their victory last Saturday night in the Senate, and while I can't quite wish them success on the course they are following, I'm beginning to make peace with the possibility that they'll win.

For years, conservatives and liberals have flirted with the idea of disposing of the fool's errand of bipartisanship. Seeking compromise with partisans across the aisle is a recipe for getting nothing important done.

For liberals, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been a leader of this school. In 2007, Krugman wrote in Slate magazine that progressives should abandon any pretense at working with Republicans. The "middle ground," he wrote, "doesn't exist -- and if Democrats try to find it, they'll squander a huge opportunity. Right now, the stars are aligned for a major change in America's direction. If the Democrats play nice, that opportunity may soon be gone."

"If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate," he wrote earlier this year, "it's that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines." Krugman went on to describe the different views in his typically tendentious manner.

He's right on the basic point. While there are plenty of hackish, opportunistic deal makers in both parties, the core visions -- one progressive, the other conservative -- that animate the rank and file are increasingly, and fundamentally, irreconcilable.

Hence, the quest for the middle ground usually rewards the worst politicians -- those devoid of any core convictions and only concerned with feathering their own nests -- and yields the worst policies. Blending the two visions is like trying to marry two different recipes. You don't get the best of both so much as a huge mess -- say, peanut butter and caviar -- or a fraudulent meal, like a "vegetarian" cheesesteak. Better to stay pure, have your way and convince the American people that your way is the best way.

In short, if you can't join 'em, beat 'em.

Now, the appeal of such an argument depends a great deal on your proximity to power. When your side is out of power, half a loaf is more appetizing than nothing. When in power, the thought of hogging the whole loaf for yourself instead of sharing is seductive.

I may be talking about team dynamics, but I don't mean that there's no difference between the teams. Far from it. The Democrats sincerely believe that nationalized health care, in one form or another, is the best thing for America and that if they can get it passed, voters will fall in love with it. Politically, there is a real danger they're right. Americans are loath to relinquish entitlements once they've secured them. That's the Republicans' gamble.

Then again, Democrats run the serious risk that before the imagined joys of health-care reform can be realized, voters will revolt over its tax hikes, huge Medicare cuts, increased bureaucracy and/or its budget-exploding costs. That's the Democrats' gamble.

Some moderate Democrats are making a side bet that they can vote for it out of solidarity and then run back to the center come the 2010 elections.

Well, I say let it ride. And just to make it more interesting, Republicans should promise to repeal "ObamaCare" if they get a congressional majority in 2010. As National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru argues, that way moderate Democrats won't be able to run away from their votes come 2010. They'll be on notice that this will be the issue of the election. And moderate Republicans will be on notice to resist the temptation to tinker with ObamaCare rather than defenestrate it once it's passed.

Sure, I'd rather see the health-care proposal die stillborn (and that's still quite possible). But if it passes, the upside is that Americans will finally be given a stark philosophical choice on a fundamental issue. That's much rarer than you might think. (Recall that the Iraq war and the bailouts were bipartisan affairs.)

ObamaCare is a vast, deeply polarizing demonstration project for progressive ideas. It's terrible policy, but it may well result in a beneficial backlash. "Example is the school of mankind," proclaimed Edmund Burke, "and they will learn at no other."

Democrats insist they're pushing for health-care reform against a political headwind because "history" compels them to. Republicans are standing athwart "history" yelling, "Stop!"

Politically, one side will be proved right, and the side proved wrong will pay a staggering price. Everyone's all in.

We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: If you think things have been rough so far, hang on.
National Review
By Victor Davis Hanson
November 26, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

When it comes to the problems facing this country, an old slogan comes to mind: “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

High unemployment, the recession, and a terrorist resurgence in Afghanistan are bad enough. But there are a number of problems on the horizon that could dwarf President Obama’s first-year trials.

Why the pessimism? In short, we are doing nothing to prepare for the crises to come.

A global recession has led to low oil prices. Yet in this window of opportunity, America has not decreased its foreign-oil dependence. We are not encouraging domestic exploration. And we are still ambivalent on nuclear power.

But as the world economy recovers, oil will probably surge back over $100 a barrel, increasing our oil-import tab by 25 percent or more. The Obama administration, though, mostly is obsessed with subsidizing relatively small amounts of wind and solar power. It likely won’t be long before angry motorists at the pump are demanding to know why we have not pushed for more development at home of still-plentiful natural-gas and oil fields.

Meanwhile, other economic bad news may be just around the corner. Today, interest rates on short-term Treasury bills still are less than 1 percent. But they, too, will climb as business picks up and worries over American inflation spread.

If we have to pay foreign lenders 5 percent to 7 percent interest on our debt, as in the past, the increased costs will gobble up additional billions from our annual budget. Yet sadly again, we are missing this rare opportunity of low interest to pay off cheaply the trillions that we already owe. Instead, we are borrowing even more!

The War on Terror is also heating up again. Fairly or not, the Fort Hood massacre sent the message that the United States is more worried about appearing politically correct in matters of diversity than about hunting down radical Islamists on its home soil. Those who seek to copy what happened at Fort Hood will be encouraged. And those charged with stopping them will be discouraged and confused.

Such uncertainty was reinforced by the attorney general’s decision to try the architects of 9/11 in federal courts in New York City. At best, the confessed mass-murderer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will lecture the United States. At worst, one sympathetic juror could find the monster only 99 percent guilty, and therefore the court might fail to convict him of planning the murders of 3,000 innocent people.

After announcing a new strategy of counterinsurgency in March, and appointing Gen. Stanley McChrystal the new supreme commander in Afghanistan, it looks like Obama only now will commit more troops to Afghanistan. That will be a wise decision — but one coming three months after the generals’ request.

We were given an unexpected reprieve through the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. We can now build on that victory by routing the Taliban in the way the Iraq surge stabilized democracy there.

Finally, there is an array of taxes on the horizon — increased federal income-tax rates; promised hikes in health-care surcharge taxes; and even rumors of value-added federal sales taxes. These increases are said to be aimed at the proverbial wealthy. But that could change — given that the top 5 percent of households already provide 60 percent of the nation’s income-tax revenue. And many are already paying 50 percent to 60 percent of their incomes in combined local, state, federal, and payroll taxes.

Just consider. The price of gas will soon likely increase. The cost of servicing our profligate borrowing will, too. One more terrorist attack like at Fort Hood, or nightly sermons from a grandstanding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or a new Taliban offensive, and the momentum could shift to radical Islam in its decades-long war against the United States. Next year’s tax hikes will be real and large — and no longer just this year’s idle talk.

As these storm clouds gather, Congress bickers on Saturday nights about borrowing even more money for health-care reform, yet another federal entitlement.

If you think things have been rough so far, hang on, ’cause you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Op-Ed Columnist
Obama in His Labyrinth
NYTIMES
By ROGER COHEN
November 24, 2009

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — Before coming up to Canada’s Atlantic provinces, where the nicest people in this nice country are said to live, I found myself seated next to Henry Kissinger at a New York dinner and asked him how he thought President Barack Obama was doing.

“He reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games,” Kissinger said. “But he hasn’t completed a single game and I’d like to see him finish one.”

I thought that wasn’t a bad image for Obama’s international gambits, and then here, at the first Halifax International Security Forum, I heard a similar observation from one participant: “We’ve had the set-up, but is there a middle game?” Or, put another way, can this probing, intelligent president close anything?

As an Obama admirer, I’m worried. He feels over-managed, over-scripted to me, to the point where he’s not showing the guts that prevailed at various difficult moments in the campaign. The ideas are good, but the warmth, cajoling and craft that make ideas more than that are lacking.

I find myself yearning for a presidential gaffe if only to reveal an instinctual human moment. Memo to Obama handlers: Give us a little more of the unvarnished. De-teleprompt the president for a few seconds!

The list of Obama’s international initiatives is of head-turning scope. There’s his “world without nuclear weapons,” announced in Prague last April, reiterated at the United Nations in September. It’s an idea with resonance, and may provide some moral suasion over countries contemplating pursuit of a bomb, but I can’t help recalling that the worlds of 1914 and 1939 were worlds without nukes. No thanks to that.

Unless proliferation, the most worrying global trend of the past 15 years is reversed, this dream is just a feel-good notion.

Then there’s the “reset button” with Russia, which always makes me think of those announcements on flights — “We’re trying to reset the video system” — and my heart sinks. One way to measure the importance of this attempt to warm a cool relationship is that Russia and the United States still control upward of 95 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal.

There are glimmerings with Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, but as Robert Gates, the U.S. defense secretary, observed here, Russia now offers “two perspectives on the rest of the world depending on which of its leaders you’re talking to.” The other perspective is called Vladimir Putin.

Obama needs Russian help on Iran, but I’m not holding my breath for forthright cooperation from Moscow on any eventual sanctions. As for the follow-up agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, intended to cut Russian and American arsenals by about half and supposed to be signed before the old pact expires on Dec. 5, it still needs work. I don’t believe Obama has yet shifted the basic confrontational optic of a resurgent Russia emerging from the humiliation of imperial collapse.

On Afghanistan, where an announcement is at last imminent on the troops the United States will commit to “the necessary war,” Obama has mixed messages with unhappy results. The clarity of March yielded to the cloudiness of fall and the long think has, in the words here of John McCain, “sounded an uncertain trumpet.” Peter MacKay, the Canadian defense minister, said the hesitation was “not helpful” because “everyone has hit the pause button until the U.S. decision.”

I worry now that Obama’s quest for perfect calibration will yield a less than resounding fudge where the tenacious message of a troop increase is undermined by talk of exit timing. That’s not how you break the will of an enemy.

In Europe, a more modest reset attempt has been compromised with political leaders (if not the public) by a perception of cool distance, underscored when Obama did not show at 20th-anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Feelings are particularly strong in Paris, where mutterings about Obama’s “Carterization” are heard. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who ushered France back to NATO’s integrated military command structure, and shattered political taboos dictating coolness toward America, has seen his hopes for a special relationship evaporate.

In Israel-Palestine, Obama underestimated the damage of the past decade and has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president’s groundbreaking outreach to Iran, which I applaud, has unsettled a regime that does not know how to respond. But here, as elsewhere, Obama has been unnecessarily weak on human rights issues in the face of an unconscionable crackdown. There’s a trace of churlish “ABB” — “Anything but Bush” — in Obama’s failure to speak out more for human rights and freedom. Once again, calibration has trumped gut to a damaging degree.

Ieva Kupce, a Latvian Defense Ministry official here, told me, “Watching Obama, I worry that democracy is going out of fashion. We in Latvia would not have made it without the United States.”

The great battle of the 21st century is going to be between free-market democracies and free-market authoritarian systems. America’s position in that struggle has to be clear if Obama’s simultaneous grandmaster openings are to produce victories.

Marching off a cliff

By RICH LOWRY
Last Updated: 3:23 AM, November 23, 2009
Posted: 2:07 AM, November 23, 2009

Saturday night's health-care vote in the Senate was a theatrical fizzle. Sure, Majority Leader Harry Reid made senators sit at their desks for their vote to create a sense of "history" -- but everyone knew that he'd get the 60 votes he needed to start debate on ObamaCare.

If a $100 million Medicaid payoff to her state wasn't enough to keep Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu bought for at least a few days, there truly is no honor among thieves. Landrieu bragged about her swag, calculating that the "Lousiana Purchase" was really worth $300 million.

The two other centrist Democrats whose votes were in doubt -- Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- took refuge in the explanation that they had only a Socratic interest in opening a debate on the bill, and who could be against that?

But there was real drama Saturday -- the same drama playing out every day the Democrats persist in the political and fiscal heedlessness that characterizes their push for ObamaCare. It's as if they don't realize that they're led by a marginally popular president (dipping below 50 percent public approval in the Gallup poll last week for the first time), are deeply unpopular themselves and are pushing for legislation that is opposed by more people than support it in almost every single opinion poll.

But they do realize it -- they just don't care. They've talked themselves into the ludicrously self-delusional notion that what ails them and the president is that they haven't yet passed the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and Medicare cuts that finance (albeit incompletely) ObamaCare.

This will long be a case study in the annals of abnormal political psychology. Tax hikes undid George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Bush lost his presidency, Clinton his congressional majority), and Medicare cuts undid Newt Gingrich (taking the air out of his "Republican revolution"). Obama's Democrats are prescribing themselves a strong dose of both, in an exercise in self-destructive quackery.

They believe that Obama can't afford failure, that's it's the defeat of ClintonCare that killed the Democrats in 1994. But such are the grave political and substantive flaws of ObamaCare that Democrats can't afford success or failure.

If they pass it, they have tax hikes and Medicare cuts around their necks, as well as the increased insurance premiums the bill is sure to cause. If they fail, they've demonstrated their own ineffectual ideological fervor, while still putting themselves on record in favor of tax increases and Medicare cuts.

The Democrats got themselves into this hellish dilemma by not taking the obvious step of scaling back the bill once it became clear it engendered fierce public resistance. Take half a loaf, disarm your critics, call it victory, hail yourselves at the signing ceremony -- and come back for more later. It's not complicated.

Instead, they've stayed on a maximalist course. They've pushed to the point where the effort could collapse -- and, even if they succeed, they'll have done themselves and the nation's fiscal future grave harm.

This is the other element of the drama that inheres in the health-care debate: If it passes, people years and even decades from now will look back and ask, "What were they thinking?" It's a rare opportunity to see a train wreck at its inception, as the conductors make the decisions with malice afterthought that will ramify disastrously.

Everyone agrees that the nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path. So Democrats will add a $2.5 trillion entitlement to hurry us further along the path. Tax hikes that could go to reducing the deficit they'll plow into the new entitlement. Medicare cuts that could shore up Medicare's own shaky finances, they'll plow into the entitlement too (if the cuts happen at all). The new entitlement will grow at a projected 8 percent a year, and it's only through gimmickry it's made to look deficit neutral in the first decade. The cost curve of health care will be bent up, and insurance premiums, too, will rise. For all of this, ObamaCare will still leave 24 million people without health insurance.

If nothing else, watching the Democrats sacrifice so much on behalf of this monstrosity is fascinating, appalling -- and dramatic. Common sense suggests that they shouldn't do it. The basic laws of political physics say they can't do it. And yet on they march.

What Obama Accomplished in Asia: Nothing much.
Weekly Standard
by Fred Barnes
11/19/2009 12:00:00 AM

Has a president ever been less successful on a trip overseas than President Obama has on his eight-day excursion to Asia? I've been covering presidents since Gerald Ford and I can't think of one.

Obama struck out on his entire agenda in China and he acquiesced as the Chinese subjected him to the humiliation of a choreographed town hall meeting with student members of the Young Communist League. And he suffered through a 30-minute news conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao in which no questions from the media were allowed. Presidents normally come away on visits to foreign countries with "deliverables"--that is, tangible signs of progress like a treaty signing. All Obama got was a list of things the United States and China would do in the future. There's a name for this: diplomatic boilerplate.

Obama's aides and flacks insisted he wasn't looking for immediate gains in the American relationship with China. Instead he was developing stronger relations for long term. This reminds me of what his defenders say about a football running back who doesn't gain many yards. He's a great blocker. Yeah, right!

And imagine