Showing posts with label 2010 Election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2010 Election. Show all posts
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Coming True
You'll recall that two posts ago, in a pararaph titled "Raw Numbers Underestimate the Policy Impact" of the election, I argued that the fear of the rising Tea Party tide would continue to influence lawmakers to move to the right -- or even the center, especially those up for re-election in 2012. Mickey Kaus in Newsweek reports on an analysis of the defeat of the pro-amnesty DREAM Act that pretty convincingly shows that, at least among so-called "centrist" Republicans, this influence probably caused the bill's demise.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Today! (PART 2)
Three more hot thoughts on Politics 2010:
This Is No Time for Bipartisanship – Let the Bickering Begin; or, Don’t Fear the Gridlock. Most of the American electorate – especially in this election -- doesn’t want the parties to get along. They don’t want the parties to compromise on bad policies. They want good policies. The voters do not agree, of course, on what those good policies are. But we now have a Republican majority in the House, and a Senate that will begin to tilt away from the Obama agenda. And the reason for that majority is because the voters want the Obama/Democratic policies stopped and reversed.
Does anyone suppose that this election was about a craving on the part of voters for bipartisan compromise? No – the majority loathed the results of Democratic hegemony from 2008-2010. They truly want to turn back the clock. They (no, no, not everyone, but the people whose numbers matter) regret their vote for Obama and are counting the days when they can turn him out (unless the Republicans nominate a peckerwood, of which they are surely capable – see later entry re Republicans' peckerwood problem). The Republicans should demand reversal of the last two years of nonsense and should not back down, even at the risk of nothing getting done.
I recall college discussions with pals over whether we would prefer almost any House or Senate candidate we could think of, Republican or Democrat, over a robot who would vote NO on every single vote. (Perhaps exceptions for veto overrides and the like.) Robot always won.
Another exception would be voting yes on certain specialized legislation, such as . . . .
-- Analysis after nonpartisan analysis has demonstrated its almost certain nonviability.
-- President Obama himself admits that his repeated representations that healthcare costs will decrease under his plans may have been, um, untrue.
Almost nobody believes this monstrosity can work or is even beneficial to all but a few, at gigantic expense. To believe that people will tolerate a shrinking doctor class as MDs' rewards for excellence are slashed, while undeserving patients consume vast resources -- well, there are some who do believe that. Supporters are scarce, and they seldom emerge from what is almost always a tower of academe or cosseted media position. With each passing week, public support for the thing reaches a new low.
Obamacare doesn’t need fixing. It needs to die, and quickly, before the prospect of the economic and healthcare horrors it will unleash keep one more employer from adding one more employee.
Republican candidates called for repeal during the campaign, and now they need to demand it. Make the case – get the facts out – and work for repeal without compromise. It is the correct policy move.
But would it be politically prudent? The idea of repeal is very popular right now, and, as noted in my previous article, a large majority of Senators up for re-election in 2012 are Democrats. It is not beyond imagining that a strong Republican leadership could round up the votes required for repeal.
Nevertheless, it might well be a lost cause, since the President could veto any attempt at repeal, and Republicans are a Senate minority. A majority for repeal might not be the necessary majority for override. And, as we have seen with the recent tax agreement, there are Democrats out there (in this case, socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont) who will filibuster.
Your Cool Hot Center advises Republicans: Let them filibuster. Let them vote against repeal. Let them vote to sustain the President’s veto. As long as you fight the good fight and present a factual, supportable case for repeal – not the peckerwood case, but the sound economic, moral, and policy case, perhaps while acknowledging the need for reform in certain areas – you will be rewarded in November 2012. If you fight the good fight and lose, all it tells the electorate is that the housecleaning of 2010 was incomplete, and will energize the base for further corrections in 2012.
And, Republicans, if you don’t fight that fight, if you just nibble at the corners of Obamacare, if you try only to “reform” the beast, then you will have justified those souls who are convinced that principle counts for nothing in Washington, that anyone who goes there is inevitably compromised, must go along to get along, in derogation of the best interests of the Republic.
It’s gotta go. It or you.
This Is No Time for Bipartisanship – Let the Bickering Begin; or, Don’t Fear the Gridlock. Most of the American electorate – especially in this election -- doesn’t want the parties to get along. They don’t want the parties to compromise on bad policies. They want good policies. The voters do not agree, of course, on what those good policies are. But we now have a Republican majority in the House, and a Senate that will begin to tilt away from the Obama agenda. And the reason for that majority is because the voters want the Obama/Democratic policies stopped and reversed.
Does anyone suppose that this election was about a craving on the part of voters for bipartisan compromise? No – the majority loathed the results of Democratic hegemony from 2008-2010. They truly want to turn back the clock. They (no, no, not everyone, but the people whose numbers matter) regret their vote for Obama and are counting the days when they can turn him out (unless the Republicans nominate a peckerwood, of which they are surely capable – see later entry re Republicans' peckerwood problem). The Republicans should demand reversal of the last two years of nonsense and should not back down, even at the risk of nothing getting done.
I recall college discussions with pals over whether we would prefer almost any House or Senate candidate we could think of, Republican or Democrat, over a robot who would vote NO on every single vote. (Perhaps exceptions for veto overrides and the like.) Robot always won.
Another exception would be voting yes on certain specialized legislation, such as . . . .
* * *
Republicans Must Make Every Effort to Repeal The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” – Policy and Politics. Stop laughing. Yes, that’s the real name of “Obamacare.” As though it ended up having much to do with patients, protection, affordable care, or care at all. Surely the most reviled single piece of legislation in memory across a broad spectrum of American voters. Legislators could not tell you what was in it. Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to pass it to find out what was was in it. The bureaucracy it promised was gigantic and staggeringly complex. And in the meantime, we were treated to the vision of government social services collapsing economies and spawning beggar classes throughout Europe who demonstrated against any attempt to turn the tide of ruin.
And, of course, the bill itself was dead on arrival save for the legislative bribery it took to pass it.
And what’s happened since?
-- Employers are cutting back and, in some cases, dumping health care benefits, and passing on higher expenses to employees.
-- Employers are cutting back and, in some cases, dumping health care benefits, and passing on higher expenses to employees.
-- Analysis after nonpartisan analysis has demonstrated its almost certain nonviability.
-- President Obama himself admits that his repeated representations that healthcare costs will decrease under his plans may have been, um, untrue.
Almost nobody believes this monstrosity can work or is even beneficial to all but a few, at gigantic expense. To believe that people will tolerate a shrinking doctor class as MDs' rewards for excellence are slashed, while undeserving patients consume vast resources -- well, there are some who do believe that. Supporters are scarce, and they seldom emerge from what is almost always a tower of academe or cosseted media position. With each passing week, public support for the thing reaches a new low.
Obamacare doesn’t need fixing. It needs to die, and quickly, before the prospect of the economic and healthcare horrors it will unleash keep one more employer from adding one more employee.
Republican candidates called for repeal during the campaign, and now they need to demand it. Make the case – get the facts out – and work for repeal without compromise. It is the correct policy move.
But would it be politically prudent? The idea of repeal is very popular right now, and, as noted in my previous article, a large majority of Senators up for re-election in 2012 are Democrats. It is not beyond imagining that a strong Republican leadership could round up the votes required for repeal.
Nevertheless, it might well be a lost cause, since the President could veto any attempt at repeal, and Republicans are a Senate minority. A majority for repeal might not be the necessary majority for override. And, as we have seen with the recent tax agreement, there are Democrats out there (in this case, socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont) who will filibuster.
Your Cool Hot Center advises Republicans: Let them filibuster. Let them vote against repeal. Let them vote to sustain the President’s veto. As long as you fight the good fight and present a factual, supportable case for repeal – not the peckerwood case, but the sound economic, moral, and policy case, perhaps while acknowledging the need for reform in certain areas – you will be rewarded in November 2012. If you fight the good fight and lose, all it tells the electorate is that the housecleaning of 2010 was incomplete, and will energize the base for further corrections in 2012.
And, Republicans, if you don’t fight that fight, if you just nibble at the corners of Obamacare, if you try only to “reform” the beast, then you will have justified those souls who are convinced that principle counts for nothing in Washington, that anyone who goes there is inevitably compromised, must go along to get along, in derogation of the best interests of the Republic.
It’s gotta go. It or you.
* * *
No, I Don’t Miss George Bush. And I don’t feel sorry for Wade Phillips.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Today! (PART 1)
In my first post on the 2010 election I looked back at some of the reasons given for the shocking collapse of President Obama’s coalition. It was fun to revisit the past two years of liberal incomprehension and error, but it did not meet my personal requirement that I offer the Cool Hot Centrist Nation something other than warmed over punditry of others. (I frequently warm over my own punditry.) Herewith, then, some nuggets of what I’m thinking about the next few years and beyond. Quite a bit of it consists of priceless instruction to the Republican Party. Starting with:
Don’t Underestimate Barack Obama. I’ve received criticism from some readers for noting occasionally that the man has some very admirable qualities. His policies are so bad that the temptation is strong to judge him as a bad man through and through. Never mind whether this is ungracious – it’s simply wrong. Barack Obama is smart (see my series on the nature of his intelligence – Part 1 -- Part 2). The Republicans should not take for granted that his ego will not allow him to move to the center, will not allow him to offer compromises to Republicans that they will be unable to decline. I’m not saying that I expect this to happen; I’m not saying that it is likely to happen; I’m saying it’s wrong to assume that it can’t happen because the President lacks the brains to be flexible about his principles. In fact, it is my expe ctation that, at least at first, he will continue to press his academic statist agenda for reasons I have set forth elsewhere.
[Note: This was composed before his recent compromise on taxes. See?]
It is the case that he has squandered a great deal of his personal capital through the exposure of his tendency to dissimulate. But he still cuts an appealing physical figure. He speaks very well off the cuff and from the lectern; his reliance on teleprompters has been overstated because his oratorical skills were overpraised in the past. He has a fine speaking voice – must be the smokes. I’m not being frivolous here – style points count in American politics. In politics everywhere, for that matter. Except maybe China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Minnesota.
The economy is likely to get better, as the economy almost always does.
And if he runs again (80%) and is renominated (less certain) he will be formidable in debate against any Republican candidate who isn’t highly intelligent and thoroughly prepared, or who lacks his glibness. Excuse me a moment – coughsarahpalincough.
I’m serious. Don’t forget about the debates. We (by this, I mean I and people who don’t want Obama to win in 2012) need someone who is Obama’s equal in intelligence, grasp of policy, self-assurance, and for lack of a better phrase savoir faire. (“Charisma” is overused.) I’m not sure who fits that bill in the current batch of hopefuls, but I know a couple who don’t. Beg pardon --hackbobbyjindalwheeze.
Raw Numbers Underestimate the Policy Impact of November 2. The Republican sweep was compelling everywhere except traditional liberal strongholds – the Northeast, California and a handful of outliers that I’ll consider elsewhere. It included statehouses and local races.
But the Republicans did not regain the Senate. As things stand right now, the Senate is 51 Democrat, 47 Republican, and 2 Independent. The independents are Joe Lieberman (Connecticut) and Bernie Sanders (Vermont). Sanders is a socialist – no, that’s not a hyperbolic slam, he really is a socialist. He caucuses with the Democrats.
Of the 33 Senators up for re-election in 2012, 20 are Democrats. And of those 20, not all of them are left-crazy, although they might have gone along with what they mistakenly believed was the bulletproof Obama-endorsed legislative agenda the past two years. These guys aren’t dumb – they see what happened to apparently firmly- entrenched senators like Russ Feingold. They see Scott Brown sitting in Edward Kennedy’s seat. Would you expect them to go down the line with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama on hot-button conservative issues? Would you expect them to ignore the message rising from the entrails of the November 2 slaughter?
Personally, I would not.
It is probably too much to hope that the Republicans can assemble a veto-proof majority to do what they need to do to undo the legislative wreckage of the last two years. But even with a minority in the Senate, the right-moderates stand some chance of maintaining effective control.
Part 2 will appear in a few days.
Part 2 will appear in a few days.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Two Years Gone: An Election Punditry Checklist
In the coming days I’ll have some original thoughts on what’s coming up in the next two years and beyond. Mark your calendars.
Right now, though, I think it’s worthwhile to look back on one of the most rapid political collapses in anyone’s memory. This went far beyond the usual mid-term corrections in legislative balance. This election meant something. Something good, in my opinion, but if you don’t think so, OK. You’ve got a couple of years to see whether the voters like what they’ve wrought, or not.
What follows is not particularly original. One pundit or another (including Your Cool Hot Center) has said one or more of these things at one time or another. I’m in agreement with most of the conventional wisdom on the reasons for the spanking the Dems took on November 2. With so many plausible explanations, it is small wonder that they summed to nudge the pendulum so far from where it was in November 2008.
Think back to the avalanche of goodwill that accompanied President Obama into office. A lot of that goodwill was from folks like me who didn’t vote for him, but who admired him in many respects and hoped – maybe even assumed – that he was shrewd enough not to attempt to govern from the far left where he had resided throughout his legislative career and before.
And a lot of that goodwill came from – yep, the mainstream media.
Two years later, his coalition has evaporated, he is personally unpopular, his legislative majorities are gone (I know, the Dems still have a tiny majority, but if you were a Democratic senator up for election two or four years from now, how would you be voting?), employers won’t hire, Afghanistan festers.
How did it go so wrong so fast for this brilliant, charismatic figure of true historical significance?
Oh, it’s not so hard to figure, really.
-- The President and Congress began immediately to promote and enact a well left-of-center, big-government, union-gaga, tax-and-spend, redistributionist Euro-model agenda. The public perceived it clearly and rejected it. Check. The President has already rejected this explanation, stating instead that there was a failure of communication. I hope he keeps on thinking this, because it’s risible nonsense. The guy was on the teevee almost every day. It became a joke at our office; we have CNN on in the lobby and every time I’d walk through, there he’d be, promoting his agenda to one friendly audience or another.
It was just a real damned bad message. And, of course, you have Nancy Pelosi saying that the contents of the healthcare act could not be disclosed and that it had to be enacted before people would see what’s in it. Well, this might be a failure of communication – only problem is, the more people found out about what was really in the thing – that is, the more accurate communication the public received -- the less they liked it. Nope, there was no failure either (i) of communication other than a failure to tell the truth about the programs, or (ii) of voter understanding.
Which reminds me: I would ask those who believe that voters were misinformed or underinformed, or who misunderstood the information they received either because they’re dumb or because they got their news from Fox News or the Drudge Report – what is your view of the status of their intelligence, information, and understanding at such time as they handed the Democrats an very impressive victory a mere two years previously? Was the uncritical and even fawning Obama coverage by the mainstream media during the election (and don’t you dare try to deny it if you hope to maintain a molecule of credibility) your idea of accurate informing of the public? They were informed and smart two years ago but ignorant and dumb now? (And by the way, Fox News and Drudge were as popular then as they are now.) I need to write about this foxnewsphobia some day, but surely it must be clear at this point that Fox News whips the daylights out of its competitors (and the Drudge Report whips the daylights out of Huffington Post and dailykos.com and the like) because their reportage corresponds more closely with what their viewers perceive as reality than does the output of the now-suspended Keith Olberman, the clownish Chris Matthews, NPR, Katie Couric, David Gregory, the New York Times, and so on ad infinitim? (And I’m not a big fan of O’Reilly/Hannity/Fox & Friends.)
-- The Democrats misunderstood their 2008 election victory as a rejection of conservatism, when it was actually (i) a rejection of Bush for his own abandonment of conservative principles (like GHW Bush before him), combined with (ii) some Bushy personality and communications deficiencies, (iii) a very weak Republican ticket, and especially (iv) a misleading media and self-portrayal of a charismatic, eloquent, historically-inevitable black guy. Check.
-- Voters felt betrayed; Obama ran as a bipartisan moderate but was neither from the get-go. Check. He and his acolytes were so impressed by his margin and the tsunami of praise that swept him into office that he figured voters weren’t interested in him compromising the left agenda he’d coyly concealed during the campaign. This was error.
-- The President fibs. He is mendacious about many things, including (probably) his personal composition of Dreams of My Father, but most vividly about the health care bill and the existence of “shovel-ready jobs” ready to be stimulated by the stimulus. Check.
-- The Democrats were thuggish in enacting their unpopular stuff, strongarming it through Congress using legislative logrolling that crossed the line into spectacularly brazen bribery. Check. Special provisions favoring five states, unions, trial (plaintiffs’) lawyers. Obama was elected to change the way Washington did business, but his allies put on the most astoundingly craven display of legislative corruption in recent memory to enact the healthcare bill.
-- Joe Biden. Check. The gift that keeps on giving, although Nancy Pelosi is giving him a run for his money. Tell me true: Hypothetical: Big-time terrorist attack on the US. President drops dead of a heart attack. You would prefer the vice-president be: (a) Joe Biden or (b) Dick Cheney. Mm-hmm.
-- The President’s overseas apology/bowing tours exhibited his discomfort with the idea of American exceptionalism that most voters rightly embrace. Check.
-- The President doesn’t believe strongly in the international Islamist terror threat. Check.
-- The President doesn’t believe strongly in the dangers represented by illegal immigration from Mexico. Check and double-check. With Mexico dissolving into criminal anarchy, and with that culture osmotically creeping into the American border states, the Obama administration sues Arizona for its efforts to do something about it. Nice.
-- This historic black racial-healer president tolerated, if not promoted, a racist Justice Department under Eric Holder, and appointed a self-racially-identified candidate, and a mediocre one at that (Sonia Sotomayor), to the Supreme Court. Check. The Republicans will continue to press for an investigation of Holder’s disgraceful stewardship of Justice. And now we’re stuck with Sotomayor. Just this week a memorandum to the President from constitutional and Supreme Court expert Laurence Tribe (a liberal, by the way, who has long hoped for an appointment to the High Court himself) surfaced in which he advised his former student Obama respecting this self-proclaimed “wise Latina”: “Bluntly put," Tribe wrote the President, "she's not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is[.]” But nothing was going to stop POTUS from appointing a Hispanic judge.
-- The President dithered for months over what to do in Afghanistan, and ended up neither getting out nor giving his generals what they wanted. Check. In fairness, no one is entirely sure what to do in Afghanistan at this point. But Obama, after having identified this as Job One during the campaign, seems to have lost interest.
-- Voters did not like it when the President, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and other Democrats repeatedly talked down to them, accusing them of narrow-mindedness, misunderstanding, misperception of their own interests, ignorance, fearfulness, rejecting of science (!), and the like. Check. This is a variation of “we didn’t communicate our programs well enough.” What they really want to say is – hell, what they actually did say was, in one form or another -- “the American voter has not understood our communications – or has unreasonably declined to accept our assurances – on the benefits of government takeover of healthcare, bailouts, cap-and-trade, increased regulation, promotion of trade unionism, etc.” Unstated finish: because they're too dumb, afraid, etc. Well, sure, sometimes people are dumb. But they almost always know when they're being insulted.
-- The President vacationed and golfed even more frequently than recent presidential champs in this regard. Check. The President and FLOTUS definitely love to party and vacation. Can’t blame them for that, really. But in the midst of an economic downturn, it just doesn’t play well.
-- Barack Obama isn’t all that. Charm and eloquence emanating largely from those twin slanty transparent screens that seem always to show up at his public appearances. Sorry, no check. The President remains a very impressive man in many respects.
And I’ll pick up with this thought in the next article.
Overall, however, not so terribly surprising that the electorate got out the brooms.
Right now, though, I think it’s worthwhile to look back on one of the most rapid political collapses in anyone’s memory. This went far beyond the usual mid-term corrections in legislative balance. This election meant something. Something good, in my opinion, but if you don’t think so, OK. You’ve got a couple of years to see whether the voters like what they’ve wrought, or not.
What follows is not particularly original. One pundit or another (including Your Cool Hot Center) has said one or more of these things at one time or another. I’m in agreement with most of the conventional wisdom on the reasons for the spanking the Dems took on November 2. With so many plausible explanations, it is small wonder that they summed to nudge the pendulum so far from where it was in November 2008.
Think back to the avalanche of goodwill that accompanied President Obama into office. A lot of that goodwill was from folks like me who didn’t vote for him, but who admired him in many respects and hoped – maybe even assumed – that he was shrewd enough not to attempt to govern from the far left where he had resided throughout his legislative career and before.
And a lot of that goodwill came from – yep, the mainstream media.
Two years later, his coalition has evaporated, he is personally unpopular, his legislative majorities are gone (I know, the Dems still have a tiny majority, but if you were a Democratic senator up for election two or four years from now, how would you be voting?), employers won’t hire, Afghanistan festers.
How did it go so wrong so fast for this brilliant, charismatic figure of true historical significance?
Oh, it’s not so hard to figure, really.
-- The President and Congress began immediately to promote and enact a well left-of-center, big-government, union-gaga, tax-and-spend, redistributionist Euro-model agenda. The public perceived it clearly and rejected it. Check. The President has already rejected this explanation, stating instead that there was a failure of communication. I hope he keeps on thinking this, because it’s risible nonsense. The guy was on the teevee almost every day. It became a joke at our office; we have CNN on in the lobby and every time I’d walk through, there he’d be, promoting his agenda to one friendly audience or another.
It was just a real damned bad message. And, of course, you have Nancy Pelosi saying that the contents of the healthcare act could not be disclosed and that it had to be enacted before people would see what’s in it. Well, this might be a failure of communication – only problem is, the more people found out about what was really in the thing – that is, the more accurate communication the public received -- the less they liked it. Nope, there was no failure either (i) of communication other than a failure to tell the truth about the programs, or (ii) of voter understanding.
Which reminds me: I would ask those who believe that voters were misinformed or underinformed, or who misunderstood the information they received either because they’re dumb or because they got their news from Fox News or the Drudge Report – what is your view of the status of their intelligence, information, and understanding at such time as they handed the Democrats an very impressive victory a mere two years previously? Was the uncritical and even fawning Obama coverage by the mainstream media during the election (and don’t you dare try to deny it if you hope to maintain a molecule of credibility) your idea of accurate informing of the public? They were informed and smart two years ago but ignorant and dumb now? (And by the way, Fox News and Drudge were as popular then as they are now.) I need to write about this foxnewsphobia some day, but surely it must be clear at this point that Fox News whips the daylights out of its competitors (and the Drudge Report whips the daylights out of Huffington Post and dailykos.com and the like) because their reportage corresponds more closely with what their viewers perceive as reality than does the output of the now-suspended Keith Olberman, the clownish Chris Matthews, NPR, Katie Couric, David Gregory, the New York Times, and so on ad infinitim? (And I’m not a big fan of O’Reilly/Hannity/Fox & Friends.)
-- The Democrats misunderstood their 2008 election victory as a rejection of conservatism, when it was actually (i) a rejection of Bush for his own abandonment of conservative principles (like GHW Bush before him), combined with (ii) some Bushy personality and communications deficiencies, (iii) a very weak Republican ticket, and especially (iv) a misleading media and self-portrayal of a charismatic, eloquent, historically-inevitable black guy. Check.
-- Voters felt betrayed; Obama ran as a bipartisan moderate but was neither from the get-go. Check. He and his acolytes were so impressed by his margin and the tsunami of praise that swept him into office that he figured voters weren’t interested in him compromising the left agenda he’d coyly concealed during the campaign. This was error.
-- The President fibs. He is mendacious about many things, including (probably) his personal composition of Dreams of My Father, but most vividly about the health care bill and the existence of “shovel-ready jobs” ready to be stimulated by the stimulus. Check.
-- The Democrats were thuggish in enacting their unpopular stuff, strongarming it through Congress using legislative logrolling that crossed the line into spectacularly brazen bribery. Check. Special provisions favoring five states, unions, trial (plaintiffs’) lawyers. Obama was elected to change the way Washington did business, but his allies put on the most astoundingly craven display of legislative corruption in recent memory to enact the healthcare bill.
-- Joe Biden. Check. The gift that keeps on giving, although Nancy Pelosi is giving him a run for his money. Tell me true: Hypothetical: Big-time terrorist attack on the US. President drops dead of a heart attack. You would prefer the vice-president be: (a) Joe Biden or (b) Dick Cheney. Mm-hmm.
-- The President’s overseas apology/bowing tours exhibited his discomfort with the idea of American exceptionalism that most voters rightly embrace. Check.
-- The President doesn’t believe strongly in the international Islamist terror threat. Check.
-- The President doesn’t believe strongly in the dangers represented by illegal immigration from Mexico. Check and double-check. With Mexico dissolving into criminal anarchy, and with that culture osmotically creeping into the American border states, the Obama administration sues Arizona for its efforts to do something about it. Nice.
-- This historic black racial-healer president tolerated, if not promoted, a racist Justice Department under Eric Holder, and appointed a self-racially-identified candidate, and a mediocre one at that (Sonia Sotomayor), to the Supreme Court. Check. The Republicans will continue to press for an investigation of Holder’s disgraceful stewardship of Justice. And now we’re stuck with Sotomayor. Just this week a memorandum to the President from constitutional and Supreme Court expert Laurence Tribe (a liberal, by the way, who has long hoped for an appointment to the High Court himself) surfaced in which he advised his former student Obama respecting this self-proclaimed “wise Latina”: “Bluntly put," Tribe wrote the President, "she's not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is[.]” But nothing was going to stop POTUS from appointing a Hispanic judge.
-- The President dithered for months over what to do in Afghanistan, and ended up neither getting out nor giving his generals what they wanted. Check. In fairness, no one is entirely sure what to do in Afghanistan at this point. But Obama, after having identified this as Job One during the campaign, seems to have lost interest.
-- Voters did not like it when the President, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and other Democrats repeatedly talked down to them, accusing them of narrow-mindedness, misunderstanding, misperception of their own interests, ignorance, fearfulness, rejecting of science (!), and the like. Check. This is a variation of “we didn’t communicate our programs well enough.” What they really want to say is – hell, what they actually did say was, in one form or another -- “the American voter has not understood our communications – or has unreasonably declined to accept our assurances – on the benefits of government takeover of healthcare, bailouts, cap-and-trade, increased regulation, promotion of trade unionism, etc.” Unstated finish: because they're too dumb, afraid, etc. Well, sure, sometimes people are dumb. But they almost always know when they're being insulted.
-- The President vacationed and golfed even more frequently than recent presidential champs in this regard. Check. The President and FLOTUS definitely love to party and vacation. Can’t blame them for that, really. But in the midst of an economic downturn, it just doesn’t play well.
-- Barack Obama isn’t all that. Charm and eloquence emanating largely from those twin slanty transparent screens that seem always to show up at his public appearances. Sorry, no check. The President remains a very impressive man in many respects.
And I’ll pick up with this thought in the next article.
Overall, however, not so terribly surprising that the electorate got out the brooms.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Victor Davis Hanson Explains it All for You
Here is a brilliantly compressed summary of why the Obama administration has fallen so far so fast. It isn't talk radio, it isn't Tea Party demagoguery -- it has been a combination of pre-election snake oil and post-election misunderstanding of what the voters were saying and why.
And a not-tiny dose of old-fashioned pride, that of the variety that goeth before a fall.
VDH is one of the best, and this one's a pearl.
And a not-tiny dose of old-fashioned pride, that of the variety that goeth before a fall.
VDH is one of the best, and this one's a pearl.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Do Y'All Know How Bad Things Are in Greece?
Michael Lewis does. He’s the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and, most recently, a great book on the Wall Street meltdown awhile back, The Big Short. He’s got an article in the recent Vanity Fair on the destruction of the Greek economy called "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds."
I recommend that you read the whole astounding article. Here is an excerpt:
In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”
As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
I do not wish to suggest that the United States is likely to become like Greece anytime soon. I do suggest that democracies who wish to remain democracies pay some heed to the growth of the public sector. Which is set to explode under the policies of the current President. The last couple of Republican presidents didn’t do us any favors in this regard, either, so there is plenty of blame to go around.
I have nothing against the Greek. I thank him for much of what has become Western Civilization, which is really an excellent civilization. A first-rate civilization, and much of it started with the ancestors of this beautiful people.
But I am telling you, Cool Hot Centrists, there is something in the human condition that inspires its constituents to say to themselves, if we are promised something, we are entitled to it even if the keeping of that promise is devastating not only to our countrymen, but to the world into which our descendants will be born. You see it here in the demands of unions and all groups benefiting from the federal dole, which numbers are alarmingly large (although, thanks to a startlingly principled Republican Congress during the Clinton Administration, and Bill Clinton’s shrewd read of the American gestalt, is smaller than it could be). You see it in the truly desperate condition of the California state government.
I don’t wish to be wearisome on the topic of our unsatisfactory President, I truly don’t. But Greece is the ultimate endpoint of the European Model of the role of government. It is a model that our President admires, at least if you take his advocacy of the present version – that is, the enacted version – of healthcare reform as evidence. The percentage of our economy accounted for by governmental activity – and that means persons employed by the federal government, and the taxes needed to support them and their benefits – is set to grow markedly under him.
The Democrats also seek to expand the influence of labor unions, as well as their ability to organize employees in businesses where their effect is unlikely to be any less baleful than their effect on the auto industry and local and state governments.
Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio said this the other day: "This election is nothing less than a referendum of our identity as a nation and as a people." I have misgivings about the Tea Party, but this much they have absolutely right.
Think about it. Just think about it.
I recommend that you read the whole astounding article. Here is an excerpt:
In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”
As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
The Trojan Horse -- beware of gifts bearing Greeks
I do not wish to suggest that the United States is likely to become like Greece anytime soon. I do suggest that democracies who wish to remain democracies pay some heed to the growth of the public sector. Which is set to explode under the policies of the current President. The last couple of Republican presidents didn’t do us any favors in this regard, either, so there is plenty of blame to go around.
I have nothing against the Greek. I thank him for much of what has become Western Civilization, which is really an excellent civilization. A first-rate civilization, and much of it started with the ancestors of this beautiful people.
But I am telling you, Cool Hot Centrists, there is something in the human condition that inspires its constituents to say to themselves, if we are promised something, we are entitled to it even if the keeping of that promise is devastating not only to our countrymen, but to the world into which our descendants will be born. You see it here in the demands of unions and all groups benefiting from the federal dole, which numbers are alarmingly large (although, thanks to a startlingly principled Republican Congress during the Clinton Administration, and Bill Clinton’s shrewd read of the American gestalt, is smaller than it could be). You see it in the truly desperate condition of the California state government.
I don’t wish to be wearisome on the topic of our unsatisfactory President, I truly don’t. But Greece is the ultimate endpoint of the European Model of the role of government. It is a model that our President admires, at least if you take his advocacy of the present version – that is, the enacted version – of healthcare reform as evidence. The percentage of our economy accounted for by governmental activity – and that means persons employed by the federal government, and the taxes needed to support them and their benefits – is set to grow markedly under him.
The Democrats also seek to expand the influence of labor unions, as well as their ability to organize employees in businesses where their effect is unlikely to be any less baleful than their effect on the auto industry and local and state governments.
Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio said this the other day: "This election is nothing less than a referendum of our identity as a nation and as a people." I have misgivings about the Tea Party, but this much they have absolutely right.
Think about it. Just think about it.
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