Tomorrow's Conventional Wisdom -- Today!! (CONCLUSION)

More freshly-minted thoughts – actually, getting a little musty since the election was awhile ago.

[PS:  I've made a strong resolution to post much more frequently in 2011 -- a larger number of shorter observations, interspersed with the longer essays.  I'll be grateful if you'll check in from time to time, even if you don't receive a notification that there's anything new up.  Many thanks.   -- Steve.]

It’s Not the Economy, Other than Secondarily.

I have seen polls where voters said that the economy was their main concern.

I partly believe this. When the pundits talk about the economy, they focus on jobs.

Jobs are important. Real important. If you don’t have one, then jobs are the most important thing.

But most people have jobs. And most people are not extremely fearful that they will lose their jobs. More people than usual, these days, but still a long way from most. I don’t mean to be snotty about this. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose one’s job because of economic conditions. (Heaven forbid one is also incompetent.)

I think that when most people say they are concerned about the economy, I think they mean they are concerned about what our political leaders on the federal, state, and local levels have done and are doing to it, and that it will be extremely difficult to undo. That is, they’re not worried about the current dip – they’ve seen dips followed by booms – they’re worried about the rest of their lives, worried that after years of spending and required future spending by both Republican and Democratic administrations (with the current administration the champeen), the damage will be long-lasting and hard to undo. Deficit spending, spending on nothing, spending on (certain) public employee unions for poor service, corrupt spending, spending to create and enforce niggly regulations, pork spending, earmark spending – and only a little of it actually classifiable as economically productive. So, so much of it is paying bureaucrats to do nothing more than move it around, something markets do so much better and cheaper and with less injury to freedom.

Not my intention to mount a defense of markets versus a command economy, as if they needed one. My point here is that this election was about more than short-term joblessness, to the extent it was about the economy at all. In spite of everything, the public is optimistic. The government has screwed up the economy, by commission (spending) and omission (failure to curb financial sector wrongdoing). They can tell the government to fix it. They just took the first step.

The Peckerwood Factor.

It wasn’t a Republican sweep. There’s not much accounting for California, which continues its descent into economic lunacy. And parts of the Eastern seaboard, they can’t be helped either.

But there were some other losers. Joe Miller in Alaska. Christine O’Donnell in Delaware.

Thereby hangs the danger of the Tea Party. When the population rises, there are lots and lots of slots to fill. Some of the candidates to whom the population turns are going to be peckerwoods, just like some to whom they turned in 2008 were, to put the matter kindly, more liberal than voters cared to see as they swept out the Republicans in that wave of revulsion.

(When I use the term “peckerwood,” I mean a style of conservatism that is reactionary, extremely ideological, and almost aggressively ignorant. Your peckerwoods may vote sensibly, but their manner and rhetoric is, after awhile, offputting and offensive and guaranteed to lose the center that the Republicans need. I do not use it in the 19th and early 20th century sense of poor southern whites.)

And, like the hard libs who slipped through in 2008, some peckerwoods slipped through in 2010.

The Republicans need to keep charge of these types. I don’t have any prescriptions on how that can be accomplished. Not all – I’d say probably only a few – Tea Party-supported candidates are peckerwoods. But they tend to be loud and to draw attention to themselves and paint responsible Republicans with their broad brush.

Beware the peckerwood.

Who Will Lead?

In November many of us got a lot of what we wanted.

Now what?

The Republicans considerably increased the size of their tent in 2010. Who will emerge to lead the party to 2012? Who will step forward to avoid screwing this up?

At this writing, there are no breakaway front runners. An off-the-cuff survey:

Sarah Palin: No. I’m sure I’ll be writing more as time goes by, but let me say it straight out – she is not smart enough. And there’s the odd family life, Bristol making Billy Carter look respectable.  I’m not entirely sure Palin wasn’t born in Kenya. I’m tired of flaky exotics in the White House or near it.

John Boehner: Prematurely orange. I don’t know what to think about his lachrymose tendencies. I know the guy has come up from a hard life, and that’s terrific. But I’ve never heard a public utterance of his that stayed with me. He seemed to think the first two years of the Obama presidency were about lack of transparency. Not impressive.

Michael Steele: Every team needs some really, really good black guys. I’m not sure any team can win these days without excellent black guys. Well, I gotta tell you, the Democrats’ black guy is totally kicking the Republicans’ black guy’s ass. What a mediocrity – I can’t believe the party hasn’t shown him the door. You never see him as a spokesman anymore, and he’s compromised by his profligacy in office. I think the country has really grown up – we’re confident enough in our judgment, independent of race, to kick black guys out of leadership positions in both parties. (I hope.)

Newt Gingrich:  Really smart, really good debater, real knowledgeable, extremely sound on the issues, but hopelessly compromised by his seamy mistreatment of his (former) wife and his condescending manner (former professor, like we need another one of those). He should have Michael Steele’s job. He could be a party leader, just not a national leader.

John McCain: No. His maverick act was always a sham and was exposed in the campaign. And let’s face it, he’s old and seems older than he is.

Bobby Jindal: Not this time. Needs some seasoning before the cameras and some serious sartorial advice. Otherwise, really like the guy.

Tim Pawlenty: The guy gets a lot of attention, but so far I’ve found him pretty Lamar-Alexanderish. Smart but in love with his press clippings.

Rudy Giuliani: A guy who runs as bad a campaign as he ran (or allowed to be run for him) in 2008 has not exhibited a model for national leadership. Having said that, I still like the guy and believe there’s a role for him. But he has to hook up with some professional campaign management that won’t tell him to hide out in Florida for two months while every other candidate is on the news every day.

Mitt Romney: Strong, but he’s going to have to deal with the crisis of Romneycare in Massachusetts.  He should say something like:  "I can't believe how incredibly stupid I was, and I've like absolutely totally learned my lesson, and don't you want a president who learns from his mistakes?"   I don’t think the Mormon thing is a big electoral problem. Is it? Don’t have a feel for it. He needs to get out front on some current issues, though. He’s not going to look good riding Boehner’s coattails. Maybe he’s trying not to peak.

Chris Christie: Look out. A term or two under his impressive belt and he could be a guy. A mountain of common sense.

Michele Bachmann: Never seen her look bad. Like Christie, she could be a great national leader. Need to see more.

Mike Huckabee: A lot to like here. Personable, smart, not crazy-right. I’ve seen it written that his parole decisions could be a problem, but I don’t see it. Right now, my personal favorite. Not without reservations. But he seems like a reasonable man who could more than hold his own with the President in debate, and who could attract . . .

. . . the Cool Hot Center.

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 . . . .

*    *    *

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. 

   --  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.

Michael Gerson Has Written the Article I've Been Wanting to Write

The Cool Hot Center has been warning Republicans against a too rapid and too close embrace of the Tea Party.  There is a lot to like about insurgent conservatism, and a lot to admire about the Tea Party.  But the Tea Party has -- perhaps unavoidably -- found itself sheltering some extremists, crackpots, reactionaries, and the odd racist here and there.  Michael Gerson's column in today's Washington Post, "Why the Tea Party is Toxic for the GOP", sums it all up.  

The Republican Party in 2010 is not so different from the party that the voters rejected in 2008.   The Democrats are clever to remind people of that.  Can anyone identify the Republicans' position -- as a party -- on any major topic?  Even health care?  Is it repeal?   Do they propose a replacement?  What exactly do they propose to do about immigration?   Michael Steele, Republican chairman, is a weak leader -- let's face it, he's been a complete flop -- during a time when Republicans should be riding high by preempting the Tea Partiers with vigorous and creative proposals.  Instead, it's hanging around outside the Tea Party hoping some of its energy will rub off on it.

If the Republicans represented a vital alternative to the Obama-marginalized Democrats, the Tea Party would have no reason to exist.  It does not, so the Tea Party has rushed in to fill the void and, regrettably, brought with it some knuckleheads.  Some of those knuckleheads are prominent, and that is not good news for the Republicans in November.

Left to Right: Jerry Mahoney, master ventriloquist Paul Winchell,

and Jerry's pal Knucklehead Smiff

I'm looking forward to November, but if Republicans are licking their chops they need to think again.  People do not want peckerwoods running the United States.  Michael Gerson nails it in today's column.

Are the Republicans Dancing on Their Own Grave?

Republicans and non-Republicans who consider themselves centrists, many of whom voted Democratic in 2008, are giddy at the exposure of Barack Obama as a poor president and kind of a lame-o guy generally.  

I can't join them.  The giddiness seems premature to me.  I'm still working out why, but this is my site, so I'm going to try to work it out here at my typical overlength.

My concern is that the President's opponents may not invest their recent gains wisely.  They are showing signs of being entirely capable of plowing their unexpected windfall into a dot-com IPO.

I can't put my finger on this; perhaps you can help me out.   It'll help if I ramble some.

I was one of those people who believed that the last general election presented us with a choice between a flashy, amateur fraud (+ punch-line running mate) and a conventional, predictable fraud (+ ditto).  I held my nose and voted for the latter, but the former won.  Flashy is sexy.  Flashy is fun.

But he was still a fraud, a well-spoken mediocrity, and it is no surprise that his inexperience in sustaining a fraud on a national scale has resulted in even many of his star-stunned supporters turning on him.  So the current piling on is, in some ways, great fun to observe. 

OK, we're getting there -- it's the fun that's bothering me.  Here's an example:  A few days ago, I came upon an article on The American Thinker website called "The Smallest President" by Geoffrey P. Hunt.   It was a corker.  Let me quote a few tasty passages:

     "Would someone remind us again why the nation elected this man to be president? A man with no resume, a man with no experience in running anything other than a political campaign, a man who is ignorant of history, economics, and technology? A man who is shallow and lazy? A man who shares neither character nor temperament with the American people in this vast republic? How did this happen?

     "Only a partisan or a fool could deny the irredeemable failure of these ideological handmaidens, the genius of Obama's shrinking presidency.

     "In utter exasperation, the citizens of Arizona finally took matters into their own hands, only to be vilified by Obama and his cohorts, who have neither the will nor the capacity to do anything about it.

     "Those who use the currency of identity politics appeal to the ideals of justice and fair distribution of resources and outcomes. But in reality they prey on those who are underprivileged and dependent, making claims of dispossession against those who have enjoyed success and independence derived from their own sweat, equity, and competence.

     "Identity politics combined with incompetence have exposed the absurdity in the ambitions of big government and made Obama the weakest, most anemic and flaccid president in the modern era."

Yes, this is rhetoric, but it's great rhetoric.  I agree with most of it.  (Although I would argue that it's tough to beat Jimmy Carter for weakness, anemia, and flaccidity.)   It's delicious.  And deeply satisfying to those of us who have mistrusted Barack Obama and his fickle media acolytes since the instant he announced his candidacy.

But recently, pieces like Mr. Hunt's, as schadenfreud-y as they are, have started to bother me.

Gloating over the President's tiny profile isn't going to get us anywhere.    Let me ask you to assume for the moment what no less an observer than Peggy Noonan assumed in her piece a week or so ago and what I somewhat more nervously predicted in a couple of recent posts -- this administration is almost already finished.  It imploded in record time, scarcely a year from inauguration.  (And somehow, the President has even managed to take something that was manifestly neither his nor his administration's fault, the BP Gulf Spill, and turn it into the occasion for a demonstration of how being a community organizer and running a large political campaign doesn't prepare a president for dick squat when it comes to leadership, resolve, or action.)   The administration has plenty of time to right itself, but as I have written here and here, I don't think President Obama gives a Rahm's ass about his electoral legacy, and I don't see him shedding his titanic self-regard to admit that his course is inimical to American freedom, not to mention common sense.  I don't think he's going to take his foot off the gas as he continues to execute his hard left.  And he'll keep going right into Poucha Pond.

Well, that's what I would like to think, anyway.  But when I see the reaction of the center and the right to the President's woes, I wonder.  After I read pieces like Mr. Hunt's -- and there are dozens upon dozens of articles like them these days -- I think: 

Enough already.   Fun is fun, but where is it getting us?

The Republicans seem to have short memories, but I suspect that the electorate will not.  It wasn't very long ago that we were all appalled at the indirection, diffidence and incoherence of the Bush Administration.  President Obama continues to remind us of this, and it's an intelligent strategy.

This is the answer to Mr. Hunt's opening question:   We ended up electing this man to be president because we were so unhappy with the lazy, dithering twit we'd had for eight years that we voted against his party and ended up with a twit who is even lazier and whose dithering makes Bush look positively resolute.

So I'm thinking that it's time for those who oppose the President to stop the piling on.  The runner is down; it's fourth and long for POTUS.   It's time for us to figure out what we're going to do when we get the ball back. 

The question people like Mr. Hunt and the Tea Party people and the disaffected centrists and I need to be asking ourselves is -- whatta we got?  With whom are we going to repopulate Congress and the Oval Office?  What are the values and beliefs we are looking to associate with the political class with whom we hope to replace the Democrats? 

It is not enough, and it is wrong, to say "limited government people" or "family-values people" or "God-fearing people," or "people closest in spirit to the Tea Party movement."  But that's what the opposition is starting to look like.  It is offering us people like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul and pappy Ron, and others who appear to be beholden to the Tea Partiers, and I am here to tell you ladies and gentlemen of good sense and moderate good will, although it may feel good to scratch that anti-government itch right now, if what you put up against Barack Obama and the Democrats has no more going for it than that, by 2012 you will find yourselves in the outer darkness for four more years.

Because upon the electorate's mature reflection, it will prefer the urbane moderate-sounding special-interest huckster to the reactionary peckerwood. 

Or, not to put too fine a point on it:  Voters will prefer someone who sounds smart to someone who sounds dumb.  (George Bush is not a counterexample.  Albert Gore and John Kerry, in addition to not sounding smart themselves, had weird and oddly repellent personalities.  And there are those who would say that Gore did win that election.)

The country leans conservative but it does not lean crazy.  It leans toward the centrality of personal responsibility but it does not lean toward meanness.  It is as nervous about the self-certainty of fundamentalist Christians as it is about that of fundamentalist Muslims.  It does not believe that government is inherently evil.  Candidates who talk as though they do begin very soon to sound deranged. 

Let's take Sarah Palin.  Now I happen to like quite a lot about Sarah Palin and I would probably agree with most of what she has to say.  But look deep into your souls and your brains, Tea Party people, and tell me -- do you want to see Sarah Palin debate Barack Obama?  Do you want the country to see her say, in such a debate, what she recently said to Bill O'Reilly -- that our "founding documents" are "quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments, it’s pretty simple."  

And the Bible would say what, exactly, about credit default swaps?  British Petroleum?  the border with Mexico?  the space program?  Affirmative action?   Wealth transfer from the rich to the poor?  Well?

And yet we see Ms. Palin with very respectable poll numbers among Republicans.  And I can't help but think the reason is that it feels so, so good to stick it to the smarmy, elitist, arrogant, fact-evading, redistributionist Democrats by supporting someone way the hell the other side of the spectrum, saying to the odious Pelosis and Reids you're so wrong that we're going to support someone who is against everything you're for just because you're for it. 

That's uh  .  .  .  reactionary.

It's not my intention to demonize Ms. Palin, or Christians.  I voted for her presidential ticket and might find it necessary to do so again.  But that ticket lost.  It lost to one that sounded one helluva lot smarter, and with Joe Biden on that ticket that's not saying much for the ticket I voted for.   When the time comes to sweep Washington clear of its current ideological rubble, we should be looking for women and men who are for something, who are willing to acknowledge that government has a role to play in making our lives better, that the free market isn't good at stopping ecological disasters, that intelligent immigration policy is good for the economy -- you see where I'm going. 

Formulating a coherent, forward-looking set of policies isn't as much fun as bashing Barack Obama.  And I'm all for continuing to document his errors and infirmities.  But in the meantime, we need to resist the tendency to answer the demagoguery of the godless left with demagoguery of the Christian right.

We need to be positive, and we need to be smart.  And we need to sound like both.

I feel a little better, thanks.