Tag Archives: Obama

The U.S. Debt Bubble Will Make Sub-Prime Mortgages Look Like a Picnic

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Can you say "sea of red ink"?

From Rep. Paul Ryan's budget proposal - click to enlarge

Just how bad is the U.S. debt problem? Jim Manzi spells it out at The Corner:

… we are sitting on the mother of all bubbles. Many, probably most, Americans anticipate a stream of consumption that will be provided for them into old age by the government (i.e., other taxpayers). Unfortunately, most American taxpayers do not anticipate the kind of enormous increase in taxes that would be required to pay for this stream of benefits. One or both of these expectations will not be met. Americans as a whole are simply less wealthy, in the most useful sense of rationally anticipatable future material consumption, than they think they are. And the size of this disconnect is vastly greater than, for example, the size of the housing-price bubble that just popped.

…the combination of the debt we have just put on our balance sheet, plus the deficits that are scheduled to be created by these programs over the next 10 to 20 years, means that we need to confront this problem soon. We have increased public debt from about 40 percent of GDP in 2005 to about 70 percent of GDP by the end of this year; and we are projected to exceed the historical peak debt of about 100 percent of GDP (achieved at the close of World War II) within the next 15 years; thereupon we enter uncharted territory.

The borrowing capacity of the U.S. government is vast, but it is not limitless. At some point that nobody can predict, we will not be able to borrow enough to continue spending n the manner that current law assumes without extremely large negative effects. This is the way the bubble will very likely pop, if we let it come to that: a funding crisis for the U.S. government.  This is very unlikely in 2011, or 2012 or 2013; but over 20 years, we are playing with fire. In essence, we don’t need to care that much about the projections for 2080, because long, long before that, we’re going hit the wall, unless we somehow address the problem.

The GOP budget proposal makes clear that “the last Congress” — you know, the one dominated by Democrats — was responsible for the pork-laden stimulus bill.

At a time when the free-market foundations of the American economy were in desperate need of restoration and repair, the last Congress took actions that further undermined them. The President and his party’s leaders embarked on a stimulus spending spree that added hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt, yet failed to deliver on its promises to create jobs. Acute economic hardship was exploited to enact unprecedented expansions of government power.

This did not sit well with the American people. Citizens stood up and demanded that their leaders reacquaint themselves with America’s founding ideals of liberty, limited government, and equality under the rule of law.

“Porkulus” was so extreme that it failed to attract a single Republican vote in the House, and only three in the Senate — the two liberal ladies from Maine and Arlen Specter, who soon switched parties on his way toward losing the Democratic primary in a bid to salvage his job.  But the Republican budget document doesn’t let the GOP off the hook:

In recent years, both political parties have squandered the public’s trust. The American people ended a unified Republican majority in 2006, just as they ended a unified Democratic majority last fall. Americans reject leaders who focus on the pursuit of power at the expense of principle. They reject empty promises from a government that cannot live within its means. They deserve the truth about the nation’s fiscal and economic challenges. They deserve – and demand – honest leaders willing to stand for solutions.

The GOP has a lot of profligate spending to answer for, but at least the party now is putting forth a serious plan, albeit one that will not survive President Obama’s veto power.  The question is whether we can get Obama voted out of office before our Chinese creditors cut off the flow of money.

Libya vs. Iraq: Geopolitical Insight in a Robotic Monotone

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An Xtranormal animation of two co-workers arguing in the break room highlights the differing standards by which Presidents Obama and Bush have been judged regarding their interventions in Libya and Iraq. The deadpan delivery of the computer-generated voices adds a humorous edge.

An excerpt of the dialogue:

He: “So Obama is killing civilians in a pre-emptive, unfunded war for oil, promoted by the dictators of the Arab League along with the UN, in support of some unidentified rebels who he’s never met with, and you are fine with all that?”

She: “He is a man of peace.  Did you know he even got the Nobel Peace Prize?  Just like Morgan Freeman.”

It’s 5:04 minutes well worth watching.

 

Astonishment at Obama’s War-Making Overwhelms Consideration of the Merits of It

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Illustration by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff

I keep waiting for my opinion about the intervention in Libya to snap into place.  For? Against?  Too soon?  Too late? But every time I try to pin it down, my mind flies off on a different tangent, enthralled by the bizarreness of it all.

It was nearly three years ago that Senator Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, in part on the strength of having the purest “surrender-at-any-cost” position on Iraq.  Who then could have predicted the following headline: “Nobel Peace Prize Winner Enters Third War“?

I blogged too quickly the other day about “Libya, Where the French Lead the Way” — although France fired the first shot, it quickly became a U.S.-led operation.  Obama has pledged to hand over leadership of the mission “in a matter of days, not weeks” — but hand it over to whom?

Here’s another great, ironic headline: “Gadhafi is Facing a Coalition of the Unwilling.”

The US government, wary of getting stuck in another war in a Muslim country, would like to hand control of the mission over to NATO, but the alliance is divided. At a meeting on Monday, NATO ambassadors failed to agree on whether the alliance should take control of the mission. NATO involvement would require approval by all 28 members. …

Britain and Italy want the alliance to be in charge of the operation, however. Rome has threatened to restrict access to its air bases, which are crucial to the mission, if NATO does not take over control. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has suggested that Britain or France could also take control of the mission, but some NATO officials doubt if either country could handle the operation by itself, according to Reuters.

And what precisely is the mission that would be handed over?  Regime change, protecting Libyan citizens, degrading Gaddafi’s power to attack his people — the mission depends on whom you ask on which day.  Leslie Gelb, who has served in the departments of Defense and State under Democratic presidents, offers this explanation:

The reason why neither President Obama nor his coalition partners in Britain and France can state a coherent goal for Libya is that none of them have any central interest in the outcome there. It is only when a nation has a clear vital interest that it can state a clear objective for war. They’ve all simply been carried away by their own rhetoric.

Obama’s actions may be inconsistent with his prior record, but George Will’s opinions are consistent.  Will is a conservative anti-hawk who opposed the surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  Unsurprisingly, he thinks Libya is a bad idea, and I think he may be on more solid ground.

In Libya, mission creep began before the mission did. A no-fly zone would not accomplish what Barack Obama calls “a well-defined goal,” the “protection of civilians.” So the no-fly zone immediately became protection for aircraft conducting combat operations against Gaddafi’s ground forces.

America’s war aim is inseparable from — indeed, obviously is — destruction of that regime. So our purpose is to create a political vacuum, into which we hope — this is the “audacity of hope” as foreign policy — good things will spontaneously flow. But if Gaddafi cannot be beaten by the rebels, are we prepared to supply their military deficiencies? And if the decapitation of his regime produces what the removal of Saddam Hussein did — bloody chaos — what then are our responsibilities regarding the tribal vendettas we may have unleashed? How long are we prepared to police the partitioning of Libya?

I and many others are astounded and concerned by the fact that Obama has launched a military action so quickly.  Jonah Goldberg, another columnist with whom I more often agree than otherwise, argues instead that Obama acted too slowly:

Back in February when the Libyan revolution was fresh and had momentum on its side, even a small intervention by the U.S. — say, blowing up the runways at Moammar Kadafi’s military airbases or quietly bribing senior military officers — might have toppled Kadafi. Members of his government were resigning en masse. Pilots were refusing orders to kill fellow Libyans. Soldiers were defecting to the rebels. Libyan citizens openly defied the regime in Tripoli. Nearly everyone thought the madman’s time was up.

That was the time to seize the moment, to give Kadafi a shove when he was already off-balance. If the dictator had been toppled when the rebels were gaining strength, America’s support would have been written off as incidental, with the Libyans taking credit for their own revolution.

But such an approach would have required America to run down the court alone, out ahead of its allies and the international community. For Obama the multilateralist, that would have been too much unilateral hot-dogging.

So Obama slowed things down to set up the play he wanted rather than the play the moment demanded. As a result, Kadafi regained his balance.

Sorry, Jonah, but as bewildered as I am with how fast Obama has moved, I can’t support the idea that he should have moved even faster.  At least his initial forbearance was consistent with his history as “Obama the multilateralist.”

A friend said to me on Facebook the other day, “So I’m not happy about this third war, but seriously, aren’t you hawkish types in favor of this sort of thing? And if not, why not?”

My difficulty in pinning down how I feel about the Libya intervention stems from being flabbergasted that we’re in the situation at all.  But let me take a shot at it.

I’m obviously not opposed in principle to the use of military force by the United States.  I’ve never stopped supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But we can’t fix every problem everywhere, we’re stretched financially and militarily now, and I think the Libyan intervention was probably a mistake.

But now that we’ve done it, I hope it’s successful. I don’t root for any American president to fail, especially not in his role as commander-in-chief.  “Success” would mean Gadhafi goes quickly and gets replaced by a new tribe that’s at least marginally more democratic, and the U.S. gets disentangled in “weeks, not months,” to use a more realistic version of Obama’s timeline.  It could happen that way, but I’m not optimistic.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Preacher, Activist, Martyr… and American

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At church today I had the privilege of reading excerpts, from the lectern, of one of the greatest speeches in American history.

I was worried that I wouldn’t make it all the way through without crying.  I have a Boehner-like tendency to dissolve in tears on solemn occasions — not just at funerals, but also at weddings and ordinations, and whenever some spoken sentiment profoundly moves me.

This is the weekend of Martin Luther King Day, and it was only 15 minutes or so before the opening hymn this morning that I learned I would be reading from Dr. King’s speech. I was intent on doing justice to the text, so I ignored the early part of the service as I sat in the pew, listening to the famous cadences march through my mind. Here is the passage that choked me up repeatedly; it’s at about the 6-minute mark in the video:

I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

A dream deeply rooted in the American dream.  Dr. King had grievances with some Americans, but a deep love for America.  Yes, I know about the dalliance with socialism, and about the anti-war activism that sometimes lapsed into anti-American rhetoric.  But Dr. King deserves to be judged on the totality of his life, and for paving a path for others to follow.

Nearly half a century later, another skilled black orator would proclaim America’s greatness even while urging Americans to do better. In eulogizing a murdered nine-year-old girl last week, President Obama said:

We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

When Dr. King gave his famous speech, Obama was just two years old — too young to share Christina’s interest in politics.  But Obama came of age in a society profoundly shaped by Dr. King’s legacy — so profoundly that a daughter of a slave lived long enough to vote for the first black president.

Ulysses Grant Dietz

I made it through my reading of Dr. King’s speech this morning, then returned to my pew to listen to a moving sermon by parishioner Ulysses Grant Dietz, the great-great-grandson of the general who won the war that freed the slaves.

Ulysses talked about “the bubble of integration and acceptance of diversity” that we enjoy in Maplewood, NJ.

My children, who are not white, have never been taunted because of their skin color, nor because they are adopted, nor because they have two fathers, nor because one of their fathers is Jewish.  They have black friends, and Asian friends, and white friends, and even gay friends—all of which would have been unimaginable in the Syracuse of my childhood.

The road to civil rights paved by MLK Jr. is not complete. The legal instruments of justice and equal civil rights for all Americans are largely in place—with some glaring exceptions. Living into those legal facts, however, is still, as we all know too well, a work in progress.  But we are on that road, and together we are moving forward.

America is not perfect, but it is exceptional.  Dr. King helped make it a better place through his leadership, his eloquence and his sacrifice.  Happy Martin Luther King Day.

“Catastrophic Success: The Perils of a ‘Do-Everything’ Democratic Congress”

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Because only one-third of the Senators face the voters in any given election, it was mathematically impossible for the Republicans to pick up enough seats in 2010 for a veto-proof majority that would allow them to overturn Obamacare altogether.  In the event, the GOP had to settle for a minority that increased enough to sustain a filibuster.

So now the strategy is to delay and defund the worst components of Obamacare whenever possible, while waiting for the courts and the election cycle to take care of the rest.

In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery does the best job I’ve seen of explaining how health care “reform” could continue to backfire on Obama and the Democrats.  I couldn’t improve on her headline, so I put it in quotes at the top of this post.  You really should read the whole thing, but of course you won’t, so here are some excerpts:

[S]eldom before has an administration governed so against the grain of public opinion, and when this occurs, there are costs. The costs are the loss of the House by a landslide of epic proportions and the implosion of support for the president’s party. The success is the passage of Obama-care, which liberals believed would change things forever. Congresses come and go, so they said, while a historic reform is forever: It would live on, they averred, while the results of the midterms would blow off quite quickly. But even before the Eastern District Court of Virginia blew a large hole in Obamacare in early December, finding its individual mandate unconstitutional, there were signs that this bargain was taking on water.

Because the historic GOP tsunami occurred in a Census year, Republicans will have significantly more influence over the gerrymandering process than they would have otherwise.

Added to this, Obama now faces hostile state governments in all the swing states he won two years ago, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. He has to win most of these, or else he’s a goner.

The GOP-dominated House undoubtedly will pass an outright repeal of all or most of Obamacare, which will never get to the Senate floor for a vote.  However,

The House will make life hard for the Democrats in the Senate, 23 of whom are up for reelection in 2012 [versus only 10 Republican senators-KP], and 13 of whom come from states in which Obamacare is extremely unpopular and which took a sharp turn to the right in the recent midterm elections. It will force them to vote over and over on health care, choosing between their constituents and their party and president, knowing their “aye” votes will find their way into commercials run by their GOP challengers, and their “nay” votes will enrage their own party’s base. When they voted “aye” for the first time (in December 2009) it was bad enough, but they had no way of knowing that the endgame would become quite so ugly, that the act itself would become quite so unpopular, or that Obama would become quite so unable to save them from voters’ hostility; now they know all of these things.

The sweeping nature of the Democrats’ health care “victory” will work against them.

Along with the lawsuits, and fights in the House and statehouses, there seems to exist a distinct possibility that the act may collapse of its weight. Assembled in haste​​—​one might say desperation​​—​and larded with deals to secure votes and backing, it is a 2,000-plus page assemblage of time bombs with varying fuse lengths that are starting to blow up in succession, causing large numbers of people inconvenience, or money, or both. … “Firms Feel Pain from Health Law” ran a recent article in the Wall Street Journal describing the problems faced by large and middle-sized businesses in trying to understand, much less to comply with, the act.

“There’s [an] administrative burden just to try and understand the 2,400 pages,” said one executive, describing the pain of spending so much time and money on things that aren’t helping their companies grow. Because of this, among other reasons, the bill continues to grow more unpopular, as six in ten people now favor repeal.

Looking ahead to 2012:

If a Republican is elected in 2012, then health care is history. If health care is the issue, Obama will lose. If all things are equal, and it is an issue, a loss is still likely. If the economy rebounds strongly, Obama will probably win. But if it doesn’t, and he loses because of this reason, then health care will have helped do him in. Businesses are sitting on loads of cash these days, reluctant to invest and add jobs until they know what will happen with regulations and taxes under this new health care dispensation, which may take effect, be radically altered in the states or by Congress, or be blown away by the courts.

To paraphrase King Pyrrhus, another such victory and the Democrats are undone.

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Along with the lawsuits, and fights in the House and statehouses, there seems to exist a distinct possibility that the act may collapse of its weight. Assembled in haste​​—​one might say desperation​​—​and larded with deals to secure votes and backing, it is a 2,000-plus page assemblage of time bombs with varying fuse lengths that are starting to blow up in succession, causing large numbers of people inconvenience, or money, or both. Almost every provision seems to have some part that conflicts with another or contrives in some way to screw up the market in ways hitherto unforeseen. Increased costs are causing employers to drop people from coverage, to charge more for coverage, or to drop drug coverage for employees’ children. Thus far, 222 waivers have been granted to members of interest groups who favor the Democrats, enabling them to opt out of parts of the plan that might become onerous. Doctors are planning to shutter their practices. The promises made by Obama​—​about being able to keep your own plan or doctor​—​are turning out to be hollow. “Firms Feel Pain from Health Law” ran a recent article in the Wall Street Journal describing the problems faced by large and middle-sized businesses in trying to understand, much less to comply with, the act.

“There’s [an] administrative burden just to try and understand the 2,400 pages,” said one executive, describing the pain of spending so much time and money on things that aren’t helping their companies grow. Because of this, among other reasons, the bill continues to grow more unpopular, as six in ten people now favor repeal. “It’s looking more and more as if [the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] as passed is simply not politically (or practically) stable,” Megan McArdle wrote on the website of the Atlantic. “I think Democrats were counting on having more years to tweak it.  .  .  . That was a very dangerous gamble .  .  . considering how badly it did in the polls.” They counted on time to tweak it upward and left (assuming that history moves in just this direction), and now have to realize it will be tweaked downward and right, if it survives in the first place. And let us recall that all of their upbeat predictions​—​that Obama’s numbers would go up by 10 points once he signed it (Bill Clinton); that people would reward Democrats for having “proved they could govern”; that people would ignore or get over the process that was used to pass Obamacare; that it would be accepted and grow popular, like Social Security​—​have proved to be wrong.

Can Obama Win Back Independents Without Further Alienating the Left?

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One should always be wary of highly partisan people who make sweeping post-election predictions about future elections (cf. Carville, James, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, copyright 2009.) But while John Podhoretz’s essay “The Liberal Crisis” has a whiff of wishful thinking to it, his predictions are far more limited, and grounded in analysis of election results in the past half century.

Does Barack Obama now look like a loser? It would be foolish to write Obama’s political epitaph, though it would be even more foolish to assume that his 2008 performance before the national electorate offers much in the way of guidance about how he will fare a second time. A recent president whose election results most closely compare with his is George H. W. Bush, who won 53.4 percent in 1988 (slightly better, in fact, than Obama’s 2008 tally) and had, moreover, a 91 percent approval rating in March 1991. Twenty months later, in November 1992, Bush went on to secure a shockingly low 38 percent of the vote.

Obama is certainly in political peril. In 2008 he won independent voters by 17 points in 2008; on November 2, independents preferred Republicans by eight points, an unprecedented 25-point shift. The percentage of the electorate that called itself Democratic shrank by 9 percent (from 39 percent in 2008 to 36 percent this year). Republicans’ participation grew from 32 percent to 36 percent—proportionately, a 12 percent gain. Let us assume that Obama succeeds in changing the trend line in 2012 by bringing back half the independents his party lost in 2010 and increasing Democratic participation by a percentage point or two over Republicans. If he does so, he will not suffer the kind of defeat his party did in November. But he will still lose.

My “wishful thinking” reference above is based on the fact that much of Podhoretz’s essay focuses on the possibility that Obama will face a significant challenger from his left in 2012.  (Russ Feingold? C’mon…) But I think Podhoretz is correct in arguing that Obama’s need to protect his left flank may keep from tacking toward the center as deftly as Clinton did after the Republican midterm tsunami during Clinton’s first term.

Ever since Obama took office, leftists have issued complaints against him that, to the non-leftist ear, sound insane.They claim he has been too moderate, too compromising, too much of a technocrat. They say the $863 billion stimulus was too small by half—an assertion impossible to prove, and pointless in any case, since the stimulus that did become law was as large as the political system in Washington controlled entirely by Democrats could stomach. Liberals were and are angry that Obama gave up the so-called public option on health care, when he had no choice but to do so to win Democratic support to get the bill through the Senate.

In point of fact, Obama has done everything in his power to advance the most unshakably leftist agenda since Johnson’s time, and possibly since the days of Franklin Roosevelt—with remarkable results. He should be celebrated by liberals and the left, not criticized by them, and certainly not abandoned by them.

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If You Insist, I’ll Pontificate on the Election Results

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Press conference photo from NY Times

A friend and former co-worker (“hi Father Tom!”) teased me by phone today about being at my day job when I could be blogging about the election.  I told him I knew there would be no shortage of commentary today about the election, and I didn’t think my dozens of daily readers are parked on my blog and repeatedly clicking the refresh button.

But what if I’m wrong about that?  From what I know about how Google Analytics works, I’m pretty sure a hundred clicks on the refresh button would still get logged as only one visit.  So if you recognize yourself in this paragraph: 1) get a life; and 2) could you at least click on the ads once in a while?  (Note to Google AdSense snipers: that was a joke — I’m not really trying to generate artificial ad clicks.  I will take this opportunity to explain, however, as allowed by AdSense guidelines, that my Google AdSense “earnings” to date total $62.79, or an average of 12 cents a day since May 2009.  (Ka-CHING!) I put “earnings” in quotes because I won’t see any money until if and when the total reaches $100.)

Where was I?  The election — which would seem like an even bigger win for the Republicans if not for the fact that a few zealots predicted a Senate takeover.  I don’t have much in the way of original brilliant insights, but I’ll share some of the best commentary I’ve seen today.

Peter Wehner:

After watching President Obama’s press conference, Democrats who are still left standing must have been mortified. The depth of his self-delusion was stunning. To put things in perspective: the Democratic Party just suffered the worst repudiation any political party has since before the middle of the last century. …

If you listened to the president, though, the “shellacking” was because of process rather than substance. ObamaCare, he assured us, is a sparkling, wondrous law; the only downside to it was the horse-trading that went on to secure its passage. They would be “misreading the election,” the president helpfully informed Republicans, if they decide to “relitigate the arguments of the last two years.”…

After his victory in 2008, Obama’s message to Republicans was: “I won.” Today, after his party was throttled, Obama’s message is: “Come let us reason together.”

What we saw today was less a president than a dogmatist — a man who appears to have an extraordinary capacity to hermetically seal off events and evidence that call into question his governing philosophy, his policies, and his wisdom. The election yesterday was above all a referendum on the president’s policies, yet his big takeaway was not to relitigate his agenda. …

The author of one of the worst political debacles in American history seems to have learned almost nothing from it.

VDH:

President Obama came close, but he still just cannot admit that his radical policies and their effects on the economy are the cause of his devastating political rebuke. …

For most of the press conference, a humbled but deer-in-the-headlights Obama half-heartedly argued that the populist outrage against his own massive debt, huge wasteful government, and elitism was really outrage against the economy he inherited, an outrage that he shares. We don’t know it, the president hints, but we are still angry at the Bush years, and yesterday mistakenly took our wrath out on Obama’s methodical, albeit too slow, efforts at recovery. In short, there was little admission whatsoever that Obama’s message and the way he pushed it turned off millions — there was no repentant Clinton, circa autumn 1994, here; instead, a shocked Obama who seems hurt that we do not appreciate him.

I don’t think the American people — who just last week heard their president boast that Republicans had to sit in the back seat, and that Latinos should punish their Republican “enemies,” and who have now given him the greatest midterm putdown in over a half-century — suddenly will pay much attention to his calls for an end to the old divisiveness.

Jonah:

During his press conference this afternoon, President Obama insisted that the American public doesn’t want to “re-litigate the past.” Roughly four minutes later, he insisted that he inherited the deficit, which got worse because of a recession he inherited, as well. Somehow Obama forgot to mention that he increased spending 23 percent, tripling the deficit in the process.

No wonder he doesn’t want to re-litigate the past. …

For a year, as he relentlessly pushed a healthcare bill, against public opposition, his advisers kept telling the press that once he got his healthcare priority passed, he would “pivot” to focusing on jobs. So while the country bled jobs from its economic jugular, Obama crammed through an unpopular piece of legislation that wouldn’t fully kick into effect until 2014. He did not do so in secret. “A crisis,” his chief of staff explained numerous times, “is a terrible thing to waste.” But the point he wants people to take away is that all of the runaway spending on his watch—much of which was focused on “reforms” that, by design, will do nothing to deal with the recession for years, if ever—was all done for an emergency that he inherited.

Taranto:

Barack Obama’s election, The New Republic’s John Judis wrote two years ago, “is the culmination of a Democratic realignment that began in the 1990s, was delayed by September 11, and resumed with the 2006 election.” This was truer than Judis realized, for he seemed not quite to grasp that a culmination is the reaching of the highest point. He imagined new highs still to come…

In his victory speech, [Florida Senator-elect Marco] Rubio–quoted by blogger Jonathan Adler–issued a very pertinent warning to his party:

We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party. What they are is a second chance, a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago.

Rubio is absolutely right. Pajamas Media’s Frank J. Fleming summed it up best when he observed last month that Republicans were going to “win huge” because they “kind of suck”–in contrast with the Democrats’ “Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck–but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart.”

If we assume that Republicans remain in general disrepute, one must conclude that John Judis got it exactly wrong two years ago. This was a thundering rejection of Obama-style liberalism.

I’ll close with a Facebook quote from a liberal friend who was sharing a HuffPo article about Mississippi Gov. and uber-Republican Haley Barbour:

“A short portly white conservative from a small town in the Deep South” vs. Obama in 2012 – the outcome of that would sure tell you something fundamental about this country, wouldn’t it?

Yes, it would tell you that conservatives outnumber liberals.

The Divider-in-Chief

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Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, who self-identify as “traditional liberal Democrats,” are calling out the President for fomenting “the politics of polarization, resentment and division.”  They accuse him of Nixonian levels of compromising the majesty of the Presidency.

The news peg is Obama’s recent statement, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”  They also cite his contempt for the American people (“reacting just to fear”) and for his Democratic base (“sitting on their hands complaining”).

They also discuss the rank hypocrisy of Obama — who broke his explicit promise to accept the Nixon-inspired strictures of public campaign financing — complaining about the source of Republican campaign funds.

As Election Day approaches, the president and others in the Democratic leadership have focused on campaign finance by moneyed interests – an ancillary issue serving neither party nor country. They have intensified attacks on business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and individual political operatives such as Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie – insisting that organizations are fronting for foreign campaign money and large secret donations and campaign expenditures. Even the New York Times has noted that “a closer examination shows that there is little evidence” that these organizations have engaged in activities that are “improper or even unusual.”

It astounds us to hear such charges from the president given that his presidential campaign in 2008 refused to disclose the names of all of its donors, and in past election cycles many liberal groups, such as the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress, refused to disclose their contributors.

To be clear, we favor disclosure of every dollar spent and closing the disclosure loophole that exists as a result of the Citizens United ruling. But it is disingenuous for a president – particularly one whose campaign effectively dynamited the lone beachhead of public financing in American politics – to scream about money pouring in against his political interests.

The President campaigned as a uniter and a pragmatist, but he has consistently governed as a partisan leftist.  On Tuesday his party will be punished, and his efforts to salvage his own re-election will begin in earnest.

Most prognosticators expect the House to change hands, but foresee only a diminished majority in the Senate.  But I remember that in the 1994 Republican tidal wave, the smart money said the Democrats would lose the Senate but hold the House — and they lost both.  This election has the same feel to me, and I’m predicting a Republican Senate.  I’ll remind you of this on Wednesday if I’m correct.

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Victor Davis Hanson Offers a Useful Cliff Notes Guide to the Obama Presidency

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Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favorite authors — so much so that I was surprised just now to discover that I never made a VDH “tag” for my blog posts.  (I just made one now… maybe someday I’ll go through the annoyingly tedious process of assigning the tag to past blog posts.  It involves paging through nearly 400 blog posts, 20 at a time.  #$&*@ WordPress.)

Where was I?  VDH.  I started following him at NRO in the wake of 9/11, and now he writes at Pajamas Media as well.  His writing from late 2001 still holds up quite well for the most part.  38 of his essays are collected in An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism — and you can buy it via my Amazon widget at the right!  (Theoretically I would get a tiny commission on the sale, but you can’t prove it by me.)

Hanson soured more quickly and more thoroughly on Obama than I did, and I started to notice something.  Whenever he wrote at length about Obama, he almost invariably tied aspects of his immediate topic back to earlier episodes, missteps or gaffes from the Obama campaign and presidency.  All polemicists do this, of course, but VDH is a master at teasing out links that are not immediately obvious.

I found myself thinking, “he must be keeping a cheat sheet — nobody can remember so much detail.”  Turns out he was keeping a cheat sheet, and yesterday he published it, at Pajamas Media:

So why are people angry? I’ll end with a brief list of twenty-one months of examples in no particular order. Each incident in itself was perhaps explicable by Obama supporters given the exigencies of the time or perhaps could be contextualized by the liberal media and political establishment. But in the aggregate they confirm an overwhelmingly damning pattern of ideological extremism, polarization, and basic incompetence – to such a degree that dozens of politicians are not running on the very Obama agenda that they once voted for.

Here We Go…

A vast new health care monstrosity that will send private insurance rates through the ceiling. The Machiavellian way in which it was slammed through. Failed stimulus. Wasteful pork-barrel spending of hundreds of billions in borrowed money. Persistent near 10% unemployment. Three trillion dollars in new debt in just two years. Record levels of federal spending. The vast increase in the size of government and its share of GDP. Eight years of projected $1 trillion annual budget deficits. Record high foreclosures. Record high usage of food stamps. The Keynesian zeal of Romer/Summers/Orzag followed by their sudden resignations in the wake of failure. Constant talk of higher taxes on “them”— the promised new health care surcharge taxes, the promised return to the Clinton income tax rates, talk of a VAT, talk of lifting the caps on income subject to FICA taxes, new capital gains taxes, new inheritance taxes on the horizon.

The use of extra-cabinet czars to avoid confirmation and audit. The neglect of the law, from reversing the order of Chrysler creditors to announcing a BP $20 billion shakedown and punishments for health insurers who don’t toe the line. The ascendance of ACORN and SEIU. The months-long shutdown of Gulf drilling. The failure to encourage coal, nuclear, and oil and gas new production. The Black Panther voting intimidation mess. The bowing abroad. The apologies. The outreach to enemies, and the snubbing of allies. The unnecessary humiliation of Great Britain and Israel. The Iran serial “deadline” charade. The unnecessary announcement of Afghan troop withdrawal deadlines. “Overseas contingency operations” and “man-made disasters.” The proposed civilian trial of KSM. The Ground Zero mosque mess. The beer summit mess. NASA’s new main mission of Muslim outreach. Stopping the border fence. Suing Arizona and demonizing the state. The apologies to the Chinese over the Arizona law, which was trashed from the White House lawn by the president of Mexico, and sued by foreign governments to the apparent approval of the administration.

The constant “Bush did it” refrain. The gratuitous slurs against limb-lopping doctors. The thrashing of the “rich” going to the Super Bowl and Las Vegas. The artificial divide of them/us based on $250,000 of annual income. The racial divisiveness from a sad cast of characters that gave us “cowards,” “stupidly,” “wise Latina,” and whites polluting the ghetto. Unhinged appointees like Van Jones and Anita Dunn. The occasional unguarded admissions like “never waste a crisis” and “at some point I do think you’ve made enough money.” The wacky behavior from the whining of “like a dog” to the sudden junketing to Copenhagen to lobby for the Chicago Olympics. The Orwellian cheap damning of the Bush anti-terrorism protocols only to accept or expand tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, Predators, Iraq, and intercepts and wiretaps. The golf obsession and Costa del Sol while trashing the indulgent rich.

I’ll stop there since we have another 27 months to go.

Again, to invoke any one or two of these can be written off as partisan nit-picking; in toto they paint a picture of ideological zealotry determined to remake the U.S. abroad into a UN neutral and at home into something like Belgium or Sweden.

I would urge everyone to vote next week…

Some of the emphasis is in the original, some I added. (If you care which is which, check the original.) I just want to point out one subtlety.  Obama caught a lot of grief over the BP oil disaster, although I and others consistently argued that he was getting a bum rap.  VDH could easily have tossed in a line above about Obama being too slow to respond — but he didn’t.  He limits his Gulf-related criticism to the drilling moratorium and the BP shakedown, both points based on clear conservative principles.

“Mourning in America”: A Brilliant Inversion of Reagan’s Classic Campaign Ad

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From John Steele Gordon at Commentary comes the helpful suggestion to watch the Great Communicator’s version first.  “Morning in America” is one of the iconic ads that the Reagan re-election campaign deployed against the uninspiring VP of a failed president, en route to winning 49 states.  I voted against Reagan twice, but now believe him to be by far the greatest president of my lifetime.  If you have any fond memories of the man at all, this will help stir them.

Now an apparently new group called Citizens for the Republic — named after Reagan’s political action committee — has adapted Reagan’s message to the current era, as “Mourning in America”:

The more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone is what makes the ad so effective.  It’s astonishing to consider just how much havoc Obama has created in our economy in less than two years.

A recent summation by James Taranto indulges in a bit more anger, but holds out hope for a new morning:

By now it should be clear that the only new idea Obama introduced into American politics was the idea of Obama: Obama the voice of a new generation, Obama the brilliant technocrat, Obama the postracial leader.

The reality of Obama has been quite the opposite. The fresh-faced young leader has governed according to stale old ideas. The dazzling intellect has proved inadequate to basic managerial challenges. We haven’t even been able to enjoy the achievement of having elected a black president, because so many of Obama’s supporters (though not Obama himself, to his credit) won’t shut up about how every criticism of the president and his policies is “racist.”

Yet in America’s current predicament, there is ample reason for optimism. We’d like to think that the failure of Obama’s policies will discredit the bad economic ideas on which they’re based, that his incompetence will discredit the notion that the cognitive elite should run the lives of everyone else, and that the phony charges of racism will discredit the long-outdated assumption of white guilt, at last bringing America close to the ideal of a colorblind society.

This is not to deny that the Obama presidency has been ruinous. But sometimes the costliest mistakes are those from which we learn the most.