Politics-Obama

Continuing my review of insults and threats of violence by liberals against conservatives, there are some more entries. Liberal talk show host calls for the deaths of various conservative talk show hosts.

Threats by same-sex marriage supporters against people whom they perceive to have voted in favor of Proposition 8, whether or not in fact those people did so. Notice the prevalence of the “N-word” in these bigoted outbusts by those who most demand tolerance.

Powerlineblog recalls the violence directed at delegates to the Republican convention in 2008: “I attended the convention and remember the terrorist acts that were carried out by anti-Republican protesters very well. They threw bricks through the windows of buses, sending elderly convention delegates to the hospital. They dropped bags of sand off highway overpasses onto vehicles below. Fortunately, no one was killed….Is it a stretch to think that some of them, at least, may have been inspired by over-the-top, hateful attacks on the Bush administration by Democratic Congressmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Michael Moore, who was a guest of honor at the Democrats’ own convention, various show business personalities, and many other leading liberal figures?…For some reason, political violence was not a concern less than two years ago. Yet today, we can hardly imagine what would happen if a group of tea partiers were to drop sandbags off a highway overpass, trying to kill motorists below. Liberal reporters’ heads would explode. But this is exactly what anti-Republican Party protesters did in 2008, and no one cared. To my knowledge, not a single Democratic politician condemned this anti-Republican violence or attempted in any way to distance the Democratic Party from it.”

Then there are the numerous uses of violent imagery by the President and members of his administration against opponents of Mr. Obama or his program. If they claim that words will lead to violence, will they take responsibility for their own words?

National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez on what she saw of the rally against Obama/Reid/PelosiCare on the Saturday before the vote. A serious, but festive gathering. Doesn’t look like a particularly racist crowd. No references to Obama as Hitler or to death wishes for the President. Here is one man’s impression of the Saturday and Sunday rallies. Not the tone one got from the mainstream media’s single-minded focus on the alleged anger.

Here are pictures of a tea party rally in Quincy, while President Obama was speaking at a nearby convention center. So, what happens? Though there is no violence or threat thereof (unless such subversive activities as singing “God Bless America” and the national anthem count), officials call in riot police and a SWAT team.

On the other hand, here is what happens at a rally by liberals, complete with the ubiquitous Nazi references (though some appear to be public school products historically ignorant of the Nazi swastika’s direction), foreign and communist flags, covered faces, anti-American slogans, and violence and vandalism. There also seems to be a distinct predominance of one racial/ethnic group.

An inevitable result of any action is the potential activation of the “law of unintended consequences.” The more complex the action, the more likely, far-reaching, and unpredictable those unintended consequences. Hence, the oft-cited lesson about the fog of war that quickly lays waste even the best plans. On the political scene, this is often manifested in tax schemes that produce undesirable changes in behavior completely unexpected by the politicians. Recently, there has been reporting about emerging unplanned ramifications from the Obama/Reid/PelosiCare law.

Next on the administration’s smorgasbord of bad ideas is “financial industry reform.” This is basically a classic pseudo-populist retread from the Democrats’ class-warfare playbook intended to melt the political iceberg towards which they are headed, rather than change course. Unfortunately for them, due to an aroused electorate and decentralized system of information distribution, it is too late and their efforts will be unavailing. Still, the law will have many consequences, many of them bad. Under the control of Christopher Dodd, Chuck Schumer, and Barney Frank, it is unlikely that this law will do much other than further entrench favored large financial institutions of the type that have been so adept at financing the afore-mentioned politicos. Them and, to the tune of nearly $1 million, Barack Obama. Consistent with the corporatist Democratic economic program, one can look forward to further cartelization in the European manner.

As still-fresh experience with the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act tells anyone willing to look, the political classes react, and overreact, to real or imagined business crises. Many times the problem is simply a failure to enforce existing laws. Other times the problem is that existing regulations are so destructive that, like water blocked in its natural flow by some obstacle that eventually finds a new course, entrepreneurs find new—and sometimes more complex and opaque—ways to meet their business and financing needs. New regulations just add further layers of expense and administrative hurdles that foster institutional sclerosis while often adding little in the way of benefit. Instead, they stymie innovation and risk-taking. Add to that natural propensity of politicians the fact that trillions of dollars are involved in the industry, and the urge to interfere (with suitable benefits to one’s cronies) becomes overwhelming.

That experience is repeating itself. As this very enlightening article explains, the financial reform bill—like much of the Obama administration agenda—threatens entrepreneurship. That entrepreneurship is the principal job engine for the American economy and depends for its own vitality on flexible and decentralized financing options. By requiring enhanced (and expensive) registration procedures and making it more difficult to attract private financing (not through the big funds and banks), the article estimates a potential impact of 500,000 jobs. Per year.

As this legislative monstrosity comes closer into view, it will be easier to see some of its more glaring defects, though the eventual effects will not be immediately apparent, any more than the decision of some companies to list on foreign exchanges rather than U.S. exchanges after Sarbanes-Oxley’s draconian changes was immediately apparent. The bill may well contain a few common sense regulatory adjustments. It’s hard to say. But it is likely to be regulatory overkill, especially when, once again, the bill will have over a thousand pages. Many of the harmful parts may be hidden and will, like landmines, explode unexpectedly. For example, in targeting the perceived evil of “derivatives,” one can confidently expect that the law will go beyond resolving basic bureaucratic turf disputes among the SEC, the CFTC, and the FDIC, and undermine the very valuable functions of providing a rapid flow of information and of risk-hedging that these instruments perform. Moreover, it is also quite possible that the rules will cause investors who have need for such instruments to move to other markets or to try to find (more opaque) ways to get around those new restrictions. After all, some say that the need of business for such functions and the current regulatory hurdles for traditional ways to meet that need (e.g., short sales, basic options, insider trading, insurance contracts) was what at least in part caused resort to these much more complex and multi-layered securitized debt obligations and derivatives based on debt obligations.

For my SCALE Business Organization students, the link, above, provides great reading of securities law issues we discussed. H/T Overlawyered.

What is it with the compulsion that liberals have to control other people’s behavior in minute detail? Last year, I wrote a final exam hypothetical that built on the Obama/Reid/PelosiCare take-over of health insurance. The exam question addressed a take-over by the federal government of the food industry. Part of the reason for this “take-over” was that the government was concerned about the obesity rate in the country as it impacted on health care costs and wanted to make sure that people ate healthier fruits and vegetables.

Life imitates art (or at least my exam hypothetical). Here is the first step, courtesy of N.Y. Senator Gillibrand: “Gillibrand said, ‘Millions of New Yorkers do not have access to fresh, healthy food.  By building new grocery stores in under served areas across the state we can give people the opportunity to live longer, healthier lives, save billions in health care costs, and create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs.  I am proud to work with President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on their efforts to combat obesity in America….’”

Then there is the proposed ban in New York on the use of salt in restaurant food. More on the same. Comments are a bit salty, at times, though.

Now we have the government targeting salt in the food industry. The purpose seems to be two-fold. One is the health care cost of eating too much salt. Salt, while necessary for life, can become unhealthy if consumed in too large quantities.  As, of course, can everything from sugar to meat to carrots to water. I suppose the idea here is to reduce the taste tolerance for too much salt. As less salt is used gradually in these foods, Americans’ tastes will adjust. The government will retrain Americans’ taste buds by making it illegal for foods to contain more than some prescribed limit of salt. Presumably this will make Americans healthier and bend down the cost curve of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare to the point that it will eliminate the federal deficit. Or some such tale.

The other purpose is the related point of making processed foods so bland and tasteless, even unpalatable, that people will abandon comfort foods and other processed delicacies in favor of munching on celery (oh, wait, there is a high sodium content there), lettuce (oh wait, the celery problem here, too), carrots (within legally-prescribed harmless limits), spinach (the carrots problem), rhubarb (ditto), and so on. Well, maybe we can all just eat aubergines and arugula, in keeping with the tastes of our liberal betters.

Or not. One problem is that humans, willful creatures that they are, are not quite as malleable as liberals would like. The political tea parties of people who are not enthusiastic about the smothering embrace of nanny government are just one example. People will simply find ways around the system, from adding salt on their own, where feasible, to getting “homemade” alternatives, to moving to other, still-legal tastier processed foods. Moreover, the food producers will not remain static but employ humans’ innate enterpreneurial creativity to find ways around the bureaucracy. For example, “low-sodium” often substitutes potassium chloride for sodium chloride. If anything, that’s probably worse overall. Moreover, salt acts as a preservative for meat. The alternatives may be other preservatives such as sodium nitrite, or more expensive food with less freshness and higher spoilage rates. Or less consumption of preserved meat products.

Obviously, the government is not going to stop with this. Meat, butter (but also margarine), eggs, coffee, tea, alcohol, corn syrup, sugar, simple starches, all have been deemed unhealthy in varying amounts in one study or another. Salt is just an initial marker in the move from control over tobacco into control over food. There is never a shortage of those who want to reform other people’s habits, only for the latter’s own good, of course.

In that direction, I have the suspicion that the vegetarian do-gooders are at least partly behind this, and that these efforts are intended ultimately to keep us from eating meat. Yes, I know I shouldn’t bring up a certain individual when discussing incipient totalitarian tendencies in some to make the rest of us “better.” But I can’t resist: Hitler was a vegetarian and loved animals.

In view of Democrats’ constant need for taxes to feed the government maw, perhaps they can tax salt, as the French once did in the “gabelle.” Note that the gabelle was an extremely unpopular tax that started as a “temporary” measure but was still “temporarily” around 500 years later. It even produced a tax revolt. All of that sounds strangely familiar.

As an aside, I try to limit my salt intake and to be moderate in eating fats and meat and other “unhealthy” foods. But I really resent do-gooders, usually of liberal political inclination, telling me how to run my life, especially since these folks often have personal issues and engage in a lifestyle that I would find problematic. I have found, if I may generalize, that those who feel “comfortable in their skin” and are busy trying to live a fulfilled and examined life have neither the time nor the desire to tell others what to do in their everyday lives. But it is certainly no surprise that government health nuts would move in this direction. Expect much more of this, especially if Obama/Reid/PelosiCare moves in the inevitable direction of greater government management and control over personal health decisions.

With the U.S. insisting on further dismantling the free enterprise system and locking the economy increasingly into a fascistic model of corporatism, we are set for the inevitable descent into crony capitalism with its attendant loss of productivity and innovation. We have seen that with the government move into the automobile industry that has benefitted unions and politically-connected financial interests, the take-over of health care through the incipient cartelization of the health insurance industry, and the pending attempts to do the same for the banking business. Combine that with huge expansion of the money supply, unsustainable deficits, more heavy-duty micro-regulation of everything from energy producers and consumers to the food industry, and an attempt to avert disaster by raising income taxes on the most successful and consumption taxes (the VAT) on everyone, and we are in for a world of hurt. There will be years of stagflation reminiscent of the economy of the 1970s. And, given the aforementioned automobile and energy industry regulations, cars with that 70s style and quality. I hope that we are spared a revival of 70s clothes and music, at least.

That’s the optimistic scenario. If things don’t go so well even after we do what every European welfare state does to sustain its social addiction, namely, cannibalize our military defense, we could become Argentina. “A century ago, if you had told typical citizens of Argentina (which at that time was enjoying the fourth-highest per capita income in the world) that it would decline to become just the 76th richest nation on a per capita basis in 2010, they probably would not have found it believable.” That was before they made all those terrible economic decisions the article summarizes at the end, and which we are well on the way to emulating.

I have not commented about the spate of insults, character-assassination, and calumny heaped by the liberal political and media elites on conservative and libertarian protesters against Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. I have not responded to sanctimonious expressions of shock at how “disrespectfully” Democrats were treated by protesters and to accompanying pleas for “civil discourse.” I have not—yet—addressed the inevitable liberal cries of racism and even, odd coming from liberals, charges of lack of patriotism directed at the protesters. I decided, instead, to collect images and commentary that refutes these charges and directs them right back at those same liberals who, once again are busy projecting their own psychological issues onto others.

Now, a disclaimer. I recognize that there are fringe elements in every movement. On both sides of the political spectrum. Unless they have been given pride of place by the organizers or are joined by the corwd, their unplanned antics do not amount to an endorsement of their views by either the organizers or the mass of the participants. Moreover, the presence of isolated agents provocateurs, especially where the other side has much to gain by provocations, is a common occurrance. Needless to say, the talking points of the Democrats do not make those basic distinctions, though they take great offense when someone says that the President’s policies and tactics remind one of various respected Leftists like, say, Karl Marx. Neither do their media allies have such discernment. They prefer just breathlessly to publish those talking points as soon as they come through the fax machine. Yes, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and the entire CNN staff, I’m talking about you.

I am going to pass along some of those images and articles in a series of posts, starting with this one.

Contrast the imagery of this series of pictures the photographer titled “March of the Moonbats,” in Hollywood, California, with the pictures taken by the same photographer of the Tea Party Express, in Los Angeles. In light of the, by turn, inflammatory and condescending remarks by our elites about conservatives, it is educational to see which group treats President Obama personally in a more disrespectful manner; which group resorts to Nazi symbols to characterize their opponents; which group uses racial/ethnic bigotry as a manner of describing others; and which group uses symbols of violence and mimicry of terrorists. Oh, and it is also interesting to see which group seems to be cheerful and having a good time.

One of the persistent concerns that conservatives have about the Democrat/media allegations of tea party and Republican threats, insult, and violence is that there will be provocations by liberals to help get their message out by “framing” conervatives. As the election season heats up, the media, already credulous where Obama and his detractors are concerned, are even less likely than usual to observe proper journalistic techniques before printing reports that fit their preconceptions.

Some provocations may be subtle. The suspected set-up by the Black Congressmen before the health care vote comes to mind. Others may be more blatant. The perpetrator gets caught and is identified as a Democrat. That is precisely what happened in the tale of the brick thrown through the window of the Colorado State Democratic Party office in Denver last summer. The Democratic chairwoman blamed it on rhetoric of health care opponents. It turns out that the vandal is a Democrat active in “progressive” causes.

One of the persistent memes of the media and other Obama defenders, before they resort to their ultimate refuge of calling opponents “racist,” is to declare that no one treated George W. Bush with the disrespect that their champion has endured. Even during the 2008 campaign there was a constant refrain that Obama was being labelled in ways never before heard, such as by comparisons to Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao, and Lenin. There were the outraged charges that conservatives were inciting violence against Obama and other Democrats, again something that supposedly was never done by the other side. The fact that there have been extremely few substantiated public instances of such incendiary comparisons or incitements to violence against Obama (at least by conservatives) does not deter people from making these charges and, abetted by Obama’s handlers, plaintively calling for more civil discourse.

By contrast, judging from the Left’s discourse from 2001 to 2009, Adolf Hitler was George W. Bush’s twin. Or Dick Cheney’s. Or Donald Rumsfeld’s. Bush Derangement Syndrome often morphed into Bush Assassination Chic, with free rein given to many and varied proposals to kill Bush. To liberals, including the media, history began on January 20, 2009. Before, there was a void. But to bring those folks back to reality, here are some reminders.

From Evan Coyne Maloney, a “Trip Down Memory Lane”:

Lots of pictures urging the killing of President Bush, usually presented by the peace-loving anti-war crowd. But there are also the folks at the Obama campaign rally who would like to see George W. Bush beheaded.

In light of the media and Democratic Party theme of tarring conservatives as racist whenever an opportunity to libel presents itself, and in light of the alleged, but likely fanciful, shouting of the “N-word” at members of Congress during an anti-health care bill rally, it is enlightening to recall a different event, from last year’s anti-health care law townhall protests. Evan Coyne Maloney reports on the beating of Kenneth Gladney by Democratic Party-affiliated union thugs:
“During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama didn’t shy away from confrontation. In fact, he encouraged it by telling supporters to ‘argue with’ opponents and to ‘get in their face[s].’ The Obama Administration’s confrontational tone included some violent imagery last August, when one White House official encouraged Obama supporters to punch back twice as hard’ against opponents. Later that day, at an anti-ObamaCare rally in St. Louis, a black man named Kenneth Gladney was handing out ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags when he was approached by pro-ObamaCare SEIU union members. One of the men asked Gladney, ‘What kind of nigger are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?’ The union thugs then beat him so bad he required overnight hospitalization. Obama’s supporters got the message. They were getting in people’s faces, and they were punching. And kicking. Repeatedly. Yet despite the fact that the Kenneth Gladney beating occurred the same day that the Obama Administration recommended supporters ‘punch back twice as hard,’ there was no hyperventilating in the media about political violence or the veiled threats that encouraged it.”

Notice also the use of the “N-word” that goes by without media (or Congressional Black Caucus) condemnation when used by Democrats.

The media uncritically reported earlier in the week that the Obama administration was planning to open vast off-shore areas to drilling for oil and gas. Environmentalists made a suitable showing of being aghast. Pundits crowed about Obama’s “moderation.” Color me unimpressed.

While I am very much for drilling off-shore and on, this is a ruse. First, unlike the President, I am very much in favor of drilling now, not at some unspecified point in the dim and distant future. For example, there are areas that have been explored, but where oil drilling is prohibited under various state and federal regulations. Large parts of off-shore California come to mind. Although it is better to start now than not, it would have been better to start thirty, twenty, or ten years ago. I have never credited the environmentalists’ argument that there is no sense in exploring for oil, as nothing would come on-line for ten years. Still, the administration’s plan is unnecessarily incremental and drawn-out. Moreover, I would also like to see some legislative movement to clip the wings of litigious environmentalists to speed things along. I don’t see the administration moving in that direction.

Second, I am intrigued by what the plan does not cover. It is interesting that the West Coast is excluded from Obama’s plan, though I, as a non-expert, cannot say if that is due to political considerations or because the California continental shelf is already sufficiently explored. However, I suspect that, at least in part, there is a political angle here. Looking at the map, one sees that the West Coast of the Lower 48, as well as the East Coast from New Jersey northward, are excluded from exploration. Perhaps, again, there is a scientific reason. Perhaps the geology of the area north of New Jersey’s southern boundary simply holds out little expectation of oil and gas deposits. But it is also true that every state north of that line, as well as the excluded Pacific Coast states, trends Democratic, whereas every state south of that line, save Delaware and Maryland, as well as Alaska in the West trend Republican. Perhaps Obama is counting on Republican support from those more southern states and relieved quiet from the Northern and West Coast Democratic elites.

Third, there seems to be some implied connection between the oil exploration initiative and the increased use of biofuels by the military. I am very skeptical of biofuels at least because the source of those fuels overwhelmingly is farmland currently under production. We need such farmland and its crops (often corn) to grow food. Increasing the price of food so we can get cheaper fuel for our motor vehicles makes me shudder. I would have less problem with biofuels is they used biomass that has no food value from otherwise difficult-to-cultivate land. I understand that there is research in that area. If so, and leaving aside other issues (expense, environmental considerations) that might make biofuels undesirable, I would welcome their use as alternatives. I am just not convinced that their use makes sense.

Fourth, andmost important, the President’s move is a tactic in a larger bid for support for his destructive cap-and-tax bill that meshes nicely with discredited moves to integrate U.S. energy and environmental policies with transnational bodies. That agenda, which still focuses on the hackneyed “anthropogenic global warming” morality tale, ought to be a thing of the past. At least, there should be no move in that direction until and unless much more convincing evidence appears that there is such a thing as AGW, and that we can—and ought—to do something about it through cap-and-tax legislation. Otherwise, we are just depressing our economy and standard of living, which then wastes both money and human lives. The best way to save human lives is to raise the level of wealth. I hope that the Senate, which must consider the House-passed bill, resists the President’s cap-and-tax folly.

There are even Republicans who are willing to play the President’s game, and I suspect that the President’s move is a gambit to give political cover to GOP squishes such as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. Republican support would put pressure on Democrats who might be opposed to the bill to go along, lest they be seen as less loyal to another “signature Obama issue” than those Republicans. Such “bi-partisanship” would give Obama political cover, as well, in a public debate that is sure to be as acrimonious as that over the health care law. If anything, cap-and-tax is likely to even less popular with the public than Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

It is fine for the GOP to support this proposal, but necessary to push for more. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans support the drilling, but want it extended to California and the New England coastal area, as well. Most important, the Republicans must remain staunchly opposed to the economic killers that environmentalist legislation becomes. The administration must be kept from doing to the U.S. what the Schwarzenegger-supported “greenhouse gas/climate change” final solution law is doing to California.

I am reminded of the past several elections, when the Democrats and the media alternated between making military service a non-issue to making it a defining characteristic of a presidential candidate to making it a nin-issue and, indeed, in the case of Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, a sign of dangerousness. In 1992 and 1996, when the military service-challenged Bill Clinton’s dodgy dealings with his draft board did not match up against two decorated veterans in George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, it was considered by the media and the Democrats the height of political chicanery to mention military records. In 2000, there were already rumblings in the media about George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard, whereas Al Gore had “gone to Vietnam.” While the snide remarks about Bush continued, Gore’s “service” became a non-topic when it was determined that his Vietnam posting was as a weed-smoking military journalist hanging out in Saigon.

In 2004, the attacks on George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard resumed with unrestrained fury and contempt. The media, well, mainly C-BS, was so eager to destroy Bush that it blindly fell for forged “records.” On the other hand, John Kerry’s military service became the defining characteristic of ability to lead. Kerry frequently reminded people of his military service, to the point that he became known among conservative wags as “Senator John Kerry, who, by the way, served in Vietnam.” While most people weren’t fooled and the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth dismantled the substance of Kerry’s resume (which Kerry had to alter as a aresult), Kerry’s emphasis on his Vietnam service became a big selling point for a liberal elite that had suddenly discovered the virtues of warriorhood, if only by proxy. Bush remained respectful of Kerry’s military experience, including the latter’s record-setting pace of three decorations (including for getting hit by rice shrapnel caused by his own gun) that also qualified him for an early exit from the war zone. But Kerry and his associates mocked Bush’s service, a point not lost on members of the national guard.

By 2008, with a Democratic community organizer running against a Republican war hero, the Democrats and the media reverted to form. Mention of military service became a distraction from the real qualifying characteristic, the ability to inspire “hope” and satisfy the yearning for “change.” Military service no longer was a desirable characteristic for a war-time president, as the Democrats had urged in 2004 to excuse their political positions in 1992 and 1996. In fact, as the afore-mentioned Senator Harkin would have it, military service might make one insufficiently flexible and innovative in one’s thinking about war. So, prior military service conveniently became a disqualification.

All of the posturing of the last couple of decades aside, voting patterns show again and again that the Democrats have trouble with the military and with veterans. That was particularly true when the GOP ran George W. Bush, whose high scores on military leadership tests were vindicated by his ability to come across to the soldiers (though not to university professors and journalism school-graduates) as a leader. Hence, the documented efforts by Democrats in the elections to find ways to frustrate voting by active-duty military and to challenge absentee ballots from the military. It is highly unlikely that Barack Obama, whose leftist leanings and arrogant behavior to military officers are interpreted (correctly, in my mind) as at least skeptical of the American military, will be able to overcome that trust deficit.

Two photos tell the tale. By the way, there are photos from other events that tell the same story.

While preparing a collection of posts about verbal venom and death threats delivered by liberals against conservatives and the media’s double standard of credulously accepting any claim of conservative threats against liberals but ignoring the reverse, I have been reviewing articles and videos of the alleged racially motivated taunts and attacks on Democratic members of Congress before the vote on Obama/Reid/PelosiCare a couple of weeks ago. Rick Moran writes at The American Thinker that “in all the reports in the MSM on the story involving racial epithets being shouted at black Congressmen, very few mention that the only evidence for these racial slurs comes from the Congressmen themselves.” Moran raises the important point that has bothered me since this whole matter was blown into a, to quote Joe Biden, a “Big F***ing Deal” by the Democrats and their media allies.

First, why is it that the Democrats, in two contingents, went from the Cannon Office Building to vote on the bill at the Capitol by walking triumphantly through a large and hostile crowd? They could just as easily have used the usual underground passageways between the buildings. Their processions were deliberately provocative and undoubtedly intended to incite a crowd reaction that the Democrats could then use to enlist their media friends in further trying to discredit the protesters, as well as the tea parties, the Republicans, and all opponents of Obama’s policies. After all, the Democrats came well-armed with their own cameras to record the event, just in case the media were not conveniently present.

Second, why did no one, other than certain Congressmen, hear the slurs? Third, why were there no videos where such slurs could be heard, though the Congressmen, the media, and assorted bystanders all had video cameras going? Fourth, why were there no charges filed, and not even any arrests, if there were threats made? Certainly there were plenty of police present. Fifth, if there was such a charged atmosphere, why did a second contingent of the Democratic leadership take the same route a few minutes later, and why did the Black Congressmen take the same route in reverse after the vote if there were these dangerous elements present? Once again, they could easily have taken the usual underground route between the buildings.

Here is the video of the Black Congressmen seeking to recreate their own “March to Selma” on the cheap. Just so they could get that media video-bite:

Dan Riehl explains what happens in the video: “[I]t would appear [Congressman] Cleaver was simply walking close by in front of a protester. The protester’s hands were cupped as he was shouting. While it appears Cleaver may have experienced a spraying of sorts as a result of the yelling, it does not support a conclusion that he was intentionally spat upon, as claimed.” The Congressman opted not to press charges. That would appear to be the wise choice.

Instapundit provides more links. Note the responses by Black conservative Kevin Jackson that obviously did not fit MSNBC’s theme.

Andrew Breitbart of the Big Government website has two other videos, neither of which shows any evidence of racial slurs. As Breitbart points out, Speaker Pelosi and her cohort passed through the same area a brief time later. It strains credulity to believe that the plentiful law enforcement there would have allowed the Congressional leadership to go through a crowd that was threatening other members of Congress. Incidentally, Breitbart offered $10,000 reward to anyone who could produce taped evidence of the racial slurs. With no takers coming forward, he raised the reward to $100,000. Still no takers.

At the center of promoting these charges as part of a broader tea party-GOP connection is South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, the Democratic Whip in the House. As Powerline explains, Clyburn is also the guy who racialized the 2008 primary campaign in South Carolina by bringing up alleged racist remarks by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill complained bitterly that Obama, through Clyburn, had played the race card on him. Clyburn’s assistance came at a time when Obama had just lost the New Hampshire primary to Hillary and needed a win.

After reviewing the videos, the pictures, and the descriptions of these events, I am convinced that the Democratic leadership tried to concoct a confrontation. Whether the entire reaction was part of a plan or, more likely, a few among the leadership and the media got the avalanche moving and then sat back and let matters proceed under their own momentum, is hard to say. But it is clear to me that they hoped to precipitate something. When it didn’t come, they went ahead with the smear anyway. All it took was for one to tell the others that he heard an insult. The others could be counted on eagerly to perpetuate the smear.  And the media were only too willing to republish the libel because, as with so much about Obama and his opponents, it fit into their bigoted preconceptions about the protesters and Republicans. The story served as a convenient distraction to the unpopularity of the health care law and had the added benefit of tarring the law’s opponents as motivated by primitive racism rather than serious and warranted substantive opposition to an unprecedented governmental intrusion into personal welfare. One can count on more such contrived events before November. Likely, next time there will be actual shouts and threats that will be recorded. Likely, too, though those who utter them will conveniently remain unidentified, as that could expose them as Democratic plants, as I will discuss in other posts.

I am not the only one who uses common sense to parse the situation as a set-up that fit oh-so-neatly into the Democrats’ strategy of demonizing their opposition. Mark Steyn weighs in: “But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they’re not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.”

I have heard many times that there is hyperinflation in our future because the Fed will keep interest rates too low too long and also prove unable to withdraw the oceans of dollars lapping around, and eventually over, the economy. Usually these alarmists are bloggers or commenters on blogs. I rarely read similar concerns coming from economic experts. That doesn’t mean the experts are right, and the bloggers are wrong. I, too, share doubts that the Fed’s timing on such matters will have the finesse to thread the needle between inflation and double-dip recession as it seeks to extract huge amounts of dollars. All easy joking aside, unless the government purposely tries to monetize the debt through inflation, I don’t see Zimbabwe in our future, though.

However, as I have written before, I see a decent likelihood of a repeat of the 1970s era of stagflation. Moderately significant inflation combined with low economic growth and stagnating standards of living. The Obama brand of moderate socialism impedes risk-taking and depresses investment for two reasons. One is the uncertainty of what tax and regulatory burdens the administration will impose next. After health care, cap-and-tax is on the list along with increased rigidification and bureaucratic oversight of financial institutions. But the contours of regulation and taxation have not been drawn. Nor is it clear that there will not be further socialist projects coming down the road, as long as this furthest-left ideological faction controls the national government and becomes increasingly unmoored from traditional process to get its program adopted. Uncertainty reigns.

The only thing as bad as the uncertainty of what lies ahead with Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their shock troops is the substance of what they have produced. As the lines on legal and open risk-taking and personal initiative are drawn tighter and the entitlement mentality clasps people more forcefully, success becomes defined more through political maneuvering and less through economic creativity. In effect, there is a whole new class of unproductive drones whose whims must be satisfied through allocations of time and money. That, in turn, increases the cost of innovation, and riskier projects and potential innovations will be delayed until they become less risky through incremental intermediate advances or never undertaken at all. It is possible that innovations will be made “under the table” or through a black market, but the lack of transparency of those transactions impairs their economic efficiency. That will increase their expense and, once again, stultify innovation.

So, stagflation, not hyperinflation. Twentieth-century (and current) Argentina, not 1920s Germany. Venezuela, not Zimbabwe. This article on Obama and America’s coming two-decade economic hibernation makes much the same point, with Obama cast in the role of Jimmy Carter. In Carter’s defense, once he saw the problems his regulatory and tax policies were causing, he was able to pivot towards capitalism and deregulation enough to begin to nudge the economic ship out of the doldrums. Though he also kept nagging Americans in his annoying fashion. I am not at all persuaded that Obama has even the political flexibility and pro-capitalism sentiments that Carter displayed.

What lies ahead? “The U.S. standard of living, says superstar Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon in a new paper, is about to experience its slowest growth ‘over any two-decade interval recorded since the inauguration of George Washington.’ That’s right, get ready for twenty years of major-league economic suckage. It is an event that would change America’s material expectations, self-identity and political landscape.  Change in the worst way.”

What can be done? “Since the 2008 election, American economic policy has been about wealth preservation (keeping the economy from sliding into a depression) and wealth redistribution (healthcare reform.) Wealth creation? Not so much.  That needs to change….Preserve wealth, redistribute wealth or create wealth.  Hopefully, President Barack Obama will choose door #3. Investing more in basic research (not just healthcare) would be a start, as would slashing the corporate tax rate. A new consumption tax would be better for growth, but only if it replaced the current wage and investment income taxes.” Quite so.

The reaction of thirty-seven states has been to pass or consider legislation to exempt their citizens from portions of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, mainly through rejection of the individual mandate to purchase insurance. That is an unconstitutional nullification of federal law, if the federal law itself is constitutional. If the federal law is unconstitutional, such state laws are superfluous grand-standing.

More intriguing, however, is what those votes signify. The broad and deep popular dissatisfaction with the nationalization of health care taps into a stronger current of alarm at the aggrandizement of government, especially of the federal government and its bureaucracy. It is that broader issue—the role of government bureaucrats in the increasing regimentation of life—into which the health care debate taps. That, not necessarily the particulars of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, will be the ground over which the November election, and others to follow, will be fought.

That popular reaction also ties into a brewing class-warfare storm, but one that blows in a different direction than the one fanned by traditional Democratic Party class-warfare rhetoric. The popular element is the productive class, not the dependency class that Democrats and their subsidiaries such as ACORN like to “community-organize.” The targeted elite is not the “evil businessmen,” but the elitist mandarin class of the media, the academy, the entrenched bureaucrats, and various other groups of the political elite and their rent-seeking auxiliaries.

Such a broad political movement can have the legitimacy to open the door to constitutional expression of its principles. While prodding states to pass anti-individual mandate laws does not translate flawlessly into constitutional-level action, it establishes a wedge through which such action may be pushed into the political process. I am raising here the possibility of a constitutional amendment, not just against the particulars of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, but against the entire relationship between the federal government and the states, and between government and individuals.

Article V of the Constitution provides two methods of proposing constitutional amendments and, separately, two methods of approving them. One way to propose such amendments is by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress. Although the language is not entirely clear, for reasons that I might discuss in the future, there is no need for presidential approval of such amendments. That has been the adhered-to practice since the Founding. The Supreme Court has given it at least tacit approval since the 1798 decision Hollingsworth v. Virginia over the constitutionality of the Eleventh Amendment. This method is the way all amendments to the Constitution have been adopted so far. Historically, it represents the Founding Era’s Federalist conception of republican government best controlled through the deliberative process in legislatures rather than too-frequent recourse to popular voting. Moreover, this approach reflects the Federalists’ concern that the national government be pre-eminent against the strongly-entrenched state interests in decisions whether to change the Constitution.

The other method for proposing amendments is to have two-thirds of the states (34, currently) petition the Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution. This option represents the Whig conception of republicanism during the early years of the Republic. That approach prefers conventions over legislation in matters of profound societal significance. There is no direct popular mechanism to amend the Constitution. Conventions, having more participants and being selected for only a limited objective, are more precise images of the popular will and could identify the common good as understood by the people better than legislatures could. While that last sentiment may be significantly in doubt today, given the size of the population of the United States, it explains the continuing popularity of conventions. Conventions selected by the people or their representatives are a compromise between purely legislative action and the direct popular action through petition (signature-gathering) and voting available to amend many state constitutions. This approach under Article V also reflects the Whigs’ preference for “community,” a concept more likely to be realized at the local and state level than at the level of a national government.

The method for approving a constitutional amendment is determined by Congress. Approval must be by either three-fourths of state legislatures or by conventions in three-fourths of the states. That, too, is a compromise between the Federalist view of very difficult amendment and the Whig view of easier amendment. Both groups realized that the Articles of Confederation suffered a weakness from the requirement of unanimous consent by the states for amendment. Indeed, there had been moves to change that requirement that failed—because of the unanimous consent requirement. In all but the Twenty-first Amendment (the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment that produced national prohibition of alcohol sales), Congress has called for approval by the state legislatures.

It would be entirely possible, then, to have the unhappy states call for a constitutional convention to meet to prohibit the adoption of an individual health insurance mandate or some other aspect of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. Indeed, it was precisely to allow the states to counteract Congressional aggrandizement that the states were given that role by the Framers. If such a call is made, Congress in theory cannot ignore it. But it seems a waste to limit the exercise to such narrow a focus. In fact, making the objective too technical and narrow might be less likely to excite supporters and more likely to doom the effort. Instead, this provides an opportunity to clip the wings of federal power by redefining the scope of what Congress may do, especially under the commerce clause.

Or, federal power might be blunted through the adoption of a new constitutional mechanism to override federal government action. It might be fruitful in that regard to revisit the theories of nullification that the more anodyne, but essentially useless, state statutory attempts to withdraw their people from nationalized health care raise. Having been used by Jefferson and Madison, but also by John C. Calhoun and the framers of the Confederate States’ constitution, such theories have a checkered ideological pedigree that big government opponents are sure to raise. But that does not negate their intrinsic merit, and the current overreaching by the federal government presents a solid opportunity to recast that image.

As noted before, there is no way for direct popular initiative to amend the Constitution or to propose or repeal federal laws. This is quite unlike the case of many state constitutions, including California’s, that allow for all of those means of popular participation. The popular initiative process is the result of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century influence of Progressivism and represents a “democratic” streak that is inconsistent with the unabashedly “republican” national constitution. There are certainly arguments against a democratization of the process as a check on Congress. The state of California is often cited as a laboratory case of what can go wrong. But there is no reason to avoid that discussion, and a constitutional convention called by the states under Article V would be an appropriate forum.

Constitutional change is often more far-reaching and unpredictable than political change. Constitutional change is simply political change on a more profound and more broadly-accepted plane. For that reason, our system by design makes constitutional innovation more difficult than political innovation. If there is a built-in inertia for the political status quo, that applies in droves to the constitutional status quo, absent some intrusion by a politically-suspect interloper such as the judiciary. Of course, that also makes constitutional change more difficult to reverse than political change. Therefore, those who benefit from the existing constitutional structure defend it even more fiercely than they do the political status quo.

As happens with any political structure, the elites seek to control it to their advantage. Over time, they become successful at doing so, as they enrich and empower themselves and favor-seeking associates at the expense of the productive elements of society through symbiotic interaction between the political and other elites. At some point, they push too far, which produces a popular upheaval. The more entrenched the elites, the longer the political dissent has become dammed behind the barrier those elites represent, and the more violent the eventual reaction.

Democratic republics have an advantage over other political systems in the extent to which they allow for dissent to manifest itself. It is more like a cresting free-flowing stream than one blocked by a dam. As political disaffection finds channels for outlet, a republic can avoid the catastrophe of a dam that eventually fails. The early American republic (and its Western European antecedents) had a strong tradition of “popular constitutionalism.” This is a way of defining the acceptable norms of conduct and appropriate policies for the community. It goes beyond the formal methods of legislating or making constitutions.

Popular constitutionalism includes peaceful mass movements, political agitation, and petitioning for a redress of grievances. Historically, it also includes more confrontational political action, such as destruction of property and symbolic threats such as hanging politicians in effigy. Operating within broad informal customs, a certain amount of violence and level of threats was permitted. Though they sometimes exceeded the accepted limits, the Sons of Liberty (with their Boston Tea Party and other events) were well-known practitioners of this form of “authentic” disobedience that resulted in constitutional change that had been choked off through the formal political channels. Others were the opposing political clubs that supported Hamilton and Jefferson, the organized and armed rural opponents of the federal excise tax on whiskey, and the agitators against the Sedition Act in the 1790s. Indeed, reading histories of that era, such as David McCoullough’s book about John Adams, one gets a good impression of the pervasiveness of such popular militancy. More recent historical examples abound, from the Dorrites in the Rhode Island constitutional crisis of the 1840s to the Bonus Army of the 1930s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the South.

Looked at through this historical prism and the tradition of popular constitutionalism as a counterweight to those who control the formal levers of political power, the vocal opposition to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare led by the current tea party movement is part of the American heritage. That is so, even if the charges of a brick thrown here or a threatening insult yelled at a congressman there turn out not ot be staged. By comparison to the robust popular constitutionalism of the early Republic and the Age of Jackson, especially, these tea party protesters are remarkably polite and well-mannered. But, like their ancestors, they have tapped into a rich vein of discontent about the scope and nature of government in people’s lives. If maintained long enough, this popular sentiment can provide the force necessary for political reform and, perhaps, constitutional reform.

In the interest of providing information about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare that the legacy media probably failed to disclose, and that the members of Congress probably did not know was included when they voted on the bill, Token Conservative will strive to link to useful articles. This link is to some finds not advertised by the law’s backers. The writer is a doctor. Who happens to be President Obama’s second cousin. Example: “A scheme in this bill actually penalizes your primary care physician if he is in the top 10 percent of doctors who refer patients to specialists, no matter how valid the reason. This ignores the expert opinion of the family care physician. It does not consider the need of the patient. It simply establishes an arbitrary percentage of doctors who will be penalized. It’s a preview of things to come from the Medicare ‘rationing’ commission. ‘Mr. Moore, how will you explain to the parents in Leavenworth or Lawrence that your vote forces family doctors to choose between avoiding a penalty and sending their injured sons or daughters to the orthopedic surgeon?’” 

This is what happens when no one reads a bill before it is passed, especially one that is more than 2000 pages long. The Democrats touted the bill’s provision that would cover pre-existing conditions for children and let “children” up to 26 years of age stay on their parents’ insurance. Except that those provisions were somehow left out of the bill. So, now, there may have to be another legislative fix.

Having addressed the substantive constitutional arguments over Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, I want to consider some institutional factors that might influence the outcome of the challenge by the state attorneys-general or by anyone else who hopes to derail this “road to serfdom” through litigation. It is difficult to predict how the courts will react to these suits. There is a general aversion on the part of courts to intervene in matters of complex social policy. The courts are institutionally and politically ill-equipped to second-guess the political branches on responses to this type of question. They do not have the requisite ability to gather and evaluate evidence and to decide the best way to balance competing societal interests. Such issues are also generally seen as involving matters of public policy, not constitutional law. Involvement by the courts in such policy disputes is likely to trigger a hostile political reaction against the judiciary as constituting a serious breach of the separation of powers.

One can add to that the particular hostility that would arise if a Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority were to overturn a law adopted by a Democratic administration without Republican support, especially when that law has become the standard around which, for better or worse (hopefully, worse), the Democrats have made their stand. Just recall the Democrats’ over-the-top reaction against the Citizens United case, where the Supreme Court finally struck down restrictions on political speech by people organized into corporations. That reaction carried over to the President’s unprecedented and pointed attack on the justices sitting in front of him as guests of Congress during the State of the Union speech. It would be Bush v. Gore again, but now with the Democrats in control of the political branches. The President and the howling mob of Congressional Democrats may have intended to intimidate the justices with their display, and the Court may have that scene in mind when they rule.

That said, this case is not Citizens United. I have not seen evidence that the Chief Justice has been particularly intimidated by the State of the Union theatrics. I suspect that Justices Scalia and Thomas would be even more inclined than usual to be pugnacious. Moreover, striking down portions of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare might be divisive, but, given the continuing unpopularity of the law, the Supreme Court likely would get significant public support. As for a Bush v. Gore redux, liberals might still be smarting over that case, but there was no negative fall-out among Americans at large over the Court’s role in that case.

But if any part of the judiciary is likely to stand up to Congress, it is the Supreme Court, not the lower courts. It is likely that the lower courts will uphold the legislation. There are currently two suits by attorneys-general. It might have been better for them to file suits in several different federal circuits, in order to hope that at least one of them might rule in their favor. Aside from the intrinsic importance of any particular issue, the best way to be one of the eighty or so cases to get review out of the six thousand filed each year, is to show a split on the issue in the federal circuits that needs to be resolved by a final decision of the Supreme Court. If none of the lower federal appellate courts hold for the attorneys-general , the Supreme Court can avoid the issue simply by denying the states’ petition for review. Of course, conversely, if the states lose in all federal circuit courts, any decision by the Supreme Court to grant their petition for review would be a sign that the Court is favorably disposed to at least some of the arguments of the states.

One factor that might weigh on the minds of the conservative justices and incline them in favor of the states’ position is that this is an opportunity for them to reaffirm the Lopez decision from 1995. In that case, the Court for the first time since the New Deal declared a federal law unconstitutional under the commerce clause and ended nearly sixty years of relentless expansion of Congress’s powers. The Court affirmed that it was willing to enforce constitutional limits on Congress under the commerce clause in U.S. v. Morrison in 2000. But then, in 2005, the Court slid back in Gonzales v. Raich and threw in doubt the tentative steps taken in the two prior cases. The suit by the state attorneys-general is perhaps the best opportunity to reinforce the limits of the commerce clause and to constrain Raich.

Another institutional consideration here is the timing of the suits. On the one hand, some provisions of this law go into effect soon. As the law involves a massive restructuring of health care funding and delivery, a quick resolution is desirable before too many people have changed their position to accommodate themselves to the new reality. Usually, cases take a long time to get to the Court. On the other hand, these suits mostly involve challenges to the statute itself, though at least one of the theories might depend ultimately on a factual resolution of the law’s impact on the various states’ budgets and relevant administrative bodies. To the extent the factual issues can be resolved quickly, there are procedures available to expedite review, and the Court has shown that it can move a case along quickly if it is so inclined.

Another potential institutional (and constitutional) issue is who has standing to sue. The state attorneys-general are filing the suit on behalf of their states and on behalf of their states’ residents. The constitutional boundaries of standing are ambiguous and ill-defined, and their interpretation and application may depend on the Court’s considerations of institutional competence and prudential wisdom to decide the case. States generally cannot sue under the parens patriae theory on behalf of their residents for harm suffered by those residents, especially some economic harm that affects them individually. An exception might be for harm, such as environmental harm, that affects the citizenry in a collective and indivisible fashion. Moreover, the states cannot sue the United States under parens patriae. The states can sue even the United States if the harm from federal action affects them as state entities, apart from harm to their residents, such as in the enforcement of their laws. However, the states cannot sue the United States merely for economic harm resulting from some federal action, lest the states be able to turn every federal policy that affects the states into a judicial contest.

It is difficult to know how this would work here. Some of the challenged provisions, such as those dealing with the individual mandate and the fine, would appear to be actions by the state in parens patriae. Certainly those individuals can sue for themselves, but those mandates do not apply yet, so it is unknown who might qualify as an affected plaintiff. On the other hand, by the time their specific identities could be known, the system would be so entrenched that a judicial decision would cause such disruption that the Court would be especially reluctant to intervene.

Other provisions, like the challenge based on the federal government’s takeover of the states’ political and administrative machinery and on the unfunded mandate theory regarding federal changes to the states’ Medicaid programs do involve the states’ interests directly. However, these challenges still sound like claims based on economic effects, especially as the states are emphasizing budgetary concerns. On the other hand, the suits try to phrase this in terms of fundamental structural issues at the core of federalism. It is also unclear whether there is a difference between suing the United States directly and suing federal agencies and officials.

The main obstacle that I see is that the suit asks the justices to reinterpret so much existing precedent and to push so much received constitutional law in a different direction that the Court becomes unwilling to act as boldly as necessary to get the job done. This law is so broad and operates on so many levels, constitutionally and politically, that it requires action on many fronts. On the other hand, perhaps, the very scope of the law may induce the Court to act. This law is not overwhelmingly popular, so that there will be defenders of a decision to scrap the system. This is particularly true if the Republicans make significant gains in November. It would be difficult thereafter for the Democrats to replicate their success, so that Congressional defiance of the Court by adopting a similar law and having the President run against the Court in 2012 is unlikely. It is said that hard cases make bad law. It is also true that bad laws may make hard cases to ignore, and it is certainly possible that the Court will undertake the constitutional adjustments necessary at least for this case. It is too difficult to predict, which is why this suit is a long-shot, but not a fool’s errand. 

If the states’ lawsuit fails, there remain other alternatives. There is, of course, the political remedy through the states’ representation in Congress. It has long been taken as given that there is no real need for the courts to intervene as the states and their officials have plenty of influence on federal policy through their members of Congress. The politics of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare have exposed that canard. But a change in the partisan composition of Congress will have an effect on the future of the health care law, though it is not likely that the political process will accommodate the near-wholesale repeal that is needed.

Going in a different direction altogether, a number of states have passed, or are considering, laws that exempt people from the mandates or purport to opt out of the system. Those laws are fruitless. If the federal law is constitutional, state laws cannot nullify a federal law.

There is one intriguing possibility. If thirty-seven states have enacted such exemption laws, or are considering them, that political energy might be re-directed to petitioning Congress for a constitutional amendment to curb the federal government’s powers in health care and otherwise. It is that last possibility that I will address in a separate post.

One more in a lengthening line of far-out judicial nominees by President Obama. This time it’s Edward Chen, nominated to the Northern District of California in San Francisco, already a hive of typical left-liberal judicial drones.

“As a federal magistrate in San Francisco, Mr. Chen objected to the singing of ‘America the Beautiful’ at a funeral because of his ‘feelings of ambivalence and cynicism when confronted by appeals to patriotism.’ His first major public response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was to worry that Americans would succumb to the ’seemingly irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating.’ And he embraced the idea that a judge should decide on the believability of testimony by ‘draw[ing] on the breadth and depth of their own life experiences … [including] one’s ethnic and racial background.’
“And that’s the moderate version of Mr. Chen.”

Sounds like the speechifying of a professor. Or of a “wise Asian man,” to paraphrase Justice Sotomayor. No, wait. He was a leading attorney for the ACLU. That explains it.

I was frequently critical of Republican Party excesses on domestic spending when the Republicans were in power. I like President Bush, but I still object to his Medicare Drug benefit (which has been reported to be, surprisingly, less expensive than anticipated) and to “No Child Left Behind.” I also strongly believe that he did not wield his veto pen often enough to control budgetary excess by Republican members of Congress seeking to stay in power. Actually, he did not wield it at all. I was extremely uncomfortable with the, probably inevitable, abuse of earmarks and spending by the Republicans when they controlled Congress. To conclude, as one surely must, that the Republicans are rank amateurs in profligacy with other people’s money compared to the Democratic pros, is to damn the latter but not excuse the former.

That said, when the Republican members of Congress do the right thing, as they have done in regard to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, they deserve respect and support. They have played a poor hand remarkably well. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been seen as insufficiently charismatic to stand up to the President in a public relations contest or to be the face of the Republican Party in an election cycle. Aside from the fact that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did not hurt the Democrats as their party’s faces in 2006, the pressing need for the Republicans in 2009 and 2010 has been for someone to slow down the Democrats. An insider with knowledge of the procedures that could be used to frustrate a 60-40 majority that is also in control of the White House and the House of Representatives is more important for the immediate task at hand than is a charismatic or programmatic faction leader. McConnell has performed his role almost flawlessly. (The dust-up with Senator Bunning over the latter’s insistence that the Democrats comply with their own “Pay-Go” rules to fund unemployment benefits by making them revenue-neutral could have been handled better.) Marshaling all 40 Republicans, including Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, George Voinovich, and Lindsey Graham, to unanimous opposition to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is an incredible political feat. It failed to prevent passage, but the leadership was able to tie the Democrats in knots until the cavalry could arrive in the form of new Massachusetts Senator Larry Brown. Notice that the Democrats have been forced to change their entire approach to legislation (to their political detriment) in anticipation that McConnell will be able to continue to work that magic.

Things are similar in the House. I am not an enthusiastic supporter of Minority Leader John Boehner. Though he is telegenic enough, his tan and his manner of speaking remind me too much of the archetype of the slippery politician. He is too tied to the Republican excesses during the Bush years. I was pleased to see him get forceful during the final stages of the health care debate, but his passion seemed too forced and “acted.” All of that said, he has assembled a team that managed to outperform the President (to the latter’s most evident displeasure, judging by his expression and tone) at the contrived “health care summit” and to have the Democrats in the fight of their political lives despite their 253-178 (after resignations and deaths)advantage. Republican Whip Eric Cantor produced party discipline that kept even one Republican from leaving the fold and, together with the support of dissident Democrats, made opposition to the health care bill bipartisan, while support became a blatantly partisan cram-down. Meanwhile, Cantor, Paul Ryan, and some counterparts in the Senate produced credible Republican alternatives to prepare for the fall campaign.

To an impressive and surprising degree, the Republicans have informally shaped the debate on this issue, starting with Sarah Palin’s broadsides that the President and Press Secretary “Dilbert” Gibbs just could not bring themselves to ignore. The Democrats were forced down a path that, surely, none of them saw when they decided to take the health care “reform” journey early last spring. With their control of the government, the Democrats figured to make short shrift of the Republican minority and enact a bill that would include, if not single-payer, at least a “government option,” as well as all sorts of other anti-business, anti-profit, anti-liberty, anti-individual restrictions, mandates, and regulations. They would then bask in their success and the continued adulation by the media O-bots to adopt the rest of the “progressive” agenda, such as cap-and-tax environmentalist throttling of the energy market, card-check for labor, financial support for ACORN and other Obama pals from the community-organizing sector of rent-seekers, and so on.

Then came the tea parties, the disastrous “mingling with the commoners” town halls, the exposure of deception after deception about the President’s plan, the increasingly week-kneed Democratic legislators feeling political heat, the sequence of missed and postponed artificial deadlines, the Reid bill written in secret, the partisan divide in Senate approval of a bill no one had read, the President’s overexposure as he was in full campaign mode clogging the airwaves trying to sell the bill, the increasing rancor between the House and the Senate over how to proceed, and the leaks of spats and conflict among White House advisers.

By continuing to push on and refusing to walk the issue back from the brink among disastrous polling, the Congressional Democrats put themselves in the position of having to approve a bill that was defended not on its merits, but as a way to save the Obama presidency, as the President himself described it in his appeals to House Democrats whose support was crucial. The bill no longer was about what was good intrinsically, either for the people’s health or for fiscal stability, but about what was good for Mr. Obama personally.

Ultimately, the Democratic leadership’s pitch to press on for a vote shows their precarious position. They had to make a massive and politically painful push for a vote that would get them punished politically by the voters, or accede to the Republican call to “start over” and get punished politically by their base. They chose the former. Rather than be seen as ineffective, they believed that succeeding shows they can govern. They would have suffered politically, in any event, but, in their calculation, they would suffer less having passed the bill.

I profoundly disagree, and I believe that the Republicans played the game perfectly. I have long thought that the GOP’s best strategy is to keep Democrats proposing things and to drag out the debate in very open and public fashion. Force the Democrats to talk, force their positions into the open, and, inevitably, force them to go behind closed doors to produce some legislative monstrosity without transparency. Then force them into painful political machinations to get enough votes. If the proposal fails, the country immediately benefits a lot from that defeat, and the Republicans benefit moderately, but later. If the proposal passes, the country immediately is hurt, and the Republicans later benefit a lot. But then the country also benefits eventually from Republican gains.

In the health care debate that worked. The Democrats may say that they showed that they can govern and that President Obama can get things done. Come on. It took over a year (since it’s not finished yet). Despite a 60-40 majority in the Senate, they had to produce a bill hatched in Harry Reid’s office, filled with odious backroom deals that have come to exemplify political corruption in the “Louisiana Purchase,” the “Cornhusker Kickback,” “Gator-Aid,” and various other special deals (such as the Connecticut pay-off that President Obama could not identify in his interview with FOX’s Bret Baier).

They then had to pass this in the House following a publicized process whose fascinatingly repellent nature will forever identify the legislation and, in the eyes of many, brand it as illegitimate. Even then, they had to bargain and deal until almost the last minute to get a 219-212 victory, though the margin probably would have been bigger, except that the Speaker gave free hall passes to some endangered Democrats to vote against the proposal, given its unpopularity with Americans.

The Democrats have won this battle. They are far from winning even this war, and, in any event, their victory would make King Pyrrhus wince. As polls confirm, they have managed to make the Republicans a respectable and increasingly-trusted political force, though the GOP still has to work hard to cement the deal. The Democrats have solidified the public image of them as elitist and deaf to public wishes. Examples abound. There was Nancy Pelosi’s, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” There was the provocative and conscious decision of the Democrat House leadership to march through the protesters, with Pelosi carrying a huge gavel, rather than take the tunnel that they usually take when walking from their office building to the Capitol. This was done presumably to provoke the protesters into saying something stupid that could be exploited for political gain and to show the peasants who possessed all the power. Then there was impeached (for bribery) and convicted former federal judge and now Congressman Alcee Hastings informing everyone that there were no rules when Democrats want to get something done, and that the rules were made up as they went along.

They are also exposed as having the radical agenda about which so many conservatives warned. They have smashed any notions of bi-partisanship and assured long and bitter memories that even profound changes in the relationship between citizens and the state can be passed, contrary to the President’s own previous declarations, by a bare majority formed exclusively by one party. This has changed the political calculus profoundly. The use of procedures designed for limited purposes in a manner that shows complete disregard of any sense of self-restraint will be long remembered. In any institution or association, there are formal rules that help constrain behavior. But, ultimately, much depends on informal customs and on a sense of political propriety and self-restraint that keeps one from doing what theoretically one might be able to do. It is the “spirit” or “character” of the institution or the association. Or of the society. It is the extent to which success of the political system still depends on the virtue, in the classical sense, of its participants. Observance of its constraints becomes most important when the temptation to ignore those constraints is the greatest. These boundaries were breached in an ugly and disturbing orgy of partisanship run amok, for the sake of Mr. Obama’s “success.”

Politics is a contact sport, and the Democrats cannot be faulted for using the power they were unwisely given by an electorate tired of political incompetence and excesses resulting from Republican complacency and deafness while in power. Moreover, Democrats cannot be faulted for bending the rules or for clever evasiveness and even some deceptiveness. It comes with the job. They are politicians and, out of character or circumstances, no different from their Republican counterparts. But there is a difference. They have just gone too far and stepped over the line. They became overconfident, entitled, and arrogant, and their ideological blinders failed to attune them to acceptable limits. In short, they got greedy for power and overreached. A political bridge too far. 

That brings up the President. Mr. Obama’s image has taken a hit. Whether that hit is above the waterline and causes merely serious damage, or whether it is below the waterline and sinks him, we will not soon know. He and his acolytes in the press may profess to think that he comes out of this as a strong leader. But he has had to grovel before members of Congress and personalize the vote as a favor to him. Reluctant Democratic members of Congress, even if they survive the election, will not forget this. He owes them.

Obama’s image as a cool, post-partisan healer is gone. Gone the way that his image as a post-racial President died with Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to the arrest of Harvard Professor Gates and through the addiction of his supporters, in the administration or out, to claim or imply at every turn that his critics are racist. As a student of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, Obama is, and (unlike George W. Bush) always has intended to be, a divider. His talk of bipartisanship or nonpartisanship will only fool the most gullible. His future policy initiatives will only reinforce that image of pitting one group in society against another, and he will be judged accordingly. Polls already tell the story of that fall. Having fallen faster and farther in his approval numbers after inauguration than any President, his “strongly disapprove” ratings now match George W. Bush’s (though his overall negative ratings are still lower). However, it took Bush six years and relentless personal attacks from the Democrats, the media, and the elites. It took Obama fourteen months.

There is an air of popular discontent with which the Republicans can connect. The Democrats are in trouble, though how much is still in the air. Some of the outcome in November no doubt will be influenced by the economy.  But something more profound has been let loose through the Democrats’ health care reform miscalculation. I hope that the Republicans continue to play the game as well as they have over the past year. If they do, they may convince enough people not only that they are the only game in town as an alternative to Democratic overreach, but that, in 2010 and 2012, they deserve to be handed another chance at governing.

In addition to the main constitutional Achilles heel of the health care law, the individual mandate to purchase insurance, there are several other potential soft spots. I will address first some residual issues raised by the brief for 13 of the 14 state attorneys-general who have challenged Obama/Reid/PelosiCare so far. I have read that brief. I have not yet read the brief of the Virginia attorney general, who filed separately. Thereafter, I will address some more general constitutional issues.

Direct versus indirect taxes
On the residual issues, one argument that the attorneys-general make is a highly technical one. They claim that the penalty, even if it is considered an ordinary tax, is a “direct tax,” rather than an “indirect tax,” and has been apportioned incorrectly under Article I, Sections 2 and 9 of the Constitution. Essentially, those sections require that direct taxes be apportioned among the states on the basis of population. This is a very arcane concept that preoccupied the Supreme Court on a few occasions before the twentieth century. A “direct tax” is best described as a capitation (head) tax assessed directly on all persons or, before the adoption of the 16th Amendment, as a tax on certain kinds of income, especially from real or personal property (sources of wealth). The apportionment approach would benefit wealthier states whose people could better afford to pay the same per capita tax than people in the poorer states.

The health care penalty applies to all, and it applies without depending on any particular activity of the person. Thus, it has the qualities of a capitation tax. It is not likely, though, that the Court will accept a constitutional theory that has not been used successfully in over a century. Assuming that the individual mandate is constitutional, the Court might hold, instead, that the tax is an indirect excise tax, in that it applies not to an individual as such, but to his or her decision to forgo the insurance purchase. In that case, there is no requirement under Article I, Sections 2 and 9 for apportionment among the states.

State sovereignty, federal coercion and the spending power
The attorneys-general also argue that Congress’s significant expansion of Medicaid programs operates as an unfunded mandate that is unconstitutional as a violation of cooperative dual federalism embraced in the 10th Amendment. The states argue that this expansion requires them to raise significant taxes to fund and administer the program. It also forces them to adopt numerous new regulations and to use the state’s administrative machinery to administer these federal requirements. Though their brief is devoid of precedents, the attorneys-general here are relying on the 1992 case New York v. U.S. and the 1997 case Printz v. U.S. They are claiming that these requirements fail to treat them as sovereigns in accordance with our constitutional framework of dual sovereignty. Rather, Congress is coercing them to become federal agents in their legislative and executive capacities. 

On the other hand, states are not required to be in Medicaid and, to the extent they are, Congress helps pay for the cost under its spending power. This is, then, not an unfunded mandate that commandeers the states’ sovereign political institutions, but merely a conditional grant that involves a voluntary decision on the part of the states to participate on the terms (including at least some funding) that the federal government establishes. In reality, though, the political pressure to participate in such “voluntary” programs is overwhelming, especially if much money is at stake. Still, at some point states may decide (as Arizona has been reported to have done) to jettison the program if it becomes too underfunded by Congress.

However, the attorneys-general argue that the usual rule of conditional grant/spending power cases as being voluntary arrangements to which states consent, does not apply here. The health care law creates massive changes in numbers and qualifications of participants and in the scope of coverage required, while federal contributions will diminish. It requires states to set up and administer new insurance exchanges or, if they choose to opt out of that, to dump even more people into a pool of uninsured and provide them with coverage. Moreover, the attorneys-general assert, changes of such magnitude were entirely unforeseen and unforeseeable when the states became voluntary partners with the federal government in Medicaid. Those changes would fatally harm state budgets that already groan under the weight of Medicaid spending and that have to be balanced because states cannot print money. Because of the long and intricate Medicaid partnership between the federal government and the states, the latter cannot extricate themselves from the relationship because that would throw millions of people into the ranks of the uninsured that have come to depend on that partnership.

While the argument has merit because the scope of the federal changes goes well beyond anything the Court has addressed in the past, this is likely not a winning argument. The Court in the 1987 case South Dakota v. Dole was unmoved by the coercion argument when it upheld the constitutionality of a conditional grant of federal highway funds. The Court concluded that the state had chosen to accept the funds and was not coerced. Though the Court left open the possibility of a different result if better evidence of coercion were shown, there are no cases of which I am aware in which the Court has accepted the argument that a federal grant under the spending power was unconstitutionally coercive of the states.

The current case is a more sympathetic fact pattern for the states than Dole, and there is more of the disconnect between financing and accountability to the public that is common for unconstitutional unfunded mandates. But the Court still is likely to tell the states that they have the choice to withdraw from Medicaid, however difficult that may be as a practical political matter. If the Court treats this case as an ordinary conditional grant case, the arguments that Congress is commandeering the states’ legislative and executive processes in violation of the 10th Amendment will fail.

Spending for the “general welfare”
There are also constitutional arguments not raised by the states. For example, the legislation contains pay-offs to various states to get the necessary votes for passage. These pay-offs have been given colorful names that will resonate with voters, such as “Louisiana Purchase,” “Cornhusker Kickback,” “Gator-Aid” (not, strictly speaking, a pay-off, but an exemption), and “Bismarck Bank Job.” While some of these have since been deleted, there are still others that, separately, benefit residents of only Connecticut, Montana, and Tennessee.

These pay-offs may violate Congress’s spending power that, under the Constitution, must be used for the general welfare. Under the 1936 case United States v. Butler, the Court gave that term very broad meaning and left to Congress the principal responsibility to define it. Usually, Congress readily meets that test by making formal “findings” about how some give-away to a favored individual, company, or group of people nevertheless benefits the American people generally. That is how Congressional funding earmarks survive. This type of pork-barrel spending is a well-established tradition by now, as spending on this or that agricultural or industrial support payment, bridge to nowhere, recreation center, race-defined college, or (in my institution’s case) moot court room attests.

It is highly unlikely, then, to be a successful line of attack. However, it is not impossible. In this particular instance, the local favoritism is so pronounced that it will require a conscious disregard of the facts for the Court to ignore the brazen lack of general welfare. Why should the citizens of 49 states pay to give a benefit for which only residents of, say, a town in Montana qualify? Still, the Court has studiously ignored the parochial nature of past spending measures.

State nullification laws
Another constitutional argument arises out of the laws that a number of states have passed that purport to allow their citizens to opt out of the individual mandate. If those laws run counter to what is constitutionally in the federal law, they are unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause of Article VI. Section 2. Despite grandstanding symbolic efforts by “anti-war” cities such as Berserkeley, California, to declare themselves “nuclear-free” zones, active nullification by states of federal laws has been rejected as a constitutional doctrine at least since Appomattox in 1865. To the extent they comply with the toothless and unworkable Senator Ron Wyden-sponsored provision in the health care law that allows states to opt out, these state laws are constitutional. But they are also toothless and unworkable.

Non-delegation doctrine
In addition, there are some provisions that give much discretion to various bureaucrats, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services to adopt regulations. One of these is to decide what kinds of items are not to be subject to the new excise tax on medical devices. Under current definition, such devices could include tampons and breast pumps. However, the Secretary is given authority to exempt “any other medical device determined by the Secretary to be of a type which is generally purchased by the general public at retail for individual use.”

This is a question under the “non-delegation” doctrine. To delegate this type of legislative authority to others, Congress must show that it has the power to regulate in this field (which it does) and that it has set adequate boundaries to the agent’s discretion. Those boundaries might consist of clear objectives to be attained or standards of performance by which the agent’s conduct could be judged. There has been no successful constitutional challenge under a direct application of the non-delegation doctrine since the 1935 case Schechter Poultry Co. v. U.S. In light of the broad deference the Supreme Court gives Congress in this area, it is unlikely that a challenge under the non-delegation doctrine would succeed.

The “Slaughter Rule”
With the “Slaughter Rule” (also known as “deem and pass”) having been abandoned, there is no longer any proper constitutional challenge under Article I, Sections 5 and 7, to the process under which the law was adopted.

Origin of revenue bills to be in House
Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution also requires that all bills for raising revenue must originate in the House of Representatives (a historical throwback to English and American practice and theories on taxation and its connection with the consent of the people). The Senate, however, may provide amendments. Since the health care law purports to raise revenue through various taxes, it has to originate in the House. But wasn’t it the Senate (specifically Senator Harry Reid and a few of his companions) that wrote the bill eventually passed by the House last weekend? Yes, it was, but Reid took the completely different House bill passed last fall and had the Senate gut it by “amendment” that inserted his own bill. The formality of House origination was met, though the bill became the Senate’s version.

In the next post, I will address some institutional considerations that might affect a judicial resolution of the health care law’s constitutionality.

I have received requests from the media and my students to discuss the constitutional issues raised in the suits by various state attorneys-general that challenge the recently passed Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. There are two dimensions to the inquiry. One is the strictly constitutional problem. The other is the question of institutional response.

Regarding the substantive constitutional dimension, there are, again, several issues, the most salient of which is the individual mandate that requires the public to purchase insurance and, in the alternative, fines those who refuse. The Congress purports to be acting under the power to ”regulate commerce among the several states” (the “commerce clause”). The relevant precedents here are the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn and the 1995 case U.S. v. Lopez. In Filburn, a holding reinvigorated in the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court gave the commerce clause a very expansive reading and upheld the application of crop restrictions and fines under the second Agricultural Adjustment Act to a farmer whose wheat production for interstate commerce was trivial and who used a portion of his wheat for home consumption. The Court held that Congress’s regulation of the national wheat market fell under the commerce clause, and that the law could be applied even to a trivial participant in the overall wheat market as long as that regulation was needed to address the evil of national overproduction of wheat that Congress was trying to address. Farmer Filburn’s production, when aggregated with the production of other wheat farmers, had a substantial effect on the national commerce in wheat. A similar result was reached in the Raich case in regard to the home growing of marijuana when considered in light of the Congress’s attempt to control the national market of marijuana.

Under that reasoning, Congress might well be able to impose the insurance mandate. The mandate is necessary to effectuate the regulation of the national market in health insurance, especially the prohibition against denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. Even if an individual’s failure to purchase insurance would have no effect on the national health insurance market, the failure of large numbers of people in the aggregate would have a tremendous effect, ultimately destroying the ability of insurance companies to issue policies that cover pre-existing conditions. People would simply wait until the condition occurred and buy insurance then, sort of like buying fire insurance to cover the house while it is burning.

However, the health insurance mandate is different from the farmer or even the person growing marijuana under artificial light in the basement. The Court has always required under the commerce clause that Congress be regulating some identified activity. That activity has to be commercial or, if it is non-commercial, it has to be part of a regulation of an identified national market. In Lopez, for example, the law targeted the possession of a firearm that the defendant must have acted to acquire. In the health insurance scenario, the person has not engaged in any identified activity, commercial or otherwise. For the first time, Congress is regulating non-activity and is forcing someone under the commerce clause to engage in an activity, rather than seeking to restrain him in an activity he has already chosen to undertake.

Even so, the Supreme Court struck down the law in Lopez on the ground that the regulated local activity was non-commercial and not tied to broader regulation of a national market. A major concern of the Court in that case was to identify a limit beyond which the Congress could not go under the commerce clause, the principal regulatory power of Congress. Our system of government is a “federal” system of dual sovereignty in the states and the federal governments. Under that system, formally the Congress is a legislature of limited and delegated powers, though that theoretical position is sorely tested under this health care monstrosity. The powers not delegated to the national government, nor prohibited to the states under the Constitution, are reserved to the states or the people. That sentiment is “codified” in the Tenth Amendment, so when the attorneys-general declare that Obama/Reid/PelosiCare violates the Tenth Amendment, this is the theory they are espousing. If the legislation does not come within the commerce power, it falls within the power of the states to regulate.

In Lopez, the Court held that there had to be some limit to Congress’s power under the Framers’ design, both in the specific language of the Constitution and in its history. The dissent in that case would have upheld the law on the ground that gun possession near a school (the object of regulation in the challenged law) might lead to violence, that violence disrupts the educational process, that the disruption leads to uneducated children, that this lack of education leads to less capable workers, and that the lower capabilities of workers will lead to lower productivity. The majority rejected that connection to the economy (rather than to a specific market activity) as too remote and speculative. It was telling, according to the majority, that the dissent could not come up with an example that, under the latter’s approach, would be beyond Congress’s power to regulate.

But here the connection to interstate commerce is even more remote than in Lopez. In the latter case, the individual had opted to acquire a gun. Here, again, the person is passive. Merely living has only a remote and speculative effect on any specific commercial market. To hold that a person affects interstate commerce simply by living would mean that there are no limits whatever to Congress’s reach under the commerce power. It would turn the commerce power into a general legislative power previously always understood to belong to the states. Not even at the height of World War II did the federal government require the people to buy something, not even war bonds.

Alternatively, Congress could argue that the mandate to buy insurance is really a tax. Congress has the power under the Constitution to raise taxes to spend, among other things, on the common defense and the general welfare. This “general welfare” provision represents one of the limits of Congress’s spending power. It is not an authority just to regulate for the general welfare. That power is reserved to the states. Just as the spending power is limited to items that, say, advance the general welfare, the spending power itself is a limit on the reasons for which Congress may raise taxes.

The Court has spoken in this area. In two cases in 1937, Helvering v. Davis and Stewart Machine Co. v. Davis, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the retirement pension and unemployment insurance provisions of the Social Security Act under the taxing and spending powers. The Roosevelt administration had marketed these programs to the public as insurance plans, but, when the cases went to the Court, the government’s attorneys shifted tactics. Rather than being merely insurance payments, they were taxes because the funds could be borrowed by the government and transferred to the general fund for expenditures.

That approach avoided the commerce clause problem, but also made this type of payment a “tax.” Under the current health care law, the insurance mandate is not paid to the government or into any government-directed fund. It would be unlike any other taxes that I can recall. Congress might be able under the taxing power to effectuate the same policy by giving a tax deduction to those who buy such insurance, but creating a tax incentive is not the same as compelling someone to buy something from another person.

The portion of the law that imposes a penalty in lieu of buying insurance looks more like a tax, but that runs into another problem. Recall that the power to tax under Article 1, Section 8, clause 1 is limited to spending for various purposes. A tax under that provision must be a revenue-raising tax, not a penalty. While the Court has been very generous in calling taxes “revenue-raising,” as long as they have that purpose or there is a clear revenue-raising effect, this law pushes the constitutional envelope. It is forthrightly described by all involved as a penalty.

If it is a penalty, that part of the health care law might still be constitutional, but not under the taxing/spending powers. It would have to be justified as a reasonable means to accomplish one of Congress’s other delegated powers, here, the commerce clause. But that would run into the problem discussed earlier, that the penalty is to assure compliance with the purchase of an insurance policy, which, in turn, might not be a constitutional use of the commerce power. The Court has long declared that Congress may not achieve indirectly under the taxing power what it could not achieve directly under the commerce power.

The challenge to the constitutionality of the individual mandate is the core of the attorneys’-general constitutional attack. It is an uphill fight, but not impossible. Tomorrow I will address some additional constitutional problems. Thereafter, I will address some institutional considerations and conclude that, though the constitutional arguments against the individual mandate have more merit than the supporters of government health care would grant, they are still likely to fail.

The GOP is stretching the reconciliation process by forcing the Democrats to vote on proposals that, if adopted, would change the text of the House-passed “sidecar” reconciliation bill. If the Senate changes that text, the bill has to go back to the house for another vote. The Democrats, much less certain of the popularity of their bill than their recent bravado for public consumption would make it appear, don’t want that. So the Republicans are presenting amendments that force the Democrats to vote for politically unpalatable propositions. This is a list of amendments that the Republicans have proposed. These are the votes so far. Democrats have already had to walk the plank on several politically damaging items:
1. In favor of cutting Medicare – 56-42
2. In favor of keeping the special deals for Louisiana, Montana and other states - 54-43
3. Against an amendment to exempt anyone making less than $250,000 from having to pay any taxes associated with the legislation – 56-43.
4. Against an amendment to reduce the cost of providing federally funded prescription drugs by eliminating fraudulent payments and prohibiting coverage of Viagra for child molesters and rapists and for drugs intended to induce abortion - 57-42.
Keep ‘em coming! I can see the election campaign commercials writing themselves.

An article from last fall by Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare that, amazingly, six months later is just as relevant. Henninger describes a paper by a liberal Stanford University economist, Victor Fuchs, written in 1976 that addressed decades of failed Democratic Party efforts to force universal government health care on the American people. Some points:

“[Fuchs] notes, for instance, that the national health insurance movement rose alongside a larger transfer of responsibility from the family to the state: ‘Every time the state assumes an additional function such as health insurance, child care or benefits for the aged, the need for close family ties becomes weaker.’
But even the state must bond: ‘It may be that one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance.’”

Henninger’s conclusion, written six months ago, well before the most recent Democratic attempt to circumvent every iota of open and regular democratic procedure, including, most likely, the language of the Constitution? “For liberals, ObamaCare is the Gunfight at the OK Corral, the last battle for universal insurance. After 70 years and the Obama media blitz, the public once and for all either wants this, or doesn’t. If it doesn’t, the Baucus bill will be crammed down via reconciliation. If so, the post-partisan president may make worse, if that’s imaginable, one of the most partisan periods in our history.”

Listening to radio and reading blogs and other opinion pieces, I was struck by the range of responses among conservatives on Monday, the day after the Democrat-controlled federal government voted to foist Obama/Reid/PelosiCare on an unsupportive popular majority. As might be expected, there was a certain amount of hand-wringing and defeatism. Those are the exact reactions that the Democrats and their media wing among the newspapers and networks are hoping to promote. It is also the very sense of inevitability and acceptance of defeat that the Democrats are trying to instill with their message that the people will just go home and sit out the election or even come to like their Democrat overlords in a version of Stockholm Syndrome.

Then there was the opposite reaction, coming from the never-enders ready to take to the woods figuratively (and, one suspects, literally in some cases) to launch political guerilla attacks on the Democrats. Fulminating to an impressive degree, they convey the impression of suddenly-unchained animals that are thrashing about with a lot of bellowing but little appreciation of how to deal with the problem rationally. Those folks’ passion is commendable, but it runs the risk of burning itself out in frustration or of precipitating some politically undesirable consequence.

There were other voices, as well, and their prominence increased as the day wore on until they emphatically drowned out the nervous nellies as well as the chest thumpers. Those were voices of controlled rage and of fierce, but measured, determination. It is determination to do what is necessary to clean out the Augean Stables of Democrat overreaching and corruption. Of political special deals and exemptions for favored states and groups. Of industry subventions and anti-competitive restrictions. Of an inevitable march towards crony capitalism that points to a full-blown socialism through a single-payer government take-over of the health industry.

I was particularly impressed by the Hugh Hewitt program. The host and his guests and callers were enthusiastic but clear and focused about the task ahead. That task is political, not judicial. I will post more about the constitutional arguments that are being made. But the judicial route is a likely dead-end and cannot substitute for the work needed for a political solution, that is, a sound drubbing of the Democrats in November.

The administration, the Democratic Congressional leadership, and the liberal chattering class on TV and in the newspapers are mistaken if they believe that the issue will disappear. First, there will still have to be additional steps in the Senate through “reconciliation” to pass the “sidecar” bill that the House adopted in addition to the principal earlier Senate health care “reform” bill in order to cobble together the House majority. There are numerous potential hurdles for the Democrats to overcome in that process, as I and others have pointed out. Leaving aside the political magnitude of the health care bill, only provisions that relate to the previous-approved budget resolution can be “reconciled” through 51 votes, and then only if they do not relate to Social Security. There may well be several provisions that will need to go through regular votes, a process that includes the potential for unlimited debate (filibustering) unless cut off by a 60-vote cloture motion. Those parts of the bill that do not qualify for reconciliation will have to be excised, resulting in a different bill than the one passed by the House. That modified “sidecar” bill will have to return to the House for a further vote. Even if the House eventually approves, that maneuver will have produced more debate and more controversy, including the inevitable cries and crocodile’s tears from supporters of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare that they were misled by the Senate and/or the House leadership. Moreover, the Senate reconciliation process itself can take a long time, allowing the GOP to score debating points and continue to stick knives into the Democrats, all while keeping the issue in the news (or at least the news that people still watch).

Then there is Easter recess. Members of Congress go back to their districts, where their constituents, including, one suspects, the tea party protesters, await to challenge them. Thereafter, there is summer, which may produce temporary political doldrums, though last summer was anything but calm. In the fall, the run for the election starts.

The Democrats will act as if health care is a closed chapter and try to move to different issues. They have already said that they will focus on the economy and jobs. In doing so, they will try to portray Republicans as thwarting such efforts by reliving the past. This is where the Congressional Republicans will need to display political savvy and do their job of not appearing to obstruct. The local activists, on the other hand, can continue to rally vigorously against health care.

Democrats think that by shifting the focus in such manner, they will blunt the GOP’s activism and enthusiasm. Hardly. The best thing that Democrats can do to ensure their defeat is to come up with new issues to debate. Their ideological drive and make-up has not changed, and their low-hanging political fruit, such as a “jobs” bill, has been shown to be barely edible. The “stimulus” now has a bad brand, and the Democrats know it. Recasting it as a “jobs bill,” as the Democrats did, has not changed the brand. Indeed, Harry Reid’s Senate drastically cut back the scope of the bill. If Democrats want to get into a debate over deficit-spurring spending proposals, it is a wish the Republicans should fulfill. A bill to extend jobless benefits yet again won’t come before the election, but, even if it does, it won’t be a Democrat talking point because the GOP will vote for that extension and won’t play the Democrats’ game of letting themselves be characterized as “heartless.”

Beyond that, there is energy regulation through “cap-and-tax.” Pelosi and Obama see their whisker-thin health care win as a grand endorsement that will break the political logjam and let them proceed with their “progressive agenda.” I don’t think that is true, but I hope to see them try. Please, Democrats, bring up the huge tax increase and job-killer of “cap-and-tax” in your pursuit of the mirage of curbing the transnational elite’s discredited “global warming agenda.” Please also bring up the card-check bill, that labor union-endorsed end to the secret ballot in union elections, at a time when the threat to fiscal solvency posed by public employee pensions and the goon tactics of the public employee union SEIU in elections and in stifling protest have entered the public debate. Then, please begin a debate about tax increases that will happen when the Bush tax cuts expire and the unemployment rate remains high.

These public debates will only sharpen the differences between Republicans and Democrats. They will allow the former to demonstrate again and again the fiscal irresponsibility and ideological extremism of the faction that currently controls the Democratic Party. The GOP will also be able to reprise the health care debate about regulations, taxes, and deficits. To the extent the Democrats sense defeat in the fall, they will accelerate the discussion of these issues as their best chance to get them adopted while they still have significant majorities. So one must not be fooled by their confident words about having the green light for change. The more frantic the pace of change, the more obviously it is an outgrowth of their political pessimism and the more it will accelerate their demise. They are caught in an electoral downward spiral.

Although one can never overestimate the ability of the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they are lucky that the Democrats are seized of a fever that they cannot seem to shake and which intensifies their insane extremism and their anti-democratic elitism. Presumably, the Republicans will keep the political pot simmering, not boiling, by reminding the voters judiciously of the substantive and procedural disaster of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

The Democrats think that most voters will forget this policy disaster by the election. After all, some pundits tell them that they are safe because they passed this seven months before the election. People have short memories, it is said. That, in fact, often has been the case in the past. Moreover, events such as a terrorist attack can happen that can conveniently help the voters project their current passion onto other matters.

But I do not think so. This feels different. Unlike Social Security and Medicare, which had considerable political support at enactment, and which were supported by at least substantial minorities of Republican legislators, Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is opposed by significant portions of the electorate. Intensely so. Significant majorities believe that government is too involved in the economy in general and in health care in particular. Support for the President has taken a dive, and, in a popular preference poll between Nancy Pelosi and a murderer of children, I am not sure who would win. One can be sure that, if Nancy Pelosi had a copyright to her image, she could become an even wealthier multi-millionaire lecturing those with less money about their duty to pay taxes for the uninsured, based on the royalties she could get from her appearance in Republican campaign ads in the fall.

I have never seen such voter intensity and bottom-up mass organization. These protesters represent a large segment of the public. One must remember that it was less than a year ago that the media tried to portray them as a lunatic fringe few, until the numbers and the visual evidence made that impossible. Then, in the media’s eyes, they quickly morphed into dangerous mobs of racists. The protesters involve more participants and represent a far larger portion of Americans than the anti-war movement of the 1960s (and certainly the Code Pinkos and the anti-WTO anarchists of the 2000s) did. This is a mild and civilized exercise of all-American popular sovereingty that will not dissipate quickly. Their concerns remain, and so will they.

These protesters remind me of the civil rights movement in intensity and public support. In some ways they remind me also of the spontaneous emergence of the anti-compulsory school busing and tax limit movements in California in the 1970s. Those resulted from overreach by the unresponsive elites that controlled Sacramento (and, in the anti-busing movement’s case, the Los Angeles Unified School District). While those movements did abate eventually, they did so not in a matter of weeks or months, but only when their political objectives were met. In the meantime, they were potent popular political movements that elected candidates and affected policy, even causing the adoption of a state constitutional amendment.

It is also easier to run against something, and to get opponents more intensely involved, than it is to rally the troops when a proposal is rejected. Democrats believe that they are better off having passed health care “reform” than if they had backed off. I strongly disagree. If you lose a political fight, you are likely to be more motivated to come back than you are to get involved if you win. Had Republicans won this, it is likely that more of them would have become complacent about the Democrats’ apparent inability to do damage. They would have let their guard down more. I doubt that will now happen, given the importance of the issue and the intensity of the opposition.

It is more important than ever to keep focused on the immediate goal, which is to score big gains against the Democratic Party in the fall elections. The Republicans are the best chance for conservatives. I sometimes vote Libertarian, and may do so again in local races, but this is not an affordable luxury this year for races at the state and federal levels. No third party temper tantrum voting. It is also not an affordable luxury to engage in intramural ideological purification ceremonies. One must vote for the most conservative candidate who can win the general election. That will mean that different Republican candidates will run in California than in Utah. So be it. Rahm Emanuel directed the Democrats to victory in 2006 and 2008 in significant part by selecting “Blue Dogs.” Yes, they bark a lot at th Democratic leadership but, in the end, they mostly still come when their party masters whistle.

Though the Republicans cannot win the Senate, the more seats they win, the more of a message is sent to Senators up for re-election in 2012. (Are you listening, Ben Nelson of “Cornhusker Kickback” notoriety?) It will also force more meaningful negotiation in the chamber and will block or slow down radical bills coming from the House.

The Republicans may or may not win the House. I still don’t think they will, but that is not necessarily a bad thing for reasons of political accountability in 2012 about which I’ve written and will do so in the future. Indeed, it is a good idea for Republicans to do what all coaches of sports teams do in public and drop all talk of a take-over of the House. Lower expectations a bit. But even gaining 30 or so seats puts them within striking distance in the future. Moreover, it will scare the remaining Democrats in swing districts. The cornered House leadership may try to push through additional radical proposals. That will only increase the likelihood of Democratic defectors joining Republicans or of the Senate refusing to go along with the House leadership.

Of even more importance are the state races. The road to end Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is a long and winding one. To maximize Republican chances, they need to be in control of the drawing of Congressional district lines after the 2010 census. That control will be determined by success in electing governors and state legislators. So far in 2009 and 2010, the GOP has done well. It is a trend they must continue.

Whether or not the Republicans retake the House, there is simply no way to roll back Obama/Reid/PelosiCare before 2013 at the earliest. Whatever the Republican margin of victory in November, they will not have the White House, and they will be nowhere near a veto-proof supermajority. The Democrats don’t have those numbers even now. However, there are ways for the Republicans (by themselves or with the help of disaffected Democrats) to block further changes in the direction of single-payer health insurance and even to starve the system financially in ways that will make it unworkable. They’ll have to take care not to appear “mean,” but it can be done.

Most significantly, the larger the Republican victory, even short of a majority, the more disheartening this is to the Democrats for 2012. It will make President Obama vulnerable, and the Democratic infighting will increase in proportion to the Republican victory. President Clinton recovered politically from a Democratic debacle in the 1994 mid-term elections. President Carter, on the other hand, did not recover from a much smaller Republican victory in the 1978 mid-term elections that previewed his 1980 loss (after a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy). Depending on whether Obama is more like Clinton or like Carter will significantly influence how he does in 2012. So far, his ideology, his inflexible belief in the righteousness of himself, and his rigid political personality that is averse to compromise, look much more like Carter than Clinton. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, it is crucial to keep the focus on the ultimate objective. To have patience and determination to take one step at a time. And to look with relief and optimism at how far Obama and the Democrats have fallen in fifteen months due to their political recklessness and stubbornness. Conservatives have learned a painful, but valuable, lesson: Elections have consequences. It must be the turn of the Democrats to learn that lesson in 2010. And beyond. Repeal the bill.

Another “strange” Obama judicial nominee. This time it’s Robert Chatigny, nominated to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. This modern-day Justinian’s rulings display an odd soft spot for sexual predators, especially those who also murder:

“Judge Chatigny’s strange take on sex offenders has shadowed his time on the bench….In the case involving Connecticut’s version of Megan’s Law, Judge Chatigny relied not on the actual words of the ’sex-offender registry’ warning, but on the ‘implied allegation’ that everybody listed was dangerous in order to rule that the law somehow violated the offender’s constitutional rights. So wrongheaded was Judge Chatigny’s ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually reversed it, not by a split vote, but unanimously.”

“The worst case, though, was that of serial murderer Michael Ross, who abducted, sexually tortured and then killed women or girls ages 25, 23, 19, 16, 17 (two that age) and 14 (two victims). Shortly before Ross was to be executed with his own acquiescence in the punishment, Judge Chatigny held a phone conference, during which he berated Ross’ attorney for failing to appeal the death penalty. The judge even threatened, ‘I’ll have your law license’ if the lawyer failed in this supposed duty.
“The judge said he had been convinced that ’sexual sadism’ was a mental disorder that made Ross as much victim as criminal. Said the judge about Ross: ‘He’s at Cornell, he had this classmate, this petite Asian girl who is sweet, and he likes her, and he winds up killing her because he has this affliction, this terrible disease … this awful, uncontrollable impulse to sexually brutalize this person he liked and then kill her. … Michael Ross may be the least culpable, the least, of the people on death row.’
“The Supreme Court eventually overruled Judge Chatigny on the Ross case, too, and Ross finally was put to death. As for the judge’s nomination for a federal appeals court, Ross’ eight victims have no comment.”

Secret back-room bills written by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that are inserted into the shell of another bill that has been vacuumed of its language like a cell that is stripped of its DNA and has another’s injected. Back room deals that involve huge give-aways to unions and to the states and friends of favored Senators. Passing bills, no, “deeming bills passed” on a huge and unprecedented project of socialism. “Reconciliation,” previously just a process to adjust taxing and spending measures to conform to properly-passed budget resolutions, is used to evade long-standing rules and practices in order to ram through an immensely unpopular 2,200-page-and-rising government take-over of one of the most personal of choices. Declarations by the legislation’s sponsors that the bill must be passed so that everyone can find out what is in it. Lies and deception about abortion language that the bill’s supporters promised was not in the bill—but which they then removed. Same thing for provisions about health care for illegal aliens and about “death panels.”

Now even the last vestiges of parliamentary decorum are being jettisoned. The promise, made over and over again, by the President and Congressional leaders that the bill would be posted at least 72 hours before the vote, so that supporters, opponents, and the public would be able to read the provisions (all thousands of pages), is worth the same as the other promises made by the Leftists in the administration and Congress. The Left loves to talk about how “democratic” it is. It is elitist and authoritarian through and through, and shows its colors constantly. The Democratic argument that everyone knew what would be in the bill is nonsense, as the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that it could not make an authoritative determination because it did not know what was in the final bill.

This is how banana republics operate.

The President’s decision to sit down with Bret Baier of FOX News—you know, that network that the White House previously told its people to boycott—was an obvious attempt to try to neutralize opposition and, perhaps, gain some support among the network’s viewers. It’s also an admission that the network has the largest news audience, one that consists not just of Republicans, but independents and many Democrats.

Unfortunately for the President, he has failed to impress conservatives. For example, from Riehl World View: “Barack Obama was just one mindless platitude after another. He can’t, or won’t answer the real questions, and, as always, can’t deal with being challenged without getting snippy. Obama’s bad policies, poor temperament and willingness to mislead, avoid, distract and demagogue when he can take center stage in his interview with Bret Baier.” Exactly. When Obama did not know about the special “Connecticut deal,” Baier helped him out. I wonder whether Obama will get the same contemptuous reaction from the media and other elites that Sarah Palin got when she asked Charlie Gibson about which version of the Bush Doctrine he was asking. Nah, I’m not really wondering.

While the interview was calm, it was obvious that the President was not happy to have a non-fawning media acolyte doing what journalists claim they do, except during the Obama presidency. Obama was avoiding answering the questions, and he tried to filibuster. Baier interrupted the President repeatedly to bring the conversation back to the question asked. The media have reported this as a “contentious” interview. (Rush Limbaugh had a great audio compilation of the media talking points about this, all of them using the same or nearly the same phrasing.) The Left thought it outrageous that Baier would interrupt the President. They seem to have forgotten how well it was received when Dan Rather would interrupt President Nixon, Sam Donaldson would interrupt President Reagan, and reporters would repeatedly interrupt and seek to badger President George W. Bush.

As his fortunes have dimmed on the government take-over of the health care system, the President has resorted increasingly to more overt personal appeals. Passing anything becomes the goal, no matter how expensive or injurious, as long as it saves him and “his” presidency. Despite his pious disclaimers in the interview with Baier, as usual, it’s all about Obama.

Here is a transcript of the interview.

Here is video of the interview:

A quick and fairly current analysis of the “whip count” of votes in the House on Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. The good news, according to this estimate from The Hill: 178 Republicans against; 37 Democrats firmly, likely, or leaning against for a total of 215; 146 Democrats firmly, likely, or leaning for; 70 Democrats undecided. If the numbers are right and the leaners all break the way they lean, the Democrats will need to get all 70 undecideds for the bill to pass. If even one of those undecideds breaks against the bill, it is dead.

But even if the bill passes, and especially if it passes by one vote, the writer believes that it can be reversed in a later Congress. Unlike other government entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, this bill is tremendously unpopular with the voters.

Not long ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney opined off-hand that Barack Obama would be a one-term wonder. Since then, I have heard a similar point made on occasion by other speakers. It just so happened that I was wondering the same not long before I read of Cheney’s remark.

Mr. Obama as a one-termer has been, of course, a hope of the more fevered denizens of the swamps of the conservative hinterland since November 5, 2008, the day after the election. I was scornful of the likelihood that their hope would be realized, and, on balance, I continue to believe that the President will be re-elected. But what shook my previous confidence in having to prepare myself for eight years of an Obama White House was the increasingly obvious combination of toxic ideology, incompetent administration, and personal detachment that emanates from Mr. Obama and his minions.

Looked at historically, it is very difficult to dislodge an incumbent who chooses to run for re-election. The task becomes almost impossible if that incumbent succeeded a President from the opposing party. In the twentieth century, only four incumbent Presidents were defeated for re-election. Three of those defeats, involving William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush were cases where they had gained the White House after Presidents from their own party. Party fatigue had set in after twelve years or more of the same party in the White House. In both Taft’s and Bush’s defeats, there were strong third party challenges that affected the outcomes. In those races, the winner received substantially less than 50% of the vote. Of the three, only Herbert Hoover, running in the political gale of the Depression, lost decisively after one term.

There has been only one instance in well more than a century of an incumbent president losing a re-election bid when that incumbent had taken over the White House from the opposite party. That loser was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Leaving aside the odd sequence (and diversion of popular and electoral votes) of the Grover Cleveland-Benjamin Harrison contests in 1888 and 1892, there arguably has not been another case where an incumbent President of a major party lost re-election after succeeding someone from the opposing party. (President John Tyler lost his re-election bid in 1844, but he ran as a third-party candidate and abandoned his campaign before the election.)

The standard for losing as an incumbent, then, is set by the inept Jimmy Carter. Short of sinking to that level, Mr. Obama should be assured of re-election. How close to the Carter standard an incumbent can safely get depends also on the quality of the opposition. Carter was faced with Ronald Reagan, a powerful campaigner and Teflon candidate. There is no Republican of similar political potency on the scene. Sarah Palin comes close, and a comparison of the dismissive treatment she receives with that directed at Reagan yields remarkable similarities. However, Palin is on balance a more polarizing figure than Reagan, which would make it more difficult for her to make the same kind of pitch to close the deal with independents and Democrats that Reagan made in his debates against Carter. In addition, Obama is a much better campaigner and presents a more likable persona than Carter was able to do in a side-by-side comparison with Reagan.

That said, Mr. Obama is doing his remarkable best to imitate Jimmy Carter. The drip, drip, drip of news about botched anti-terror efforts (The ludicrous “The system worked” declaration by Janet Incompetano as a response to the Crotchbomber), missteps in trials for accused terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the cluelessness of reaction to the Honduran constitutional dispute, the continuing debacle of healthcare “reform” in which the administrations comes up with patently absurd claims, all undermine the public’s confidence in Obama’s administrative competence. His weakness in foreign relations, complete with bowing before sundry monarchs and dictators; his failure to constrain Iran; his apparent appeasement of Russia; his coziness with Latin American leftists; his nuclear disarmament and anti-missile technology decisions; his decisions of interrogations of terrorists; his (and Eric Holder’s) attempted or threatened moves against Bush administration officials and against CIA interrogators, and his 2009 Obama World Apology Tour all show a profound weakness, stemming from personality and ideology, in protecting American interests. If they have not hurt the President yet, and I think they have hurt in the public’s perception of him, they present catastrophic political danger to him, should there be an attack on the U.S.. They at least present persistent, if not catastrophic, political danger through their cumulative negative effect.

Every administration has periods of good luck and bad. So, timing means a lot. Assuming that Mr. Obama has had neither extraordinary good nor bad luck overall as measured by “events” so far, he is early on showing a lot of Carteresque tendencies. Assuming also that those tendencies continue in approximately similar manner, Mr. Obama could be in trouble in 2012, something that seemed to exist only in the realm of fantasy a year or even six months ago.

But being as bad as Carter will not defeat Obama. There is one thing that Obama has that Carter did not, and which will give him 10% of the vote that Carter could not get. That thing is Obama’s race. The additional turn-out among Blacks, along with an even more heavily pro-Democrat tilt than usual among that group, will account for some of the boost. Similar increases, though perhaps less significant, will manifest themselves among other racial minorities. But many Whites, too, will refuse to vote against the first, at least partially, African-ancestry President. Riddled with racial guilt, these liberals will not vote to confirm Obama’s political failure and their own failure to recognize their candidate’s lack of experience and qualification for the office that was so glaringly apparent to less partial observers. As already has been made clear by various journalists, well, by Chris Matthews, immediately after Obama’s inauguration, for them, Obama the “Black President” is too important and big to fail.

If I recognize this, Mr. Obama’s savvy political advisers will know it at least as well. They will make sure that the racial undercurrent remains in full flow in 2012. Opposition to, or criticism of, the President will once again be slammed as racist by Obama, his minions, and the newspapers, TV networks, and other parts of the media wing of the Democratic Party. This will serve to drive such doubting liberals and weak-kneed moderates back into the party line. In short, then, Mr. Obama can be as bad as Jimmy Carter, and not worry about re-election. To vote Mr. Obama out of office would require disasters far worse than the economic malaise and the national security weaknesses that characterized the Carter years. What might suffice as a big enough disaster is hard to say. But an unemployment rate even of 10%, a high inflation rate, an Iranian nuke, an Iranian attack on its neighbors, a new 9/11, or a Russian, North Korean, or Chinese invasion of their neighbors probably won’t pry loose enough Obama disciples to turn him out of office. Some of his former supporters will turn against him or not show up to vote, but, as the religious imagery associated with support of the “Black Jesus” demonstrates, for too many (including, perhaps, the President himself) Obama is not merely a politician, but a movement or cause.

For those reasons, primarily the reason of his race, I do not believe that Obama can be defeated in 2012. The Republicans will not be facing Jimmy Carter, but a Jimmy Carter simulacrum that benefits from affirmative action. That said, I think that there is a 10% chance that Mr. Obama will not be President in 2013. The reason is Mr. Obama himself. He may opt not to run again.

It has become abundantly clear already that he does not enjoy being President. For all the idle comparisons between Obama and FDR or John Kennedy, those others enjoyed the job itself, not just the perks. They brought a “vigah” (in Kennedy’s phrasing) to the position that the incumbent does not. Even before the election, Obama had a reputation of not wanting to work at the hard stuff. He produced no significant legislation in the Senate. His absenteeism was legendary. He made a habit of voting “present” in the Illinois legislature. Earlier in his life, he did not like the temporary jobs working in finance and law. On a more benign level, he appears to be genuinely committed to his family. He enjoys more leisurely intellectual contemplation.

That explains why he likes to get out of D.C. so much and why just two weeks into his term he explained his visits to local schools by confessing that he did not like being in the White House. That explains also his incessant campaign mode, his campaign-style political speeches with their hard edges and political platitudes and generalities (see, for example, the State of the Union address), and the meetings and “summits” where Obama presides like a professor in a seminar.

The there is the outward appearance of lack of passion to the job. His supporters initially saw this as a surfeit of “cool.” We more skeptical types considered it aloofness, even coldness, that was a reification of his psychological elitism. By now, I have read of even some of his supporters active in the media and in politics grousing about this detachment and “above the fray” approach and comparing Mr. Obama unfavorably in that regard to George W. Bush. In political whispers behind cupped hands, such people point with reluctant respect to Bush’s leadership, his emotional commitment to his work that allowed people to know where he stood, and, despite some notable failures, his ability to get things done even with a Democratic Congress. Mr. Obama, they say, lacks these qualities. His coolness has become a liability.

Being President is hard work, and Presidents age visibly. Pictures of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in the first and eighth years of their Presidencies show remarkable physical changes far greater than can be attributed merely to the lapse of seven years. Bush was battered politically and fanatically for eight years by his opponents and had to deal with serious challenges to the country’s national security. I am not sure that Obama has either the, shall one say, “flexible” personality and the ability to lose himself in personal “diversions” of Bill Clinton, or the orneriness and strong sense of self of W.

Obama has made his name in American history as the first “non-White” President. If he is faced with four more years of a sour economic mood, and if he has either completed his ideological agenda that will (negatively) transform the U.S. domestically and internationally, or he has found that the agenda cannot be completed, he may decide that there are better ways to spend his time. Given the likelihood that, after 2012, he will face a Republican Congress or at least a Congress composed of Republicans and enough unhappy Democrats that his political agenda is a dead letter, he may not want to continue. He does not have the political inclinations toward true compromise (”bipartisanship” not being the same as compromise) or the political skills of triangulation that Mr. Clinton possessed. Nor is it likely that his “A” team would continue with him into a second term; subsequent hirees often do not possess the personal loyalties to the President, the political skills, or the calibrated ideological commitment of the initial group.

Presidents almost universally get frustrated in their second term, for some combination of various reasons, such as public fatigue, their quasi-lame duck status, the accumulation of unfinished projects and the passage of time, the departure of trusted individuals, the inevitable scandals involving present or former associates or acquaintances, media feeding frenzy for stories, economic cycles, rivalries and conflicting interests with Congressional barons eager to share your successes and distance themselves from your failures, the constant baying from the opposing party, and on and on. Perhaps President Obama decides that the journey was more enjoyable and personally satisfying than the destination. A second term, then, would be an unnecessary punishment.

Would it not be much better, he might say, to seek an appointment to the Supreme Court rather than re-election to the White House? He could make history as only the second President to be a Supreme Court justice. He could enjoy a lifestyle much more suited to his temperament. He could seek to have his agenda of a transformed “positive” Constitution adopted just by persuading four other justices. That would allow him to seek to impose on the American people various elements of his vision of socialized health care, environmental restrictions, expanded constitutional protections for unlawful enemy combatants, and racial spoils systems that he might not be able to attain democratically. He would be, for the most part, among other academically-inclined intellectuals. He would rejoin, and interact with, for the rest of his life, members of the legal elites and adoring laws students. True, he could still do that after a second term as President. But why wait if, as appears, he really does not like his current job?

It is unlikely to happen. But if Barack Obama is not the President after January, 2013, it is more likely due to his decision not to seek re-election than to having suffered a defeat in an active campaign for the office.

There has been much talk of the Democrats using “reconciliation” to pass Obama/Reid/PelosiCare if they cannot get the 60 votes needed to “invoke cloture” (conclude debate) and end a filibuster. The problem arises from a tradition in the Senate as a deliberative body that allows relaxed rules of debate. Unlike the “democratic” House, where the leadership acting in conjunction with the Rules Committee strictly defines the terms of debate on a bill, the Senate is more of a club of equals where courtesy and independence dictate fewer restrictions on the opportunity for members to rise and speak.

Reconciliation has traditionally been used in very limited circumstances, usually to reconcile appropriations- and tax-related bills in the Senate to budget measures already passed by both houses. But that process is regarded as a distinct exception to the Senate tradition of debate. Therefore, there are many criteria and specifications for when, why, and how reconciliation may be used. The Senate parliamentarian, a scrupulously non-partisan individual, is often called on to make rulings to limit the scope of reconciliation. Those rulings themselves are binding on the Senate, though only by tradition. The parliamentarian’s rulings can be overridden by unanimous consent, not a likely option if the process is used for anything other than the routine and fairly innocuous matters for which reconciliation traditionally was used. Alternatively, the Vice President can overrule the parliamentarian absent unanimous consent, an option fraught with political danger, a figuratively nuclear political option.

This is an overview of the reconciliation process. Read it if you dare. If Congress and the President need to resort to anything that complicated to get a bill passed over opposition, there is something wrong with the bill. It’s worse than seeing sausage made. Here is an overview of reconciliation applied to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

Obviously, reconciliation in the Senate is far from a sure thing. Therefore, the result-oriented ideologues in the White House and Congress might decide that they will find a way to proceed without reconciliation. A bill already has passed the Senate. The House can vote on that bill, with promises that there will be changes through follow-up amendments in a reconciliation bill. But if the House passes the Senate bill, that one can go to the President’s desk, as it has met the Constitution’s bicameralism requirement, namely, that a bill must pass both houses in identical language before being presented to the President. Once Mr. Obama signs the bill, it becomes law. There is no legal compulsion for the Senate then to live up to its word and pass the amendments it promised. They might give it a try, and, finding that they don’t have the 51 votes to go forward, abandon the effort. That would be a tremendous breach of trust toward the House, but Pelosi and the leadership might go along with it, just so they can have some health care “reform” adopted. The real losers would be those House members in swing districts who were opposed to the earlier bill and who voted for something that can prove to be toxic for their re-election in November.

This is a risky procedure for the Congressional Democrats, and the possible use of such a tactic presumably is known to the Democratic fence-sitters. Thet do not trust either the House and Senate leadership or the administration and would push for another alternative. That alternative is to have the Senate pass amendments (which would require the cumbersome reconciliation described above) and the House to approve that amending bill before the House votes on the underlying health care bill. As long as the President then signs the health care bill before he signs the amending bill, everything is in proper order.

All of these procedural gyrations are done to get around the Senate tradition of the filibuster and to engineer an eventual government take-over of one-sixth of the economy against the wishes of a majority of the American people. But don’t hold your breath that this will happen. Reconciliation and adoption of the Senate bill are far from assured. Right now, the votes are not there, and the odds appear to be getting longer.

One sign of an administration running into political headwinds is the leaking of information critical of this or that insider. The higher the position of the target, the more significant the leak, as it is likely that people close to this person and of similar prominence are leaking the information to gain an advantage in the jockeying for political influence that occurs in the White House. That is the playground of major league political egos, after all. When those targets of criticism are high level associates of the President and, indeed, the President himself, and when the criticism occurs early in the second year of the administration, this is a sign of serious discord and of an administration stuck in a morass.

Therefore, when an article appears in The Washington Post that extols the virtues of President Obama’s chief of staff, the tiny, Tourette’s-tending terpsichorean Rahm Emanuel, eyebrows are raised. The skeptic’s interest is particularly piqued when that article appears in the middle of (leaked) rumors and increased demands from the moon-baying Left that the President must fire Emanuel because the latter is responsible for the political stalemate of the Obama agenda despite overwhelming Democratic Party advantages in the Congress. According to this article, the President’s other advisers are responsible for this debacle, a result that would not have occurred, had the President only listened to “Rahmbo.” Sample graph that conveys the tone:

“Obama’s problem is that his other confidants — particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod — are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn’t dirty his hands in politics.

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel’s counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn’t politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn’t met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

“Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.”

This protrayal of Emanuel as the omniscient sage lays it on so thick that the inevitable suspicion is that Emanuel himself is the source of these leaks against his own President. As expected, Emanuel denies any complicity, and the very ham-handedness of the leaks ironically gives credence to his denials. Emanuel, after all, is known for his skill at political infighting and his (fiercely partisan) pragmatism. But then, if one were truly Macchiavellian, one might suggest that this apparent overkill is exactly what Rahm needs to hide his fingerprints.

The episode is also useful to try to insulate Obama from political fall-out if his health care take-over collapses. He (through Rahm and these leaks) can lay the blame at the feet of the left-liberal Congressional leadership and the besotted Obama lovers Gibbs, Axelrod, and Jarrett. Of course, that still exposes some political flaws in the President for having had the lack of political acumen and the inexperience not to listen to Emanuel but to defer to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and his own sycophants. The article also concedes what those of us who have declined to become The One’s disciples have long known, namely, that those on the other side too often are the O-bots we’ve characterized them as being.

Needless to say, this hagiography of Emanuel has not gone unnoticed and uncriticized by his (many) enemies in and out of the administration.  At the Huffington Post, one particularly huffy Huffster huffed, “The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change. Rahm was simply their chief of staff. And now, this hypercompetitive bantam rooster is attempting to blame others for what went wrong. That’s evidently so important to him that he’s trying to take a victory lap around the wreckage of what was once such a promising presidency.

President Obama has declared the time for talking about health care reform to be over. He is, however, still calling on those who support his program to make their voices heard, an endeavor for which his advocacy group’s website has prepared a handy-dandy list to guide “seminar callers” to talk shows. Those who oppose his program, the majority of those responding in many different polls, should sit down and be quiet, presumably.

Once upon a time, i.e., in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, then-Senator Obama was not only against reconciliation, but rejected the idea that something as huge as health care reform could be done by a bare majority:

“[Health care reform] is an area where we’re going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We’re going to have to have a majority to get a bill to my desk that is not just a 50-plus-one majority.”

It is becoming more and more obvious that President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are going to pass something, anything, concerning health care. Bad as passing something that the American people reject is better for them politically than passing nothing at all. Their political calculus is that they are going to lose seats in November, no matter what, but that they will lose more if they are perceived to be political failures than if they can point to something that they have done and declare victory. Moreover, they are not going to walk away from an issue that their President has made his signature policy since he began running for the office.

Towards that end, their strategy is to do the most radical that they can persuade enough of their waivering members to accept, and, at the same time, bring in as many Republican-connected ideas to put forth an image of bipartisanship. The latter is doubly beneficial in that it might get some Republicans to sign on, depending on how radical the rest of the proposal is. But even if no Republican signs on, the calculus is that the Democrats can portray the result as a “bipartisan” bill. As Nancy Pelosi proclaimed, a bill can be bipartisan if it includes Republican ideas, even if no Republican ends up voting for it. That also allows the Democrats to portray the GOP as simply obstructionist, with the upshot that it buys the Democrats come political cover and may reduce their losses in November. So, while the Pelosi approach is conceptual nonsense, it makes political sense.

Another advantage to the Democrats of adopting some bill, is that, whatever the bill contains, they can declare victory and then claim to be focusing on other issues. It moves the discussion, at least temporarily, to other matters and allows the Democrats to claim that they are addressing “jobs” and other economic issues. Moreover, there will be a cushion of time, perhaps seven months, before the election, including the three months of summer during which political issues normally recede into the background of voters’ minds. Come fall, the Democrats can try to blunt Republican efforts to raise the health care issue by accusing the GOP of bringing up issues that have been decided rather than addressing ongoing issues.

The bill that will emerge will be sufficiently ambiguous that the Congressional Budget Office will not be able to have enough specific figures to challenge whatever absurd claims of low costs the White House produces. Moreover, the bill can be rather small, as long as it contains the seeds for the eventual government take-over of health care. Then, there can be incremental increases over time, as this feature is added or that program is expanded. The same pattern has occurred historically with all taxpayer-funded entitlement programs. This has always been the advice of Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, regarding this issue. The Democrats understand that the Republicans, even if they retake Congress and the White House, will be too weak-willed to undo sush entitlements, as the issue will be demagogued effectively by the Democratic opposition.

Moreover, all the talk about the difficulty of getting a majority of Congress to vote for the bill is hot air. Even when the earlier version passed by only 220-215, I pointed out that the Democratic leadership had enough possible votes in reserve. They simply allowed as many endangered Democrats as possible to vote against the bill, so as to give them political cover with their constituents. Even if some anti-abortion Democrats who previously voted “yes” now balk, there will be some former “nay” votes who will switch. As I said, they will tweak the language until they get enough votes.

The Senate will, if necessary, avoid the likely filibuster by invoking the “reconciliation” process. That only requires a majority vote as there is no unlimited debate (absent a 60-vote cloture motion) permitted. Reconciliation has been used for budgetary matters and never for such a broad substantive issue. As such, the Democrats’ moves would be subject to being rules out of order by the Senate parliamentarian, a historically scrupulously non-partisan officer. However, the Democrats have already whispered that, is necessary, they will vote to overrule any decisions of the parliamentarian that would frustrate their political goals. Though it would normally take unanimous consent for such overruling, the Democrats have threatened to jettison even that rule. It is clear that any such moves would destroy the Senate’s rules for the future, once the GOP regains control of that body. But the Democrats figure that the ends justify the means, and that there will always be time in the future to engage in hypocrisy about the sanctity of the Senate’s rules that foster deliberation and give voice to the minority. After all, as I have written before, the Democrats were very much in favor of the inviolability of the filibuster (in 2005) before they were against it now.

While that is the Democratic calculus, and probably is the best of bad alternatives for them, it is not without costs. By the time the process is finished, it will be some time in April. That is only six months before the election. Any “reform” that emerges over Republican opposition will not be seen as bipartisan, regardless of Madame Speaker’s pronouncements. The issue has been such a hot topic for too long. It is too indelibly etched into the political consciousness of the voters. The process has been too messy, with too much back room dealing. The eventual bill will do nothing to change the concerns about costs that have been raised successfully, as well as the taint that the government will make these health care decisions. Six months, especially with the issue coming front and center for a large and motivated portion of the voters, is not long, given the fact that the issue has been on the front burner for over a year. The public has simply got too engaged on the issue for the usual stupor to return in time to save the Democrats this November. This is not an obscure bill or a matter of only marginal concern for voters.

Moreover, the health care issue cannot be divorced from the rest of the Democratic agenda. The deficit, cap-and-trade (coming as it does during a time when the global warmongers have seen their arguments suffer grievous erosion of public support), tax increases, and unemployment all will continue to be issues that hurt the Democrats for various, though interrelated reasons. In the end, passing a health care bill may save a few Democratic House seats, but it will not avert the political tide that is threatening to overtake them. There are simply too many causes for that tide. But saving even a few seats may preserve Democratic control of the House, and that is enough to cause the leadership to urge the politically-vulnerable members of its caucus to commit political suicide by voting for a bill that the majority of the American public does not want.

September, 2008: Candidate Barack Obama ridicules John McCain’s proposal for a commission to study the  country’s economic problems in the recession. Says Mr. Obama, “Just today, Senator McCain offered up the oldest Washington stunt in the book – you pass the buck to a commission to study the problem. But here’s the thing – this isn’t 9/11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it, John McCain won’t, and that’s the choice for the American people in this election.”

Here’s another version, extolling the need for presidential leadership rather than commissions. Starts at about 0:40: 

February, 2010: President Obama signs an executive order to form a commission to suggest steps to solve the debt and deficit problems.

Whatever happened to presidential leadership? I agree with candidate Obama’s assessment that these issues ultimately depend on political will and leadership, qualities in scarce supply in this administration. I also agree with his self-indictment that commissions are old Washington stunts to “pass the buck.”

This commission is just showboating. The commission’s recommendations aren’t due until December, after the election. That way, the inevitable tax increases (including on the middle class) needed to fund the massive spending increases the administration’s programs envision, won’t be a hot topic during the election. The Democrats can try to fool the American people about how serious they are about the deficit and cut their electoral losses. They can talk “responsibility” and “deficit reduction,” when everyone knows they won’t act that way, except to raise taxes.

The tax increases won’t be voted on until 2011, the maximum possible time before the 2012 election. Moreover, the Obama and the rest of the Democrats can hide behind the “bipartisan” nature of the commission to blunt the Republicans’ message in 2012. If the Democrats raise taxes and the Republicans balk, Obama can say that the GOP is irresponsible because the (Democrat-dominated) commission found such tax increases necessary. If some members of the Congressional GOP go along, Obama again can portray the tax increases as “bipartisan” and ridicule any GOP dissenters. Either way, he and the Democrats can shun responsibility. That’s not leadership. Why not just elect functionaries in the form of commissions to decide issues?

Meanwhile, there won’t be spending cuts. Quite the opposite. The matter will take on catastrophic shape if the government increases its meddling in health care, its regulation of business, and its environmentalist cap-and-trade and anti-energy policies. The charade is illustrated by the President’s statement that he has ordered a freeze on discretionary spending. That amount is a very small portion of federal expenditures. It won’t start until next year. And it has recently been raised substantially.

The “PayGo” legislation that Obama mentions towards the end is more such empty symbolism. Within days of Obama’s announcement that any new programs would have to show how they will be financed, the Congressional Democrats were funding programs under an “emergency exception” and trying to find other ways around the PayGo law.

Once again, this decision demonstrates the utter lack of seriousness of the President and his cohorts. Moreover, it is yet another campaign promise with an expiration date. See also, no middle class tax increase (”No one making under $250,000 will have to pay a dime in additional taxes”). “Guantanamo will be closed within a year.” “Unemployment will not go above 8% with the stimulus law.” “We have a plan.”

The President has been making the rounds preaching the virtues of spending within one’s income and saving for the future. If that sounds schizophrenic, it is, coming on the heels of his reckless budget. In making his point, Mr. Obama in effect dismissively refers to Las Vegas as a frivolous and wasteful use of money. This being his second such dismissive remark about Sin City, the reaction came forcefully. Even Harry Reid told Obama to knock it off. But it was Las Vegas mayor, Oscar Goodman, who was most forceful. Accusing Obama of having a psychological problem and being a slow learner, Goodman told Obama that he was not welcome in Las Vegas unless he straightened this matter put quickly. Ouch! And Goodman is not a Republican. Republicans don’t win political races in Vegas. The President caved quickly.

As the furor around the President’s nigh-on $4 trillion FY 2011 federal budget with its $1.5+ trillion deficit continues, it is important to keep in mind what is Mr. Obama’s fault and what is not. It is not Mr. Obama’s fault that the country is in a recession. Nor is it Mr. Obama’s fault that unemployment has gone up, or even that it has reached 10%, according to one measure (17%, according to another), different numbers according to yet others. Nor is it Mr. Obama’s fault that there is a broad asset devaluation that is eliminating froth, a devaluation that has both a short-term and a long-term component. Nor is this year’s (FY 2010) or next year’s (FY 2011) deficit entirely, or even mainly, the fault of Mr. Obama. Nor was last year’s (FY 2009).

With the disclaimers in favor of the President out of the way, let me be clear (to borrow a phrase from the press-anointed great orator) that I am not joining him in saying that those conditions therefore are the fault of his predecessor. Indeed, one aspect of Mr. Obama’s responsibility for the degree of current economic problems is his habit of blaming his predecessor rather than getting on with it. More about that later.

Still, Mr. Bush is to blame for some of the current misery. The increased federal funding for education and the drug prescription programs, along with other non-defense and non-national security items, enlarged the size of the federal budget significantly during his tenure. The tax cuts were not the problem, as they, predictably, increased federal revenue. Federal revenue, adjusted for inflation, did not go down; federal expenditures went up. Even the wars were essentially funded, with the FY 2007 deficit (pre-recession) dropping to around $160 billion. Many of us on the Right opposed Bush’s spending programs (even though the prescription plan ended up costing less than we had feared). As an aside, it is entirely unconvincing for Mr. Obama to rail about the fiscal irresponsibility of Bush’s prescription drug benefit when his own proposal is to expand it and to pay for that expansion in some undisclosed fashion. Adding to the budgetary strain of Bush’s compassionate conservatism was Congress’s profligate spending, including during 6 years of Republican hands on the spigot. Bush’s unwillingness, as a bargain for Congress’s support of his foreign and national security policies, to exercise his veto until the Democrats took over Congress in 2006 exacerbated the fiscal irresponsibility.

With the recession swinging into full force in 2008, deficits went up towards the end of FY 2008. Revenues dropped due to the slow down in economic activity and the financial panic, while federal spending increased, including the first portion of TARP loans to the banks. Still, the deficit at the end of FY 2008 was under $500 billion. With the economic inertia moving in the direction of recession, those deficits clearly would have increased, no matter whether Bush or McCain had been President in 2009, rather than Obama.

Looking at the recession itself, rather than the deficit, to the extent we are seeing the result of an unsustainable asset bubble, Bush is also partly to blame. So are Greenspan, Clinton, both Congressional delegations, and various bureaucracies, such as the SEC. On the deficit front once more, Bush, to his credit, tried to reform Social Security to bring its future costs under control, only to be demagogued by the Democrats and the media to the point where these people plus enough politically spineless Republicans (who typically lost their seats in 2006 and 2008 anyway—Chris Shays, are you listening?) derailed his proposals.

On the asset front, Bush and members of his administration many times warned about the problem of sub-prime loans, especially those under laws to pressure banks into lending to increase home ownership among poor and certain racial minority home buyers to purchase houses. His administration also warned about murky derivatives and the banks’ purchases of such investments. His proposal to curb these practices did not make it out of committee in the Senate due to loud wailing by Congressman Barney Frank (who, contrary to more recent posturing, was oblivious at the time to the dangers of over-leveraging) and officers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (including well-paid Democrats). Then there was the filibuster threat from the Democrats (who controlled well more than 40 votes) against legislation to curb these practices that Frank and others described as “not broken.” Perhaps Bush should have used more political capital to push this matter along, but his eyes were on national security and the obstructions and attacks from the Democrats and the media on that front. Still, he does bear some responsibility for the failure to address these excesses more resolutely and successfully.

Greenspan’s role in artificially keeping interest rates too low, opening the spigots, cheapening the dollar, and driving investors to more and more speculative risk-taking (fueled by government participation through programs that reduced the risk of failure) is well-known. Plentiful dollars were looking for safety in commodities, starting with real estate, including investments in riskier and riskier loans. The bundling and securitization of these loans, together with the opacity of these bundles that might contain mixes of solid and risky loans in unknown ratios, contributed to the uncertainty about bank holdings that helped trigger and sustain the panic of 2007-2009. Eventually the limits of plausible real estate investments were passed and capital looked for other commodity havens, from gold to oil to rice. Commodity prices soared, with speculation in oil contracts fueling a huge spike in energy costs. That asset bubble, too, contributed both to the dollar inflation and the self-reinforcing cycle of commodity fever, and eventually helped cause the economic bust as many of those speculative positions had to be liquidated and the froth wrung out.

These economic trends are well beyond the power of any President to control and direct. To blame Bush or Obama is ridiculous. If any single institution were blameworthy, it would be the Congress, which, after all, is constitutionally and politically responsible for taxing and spending decisions. But even Congress by itself did not cause these conditions. Nor can Congress control them.

However, the President and the Congress can mitigate or exacerbate these conditions. For that, Mr. Obama and the current Congress bear much blame. Although I was inclined against the TARP law, I could see the argument for it. Obama likes to portray the cost of TARP as a Bush-caused deficit issue. But, first, the TARP was a loan program, much of which has been repaid during Obama’s administration. So, this should help his current deficit numbers. The problem is that Obama wants to spend these funds on other programs, so they contribute to the deficit once more. Second, Bush only signed off on the first half of the authorized TARP funds; Obama signed off on the second half. He did not have to do this. That decision is his responsibility and, to the extent that he argues the entire FY 2009 deficit should be assigned to Bush, this is deceptive.

Moreover, the “stimulus” that supposedly has saved and created so many jobs (but in fact has done so mainly for government jobs) was an Obama decision. As were the 2009 bail-outs of automakers. These aspects of the deficit clearly belong to Obama. Since the government no longer tries to figure out the impossible task of computing the number of jobs saved/created by the stimulus, but says that any jobs for which such money went automatically were saved/created, it is difficult to say what real impact the stimulus had on joblessness. The broader consensus outside the White House is that it has had little or no impact. As well, there is a negative effect of the stimulus on jobs. The need to borrow the funds for the stimulus crowds out private access to credit that might have saved those jobs. If the government is simply monetizing these costs, the bill will come due through inflation or taxes, the latter of which especially are job killers.

That brings me to the crux of the blame Obama must take. His radical programs reduce incentive for private capital to come in and take risks for job-creating expansion rather than sit on the sideline and invest in safety (gold prices have shot up) or by bidding up stocks to dubious price-earnings levels. His class-warfare tax rhetoric, the massive and radical collection of entitlement spending proposals (health care, student loans), the looming cap-and-tax regulations, the radical bureaucrats he has appointed (such the head of the off-the-rails EPA), the take-over of—and meddling in—car companies, the faux-populist attacks on banks and Wall Street, all spook investors and discourage risk-taking.

If I am a truly wealthy person, and I am threatened with higher taxes, I park my wealth in low- or no-tax investments (e.g., municipal bonds) or figure out tax avoidance devices. If I have to work because I own a business, I will squeeze my employees for at least some of the additional cost, by lowering their compensation/benefits, by firing some and having the others work more, or by moving more of my business out of the U.S. If the workers don’t like it, they can quit, and I will replace them with unemployed workers at the lower price. None of these things will increase jobs or, in the aggregate, help the economy. People are not passive, and history shows this to be the expected reaction. It happened in the late-1930s in response to FDR’s class warfare rhetoric and his tax and regulatory policies. Unemployment actually increased and did not come down significantly until the labor shortages created by WW II took care of it.

With lower economic activity induced by Mr. Obama’s rhetoric and proposals, and with the cost of these programs, no wonder that the deficits stretch out as far as projections are made. His spending proposals, unlike the temporary expenditures on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that Mr. Obama likes to blame, create structural deficits. They impose continuing and increasing costs. Worse, those expenditures, and his regulatory proposals, suppress economic growth, the very thing that might allow him to finance at least some of the anticipated growth in the cost of existing programs, such as Medicare. They do that by requiring government either to raise taxes, thereby reducing investment, if taxes are targeted at the rich, or depressing consumption, if taxes are targeted at the middle class. Alternatively, the government can borrow, thereby raising the cost of credit for private institutions competing with the government for loans and again reducing investment. Finally, the government can print money and create inflation, thereby creating great uncertainty about the value and stability of investments made now and also raising the cost of credit.

So, while Mr. Obama cannot be blamed for the recession and for all of the deficit, he (and the equally radical leadership in Congress) can be held accountable for the lingering joblessness and for increasing proportions of the deficits. Those are, even now, exacerbated by the economic fear and uncertainty created by his own radical agenda and his destructive and partisan class warfare rhetoric and tax proposals. It is ridiculous to blame his predecessor when his own projected deficits, in its best years, exceed his predecessor’s deficits in his worst year. With each passing month, his excuses become more laughable. Voters are getting that message better than, apparently, he is. His whining and attempts to deflect from his responsibility arising from his own proposals are backfiring.

Mr. Obama did inherit a recession; he did inherit a deficit, just as Mr. Bush inherited the collapsing NASDAQ and, to a lesser extent, Dow Jones, with the economic slow-down of 2001. Obama’s advisers and supporters are right in saying that the deficits and the recession would have been here no matter who was President. But they are wrong in not accepting that it is Mr. Obama who is prolonging and exacerbating the condition.

From Investor’s Business Daily comes Michael Ramirez’s impression of Mr. Obama:

I realize that federal hiring is booming. I also realize that the new administration has to replace lots of Bush administration officials with hires who reflect the composition of the Obama administration’s political coalition. Still, it is at least a bit odd that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would be making special efforts to hire these previously underrepresented groups: “The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine.”

“Mental retardation?” “Mental illness?” That does explain many of the recent decisions of Attorney General Holder regarding national security issues. Why is the Civil Rights Division allowed to use the “r”-word, while Rahm Emanuel is not?

In the SOTU speech, President Obama touted the wonders that the stimulus package has done to create or save jobs. Never mind that such estimates, especially of jobs “saved,” are difficult to make. Never mind also that the great majority of such jobs went to public employees with powerful unions that contribute to Democrats, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Never mind also that, once the stimulus ends, such jobs presumably will disappear, as well, unless the government plans on many years of subsidized jobs. Never mind also that each such artificially maintained job has to be paid for by taxes (thereby reducing investment and capital formation and, ultimately, inhibiting job creation) or by borrowing (thereby crowding out private borrowers and inhibiting job creation).

Focus instead on the sheer waste of funds for the number of private jobs supposedly created. Focus also on the political corruption and cronyism that attends government hand-outs. Gateway Pundit links to a story about the company to which Obama was referring. According to the story, based on publicly available information, they created 15 jobs in 2009 and plan to create 27 more in 2010. For a price tag of “only” $100 million. The money may not all be for this company’s jobs; the story is a bit hazy on that point. But even if the company only gets some of the money and its subsidiaries get the rest, 42 jobs even for a small fraction of $100 million is ridiculous. But the reason for this extravagance is easy to uncover. The company’s owner is a heavy contributor to Democrats and sat with Michelle Obama at the SOTU. Just another average Joe trying to make a living and having his failing business and despondent workers rescued by the taxpayers beneficent federal government.

This is Sarah Palin’s tremendous response to the SOTU speech. Again and again she lays bare the empty rhetoric and the generally meaningless content of the speech. The GOP should have let her give the response. An excerpt:

“Everything seems to be ‘unexpected’ to this administration: unexpected job losses; unexpected housing numbers; unexpected political losses in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. True leaders lead best when confronted with the unexpected. But instead of leading us, the president lectured us. He lectured Wall Street; he lectured Main Street; he lectured Congress; he even lectured our Supreme Court Justices.
“He criticized politicians who ‘wage a perpetual campaign,’ but he gave a campaign speech instead of a state of the union address. The campaign is over, and President Obama now has something that candidate Obama never had: an actual track record in office. We now can see the failed policies behind the flowery words. If Americans feel as cynical as the president suggests, perhaps it’s because the audacity of his recycled rhetoric no longer inspires hope.”

Via Gateway Pundit comes Rush Limbaugh’s speech to Mr. Obama.

Here is the Republican response by Virginia governor Bob McDonnell. On health care:
“All Americans agree, we need a health care system that is affordable, accessible, and high quality. But most Americans do not want to turn over the best medical care system in the world to the federal government. Republicans in Congress have offered legislation to reform healthcare, without shifting Medicaid costs to the states, without cutting Medicare, and without raising your taxes. We will do that by implementing common sense reforms, like letting families and businesses buy health insurance policies across state lines, and ending frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals that drive up the cost of your healthcare. And our solutions aren’t thousand-page bills that no one has fully read, after being crafted behind closed doors with special interests.”

On the role of government:
“Many Americans are concerned about this Administration’s efforts to exert greater control over car companies, banks, energy and health care. Over-regulating employers won’t create more employment; overtaxing investors won’t foster more investment. Top-down one-size fits all decision making should not replace the personal choices of free people in a free market, nor undermine the proper role of state and local governments in our system of federalism. As our Founders clearly stated, and we Governors understand, government closest to the people governs best.”

Re: the SOTU speech, here is Victor Davis Hanson with a spot-on dissection of this trite and infuriating performance.

Alex Castellanos on the lack of substance beyond the platitudes.

Former intelligence agent and speech writer Marc Thiessen goes beyond the same criticisms others have made. Excerpt:

“He scolded Scott Brown (without mentioning his name) and all those who have criticized his handling of the Christmas Day bomber, declaring that ‘all of us love this country’ and warning critics to ‘put aside the schoolyard taunts about who is tough.’ If you disagree with Obama’s policies, you are questioning his patriotism. Imagine what the reaction would have been if Bush had tried that in a State of the Union with those who criticized the surge in Iraq. The howls of the liberal media would have been deafening.
“His one moment of ‘humility’ came when he acknowledged his biggest mistake of the past year: his failure to adequately explain his policies to all of us. This was a State of the Union for the slow learners. His message to all of us was: ‘Let me speak slowly for you.’”

I must say that I am taken aback by Obama’s State of the Union speech. With rare exceptions, this has to be the most classless, arrogant, petulant, nasty, partisan, hypocritical, defensive, unpresidential pile of, ahem, words ever uttered in this context. When combined with the trademark aloofness and upturned chin, its arrogance is at once more pronounced and more chilling. Leaving aside the substance of proposals, there is no way that any of his four predecessors would have delivered that kind of speech. There were, as expected, the more than 100 self-reverential references to “I,” “me,” or “my.” Fine. There were the usual repeated castings of blame on the Bush administration, with only one brief and unconvincing admission of any responsibility of his own. Some of these came just about the time he was declaring that he was uninterested in relitigating the past. We’ve come to expect that kind of buck-passing, as well, and it is less and less politically effective.

But then there were the more outrageous aspects of the speech, spoken by someone who seemed quite annoyed that his wishes had not been heeded. There were the false appeals to bi-partisanship, as he vigorously attacked the previous administration and conservatives, and as he told Democrats to stay the course and follow him, while Republicans should join them or, with their Congressional minorities, present their own proposals (which, of course, they have and plan to do again soon, according to Senator Tom Coburn and Representative Paul Ryan).

Then there were the lies and deceptions about spending and the deficit, as the CBO reports make clear. The bald-faced deceptions about the administration’s so-called transparency and restrictions on lobbyists. The calls for more government spending. The tax incentives for college students to do “public interest” work, i.e., community organizing and such, rather than productive work that really provides a public service (such as providing someone a job). The deceptive tax proposals that will continue to stifle economic growth.

Then there was the unprecedented and gratuitous rhetorical drive-by attack on the Supreme Court, while six of the justices were sitting there, an attack applauded by the Democratic legislators and bureaucratic hacks sitting nearby. Obama attacked the justices over the campaign finance decision, and managed to make two misstatements in just one sentence. He was wrong about the age of the precedent (20 years, not 100) and about the foreign corporations campaign contributions (though Obama got a lot of eyebrow-raising contributions from Nigerians in 2008). Since he was touted as a constitutional law expert, he must know these accusations to be false. Ergo, he lied. Justice Alito mouthed that Obama’s statements weren’t true. Good for him. I suspect there will be far fewer, if any, Supreme Court Justices at the next SOTU speech. BTW, Obama ignored the McCain-Feingold public funding/campaign spending limits in his run for the Presidency.

His discussion of national security issues was by turns off-base (Iraq), perfunctory (domestic security), deceptive (”torture”), non-existent (KSM, interrogations), insulting (moral equivalency of U.S. and Iran re: possession of nuclear weapons), and delusional (isolation of North Korea and Iran).

His condescension at times was palpable, as when he chided himself for not having explained his programs adequately (and slowly enough) for the American people. This after an unprecedented number of televised speeches, speeches before Congress, speeches around the country, and media interviews. We’re just too dumb to get it.

The only redeeming moments were his surprising calls for nuclear energy and offshore drilling and his uplifting closing. The former was probably made under the safe assumption that Pelosi and Co. are in the back pockets of the enviros and will never accede to that. The latter is diminished by the rest of the speech.

Here is a text of the speech released by the White House.

The speech went in excess of an hour. Why do Democrats talk so much?

Via Rich Lowry at National Review Online’s “The Corner” comes this bit of Obama nostalgia from a year ago: “Obama hopes to avoid Clinton health care missteps.” Hah!

Some excellent parts that sound like parodies: “The strategy begins with giving people the chance to highlight their concerns and experiences….By asking anybody and everybody to share their health care experiences, Daschle is confronting one of the major criticisms of 15 years ago: that the effort to craft former President Bill Clinton’s plan for universal coverage was too secretive. ‘We have to make this as inclusive a process as possible,’ Daschle…said in a speech in Denver.”

“He cited other lessons, too. This time around, lawmakers cannot try to address every detail when it comes to legislation. ‘Details kill,’ Daschle said. ‘If we get too far into the weeds, if we produce a 1,500- or 1,600-page bill, we’re going to get hung up on all the details and we’re never going to get to the principles.’ [Note: They listened to Daschle; they didn’t produce a 1500-page bill; it was a 2000-page bill.] Once Congress does take up a health plan, it also can’t divert attention to other subjects, he said.”

“But the insurers want to require that people buy insurance, while Obama only supports a coverage mandate for children.”

Does it seem to anyone else that they did not follow that plan?

Meanwhile, from Nancy Pelosi: “I don’t have the votes for it at this time.”

President Obama’s speech today at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, was a pleasant surprise. There was still far too much self-reverence, judged by the number of “I”s. There was too much meandering sermonizing, and the speech was too long. And there was this unforgivable descent into megalomaniacal self-glory: “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” As well, the history of war was too simplistic and at times too close to historical fiction (the reference to the Crusades was unnecessary and distorted). There was no need for, yet again, the old Obama bad war (Iraq)/good war (Afghanistan) false dichotomy and implied criticism of his predecessor.

Still, the tone was a much needed corrective to the Nobel Peace Committee’s self-delusional decision to grant him the prize based on a nomination that had to be made when he was less than two weeks in office. I believe that the speech is entirely motivated by political self-calculation, as the President had taken much criticism and ridicule for the choice. He clearly believed, judging from the content such as the declared humility, that there had to be a figurative rebuke to the Nobel Prize committee for popular consumption by voters back home.

That said, by comparison to his prior efforts, the speech was powerful and appears to have taken aback the Euro elites that came to hear it. Little applause interrupted the speech except when he promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, albeit without a time commitment. The President generally avoided his past habit of bowing to foreigners either physically or figuratively through apologies for this or that real or imagined American failing, though he could not escape it entirely. He emphasized the need to use power, even military power, rather than “sitting down and talking without preconditions.” Better yet, he did so without the usual degree of equivocations and rhetorical bobbing and weaving that signified his preference for moral equivalence between the U.S. and various oppressive enemy regimes. There wasn’t to the same extent the mostly flat delivery and internal contradictions that characterized his Afghanistan War speech at West Point recently.

Now it remains to be seen whether the President will follow up this speech with actual resolve in dealing with other countries, both in military confrontation and diplomatic engagement. Or will it just be business as usual, which will define the speech as pure political opportunism that other countries can ignore? There is much evidence from the President’s past, his circle of advisers, and his conduct of foreign affairs and national security matters so far that gives cause for alarm. But for now, the President struck the right notes.

Some other reactions: Judith Miller of the Manhattan Institute agrees. As does Sarah Palin. Mark Steyn casts a “nay” vote.

President Obama has been plagued by falling poll numbers. This first appeared in regards to particular issues, such as national security. There, as early as last spring, his proposals regarding the closing of Guantanamo Bay, restrictions on interrogations of terrorists, investigation and prosecution of Bush officials and/or CIA agents, publication of records of interrogations, etc., were decidedly unpopular. More people sided with Dick Cheney’s views than with Obama’s. By summer, his health care proposals were taking a beating. Indeed, the more he pushed for them, the more public support declined. His handling of the economy and the looming deficits hurt him next. Support for Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is now below 40%. There are now polls showing that Republicans are trusted more on health care than Democrats. On the generic party preference ballot, Republicans are now up by 9% in one poll.

The erosion of Democratic support is also occurring on the state level, which is an important matter, as the states will reapportion their state and Congressional districts after the 2010 census. Republicans have won 33 of 50 special elections for state legislative districts since November, 2008. Three Congressional Democrats who represent Republican-majority or competitive districts (won by W in 2000 and/or 2004 and by Obama in 2008) already have announced their retirement before the 2010 election.

While his standing with the public on particular issues has cratered, people still tended to give him majority support on his overall job performance. This is due to his personal standing, as there is no way that people can disapprove of his position on issue after issue, believe that the country is on the wrong track, yet still approve of his overall job performance. Recently, however, poll after poll has begun to show his overall job approval sinking below 50% into a statistical tie between those who approve and those who don’t.

Now comes the killer. In a Public Policy Polling survey of whom they preferred to see as President, Mr. Obama or George W. Bush, Mr. Obama won. By 6%. Six percent separates the supposedly worst President ever from The One who would cause the world’s sea levels to lower and the planet to heal. And this is in a poll by a liberal, but credible polling firm. Those numbers are likely to improve for W and decline for O the longer the latter is in office. Indeed, among Whites Obama is already significantly in the negative against Bush, while Blacks and, to a lesser extent Hispanics, still strongly support Obama. There is a gender gap, in that men now prefer Bush while women support Obama. There is an age gap, with Obama being preferred by those under 45, and Bush and Obama tied among those over 45. The Northeast and the West, with its bicoastal elites in large urban centers, strongly favors Obama, while flyover country in the Midwest and South strongly supports Bush.

At the very least, this shows two things. One, nothing cures popular dissatisfaction with a President more than do the follies of his successor. Two, while Democrats will try to use the Bush card for the foreseeable future, and President Obama will continue to blame his predecessor for his own failings, this will be an increasingly feeble and, indeed, risky strategy.

On a side note, I do not agree with the 20% of respondents who want to see Obama impeached. There are no bases for such a move right now, and this would just be a distraction from dealing with the more pressing issues of defeating Obamaism politically. A move towards impeachment right now would simply give the Democrats political cover and hurt conservatives politically with the great majority of the people. Political disagreement is not ground for impeachment, and Obama’s political decisions do not evidence criminality or the degree of craven corruption that impeachment requires.

Obama’s flailing internationally and his radicalism domestically, combined with his penchant for fingerpointing and blame-shifting, have produced vigorous blow-back from Dick Cheney. Ol’ Vice has emerged as the principal defender of the Bush administration and point man in the attack on Obama’s mischaracterizations and ideological demonization of Bush’s national security policies on which Cheney had a not inconsiderable influence. Some Republicans, such as the former leader of the Log Cabin Republicans, want Cheney to assume a more prominent political role. This has led to the start of a “Draft Cheney” movement to get him to challenge Obama for the Presidency in 2012. Cheney would be the anti-Obama candidate temperamentally, politically, intellectually, and ideologically. That might be a potent combination by 2012. I’d certainly vote for Darth. But I do not see it happening, due to Cheney’s health and age and his own emphatic rejection of the idea,

Via Allahpundit at Hot Air comes definitive evidence, courtesy of the liberal Pew polling organization, that former Vice President Dick Cheney has won the debate against President Obama over enhanced interrogation. For the first time since Pew began such polling, a majority of the American public believes that torture is often or sometimes justified. Only 25% of Americans believe it is never justified, which would be those who identify themselves as liberal in other polls (21%) plus a small fraction of independents. These folks are usually called professors. Since carefully controlled and circumscribed enhanced interrogations of the type conducted by the CIA are not torture by definition or in practice, public support for those procedures likely is even higher. This distinction between waterboarding or rude interrogations and real torture is not lost on the American people (or al Qaeda), though it seems not to register with members of, especially, the legal academy.

Support for torture is up by 9% since Obama took office, most of that since he and his administration began the publicized debate with ol’ Vice. All one has to do is watch the two and hear their arguments. In matters of national security, whom would one rather see in charge, Barack Obama or Dick Cheney? For most Americans the choice is clear. It’s one thing to listen to Obama’s feel-good rhetoric when the serious adults are still in charge. It’s quite another when the Candyman is actually in charge. Obama is an inspiring head of state figure. A war chief? Not at all.

More interesting is that support for torture has risen most dramatically among Democrats (+18%) and independents (+9%). This change in attitude parallels an increased public perception that Mr. Obama is not tough enough in foreign relations. Again, most of that change is due to Democrats and Independents souring on the President. Mr. Obama’s apology tours, his softness towards Iran, and his delay in formulating an Afghanistan policy are beginning to cement an impression of the President in the mind of the public.

Perhaps the President’s deflationary polling and the perception of weakness is related to his Afghanistan policy. The timetable for withdrawal of forces announced by the President is seen overwhelmingly negatively by the American public.

As predicted, President Obama managed to disparage and blame his predecessor for the situation in Afghanistan, just as he had blamed Mr. Bush for the problems in Iraq while he was still a Senator, all while opposing the change in military strategy and tactics that defeated the al Qaeda-sponsored terrorists in that country. In his latest speech, Mr. Obama then adopted a version of the Bush policies to address the military situation in Afghanistan. But his heart was not in it. As I’ve noted before, O is not W. The latter loved and respected the military. The former does not.

The line by the television reporter at the end is priceless, talking about the tepid reception given to Mr. Obama by the Marines.

Last night, President Obama delivered further proof of his leadership style. His speech about Afghanistan was 4,582 words long. He mentioned himself 44 times. He mentioned “victory”—well, not at all. This is hardly the kind of speech that will rouse the spirit of sacrifice among the troops, inspire the American people, frighten the Taliban, or reassure the increasingly skeptical Afghanis and Pakistanis about the American commitment. I’ll have more to say later, after some more reflection. Would Bush or Cheney have given this kind of speech?

In anticipation of President Obama’s loooong-awaited decision about troops in Afghanistan, I have some thoughts. As noted before, Mr. Obama has tried to sell his delay as intellectual reflection and cautious pragmatism. It is neither. One must recall that Mr. Obama during his campaign pronounced Afghanistan the “necessary war” to contrast it for himself and his base from the “optional war” in Iraq. He pledged to pursue that war vigorously and consequentially, even threatening to expand operations into Pakistan unilaterally, if necessary, to destroy the Taliban and capture bin Laden. Any number of liberals liked to taunt the Bush administration and conservatives with the fact that bin Laden was not captured as a way to demonstrate the incompetence of the administration. When those liberals were not fretting that Bush was hiding bin Laden somewhere to spring him as an October surprise before the election of 2004. And then 2006. And then 2008.

Mr. Obama also crowed during the campaign that Afghanistan was so important that his team had been working on an Afghanistan strategy. Later, he and his media supporters confidently asserted that they were the best-prepared transition team ever and were ready to hit the ground running. Though that wasn’t the case, and only an expanded use of drones to attack suspects in Pakistan resulted, the President in March reemphasized the importance of Afghanistan and declared that, in accordance with his view that failure was not an option, a thorough strategy had been developed that would be in place shortly. Later that spring, he fired the commander in Afghanistan and placed his own choice, General Stanley McChrystal, in charge of operations there.

McChrystal was given the task of developing a new strategy, in light of supposedly suddenly changed circumstances on which no one elaborated. When the general came up with a new plan within a few weeks, he found himself unable to get the President’s attention to discuss it. Only once that state of affairs leaked out to the public did Mr. Obama find the time in late summer/early fall for some well-publicized brief encounters with his general. Now, finally, a decision has been made, one-and-a-half years after candidate Obama’s revelation about his preparations for a plan for Afghanistan, more than 10 months since the inauguration, more than eight months since Mr. Obama’s grand speech on Afghanistan in March, more than six months since General McChrystal was appointed, four months since the general completed his assessment, and nearly three months since the report was submitted.

And to do what? To build on the existing presence and increase the American commitment there by 30,000 or so troops. Not to initiate a military offensive. Now, for one thing General McChrystal requested up to 80,000 troops (and a minimum compromise strategy number of 40,000) and warned that the lower the number, the higher the likelihood of failure. Thus, 30,000 or so is below that minimum threshold. The President is apparently hoping that the allies will make up the difference, a hope that is not based on anything the allies have said and done. Indeed, all indications from the allies are just the opposite.

The greater problem here, though, is the psychological one, something that will inevitably affect the morale of American troops and the American people negatively and the Taliban and other terrorist elements around the world positively. That problem comes from the dithering that has accompanied the decision. Dress it up as he might, this no longer comes across as a careful and deliberative process. It might have done so in February, March, April.Perhaps even May and June. But not now. It reeks of indecision and of being driven purely by political calibration and stands as a stark contrast to the stubborn politics-be-damned defense of American interests by George W. Bush.

Combined with the second manifestation, the much-heralded “exit strategy,” complete with benchmarks and, soon to come, timetables, this also looks like defeatism. It is a biding of time, like someone who cannot wait to leave a gathering but will stay the shortest time possible to meet social obligations. That atmosphere of defeatism, of looking for a way out, and the perception of a war based only on domestic political calculations rather than on an existential need cannot but corrode the effort. Everything the administration has done here, both in the delayed process and in the unsatisfactory substance, underscores that. Better then to bring the troops home than to let them get bogged down in a Vietnam-style struggle for stalemate and defeat.

Turning back to the still-hot topic of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, via Hot Air come some enlightening, but entirely unsurprising updates. Liberals have been fond of saying that the government option will leave you with the same choices and not increase your cost. In fact, they’ve claimed that the government option will likely cause people’s premiums to go down, through increased competition as insurance companies cut into their “massive” 3% profits and through generous initial government subsidies. Of course, they’ve also said that they will have a sizable excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans to help keep everything “revenue-neutral.” As an aside, that’s a truly ironic name, given that Cadillac is made by G(overnment) M(otors). Since there is no indexing for inflation for that tax, it won’t be long before even Subaru plans will be considered Cadillacs.

I have always agreed with the contrary position that increased mandates to insurance companies to insure the uninsured and uninsurable combined with increased insurance company administration of medical choices determined by government directives will increase costs. Now comes word that insurance premiums will go up for the great majority of Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Moreover, taxpayers will have to pay for the subsidies to those whose premiums will decrease. Either that, or the deficit will go up. Worse for the plan, but as expected, most taxpayers will try to avoid the Cadillac tax by opting for less expensive policies. That, in turn, will lessen receipts from the excise tax on which the administration is counting to fund its program. The resulting funding gap has to be plugged by further taxes or by deficit spending. People are rational and act dynamically, whereas government planners are fixed on the concept that people are robots and act statically.

Entirely unsurprising, too, at least to conservatives, is the Washington Post’s astonished recognition that the plan will do nothing for the deficit. Even the Senate bill claims to reduce the deficit only by a rounding error in a deficit projected to reach 14% of GDP by 2035. Those numbers won’t happen of course, because they are unsustainable and the country will be bankrupt long before then. But the point remains. Obama/Reid/PelosiCare won’t “bend the cost-curve downward” and help solve the deficit. Significantly, the government’s calculations assume that the massive cuts in Medicare benefit and doctor compensation come to pass along with significant planned tax increases. In reality, those are already being modified or jettisoned. Medicare cuts promised in the past have never materialized, as Congress lacks the political will to do so. Rather, benefits have always been expanded. The House is also planning to change doctor compensation for Medicare services, but change it upward. The Senate will surely follow suit.

In a further display of their ingrained elitism on display during summer’s townhall meetings, Democrats plan to push this health care “reform” law through soon anyway, even though these government health plans are more unpopular than ever, with a 10% overall negative rating that threatens Democratic majorities in 2010. They are hoping to put this political hot potato behind them well before the 2010 election and hope for a rebound of the President’s political fortunes. That threat won’t be avoided by rushed passage of a huge bill like the nearly 2100-page Senate version or the nearly 2000-page House version, according to this analysis of the impact that the passage of high-profile pet legislation has had on the public approval ratings of prior Presidents.

I am perfectly happy to have the Democrats throw themselves onto the shoals of political ruin. But the long-term cost to the country if the government takes over a huge swath of the economy and proceeds to mandate and administer in the usual excessive command-and-control mode of liberals, is simply too high. I would rather see a failure of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare and have a weakened Democratic majority retain control of Congress than to see passage of such a law and have the Republicans take over Congress in 2010.

Columnist Mark Steyn reaches into his archives to unearth a column he wrote several years ago about one of the economic and personal costs of the socialized Canadian health care system, the cost of waiting. The time wasted waiting for medical services under such an inefficient system lowers economic productivity in the aggregate and imposes suffering and death on the ill and afflicted. These costs are never figured into the equation when liberals complain about the costs of American health care. But one of Steyn’s sources has it right. In the U.S., doctors want to provide necessary services as quickly as possible. The insurance may not want to pay for the service as readily as the doctor wants to provide it or you want it done, but, among the parties a rough efficiency and judgment of necessity of treatment are worked out. The procedure, done quickly, puts money into the doctor’s pocket quickly, as well. In a socialized system, there is no such profit motive. There is no incentive on the part of doctors to provide the service quickly and efficiently. Yet, the government (the ultimate insurance company) wants to save money, which it can do best by denying service. The rough efficiency and judgment of necessity of treatment do not materialize. And the cost of waiting, once the expectation of delay insinuates itself into all aspects of the system, manifests itself in other repulsive ways, judging by Canadian experience.

In his first State of the Union speech, President Bill Clinton outlined his domestic agenda. A part of that agenda a call for fundamental change in the health care system. That plan was later dubbed HillaryCare, as Hillary Clinton was put in charge of a task force to develop a reform proposal. One interesting aspect of the Clinton speech is how he emphasized that the economy would suffer severely if his proposals for health care “reform” were not adopted. As history has shown, the economy did not collapse from the rejection of HillaryCare. In fact, it grew tremendously, assisted no doubt by the unfolding of the computer tech revolution, the peace dividend, and fiscal discipline imposed by the partisan self-interest of the post-1994 Republican-controlled Congress. It grew despite the 1993 tax increases that temporarily stifled growth and underscored for the public the reflexive tax-and-spend orientation of the Democratic Party. The voters’ perception of the Democrats’ overreaching from the HillaryCare threat and from the middle class-targeted tax increases, combined with Newt Gingrich’s and Dick Armey’s dynamic leadership that produced the GOP “Contract With America” led to the Republican take-over of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

According to the historically very accurate Rasmussen poll, support for Obama/Reid/PelosiCare has dropped to its lowest level yet, with only 38% approving while 56% oppose the plan. Among those whose views are most intense and who therefore are likely to be the most committed voters, twice as many strongly oppose as strongly approve (43% to 21%). An interesting warning to Obama and the Democrats is that at this time in the electoral cycle before the political earthquake of the 1994 election, more people supported HillaryCare than now support the administration on health insurance/care.

Another warning from Rasmussen concerns Obama’s own job approval rating, which has dropped to its lowest number in the poll, 45%. Again significant is the strong approval/strong disapproval rating, which has a significant difference between those most likely to vote, with a 27%/42% split. Among independents, only 16% strongly approve, while 51% strongly disapprove. The generic party preference poll also continues to favor the Republicans, considerably more so than it did before the Republican mid-term election success in 1994.

The President has done a trifecta, bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia, the Emperor of Japan, and, now, the head of Communist China. There’s something special about authority figures that makes our leader swoon.

During his trip to China, Obama was pressured on the American deficits and the decline of the American dollar. Very specifically, he was quizzed about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare and its cost. Obviously, the Chinese are not too impressed by the bogus figures the administration has put out there to make it seem as if a government take-over of health insurance/care will actually lessen the deficit. When the tea party attendees questioned the government’s numbers and protested the plan, they were branded racist. Are the Chinese racist, too?

Once upon a time, a Senator lauded military trials as designed under American law as giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a fair trial “with all the bells and whistles.” That Senator was Barack Obama, now attempting to distance himself from the removal of KSM to the ordinary federal court. The video of Senator Obama’s comments demonstrates again that the current civilian trial strategy is a solution in search of a problem. Relevant segment at about 1:30.

The national debt reached $11 trillion about eight months ago. It has just reached $12 trillion. Given the projected deficit over this fiscal year, it is possible that the deficit will reach $14 trillion within a year. Under Obama’s spending plans, it is expected to reach $24.5 trillion by the end of the coming decade, more than the annual GDP. That puts the country in failed economy league. And, of course, this does not include government spending from Obama/PelosiCare.

I’m not sure deficits actually will be that high. The projections are based on projections from current expenditures. But some of those, like the Iraq war spending, are likely to decrease, as are various “stimulus” payments. Still, the danger is that Obama’s proposed programs are going to be permanent federal commitments and, therefore, contribute structurally to the deficit. Annual $800 billion deficits, far more than anything George W. Bush had in even one year, are simply unsustainable.

One tactic that appears superficially to be a solution. Let all the Bush tax cuts expire. Some commentators already perceive the administration to be floating trial balloons of this type for a $3 trillion tax hike over ten years. I have been wondering about this for some time. But I think that the timing would be politically risky for Obama. The tax cuts expire at the end of 2010, which would precipitate considerable discussion about the matter shortly before the midterm elections. The Democrats could vote a one-year extension to put the matter over until 2011, but that still would not avoid the acrimony in 2010 entirely. It would also threaten Obama’s 2012 campaign. More likely, the matter would be extended through 2013, although they might be permitted to expire on schedule as to certain higher-income earners. After that, all bets are off, and everyone will be hit hard of the cuts expire, especially if they are not phased in.

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats are also looking to impose a huge European-style value-added tax that is hidden in the price of goods. That will make goods much more expensive for Americans even as their wallets are emptied by other higher taxes. Moreover, tax collections never meet government projections, because people change their economic behavior in response to changes in tax laws. Taxes on income and on capital formation (e.g., through taxes on dividends and capital gains) reduce job formation, thereby depressing GDP growth. Economic growth is the only way to provide effectively for tax revenues because rates can be kept low while still producing significant amounts.

Another alternative, actually to reduce government spending, seems not to be on the table.

My prediction: A weak currency, weak job growth, and high taxes. A lost decade or more of growth, with stagflation eroding people’s living standards and depressing American initiative and creativity.

Odd tales from the Porkulus. Apparently, the government has published numbers of “jobs saved or created” by the stimulus—in New Hampshire Congressional districts that do not exist. Stranger still, the same thing happened to the tune of $750,000 in a fictional Arizona Congressional district. When the administration spins about the millions of jobs saved or created by the Porkulus, they may be counting those jobs in non-existent jurisdictions. In real jurisdictions, the jobs tend to be measured by the thousands and, if one excludes public sector jobs such as teachers, the numbers are measured in the single digits.

As expected, liberals are jumping in to defend President Obama’s goofy bow to Japan’s Emperor Akihito. The defense, predictably, is “cultural sensitivity.” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air dismantles that excuse in light of the tradition, unbroken for more than two centuries of American leaders not bowing to foreign leaders. Moreover, as I pointed out yesterday, bowing to other heads of state definitely is not a tradition of international relations. Morrissey embeds this video by the University of Connecticut’s College Republicans that juxtaposes Mr. Obama’s greeting with that of many other dignitaries.

Morrissey also points out that, when President Clinton in 1994 almost bowed to Akihito, the New York Times lambasted him for almost doing something “unthinkable” and looking “obsequent.” So far, the Timeshas kept its counsel about Obama, who is after all, more than “Bubba” Clinton, one of their own class. If Obama does it, one certainly must not chide him on etiquette.

The President raised lots of eyebrows earlier this year when he bowed deeply and unexpectedly to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G20 London economic gathering before kissing his hand. I wrote about the matter at the time. While the legacy media generally ignored the spectacle, conservatives had some fun at the President’s expense. Now come photos and videotape of Mr. Obama bowing deeply to the Emperor of Japan.

The gesture was so stark that even the Los Angeles Times, well, at least its blog, courtesy of Andrew Malcolm, took notice. Obama bending himself in half might be seen as just meeting the custom of the place where he is or the person whom he is greeting. George W. Bush, after all, was photographed walking with King Abdullah at the Texas ranch holding the monarch’s hand. That elicited lots of comments and mirth among journalists.

But any comparison between the two based on custom only redounds to Mr. Obama’s disadvantage. While the sight of two leaders walking hand-in-hand may seem odd to modern American eyes, much as the French bi-cheeky air kiss, or the Russian hug-and-smooch do, in many parts of the world, and in the West in the past, this is seen as a sign of a relationship of friendship and equality. Bowing deeply, on the other hand, and kissing another leader’s hand is everywhere an expression of deference. Indeed, in regards to Japanese custom, the deeper the bow, the greater the submission. Obama’s bow so reeked of an inferior’s homage to his superior, it is what used to be called “bowing and scraping.”

The Emperor did not reciprocate the bow. Neither did King Abdullah in the earlier scenario. As the pictures show, when Dick Cheney met the Emperor of Japan, he shook the latter’s hand. No bowing for Darth Cheney. It may be that this is yet another faux-pas by an inexperienced and unqualified naif, as many conservatives saw Obama during the campaign. Perhaps, especially when this happens more than once, it has a more sinister meaning for the U.S. Foreign leaders of whatever stripe pay attention to these matters of etiquette. To them, such expressions of submission are of a kind with Obama’s World Apology Tour 2009 and project an air of weakness and docility that may, no, will cause the U.S. much trouble in the future to correct. At the very least, these signals can cause the kind of miscalculation that lets a foe take a bellicose position that draws the U.S. into unwanted confrontation. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait is said to have been such a misstep based on miscues from words to the dictator by President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador in Iraq.

Given the White House’s current occupant’s penchant for gestures of supplication to foreign leaders, especially ones not popularly elected, one wonders what to expect from him when he meets the Chinese leadership. After all, their importance in helping Obama finance his record deficits far outweighs that of either King Abdullah or Emperor Akihito.

* Mark Steyn’s phrase

While the President managed an increasingly criticized “shout-out” and some rambling remarks about a conference held by an ethnic identity group before delivering himself of a rather bloodless and detached brief statement about the Fort Hood attack by the would-be suicide shooter, former President Bush and his wife went to the base to meet with soldiers and their families. And he did it in secret and unannounced, a trip not known until FOX News broke the story the next day. Oh, Mr. Obama will appear later this coming week at a major press-saturated ceremony.

Lest some say that this was an aberration, or that Bush was able to do this in secret because he is now just a private citizen whose movements no one follows, there are a few responses. For one, the press is able to cover the former President’s movements just fine when he goes to make a speech or two in Canada. More important, Mr. Bush is just continuing what he and former Vice President Dick Cheney did with thousands of troops while they were in office, secretly and without fanfare visiting with them and/or their families or writing personal letters.

The majority of American voters who elected Mr. Obama fancied his detached cool, yet one more aspect of the voters’ tendency to elect the opposite of the outgoing incumbent. They got what they wanted, and then some. The telepromptered Mr. Obama can speak the words, but he has yet to master the tune. With his emotional tonedeafness, I doubt that he ever will. He is no Ronald Reagan. Nor is he a Bill Clinton. Or, obviously, a George W. Bush.

An allegory of government health care, put in a quick tale that most Americans can understand.

HT: Matthew Cohen

Karl Rove has put together a summary of the Republican proposals for health care/insurance reform. While this is long on platitudes and short on specifics (which have been presented by various Republican Congressmen), it does set forth several good ideas. I have my doubts about some of them (the proposal to allow employers, or anyone else, to promote employees’ healthy lifestyles is particularly suspicious). Overall, though, to the extent they actually are substantive, these proposals are sound. They rely on private markets and more individual choice, rather than on the notoriously incompetent public servants, to make medical decisions.

Over the past several weeks there has been a lot of back-and-forth over the Obama administration’s attacks on FOX News. There has been much speculation about the reasons for the actions by the President and his advisers. One must look at this on several levels to gain a proper appreciation for this puzzling behavior.

Most obvious, and clearly significant, is the distaste, if not outright enmity that Obama and his minions have for FOX News. Unlike the purring and obsequious “journalists” at CNN, NBC, and MSNBC, FOX actually challenges the administration’s claims. Those claims often are risible and violate fundamental perceptions of common sense, but the non-FOX media willingly suspend the disbelief they so profusely lavished on every word George W. Bush uttered. On the other hand, while FOX fact-checks Obama’s health care claims, CNN does fact-check an SNL skit that is a mild parody of Obama’s lack of accomplishments.

That, what is it called? Oh yes, journalism. That journalism is foreign to the President’s experience of receiving, with few mild exceptions, adulation and uncritical acceptance. And to matters foreign to one’s experience, one is likely to react with suspicion.

The President’s campaign seems quixotic, in that FOX News not only has a huge following among Democrats and Independents, as well as among Republicans, and is actually gaining readership and sympathy from this contest. The President is seen as unsympathetic towards free speech and as a vindictive whiner.

Another partial explanation is that Obama simply has certain personal shortcomings. He is a small man, psychologically, one who, despite his carefully-staged public persona, is not comfortable in his own skin. He is the opposite of George W. Bush, who, in that regard, always gave off a “don’t give a damn” vibe through that smirk that drove liberals crazy. Obama shows all the characteristics of someone with an inferiority complex and a fear that, at any moment, someone is going to draw back the curtain and discover the charade. It is the uncertainty about his lack of accomplishments and qualification for the Presidency that lurks within him.

The upwards-tilted gaze and projecting jaw that Obama likes to present, the messianic speeches and images, the snide attacks on critics when the mask slips, the bullying attacks on Americans who oppose his policies while figuratively prostrating himself before America’s enemies abroad who push back, his attacks on Rush Limbaugh, his minions’ proposals to curtail free speech through the “fairness doctrine,” “hate speech” laws, “diversity mandates,” and threats of criminal action during the 2008 campaign, all present someone who is not comfortable with notions of dissent. His followers often are similarly afflicted, as the frequent references by Democratic polticians and administration spokesmen and supporters to the protests by “tea party” attendees and the questions from town hall participants as “unpatriotic” and “un-American” vividly illustrate. Dissent suddenly is no longer the highest form of patriotism, but an attack on Obama and, thereby, on the U.S. itself. One recalls in vain George W. Bush attacking or seeking to marginalize the media and liberal commentators who savaged him for eight years. Obama has far more profoundly legitimized undermining of constitutionally-protected free speech rights of dissenters than anything that Bush can be accused of with any conceivable basis in fact.

Why is Obama pursuing what appears to be a rather stupid tactic? Part of the explanation lies in his vanity. He is accustomed to surrounding himself with political acolytes. In his earlier elected positions, no one criticized him, as he operated within thoroughly liberal environments. Those that opposed him, such as other primary or general election candidates had a habit of suddenly withdrawing from races as pressure was brought through revived old news, suddenly leaked “sealed” records, and such. It was the election equivalent of turning up floating lifelessly in the Hudson, or Chicago, River. Obama had a remarkable run of lucky political coincidences at critical junctures.

With FOX challenging his exaggerations, attacks on political opponents, prevarications, and ideology, he strikes back. Rather than ignoring these people that dare to oppose him, he is only too eager to put them in their place. Even if he is “lowering” himself to the level of mere scribblers.

But that isn’t the only explanation. After all, FOX only benefits from the controversy by having its ratings go up. Moreover, Obama is insulting the many viewers of FOX when it insults the network. Those viewers know that FOX in fact does provide the most balanced of news among all networks. That’s why almost a third of FOX’s viewers are Democrats.

But Obama really doesn’t care about FOX ratings or the FOX viewers. He is trying to do three things. First, he is trying to influence other media outlets by preemptively deligitimizing stories picked up by FOX, such as the Van Jones exposure. Tarring FOX as being a mere opinion or entertainment network will, he hopes, make other reporters less willing to go quickly with stories that originate there and that are embarrassing to the administration.

Second, he is trying to give other media outlets cover for their fawning coverage of him. After all, if FOX is critical of him and can be made to appear to be unfair, this allows the other networks to shill for him and dismiss any criticism by others by claiming that they are providing the true “news” aspect of the story.

Third, he is hoping to use such attacks on FOX and on conservative commentators to distract the public’s (and FOX’s) attention from some political topic. It’s a classic feint to change the subject when the topic gets embarrassing. The media (including FOX) quickly take the bait and run after this new topic that is more superficial but also captures the public’s attention more than yet another dry exchange over health care.

Fourth, he is trying to distract his political base. He has not delivered significantly on the substantive programs that his supporters think he promised them during the campaign. Judging from Kos and other Leftie bloggers and media types, there is mounting frustration with the lack of progress in achieving the earthly utopia of secular progressivism. By feeding them the story of the alleged sinister misdeeds of FOX, he can play into the Left’s prejudices, as well as lead them off the scent of his lack of substantive accomplishments regarding the environment, health care, the economy, taxes, Guantanamo, the war in Afghanistan, and so forth.

Even if this latest effort at demonizing his opponents peters out, one can look for similar such tactics to reappear. That would hold true, even if the President wins some successes in promoting his domestic agenda. They are simply too good a fit for the President’s political style and personal character traits to be jettisoned.

President Obama has insisted that a “public option” merely provides some more choice for consumers of health insurance. Conservative critics allege (and I certainly agree) that the option is a Trojan Horse intended to drive private health insurance (except perhaps some boutique policies) out of the market and bring about a single payer system. Candidate Obama in his early incarnations certainly supported such an outcome.

This post at Verum Serum documents some of the deceptions of Democratic politicians and liberal journalists and other supporters of the public option as a strategy to reach the objective of single payer. Here’s the video, where the mask slips and the truth comes out.

Robert Samuelson, writing in The Washington Post, succinctly lays out the fallacies of the “public option.” From affordability to cost control to improved quality of care to competition and choice, the government option as sold by the politicians is a mirage. Many Americans have the common sense to understand that government cannot repeal the laws of economics and create something out of nothing. But the politicians hope that a fantasy repeated often enough will convince a sufficient number of people who believe in bumper sticker policy to get the public option through Congress.

A point not mentioned by Samuelson is the fiction of the “state opt-out” that is being touted as a way for states to avoid the public option if their voters don’t want it. The problem, as my students know from studying Congress’s use of the spending power to “persuade” states to comply with federal policies, is that political reality cannot conform to theory. Under the plan, the residents of the United States will be taxed to pay for the government plan’s costs. Those costs, as Samuelson demonstrates, will inevitably rise through a number of predictable developments (such as the withering away of private plans and increased number of participants in the government plan). Whatever private plans remain will provide more limited coverage and will become more expensive as the pool of participants drops. It will become politically untenable for a state to have its citizens pay taxes for a plan that will offer lower, taxpayer-subsidized costs to people in other states, yet make such an option unavailable locally.

A real state choice plan would be to have no national public option, but allow the states to develop their own. The increasingly desperate financial state of RomneyCare in Massachusetts and the problems with the limited child-oriented LingleCare in Hawaii would put brakes on any careless state forays into government-funded health care for the general population.

President Obama’s supporters bristle at the characterization of their man as a socialist by his detractors. But those remarks do not come from nothing. There has been a strong undercurrent about the evils of capitalism in the administration’s demonizing of the health insurance industry. From the President down, therehas been a constant drumbeat about the allegedly obscene and undeserved profits of health insurance companies. When Nancy Pelosi attacks these companies’ profits as obscene and immoral, one assumes she knows of which she speaks, given her history of questionable steering of government funds and projects to family and friends. I have seen many defenders of socialized health insurance/care attack the profits of insurance companies the elimination of which, they say, will allow the government to provide better care to more people at a lower price. Of course, the hostility to the concept of profit among these people presumably does not extend to their own livelihoods, including the profit they make from the sale of their labor at a cost higher than what is necessary to sustain them at a minimal level of physical survival.

Leave aside that most Americans by far who are covered by private insurance plans are participants in non-profit entities such as Kaiser Permanente and (in most states) Blue Cross-Blue Shield. As this article explains, the health insurance industry’s profits are comparatively anemic compared to other enterprises, a number of which, such as the railroads, are heavily subsidized. Though at times somewhat higher, recent profits have been about 2%, with the highest at 5%. Somehow I doubt that these facts will get in the way of a good hate campaign. But there should be no doubt then that these arguments are driven by an ideology and by a view of profits and of private initiative and enterprise that is, well, socialist.

Every political alignment has its more ideologically extreme members. They, presumably, consider themselves ideologically principled. On the Right, they often rap themselves in the Constitution and the Flag. Fair enough. These folks serve a purpose because often they push the debate on policy and give a voice to issues that turns out later to be prescient. But too often they come across as strident and even demented. This effort to launch a movement to impeach President Obama is one of those moonbattery moments among the Right.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air thoroughly explains the political and constitutional foolishness of such an effort at this time. I fully agree with the message of his posting. Obama’s actions so far do not meet the constitutional understanding of “high crimes and misdemeanors” under even the most generous reading. Democrats will not launch impeachment proceedings even if the evidence of qualifying wrongdoing by Obama were orders of magnitude clearer. If anything, the Congressional leadership considers Obama insufficiently committed to the radical cause. For the Republican minority to press such an issue would not only be fruitless, it would be politically suicidal. It would allow the Democrats to shift attention from their disastrous policies onto comparisons of personality. And, whatever their political skills, House Minority Leader Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell cannot match the President’s propaganda machine or his on-camera telepromptered charisma.

The American public punished the Republicans politically for the dubious impeachment efforts directed at President Clinton. Those Republicans at least had perjury and obstruction of justice as predicate offenses by the President. Any attempt to replicate such efforts against Obama would tar the Republicans and invite a political backlash that the GOP cannot afford. It would waste an increasingly promising opportunity to expose the Democrats on their substantive radicalism to slow them down in 2010 and beyond. The American people are not forgiving of contrived impeachment efforts or other tactics that are unnecessarily divisive and alter political issues into legal or quasi-legal ones.

That is one reason why I have not been unduly concerned about efforts by the extreme Left, as represented among a number of the faculty at my school, to prosecute Bush-era officials. The Democrats would pay dearly politically for such a course, and I do not see Obama pursuing it unless he felt supremely confident of his political position. Given his eroding approval ratings, that is unlikely. Or, Obama feels driven into a political corner with nothing to lose. He is nowhere near that, given the difficult struggle for his ambitious and radical domestic agenda.

I, along with Ed Morrissey, am also sick and tired of the Nazi-comparisons coming from both sides. This is done far less often by the Right than by the Left (during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and now against anyone who dares to express disapproval of Obama policies at town hall meetings). But when the Right does it, it is equally despicable and over-the-top, unless there is a direct and relevant factual comparison. Here, there is not.

There are plenty of troubling policy initiatives that threaten disastrous economic and social consequences, but neither Obama nor the Democrats are carting peaceful American dissenters off to camps any more than Bush and Cheney were doing through the Patriot Act. There are plenty of personality cult stirrings in the administration and its supporters. It is perfectly legitimate to point out the similarities of both the President and his supporters in this regard to the natural dynamic between the totalitarian leader in history and his followers. But it is not legitimate to call him Hitler until he, well, starts to act like Hitler in his policies.

I disagree with Morrissey’s column on one minor point. He accepts that a reading of Federalist 65 (though not the Constitution’s text) supports the claim that impeachment can be done for political reasons. Not exactly. Hamilton agreed that impeachment was not simply a criminal process. Hence, someone could be tried in the courts for conduct that led to his impeachment, without violating double jeopardy or due process. But to assert that the process was, at some level, “quasi-political,” not “legal,” does not validate the use of the procedure for purely political differences.

Hamilton is clear about that distinction between process and substance. The process could only be used for misconduct that, even if it did not amount to criminal bahavior, showed unfitness for office by undermining the constitutional order. English practice that, in the 17th century, had allowed impeachment for purely political differences during the Long Parliament of Charles I, by the latter part of the 17th century already required more solid, non-political cause. Early American state constitutional practice that had flirted with the purely political model of impeachment, had moved to the language and custom reflected in the U.S. Constitution, as well. Hamilton recognized those roots, affirmatively citing the English precedent. Impeachments, therefore, are never pursued on the formal grounds of even severe political differences, though such political squabbles may fuel the decision to pursue impeachment for conduct that otherwise would be ignored.

I have not written about my fellow constitutional law professor Doug Kmiec in a while. Professor Kmiec, teaching at Pepperdine University Law School, was a staunch Catholic Republican pro-lifer who served in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration. During the most recent election, after supporting the doomed primary candidacy of Mitt Romney, he parlayed his distaste for the more openly pro-life John McCain into an increasingly full-throated support of—Barack Obama. Not only did Professor Kmiec support Obama, he came to view the latter as the true pro-life candidate and one of the most pro-life Presidents ever.

The tenor of Kmiec’s increasingly militant pieces on the topic caused much derision among his former political associates and ideological fellows, about which I have posted before. Academics, such as Princeton philosophy professor Robert George lined up to dismantle Kmiec’s philosophic arguments. Members of the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy began to question Kmiec’s religious assertions. Columnists have dismissed Kmiec’s political rationalizations. I met Doug Kmiec a few years ago and was quite impressed by his philosophic rigor about the application of natural law thinking to current issues of rights. I barely recognized the new Doug Kmiec. 

As the Obama administration faced questions about its domestic policies, Kmiec vigorously defended it. When Notre Dame was criticized for extending an invitation to the President to speak at the graduation ceremony and to receive an honorary degree, Kmiec was right there to defend the university and to laud the President in a gush of fawning verbiage. When Justice Souter retired and even before Sonia Sotomayor was nominated, Kmiec immediately (and unconvincingly to me) jumped on the Obama ”empathy” bandwagon.

Kmiec even reversed himself clumsily on the D.C. v. Heller decision. In 2007, he had supported an amicus curiae (”friend of the court”) brief in support of the constitutional argument for an individual right to bear arms for self-defense and against the D.C. ban on private possession of handguns. In 2008, the Supreme Court had adopted the position that brief advanced. In 2009, Kmiec criticized that same ruling as unconstitutionally ignoring the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment. He also opposes extension of that right to protect against state and local gun possession bans like the one in Chicago that is currently on review before the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago. Apparently, that natural law/natural rights approach that Professor Kmiec so favors in his constitutional law casebook does not apply to the right of self-defense that is crucial to protection of the right to life. Once more, he abandons his former straightforward pro-life position for one to match the nuances, not to mention bald-faced contradictions, on the topic coming from his idol in the White House.

That flip-flop was in accord with Kmiec’s reversal of his position on California’s Proposition 8, the pro-opposite sex marriage vote, something he also was for, before he was against it. In what has become drearily predictable, Kmiec has also reversed himself on the jurisprudential issue of constitutional interpretation. He now ridicules the “conservative” position that courts should interpret constitutional clauses in light of the original understanding of the language when it was adopted. This is in sharp contrast to his long-held and published previous views, voiced as recently as two years ago, when he was still working for the Romney campaign, about the essential nature of original understanding constitutional interpretation. His embrace of the jurisprudence of original understanding has disappeared along with his philosophic attachment to natural law.

Many have wondered what is producing this conversion. While not happening with the speed of Paul’s epiphany, it is nevertheless producing an equally complete Road-to-Damascus reversal of deeply-held beliefs, albeit in the opposite direction. I have previously speculated that Kmiec was angling for a federal judgeship. Others thought it was an ambassadorship to the Vatican. But the Vatican apparently let it be known behind the scenes that Kmiec was too blatant in his dubious assertions of the pro-life qualities of the President and unconvincing in his protestations of his own continuing pro-life stance. His increasingly accommodating views about abortion that essentially measured compromise as surrender to the pro-abortion rights side were unacceptable to the Vatican. Of course, the reality of Kmiec’s new-found acceptance of common ground mimicked that of the President himself, the most radically pro-abortion President ever and someone whose position on partial-birth abortion and whose hostility towards protecting babies born alive after abortion was more radical than even Senator Boxer’s.

So the question remained exactly what Kmiec was after. Now we know. It is indeed an ambassadorship. To Malta. For that, one surrenders life-long positions that, presumably, were deeply held and carefully thought-through philosophic and religious tenets? I am again reminded of something I have posted before, a remark from Sir Thomas More (”A Man For All Seasons”) to Richard Rich, the snivelling opportunist who acts as the King’s tool to bring down More in return for becoming Attorney General of Wales: “For Wales? Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…But for Wales!”

For Malta, Doug? For Malta?

David Kahane styles the life story of one Barack Hussein Obama as a proposed comedy getting the plot development treatment in a fictional Hollywood setting. Who’d believe it, right?

Another Krauthammer masterpiece. His speech begins about 6 minutes in with some jokes. The main part begins about 8 minutes in. For those who don’t know anything about Krauthammer, he is paralyzed as a result of a diving accident his first year of medical school. Krauthammer is a noted psychiatrist who has published some important papers in the field. On a less professionally lofty level, but playing off his training, he coined the concept BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) to characterize liberals’ visceral dislike of anything connected with George W. Bush. Liberals since then have tried to appropriate the “derangement syndrome” concept for their own use.

This is the transcript of the speech. The speech is a classic, and there is no justice that I can do to it by quoting passages. The whole thing has to be read and studied. That said, I cannot resist a couple of quotes to give a taste of a wonderful repast. Describing the difference between the center-left liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration and the left-liberalism of the Obama administration, Krauthammer observes:

“For what might be called the New Liberalism, the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power–the old Clintonian view–but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.
“For the New Liberalism, it is not just that power corrupts. It is that America itself is corrupt–in the sense of being deeply flawed, and with the history to prove it. An imperfect union, the theme of Obama’s famous Philadelphia race speech, has been carried to and amplified in his every major foreign-policy address, particularly those delivered on foreign soil. (Not surprisingly, since it earns greater applause over there.)”

America as deeply flawed is a theme that is taught over and over in our schools. I see it in the multiculti relativism and the transnationalism embedded in our law school faculty and in the burning desire to see those, such as Bush administration officials who sought to protect Americans from terrorist attacks after 9/11, punished here or abroad. It is a poison that flows through our elite institutions and ultimately threatens our political existence.

And there are other poisons that come from the administration’s left-liberalism. The signs are everywhere and obvious to all who will look. The effects are beginning to be felt and will be felt more and more, as the wind Obama has sown will be reaped as a whirlwind of national decline. Obama’s focus on the need for a moral rebirth of the United States before it can tell other nations what to do leads him to apology tours and other harebrained schemes that will backfire on the U.S., politically at best, militarily at worst. They do nothing to help the U.S. and seem designed more to sate Obama’s hunger to be recognized as a transformative figure, the secular messiah of his acolytes’ imaginations and the media’s hagiographic portrayals.

Peter Wehner agrees that Krauthammer hits the nail on the head in this speech and reads it as distilling the reason that Mr. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize:

“In his address, Krauthammer says,

as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional — exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

“That, in two sentences, explains why Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Now the Nobel Committee couldn’t quite come out and say that directly; it decided to couch the award in this language, taken from the citation: ‘[Obama’s] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.’
“There you have it: Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America — and it’s not flattering. That much of the world — composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity — isn’t happy with the United States is not news. What is news is that an American president would validate many of those charges. I find that deeply disquieting. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not surprisingly, considers it worthy of its highest honor.”

James Capretta at National Review Online describes the “Baucus death spiral” that happens to insurance plans when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. The way out was the mandate that young, healthy people join the insurance pool or pay a hefty excise tax. But, as Capretta points out, that mandate is politically unpalatable so it has been reduced and delayed, but without a way for the insurance companies to avoid the increased costs. The industry is trying to get the mandate back in, which Capretta calls the wrong approach. I agree in that an approach that removes impediments to market forces and consumer choice is the far better and more sustainable solution.

But the real problem is not economic. Most understand the questions and the answers. The real hang-up is political. As Capretta notes, Democrats “are desperate to enact something they can call ‘universal coverage’ without any coherent plan to slow the pace of rising costs. In that context, a new entitlement for subsidized insurance is exceedingly expensive, which is why the sponsors try to hide some of the costs behind mandates, hidden taxes, compulsion, and insurance regulation. However, as they are now finding out, there’s no free lunch here. Someone has to pay for it all. It’s just a question of who and how much.”

Capretta links to this blog post on the Baucus bill, by an expert in health insurance/health care issues. He declares that the Baucus bill would explode the health insurance market. He gives some examples how families would be affected by the new premium structure and why they would avoid paying for health insurance until they became sick.

Many people understand about the fundamental folly of the whole government health insurance/health care debacle, the problem of lack of sufficient information and the inefficiency in evaluating information and making decisions that is the ruin of central planning. The British National Health Service is the world’s third-largest employer, after the Chinese People’s Army and the Indian National Railways. And they make decisions for a population less than 20% that of the U.S. “Successful” programs in the Scandinavian countries or in the Netherlands (actually, the Dutch are trying to privatize their system more) are in countries with a small fraction of the population of the U.S. What could go wrong?

From Slate, of all places, an insightful evaluation of why the political and economic realities dictate that the costs for ObamaCare proposals such as the one in Senator Baucus’s bill inevitably will exceed those advertised.

There has been speculation that President Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize is only a prelude to future such awards to him. The current award has been characterized by the head of the prize committee as an encouragement to the President to continue to move the U.S. in a direction of subjecting American action to restraint by transnational organizations and foreign regimes. The President himself has often stressed the need for the U.S. to change the (imagined) unilateralism of the Bush administration. He has paid obeisance to the United Nations’ “importance,” made the need to talk to the U.S.’s enemies without preconditions (from the American side only) a prime foreign policy plank, and embarked on major tours to apologize unilaterally for various sins of the United States. His pronouncements pander to the most baseless grievances of thuggish regimes that gives those regimes legitimacy to suppress domestic dissent and violate human rights with impunity, while demoralizing movements towards democracy and liberty that traditionally could have counted on American support. He supports a program of weakened national defense and strengthened domestic social collectivism. The Obama administration’s path reminds me of a dream I had.

From Tehran, President-for-life Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad congratulates President Obama for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. The American president received the prize for his contribution to world peace through the executive agreement that he made with Ahmadi-Nejad to remove American troops from Afghanistan and Iraq in 2011 and to recognize Iranian suzerainty over the Persian Gulf region, and for his willingness to talk with Iran without preconditions for the 18 months that it took for Iran to complete construction of its first six atomic bombs. Ahmadi-Nejad notes his gratitude to Obama for these steps, without which it would not have been possible for Iran successfully to invade the Arabian peninsula and Jordan and to develop a direct land connection to its allies Hamas and Lebanese Hizb’Ullah.

From Pyongyang, North Korea, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il congratulates President Obama for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace by withdrawing American armed forces from South Korea, the Philippines, and the rest of the Western Pacific as part of his massive reductions of American armed forces to help pay for the far-greater than publicized costs of the new American health care public-only option modeled after the Cuban system. Bringing the troops home on the model of what the President did in Iraq and Afghanistan, as so many of Obama’s left-wing supporters demanded, allowed North Korea to launch an attack on South Korea using the nuclear-tipped missiles it had been developing while dragging out long-running talks demanded by the American Left and by the North Koreans. While the South Korean military resisted valiantly, the North Koreans, supplied and reinforced by the Chinese who were glad to find a solution to the internal economic weakness of the North Korean system that had threatened to destabilize it and send refugees into China, eventually overwhelmed the defenders.

From Kabul, Afghanistan, Russian President-for-life Vladimir Putin and his Afghani counterpart, Mullah Omar, congratulate President Obama for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. As a result of Obama’s decision in 2009 to scrap the American agreement with Poland to place a defensive missile shield there, and of the treaty in 2010 to eliminate 2200 nuclear warheads from the U.S. and Russian arsenals (leaving the U.S. with none and Russia with 600), Russia was able to reestablish the boundaries of the old Warsaw Pact. With Obama’s de facto unilateral nuclear disarmament of the U.S., the formerly free nations of Eastern Europe chose to obtain the best bargain they could from the increasingly assertive Russians. The Russian economy was in a near-meltdown when Putin introduced rigorously capitalist measures in 2011, even as the U.S. was heading down a strongly socialist path against which Putin warned Obama. Those reforms, combined with a massive capital inflow due to the replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency after the disastrous inflation and subsequent economic depression caused by the Obama administration’s massive deficits and takeovers of large portions of the American economy, have revitalized the Russian economy. Putin is in Kabul to commemorate the Pact’s latest victory, conquering the Caucasus nations of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and to sign a friendship treaty with the Taliban government of Afghanistan and their allies, the Taliban government of Pakistan. It is peace in our time, as the Russians even put the Czech Republic and Slovakia back together with Obama’s help and an armored division of Soviet Russian troops sent to Prague. With NATO now disbanded after its humiliating 2011 defeat in Afghanistan, once the Biden program of minimizing the American presence there and relying of Special Forces raids proved to be the massive failure that former Generals McChrystal and Petraeus had predicted, the European Union has declared a Finnish-model neutrality of cooperation with Russia and proclaimed itself a demilitarized region. Putin is also pleased that Obama has rejected the overtures of a suddenly-concerned China for a military alliance against the Russians. He has publicly thanked Obama for “correcting another American mistake” by returning Alaska to Russia for the $6 million that the U.S. paid for that purchase in 1867. Of course, after the inflation of 2010-12, that sum is now worth only 6,000 Bush-era dollars.

From Ramallah, the leadership of Hamas congratulates President Obama for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace through the decision to sever ties with Israel and to vote for a complete U.N. embargo against the small nation enforced by U.S. warships. That made it possible for a joint Iranian-Syrian-Egyptian-Hamas-Hizb’Ullah invasion to destroy Israel, after Iran used its nuclear stockpile, four of which found their targets. True, Iran lost a dozen cities in the Israeli desperation counterattack, but, as the Iranians pointed out before, they could afford to lose millions of people and still win a war with Israel. Moreover, with the demise of the Zionist entity, the Middle East peace envisioned by the administration and its electoral base has been attained, though it is a peace of the grave.

From Caracas, the capital of the new Bolivarian Federation, President-for-life Hugo Chavez congratulates President Obama for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Chavez, whose Bolivarian Federation includes Central America below Mexico, the northern portion of South America (including the former countries of Colombia, Peru, and Equador), various Caribbean domains such as Cuba, and the former U.S. state of Florida, acknowledges Mr. Obama’s contribution to his successful war of liberation. It was Obama who agreed to remove U.S. forces and military protection from those countries, which allowed Chavez to use his newly-acquired Russian military equipment and the assistance of Russian military forces on bases in the former Venezuela to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist democracies in many of those countries and to advance his vision of socialism. Once he used one of his Iranian nuclear weapons to bomb the Colombian capital, Bogota, Chavez’s threats to nuke other cities made his task much easier. Not to be outdone by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Chavez has awarded Obama the Simon Bolivar Medal for Obama’s contribution to the advance of socialism and for Obama’s agreement, after duly apologizing for American aggression, to return Florida to control by Spanish-speakers from whom the area was “stolen” almost two centuries ago. Obama’s new Secretary of the Treasury, Michael Moore, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, George Soros, accept the award on President Obama’s behalf.

From Sacramento, Nuevo California, Mexican President (and former drug cartel boss) Miguel Duran congratulates President Obama for the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace for the treaty made by him and approved by the Senate elected in 2016. The treaty was made after Mr. Obama suspended parts of the Constitution in 2016 to allow him to run for as many terms as he wants and after opposition parties were declared “enemies of hope and change” and were prohibited. The treaty returns to Mexico all land acquired by the United States through the annexation of Texas, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War, and the Gadsden Purchase.

From Brussels, the president of the newly-restructured demilitarized European Union congratulates President Barack Obama for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for Mr. Obama’s continuing efforts to reduce the influence of the U.S. in world affairs. The latest effort towards that end is the treaty with the EU that returns to France the territory acquired by the U.S. as a result of Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 treaty with Napoleon Bonaparte and called the Louisiana Purchase. Under this recent treaty, all American inhabitants not of Cajun or American-Indian ancestry (proper blood-lines to be shown to a “Race and Ethnicity Commission” established under UN auspices) are to be removed from that area within five years.

From London, the president of the newly-established Islamic Republic of Londonistan congratulates President Barack Obama for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Obama received the prize for his contribution to world peace for the treaty he made with the Islamic Republic to return all lands gained by the United States as a result of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that ended the American war for independence from then-Great Britain. The new treaty stipulates that the territory within 250 miles of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the city of Chicago shall remain under U.S. control until the death of President Obama. At that point all shall revert to the Islamic Republic of Londonistan. All people of non-American Indian descent shall be repatriated to their continents of origin within twenty years after the return of the land. There will be an exception made for a twenty square-mile area around the site of the Jamestown, Virginia, settlement and the town of Williamsburg, Virginia, and another four square-mile site in the District Columbia, both of which shall be preserved as sites to commemorate the entity that was once the United States of America. The sites will serve as a warning to those who would seek to establish a society formed on outdated notions that individuals are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and that governments are established only to secure these rights.

I then woke up, bathed in sweat, relieved that it was only a nightmare. I turned on the news. The President had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Michael Lewis, writing in Commentary, discusses the Art of Obama Worship. He addresses how current artists are disregarding the prior American norm of separating art from politics. That reflected a healthy separation of the private intellectual domain from the corrosive influence of politics. Using art for political indoctrination and for, by turns, idolizing the ruling clique and demonizing its opponents, is an attribute of totalitarian systems. To the extent that American art was politicized, beginning in the 1960s, it took a skeptical, indeed cynical, position against American institutions. Art was not just politically progressive. Itoften revelled in its transgressiveness, as anti-Christian and anti-Republican (especially that featuring George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld) art showed. Artists prided themselves on “speaking truth to power.” Even when their “speech” had the reasoned content and controlled delivery of a Tourette’s sufferer:

“This is not to say that 9/11 did not call forth a volcano of moral rage among artists—only that this rage found no outlet until 2003, when it came to be directed at George W. Bush. Among all the scatological, puerile, and corrosive caricatures of Bush that began to be shown at that time, one looks in vain for even one corresponding image of Osama bin Laden or Mohamed Atta. For example, In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman’s intensely personal graphic memoir of the 9/11 attacks, contains not a single depiction of bin Laden, while we are treated to scurrilous images of President Bush toppling the Statue of Liberty and a gleeful Dick Cheney slitting the throat of the American eagle on whose back he is riding.”

This sometimes self-consciously hostile art was a worrisome shift towards a mutual interaction between art and politics, especially as government funding of art expanded, a funding that began with the New Deal art that at times seemed to be a less virulent form of “socialist realism.” But, at least for a generation, this oppositional art (while clearly selective and ideologically biased in its targets) still maintained a semblance of opposition to the status quo. All of that has changed with the ascension of Barack Obama (and his political support for Artists Corps, a new federal program to support artists). And, unlike the sometimes hagiographic art that grew around other Presidents (Washington, Lincoln), Obama worship, like the Nobel Peace Prize, has erupted before the man has done anything of sufficient consequence to merit the worship. Much of that art, as I have written before, smacks of religious-type adulation:

“In one three-month period, 787 Obama paintings were auctioned on eBay, showing the new president in every possible pose, and a few impossible ones: standing commandingly before the White House, cradling a basketball and wearing a Washington Wizards uniform, gamely wrestling a bear on Wall Street, even flying naked on the back of a unicorn.
What is striking about these paintings is not their quality, about which the less said the better, but their consistent tone. They belong to that class of objects known as ‘devotional art.’ Such objects are not only intended as votive offerings, to serve as the focus of veneration; the actual process of making them is itself an act of piety, a consideration that all but places them outside the realm of aesthetic judgment.”

A leader in the Obama worship genre of current art is Shepard Fairey, the artist with the irresistibly effete name, whose Hope (and other captioned) graphic poster presentation of Obama adorns in miniaturized form many an automobile. The poster has become so paradigmatic that enterprising conservatives have made their own version. I have the “Nope” version, preferring it to the less respectful one that shows the Obama profile with the caption “Dope.” Fairey more than the others inadvertently has exposed the flackery and the lack of legitimacy of American artists when they claim to be cutting-edge critics. The true dissenters among the highly conformist artist class have been conservatives, that is, those who would expose the above-mentioned flackery and the ideological conformity and rigidity of the “arts community,” a term used loosely, as one must to include the low-brow art of these political propagandists. Such a term would also extend to the large class of musicians, singers, and actors, and accurately describe their ideological herd mentality.

If Richard Cohen of The Washington Post is not careful, he will get banned from the reading list of the typical liberal Post customer. Especially when Sarah Palin agrees with his analysis. Writing perceptive and balanced columns about the choices facing the administration in Afghanistan won’t get subscriptions renewed. But Cohen is correct in all parts of this analysis. His impression of the President:

“This is the president we now have: He inspires lots of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs, where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama.”

Indeed. Cohen might have added that Obama is flunking the awe test in the shock-and-awe sense that matters in foreign affairs. In Afghanistan, the worst that the President can do is to split the difference on General McChrystal’s troop request. Cohen understands the stakes of keeping the Taliban out of power, the connection between al Qaeda and the Taliban, between the success of those two groups and the stability of Pakistan, and the connection between a stable Pakistan and peace on the Indian subcontinent and points closer to home. Those were points that the President himself made a few weeks ago, as well as during his campaign when he repeatedly pronounced Afghanistan as the good war that he made his own once he was inaugurated. The President’s more recent waffling and outwardly coy pseudo-noncommittal are not good signs. Is this another Obama promise that has reached its expiration date? Cohen correctly dismisses automatic comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. True enough, but Vietnam was not predestined, either. And Afghanistan can easily be turned into Vietnam by political paralysis and military half-measures.

As I wrote last week, and as so many others have opined, the President was remiss in going to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics. Making such a high-profile appeal made the exercise highly political and forced opponents and supporters of both the President and of bringing the games to Chicago to approach this as having more at stake than would have been the case had the President not broken new ground here. No previous American president has taken such a personal approach, though this is not unheard of from the heads of lesser countries. In normal diplomatic matters, the President does not meet his foreign counterpart until the lower-level contacts have produced an agreement that the heads of state merely ratify. That’s why Obama’s campaign promise to sit down without preconditions to talk with the axis of anti-American tyrants raised so many eyebrows and signaled to all the candidate’s naivete or hubris.

Chicago’s bid might have failed, regardless of the President’s efforts. But by going all in, Obama insured that the Olympic Committee’s rebuff rubs off on him, as the writers at The New York Times recognize, to their credit. I do not believe that Obama helped or hurt the city’s efforts. These matters are not decided by having the Obamas appear, Oprah Winfrey in tow, to make a rather emotional and predictably self-centered appeal (on that last point, listen to the George Will snippet in a link, below). But that is precisely why this was such a fool’s errand. The office of the President has been diminished by his having paid attention to matters not suited to the position. He himself has been diminished by the snub to Chicago of losing big in the first round, a result that appears to have taken them by surprise.

At the very least, Obama’s and the administration’s overconfidence before the vote shows political incompetence of the sort that led him to make projections about the economy and his ability to implement policies that have fallen far short of his promises. At worst, it shows an arrogance about his abilities to show up and, through emotional speeches, change the course of nature, as well as human nature. He and David Axelrod may have thought that the Byzantine politics and Olympian corruption of the IOC would be manageable given their background in Cook County politics, but Obama’s excessive self-regard in that matter reminds one of the campaign speeches in which he messianically presented himself to the world as the one during whose reign the world would finally begin to heal itself and the oceans begin to subside. One next expected him to promise a new covenant between himself and the world.

After an initial burst of honest disappointment at their failure, Obama’s acolytes in the media have quickly begun to spin the story in multiple new directions. All done to avoid the personal political cost that comes from such an overt injection of personal politics into the process. Had Chicago been awarded the games, as many in the administration apparently believed, Obama and his supporters would have trumpeted his personal powers of persuasion as the single most important factor. In a strange turn-about, success would have had one father; now, failure has many potential fathers, all but The One. Among the weirdest assertions has been that the Copenhagen fiasco must be blamed on George W. Bush, because hostility to him is still causing other countries to shun the U.S. This smear conveniently forgets, of course, that Chicago was chosen as a finalist when the despised Bush was still President. As a link within the above link shows, at least some of the IOC members were put off by what they saw as Obama’s arrogance, though that also seems to be due to an affliction of an oversized ego from which these Olympicrats suffer.

Another tactic among Obama defenders is to accuse the Republicans as being, what else, un-American and unpatriotic for being glad that Obama failed. As if the point here is to be glad that he failed, rather than that he was warned against foolishly meddling in the matter. The media and other Obama defenders choose to forget that these were the same criticisms that Obama and his campaign made against John McCain last fall when McCain suspended his campaign to return to Washington to participate in the TARP debate.And that was a considerably more deserving matter than the Olympic Games of having Obama (who stayed away from the Senate yet again) participate directly. One might almost think that the financial benefit to Axelrod’s firm and to other Obama contributors and supporters was motivating the White House’s futile full-court press in favor of the Chicago bid.

If Obama cannot succeed on such a comparatively minor matter when he puts the presidency’s prestige on the line, will this tell him something about the likely reception he is going to get in Tehran or Pyongyang? Contrary to Obama’s sports analogy, any do-overs you get are going to be much more difficult. International diplomacy is a game of perceptions, and one perceives that the perceptive foreign perceiver’s perceptions of American diplomatic prowess are not going to be enhanced.

You know that a liberal politician is in serious political trouble when the folks at Saturday Night Live lampoon him rather mercilessly. That is something normally reserved for Republicans. Criticism of the entertainment industry’s favorite liberal is usually muted, at least until a more favorite liberal comes along. See, the treatment of Hillary until Obama appeared. But this skit takes direct aim at the administration’s lack of accomplishments. Again, George W. Bush did not have any greater accomplishments as of, say, September 10, 2001, than does Obama at a similar point of his presidency. But Bush had a much more modest view of the President’s role in constitutional government and of the government in people’s lives than does the incumbent. Bush also did not come into office with the same fanfares of change and the boundless belief that he could just remake the United States, no, the world, by his ascension, as has been the relentless message of Obama and his supporters. 

Is this a role for the federal government? Regulating texting while driving? I have no problem with the states regulating texting while driving, but the division of the American polity into dual sovereignties of the several states and the Union in the Constitution contemplates a different role for the federal government than micromanaging driving habits. Deal with international matters, issues of war and peace, interstate squabbles, and national problems that, due to their extent and complexity, are beyond the ability of the states to control.

Moreover, if this is such an important matter that it demands federal control, why is this done by executive order? This goes well beyond internal White House office control, mere procedural clarification of some matter entrusted to the President by Congressional delegation, or an operational aspect of some core executive power, such as battlefield conduct by American soldiers.

It is certainly within the President’s formal power to do this under currently accepted constitutional law that only requires that the letter of the Constitution be followed in meeting the formalities of federal power. Chief Justice Marshall in 1819 in the foundational case McCulloch v. Maryland declared that the Court would strike down attempted exercise of power by the federal government that, while it might meet the letter of the Constitution, violated its spirit of federalism. In a later newspaper editorial defending that decision, Marshall strenuously rejected the arrogation of power by the federal government through pretextual use of the proper constitutional formalities. But Marshall’s concern about the improper use of federal power has long since given way to an acceptance of pretext and clever manipulation to increase the federal government’s reach into people’s daily lives. The President, the Congress, and the Court all participate in this charade.

I find the application of this restriction to private persons who do business with the feds particularly instructive:

“Extending this policy to cover Federal contractors is designed to promote economy and efficiency in Federal procurement. Federal contractors and contractor employees who refrain from the unsafe practice of text messaging while driving in connection with Government business are less likely to experience disruptions to their operations that would adversely impact Federal procurement.”

While the actual order merely tells the federal agencies to “encourage” such private behavior, the precise means of encouragement are left unsaid and up to the bureaucratic mindset of the relevant paper-shufflers. Hardly an encouraging sign. Is there anyone who doubts that a similarly controlling and nannying approach will be used against private citizens in their personal lives, once government controls health care? It is in the very essence of the President himself and in his coterie of ideological fellow travelers. It grips them with such force they simply cannot help themselves.

One of the concerns of an actor is overexposure. You don’t want to be seen so frequently in so many roles that the brand becomes tarnished. That goes even more for the President who, in addition to being a politician, is also the head of state. Frequent public appearances, press conferences, grand formal speeches, televised productions, along with a deluge of discussions on more minor broadcast venues are fine during a political campaign. But once the campaigning stops and you assume the office, different rules apply. As the head of state you have to be seen as above politics to a significant degree. The number and style of your public appearances must change. Otherwise you risk being seen as nothing more than the ordinary politician, and you will be judged accordingly.

The styles of President George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama are quite different. Bush left himself open to the criticism from the Right that he was not active enough. When he defended his programs vigorously, both his and those programs’ public popularity rose. Bush was seen by many as too willing to stay above the fray rather than hit back, convinced as he was of the ultimate wisdom of his cause.

Obama has the opposite tendency. Conservatives have contended that Obama is overexposed and is cheapening his brand. One cannot deny, though, that they probably have secretly cheered Obama on. Polls have shown that, since late spring, the more Obama talks about policy and the more actively he campaigns, the less popular the policies—and Obama—have become. ObamaCare is the prime piece of evidence.

Obama’s constant presence in the public eye and his grand spectaculars are at best losing him audience and, more likely, causing him to become a diminished figure as people resent his hectoring. He is like the guy who follows you everywhere to comment how you should be doing things differently. Worse, he begins to reinforce in the minds of many those cult-of-personality traits that have dogged him, his supporters, and his administration since the campaign (remember the singing kids, the fainting women, and the theatricality of “Greek columns” in the stadium for his acceptance speech).

Obama holds a speech to a joint session of Congress for health care. Though not unprecedented, that is not a venue normally chosen for a presidential address unless it’s the State of the Union address or a war message. Worse, he says nothing that he hasn’t said in a couple of prime-time press television addresses (another means of communication that he has overused in his few months in office), some televised press conferences, and various televised “townhall meetings.” Worse, still, his speeches are long on generalities, imprecise on the truth of the claims, and short on specific explanations. They look and sound, in other words, like campaign speeches, repeated again and again.

Then, Obama makes a speech before the UN. That is to be expected in his first year in office. However, he also chairs a meeting of the Security Council (televised, of course), a task usually left to some diplomatic underling. No U.S. President has ever done that, and I wonder if any other of the leaders of the Big Five has. Then he hosts the G20 (formerly the more realistic G8, but increased so that US influence decreases), which, again, is fine. But from there he flies to Copenhagen to get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago. I don’t know that any U.S. President has involved himself in that effort before. Add to that his world tours in just his first few months, and one gets the impression that he likes the campaigning for the office, the public adulation, and the perks of the office much more than the work and that needs to be done. After only a couple of weeks in office, he already complained how he had to get out of the White House, so he visited a school.

Now, one might think that this is just another criticism of the President coming from a blogger who is unsympathetic to Obama’s program. I must confess, however, that I am warming to Obama’s constant lecturing and alarm-mongering, though, admittedly, for selfish reasons. Initially, he got traction for his programs. But the more he talks now, the less his words matter. Given the time, he has exposed himself for what he is.

But it isn’t just conservatives who recognize this. It is broken clock time. There are now liberals who are concerned that Obama is wasting the prestige of the office, and that his amateurishness and infatuation with himself are harming U.S. interests. More precisely, Richard Cohen, frequently of The New York Times, castigates the President for his electioneering and empty posturing:

“The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.
“Take last week’s G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. There, the candidate-in-full commandeered the television networks and the leaders of Britain and France to give the Iranians a dramatic warning. Yet another of their secret nuclear facilities had been revealed and Obama, as anyone could see, was determined to do something about it — just don’t ask what.
“The entire episode had a faux Cuban missile crisis quality to it.”

It gets worse, as Cohen correctly judges Obama to be losing credibility:

“The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a ‘war of necessity’ — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.
“Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health care legislation — ‘Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town … ’ — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.
“Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran….”
“Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama’s the president. Time he understood that.”

I couldn’t have said that better myself, even as to the (for Cohen non-parodic) reference to Obama as a Supreme Leader.

UPDATE: When it rains, it pours. Another liberal, none other than Representative Charlie Rangel, fresh from amending his income tax returns, has weighed in with his assessment that Obama’s meddling in local matters is not presidential. By the way, is Rangel racist, too, when he criticizes the President?

Expect government regulation of diet to become more insistent if ObamaCare passes. After all, we already see this with motorcycle helmet laws and other paternalistic laws premised on the notion that we can regulate these people because we pay for the medical care for some of them. It is already starting, but taxes of “junk food” and subsidies of Sesame Street-endorsed fruits and veggies (preferably that wonderful fresh arugula and those organic strawberries) will not change habits enough to suit the emerging diet police. Moreover, such taxes are extremely regressive because poorer people are more likely to consume the food targeted as junk food. Unless they propose to raise taxes sky-high, these New Puritans (to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, a puritan is someone who has the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy) will have to resort to more direct regulation. After all, as the Secretary of Energy has declared, Americans are like unruly teenagers who have to be disciplined and guided by the government. And as Bill Clinton declared in his opposition to tax cuts when he was President, Americans would just spend that money unwisely. Ahh, yes, the tolerant liberal mindset that the “masses are asses” (a sentiment expressed to me many years ago by a very well-educated liberal woman I was dating) and need the helping hand of the government to avoid the folly of their stupidity and ignorance as to even the most basic decisions in life.

Mark Steyn is a journalist. Canadian by birth, he now lives in New Hampshire. On his website, he has allowed his readers to tell of their experiences or about news reports of others’ experiences with the storied Canadian health care system. The collection of reader responses tells a different story about the Canadian system than what the Left in the U.S. will tell you. And its so predictable: Lack of beds; lack of doctors; lack of care. The most interesting ones were the links to newspaper articles about Canadian and European health care rationing (the preemie who was two days too young to save, per NHS regulations; the Irish guy who was dying but couldn’t get a liver transplant because he hadn’t been 6 month alcohol-free) and lack of beds and doctors, but there are also others that describe Medicare appeals panels judging the medical necessity of procedures.

Meanwhile, the administration resorts to scare tactics as to what happens if ObamaCare in some version is not adopted. One of the often-heard points is the supposed plight of the millions of uninsured. Another likely to be launched soon comes from a convenient study that “finds” that 45,000 Americans die annually from lack of health insurance, and that a person without health insurance has a 40% higher chance of death than someone with health insurance. (So, private health insurance has been a good thing, then?) I have already seen a Reuters piece that trumpets the study’s result. But a junk science expert has taken apart the study’s methodology and debunked the results. It’s unlikely we will hear that. The Congressional Budget Office which, though it tends to lean Democratic in its analyses, is becoming the administration’s worst enemy regarding Obama’s economic projections and fiscal policies, comes up with a quite different analysis. They project that low income people without insurance have a 3% higher risk of death than insured people (reasons not clear), while higher income uninsured have no statistically different risk of death.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air explains one of the misrepresentations by President Obama in his health insurance proposals, the impact of the large number of self-insured employers who use insurance companies only to administer their plans. Some employers partially self-insure for minor expenses, though they may buy a catastrophic-type policy from insurance companies. I believe that’s what my employer does. Participation by employers increases the competitive nature of health insurance/care coverage, as the link to John Lott demonstrates.

Most employees don’t realize this aspect of their health care. Morrissey is right that ObamaCare would only make the whole process even more opaque. The way to restore transparency and to maximize competition is to promote policies that make the payment for medical services akin to that for automobile services and to increase the direct contact (and bargaining) between customers and, on the other sides, doctors and insurance companies.

An entertaining summary, complete with pictures, of the D.C. rally this weekend by opponents of the administration’s programs, especially ObamaCare. Those would be the types of folks dismissed by mindless reporters, columnists, (Maureen Dowd, I’m writing about you) and other media types in sweeping terms as racists for opposing the President’s policies.

Apparently, some on the Left believe that this is a winner and have poured $1 million into the campaign of the guy who is challenging Joe Wilson. First, that shows how obsessed liberals are with their messiah. They put lots of money into the collection box when The One is disrespected. Unfortunately, once this news got out, conservatives responded with an equal outpouring to Wilson. The liberals are just wasting their money. As I’ve written before, the Joe Wilson controversy is not a political winner for Democrats. Wilson beat that same challenger in 2008 by 54%-46%, in a year when Republicans had a disastrous showing. It is highly unlikely that 2010 will be similarly bad for the GOP. Though it is still a long time until election day, current trends suggest a rather serious drubbing in the works for Democrats. Wilson’s district has gone Republican in each election in the last 44 years. So knock yourselves out and waste your money.

Moreover, every rehashing of the situation brings up once again the, shall we say, incongruity of the health care plan’s treatment of illegal aliens and of Obama’s handling of that matter. It again stirs up the seething opposition to ObamaCare. It brings up Obama’s own characterization of Palin. It causes people to rehash the many whoppers and distortions Obama came up with in the speech. These things are not helping the Democrats, but are hurting their credibility. Joe Wilson is becoming a new popular hero to a lot of people, as a catalyst for the popular opposition to the administration’s blatant statism. He is this year’s “Joe the Plumber.” So, as far as I am concerned, the Democrats should keep this front and center.

Historians have often pointed to American protectionism in the 1930s, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, and European trade retaliation as exacerbating the economic downturn that became the Great Depression. Economists have been warning some time now that the U.S. should reject any similar moves, as they likely would trigger trade retaliation that would threaten economic recovery. There has been considerable concern that President Obama would resort to protectionist actions, as he and his advisers had often expressed hostility to free trade while he was a Senator and during the presidential campaign.

However, he also let it be known, to the Canadians, for example, that he did not really mean his protectionist rhetoric and, instead, was a closet free trader. Once elected President, the Europeans and the Chinese warned Obama against protectionist actions. Obama kept a low profile and stayed away from protectionist moves, except to the extent that driving down the dollar and making American exports cheaper overseas might be seen as economic warfare. No more. The President has slapped duties on cheap Chinese tires.

The result of this will be several-fold. First, these tires (which are preferred by lower-income buyers) will cost consumers more. American sellers purchase these tires for resale. Domestic manufacturers opposed the duties, as they cannot manufacture such tires profitably due to higher labor costs. Moreover, American manufacturers are not equipped to pick up the slack, even if they wanted to, because of the different processes involved. That’s why those domestic producers purchased those tires from China and rebranded them.

The real supporters of this action were the manufacturers of other goods who want the President to impose similar tariffs to protect their industries and, of course, the United Steelworkers Union, whose bidding Obama is doing. Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government is a combination sure to bode ill for the American consumer. This protectionism, extended to other industries, too, will raise prices and throttle competition, as was shown by the experience of the American car industry when they received protection from competition from Japanese car makers years ago. American cars were of poor quality and comparatively expensive, a reputation from which the car industry still has not fully recovered.

Then there is the inevitable Chinese retaliation against American producers. Predictably, the Chinese launched investigations into charges of “dumping” by the U.S. of chicken and automobile products. If the Chinese penalize those American products, it would roughly equal the amount the Americans are imposing on Chinese tires. Purely by coincidence, I’m sure. Predictably also, the Obama administration is loudly proclaiming the unfairness of the Chinese protectionism, while confidently defending their own. Agricultural producers had asked the administration not to apply the tariffs because they feared the likely Chinese reaction against such important American exports.

There is real danger from such protectionist tit-for-tat. A trade war would be very harmful to economic recovery, especially as the U.S. needs exports (which were a true jobs stimulus over the past year) to fuel employment. However, most experts believe that, after this initial spitting contest, China and the U.S. will work to keep the trade friction within manageable bounds.

I had to shake my head over this one. An acquaintance of mine and former colleague, whom I respect as an intellectual type with great insight and analytical talent, wrote about his negative reaction to the anti-Obama marchers in D.C. Granted, he is a standard-issue academic liberal and reflexive supporter of Obama and his domestic policies. So it is predictable that he would oppose the protests. Fair enough. One would predict that he did not oppose the anti-Bush protests between 2001 and 2008, or the protests by leftist groups at the political conventions last year. Or any other left-leaning protest or rally. Again, fair enough; he doesn’t have to be ideologically unbiased in his approach to political rallies. I’m not, either.

But what struck me, apart from some odd historical references, was the, well, patent lack of seriousness of his criticism. It boiled down to mocking the anti-government message of the protesters because those protesters travelled on federal highways on buses certified by federal safety inspectors or in cars subject to federal safety regulations. Moreover, one of the protesters quoted in the New York Times was a teacher, perhaps in a government school (possible, but based on my experience with the politics of government school teachers, the odds are against that). Even more scandalous judging by my acquaintance’s tone, they make use (at some time presumably) of fire departments and police departments. Well, at least they live their lives confident that, if necessary, they can call on the assistance of such government departments. Or something like that. And the sarcastic tone he used to describe the protesters’ goals belie any claim that he was writing with bemusement at the irony of the protesters’ opposition to government take-over of health care.

Many of those protesters probably would oppose the substantial intrusion by government in some of the same matters that he described. As to others, even libertarians believe in a proper, albeit quite limited, role for government. But, as always, the difficulty is one of line-drawing. Just because I buy groceries with the assistance of the produce manager at the local Von’s doesn’t mean I agree to have him sleep at my house whenever he wants. It seems to me that the administration’s policies of huge government take-overs of private businesses, the nationalization of banking, economically ruinous fiscal and monetary policies, and the relentless entry of government into more and more personal matters, capped by an attempt to seize health care (with the inevitable intrusion of government into matters of diet, beverages, exercise, medications, and leisure activities) are more significant invasions of personal liberty and threats to human thriving than is setting up a police department or building a road. Or, at least, perfectly reasonable people might suppose so.

But, let us engage my acquaintance on his turf. Most of Obamanomics simply amounts to transfers from productive individuals to the rent-seeking political classes (I believe the term among some for the latter is “drones”) and to the shiftless permanent underclasses created by decades of dependence-inducing dysfunctional government welfare policies based on moralizing leftism that suddenly has no problem with laws that intrude on personal autonomy. If the operative principle is simply that opposition to such “soft totalitarianism,” particularly as it affects highly personal matters, is illegitimate because of the existence of other government intrusions, or indeed because of the very existence of government, then opposition to any government program is similarly illegitimate. Certainly the intrusion into the privacy of a relatively few from government wiretapping to detect terrorist conspiracies is far less prominent and far less promiscuous than government intrusion into the health care decisions of many.

But I suspect that liberals won’t take the same devil-may-care approach to such national security protections just because government already taxes them for the support of an army from which they benefit. Indeed, if my acquaintance is right as a matter of principle, no matter how outrageous and oppressive the government’s action, you cannot complain. Government abolishes private property, prohibits dissent, takes your first-born? You cannot complain because you use a government-maintained road to get a Slurpee at the local 7-11. Something tells me, though, that liberals would sing a different tune if government ever restricted how or with what or whom someone could have sex because you live in a house built through a government permit process. But the worst for liberals would be government restriction of their most sacrosanct liberty of all, abortion, justified because the deed is done by a doctor who got a degree under a government licensing process and the woman used a car to get to his office.

Those who wrote in support of my acquaintance’s ruminations were, well, let’s just say “naive.” One of them uses the old tried-and-true liberal appeal of last resort, to accuse everyone who opposes Obama’s policies of racism. Talk about bigoted generalities. I don’t see the protesters playing the race card over and over and over as do liberals. But it’s to be expected from the self-proclaimed and inaptly-named “reality-based” community. Can’t respond on the merits? Use the old ad hominem, even one that is suffering from overuse and losing its potency.

The other supporter who wrote in was even more “naive.” She claims that private insurance companies, not the government, have more interest in cutting health care costs and hastening death. Leave aside the facts about government rationing that Obama has admitted in the past, and leave aside her own apparent concession that government doesn’t care about costs and thereby dooms government health care to exactly the same kind of fiscal lunacy to which every other government program is prone. She then proclaims that people do not elect insurance companies and therefore cannot rid themselves of private insurance companies the way they can vote out politicians.

No, I am not making this up. This person has not the slightest clue about economics or politics. Unfortunately, I have heard this type of comment before, even from a supposedly educated law professor on another occasion. She obviously has not the slightest notion of the essential difference between voluntary private organizations and the involuntary nature of the political state. She doesn’t realize that, if you don’t like the insurance company, you are not bound to it, in theory or in practice. The state is another matter. To paraphrase Trotsky on war, “you may not be interested in government, but government is interested in you.”

Moreover, you can always pay for the medical procedure yourself. You cannot nearly as readily withdraw from the state. Again, let’s leave aside that health care decisions will be made by faceless and unelected bureaucrats. The DMV comes to mind. Or, to use Obama’s example, the Post Office with its monopoly on certain services. The problem is more fundamental. Given the nature of collective decision-making in a democracy, the hopeless gerrymandering of political districts, and the judicial interference in democratic decision-making, political responsiveness to social discontent is far more inflexible and difficult to obtain than is change in one’s relationship to private business. The notion that you as an individual can readily rid yourself of a government imposed health care system is ludicrous. And the “option” claim for government insurance has been shown to displace private insurance and result in anything but a mere option.

I really had hoped for better arguments.

Once again, I find myself ahead of the public policy curve. I resolved long ago to stop voting in favor of increased subsidies for the government schools. I already pay significant taxes to support them, and I have witnessed the incompetency, bureaucratic intransigence, and inefficiency. That’s before I get into the curricular substance of some of the social “science” indoctrination. That said, I would be happy to have more reward go to the very excellent and dedicated teachers among the herd, who instruct in classes that actually teach something worthwhile. If there were an effective voucher system in place that forced academic competition on these schools; if the damaging political power of the teachers’ unions were broken; and if the schools were released from some of the layers of social engineering mandates that are piled on by the state and federal governments, I would be much more inclined to support the resulting institution. The one potential glimmer is the increased use of charter schools and the gradual reliance by the government schools on more private models. The U.S. pays more for education per pupil than just about every country in the world (I believe Switzerland is the exception), but delivers less. Funny how I hear no Obama talk about ridding us of this costly, inefficient, and unpopular system when we pay more and get less than other Western countries.

The public is similarly disenchanted. But little will get done as long as there is this quasi-monopolistic union-bureaucracy tandem looking out for its interest instead of that of parents and children. Another problem is that many parents recall this or that friendly teacher and maybe even the occasional dedicated and skilled pedagogue, with the result that they believe that their children’s teachers and schools are fine, but that everyone else’s are bad. Then they don’t want to push for actual change that they hear those teachers as claiming might negatively affect their schools. The votes on vouchers are such examples. Instead, they just complain about the schools generally in public opinion surveys such as this one.

From City Journal comes this explanation of the costs of that marvelous “free” French health care that is consuming ever larger portions of the French budget and the French GDP, now to the point that it is becoming politically unsustainable as well as economically chronically debilitating. There is a reason why even Europe’s “wealthy” countries have the standard of living of Mississippi, and it has nothing to do with the problems that plague Mississippi. The point here isn’t that American health care is free. To the individual they may cost roughly the same in direct taxes. But it is in indirect or less visible taxes, that the French pay more. The higher unemployment rate that is a drag on overall productivity is another social and economic cost. Finally, the more systems rely on government mandates and control (ours included) the less choice there is. So there is more choice if you pay your doctor directly or if there were a more competitive insurance industry with interstate competition and fewer government mandates on coverage; less choice (due to cost and benefit structure) if you have an insurance PPO plan; less choice than that if you have an HMO plan; less choice than that (due to doctor scarcity and cost structure) if you have Medicare; less choice than that if you use the VA; less choice for more people at higher cost if you get ObamaCare.

HT: Misunderstood Finance Blogspot

If you wonder why Democrats and their media wing are still going into full defensive mode every time Sarah Palin speaks, writes, emails, or uses Facebook, you only need to look at the ObamaCare debate. While other Republican politicos have ranged from worthless to slightly better than worthless (Senator Jim DeMint excepted—he’s been good), Palin has been fighting back. From the “death panels” remark (after which the bill’s provisions were rewritten to meet her objections) to her analyses of ObamaCare and her attacks and responses to the Obama administration’s feints and falsehoods, she has taken a leading role in rallying popular opposition. Hence, Obama believed it necessary in his latest ObamaCare speech to refer to her, albeit without mentioning her name, as allegedly peddling lies.

It has become known that the administration was peeved about this op-ed piece by Palin in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, in which she challenged rather the whole of Obama’s proposals. She attacked the costs, rationing, and government restrictions on choice inherent in the plan. She backed the free-market, pro-competition proposal by Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, a blueprint for reform that I also generally like:

“As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care. ”

Obama managed to turn the line about vouchers into another scare tactic in his speech tonight, in an attempt to bamboozle people into supporting his plan. That was right after he denounced the alleged use of scare tactics by opponents.

Then there is this Facebook posting, in which she (correctly) points out that the White House’s attempts to distract from their problems by attacking her Medicare voucher proposal do not refute her other pro-market proposals. Moreover, she wonderfully taunts the ObaMedia: “One last thing: after President Obama’s speech tonight, listen for which pundits use the words ‘false’, ’scary’, and ‘risky’ in describing the proposals I put forward. That’s how you’ll be able to tell who the White House counted as ‘allies’ worthy of receiving its talking points.”

Then there is this rebuttal to the President’s speech, in which she correctly summarizes the plan as being the usual penchant for Democrats to turn over everything to the government. Moreover, she skewers the President’s double-talk and hypocrisy. Three excerpts:

“And it’s hard to listen to the President lecture us not to use “scare tactics” when in the next breath he says that ‘more will die’ if his proposals do not pass.”

“In his speech the President directly responded to concerns I’ve raised about unelected bureaucrats being given power to make decisions affecting life or death health care matters. He called these concerns ‘bogus,’ ‘irresponsible,’ and ‘a lie’ — so much for civility.”

“In fact, after promising to ‘make sure that no government bureaucrat …. gets between you and the health care you need,’ the President repeated his call for an Independent Medicare Advisory Council — an unelected, largely unaccountable group of bureaucrats charged with containing Medicare costs. He did not disavow his own statement that such a group, working outside of ‘normal political channels,’ should guide decisions regarding that ‘huge driver of cost … the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives….’ He did not disavow the statements of his health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, and continuing to pay his salary with taxpayer dollars proves a commitment to his beliefs. The President can keep making unsupported assertions, but until he directly responds to the arguments I’ve made, I’m going to call him out too.”

Go get ‘im, Sarah.

President Obama prepares for yet another campaign appearance speech, this time before an audience whose members have difficulty controlling themselves, have short attention spans, don’t do their reading homework, and have no sense of the value of money. Congress, in other words. The President, whose failure to appear before the television cameras for what must be at least thirty hours, is expected to be accompanied by his faithful teleprompter in an effort to rouse the Congress from its torpor and the public away from its pesky insistence that radically transforming the government and economy is not a path trod lightly. Or, better, not trod at all.

Holman Jenkins of The Wall Street Journal has a copy of a speech that the President should give, were he honest about the health insurance/care policies. It is a clever satire that one can appreciate for both its honesty and its humor:

“To the American people I promise tonight, whatever compromises lay ahead, whatever the arduous negotiations, Democrats and Republicans will work together to continue to drive the current system off a cliff. (Applause from Democrats in the audience; Nancy Pelosi beams.)

“Even if we cannot enact my administration’s ‘public option,’ we will extend the great work of previous generations, making sure private health care continues to be unaffordable to more and more Americans, and piling up fresh mandates on employers so fewer and fewer of our citizens will have either jobs or health insurance.”

Andrew Malcolm of Top of the Ticket blog at the L.A. Times gives good advice to the President and the Republicans, providing handy ten-step lists to make sure the speech is a success or, if you’re a Republican, that it’s not. Malcolm has the substance down exactly right:

“As a real good talker, the president’s MO has been to leave the legislative details to the Hill, be perfectly clear about the need for a government option but hedge about its necessity and drive home instead why America can no longer go down this or that road because bad things are sure to happen if we don’t change to his course, which he hasn’t really spelled out but we should trust that, although unknown, it would be better than the other bad things he says are surely en route.”

Powerful article about the British dental care system. And this is the supposedly new, improved version. What is noteworthy is not just the personal tragedy that comes from a basic policy of delay treatment, then pull the teeth. It is the manner in which the system is organized. All the problems of government care are there: Low compensation. People in unnecessary pain (a cost that is not measured by the defenders of government care). Loss of worktime (another cost that is not measured by the defenders of government care). Shortage of available government dentists, which exacerbates waiting time. So the government increases compensation (which still looks ridiculously low), but it does so by micromanaging procedures in a way that actually further distorts the delivery of services. The structure of compensation is typical bureaucratic regulation that has nothing to do with reality and causes dentists to try to make money by avoiding both the needed preventive care and the complex reconstructive remedy. Result? Pull teeth, make more money. Patients even have to contribute to the costs of this dentistry.

I suppose that, at some point, there’ll be no more teeth to pull, but, then, that’s probably past the retirement age for both the bureaucrats and the dentists. The fiascos the article describes are exactly what concerns people who oppose government control of health care/insurance. But we want to copy the “wonderful” NHS where everyone gets such superb care at a fraction of the cost in the U.S., and with no impact on personal choice or convenience, the laws of economics be damned.

Back during the dark days of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration, righteous liberals were very concerned about the separation of powers problems posed by unilateral executive action against terrorists and suspected terrorists. Such concerned constitutionalists went to court again and again to contest such executive usurpation over military commissions, detention of unlawful enemy combatants, and warrantless wiretapping for intelligence gathering to detect incipient terrorist plots. Such national security concerns were quite beyond the President’s power, judicial precedents to the contrary notwithstanding. The courts did uphold a few of these critics’ constitutional claims, having to discard common sense and to overrule decades-old precedents in the process and injecting themselves into an area (national security and military needs) in which the courts institutionally and the judges personally are woefully incompetent to decide.

Such liberal ultra-strict sticklers for collaborative action between the President and Congress also killed many trees publishing articles editorials, law review pieces, and other pronouncements that purported to demonstrate the nefariousness of the executive’s unilateral actions in any field, but especially in the national security matters at hand. Of course, they were no more pleased when Congress approved the President’s handiwork in some of these areas. In a couple of cases, the Supreme Court, apparently insulted that the Congress and President had done what the learned jurists had prescribed in the earlier adjudications, now found the combined collaborative effort unconstitutional, as well.

This battle on the executive power front has fallen eerily quiet since the election of Barack Obama. Indeed, Mr. Obama has made unprecedented use of unilateral executive power through the appointment of policy-making “czars” that bypass the constitutionally-prescribed Senatorial confirmation process for officers of the United States. Rather, these independent commissars report directly to the White House as Presidential functionaries though their range of discretion may supplant or even replace authority normally given to officers (such as Cabinet secretaries) subject to the traditional constitutional processes.

One would think that, based on traditional understanding and Supreme Court precedent (Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Dames & Moore, Curtiss-Wright Export), the President’s power to act unilaterally under his own constitutional authority would be greater in foreign affairs, military command, and national security matters than in the ordinary domestic policy tussles for which these “czars” are responsible. But the liberals act exactly opposite. To the extent that there is any grumbling, it remains over the executive branch’s treatment of foreign terrorists (detention, interrogation) and Americans or foreigners suspected of collaborating with such foreign terrorists. But there is no similar concern about ordinary Americans’ lives being affected by the actions of such an imperial presidency. I suppose it is hard for those critics to get worked up over uncontrolled executive action against an unwieldy mass of common Americans trying to live their lives when there is so much more romance in feeling compassion for the exotic foreign terror dealers. The frisson of danger in talking to someone sworn to kill you and as many of your kind must meet some greater psychological need than worrying about your boring gun and Bible-clinging compatriots.

One of these “czars” is a typical example of the person liberals would consider it ridiculous and rather laughable to worry about. He is Van Jones, the President’s “green jobs” czar. According to sources cited by Gateway Pundit, Jones is a founder of the radical group Color of Change and a self-avowed “rowdy black nationalist.” According to cited sources in Wikipedia, Jones described himself as a communist in 1992.

Now it appears that Mr. Green Jobs is a 9-11 Truther. I have previously posted about the devoid-of-fact conspiracy mongering of the Obama birth certificate sleuths. Their antics and theorizing was a staple of cable news shows (well, CNN) and cable talk shows (well, CNN and MSNBC) for weeks. The White House took the opportunity to bemoan their kookiness.

But this group of Truthers, led by structural engineer Rosie O’Donnell and materials physicist Jeannine Garofalo, rejects the notion that plain old jets hijacked by Islamic terrorists brought down the World Trade Center. They claim that steel cannot be brought down by jet fuel explosions, and that the planes had their passengers removed (who remain hidden by the government) and were filled with explosives. The alternative theory is that the real jets were shot down by North Dakota Air National fighter planes, and other explosives-laden planes were crashed into the buildings. Most significant, the government planned or (under the version that this was the Mossad’s doing) at least knew about it. They’re a bit hazy about whether the mastermind was Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or the usual neocon cabal, i.e., the worldwide Zionist conspiracy. (I’d pick Cheney for sheer audacity and scope of the project.)

There has not as of yet been the same media feeding-frenzy about the lunacy of these Truthers, some of whom also populate the Birther ranks. Keith Olbermann has not yet leveled his keen analytic and dispassionate reason at them for the elegant fisking they deserve. Actually, there are crickets chirping all around, with the media hoping that this guy is gone within the next couple of days so they won’t be forced to defend him and Obama. Mark Steyn recalls Bill Clinton’s succinct assessment of the Truthers, “You’re nuts.”

Oh, and he’s also a supporter of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal.

And then there’s his part in the God’less America “peace rally.”

Allahpundit thinks that this is a practical joke by Obama on the media: “Hey Rahm — bet you 20 bucks I can get a Truther communist appointed to an environmental oversight position.” I disagree. That would require too much introspection and self-analysis by Obama and his minions to see who and what they are. And Obama doesn’t do humor. Messiahs are not known for funny gags.

Can one even contemplate what the Congressional, Democratic, and media response would have been if Bush had appointed someone of Jones’s temperament, background, and degree of ideological radicalism (on the other side, of course)? Rowdy White supremacist, Aryan Nation follower? BTW, I am not convinced that this guy really believes all this stuff. I think that it is not beyond contemplation that these speeches, groups, petitions, etc., are just ways for him to talk the talk and pretend to walk the walk of the left-wing academic and social groups with which he associated. I think he was just trying to find a way to money and influence, and this seemed to him the most plausible in light of his academic background and his race (plus, I agree, some core leftist beliefs).

Leaving aside his general past looniness, he believes his current job description to be to transform society by getting rid of capitalism. That would indeed be an expensive proposition, if this Spanish study is correct. At a cost of more than $100,000 per year per job, and a destruction of 2.2 other jobs per green job created, the greening of the world would seem to be due more to the reduction of the standard of living of the large numbers of people who would be out of work.

UPDATE: The czar has been deposed, er, abdicated. It was not unexpected that this would occur in the middle of the night during the end-of-summer Labor Day weekend in this “most transparent of all administrations.”

In a speech on government insurance/health care that is eerily reminiscent of the issues raised by ObamaCare, Ronald Reagan dissects the arguments and tactics of supporters of government care. He correctly notes the relationship that exists between government single-payer insurance and socialized medicine. He warns of the dangers of the “foot-in-the-door” strategy of supporters of state power. That again plays itself out today, as one listens to the declarations of people such as Representatives Betsy Markey and Barney Frank and President Obama himself. If they can get the basic idea accepted, they can expand the program dangerously later. That happened with Social Security. It also happened with Medicare, the program against which Reagan is speaking. The program was expanded considerably since its inception. Initial prohibitions in the law against government interference with medical decisions were eroded by subsequent funding restrictions as the government began to try to control the spiralling costs as the number of enrollees expanded significantly. Other costs were borne by privately insured patients, resulting in a heavy subsidy to Medicare. Even so, the program has been pronounced unsustainable by President Obama. Things have turned out as Ronald Reagan predicted, and the path that got us here is being retrod by way of the same appeals to unrestrained emotionalism that characterized the liberals’ approach last time around.

During the Bush administration the Democrats and their media allies turned the dismissal of a couple of fewer than a dozen U.S. Attorneys into a cause celebre. Charges of corruption and of politicization of the Justice Department were levelled with abandon. There were calls for special prosecutors to be appointed. Congressional investigations continue into peripheral matters said to prove that politicization of Justice.

Never mind that the President has the full plenary power under the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent to fire U.S. Attorneys. Never mind that many of these were holdovers from the Clinton administration. Never mind that, unlike Bush, who retained many Clinton appointees, Clinton himself demanded the resignations of all U.S. Attorneys from the George H.W. Bush administration. Never mind that Janet Reno as Bill Clinton’s tool ran the most politicized Justice Department since the Nixon-Mitchell duo.

Those same Democratic spokesmen for prosecutorial independence and executive rectitude, along with their media allies, have become eerily quiet. To the extent they make any noise, it is to pronounce the Holder Justice Department as truly professional and apolitical. Never mind Holder’s role as an enabler of the notorious and corrupt Marc Rich pardon by Bill Clinton, acting within the Reno Justice Department. Never mind Holder’s department’s abandonment of a solid voter intimidation case against the pro-Democratic New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia.

Even the obviously politically-timed Justice Department investigations of the CIA are paraded as examples of prosecutorial independence. Never mind that there has already been an investigation of these matters by Justice Department career lawyers who have found that no criminal cases should be filed, except for one brought against a CIA “contractor.” Never mind that the CIA’s Inspector General has already completed an investigation and that some agents were disciplined. Other than political red meat to the left-wingers in the Democratic Party, why open up old wounds through another investigation, and appoint a special prosecutor whom his supporters tout as “relentless”? If the prosecutor agrees that prosecutions are not warranted, it simply confirms what has already been done. If he concludes such prosecutions are warranted, the difficulties of proof that the earlier career prosecutors saw make success unlikely. Either way, the CIA gets dragged through the dirt, with clear impact on future effectiveness. Moreover, Americans are getting tired of the drumbeat of left-wing propaganda and actions against people trying to protect the U.S. from terrorists after 9/11, while the same left-wingers do everything in their power to protect and coddle the self-same terrorists. So this is not an electoral winner on its own and must be a political attempt to gain cover on Obama’s left flank.

So now comes the termination of an investigation by the New Mexico U.S. Attorney’s Office of pay-for-play allegations against Governor Bill Richardson. That investigation forced the Obama administration to forego Richardson’s services as Commerce Secretary. Richardson is a close Obama ally and has been used for quasi-official diplomatic feelers by the North Koreans, continuing a recent pattern of N.K.-U.S. talks through such channels. (It keeps Obama from having to follow through with his promise to sit down for talks with any dictator without preconditions.)

The letter from the U.S. Attorney’s Office to the targets announcing the dismissals is unusual. Normally (and properly), if there are no grounds to proceed, that is the end. No further statements are necessary or, one can argue, ethically appropriate. If you have something, indict. If not, close the case and make your statement brief and to the point.

The tone of this letter shows the U.S. Attorney’s displeasure that the investigation was aborted. It pointedly declares that improper conduct went on and that the dismissal “is not to be interpreted as an exoneration of any party’s conduct.” The tone of the letter corroborates the AP story that the U.S. Attorney was directed by higher-ups to drop the case. None too surprising, the legacy media have declined to follow the story. Perhaps they will discover it when, during the next Republican administration or Congress, there will be investigations of Eric Holder.

Jonah Goldberg succinctly dismantles the President’s argument that his health care proposals will maintain or expand current quality of care, expand coverage, and avoid cost increases.

“Imagine you’re in charge of bringing pie to a company picnic. You’re planning to provide dessert for 100 people. Then, your boss says you need to hand out pie to 150. Fine, you say, I’ll make more pies. But — oh no! — you can’t, because you’ve also been told costs must go down. Okay, then you can cut slices of the existing pies smaller so everyone can have a piece. Wait! You can’t do that either, because you’re not allowed to ration (i.e., give less to more).

“According to Obama, the health-care pie will be sliced into more pieces, of equal or greater size than available now, for less money — all because government is so much better than the private sector at managing large projects.”

Sure. But who knows? Jesus fed thousands with a few loaves and fishes. The One’s followers have invested similar faith in their secular messiah. No wonder Obama’s claims sound true to his supporters.

Goldberg writes a follow-up post that points out another obvious problem with government involvement in health care decisions. Much as heavy use of alcohol or light drugs are often gateways for more serious and destructive drug use, government control of health care issues will inevitably lead to further control of one’s life. Gun violence, car accidents, and diet are significant contributors to mortality and morbidity, so they present almost irresistible targets for government control. That’s especially true in light of past efforts by liberals to control those very things. As Goldberg points out, health care presents another wedge, besides global wrming fear-mongering and appeals that some restriction of liberty is ”for the children,” to allow wholesale government control over our lives.

Now that the Washington Post is calling for pulling the plug on ObamaCare, or ObamaInsurance, one awaits the decisions of the last hold-outs among the legacy media, such as The New York Times. Will they continue to live in the fantasy land of the administration or will the (inevitably) conservative facts of life return them to earth, however reluctantly? For the Post it was the more than 20% upward revision of the federal debt over the next ten years. Even those numbers of $9 trillion deficits, coming as they are from the White House OMB, are suspect. The OMB and its director, Peter Orszag, have consistently prettified Obama economic statistics, and there are already calls that even this number is too optimistic by another trillion or two.

I disagree with one thing in the Post editorial. While the Bush administration indeed contributed to the deficit problem with various social programs like the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and while the Bush administration moved to get the bank bailout rolling, to give the Bush administration more than a small fraction of the blame for this year’s deficit and for current domestic proposals is covering for Obama. It was Obama’s choice to proceed with half of the proposed TARP funds. Moreover, as the column agrees, the stimulus was Obama’s. I disagree about the positive effect and the need for the stimulus that the column envisions. All of that should go into Obama’s column. One may disagree about the need for that spending, but putting the responsibility where it belongs makes Obama’s plans for additional deficits more clearly reckless.

Jonah Goldberg at NRO’s The Corner has a pithy post about the transformative effect of the Obama administration on the United States. But it isn’t the transformation advertised by candidate Obama last year, or that envisioned by his disciples:

“For years to come, this moment will resonate. Columnists will talk about how the deficit spiraled (even further) out of control in the summer of 2009 and the emasculation of the dollar became irreversible. Hawks will blame the castration of the CIA as the fons et origo of the next terror attack or the cause of the bureaucratic calcification of the CIA that led to some other intelligence catastrophe.”

The U.S. is being transformed, and as Goldberg explains, this transformation will be analyzed for years to come. We are in for a rough ride. Goldberg’s comment is that bracing daily splash of pessimism that many pragmatists crave. He is also right.

Herewith a collection of recent articles I have found enlightening about health care proposals.

The Weekly Standard provides insight into the Dutch effort since the 1980s to move away from nationalized health insurance, first to a kind of public option/non-profit cooperatives/private mix and when that didn’t alleviate the problems sufficiently, to a more openly private insurance system. This is noteworthy for several reasons. The Dutch economy is among the most heavily socialized. The Dutch system, like other European systems began from the position that health care was a right for everyone. The country experienced the predictable inefficiencies of the system with its lack of incentives through competition.

Contrary to the desires of American liberals, the watchword has become to overcome managed competition. People now have to buy private insurance that the top one-third of the population already bought to escape the public system.

The article also reviews the many ways that government systems fail and how they try to control the inevitable costs. Government health care may not deny you the care altogether. But, “[one] way for a government to ration care is to simply delay it. You probably will get the care eventually but a long wait time means that there are fewer resources, facilities, and equipment needed in a health care system.” Or, “[another] approach to rationing is to limit availability of technology.” Examples would be the few MRI machines available in Canada, so that people have to go to the U.S. or, once again, wait. Or, “[rationing] may also take the form of limits on payments for medications.” That results in underfunded budgets for medications, which cannot be exceeded on pain of fines. Thus, needed drugs are underprescribed.

The solution in countries that ration health care? “For those who want to avoid these waits, supplemental private insurance and access to a discrete private system is one solution. While some countries have expanded access in the public system because wait times became intolerable, this has led to costs rising at rates that have themselves become a major issue.” An example of that is the German system, with which my family has some familiarity. The French system is often lauded as being a particularly responsive public system. France is one of the countries that has consciously expanded access to health care to reduce wait times. But France, combining expansive care with bureaucratic inefficiency, now has a budgetary albatross whose costs have so spiralled out of control that they threaten the government’s fiscal stability. This has become a major political and economic problem.

Economist Robert Samuelson discusses the inevitable cost explosion that will come under any government health insurance coverage. Extending Medicare to all will suffer from the defects of the current version of the program, but on a grander scale. Samuelson does not believe that rationing will be the result. Instead, as all the liberal talk of health care as a “right” shows, and as has already occurred with mandates imposed on private insurance coverage, Congress will expand the program but only talk about constraining costs. The best that can be expected from Congress is to try to squeeze doctors, hospitals, and drug companies. The rest will be increased taxes and/or deficits. And the President? “He simply claims that his plan will do things it won’t. What he’s offering is an enlarged version of the status quo that, as he says, is already unsustainable.”

Public systems are clearly prone to odd examples of expansion of “necessary” health care.

Once more about those uninsured: General estimates place the number of uninsured Americans who make less than $50,000 (roughly the median earnings of a family of four) and who don’t qualify for government programs at 8 to 14 million. The lower figure are the chronically uninsured, the higher figure those who are temporarily uninsured at some point when the survey is taken. Not 46 to 50 million, a figure thrown around that has been debunked for a long time. Even in that category, a lot are young single people in excellent health who probably could afford to pay relatively cheap premiums if they were not subsidizing costly insurance mandates, but opt not to do so. The Census date used there are from 2007, but there has been little change in the percentages of uninsured over many years.

Then there is the usual collection of stories of Canadians being sent to, or escaping, the wonderful Canadian health care system that liberals seek to emulate. There is the agreement between Ontario and the city of Detroit and other municipalities to provide services to Canadians they cannot get there as readily. Detroit!?! Even defenders of the arrangement agree that such safety valves allow Canada to have a smaller health care budget. That should answer the argument why Canadians pay less for health care. As with so much of their national existence, they depend on the U.S. On whom will they be able to free-ride if the U.S. follows their lead?

Another, though older, example of that vaunted Canadian care. Via Mark Steyn at The Corner, some incidents from EuroCare, including the sad tale of Irish mothers who have to wait months before getting a first obstetrician appointment. Again, via Mark Steyn, the tale of 4000 mothers who had to give birth in unusual circumstances due to a lack of maternity beds in Britain. Also note the links in the middle of the Daily Mail article for further examples.

A zestier discussion, courtesy of Ann Coulter, who argues (correctly, in my mind) for more competition among insurance companies and fewer government mandates.

The legacy media enjoy writing about the “angry White male” whose periodic mass appearance in American voting booths swings elections in, for the liberal mindset, unnatural directions. The 1994 election that ended a half-century of one-party Democrat control of the House of Representative that rivalled in length Castro’s Cuba and the Kim dynasty’s rule in North Korea is frequently mentioned as a case on point. Then there is a slightly different version, the “angry Conservative,” about whom liberal journalists (I know, redundancy alert), politicians, and editorialists vent much verbiage, often condescending or derogatory, sometimes bemused or sorrowful.

Now comes a different take. Since 2006, liberals have enjoyed considerable political success. They control the White House with the most leftist occupant ever. They have a supermajority in the Senate and control the House with a contingent of hard-leftists from places such as San Francisco. They control the vast majority of newspapers and television networks, and the wire services. Still, they are angry. As the response from Democrat politicians, union thugs, and commentators make clear, they despise any sort of dissent from their program, frequently labelling that as unpatriotic, un-American, treasonous or racist. When they are not ganging up to assault middle-aged protesters, that is. They flail rhetorically at opponents, seen and unseen, with baseless vituperation. They make allegations that, when investigated, figuratively blow up in their faces. Remember when Contessa Brewer, a supposed reporter at (naturally) MSNBC beclowned herself with the claim that it is a sign of the racialist danger posed by disgruntled White militia types when someone showed up with a gun at an Obama health care event in Arizona. Except that he was carrying a legal semiautomatic rifle near, not at, the event. And he was, umm, Black. (Picture) Eventually, as happens in any leftist “revolution” they turn on each other, as Glenn Greenwald and others show with their increasingly vocal impatience with President Obama. The Revolution inevitably devours its children.

The obvious question is, “Why?” One response is that there is an inherent intolerance among leftists, especially for those who commit the thought crime of opposing leftist ideology and programs. Another is that the left is frustrated by the inability of their champions in Washington to remake American society in the destructive image of socialist/fascist-inspired state corporatism. A third is that the left is generally a collection of anti-democratic elitists who have only disdain for the intellectually-unwashed, Bible-and-gun-clinging, middle-class, heterosexual,  American Babbitts and Bubbas they see when they envision the population between Manhattan and San Francisco, and between Georgetown and L.A.’s Westside.

All of these are attractive to conservatives whose political impotence leaves them only the satisfaction of watching the left form circular firing squads of political recrimination. Matthew Continetti at the Weekly Standard provides more evidence and insight into this phenomenon of the Angry White Liberal, from Nancy Pelosi and Eric Massa to the king of the AWLs, N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Jon Stewart. Not to be overlooked are recovering sportscaster Keith Olbermann and pretty much everyone at Daily Kos and the Huffington Post. And then there is always the tired “racism” charge, which is, to borrow from Samuel Johnson, the last refuge of a liberal in any argument. Continetti’s article helps us conservative ignoramuses get an insight into the emotional trauma currently suffered by liberals from the actions of those of us whose dissent, according to conventional liberal wisdom, most certainly is not patriotic.

During the Bush administration, liberals bemoaned the use of unilateral executive power, such as in dealing with terrorists. Well, they also bemoaned the use of executive power under grants from Congress, such as in dealing with terrorists. There were the usual concerns about lack of accountability, undermining of formal constitutional separation of powers, and threat to individual freedoms.

Now, however, the moaning has stopped. Unilateral executive power, or executive power based on legislative delegation that is breathtakingly unconstrained, is evidence of good and efficient government. In fact, to emphasize the lack of accountability that is now presented as a badge of honor, presidential appointees that report to the President and operate outside the usual bureaucratic and statutory political structures are called “czars.”

That reference to the Russian version of Caesar denotes an absolute ruler, unaccountable to democratic institutions or to his people subjects. It is not a designation associated with concern for the finer points of civil liberties. Or the broader ones, for that matter. Certainly, the breezy use of that name, without any sense of outrage or even irony, does not befit a free republic. But the casualness of that use is an indictment of the health of our system. Only reactionaries now fret about such things as health care czars and climate czars. To the elite, this is evidence of the welcome growth of a dirigiste regime. After all, we’re not dealing with the delicate personages of a few hundred accused foreign terrorists and other unlawful enemy combatants. We’re just interfering with the personal and economic well-being and the freedom of many millions of Americans. And those people deserve whatever government is coming to them. After all, they elected the administration. Right?

Here, Professor Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, presents an overview of the American Czars.

It has become commonplace to hear from the President’s backers in and out of the media wing of the Democratic Party that criticism of the President, or even of his policies, is the result of racism, even if only subconscious. It is the race card that has been played over and over again and which, while it appeals shamelessly to white guilt, is increasingly ineffective with the public at large. It does still resonate, however, in the halls and gatherings of the elite, the great majority of whom are liberals. At least it resonates there publicly, while those same people may express opinions privately that are at sharp odds with their public personas. Such racial guilt played no small part in the election of Mr. Obama, the otherwise least qualified person to run for the Presidency from any major party in the history of the United States.

Since this tactic has worked so well to shut down criticism during the campaign last year though somewhat less well over the administration’s fiascos this year, one cannot fault Black politicians for copying the example of Mr. Obama and his surrogates. Thus, New York governor David Paterson, plumbing ever new lows of popularity, blames the media’s racism for his troubles, claiming that they report negatively about him due to the color of his skin. Paterson (who is Black) adds to his evidence the fact that Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (who also is Black) is receiving the same treatment and losing popular support for the same reason. For good measure, he then adds to his list of victims of a racist media President Obama, who is targeted because he is trying to change things. (No, I don’t follow the reasoning, either.)

Worse, according to the good governor, complicit in the racist campaign of the White media to bring him down is the (racist?) Black media that won’t come to his defense. Governor, I would suggest a serious bout of introspection about the self-inflicted political wounds and the political incompetence of your administration. It wasn’t your fault that people voted for you for Lieutenant Governor during better times when your sympathetic life story could overshadow your lack of political skills. It wasn’t your fault that then-Governor Eliot Spitzer couldn’t have affairs like ordinary politicians (Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, John Ensign) and had to pay for sex, instead. Then he had to resign, and suddenly you actually had to do something. And you are in way over your paygrade. It isn’t racism. But continue to spout such nonsense. The more often and more ridiculous such accusations, the sooner we become immune to them and can rid political discourse of such foul tactics.

Via Jonah Goldberg @ The Corner

UPDATE: One of President Obama’s dependable friends, Fidel Castro, agrees that Obama’s opponents are racists trying to undo him. This from a dictator whose white-skinned regime imprisons a population that has a significant Black population.

Penn and Teller explain Obamanomics. HT: Melonie Johnson

There has been a developing political mystery, the whereabouts of Joe Biden. Disappearing vice-presidents are certainly nothing new. In most administrations, the vice-president has been a non-entity with little to do. Biden’s predecessor, Dick Cheney, also often disappeared from view, and was usually rumored to be at some “undisclosed location.” The more imaginative among the liberals were certain that Cheney was plotting with the Emperor Palpatine over some diabolical matter or another.

The notion of Joe Biden in a Cheneyesque role does not seem plausible, however. The previously ubiquitous vice-president has disappeared since proclaiming that the stimulus would be creating 600,000 new jobs in short order. No doubt President Obama does not want to handicap his shrinking chances for Obamacare further, by having Joe accidentally tell the truth a gaffe. As has been said many times, a political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. But there is probably no truth to the rumor that Joe is gagged and bound to a chair in the basement of the vice-president’s official residence under heavy guard.

I have written so many times about ”diversity” in the academy that I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. But as long as things aren’t changing, the beat must go on. Diversity in a university setting means anything but intellectual diversity. In the latter, it often means a suffocating uniformity of liberal cant that drowns out dissenting voices, unintentionally usually, but intentionally if dissent becomes too prominent.

In the real world, on the other hand, liberals are at a disadvantage. People by inclination are conservative, due significantly to the fact that, as Margaret Thatcher famously pronounced, “The facts of life are conservative.” Sure, liberals have the media outlets deemed “elite,” such as the New York Times and most of the rest of the dwindling-circulation legacy media, the “news gathering” groups such as the AP, and the television networks except FOX News. However, conservatives “own” talk radio with its mass listening base.

In the free market, then, liberal talk radio has been crowded out. Al Franken and Rachel Maddow simply could not compete with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham. However, the liberal message easily has a voice through the other media channels. So, all would seem well. Fair and balanced. But, no. Liberals cannot handle the idea that there is a forum that they do not dominate. So they periodically threaten to resurrect the “Fairness Doctrine,” which, as the name discloses is the antithesis of the “freedom doctrine.” Just as “fair trade” is the opposite of “free trade,” the Fairness Doctrine is government management of broadcasting to produce a predetermined result that distorts the verdict of the market. It does so by, in effect, forcing broadcasters, as a condition of their license, to present programming that reflects a broad spectrum of views. Although one doubts that includes the duty to allow the KKK to get its message on the air, the doctrine seems harmless enough, even though, like other government programs, it foists on consumers things they do not want.

But, by some happy “coincidence” the doctrine doesn’t apply to newspapers, dominated by liberals. While it does apply to over-the-air TV broadcasters on the basis of bandwidth scarcity (an increasingly ludicrous concept, given the availability of cable and computers), it doesn’t apply to the editorials on, say, CBS, that masquerade as news reports. Those reports, studies have shown, lean in a decidedly leftward direction. As to such networks’ editorial programs, the format is unlike talk radio. They are usually panels, with three leftists of various stripes who advocate the liberal position and a “respectable” house conservative, such as the New York Times’s David Brooks, who splits his time between advocating and criticizing conservative views. So the forum for information that is most likely to be affected is the one controlled by more vocal and effective conservatives.

While some, such as Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have openly called for a return of the Fairness Doctrine, other Democrats have been cool to the idea. The Obama administration has been inscrutable on the matter, sending signals from both sides. But the whole idea may become a non-issue, if the FCC’s Obama-appointed “diversity czar” gets to implement the ideas that he has advanced in his policy scribblings. As so many of the Obama non-union appointees, this is another cancer product from the non-reality based community, this time from the academy and its leftist fellow-traveler, the Center for American Progress.

A rebirth of the Fairness Doctrine likely would require Congressional approval and, thereby, some degree of political accountability. But an administrative policy imposed by this unelected bureaucrat would avoid such annoyances of a democratic system. The plan would impose licensing fees equal to a station’s entire operating budget, a huge cost increase that would make radio broadcasting hugely expensive. Those fees would then be funneled to “public broadcasting outlets,” to give them funds equal to what the private market has. In other words, this would be like Medicare today, where the many private providers end up subsidizing the uneconomic and fraud-ridden government program. Since there are few public outlets and many private ones (well, at least until such a program raises their costs), this will be manna from heaven for the former. Experience tells us that such programs, other than broadcasting the scintillating government meetings that 47 people watch, will be dominated by liberal programming and revisionist politics. Expect the usual White males/conservatives/Christians/businesspeople “bad,” others “good” form of historical and political commentary that is currently inflicted on inmates in the K-Graduate level government schools.

Forcing private companies to broadcast the liberal worldview won’t make such ideas more palatable to the public or better reflections of reality. But it can make conservative programs less accessible. Lest one think that, well, there are still conservative websites and blogs, liberals are already setting their sights on ways to control content on those sites to assure they are presenting a breadth of political coverage.

With lots of claims and counterclaims about Obamacare, from CNN comes is a detailed analysis of the loss of five freedoms of health care: The freedom to choose what’s in your plan; freedom from having the young subsidize the old; freedom to set up your own Health Savings Account and buy limited insurance; freedom to keep your existing plan for more than another year; and freedom to choose your own doctor without clearance from a government-run HMO system.

This article is also detailed and presents a collection of corrections to Obama misstatements about his health care/insurance initiatives, addressing costs, doctor-patient relations, a government take-over of health care, abortions, illegal immigrants, and Medicaid cuts.

I’m confused. Why is the President, trying to sell Obamacare to a skeptical public, saying that there’s nought to worry about because when government agencies like the U.S. Post Office compete against private entities like UPS or FedEx, it is the Post Office that is always in trouble? This is so delicious, I’m going to drag out the D’Oh-bama concept for a special appearance. So, the strategy is to try to sell the wondrous efficiencies of the government proposal by comparing it to the Post Office and characterizing the latter as a failure. Obviously, he was off the teleprompter. As Allahpundit suggests, if this strategy shows promise at convincing the public, Obama can really get the people on board by likening the operation of Obamacare to the DMV.

Remember the “Dissent Is Patriotic” that appeared during the Bush administration years on so many Subarus, Priuses, and similar vehicles of choice of the pompously righteous, smugly moralistic Left? Those bumper stickers have magically disappeared with the election of The One from whose program no dissent is rationally possible and, therefore, tolerable. I just received some bumper stickers I designed, ‘NOW, Dissent Really Is Patriotic.” I am getting them just in time, as the Obama supporters in the media, the unions, and the politicians begin to clamp down on dissent. As Rich Lowry of National Review notes, with Obamacare’s overall unpopularity, the administration wants a truly silent Silent Majority.

Just as Joe Biden has impugned the patriotism of those who are opposed to the administration’s high-tax policy; just as Nancy Pelosi has questioned the patriotism of those who opposed the “stimulus”; now appear the usual Democrat challenges to the patriotism of those who oppose Obamacare. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) called the protests “un-American”, a charge her handlers have since caused her to recant. Funny, but I do not recall Republican politicians (bloggers are another matter) challenging the patriotism of Democrat opponents of the Bush administration. Not even opposition to the Iraq War. Instead, George Bush consistently ignored the ignoble personal attacks directed at him by Democratic politicians, never mind the fringe elements of Democrats among the Hollywood types, bloggers, “journalists,” students, etc. Instead, he pointed out that freedom of dissent is one of the reasons to resist aggression by totalitarian foreign forces. As this “study in contrast” reminds us, administration officials, too, avoided such incendiary rhetoric. Indeed, I remember that, to the extent the issue of challenging patriotism was raised during those years, it came from Democratic politicians pre-emptively attacking Republicans over the issue, with no presentation of actual evidence that Republican politicians ever did what Democrats decried.

While these allegations by Democrats are scurrilous, one Democrat stands out through the inanity of her accusation about how she knows that these are not grass-roots opponents of Obamacare: “I saw some of the clips of people storming these town hall meetings. The last time I saw well-dressed people doing this was when Al Gore asked me to go down to Florida when they were recounting the ballots, and I was confronted with the same type of people.” So, people opposed to Obamacare can’t be well-dressed? Presumably, they have to look like the ACORN types and the aging hippies and dreadlock-sporting trust-fund activists from various anarchist, communist, anti-war and other Leftie groups to be genuine protesters that Democratic Senators recognize. Though one can easily guess who spouted this inanity, let me make it clear. It was California’s very own Babs Boxer, Senator sub-ordinaire.

Democrats also profess themselves “shocked” at the signs some of the Obamacare protesters have brought. Some of those signs apparently sported swastikas in opposition to the program. It is not clear that the swastikas were direct references to Obama himself, or simply (correctly) identifying the nanny state imperatives of the Obama agenda as a kind of (kinder and gentler) totalitarian take-over by the state of the individual’s most intimate decisions. But Nancy Pelosi saw this as way beyond the pale. Do they believe that we have forgot the constant references of Bush=Hitler coming from Democratic politicians and supporters? The Bushitler bumper stickers?

Not surprisingly, it has been the Democrats who, while loudly decrying the rudeness of the Obamacare protesters, accuse them of being racists, Nazis, and political terrorists.

I am not a fan of reducing every particular political difference to accusations of Nazism. When, however, an ideological movement emerges and attempts to impose an agenda that reeks of fascist principles and ideas, and then proceeds to exhibit fascist characteristics in its tactics, it is certainly appropriate to point out that similarity. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism becomes an ideological tour book for such movements. Obamaism has an alarming confluence with fascism in its ideas and, increasingly, in its method. Note that I wrote “fascism” (and a gentle one, at that), not Nazism.

Tomorrow, more to come on Nancy Pelosi’s umpteenth attack on her opponents’ patriotism.

Nothing says gov’t control better than our new good friend, the Castro regime. And—they’re running out of toilet paper. The good news? They hope to have ”a shipment” by the end of the year. That’s even worse than Sheryl Crow’s “I use just one sheet per bathroom visit” from 2007. Charmin’. If you’re a fan of Cuban cigars, you better hope they don’t run out of the gloves they wear when making them. Otherwise, who knows what kind of, ahh, stuff you’re smoking. If Obama meets the Castros, will he shake their hands?

So, in typical Democratic socialist economics/politics, despite shortages, prices get lowered. That should take care of the problem. But, wait. What products are getting lower prices to help the masses? Why, it’s canned squid and mayonnaise. Those must be sought-after dietary staples in planned economies.

Say, who runs the retail stores? The military. Nothing fascist about that. Just because that also happens in the People’s Republic of China and in Venezuela doesn’t suggest a pattern. Does it?

One more gem: “Castro, who replaced his ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president last year, also has complained that Cuba’s productivity is too low. He has taken various steps to boost output, including putting more state-owned land in private hands and pushing for salaries to be based on productivity.”

Productivity in a state-run prison economy is too low? Who’d have thought that! What’s the remedy? Why, it’s to privatize. Maybe then an agricultural country can finally import less than 60% of its food. Note that the remedy is not to expand the “government option.”

I have just signed the online petition against Obamacare. And I have said many things against Obamacare over the past several months. So it is incumbent on people to report me to Herr Obama’s website for anti-Obamacare propagandists, flag@whitehouse.gov. The whole episode reminds me of President Nixon’s enemies list. But, as columnist and fellow-constitutional law professor Hugh Hewitt points out, it took Nixon a lifetime of trench warfare with Democratic Party politicians and campaign activists to reach that point of paranoia and political thuggery. It has taken the Obama administration just six months and the emergence of some political opposition.

Through this and other signs, Obama has revealed himself what many of us thought him to be, the Chicago-politics-schooled political thug with a thin skin, a massive ego, an intolerance for dissent, and a deeply-leftist agenda tempered only by his driving ambition to get re-elected. I was asked, soon after the inauguration, what I thought of Obama. At the time, he was still pursuing a calculated and staged “bi-partisanship.” I responded that appearances at the time gave many cause for cautious optimism, but that I was withholding judgment until I saw his reaction when, as was inevitable, opposition to his programs would rise, or when, as also is inevitable, the first team leaves and others are appointed in their steads. I also pointed out that, copying Hillary Clinton’s use of real or imagined African proverbs to enlighten us Westerners, a “leopard does not change his spots.”

Obama, it has become clear, has not. At the time, based on his social and cultural background and his past rhetoric, political positions, and “employment,” it was rather clear to me what kind of “cat” Obama was. Where a significant portion of Americans saw him as a “cool cat” with transcendent, meta-political appeal, many conservatives saw him as an ideological “catastrophe,” the most ideological Leftist and politically inexperienced (and therefore dangerously programmatically idealistic) President ever.

It is always a problem when one takes one’s own publicity as gospel. For Obama, this has been easy. The Nuremberg-style rallies, with their stages and sets, the fawning and sycophantic press, and the ecstatic crowds complete with “fainting” women (remember those?) play into his notoriously thin skin and massive ego. Obama is simply not comfortable in his own skin. He tries to deal with this through personal distance and aloofness that easily crosses the line to condescension and dismissiveness.

Ultimately, he senses that he is not prepared for the job, so that he has to win every political bout. Compromise becomes difficult the more it becomes, for whatever reason, personal. Those that oppose him are not people to be dealt with as participants in a process, but as heretics to a cause. Worse, of course, is if they are members of your own party, in which case the political crime is not heresy, but apostasy. Hence, the vitriol that has been directed at the Democratic “Blue Dogs” at various times by Obama’s surrogates in the Congress.

Once one understands the basic psychology and the ideological fervor of Obama and his supporters, the reaction to the opposition to his program (”How Dare They?”) becomes easily understood. Opponents are political agitators who are “astroturfers,” not representatives of legitimate grass-roots opposition, as here. This is rich in a number of ways. It’s coming from an administration and a President schooled in the ways of the deity of agitators, Saul Alinsky. From a President whose big qualification for political office were his activities as a “community organizer.” From staff, such as David Axelrod, who prides himself on having developed and practiced the “art of astroturfing” his candidate’s opponents as a political tactic. From an administration that has worked hard to steer a billion dollars here and a billion there to “community organizing” groups such as the criminal ACORN (under investigation for vote and other fraud in many states). From an administration that politicized the Justice Department by dropping the clearest case of voter intimidation in recent memory, against the nightstick-toting New Black Panther Party—a default case they had already won and a decision that brought protest from their own career staff and the Civil Rights Commission chairman. From a side that has made it their political signature to send rent-a-mobs to opponents’ political rallies as long as I can remember. From a side that, by its definition, astroturfs, and that even now organizes union members to invade the townhall meetings to drown out (or beat up) the unexpected grass-roots opposition that got the jump on them. And from a President who, while campaigning,  urged his supporters to “get in [opponents’] faces.”

With the spurt of coverage of the Obama birth certificate tempest in the teapot, let me put in my two cents. As I’ve written on other occasions, I am suspicious of grand conspiracy theories. Not that conspiracies don’t exist, or that the speculations about coordinated nefarious activities, usually by government officials, cannot be correct. But, if one explanation of an event is a rather simple and straightforward one, and the other resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption-like sequence of events, all wrapped in a blanket of secrecy among a large number of persons, I’ll go with the straightforward explanation, unless the other one has more evidence than, “Well, it could have happened this way, and no one has disproved that.” You have a theory, you have the burden of persuasion.

Thus it is with the insane conspiracy-mongering by the “9/11 Truthers” that the World Trade Center bombing was not the work of the 19 al-Qaeda-connected radical Islamist terrorists, but of Bush, Cheney, the military, the CIA, the Mossad, the passengers on flight 93 (who are said to be in hiding somewhere, held by the government), and so on. If polls are correct, a sizable minority of Democrats (about one-third) hold this view of an “inside job” by the Bush administration, the Israelis, or both. Never mind the evidence of the 19 terrorists, never mind the claims of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, never mind the statements of Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker.” The main supporters of that view are, as expected, the BDS-driven Left. However, prominent among these “Truthers” also are supporters of Ron Paul for President. Though he has not endorsed such conspiracy-mongering expressly, the Congressman himself has recently made a vague remark that has been interpreted as supportive of this theory.

One of the grand conspiracy-mongers around is Andrew Sullivan. If one has time, it makes for fascinating reading to see the descent into irrationality of someone who, I guess needs to post something, anything. Just follow the links and sub-links and sub-sub-links.

Now comes a similar conspiracy theory, this time primarily supported by right wingers, though, again there is a surprising number of lefties (the rumor was started by a Hillary Clinton supporter) and many of the same Ron Paul supporters. Interesting, too, that Fox News and National Review, among others, are hammering this conspiracy, while CNN has programs that give these people the oxygen of publicity.

The argument is that President Obama is not eligible to be President, in that he is not a natural-born citizen. Rather than having been born in Hawaii, they say, he was born in Kenya. Though his mother was an American, under the law of the time, having the mother be American did not automatically make someone an American citizen, especially given her young age. Traditionally, nations looked to the father’s nationality for citizenship. And, of course, he was not born (according to this theory) in the U.S. and subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S., as provided in the 14th Amendment.

This editorial in National Review Online provides a good background. It is inconceivable that Obama’s mother would have given birth in Kenya and then, mindful that Obama would become President a half-century later, quickly flown from Kenya to Hawaii, colluded with the authorities (or the authorities are now conspiring with the White House fraudulently and feloniously to make up this official record of a Certification of Live Birth) to issue a certificate of live birth, and sent birth announcements to two newspapers. This is insane. If there were any credibility to these matter, the Clintons and their operatives would have found evidence during the primary last year. After all, it was a Clinton supporter who got the ball rolling on these speculations.

That said, one reason for these rumors is that this administration, which trumpets its supposed transparency, has been exceedingly secretive about Mr. Obama’s history. Mr. Obama himself has changed positions frequently about the “facts” about him that could be mentioned, or not, during the campaign, versus those he mentioned after being elected. Andrew McCarthy has a thorough round-up of the prevarications, obfuscations, flip-flops, and gaps that run through the story of Obama’s past. McCarthy clears up the distinction between a Certification of Live Birth (which Hawaii has released and which Hawaii officials, who state that they have seen the official document, say contains the evidence on the long-form) and the official Certificate of Birth (which has not been released).

While those who challenge his citizenship have the burden of coming forth with evidence for their various claims that he was naturalized or that he was adopted by his Indonesian step-father when the latter married Obama’s mother, these are among gaps and ambiguities that the President has let linger. What kind of passport did he travel on when he went to Pakistan years ago? Where did he go there? How was his education financed? If it was financed by a Saudi, as rumored, why? Exactly what were his connections to shady characters and illegal drugs on which he touched in his autobiography? Why didn’t he (or Bill Clinton) release the detailed health records that the press demands every Republican release?

There is even as simple a matter as his academic record, when he is trumpeted as the most intellectual president ever, a claim that is undermined repeatedly by his very elementary misstatements and gaffes about matters historical and economic. George W. Bush released his transcripts with its mediocre grades that elicited such laughter and condescension from his critics. Until, that is, it turned out that the imbecile Bush had better grades and higher military I.Q. test scores than the brilliant and erudite John Kerry and Al Gore. Why the pattern of secrecy? Do his records reveal him to be far less the brilliant man his supporters make him out to be? Is his success due to favoritism? A significant part of this problem is that the media has spent so little time and shown so little taste for vetting him as a candidate. We knew more information in a few days about Sarah Palin’s and Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s past, minor infractions, personal history, and associations than we yet know about Obama. The only thing we do know about Obama is that he undertook great effort to hide his past associations by initially denying their existence (Ayers, Dohrn) or minimizing their extent (Wright, Ayers, Dohrn, Rezko, etc.).

It is those gaps that we should focus on closing, and those ambiguities we should clear up. And, of course, conservatives should not get distracted by these matters from vigorously fighting the real problems that Obama’s policy initiatives represent. But, come on, unless you’ve got a lot more evidence, drop the conspiracy mongering. He may be a political disaster, but the President is a natural-born citizen.

A couple of columns re: Obamacare. The first is the usual excellent analysis by Charles Krauthammer, who describes a process of devolution that I have posted about, as well. I agree with Krauthammer that there will be something that Obama can call health reform that will be passed by Congress this fall. The Democrats are not going to throw Obama’s administration under the bus by denying him his signature political issue. The caving of the “Blue Dogs” because they were given $100 billion in cuts to the program (money that can easily and stealthily be added later) is a symptom of that ultimate party loyalty.

That said, what ultimately emerges as “health reform” likely will  be far different from what the administration in its heady early days envisioned. The goal of Obama health care reform has been downsized to Obama health insurance reform. And even that is being diluted: Talk in the Senate now is to switch from “government option” (which several Democrats have now conceded is a way to drive private plans out of business and create “single payer”) to “non-profit cooperative” of “affordable” plans. BTW, as to that last, I see that as only marginally less likely than a government option as being unfair competition to regular private insurance. Even that program is likely to suffer further alterations as the reality of what is being peddled more and more sinks in for the public and members of Congress hear from their constituents, by far most of whom (according to surveys) are happy with their plans.

Krauthammer concludes that the final bill likely will contain further restrictions on insurance companies to promote portability (a good idea, if one is going to have regulations) and a ban on pre-existing conditions exclusions (probably a good idea, depending on the details). I would be in favor of a more thorough revamping of the system in favor of private choice, but, from the point of government regulation, these seem the least bad.

But, what about the cost? Who pays? As so often, it will be a wealth transfer from the politically less-involved, more naive, and poorer (the young) to the politically-active, numerous, and comparatively wealthier (the aging baby-boomers). After all, as the CBO and others have conclusively demonstrated, the rising cost of health care is a function of an aging population:

“But wouldn’t this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers; an end to the dream of imposing European-style health care on the U.S.; and a president who before Christmas will wave his pen, proclaim victory and watch as the newest conventional wisdom reaffirms his divinity.”

This sounds like other government programs (Social Security) where the relatively shrinking number of productive younger workers subsidize the no longer productive older retirees. It has the same dynamic as the welfare state, though, as a private enterprise (heavily regulated) it will be operated more efficiently.

The second article is light-hearted, but practical advice from Andrew Malcolm at the L.A. Times blog, on how to deal with the Obamacare salesman coming to your house.

For a really bracing dose of pessimism, one can always rely on the Asia Times’s Spengler (David Goldman, who also blogs at the Catholic website First Things). Spengler makes John Derbyshire at National Review and the Washington Post’sCharles Krauthammer sound pollyannaish. I had not looked at his articles in some time, but he does not disappoint.

His article addresses the really profound disaster that is the Obama foreign policy. One small sample:

“In Obama’s imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition - empowered by Washington’s turn against Israel - would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi’ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama’s face.”

I have always scoffed at doom-mongering skeptics who insist that the 21st century will not be he American century, and that the U.S.’s greatest days are past. The first six months of the Obama administration’s policies have sorely tested my optimism about continued American greatness. And there are years of this to go. Given the current lack of competitors with equal material resources (China is still basically a third world country, and still needs to mind its historic preoccupation with governing its teeming masses; Russia’s economy is, to put it mildly, profoundly weak; Germany and Japan are suicidally pacifist, childless, and risk-averse), I believe the U.S. is likely to retain its position for the next generation or two, at least. However, I am concerned about the non-material dimension, that is, the will to act, and the perception in the world of the U.S. as irresolute. That will only increase the challenges to the U.S., and I worry what price will have to be paid, post-Obama, to re-establish respect for the U.S. among the international collection of assorted thugs in charge of most countries and not well-inclined toward peaceful co-existence with their neighbors or the U.S.

A generous serving of red meat for the right: Andrew Klavan of Pajamas Media gives an overview of President Barack Obama’s “craptalk.” According to Klavan, the faux-intellectual Obama in at least this matter is The One. [Caution: Heavy use of the word “cr