Three Legs Good, Six Legs Better

Ken Blackwell reminds us that the conservative coalition is not a just the three-legged stool of the Reagan Coalition but something bigger.

Here’s his enumeration of the honored members of the conservative coalition and their number one issues.

1. Social conservatives — judges
2. Christian conservatives — judges, religious freedom, home schooling
3. Second Amendment conservatives — judges
4. Economic conservatives — taxes and spending
5. Philosophical conservatives — limited government
6. National Security conservatives — terrorism

I don’t know what you call that, but it ain’t a three-legged stool. You could call it a big tent. Or you could call it six-pointed star, Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, begging American Jews to come on in.

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we count ourselves as libertarian conservatives, but we respect and honor all the other members of the coalition. We say: Your issues are our issues.

Now. How many of the six points of the conservative Star do you think that John McCain respects and honors?

Against McCain

As he campaigns for the nomination of the Republican Party Senator John McCain certainly does a good job of infuriating the conservative base of the party.

For instance, you’d think, crafty politician that he is, that he’d have learned how not to talk like a Democrat, playing the class warfare card, and all.

But no. Last night at the Republican California debate at the Reagan presidential library, he did a good job running as John Kerry against Mitt Romney.

I know how to lead.


I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit.

Oh, I see. So Mitt Romney’s career, including a long stint at Bain Capital creating jobs and wealth, just doesn’t measure up?

Then there’s the Wall Street bashing bit, getting a late hit in on the mortgage meltdown.

I think that there’s some greedy people on Wall Street that perhaps need to be punished.

Actually, I think there are some people on Capitol Hill who need to be punished. Who is it that passes laws to keep sluicing money and subsidies at the housing market? Who is it that has been bullying the lending institutions for decades to lend money to minorities? Who is it who cranked interest rates down to one percent in the early 2000s? And who is it who was carrying water for politically-connected S&L magnate Charles Keating back in the 1980s? And what was Senator McCain doing two or three years ago when it was obvious that the real-estate boom was getting out of hand?

It fascinating how pols like Senator McCain go for Wall Street all the time. It’s all smoke and mirrors, of course. Wall Street runs the government bond market, the market that floats the government’s paper out to the world. Wall Street is the most important thing in the world for the government and for the Senators that slosh the feed into the government’s trough.

I’d say that if there’s someone that’s really greedy and really needing to be punished it is the pols that vote to run big deficits, and get Wall Street to push Treasury Bills and Treasury Notes and Treasury Bonds out into the world to fund the deficits. And then with the other hand they sit around doing nothing while the Federal Reserve lets the dollar decline so that bond holders are left holding dollar-denominated bonds worth a lot less today than they were a few yers ago.

Heck of a deal for the US government and its senatorial functionaries. Heck of a deal for Wall Street. But not so good for the folks that bought the bonds.

Who’s the greedy one there, Senator?

Seriously, do we really want this guy in the White House where he can govern like a Democrat and have the Republicans take the fall for more bloated government and more attacks on the First Amendment?

Florida: McCain over Romney

It seems incredible that the “maverick” Senator John McCain is the Republican frontrunner. How could this moderate senator from Arizona be leading the the fight for the nomination in the conservative Republican Party?

The answer, I think, came in South Carolina when non-activist conservatives seemed to be going for McCain out of buyer’s remorse. Voters were wondering if they were really right to choose George W. Bush back in 2000. The sensible thing to do seemed to be to vote for McCain.

Anyway, write Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, McCain can win and Romney can’t.

McCain has a much better chance of winning the election than does former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

And they are probably right. Conservatives may think of President Bush as a not very conservative president, but the American people think of him as conservative, right-wing, and Republican. After all the ups and downs of the past seven years, they think it is time for a change, and they are right.

So it is time to think strategically. If, as seems likely, the Republican candidate loses in November, would it be better to lose with a full-spectrum candidate like Romney or a maverick, media favorite like McCain?

In my view, the voters need a dose of Democrat. Republicans aren’t going to get a chance to do real conservative reform until the current promise of “Change” has passed its sell-by date.

Democrats don’t stand for Change. They stand for more government, more bureaucracy, more subsidies, more waste. In another four years voters will have been robustly reminded of this.

Fox Focus Group Response to SOTU

In his last State of the Union speech President Bush seemed to be a confident man, hardly the broken, failed president that he critics imagine.

And you could tell that from the reactions of the focus group assembled by Frank Luntz for Fox News.  Few in the focus group had a positive opinion of the president coming into the speech, but nearly all had a good impression after the speech.  Now how could that be? 

Could it be that the media (including the presidential candidates) combine to render a negative verdict on the president?

Luntz highlighted the group reaction to two presidential proposals.  Everyone in his group approved when the president proposed to end 151 failing and wasteful federal programs.  But when the president proposed to make his tax cuts permanent only the Republican-leaning participants strongly approved.  The Democrat-leaning participants strongly disapproved.

There’s a lesson in that.

Throw Money at Higher Ed?

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano want to spend more money on higher education according to Matthew Ladner from the Arizona based Goldwater Institute.

“We must recognize that higher education is something that all Arizona children will need to succeed,” stated Governor Napolitano.

The governor wants to increase funding to double the number of college graduates in Arizona by 2020.  But others think that the supposed “dire need for an ever increasing number of college graduates is a myth.”

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, only 29 percent of all jobs actually required a degree in 2004. The Bureau projects that of the top ten occupations with the largest growth from 2004 to 2014, seventy percent won’t require a college education.

Already 40 percent of people get a two or four-year college degree.  So we are already graduating more college graduates than we need.

Of course, Arizona’s university system performance isn’t exactly something to write home about.  According to Ladner:

The National Center for Education Statistics lists Arizona State’s four year graduation rate as 28 percent, the University of Arizona at 30 and Northern Arizona University at 27. The six year graduation rates for these three schools stand at 56%, 56% and 47% respectively.

How about improving the current performance of the under-performing Arizona university system?  One way of doing that would be by giving college student higher education vouchers so that the state university system would have to compete for student dollars.  Arizona already has such a program.

Because no good deed goes unpunished, Governor Napolitano recommended that the Arizona legislature cut funding for the voucher program.

Governor Napolitano is a Democrat.

"Mansfield Park" Mis-Priced

Enough of politics and race cards. Let’s talk about real issues, like a disastrous TV production of Mansfield Park.

In the golden age of Hollywood the culture snobs like you and I would always sneer at the costume dramas: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France presented with a hairstyle and small talk right out of 1930s popular culture.

There was one comfort.  The BBC would never stoop to that sort of thing.  Nor would Masterpiece Theater.  At least, not when dramatizing Jane Austen.

But as my sister and I watched the one episode production of Mansfield Park last night on PBS we felt that we were watching a Hollywood costume drama.

Of course, it is ridiculous to attempt a vast novel like Mansfield Park in one episode.  A novel of relationships cannot be crammed into two hours like an action drama.  Still, it doesn’t hurt to try.

But to make the prim Fanny Price into a bit of a pouting slut with flashing eyes, when the whole point of Fanny is that, as the poor relation, she cannot afford even one lapse from irreproachable behavior; to make Lady Bertram, the indolent and self absorbed mother of four wayward rich kids easily tempted by the false intimacies of a rashly conceived project of amateur theatricals, into something of a shrewd judge of character who knew all along that Fanny was in love with her cousin Edmund; to show the characters of a comedy of manners cavorting around an English country house without manners and without decorum; this is to miss the whole point of Jane Austen.

Fortunately, there is still the book.  And there is also the 1983 BBC production available on DVD, “faithful to the novel and soooooo booooooring,” thank goodness.

Party Splitting Time

Everyone is accusing everyone else of splitting the party. On the Republican side it started with Mike Huckabee, who seemed to be splitting the evangelicals off from the economic and national-security conservatives. Then it was John McCain splitting national-security conservatives off and seeming to diss the economic conservatives and the social conservatives.

Then the Clinton tag team started playing gender cards and race cards within the Democratic Party by ridiculing and then polarizing Barack Obama.

Then the great Rush Limbaugh said that he might sit the election out if certain candidates won the Republican nomination. They know who they are.

Now Peggy Noonan says it’s all Bush’s fault. It was he that split the Republican Party.

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Look fellas, let’s cool it a little. This is primary season. This is the time when the parties are supposed to tear themselves apart. This is when the candidates try to get the 51 percent of the party that they need to win the nomination. This is beneficial. We get to find out what the party factions really think and what they are ready to vote for—or more likely vote against.

But we won’t really know if permanent damage was done until after the general election.

If the Democratic Party splits over Clinton v. Obama we’ll know about it in November. If the Republican Party splits over McCain, we’ll know it in November.

Things change. Great political coalitions form and then they break up. I’d say that, if anything, we are overdue for a major party split. And like earthquakes, you expect a big one when things have been quiet for too long.

I’d say that the Democrats are more vulnerable to a split. The fact is that blacks and Latinos don’t like each other. Something’s got to give as the animosity between blacks and Latinos starts to bite.

But what do I know?

Stimulus Plan Could Be Worse

Helicopter Money. That’s what Larry Kudlow calls it. The economic stimulus deal between the White House and House leaders announced today primarily amounts to a plan to borrow money from investors and give it to taxpayers. Up to $600 per person and more if you are married with children.

But if you want economic stimulus instead of the satisfaction of “doing something” then the way to stimulate the economy is to lower the marginal cost of doing business. You could lower the marginal tax rate on corporate profits. Or you lower the marginal tax rate on capital gains.

There is also to be a “temporary” increase in the maximum size of mortgages bought by Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae. So that means we are going to increase the subsidy on home ownership.

Don’t mind me, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to start moderating the subsidies for home ownership? If you want someone to blame for the mortgage mess then it starts with the Home Loan Bank started in the Great Depression. Then there were the politically-connected Savings and Loans with their 30 year fixed rate loans. Then there was the government-insured FHA loan. Then there were Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae. And every time there was a blip in home prices the subsidies were cranked up another notch.

I have a dream of an America in which house prices were not sky high. It would really help young people. A good way to do that would be to slowly reduce the amount you can borrow against your house. And another way would be to slowly unwind the government-sponsored mortgage giants like Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae.

When you subsidize something you get more of it and you jack up the price for it. The folks who owned the “something” before the subsidy get a windfall. The rest of us just end up paying more for less.

Don’t mind me. I bought home construction stocks a month or so ago, so increased subsidies for housing will just crank up the value of my investment.

The Economy: Now What?

Last week Wall Street was calling for a cut of 50 basis points in the Fed Funds rate. And just to get the Fed’s attention international markets tanked over the MLK holiday weekend.

So what did the Fed do? Well we all know now. It topped Wall Street and made a 75 basis point cut, reducing the Fed Funds rate to 3.5 percent. A “panic” cut, according to the British media.

Well, yes, but if you look at other short term rates, not out of line.

But we ordinary mortals must wonder: Is this 1929 all over again, or what? The simple answer is that nobody knows.

But there are a couple of good signs amidst the gloom and doom. First of all, the Libor rate has come down from being about 50 to 75 basis points above the Fed Funds rate. A month ago the 3-month Libor was at 4.86 percent. Today Bloomberg has the 3-month Libor at 3.33 percent. That means that the banks are lending to each other again. Maybe the credit crunch is over.

And the housing construction stocks are up sharply since Tuesday. Why would that be? Well how about the 15-year mortgage rate coming down below 5 percent. Six months ago it was at 6 percent; now it’s at 4.8 percent.

No doubt we still have a leg or two to go in the bear market, and maybe a full-blooded recession. But maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Why Republicans Don't Appeal to Blacks

In an article about the identity politics now playing at a Democratic presidential debate near you Lisa Schiffren lays out the simple reason why Republicans have never succeeded in attracting black votes.

In my bleeding-heart conservative youth, I once complained to Spencer Abraham — then the head of the Michigan GOP — that Republicans didn’t try hard enough to attract black voters. He repeated the then-current wisdom of the great, hard-bitten GOP strategist Lee Atwater. Atwater was convinced that the very process of attracting urban black voters would cost votes from the GOP base — not because the base was racist, but because white non-urban voters opposed the big-government programs that typically won black voters’ allegiance. There simply weren’t enough black votes to make it worthwhile for the GOP to court them and risk losing their base. It would be a net loss if it worked. Case closed.

What that means is that Republicans will start appealing to blacks when blacks decide that the politics of government programs is not for them. And right now there is hope on that front.

In City Journal Steven Malanga writes that blacks are suddenly waking up to find that Hispanics are elbowing their way past blacks for a seat at the government trough.

What’s the point, they say, of these quotas and set-asides if they don’t benefit us? What indeed?

Identity politics cuts both ways. It can give and it can take away.

MLK, Roe, and Conservatism

A week ago presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got herself into hot water by making the point that it is presidents like Lyndon Johnson that write the laws and not activists like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

She has a point. Politicians do tend to come along at the last minute and suck up all the oxygen in the room when they take credit for movements that have been decades in the making.

In my view it is not politicians that count. It is the people who think thoughts and the actors who lead movements and activist organizations.

But never mind. Maybe we want people like Hillary Clinton to believe that it is politicians that count, not ordinary people and not extraordinary people like the Rev. King.

This day is not just Martin Luther King Day. It is also the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. And it is also a day to think about the importance not of changing the law but of “changing hearts and minds.”

When the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade it changed the law of the land. But it did not change the culture. Initially, the pro-life movement that arose in opposition took the same road. It worked on changing the law.

But we can see now that the important work for the pro-life movement is not changing the law, it is changing hearts and minds. When you have changed hearts and minds the work of the politicians in writing new laws is merely an afterthought.

And anyway, in my view the important thing is not to make abortion illegal, but to make it “safe, legal, and shameful.”

As conservatives face a rebuilding year, it is important, as John O’Sullivan wrote ten years ago in National Review, that conservatives work to reduce the amount of law in society. For the intensive law and bureaucracy regime is inherently anti-conservative. All that law, he asserts,

[I]t discredits the dispersed moral sentiments of traditional society — such virtues as duty, fidelity, and chastity — which enable that society to work spontaneously without too close a bureaucratic supervision.

That is what liberals don’t understand. When you kick away the props of society, the virtues of duty, fidelity, and chastity, then you have to do everything with expensive law and bureaucracy. And the truth is that there just isn’t enought bandwidth to do that successfully. The social emotions, shame, guilt, love, and generosity, are much more efficient in ordering society.

So we don’t want women to fear doing something illegal when they have an abortion. That is so liberal and so bureaucratic. We want them, and the fathers of their children, to fear the shame of it: killing the fruit of their union.

Back of the Bus No More

It’s always good to hear the sensible words of the adults after a week or so of ranting and raging by the kids.

So today Charles Krauthammer opines on the LBJ-MLK flap. 

You remember.  Hillary Clinton said that it is presidents that get things done.  It took Lyndon Johnson to pass the civil rights acts of the 1960s. 

That is true, and it is true for a shameful reason.  Back in the 1960s blacks were disfranchised.  They had to get in the back of the bus and let the liberals lead on Capitol Hill.  Liberals have preened themselves on their nobility ever since.

Today, that arrangement — white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty — is a demeaning anachronism.

And that is why blacks have reacted with offense and outrage over the patronizing remarks of the Clintons on race.

For conservatives there is a real frisson of Schadenfreude over white liberal Democrats getting the Treatment over race.  We risk the Treatment any time we open our mouths.  And couldn’t happen to more deserving people.  Krauthammer

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil rights-era agenda.

Today there is a black man running a mainstream campaign for a major party presidential nomination.

What Barack Obama is saying by his presence as a major contender with a real chance at winning the nomination is that it is time for blacks to get out of the back of the political bus.  They don’t need liberals to front for them any more.

And liberals are shocked.  How could blacks forget all that we have done for them, they whimper.

But this is an old story.  The history of the United States is full of hyphenated Americans that grew up in the motherly embrace of the Democratic Party.  And then the day came when it was time to grow up.  It became time to throw off the hyphen and become an American.

African-Americans have had as rough a time getting to that moment as any group in US history.  But now it looks like they are getting there.  And one of the rites of passage is to throw off your allegiance to the Democratic Party, to leave the liberal plantation.

We conservatives say: Welcome!  There is nothing in the world like being an American.

Freakologic: Making Life Logical

After a stunning success with The Undercover Economist, British economist Tim Harford is out with a new book, The Logic of Life. It’s all about the logical choices that people make in their lives.  For instance, how would you think that women react when a lot of men are in prison?

The more men are in prison, the more likely women are to get themselves a job, and the more likely they are to go to college.

In New Mexico, according to Harford, 30 percent of young black men are in jail.  So that means that young black women are very unlikely to marry. 

Of course, it works both ways.  The men that don’t go to jail find that there are lots of women available, so they are less inclined to get married.  Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

And so it goes, according to Harford.  What about the rise in divorce?  Can you explain that logically? 

Well, a century ago, looking after a family was so time consuming that a radical division of labor in the home was essential.  But once modern labor-saving devices came along, the importance of the domestic division of labor declined.  The cost of divorce went down.  So more people got divorced.  And when the supply of divorced people increased the cost of finding a suitable new mate went down too.

When the cost of divorce went down, more women could afford to pay the cost of getting out of an abusive relationship.  That had an effect on men.

The result? Domestic violence fell by almost a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners fell by ten percent. Female suicide also fell.

Obviously, that’s not the whole story.  And maybe the decline of divorce in recent years is a sign that people are learning to be more careful about getting married and better behaved once they commit.

But it’s interesting to think that the left-wing agenda of destroying the family was actually helped by the conservative reaction to high crime rates.  With lots of men in jail, lower-class women responded by avoiding marriage completely.

And the ready availability of government assistance made the choice less expensive.

It’s something to think about in the years ahead as conservatives journey in the wilderness of the Clinton-Obama administration.

The Reagan-Bush Era Is Over

Last Sunday Newt Gingrich went on George Stefanopoulos’ ABC Sunday show and said that the Reagan era was over.  Said Newt:

We are at the end of the George W. Bush era.  We are at the end of the Reagan era. We’re at a point in time when we’re about to start redefining — as a number of people started talking about, starting to redefine — the nature of the Republican Party, in response to what the country needs.

Rush Limbaugh was not amused.  To him the Reagan era is not just an era. Said he: “I don’t think the Reagan era is anything other than conservatism.  And I don’t think conservatism is over.”

Yesterday Newt came on Rush’s show to ’splain himself.  And really, it turned out that Newt and Rush were saying the same thing, only on different pages.  Said Newt:

Reagan gave a speech on the creative society.  He said, "Public officials are elected primarily for one purpose, to solve public problems."  Now, that’s what I was trying to get at.  We need a 2008 agenda that is as bold for us as Reagan was in 1975[.]

My view, opposed to both Rush and Newt is that there’s a problem with the Reagan vision.  It is excessively masculine. 

It misses the point to say, as Newt says:

I think the challenge is for our generation to come up with a platform that is as bold, a set of solutions that are as bold, as Reagan was in 1979-1980.

That’s how you speak to men and rally them for battle.  But what about women?  Republicans already have nearly all the men who don’t live on Social Security or who work for the government.  But what about women?

Women are risk averse.  They don’t want bold solutions.  They just want things to work.  They want schools that meet the special needs of their children and they want health care that meets the health needs of their family. They just want the resources to care for the people they love.

In the last century it has been Democrats that have communicated best with women by promising to deliver resources.  Yes, said Democrats, we care about the kids.  We care about health care.  We care about senior citizens.

But what Democrats delivered were cruel bureaucracies.  They delivered school bureaucracies that delivered paychecks and pensions to teachers, but didn’t deliver much education to children.  They delivered an incredibly expensive government-dominated system of health care.  And they encouraged people to warehouse their parents in “assisted living.”

And that is to say nothing about the destruction of the family by big government programs.

In my view there is an opening to start communicating with women about a better way to care for children, to provide health care and to care for seniors.  One that puts women at the center of the care network, not bureaucracies and government programs.

But it will not be about anything that Rush or Newt understands.

Dem Political Poker

In the last generation our Democratic card sharps have had a grand old time playing the race card, or the gender card, or the class card in the nation’s political card rooms. Time after time they cleaned the clocks of poor unsuspecting Republican fish. What great fun it all was!

Until now.

There was always the danger, of course, that one day some ruthless Democrat would decide to play the card on a fellow Democrat for crude political gain. But generations of Republicans have gone to their Maker without it happening.

Until now.

This morning, Rush Limbaugh was in full chortle, playing “Johnny Comes Marching Home” from the soundtrack of Dr Strangelove while he intoned about the Democrats’ Uncivil War.

We’ve got Hillary! playing the gender card, Obama playing the race card, and Edwards playing the class card.

The only thing missing is that nobody has played the gay card. Not yet.

The question is: Which one of them is bluffing?

Primaries Expose Party Splits

In a useful review of the campaign season thus far, Michael Barone finds that the candidates are exposing the fault lines in the two major parties.  First the Democrats:

One faction of the Democratic Party is relatively upscale, well-educated, young. This faction is supporting Barack Obama. The other faction is relatively downscale, less-educated, old. This faction is supporting Hillary Clinton.

The mainstream media loves to play the game of split-the-Republicans, but you have to wonder if the split between secular liberal university professors and single mothers isn’t a political tsunami waiting to happen.  Looking back to the days of FDR and JFK:

The Democratic primary electorate was heavily downscale, ethnic and religious. But now the two factions are roughly equal in size. The downscale constituency has tended to prevail, but not always and not inevitably.

Of course, these two factions are joined at the hip, because it is the hip professors and MPA graduates that administer and dispense the benefits of the welfare state to the downscale victims while reserving a reasonable and customary slice for themselves.  But sometimes people forget who their friends are.

The Republicans have more factions:

• Huckabee is the candidate of the “religious conservatives and no-one else.”
• Fred Thompson competes for the same plus the southern-accented.
• John McCain appeals to “the remnants and descendants of the historic Protestant Yankee base of the party.”
• “Rudy Giuliani, with his liberal positions on cultural issues... [appeals to the] ethnic and metropolitan.”
• “Mitt Romney’s appeal seems to be strongest among economic conservatives, impressed perhaps by his business record and untroubled by his switches on cultural issues.”

That’s the way it should be, of course.  Each of the factions puts up their own candidate.  But what does it all mean?

Barone thinks that the Democratic race could be decided by February 5.  But the Republicans are likely to take longer.

The problem is that the longer the party factions are fighting, the harder it will be to bring them together for the general election battle.

The primary battle is important.  The conflict is a test of strength and will, and it allows the factions to decide if they really want to belong to the party any more.

Usually they do want to stay.  But sometimes they don’t, and that is when the fun really begins.

The Bonfire of the Multicultural Vanities

Does New York Times columnist David Brooks nail it, or does he nail it?  This contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party between a white woman and a black man is turning into a bonfire of the multicultural vanities, he advises. 

Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

As we wrote here yesterday.  It was grand fun to play the race card when a black man was running against an eevil racist Republican, or play the gender card when a white woman was running against an eevil sexist conservative.  Serve those dead white males right.  But now the game of identity politics is turning into a civil war in the Democratic Party

The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

I know what you are saying.  It couldn’t happen to more deserving people.  Let the feminist sexists and the black racists slug it out.  They deserve each other.  That’s what Brooks says, more politely.  And then he delivers the payoff:

The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.

That’s a good point.  We haven’t heard from Latinos yet.  In fact, I should think it is insensitive of the two racist sexist combatants not to have considered the feelings of Latinos.   It is demeaning to conduct the contest for the Democratic nomination purely in terms of sexism and black/white racism.

What about La Raza?  What about La Reconquista?  What about the identity of the folks cruelly conquered and enslaved by dead white Spanish conquerors?

Liberal Fascism Over the Rainbow

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow
States aren’t blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the libs are far behind me
Where programs melt like lemondrops
And shrink below the budget tops
That’s where you’ll find me

Daily when the netrooter
Lib’rals cry
“Fascist Neanderthaler”
Why then, oh why can’t I?

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the libs are far behind me
Where programs melt like lemondrops
And shrink below the budget tops
That’s where you’ll find me

In the faculty lounge when
Lib’rals cry
“Fascist bigot are you,” then
Why then, oh why can’t I?

If happy little lib’rals cry
“You know you’re fascists”
Why, oh why can’t I?

The World's Cheapest Car: Tata Nano

Some things are more important than politics, as we all know.  The children, for example.

Also personal transportation.  And today there was a milestone in personal transportation. 

You can get a measure of the excitement from Richard S. Chang of the New York Times reporting from India. 

Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

And now it is here, the 4-passenger Tata Nano, available for a price of 1 lakh rupees later this year.

The Indian media is naturally very proud.  The Hindustan Times reports:

Nano, Tata Motors’ Rs 1,00,000 "people’s car" unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi on Thursday will help the common man shift from two-wheelers to four-wheelers, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said.

“This is a proud moment for India,” he said.

Unfamiliar with rupees and lakhs?  Oh, fie, what kind of a multiculturalist are you?

A “lakh” is 100,000.  The Indians also have another important number, the “crore.”  The crore is 100 lakh, or 10 million.  You can check out the Indian number system here.  One interesting aspect of this is that a crore is written as 1,00,00,000.  What do you think of that?

The confusion is that we have a mixture of Greek in “nano” and Indian in “lakh.”  Are you still with me?

OK, I’ll stop with the multi-culti stuff.  The Tata Nano comes in at $2,500.  Which is some kind of a price.

Some people are upset about this.  They are worried about saving the planet.  Imagine tens of crores of Indians driving around in these little Nanos!  It will kill the planet and cause glaciers in Greenland to melt.

But I am thinking of something more prosaic.  Right now, people of modest income in the developing world tend to ride around on 125ml Honda motorcycles.  Sometimes the whole family is draped across the bike.  This is not safe.  Now families can ride in their four-wheeled Tata Nano with its 2-cylinder 33 hp 660ml engine.  It will be much safer.

Other people are worried about “chaos” on the pot-holed rural roads of India.

There’s solution to that, of course.  Build more roads!  Most of the populated areas of India are dead flat, so it shouldn’t be too expensive.

Clinton Gender Card Threepeat

Nobody ever accused the Clintons of modesty.  So it is not surprising that, in the crisis of New Hampshire, they played the gender card.  They did it before, and it worked.

But to play the gender card three times in one weekend.  That’s positively Clintonian!

It even got to Andrew Sullivan:

The Clinton machine is now poised to pull every partisan lever and deploy every cheap tactic: the gender card, the elderly card, the 527s, the teachers’ unions, AFSCME, the Human Rights Campaign, the super-delegates, and the core Democratic base.

And you could tell it was all planned by listening to Bill on the morning after, retelling the story of Hillary tearing up.  Writes Toby Harnden, quoting Bill:

"She was genuinely moved that in the middle of a political campaign another person would actually express a genuine level of concern for her," he told Telegraph.co.uk after had she eked out a surprise two-point victory.

"It was quite touching. You know, people forget that the people that do this are human. She was just very moved by it."

Er, not exactly.  Many of us constantly marvel how candidates manage to keep going.  And we are especially aware that Hillary is 60ish and John McCain is 70ish.  What they forget is just how ruthless the Clintons can be.

As for me, I’d like to know who those “iron my shirts” chappies were.

I expect that there are several professional investigative reporters from the mainstream media interviewing them at this very moment. Not.

It’s time for Barack Obama to play the race card.  It’s not as if he hasn’t pulled any stunts in previous campaigns.

These guys deserve each other.

Is the Right Wrong?

Ten years ago, Daniel Finkelstein was an advisor to the doomed Conservative government of British Prime Minister John Major.  He knew that the Conservatives were going to lose, and that the Conservatives had to change.  “Then what are you waiting for?” said an American friend.

Now FInkelstein wants to return the compliment.

What do the Republicans do if they lose? They have to change, and change profoundly. They will have to move towards voters. And are they going to lose? It is extremely likely that they will. So what are they waiting for?

But this is to confuse tactics and strategy.

In the present US election cycle after Iowa and New Hampshire it is clear that the Reagan-Bush coalition is hurting.  One after another, Republican primary voters seem to be trying out the non-Reagan-Bush candidates.  First Mike Huckabee won in Iowa.  You could call him a social-only conservative.  Then John McCain won.  You could call him and national-security-only conservative.  The voters seem to be dancing nervously around Mitt Romney, the official candidate of the full-spectrum conservative right that includes the full menu of social conservatism, economic conservatism, and national conservatism.

But will it matter?  Chances are that the American people will choose “change,” either the meat-and-potatoes change of Hillary Clinton or the change-as-hope change of Barack Obama.

That’s what happened to the British Conservatives in 1997.  The voters were tired of the Conservatives and enamored of change.  So they voted for the charismatic Tony Blair.  It was Wordsworth time:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

They didn’t want Conservatives.  Anything but that.  And they loved Tony Blair.  “Education, education, education,” he said.  “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime.”

Now we are ten years later.  The British people have had ten years of tax increases and ineffective government.  Education is in the toilet.  Crime is on the rise.  Welfare is in the toilet.

In response, the Conservative Party is coming out with a radical conservative program.  They just announced a radical welfare reform program and the media asked them why it wasn’t stronger.  They have a radical education reform program coming up that will feature choice.

What has happened is that the voters are fed up, and they are now willing to listen to the Conservative Party.  That’s the way the political system works.

Republicans have been in power on and off for 25 years.  They have made a lot of changes, and a lot of people are tired of it all.  They think it is Time for a Change.  They are right.

Of course, tactically, Republicans should keep in touch with the voters.  But strategically they should be planning for the next round of reform.  That will probably not come until Social Security and Medicare and the public schools “hit the buffers,” but that is the way the political system works.

"Liberal Fascism" Hits the Shelves

I got an email today from Barnes & Noble to tell me that my Liberal Fascism is on its way.

But I almost wish I had decided to go out and buy it at the store. Author Jonah Goldberg reports that some buyers are getting the dead fish treatment from the liberal store clerks, as in:

“The clerk made me say the name three times. She looked for it. Couldn’t find it. I made her go in the back. They were still in the box apparently. She looked like she wanted ice tongs when she picked it up.”

Or this:

“I had to ask the lady at the info desk to look it up - she had trouble. Couldn’t find it under the title, but found it under your name, and walked me over to it. Handed it to me like she was handling a dead fish. Heh, that last part could be my imagination, but as a conservative who loves bookstores I always brace for the stereotypical lib clerk in the big box bookstore.”

The importance of Liberal Fascism is of course that, in the words of Daniel Pipes, it contradicts

the political spectrum that has shaped our worldview since the late 1930s, which places communism at the far left, followed by socialism, liberalism in the center, conservatism, and then fascism on the far right.

In the 1920s and early 1930s every fashionable was a socialist or a national socialist or a fascist. It was Stalin’s idea to call everyone he disagreed with a “fascist.” His followers immediately understood that there was something profoundly different between socialism and national socialism. And they wrote the history books to make sure everyone else did too.

But Goldberg’s book offers a new way of looking at political allegiance.

His revised political spectrum would focus on the role of the state and go from libertarianism to conservatism to fascism in its many guises — American, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and so on.

You could also use the same spectrum to indicate the involvement of the little platoons, voluntary associations outside the political sector, with libertarians maximizing voluntary associations and the various fascisms eliminating them.

Winning the Obama Way

They say that the Clintons invented and patented the politics of personal destruction.

But then there’s Senator Barack Obama.  According to Kyle-Anne Shiver in the American Thinker Obama won his first elected office with a bit of fancy footwork.  He was running for the Illinois State Senate against the incumbent Alice Palmer.  Palmer had failed in a run for Congress and filed to run for her old job.  According to Shiver:

[Obama] sent his aides to the courthouse to carefully examine all of Alice Palmer’s signatures to see if enough could be disallowed to knock her off the ballot altogether.  And indeed, some of Alice’s signatures were fake.  The aides also found enough other fake signatures on opponents’ ballot initiatives to knock them off the ballot as well.

Well whaddya know?  That’s what you call the Al Davis way: Just Win Baby.

Then in 2004 Obama ran for the United States Senate and Obama was up against a multimillionare businessman Blair Hull in the Democratic primary.  Then came the bombshell, as David Mendell reported in the Chicago Tribune, and

multimillionaire Blair Hull plummeted from front-runner status amid revelations that an ex-wife had alleged in divorce papers that he had physically and verbally abused her.

Just Win Baby.

In the general election, Obama was up against wealthy, goodlooking Jack Ryan, According to CBS News reported Dean Reynolds:

Unfortunately for Ryan, he also spent time frequenting some shady bars in Paris where live sex acts were apparently part of the draw. Nor did it help that Ryan’s ex-wife alleged that he urged her to participate in said acts when they were married.

So Obama ended up running against perennial candidate Alan Keyes, who wasn’t even a resident of Illinois, and the rest is history.

Al Davis would be proud, don’t you think?

But we need another term for the “politics of personal destruction,” forever associated with the Clintons and their War Room. 

Because Obama is a nice guy, not like those evil Clintons.

Some people might say that Obama and the Clintons deserve each other.

What Is This Thing Called "Change?"

Dear old Rush is in better case today than he was Friday, on the day after the Iowa caucuses.

But he confesses to being flummoxed by all this talk of “change.” That’s because, as far as he can tell, a chap like Barack Obama doesn’t represent change at all, but just same-old-same-old adding another layer of government programs on the already rather substantial government program cake.

Rush is thinking like a political activist, not like an ordinary voter.

Voters are not saying that they want to change the government programs; they are just saying that they want a change at the top. They are tired and frightened by the “stress” of the Bush years, which has been one thing after another. First there was the tech bust and the biggest bear market in a generation. Then came the housing boom, which was reported as an exciting party but was probably, for many voters, very frightening. Now we have the housing bust and a possible recession. People are right to be scared of that Dynamic Duo.

Then there’s the Iraq war. Voters might be less worried about Iraq if the political parties had been united on it. But the Democrats, driven by their anti-war base, have been using the Iraq war for partisan political ends, and so the voters are torn and conflicted.

That’s why I keep saying that we need a Democrat in the White House in 2009. We need to know what Democrats would really do if they were in charge of the war on terror, and we need to know what they would really do in reforming the domestic programs of the United States.

Then Republicans could do some serious thinking and policy analysis. There’s plenty to do. The welfare state has been growing for 70 years and is more or less completely unreformed.

What do the voters want? Who knows?

The SST BizJet

Enough of the sainted Barack Obama starring in “The Fall of the House of Clinton.”  Enough of the end of the Romney campaign.  Or is it the mean-spirited John McCain and his Straight Snark Express.

Let’s talk about guy stuff, like a new $80 million business jet that’s designed to carry 12 important executives at Mach 1.6 non-stop for up to 4,600 miles.

Of course, it is nothing to do with prestige and getting there before the ordinary hoi polloi in their airborne Greyhound buses.  As Ben Webster reports, it has nothing to do with that.  At least that is what the chaps at Aerion say.

“There is a saying that you can tell the men from the boys by the price of their toys,” said Brian Barents, Aerion’s vice-chairman and a former supersonic fighter pilot for the US Air Force. “But while prestige is a factor, this is primarily a timesaving tool to make executives more productive.”

Yes.  Of course, no ego stuff here, merely hard-working executives trying to be more productive!

To get a flavor of the design, you should go to Aerion’s website.  But think about this.  First of all, this 12-seat plane will have Pratt and Whitney JT8D engines.  That’s the turbofan that powers the twin-jet100-seat MD-80!  Got enough power, chaps?

Length	148 ft
Width	62 ft
Max Speed	Mach 1.6
Max Takeoff Weight	90,000 lbs
Max Fuel Weight	45,400 lbs

Imagine that!  The plane is half the length of a football field. Half of the takeoff weight will be fuel.  Well, when you strap on a couple of 20,000 lb thrust engines, what do you expect?

How soon will it be when everyone who is someone will have to have one of these?

The Horse-race After Iowa

The glorious thing about presidential politics in the US is that it really is an open process.  An outsider really can come in and change the politics of the United States.

Last night two outsider candidates came in and beat the establishment, politics-by-the-numbers candidates.

Of course, Harvard-educated Barack Obama isn’t really such an outsider, and neither is Governor Huckabee.  But they certainly cleaned the clocks of insiders Clinton and Romney.

In an NRO Roundtable Richard Brookhiser pointed out that Mike Huckabee is not a religious-right candidate in the mold of Pat Robertson.

In one important respect, Huckabee’s supporters have made a wiser choice than their soul-mates 20 years ago. Their man has been a governor and a lieutenant governor.

Of course, as Daniel Casse remarks, the left thinks that they’ll make hamburger out of Mike Huckabee.

I don’t know what Huckabee means for conservatism. But it promises a helluva party for the angry Left. Since Thanksgiving, the New York Times has been positively giddy about the possibility that the GOP was firmly in the hands of a genuine Bible-thumper.

If the Left thinks that, they had better be careful.  The Democratic base may be violently secular, but the moderate general election voters are not.  Mike Huckabee is a wily politician, and very good at negative politics.  He could eat the Angry Left for lunch.

Going forward, I am reminded that for most of us, what matters most is that the candidates we don’t like lose.

On the Democratic side, I can live with Obama, but I really don’t like Edwards and Clinton.

On the Republican side, I can live with Huckabee, Romney, or Giuliani.  But I really don’t like John McCain.

So I’m rooting for the independent voters to pile on for Obama in New Hampshire.  Don’t disappoint me, fellas!

Conservatives Need Not Apply

The august New York Times has decided to give conservative William Kristol a column on the editorial page.  Not a bad idea, you’d think. Kristol represents a fairly centrist big-government conservatism that ought to go down fairly well with the big-government liberals that read the Times.

But you’d be wrong.  The NYT readers are beside themselves. Writes Harry Stein, author of How I Accidentally Joined the Right-wing Conspiracy, the reaction was

Sputtering fury. Vicious name-calling. Denunciations of the Times for this unspeakable act. Threats to cancel subscriptions and otherwise exact revenge.

Editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal was surprised.

Kristol “is a serious, respected conservative intellectual—and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that?”

Er, yes.  Intolerant.  And liberals are experts on that.  But maybe Rosenthal doesn’t really understand his readers.  Not like we right-wingnuts understand ’em.  Because, you see, we get to experience the incoming rounds from them, every day of our lives.  Says accidental conservative Stein:

Can Rosenthal truly be so unaware of the character of his own core readership? Does he actually believe that they’re open to challenge, or even reasonable back-and-forth? Doesn’t he read his own paper’s letters page? “David Brooks can write the mildest column in the world,” Bernard Goldberg observes, “and the letters to the editor act like he’s Hitler.”

I know.  It’s all too delicious for words.

But I blame Al Gore.  It was he who stirred up the party faithful after the contested 2000 election and, characteristically, never really conceded the election.  Democrats decided it wouldn’t hurt to keep their partisans in a frenzy.

In my judgement, this was a strategic error, one that prevents the Democrats from making sensible course corrections from their left-wing orthodoxy.

But first, they get to win in 2008.  Then watch it all fall apart.

On the Day Before

Tomorrow, Friday, January 3, 2008, they will start counting the first votes in the 2008 presidential election. All the hype will start converting into Ws and Ls.

In the Republican race it seems that the most professional candidate, the guy who has spent the money and built the organization, and plotted the most detailed strategy—Mitt Romney—is challenged by two candidates without much of either.

In Iowa, Mike Huckabee has come to challenge Mitt Romney, but lacking money and organization has had to rely on stunts like announcing that he’s not going to run his negative ad. Now he’s off to Burbank, CA, to appear on the Tonight Show.

In New Hampshire John McCain has been working the local media and has come up in the polls.

Can stunts and media attention beat organization and ground game? We’ll soon know the answer.

My guess is that organization and strategy will win out and that after Iowa and New Hampshire Mitt Romney will be in pole position.

But what do I know? We should never forget the first rule of wisdom. It applies also to politics: Nobody knows nuttin’.

What about the Democrats? I’m not sure that I care. I don’t have a dog in that fight. But at least Democrats have a decent choice. They have a Lover in Obama, a Hater in Edwards, and a Clinton in Hillary!