Race Bureaucrat Worries About Obama

The chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Britain has created a firestorm by writing that the candidacy of Barack Obama postpones the racial healing of America.  Trevor Phillips, a Caribbean black, writes that for whites

A vote for Obama is a pain-free negation of their own racism.

With Obama, whites can say, OK.  Now we voted for a black.  Let’s call an end to the stain of slavery and the politics of guilt and get on with a post-racial America.   I’ve talked to white friends, and we agree.  Obama represents a chance to escape from the racial politics of the last generation.  We are fed up to the back teeth with having race rammed down our throats by the race-relations industry, what you might call Big Race.  We don’t feel guilty.  We are proud that in two hundred years the west has moved from the universal, immemorial acceptance of slavery to the present situation where all racial inequality is scandalous.

But for Phillips this is far too easy. (Well, of course, he’s made his career out of the politics of liberal white guilt.)  You don’t understand race until you

grasp how profoundly race shapes everyday encounters in the US.

The idea that black problems can be swept under the rug and conveniently assigned to cultural failure “downplays the impact of globalisation on poor communities.”

Of course, Phillips has it all wrong.  It is not “race that shapes everyday encounters in the US.”  It is liberal political power that forces race to the center of national life. 

That is because liberal political power depends upon keeping race as a festering sore.  If we wound up the race laws—the welfare programs, the quota programs, the human rights commissions—but fiercely enforced laws on color-blindness then blacks would get to work and whites would lose their guilt.

There would be a huge sigh of relief.  Right now whites live with the reality that any encounter with a black person could lead to disaster.  You never know when you might say something or do something wrong and be hauled up before some liberal tribunal and stripped of your job, your career, and your reputation.  The safest thing is to avoid black people and say nothing when you are around them.

Imagine an America without the stain of liberal race persecution!

It would mark the true beginning of post-racial America.

But liberals like Trevor Phillips would lose their power. And we can’t have that.

Media Turns on Clintons

The fundamental thing to understand about the media is the blood-in-the-water principle.

The media is always lovey-dovey with people in power. But as soon as there’s blood in the water, and a powerful person appears wounded, then the media sharks appear from near and far to take a bite. It’s called the feeding frenzy.

I remember when I first understood this. It was twenty years ago when the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Jack Patera, was fired. All of a sudden we learned that the sports personalities who had been interviewing Patera on the “Jack Patera Show” before every Seahawks game for years—with Jack this and Jack that—never really liked the guy. And they thought he was a lousy coach. Oh good. Now they tell us.

This week it looks like there’s blood in the water for the Clintons. Jennifer Rubin writes that the media really don’t like the Clintons. She quotes Tucker Carlson:

They’re awful to the media: let’s be totally blunt. They’re awful to the press. They treat the press like enemies. [Clinton Communication Director] Howard Wolfson’s always calling around threatening people. Threatening people! News organizations! They do that! People hate you if you do that. I mean, they’ve earned the enmity of the press, in my view. They have. I mean, it’s been hard but they’ve done it.

Really. You mean all along in the Nineties while the MSM was rolling on the floor at Bill Clinton’s feet they really didn’t like him? And the Clintons are meanie-jellybeanies? Now you tell us.

OK. I’m grownup. I can take it.

This must mean that Hillary Clinton really is down for the count. Forget the polls. The Texas and Ohio primaries are going to be blowouts. It’s blood-in-the-water time. Sharks appearing from near and far. Feeding frenzy. Otherwise nobody would dare.

I reckon that over the years the Clintons have probably used their power to wreck the careers of several journalists they didn’t like. It’s the sort of thing that media insiders all know about. Only we never got to read about it.

Well, you wouldn’t want to cross the powerful Clintons.

Not until now.

Bill Buckley Dead at 82

Even the New York Times agrees that William F. Buckley, Jr., dead at 82, was essential to the modern American conservative movement. Quoting Hugh Kenner, Douglas Martin writes:

“Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”

I’m not sure that Bill Buckley had many good ideas, but he put his head above the parapet and became, for 50 years, America’s Mr. Conservative. He made it difficult to assert that all conservatives were beetle-browed Torquemadas.

His high spirits, his kindness, his goodness, and his capacity for work were an inspiration to all.

His passing certainly emphasizes, as if we needed any reminding, that the conservative movement that grew out of Bill Buckley’s youthful enthusiasm in the 1950s, was joined by Jewish New York intellectuals in the late 1960s, was given national political power with Ronald Reagan, and was allied with ordinary religious people with the Christian Right, is now in retreat.

The call goes out now to a new generation to renew the conservative message, and Bill Buckley, always a sponsor of young talent, would be the first to second the call.

When Liberals Write About Religion

Ever since the Enlightenment liberals have liked to talk about religion as something they are separate from. Liberals are the voice of reason, freed from the superstitions of conservatives, reactionaries, and other simple people.

So when liberal religion writer Alan Wolfe writes in The Atlantic about “the coming religious peace,” he doesn’t mention the great secular religions. No, what he’s talking about is the coming peace between Islam and Christianity and their reconciliation into the modern secular world of reason and tolerance. What a good thing, to end this pernicious religious war.

Still, many people, he writes, are expecting an upsurge in religious violence.

A common worry is that intense competition for souls could produce another era in which religious conflict leads to religious war—only this time with nuclear weapons. If we are really in for anything like the kind of zeal that accompanied earlier periods of religious expansion, we might as well say goodbye to the Enlightenment and its principles of tolerance.

But don’t worry. Over most of the world, religious belief is declining.

[M]any areas of the world are experiencing a decline in religious belief and practice. Second, where religions are flourishing, they are also generally evolving—very often in ways that allow them to fit more easily into secular societies, and that weaken them as politically disruptive forces.

You can see what is going on here in the mind of Alan Wolfe. Religion and faith are things that other people do, and the Platonic Guardians like himself, looking at the world from a higher place—presumably up at the entrance to the Cave, far above the lesser mortals still chained and looking at shadows on the wall—can look forward to the day when the shadow-watchers will have seen the light.

But the great fact of the world since the Enlightenment has been the growth and militant expansion of secular religions like nationalism, socialism, fascism, and the “politics of meaning.” And that’s leaving out other enthusiasms like anarchism, New Age spirituality, and general left-wing terrorism like the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhof gang.

We conservatives see an inevitable clash, at some point, between the moderate, religious forces of democratic capitalism, and the secular religions which in general are arrayed against the gentle world of trust and reciprocity of the global commonwealth. They want to terminate the differentiation of society into separate political, economic, and moral/cultural sectors. They want to collapse these sectors into a nostalgic compact society secular politics and secular religion.

As a secularist, Alan Wolfe cannot see the persecutions carried out by the militant secularists: the endless secular propaganda on the media and in the schools, and the speech code enforcers, human rights commissions, and informal tribunals that daily show ordinary religious people the instruments of torture.

Yet that is where the flashpoint will occur. Between the militant secular believers and the moderate religious believers. But people like Alan Wolfe define the world to exclude such a possibility.

And in my view the clash will come over the question of human life. Secularist ethics is profoundly self-centered and directed towards amorphous questions like a free-floating compassion, obesity (!) and saving the planet with government programs. Religious ethics is centered around the need for people to purge themselves of selfishness and rage, to practice the difficult process of forgiveness and compassion towards those nearest and dearest and between generations within a family.

The question is how much inconvenience people are willing to tolerate with respect to inconvenient life. That would be inconvenient unborn life and inconvenient older life.

NYT Trashes Working Women

In politics, or at least the politics of personal destruction, anything goes.

So if the New York Times wants to trash John McCain by dredging up a ten year old story about McCain and an attractive female lobbyist, well all’s fair in love and war. Even if there’s no evidence, apart from the fears of staffers, that anything “happened.”

But think of what a story like this does to working women in general, writes Carol Platt Liebau.

Huh?

Remember the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings, she writes.

When Anita Hill launched her still-unproven assault on Clarence Thomas’ character seventeen years ago, men all over America discovered that their reputations could be threatened by a simple accusation from a woman, offered without even a scintilla of evidence[.]

Obviously the appropriate thing for men to do then was to minimize contact with attractive young professional women. Because you never knew when some liberal with an agenda would drag up some perfectly innocent relationship and use it as a bludgeon to ruin your career.

With last week’s McCain Smear, the New York Times has given the ratchet another twist.

Now, it seems that their fidelity to their wives can be publicly questioned for nothing more than spending time in the company of an attractive, young professional woman.

Obviously, feminists all over America should be descending on the New York Times with a hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned kind of rage.

Only they won’t. Because gender equity and the status of women in the workplace takes a back seat to liberal politics.

All across America, there are young women attempting to advance at work by being just as smart, just as prepared, and just as diligent as their male counterparts. But if the senior (most often male) employees they need to impress are hyper-sensitive about the reputational damage that can result from spending time with them, female workers going to be deprived of opportunities they need to showcase their talent.

Oh well. Too bad. That’s not as important as electing a Democrat for president, after all.

Obama: Read the Commenters

Never mind about the vapid messianic tone of the Obama campaign.  Never mind about his snobby wife’s disdain for America.  When you get down to specifics this is a pretty left-wing guy, writes The Times’ Gerard Baker

He plans large increases in government spending on health and education. He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist. He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.

Pretty normal comment, you’d think.  But Baker provoked a number of Obama-heads to respond.

Here’s one:

It is NOT unpatriotic to question your government or your country. It is the most patriotic thing you can do. Barack Obama is bringing my country hope, and it’s the most important thing a president can do for his country.

And this:

Coming from someone who is supposedly liberal and a campaign worker for Mr. Obama, I have not had anything to be proud about this country for until he came along.

A disabled voter:

I am a disabled mother... My fiancé is blind and he is disabled... And I haven’t been proud of my country since Bush took office!

Well, we know where she’s coming from.  And no, Obama isn’t a left-winger, retorts this writer:

Gerard Baker: He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist.
Barack Obama: I believe in the Free Market. I believe in Capitalism. I believe in Free Trade. I am not worried about us being able to compete anywhere on earth with American workers.

Of course, Obama is still fighting for Democratic votes right now.  We’ll get a better idea of his general election agenda in the months ahead. 

But let’s face it.  An Obama adminstration is going to feature another expansion of the welfare state and more national resources under the control of the political sector.

Like I keep saying.  We won’t abandon the follies of the welfare state until it hits the buffers.

"Another Reagan" Wouldn't Run

Today’s Republicans all live in hope of “another Reagan.”  Not a chance, says lawyer Ann Coulter.  It could never happen.  And you can think the campaign-finance laws for that.

I ask: How many Reagans have we lost to campaign-finance reform?

Coulter goes through the progress of Reagan from the first time that businessman Holmes Tuttle approached him with an offer to help finance him in a run for office.

At every step along the way, from the first $1,000 a plate fundraiser (now illegal at the inflated cost of about $7,000 a plate) to the nationwide broadcast of his speech “Rendezvous with History,” his run for the governership of California and his run for president, Reagan and his backers would have been stymied by the limits and the bookkeeping of modern campaign finance law.

It is appropriate, is it not, that the Republican presumptive nominee for president is an author of a campaign finance law.  What a coincidence.  It reminds me of the McGovern reforms of the nominating rules of the Democratic Party after the debacle of 1968.  Funny how McGovern turned out to the first beneficiary of those rules.

Coulter reckons that only four kinds of people can now run for office:

1. High-school fatties like Bill Clinton
2. Billionaires or near billionaires like Mitt Romney
3. Celebrities like Arnold
4. MSM-anointed candidates like McCain and Obama

Er, well yes.  But wasn’t Reagan something of a celebrity in his day?  B-movie actor and TV host?

Back to the drawing boards.

Really Proud of America

Liberals have always had a real problem feeling proud of America.  In fact you could say that the defining mark of an American liberal is that he or she is proudly ashamed of America.

So Michelle Obama’s statement that now, for the first time in her life, she could feel “really proud” of America is unremarkable.  All liberals think and feel similar thoughts until America does what they want for them.

But another Michelle, the notorious conservative “woman of color” Michelle Malkin, wants to know what planet Michelle Obama is living on.  Obama is seven years older than Malkin.

We were both adults when the Berlin Wall fell, Michelle. That was earth-shattering change.
We’ve lived through two decades’ worth of peaceful, if contentious, election cycles under the rule of law, which have brought about “change” and upheaval, both good and bad.

Then there are all the breakthroughs in medicine, communications, and technology of the last generation.

If American ingenuity, a robust constitutional republic, and the fall of communism don’t do it for you, hon, then how about American heroism and sacrifice?

Who couldn’t feel proud of the American response to the Indonesian earthquake, and the private response to Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.

There’s a problem here: a great American problem.  And it’s not America that’s the problem.  It’s American liberals and their snooty disdain for the nation that showered them with benefits and subsidies and made them into privileged Don’t-You-Know-Who-I-Am elitists utterly lacking in gratitude.

Now that’s an area where we really need “change.”

Clintons Snark on Obama

Our good friends at Clinton Central are shocked, shocked that Senator Barack Obama has been lifting chunks of his speeches out of other peoples’ speeches.  And they want us to be shocked too.  Mark Hemingway retails the Clinton spin weaved by Howard Wolfson:

“Senator Obama’s record as a legislator and a public official is thin. He has not had a long record in public life, so he is really asking us to judge him on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises,”

So, the argument goes, if his rhetoric belongs to someone else, well, you voters know what to think!

Then there is Michelle Obama who is getting an earful from conservatives by  suggesting that America had little for her to be proud about.  Until now.

“For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is making a comeback,” she said.

Well, you could think that if you believed that all the great achievements of the past twenty-five years were for naught. 

Even though an average American might feel that his country had not done anything lately, it is hard to imagine that this could be true for the daughter of a city pump operator like Michelle Obama who went on to graduate from Princeton and Harvard Law School.

Of course, it is probably a lot harder for the daughter of a white city pump operator to get to go to Princeton and Harvard Law like she did.  So maybe she has a point after all.

All this exquisite outrage is fine, of course.  But the question is: Do the American people give a darn? 

That is why we have elections.

Castro Steps Down At Last

Lefties say the darnedest things.  That’s because they regard the continuance in power of left-wing tyrannical regimes as a natural and harmless thing.  But they hate every moment in power of right-wing regimes, elected or not.

So you’d expect the left-wing BBC to take a benign view of the tyrannical Fidel Castro’s decision to step down after nearly 50 years as the dictator of Cuba.

After taking the line that Castro was provoked into aligning with the Soviet Union by US intransigence, we get to the payoff line.

But Cuba under his rule has made impressive domestic strides.

Good medical care is freely available for all, there is 98% literacy, and Cuba’s infant mortality rates compare favourably with Western nations.

Is it?  That’s not what I hear.  What I hear is that medical care is strictly rationed and only the elite get good medical care.  Even then, of course, Castro has a Spanish surgeon flown in to perform his abdominal surgery.   I hear that Cuba’s infant mortality rates are skewed because questionable infants are aborted in Cuba.  So as to keep the mortality rates favorable.

And as for the literacy rate?  How do you define literacy?  Does anyone know the methodology of Cuba’s literacy statistics?  Or is it a state secret?

In other words, the BBC is talking rubbish.

But, at least, Castro has stepped down.  In the last 50 years he has come as close as anyone can get to ruining his country.  All because, as the BBC says, as an impressionable youth,

shocked by the contrast between his own comfortable lifestyle and the dire poverty of so many others, he became a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary.

It might be more accurate to say something like this.

“Like many another ambitious young man of good family down the ages, Castro’s ambition tempted him into the excitement of violent revolutionary activity rather than the boredom of democratic politics.”

Obama's Immigration Problem

It’s no secret that the Democratic Party is a lot more “liberal” on immigration.  That’s partly because the political elite is pro-open-borders.  And partly because the Democrats are the party of Latinos.  And Latinos with relatives back home want their relatives to be able to immigrate to the US.

But Senator Barack Obama has a problem with Latinos.  And the problem is simple.  Latinos don’t like blacks.  For instance, while there remain a few whites who think that blacks are lazy, according to opinion polls, a majority of Latinos think that blacks are lazy.  You’ve got to be carefully taught, and that takes time.

It’s no secret that the major Democratic constituency remaining unexcited by Obama is Latinos.  It’s got to the point, as reported by Hugh Hewitt, that liberal organs like the Los Angeles Times are publishing editorials like "Hola, Obama," to plead with Latinos to get on board the Obama train.

But the strained relationship requires effort on both sides, from Latinos and from Obama.  That means, according to Hewitt that:

If Obama is the Democratic nominee, he will have to bid up the immigration proposals that cratered last year, even above the positions he has already taken.

But a broad majority of the American people strongly resist an “amnesty” on immigration.  So that could but Obama on the wrong side of a big issue.

Of course, if the mortgage meltdown continues, and a recession fully develops, immigration will be a secondary issue in November.

But who knows?

Obama-the-Empty-Suit Day

Funny how our noble punditoriate all manage to write the same story on the same day.

Yesterday, everyone was writing a Valentine to John McCain. Today it’s “Obama the Empty Suit”.

You might think this is shameful, or a sign of laziness. But I think it is the same phenomenon as the idea of the Japanese as one hundred million hearts beating as one.

The fact is that the same idea is always occurring to a bunch of people at the same time. You could look it up.

Let’s start with minor league John Hawkins.

If even Paul Krugman is willing to publicly admit that Barack Obama is a human featherball — a slick, smiling, substance-free empty suit who excites gullible dimwits by repeating the words "change," "unity," and "hope" over and over — then who am I, a mere conservative blogger, to disagree?

Or the rest of us sandlot players.

But then there is the magisterial big hitter hitting the same pitch.Charles Krauthammer. The most remarkable skill in the world is to get people to pay for something that’s available free, he suggests.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

We old veterans would never be taken in by a chancer like that, now, would we?

Even steady base-hitter Mona Charen has noticed the Obama effect. Old wine, new bottle, she reckons, because when you strip the gassy rhetoric away, there’s just same-old same-old.

Much of his rhetoric is lighter than air — almost content-free. It’s the past versus the future, hope over fear, one nation not two, yes we can, turn the page, and so forth. But when you get past the music and really focus on the lyrics, Obama emerges as an utterly conventional, down-the-line liberal Democrat. He claims to be all about the future, but his policy ideas are about as modern as disco and the leisure suit.

Even Jonah Goldberg has surfaced from his book tour to claim that all this talk of unity and coming together was exactly what he has been writing about in Liberal Fascism.

How long will the spell last? Krauthammer reckons it has a ways to go.

My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

Hmm. Mr. Optimist.

Valentines for McCain

It’s Valentine’s Day, so every Republican pundit is sending flowers to John McCain.

Michael Reagan writes that his father would have supported McCain. Ronald Reagan, he recalls, had a real dust-up against Jerry Ford in 1976.

When it was over and Ford had won, what did Ronald Reagan do? He simply went all-out to help Ford win his re-election, as did I and as did my sister Maureen. My dad simply followed his rule of backing the Republican candidate no matter who he was.

Larry Kudlow is for McCain. Why? He’s going to be the next president.

For starters, McCain will have a unified Republican Party — conservatives and all — working hard for him. He’s also going to win over the Reagan Democrats, the Bush Democrats and the Perot independents. These folks demand a strong military, want government off their backs, and are sick and tired of growing federal deficits and out-of-control spending. McCain’s their man.

Listen to Larry Elder. Sure, many Republicans are upset because McCain voted the wrong way on the tax cuts, on ANWR, and immigration.

But aren’t these I-can’t-pull-the-lever-for-McCain Republicans the same people who purport to care about A) the war in Iraq, B) the economy, and C) the Supreme Court?

Even old William Rusher puts in a word for John McCain.

He will be a formidable adversary for the Democrats. As I have warned before, 2008 has all the earmarks of being a Democratic year. The Republicans have held most of the major offices of government for eight years, and lots of people will think it’s simply the Democrats’ "turn." But Hillary, instead of McCain? Obama, instead of McCain? It makes one wonder.

Earmarks? So that’s it, then. John McCain’s our man.

Obama in the Driver's Seat?

After Senator Barack Obama convincingly won the Potomac Primary yesterday, is it time to start selling tickets to the Fall of the House of Clinton, as some wags call it?

Or have the reports of their death been grossly exaggerated?

RealClearPolitics’ resident political scientist and number-cruncher Jay Cost says: wait a minute, chaps. Take it easy with the claims of Obama momentum and inevitability.

Clinton’s losses in the contests are as explicable as any of her losses before or on Super Tuesday. Obama has systematically won states that play to his particular strengths since the Iowa caucus. So has Clinton. Her problem has been that she has not had any good states in the last week.

Of course, he says, there may indeed be momentum kicking in for Obama. It’s just that, given the data, the momentum effect is presently “undetectable.”

Cost analyzes the demographics of the upcoming states and reckons that the advantages for each candidate come out as a wash.

All in all, this implies a rough parity from here until the end of the primary season. Approximately speaking, neither candidate seems to have an advantage in the remaining contests. So, my suggestion to readers is not to get caught up in the "Obama is inevitable" storyline. Minimally, we should all remember how well the "Clinton is inevitable" storyline worked out five months ago!

But for those of us who are not Democrats the spectacle of the Democratic Party tying itself up in knots over race and gender is long overdue poetic justice. (See Maureen Dowd)

As it says in the Bible: Those who live by identity politics will die by identity politics.

At least, it would have said that if modern identity politics had been invented back then.

The Problem Isn't Just McCain

In the aftermath of Senator John McCain’s presumptive victory last week in the race for the Republicans presidential nomination the fur is starting to fly.

It’s a bit disappointing to see folks like writer Mark Helprin, along with Jack Kemp and others, dragged out to spank the reluctant orthodox conservatives into line. It makes you think that the McCainiacs actually want to expel the conservative wing from the Republican Party and reconstitute it as a moderate party.

Jonah Goldberg, on the other hand, does have something useful to say. He reminds disappointed conservatives that McCain’s agenda is not so far different from the agenda of the “compassionate conservative” President Bush. Both McCain and Bush are pro-immigrant amnesty. Both are pro-big-government. And when it comes to the judges, well, it was President Bush that nominated Harriet Miers.

If you take the drift of Goldberg’s argument, he is saying that Reagan conservatism ran out of gas about ten years ago. Since then it has been running on the fumes.

On that view McCain is not such a dreadful compromise, especially if you are willing to concede that the official conservative in the race, Mitt Romney, signally failed to catch fire and win the support of the broad Republican Party.

It also points out that conservatives have a lot of work to do before we can hope to return to the American people with a winning message. After all, if a true conservative can’t win the nomination of the conservative party it’s not likely that he could win the support of a majority of the American people.

The Trouble with an Establishment of Religion

Everyone has something to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suggestion that the adoption of some aspects of sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable.”

In the New York Post John O’Sullivan feels that the Archbishop is preemptively appeasing the Muslims in Britain.

He seems to be blessing a creeping development in British life that would divide the nation into religious ghettoes, reduce women’s rights and abolish one of Britain’s proudest achieve- ments: a rule of law that applies equally to everyone.

Everyone thinks he is a fool, and many people think he should resign.

But to me the flap is salutary. For it demonstrates the problem with a nation that has an “establishment of religion,” that is, an official government religion.

And I include in that, naturally, the established religion of the United States, the belief system of the educational and cultural elite which we call multiculturalism and diversity.

When you have an establishment of religion then all questions of moral and cultural values come under the sway of national politics. You get Archbishops preemptively deciding the future of cultural and moral change. Or, in the case of the government universities in the United States you get speech codes and persecution of conservatives who don’t fall in line with the elite cultural consensus.

This is all wrong when you look at society from the point of view of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

In Novak’s view we should think of modern society as differentiated into three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. Each sector is in some sense independent of the other sectors. Indeed it is their greater separation of powers that guarantees the future of freedom because each sector is deliberately denied the power to oppress the other sectors. And each sector is jealous of the powers of the other sectors and is always ready to point out when another sector is get above itself.

Now, it is obvious to me that all laws promulgated by the political sector issue in some way from the moral/cultural framework in society, the notion that people have of good and evil. When you have an establishment of religion it means that the moral/cultural sector is subsumed into the political sector. In this state you cannot have a free and open contest between differing moral/cultural viewpoints. In fact you get what we have now in the United States and doubly so in Britain. You get a hegemony of the established church, whether the Church of England or the church of university and media liberals.

In the United States and in Britain the overwhelming domination of the Christian world view is coming under challenge from non-Christian immigrants who include not just Muslims but Hindu Indians and Han Chinese and their Confucian tradition.

It is “unavoidable” you might say, that in the future the culture of the United States and eventually its laws will come to reflect the evolving blend of cultures.

That process gets to be very different when an established church is in charge of the moral/cultural sector. For then all changes to the laws end up being a political deal between the current political/religious establishment and the insurgent minorities.

And that usually means more conflict than when different moral/cultural traditions are forced to compete on a level playing field where none have the open support of the government.

Let us learn from the foolishness of the Archbishop and insist that the United States purge itself of the creeping establishment of the church of liberal pieties and insist on a return to a rigorous culture of moral/cultural freedom, where no belief system has the sponsorship of the government, where all moral/cultural traditions must compete for the favor of the American people.

Democrats: Safeway vs. Whole Foods

Those of us cursed with a conservative temperament view the current Democratic race with perplexity.  What is going on?

Conservative columnist David Brooks has the answer.  Think retail.  Think of Mrs. Clinton as Safeway and Senator Obama as Whole Foods.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer.

Yes.  In case you hadn’t looked at the marketing reports on the two campaigns Senator Clinton is winning the less-educated voter by 20, 30, even 50 percentage points.  “She’s got good programs at good prices,” writes Brooks.  Then there is Barack Obama.

Barack Obama is an experience provider. He attracts the educated consumer. In the last Pew Research national survey, he led among people with college degrees by 22 points. Educated people get all emotional when they shop and vote. They want an uplifting experience so they can persuade themselves that they’re not engaging in a grubby self-interested transaction. They fall for all that zero-carbon footprint, locally grown, community-enhancing Third Place hype. They want cultural signifiers that enrich their lives with meaning.

Educated people emotional?  I thought that education taught you to be rational!

Where does that leave the Republicans?  Good point!  I see an opening.  High-school graduates really are not having a very good time in welfare state America.

[H]igh school graduates divorce at twice the rate of college graduates. High school grads are much more likely to have kids out of wedlock... High school grads are much less optimistic than college grads. They express less social trust. They feel less safe in public. They report having fewer friends and lower aspirations.

There is no mystery about this.  The politics offered by the Democratic Party since the 1960s has bought off the votes of high-school grads with the drug of government pensions and social programs and has thrown the less educated into a downward spiral of dependence and despair.  Meanwhile the educated liberals have all got lovely jobs as environmental specialists, college professors, researchers, and administrators.  These jobs may not make the educated liberals rich, but they certainly pay enough for them to shop at Whole Foods.

There must be an opening here for Republicans to learn how to talk to the battered high-school grads.  Actually, we already have.  That’s why liberals have been writing books like “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”  They can’t understand why lower-income Americans vote for Republicans when they ought to vote for Democrats out of gratitude for all the lovely programs that Democrats give them.

Let’s get moving and learn to talk better with the Safeway crowd.  After all, Whole Foods is so pretentious!

Romney Out

They called him a flip-flopper and a robocandidate, but mostly Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney just had class.

And now he is suspending his campaign after the disappointing results of Super Tuesday. Speaking to the CPAC conference today he said:

If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

Romney is a class act, and he terminates his campaign with his head held high. Why is it that throughout his campaign he refrained from getting down into the gutter with Senator McCain?

Roger Scruton in Culture Counts tells how this works. The point of religion and culture, he writes, is to breathe into society the practical knowledge of “knowing what to do” and “knowing what to feel.” It is a testimony to Romney Mormon faith that he seems to have exactly that.

His concession speech was a good one, a bold statement of conservatism. Here are a couple of quotes.

Most politicians don’t seem to understand the connection between our ability to compete and our national wealth, and the wealth of our families. They act as if money just happens—that it’s just there. But every dollar represents a good or service produced in the private sector. Depress the private sector and you depress the well-being of Americans.

That means that every dollar taken out of the private sector is a net loss, even a dollar for “stimulus.” Then there is this:

The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960’s welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven’t given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility... Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug—we have got to fight it like the poison it is!

Unfortunately, it will probably be four or eight years before America is ready again to fight the good fight.

Meanwhile everyone is intoxicated with the audacity of hope and change you can believe in.

After Super Tuesday: Wait Until 2009!

Our Democratic friends are racing towards the nomination in a dead heat. They are all excited about change. They are setting high expectations for their supporters.

Sad-eyed Republicans look like they are going to be led by Senator John McCain. He has made his national reputation by working with Democrats on Democrat-style legislation and frustrating the Republican agenda.

So it certainly looks like the Democrats must be prohibitive favorites to win in November. What would that mean?

It’s time to remember Irving Kristol’s words back in the 1980s. The Republicans, he wrote, should cut taxes to the bone and give the government back to the Democrats when Uncle Sam is broke.

That, of course, is exactly what happened in 1992. Bill Clinton was elected in a wave of enthusiasm and a promised middle-class tax cut.

Then we all came down to earth. In 1993, remember, newly elected Bill Clinton told us how that promised middle-class tax cut had gone up in smoke. "I never worked harder on anything my whole life than I did that middle class tax cut," he told us as he raised taxes.

In the end he pushed a $500 billion tax increase through Congress without a single Republican vote, and lost the House and Senate in 1994.

If you look at Bush’s budget numbers in the 2009 budget, you will see that he is handing the next president a live grenade. He has cranked up defense spending enormously. He has made almost no progress in reducing any other spending. See usgovernmentspending.com for details.

So is the next Democratic president is going to dare to get soft on the War on Terror? Or raise taxes? Or cut the Democrats’ beloved social spending? Or renege on universal health coverage?

Clinton and Obama are telling their supporters that the tough choices and arguments of the past eight years will be swept away in a vast tide of change.

Not really. President Bush has served up all the tough choices in the upcoming budget so that they will all land with a thump in the president’s in-tray next January 20.

Which means that we conservatives will have the Democrats just where we want them.

McCain: Why Does He Do It?

Why is it that Senator John McCain’s is most impressive when sliming other Republicans?

First, he’s been accusing Mitt Romney of being on the cut-and-run side on the war. Which is baloney, as Kathryn Jean Lopez makes clear.

In a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, he continued to insist, as he had just before the Florida primary, that Romney was on the side of defeat in Iraq.

Not exactly, Senator McCain.

Now he’s ginned up a day-before-the-election hit on Rush Limbaugh, by having former Senator Bob Dole send an email to Rush extolling McCain’s conservative credentials from back in the early 1990s.

By Monday evening, the Rush memo was being billed as “Dole Scolds Limbaugh” and McCain was going after Romney. Again. Reports Calvin Woodward:

"Well, it’s probably the last person I would have wanted to have write a letter for me," Romney said on Fox News, likening McCain’s candidacy to Dole’s losing 1996 presidential bid. McCain called on his rival to apologize. "This is no way to end up this campaign," McCain said, "by attacking a genuine American war hero."

Er, excuse me? If you disagree with Bob Dole you are attacking a genuine American war hero?

There’s only one way to characterize this sort of political mudslinging. Clintonian.

Just how does John McCain expect the conservative base to go out and campaign for him this Fall after he’s been channeling the Clintons?

Big Spending Increase in US Budget

It’s "Dead on Arrival." That’s what the Democrats like to say when a Republican president sends them a Budget of the United States Government.

What they mean is that they intend to make a few changes on the margin, and make sure that a few more Democrats get their noses in the federal trough. This is called compassion.

But here at Road to the Middle Class we have a better way of analyzing the president’s budget. We have usgovernmentspending.com.

Already, within hours of the official release of the federal budget for Fiscal Year 2009, usgovernmentspending.com has the new budget numbers up online.

You know the headline news. President Bush’s final federal budget has cracked the $3 trillion barrier, at $3.107 trillion.

What you might not know is that the federal budget includes a spreadsheet, Table 3.2 — Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962—2013 that includes estimates of expenditure for FY 2009 made a year ago. Let’s see how the estimates for 2009 changed in the year since President Bush last sent a budget to Congress.

Estimated Federal Spending for Fiscal Year 2009

Change from FY08 to FY09 Budget

Amounts in $ billions

Item 2008 budget 2009 budget Change Pensions 765.2 767.9 0.35% Health Care 712.6 712.7 0.01% Education 97.4 99.9 2.57% Defense 723.9 805.0 11.20% Welfare 266.1 283.1 6.39% Total Spending 2,985.5 3,107.4 4.08%

Oooh. That does hurt. Defense spending is up 11 percent over the estimate made last year. Of course, a lot of that comes from bringing the Iraq war fully on-budget.

And overall spending is up four percent. This is not the natural increase in annual spending. This is the change in the estimate for FY 2009 spending totals made between last year and this.

I’ll have to think about that.

Ted Kennedy Calls The Clintons Out

It is certainly a moment, when Ted Kennedy comes out for Barack Obama and disses the Clintons.

The implication is clear.  The Clintons are corrupt and it is time for the Democratic Party to move on.  Kennedy, according to Peggy Noonan, is part of

a great rebellion, a coming together of former officials, members of the commenting class, and the Kennedy family to stand athwart the Clintonian future and say, Stop.

Well, maybe.  Actually it is more accurate to say that in the last couple of weeks the Clintons have held up a mirror to the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party didn’t like it.

Bill Clinton played the race card, and everyone swooned with disgust.  Oh yeah?  But the Democratic Party for the last 40 years, from the day after the signing of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, has been the party of race baiting and of race counting.  What’s new about Bill Clinton’s efforts in South Carolina? 

Only that he was playing the race card against another Democrat.  That was too much for Ted Kennedy.

Clinton Corruption?   Please.  The Democratic Party since at least the days of the big city political machines has been the party of corruption, that is, using government money to buy votes.  When the buying of votes is limited to the odd subsidy, you could say it was pretty harmless.  But when you are buying votes with 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent of GDP, then you have created an almighty stench that corrupts everything.

It is an especial irony that it is Ted Kennedy who has called out the Clintons on their corruption.  Ted Kennedy is the uber-liberal who has spent a life voting for programs to hand our money-for-nothing to Democrat-voting Americans.  The consequence is that half the country is corrupted by an addiction to government programs and the other half is in a foul mood about paying for a bunch of addicts to get their fix.  The human cost of Ted Kennedy’s political career is incalculable.

But Ted draws the line at the Clintons.  That’s a comfort, if you like.