Third Way Democrats Propose "Politics of Opportunity"

How is it possible that Americans in opinion polls agree with Democrats but keep voting for Republicans? That is the question that the folks at Third Way are asking. What’s going wrong, they ask in a new study, The Politics of Opportunity conducted by Anne Kim and Jim Kessler?

Martin Frost reported on the report on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his show on Wednesday.

What they discovered was

several key disconnects between the way progressives view the American economy and the middle-class, versus the way the middle-class feels about the nation’s economy and their role in it. Americans are optimistic about the nation’s future and their own; progressive messaging is not.

Let us repeat that for our readers, big and strong:

Americans are optimistic about the nation’s future and their own; progressive messaging is not.

That’s better. And even that statement doesn’t quite address the problem. It is not just “progressive messaging” that is pessimistic. It is progressives themselves.

Kim and Kessler go on to define five disconnects between progressives and the middle class.

• Pessimism vs. Optimism
  
• Economic Decline vs. Economic Strength
  
• Economic Security vs. Individual Opportunity
  
• Most progressive economic ideas don’t benefit the middle-class
  
• An off-target critique of conservatives
  

Yeah, that does pretty well cover the waterfront. So what do they propose?

First of all, they propose a new message: “A new era of middle-class opportunity.” Then they propose a three point framework to advance progressive ideas:

1. Keep the American economy strong
   
2. Promoting middle-class aspiration
   
3. Helping individuals manage risk so they can pursue their aspirations
   

Who can argue with that? The whole point of Republican economic policy since 1980 has been precisely to grow the economy, promote middle-class aspiration, and introduce a measured amount of risk into peoples’ lives, getting off the dangerous Democratic policy of socializing all risk so that the whole nation is at risk if the Democratic suits screw up. It is Democrats who have been actively opposing the common-sense policies that Republicans have been patiently pushing for the last generation.

And now these Third-Way Democrats want to sweep away a generation of demagoguery? Who do they think they are?

The report finishes off with a number of bullet points on how to demagogue Republicans. Here’s one. “No investments in infrastructure.” The United States is only No. 12 in internet infrastructure penetration.

That’s an interesting point. The United States used to be big in infrastructure. It built roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. Then the liberals came along in the 1960s and wanted to spend money on social programs. Infrastructure, they said, would end up paving over the whole nation. And liberals started opposing highway construction. And the national investment in infrastructure started to get crowded out by the War on Poverty.

Now liberals want us to forget a generation of folly and opposition and believe them when they tell us that the US is lagging in the Internet. Please!

Still, let us look on the bright side. If Democrats could really came up with sensible ideas on the economy, ideas that catered to aspiration rather than pessimism, then Republicans could retire for a well-earned rest.

We could declare victory in the Reagan Revolution and figure out what to do next.

The Agony of Turning From The Mainstream of Life

Christian talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is properly annoyed by Andrew Sullivan’s drive-by column in Time, My Problem with Christianism. Writes Sullivan:

Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

Is it really true to say that the “discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives?” Where is this going on? On the TV News? In the universities? In the schools? In the courts? In the Congress? On talk radio?

And just who is this religious right anyway? Pat Robertson? Jerry Falwell? Rick Warren? Just who did you have in mind?

Come on, Andrew. The main discourse about religion in the public square is coming from secular liberals who won’t shut up about the Taliban religious right. But the religious right seldom gets a chance to actually occupy bandwidth in the national conversation and get its story out. At least, the mainstream media always makes quite sure that no religious right utterance gets into the public square without rebuttal.

We understand Sullivan’s rage, of course. All political issues, all religious issues, all cultural issues for Andrew Sullivan are viewed through the lens of gay marriage. There is only one issue, and that is gay marriage. There is only one acceptable opinion: to be for gay marriage.

We tolerant conservatives do feel Sullivan’s pain. We understand his problem. It is shared by many people on the left who have been led away from the mainstream of life by the left’s ideas and agenda. They are the disaffected faculty in the university. They are the childless liberal women who still demand an absolute right to abortion. They are the childless liberal couples who have put work, or career, or spirituality, or activism, or the environment before children. And they are the gays and lesbians who imagine that by grabbing the Holy Grail of gay marriage that they will be able to return to the mainstream of life.

They will be disappointed. You do not get to live in the mainstream of life by getting the state to certify that you are mainstream. Would that it were so.

If you want to live in the mainstream of life then you need to fall in love, get married, sire children, and then raise them. Breeding, they used to call it with derision.

The mainstrem of life is rather mundane and frustrating when you are in the middle of it. You fantasize about the career you might have had, or the adventures you might have had, or the torrid love affairs you might have had.

One day as you paddle along in the mainstream of life you discover that your children are all grown and you realize that you are too old to start again with that exciting career you might have had, or the life of adventure you might have had, or the thrilling love affairs you might have had.

But if you are a liberal and you have spent half your life sneering at the mainstream of life, and then you suddenly decide that you want into the mainstream of life, what do you do? You call on sympathetic judges in Massachusetts to certify you as mainstream, to change the world with a stroke of a pen, as liberals have done all our lives. You demand that Americans admit you into the mainstream of life.

And then you get nasty.

But is really doesn’t matter what you do, or how loudly you shout and scream. You can write nasty articles calling “fundamentalist” Christians “Christianists” if you like. And then you can disingenuously claim that you are not saying that “Christianists“ are terrorists. But it still doesn’t change anything. Go ahead. Say it.

The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist... And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all.

We understand exactly what you are doing, Andrew Sullivan. You are trying to marginalize decent American Christians as extremists and bigots.

Because, decent and tolerant as they are, ordinay American citizens just cannot stomach the idea of letting liberals rip the institution of marriage to shreds. Not yet, at least. And there is no reason why they should.

Ever since the 1960s liberals have been talking down marriage. It was old-fashioned. It was middle class. It was oppressive to women. Now all of a sudden they have rushed back. We want to be married, after all, they cry!

Only, being liberals they can’t leave well alone. Ordinary marriage isn’t good enough. There must be change! There must be accommodation of the marginalized! GLBT! Polyamory! And anyone that disagrees is a bigot.

Will this nightmare never end?

Could Europe's Anti-Semitism Happen Here?

Ever since Jews first started immigrating to the United States from Russia a century ago they have found their home on the Left. Jews experienced the universalism of socialism as a refuge from the ethnic and religious hate they had experienced in European ghettos and beyond the Pale of Settlement in Russia.

But are Jews safe on the Left any more?

Student Teresa Mia Bejan reports on the pervasive anti-Semitism in lefty Europe and in the oh-so-lefty European universities

Anti-Semitism is alive and well and living in Paris. And London, apparently. And Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid — and Oxford, too, to my shock and chagrin.

Yes. In Oxford.

Walking down the famed Cornmarket Street in central Oxford, one routinely sees the telltale combination of Lonsdale-brand jacket with Gap T-shirt — the neo-Nazi's favorite fashion statement for the clever way in which it displays NSDAP, nationalistische sozialistische demokratische Arbeitspartei, proudly across his or her chest.
...
But mentions of the Holocaust at the traditional Oxford formal hall are met with derisive coughs and cries of "don't bring that up again!"

Bejan seems to think that European anti-Semitism couldn’t happen here. But of course, it already is, in the university, as colleges encourage Middle-Eastern Studies departments to fill up with Jew-hating academics.

It goes against centuries of bitter experience, but it is looking more and more as if the best friends that Jews have in the world are American Christians—you know, Red State Americans who go to work, follow the rules, go to church, and obey the law.

Fortunately there is already an advanced guard of Jews who have migrated to the conservative movement and the Republican Party. They are the dreaded neoconservatives and religiously observant Jews. There are even Jewish conservative radio talk show hosts! Let us hope that the laggards overcome their natural and well-founded mistrust and come on over soon.

The fact is that the Left is a movable feast and it only dines on the victim du jour. When Jews were dying in their millions, they counted as victims. When Jews are successfully building the State of Israel they don’t count as victims any more, and don’t enjoy the compassion and the caring of the Left any more.

While there is still time, come on in fellahs, the water’s fine!

Imagine If Oppressed Blacks Were in Therapy, Says Instawife

What does a psychologist think when she encounters the thought of Shelby Steele, author of The Content of Our Character, The Dream Deferred, and now White Guilt?

Psychologist Dr. Helen Smith, the Instawife, takes a look at the black power/white guilt dynamic that was the precipitate of the civil rights revolution. The victim politics of race victimhood, if practiced by psychologists on their patients, would be malpractice.

[I]f psychologists spent their time telling their patients they were victims of mental illness (or racism etc.) and that they could only get better by coming to therapy, how could the patient ever develop autonomy, skills, and the ability to solve their own problems? It is the same with the race card on the part of the left -- victimhood will keep blacks maintained in the status quo, always looking to the left for validation and to enforce their "rights."

The politics of race is a destructive game that keeps its victims in permanent victimhood. All parties to this political game have abandoned. their moral authority. The

left has turned against democratic principles and instead engages in a victim mentality for blacks that keeps them on the plantation. The left's deal is that they will keep throwing out a few bones like affirmative action, as long as blacks will allow themselves to be reduced to their race and the left can take moral authority for "helping" them. As Steele points out, this is a deal with the devil.

One fine day, one fine spring day, the ice jam on the river of race, the liberal discourse of oppression and victimhood, will break up. It will be a sight to see.

How Badly in Debt Are We?

The average US household has a credit card balance of $9,000. That’s what we hear. America is drowning in debt.

But Liz Pulliam Weston at MSN says: Wait a minute. First of all, she writes, most Americans owe zero to the credit card companies. Half of those that do owe money have a balance of less than $2,000.

So where does the $9,000 number come from?

Well, it seems to be concentrated up in the high income sector. For instance, Fair Isaac reports that 15 percent of card holders have balances in excess of $10,000. If that is so then it could be that a few rich folks are the ones that are skewing the average.

All in all, Weston reckons, there is

more than enough evidence to suggest that a large number of people are overdosing on debt. The average American, though, seems to be doing just fine.

But if that is true then there’s no need for politicians and moralists rush out and do something before the nation drowns itself in debt. At least not yet.

It's a Good Sign that Manufacturing Jobs are Declining

Economics is as “dry as toast” to use the memorable phrase from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But someone has to explain it because lives depend on governments getting with the economics program. Right now Zimbabwe is suffering from runaway inflation. Why is that not surprising, when the Mugabe government has done everything possible to wreck the economy?

Economics Professor Walter Williams is willing to do the dirty work of explaining economics, even the vexing question of the decline in manufacturing jobs. You know. Outsourcing.

Everyone is worried sick about the decline in manufacturing jobs. Is it a bad thing? Or not?

Williams cites the vexing question of the decline in farm jobs. You are worried about manufacturing jobs going away? Look what happened to farm jobs.

In 1900, 41 percent of the U.S. labor force was employed in agriculture. Now, only 2 percent of today's labor force works in agricultural jobs.

Well, what do you think, Senator? Good or bad?

Good, right? Because farmers today are much more productive than they were a century ago. We need fewer people on the farm to grow our food. That means that instead of people working on the farm they can work other jobs. That way we get a two-fer. We get the food production from the farms and also the work from people who would have been working on the farm a hundred years ago.

That is what is happening in manufacturing.

Since 2001, with the aid of computers, telecommunications advances, and ever more efficient plant operations, U.S. manufacturing productivity, or the amount of goods or services a worker produces in an hour, has soared a dizzying 24 percent. That's 72 percent faster than the average productivity advance during America's four most recent recession-recovery cycles dating back to the 1970s. In short: We're making more stuff with fewer people.

And guess what. Manufacturing employment is going down all over the world, including the countries

who produce 75 percent of the world's manufacturing output (the U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada and Mexico).

But what will all the manufacturing industry workers do? Well, they will get to do other stuff. Some of them will experience hardship, of course, especially those in unionized industries like airlines, autos, and steel, where wages were artificially high due to union monopoly power.

The bottom line is that the US workforce is at an all time high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 150 million strong, and unemployment is down to 4.7 percent. Wherever it is that those jobs are flying to, they aren’t flying far.

Is The Global Warm Turning?

For years climate scientists have been telling us just what the environmentalists have wanted: Global warming is real and more research is needed.

Actually that last bit about “more research” is my little contribution. That is because it pretends to understand what scientists are thinking. I imagine it is something like this: “My Land! There’s gold in them thar hills. Ahem, yes. GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL! Now, can I have my next climate change grant approved, please.”

But now Kenneth Green in NRO thinks that the worm has turned.

Environmentalists, who have long espoused a version of humankind as an energy-powered cancer on the Earth, see greenhouse-gas controls as a way to starve out the tumor of humanity. Many scientists, unable to look beyond linear thinking, can’t get past the idea that the only answer to change is to impose stability.

Of course, tree researcher Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies deals rather firmly with the stability theory. The climate of the earth fluctuates in all times scales, according to his research.

Up to now scientists have bought into the self-help solution of the environmentalists, to put mankind on a energy diet as repentance for its sins. But now some of them are changing their tune.

On April 18, a group of 90 scientists wrote an open letter to Canada’s prime minister observing that “Advances in climate science . . . have provided more evidence supporting the need for action and development of a strategy for adaptation for projected changes.” The group goes on to emphasize that as “mitigation measures will become effective only after many years . . . adaptive strategies are essential and must begin now.”

Notice the words “action” “development,” and “begin now.”
You can see why the scientists might be changing their tune. They are not fools. They can see that an adaptive strategy on climate change could mean a lot to them. It could mean: Jobs; Research; Startups; Money, power and the love of beautiful women. Yes, scientists can play both sides of the street on this one. And why not? The only thing that matters to a scientist is where the next grant is coming from.

The adaptive strategy, in case you didn’t know, is the policy of President Bush and the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Signatories to the partnership included Australia, India, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, and South Korea, as well as the United States—in other words, everyone that matters.

Do you think that President Bush might have figured the scientists out?