Michael Novak for Romney

Readers of RMC will know that Michael Novak is one of our RMC Chappies.  That’s because of his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and its notion of the Greater Separation of Powers.

So when Michael Novak comes out for Mitt Romney, we listen. He says he’s been privately for Romney for some time but the egregious bigotry of Mike Huckabee forced him to go public.  And he argues from the old biblical injunction “By their fruits you shall know them.”

[E]very one of the Mormons I have ever worked with, beginning with a great graduate assistant for one of my classes at Stanford in about 1967, have been the most well-mannered, inquisitive, competent, kind and thoughtful people I know.

Me too.  And nothing has revolted me more in this campaign season than the anti-Mormon bigotry of Mike Huckabee.

Michael Novak’s notion of the Greater Separation of Powers proposes that we think of democratic capitalism as a society of three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

In his view these sectors should be free and differentiated like the three branches of government.  They should each have power and each use their power to jealously limit the powers of the other sectors.  It’s a powerful concept, taking the separation of powers concept from government to the wider society.

That brings us to the signature sound bite of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron: There is such a thing as Society; it’s just not the same as the State.

Because the State means the political sector takes over and totally dominates the other sectors.  But conservatives believe in a distribution of power among the various sectors of society.

Can Obama Really Solve Everything?

Many conservatives have been annoyed by the intrasigence of Democrats during the Bush years. There’s no doubt it’s been effective and deflected Republicans from overdue reforms of the welfare state.

But the Dems have come to believe in a dangerous illusion that as Jonah Goldberg puts it:

If only Democrats ran things, there’d be no war, our allies would love us, global warming would be brought to heel, and we would have universal health care, happily married gay neighbors and embryonic stem cells for everybody.

If only. Up to now Dems thought they would see Happy Days are Here Again with Hillary Clinton. Now it’s beginning to look more and more like Sen. Obama.

But the idea that returning Democrats to power is going to change things is starting to die an agonizing death.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it best himself in Monday’s Roll Call: “Have we stopped the war in Iraq? No. Have we gotten health care? No. Have we improved education? No. But we have been able to do what we’ve done. We’ve done a lot of things.”

Yes, and a lot of the things done were pretty shabby.

The truth is, as Rush Limbaugh says, that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30 year-old playbook. Their ideas, for withdrawal from Iraq, for an intensification of government intervention in health care, don’t really move the country forwards.

And once they return to the White House, people will start to notice.

If that is what it takes to prepare the American people for genuine reform, then so be it.

We Interrupt This Message

The shocking thing about the actions of New Life Church member Jeanne Assam’s takedown of assassin Matthew Murray is the break with the narrative.

There we were, worrying about “hate speech” and the NIE assessment, whether Hillary Clinton is slipping in the race for the presidency, and listening respectfully to all the important talking heads when suddenly the story changed.

Instead of the usual liberal narrative about “hate” we had a true hater knocking off Christians in Colorado. And all of a sudden a woman takes him down—with a gun.

There was another security guard at the church with a gun, but he was dithering. Assam was a trained police officer. So she just kicked in her police training. She ran towards the gunman, shooting as she went.

Then she appeared at a press conference and talked about God’s Will.

It’s a slice of life without your usual liberal suspects, and we are not used to that.

The shocking thing about the whole incident is listening to the different world view. Said Assam at her press conference:

"God was with me. I didn’t think for a minute to run away. God guided me and protected me.


"It seemed like it was me, the gunman, and God."

Yes, we usually try to keep that sort of thing out of the newspapers. But we are used to the rhetoric of the gunman, Matthew Murray:

"You Christians brought this on yourselves," Murray wrote, [on a website]. "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."

Talking about God on TV. That’s controversial in today’s America. Blaming Christians for all the world’s problems. Why that’s what they teach in school.

Is Huckabee a Liberal Plant?

If you are like me you haven’t been too impressed by Mike Huckabee.  Just something about the guy.  So now that the hit-jobs are coming out, I can’t say I’m that upset.  Douglas MacKinnon even wonders whether Huckabee is a liberal plant!

If you are the eventual Democratic nominee for President in 2008, who would you like to run against? Answer: A Republican you can beat.

Never mind about horserace stuff like that.  According to Club for Growth’s Steve Stephens you should be more concerned about Huckabee’s record and a taxer and a spender.  As David J. Saunders puts it:

Anti-tax groups, like the Club for Growth, have been at odds with Huckabee for a while, and at times it’s become quite heated...

In 2003, when Grover Norquist, president for Americans for Tax Reform, criticized Huckabee’s tendency to raise taxes instead of scaling back spending, he fired back.

“What do our critics want - to rip the feeding tubes out of an 8-year-old or an elderly person on Medicaid? Grover needs to run for governor somewhere, win, and then try to govern,” Huckabee told the Washington Times. “He makes it sound so easy.”

Yes.  No doubt.  But the truth is that keeping government under control is hard work, and if you aren’t hard at work pruning then you are letting it grow out of control.

And the quote about 8–year-olds and grannies is a liberal line, not a principled conservative one.

Because to a conservative the job of looking after 8–year-olds and grannies belongs to their family.  It does not belong to other peoples’ families through the tax system.

Libs Ante Up in War on Terror

Many conservatives are angry about the naked political slanting in the latest National Intelligence Estimate.  How do we suddenly know with high confidence that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003?  But I am more sanguine.

With the NIE the opponents of President Bush within the administration have put a bet on the table.  It’s one thing to be embarrassing the Bushies with embarrassing leaks.  It’s another thing when you suddenly up and say: Hey, look, No Nukes!  All of a sudden you have actually done something, and in today’s political climate that means that you become a target.

For instance, Kenneth R. TImmerman took a look at the NIE and found something different than what he was supposed to find.

What the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran actually said for the first time in an official, United States government document released to the public, is that Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003.

Well!  That’s certainly something to think about!

We conservatives must realize that the battle over the war on terror is a multigenerational thing, both within and without the United States.  We can’t win in one election cycle and put it behind us.  It’s going to be like the Cold War where the Democrats played a game of now we’re with you, now we’re against you, depending on the mood in the crazy left. 

So it’s good that the liberal mid-level bureaucrats have put out their marker.  That gives our side something to shoot at.

And anyway it doesn’t change the strategic situation.  Iran is a revolutionary power that the United States wants to keep under control.  Nukes or no nukes.

Romney's American Creed

You can read the MSM’s hostility to religion any time you open a newspaper or tune into a network news broadcast.  Here’s CNN on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech on religion and America December 6, 2007.

White House hopeful Mitt Romney on Thursday articulated his position on the role of religion in America, but avoided details about his personal faith.

What is it about these people?  What is it?

Well we know.  Or modern secular educated elite thinks that it has a better belief system than the one developed by our Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in the religious culture of the United States. And you can see why.

The pluralistic non-established religions of the United States cannot be controlled by the secular educated elite.  That is why they are trying to create an established secular religion with its “teachers” and “counselors” in every public institution of education.

But Mitt Romney is an American, not a secular American.  And the danger is that he can talk, as a presidential candidate, over the heads of the media directly to the American people. 

He can appeal directly to the American tradition that goes back to the founders, the tradition that the secular educated elite want to replace.

He can talk, as he did about the first prayer breakfast of the United States of America, before there was a United States.  It happened in the fall of 1774.  Given the dark clouds of war closing in, the members of the Continental Congress felt the need to pray.  As told by Romney:

But there were objections. ’They were too divided in religious sentiments’, what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics.

"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

"And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.

That’s the sort of thing that our secular educated friends don’t want to hear, and they don’t want you to hear.  And if they had their way no American in public life would dare to recount that incident, at least not without irony or scare quotes.

That is why there is a culture war being fought in the United States.  It is a war between those who want to continue the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States and those who want to replace it with a secular culture.

Gingrich pushes platform in Iowa

Newt’s in Iowa and running for VP.  He’s also pushing his latest update on the Contract with America, a poll-tested set of issues called “Platform for America.”  Here’s what he’s pushing, according to Ralph Z. Hollow.

The former speaker said his appearances in Iowa this week are "about a single-page flat tax" (82 percent), a "moment of silent prayer in school" (94 percent) and the "death penalty for anyone carrying out a terrorist act in the United States" (79 percent).

Newt says that the problem is that:

this is a center-right country caught between an incompetent right-wing party and a ruthlessly organized, energized, militant, minority left-wing party.

You can’t argue with that.  But the question is: why?

My answer is that the Republican Party would like to roll back the vast government edifice, as in:

Pensions: 6.2 percent GDP
Health Care: 6.2 percent GDP
Education: 5.7 percent GDP
Welfare: 3.0 percent GDP
source: usgovernmentspending.com

But they can’t because the Democratic Party stands “ruthlessly organized, energized, militant,” ready to defend every last program to the last 0.1 percent of GDP.