America Moving to the Middle?

Everyone says that they are fed up with the partisanship of the past decade. In consequence many people are eager to uncover signs that the partisan years are over, and that America is moving to the middle.

So along come Gerald F. Seib and John Harwood to tell us that Americans want change.

When the Wall Street Journal and NBC News surveyed voters in December, as the campaign began, almost half agreed that America needed "major reforms and a brand new and different approach" to handling problems.

Earth to Seib and Harwood: Major reform is what Republicans have been trying to enact for the last 12 years since Newt Gingrich won a Republican majority in Congress.

But major reform, if it means anything, means major changes in the way we run government. If it would mean anything it would mean changing the numbers on government spending. Here are the numbers for 2008 from usgovernmentspending.com

• Pensions: $911.6 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $925.0 billion
  
  
• Education: $848.2 billion
  
  
• Defense: $730.8 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $445.2 billion

Now, seriously, what kind of a hope do we have that any substantial change will happen in the delivery of these huge programs?

A big part of the current animus, Seib and Harwood claim, is that Congressmen no longer live yearround in Washington. When Friday rolls around everyone heads back home to the voters instead to sticking around and socializing.

But there is hope. There’s Mara Vanderslice, a Democratic operative who is trying to develop outreach to religious voters. She represents “a new wave of younger activists willing to reach across party lines for the causes they advocate.” That’s one way of putting it. But her website Common Good Strategies seems to be nothing more than a Democratic Party organ. Its mission is:

Working with the Democratic Party and non-profits on the local and national level to reach out and build authentic relationships with America’s diverse religious communities.

OK. Why not Peter Wehner, “a genial social conservative who worked for Mr. Rove in the Bush White House?” He sees, apparently, a movement among evangelicals away from abortion “toward social issues, social justice and aid to Africa.”

If you read what Peter Wehner actually writes—for instance this piece for the Commentary blog—you experience basic Republican partisan talking points.

This talk of moving to the center is just a slow-day navel piece. The level of partisanship is a measure of the political temperature: how much agitation is there for change and how much resistance is there to reform.

The partisanship of the last decade issued out of Republican desire for reform and Democratic determination to stop it. Right now, Republicans are exhausted and discouraged. So you can expect a period of quiet.

But something tells me: Not for long.

BritCon Throws Down Gauntlet

Lots of people think that British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is a lightweight. I don’t. Instead I see a strategic mind at work.

This week, after cold-cocking the British Labour Party in the local elections and scoring a huge gain in the horse-race opinion polls, Cameron wrote an op-ed for the lefty Independent: “We are the champions of progressive ideals.” He throws down the gauntlet immediately.

A painful reality is dawning on Labour MPs: in its longest unbroken period in office, Labour has done little to advance progressive ideals. A government that promised social justice and economic efficiency has in fact delivered neither, to the dismay of the Labour Party. Instead, it is the Conservative Party that is the champion of progressive ideals in Britain today.

Look, he writes, nobody can deny that income redistribution has done a lot to alleviate poverty. But “those methods have now run their course.”

The returns from big state intervention are not just diminishing, they are disappearing.

In other words it is time for the left to admit that just throwing money at the poor doesn’t help the poor. It is not lack of money that causes deprivation, it is lack of character. Something else is needed, and Conservatives know what it is.

[W]e will use the modern mechanisms of civil society – whether it’s businesses that can really help get people trained and ready for work, social enterprises that get people permanently off drugs, or charities and community groups that can give couples the support they need when relationships come under pressure. For us it’s about the whole public realm, not just the public sector.

As David Cameron has said, time and time again: “There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the State.” By forgetting that truth, first enunciated by Edmund Burke over two centuries ago, the progressive dream has guttered out into fumbling darkness. But there is a way out.

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we [the Conservative Party] can achieve real change.

The latest opinion poll has the Conservative Party ahead of the Labour Party by 49% to 23%. Talk about kicking a guy when he’s down.

The Happiness Quotient

First he discovered that conservative religious people give more, in Who Really Cares? Now Arthur C. Brooks is writing about happiness, according to Maggie Gallagher, and the happiest people are—wait for it—religious conservatives.

Really, this should surprise nobody. We know that the worst thing in the world is to have nothing to do and nothing to contribute. Naturally, conservatives are happier than liberals.

For Brooks, one of the great surprises was the enormous "happiness gap" between political liberals and political conservatives that has persisted over the last 35 years.
...
Of course, conservatives are more likely to be religious and to be married, both important contributors to happiness. Religious liberals, for example, are happier than secular liberals, but neither group is nearly as happy as people who say that they are both religious and conservative. Fifty percent of religious conservatives are very happy and just 5 percent are not too happy.

Freedom, according to Brooks, makes people happier. But people are also happier when they live under “moral constraint.”

What makes people happy is freedom and community. That seems a paradox. How can you be free and yet bound into a community that may shame you and judge you?

That’s how liberals think. We conservatives know better. You make yourself happy when you are free to bind yourself in loving service to others. As Minette Marrin wrote back in 2001: compassion and community without compulsion.

Somehow that notion has a familiar ring.

Last Refuge of a Liberal

Great news! Hillary Clinton, fighting for the people against the elites, vows to smash OPEC, according to Geoff Elliott.

"We’re going to go right at OPEC," she told supporters in Merrillville, Indiana. "They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at.



"That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly," she said, saying she would use US anti-monopoly laws as well as the World Trade Organisation to take on OPEC.

Bless my buttons. You mean to say that one-size-fits-all health care Hillary has found a monopoly she doesn’t like? I thought that Democrats were all in favor of high energy prices because we need to conserve on our wasteful use of non-renewable energy and save the planet and stop global warming.

Listen, honey. Oil prices are high because you Democrats have been standing in the gas-station forecourt stopping the oil companies from doing what they are born to do. When Big Oil wants to drill for oil you tell the oil guys they can’t. Not in Alaska, not in the Gulf of Mexico, not deep offshore. When Big Oil wants to build a new refinery, you say no deal.

And now you want to blame OPEC for high energy prices?

Who was it who said: “Populism is the last refuge of a liberal.”

So it’s come this. In her last desperate bid to get the nomination for President of the United States, Hillary “politics of meaning” Clinton is demagoguing on energy.

Listen America. If you want low energy prices there is one thing you should never do. Never, never, never vote for a Democrat.

Now It's the Vast Elite Conspiracy

That Hillary Clinton is some smart girl. It was she, ten years ago, who fearlessly deployed her super-sniffer conspiracy detector during the Clinton impeachment scandal. She found nothing less than a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” determined to drive her husband out of office.

When you work hard at something, you get to be pretty good at it. This last month, according to David Brooks, Sen. Clinton has discovered a vast elite conspiracy. This cabal of naysayers have conspired to pour scorn on her proposal to enact a gas tax holiday. On ABC’s This Week,

[Host George] Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: "I’m not going to put my lot in with economists."

David Brooks had to admit a certain admiration for Sen. Clinton’s brazen conversion to the practice of populist demogoguery.

This wasn’t just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn’t going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn’t going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader ’” helping one’s own.

Thus all of a sudden the most liberal member of the United States Senate, Sen. Obama, gets to look like a moderate. While Clinton believes in raw power, Obama gets to look like a politician who believe in the power of communication.

They are imperfect messengers for their creeds. Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party. Obama talks about postpartisan compromise in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.

The problem is that America’s problem is not a lack of raw power or a lack of communication. It is an excess of raw government and its obsession with power and the appeasement of powerful and/or vocal interests.

Don’t look to Sen. Clinton or to Sen. Obama if you want a solution to that problem. Not that either of them could possibly be called an elitist.

Changing the Terms of the Debate

After the Conservative Party’s local election win in Britain last week, Janet Daley asks: what next?

The answer, she writes, involves reframing the debate. Gordon Brown (and liberals here in the US) want to say that the choice before us is

between a party (his) that believes in "doing things" - taking people out of poverty, unlocking talent, etc, etc - and one that would prefer to "walk away" and leave people to get on with it.

No, no, no. Conservatives have got to insist on a different debate. Government can’t take people out of poverty, except in a temporary way.

[T]he state cannot "lift" people out of poverty (except in the most temporary sense), only people themselves can do that; that government cannot unlock talent, it can only get out of its way; that the surest way to keep the number of helpless and incompetent to an absolute minimum is to reduce dependency on the state as much as possible.

On the contrary, “caring for people means allowing them to take responsibility.” Because if you don’t let people take responsibility you turn them into political vegetables. That is fine for vegetables. But for people it is wrong.

Employment: Household Survey Up Big Time

Here we go again. The Labor Department’s Employment Situation Summary released today shows employment down by 20,000 jobs—if you look at the Establishment Survey, the data obtained from employers.

But if you look at the Household Survey, the survey of people, asking them whether they are employed or not, then you get a different story, a radically different story. In the Household Survey employment is up by a shattering 362,000 jobs. This number comes about equally from a reduction in unemployment of 189,000 and an increase in the labor force of 173,000

So which do you believe? The headline “jobs” reported by the mainstream media or the Household Survey data?

Really, we are getting two ccompletely different stories. The employers are reporting that we are in a recession, and the nation’s households are reporting that we are getting out of a recession.

The difference is pretty significant. Who is right? Tune in for next month’s exciting episode.