Is it Bush 3 or Clinton 3?

When President-elect Obama ran for office Republicans and conservatives were terrified that Americans would be electing a left-wing radical if he were elected.

Today the folks most terrified must be idealistic Obama supporters who really believed in “Change we can believe in.” President-elect Obama has appointed an economic team that the eevil Karl Rove likes.

[O]verall, Monday’s announcement of Mr. Obama’s economic team was reassuring. He’s generally surrounded himself with intelligent, mainstream advisers. Investors, workers and business owners can only hope that, over time, this new administration’s economic policies bear more of their market-oriented imprint.

He has proposed to retain Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and now General James Jones, according to Con Coughlin is regarded as a good bet for National Security Advisor. Writes Coughlin:

[Jones] is known as an arch-hawk on Iraq who, like Mr Gates, was a firm advocate in persuading President Bush to implement the successful surge strategy.

Some conservatives are all bent out of shape because Obama is stealing their clothes. But I think that we should be delighted. What Obama is saying by his actions is that there was nothing wrong with the policies of the Republican Party except that Republicans were in charge. It’s ok to execute from the Republican play-book as long as it is trusted Democrats that are executing the plays.

It puts the whole Bush era in a new perspective. The problem that the Democrats had, many of us felt, was that the stupid and incompetent Bush wasn’t a Democrat. The cold-cock politics of knocking down every Republican initiative was purely partisan.

Now that Democrats are in power they can legislate and execute based on the merits of the case, not on whether it is Republicans proposing it.

That has to be good for America.

Watching Science 2.0

The current scientific research model, call it Science 1.0, was invented by the Germans in the early 19th century.

In the chaos of French-occupied Germany after the disaster of defeat at the hands of Napoleon the Germans decided: Never Again. They determined to build up Germany so that the French could never be strong enough to invade the German heartland, as they had been doing with annoying regularity for nigh on 200 years.

Part of the plan was education, to educate Germans and strengthen the state. And part of the education plan was the research university with its tenured professors. Pretty soon, everyone was copying them, converting universities from churning out clergymen to churning out scientists and engineers. The first research university in the US was Johns Hopkins.

But there’s a problem with this plan, especially if we look at it from the perspective of Micvhael Novak’s Three Sectors: political, economic, and moral/cultural.

The research university and its professors are creatures of the political sector. In fact, you could say that today the education system exists solely to bolster the power of the political sector. Of course, that’s what the Germans had in mind in the first place.

But in the Novak system the idea of the three differentiated sectors of society is that they are separate and independent, and jealous of each other’s power, just like the three branches of government. In their separation and their jealous monitoring of each other’s power they preserve and defend freedom and justice.

You can see the problem when you look at physics, which got all its money because it could offer the politicians H-bombs. Or the social scientists, who could offer the politicians the tools to run (or at least pretend to run) the welfare state.

Now we have the global warming scientists, who get huge sums of research money to investigate global warming for the politicians. Not surprisingly they instinctively understand that the continuance of the research grants depends on a continuing crisis. So they deliver.

Enter Science 2.0. Today, thanks to the internet and to open-source software, anyone can open a blog and start analyzing the data from the government-grant-maintained scientists. As often as not, they find problems. After all, with all their money and their titles, and their powerful political patrons, these grant-maintained chaps are still bureaucrats.

Over the last week we have seen a couple of brilliant entries in Science 2.0 on the global warming front.

First of all there is the effort of Willis Eschenbach at Climate Audit. In an elegant analysis of Michael Mann’s hockey stick data, he showed that the hockey stick signal was carried by only 25 of Mann’s 95 temperature proxy series, and that all of the 25 were problematic. Take out the 25 problem series and you got a temperature series that looked like the old consensus view of the earth’s climate in the last millennium. You start with a Medieval Warming Period followed by a Little Ice Age, followed by the current warming period—which is still cooler than the peak of the MWP.

Second is a nice analysis by Bill Illis at Watts Up With That. Illis takes the global temperature record and removes the fluctuations caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). ENSO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Pacific Ocean and AMO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Atlantic Ocean. What happens? Well, you get a lot less global warming, because we are just at the peak of the last AMO uptick that began in about 1975.The grant-maintained scientists have been telling us that the temperature increase since 1975 has been a global warming signal. They have not told us that we should take into account that the global warming signal has been amplified by the AMO and ENSO fluctuations.

Of course, these amateurs, Eschenbach and Illis, could be wrong. So could the government grant-holders. So could any man. But their analysis is out there, and anyone can take a whack at it. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. No harm, no foul.

There’s an inherent advantage to the Science 2.0 model. The Science 2.0 chappies don’t have careers at stake, so they don’t have to be as defensive as the Science 1.0 careerists who are, in the last analysis, only front men for powerful patrions in the political sector.

And politics, the postmodernists tell us, is all about building a narrative of power.

Obama's Center Right Team

Some conservatives seem non-plussed by President-elect Obama’s picks for Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and his White House economic team of Larry Summers and Christine Romer. What’s this left-wing radical doing appointing a center-right economic team? What indeed?

But uber-supply-sider Larry Kudlow is complimentary.

There is nothing to be surprised about. Nobody could know what Obama would do. He had no track record on economic policy.

He had a track record that showed him associating with left-wing radicals on his way to power. But that could have been mere opportunism, knowing that lefties would like helping a young (and Harvard-educated) black liberal.

And there is no need to feel betrayed, that a President Obama will take credit for a supply-side economic policy that makes Democrats look good. Assuming that he actually executes a supply-side policy.

Let’s not forget what Ronald Reagan said about this. It’s suprising what you can get done when you don’t mind who gets the credit.

No. What we conservatives want is to bury forever the class-warfare client-state economic policy that liberals instinctively want. Just as we wanted welfare reform even if President Clinton got the credit.

We don’t just want a supply-side economic policy for ourselves. We also want it for immigrant and inner-city Americans who will never get out of poverty with welfare state policies, but will get ahead with supply-side welfare society policies.

When a Democratic president moves the playing field and becomes a little bit supply-side, then Republicans can say: if a little bit of supply-side is so great, why not a little more?

What’s not to like about that?

Occam's Razor Cuts Again

It’s a red letter day for us global warming deniers.

Over at Climate Audit Willis Escenbach has done some analysis on the temperature proxies used in Mann et al. (2008), the paper thay updated MBH98, in which Michael Mann introduced the "hockey stick" to the world.

That first paper in 1998 shocked the world by showing that the earth’s climate was pretty steady for the last 1,000 years, only shooting up when the industrial revolution got really started in the mid-19th century.

This was important because previously everyone had thought that the earth had been warmer than today in a Medieval Warming Period.

But Eschenbach’s analysis shows that the “hockey stick” signal is only carried by two sets of data series, or about 25 proxies out of the total of 95.

One set of data are three Tiljander lake sediment series from Finland. Tiljander has advised that these data should not be used as temperature proxies because they are corrupted by urban development in the last century and a half.

The other set of data are mostly the various bristle-cone pine series assembled by Donald Graybill. These are all from high-altitude pine trees in the US southwest. Writes Eschenbach:

[Graybill’s] work has been called into serious question by Linah Abadneh’s thesis, wherein she was unable to replicate his results.

What happens if you throw out the Tiljander lake sediments and the Graybill pines?

You get a chart that shows a Medieval Warming Period, a Little Ice Age, and temperatures today that are lower than they were a thousand years ago. What a surprise.

Here's Obama!

Everybody’s been asking: “Where’s Obama” on just about everything. What’s his take on the auto bailout? Rush Limbaugh wants him to issue a statement promising no tax increases for a few years.

But at least there seems to be movement on the auto bailout, according to Bloomberg.

President-Elect Barack Obama`s transition team is exploring a swift, prepackaged bankruptcy for automakers as a possible solution to the industry’s financial crisis, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That is what they call a trial balloon.

And it seems that, from the various quotes from Washington barons of the realm, that the idea has some support.

It would probably be my preferred option. But whatever it is, it has to include haircuts all round.

The whole point of a recession is the liquidation of the malinvestments of the previous boom. Well, we are well into the liquidation of the mal-mortgages of the previous boom. Now it’s time to look at the malinvestment of the previous half-century in sky-high wages and benefits for auto workers.

It seemed like a good idea half a century ago, to promise good wages and benefits out of the huge profits of the auto companies. But things got a bit out of hand, as they do when politics gets involved in anything. Now it is time to face reality.

It’s time to get past denial, as our liberal friends say.

What New Deal?

Rumor has it that Obama’s advisors are planning some sort of a Big Bang program in January. As Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council:

You should never let a crisis go to waste. [It lets us address long-term problems] in the health care area, the energy area, the education area, the fiscal area, [and] the tax area.

You can see what is coming, given that President-elect Obama represents the progressive educated elite. What is coming is an intensification of the power of the progressive educated elite expressed through the power of the political sector. They want to enact a hugely dirigiste program that puts government even more deeply into every area of American life. It’s a “new” New Deal.

That’s all very well, but as Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes in the Wall Street Journal, how about Obama cleans up the festering problems of the old New Deal that are just now wiping out the economy.

His real problem is the crack-up of the world FDR built.


Fannie Mae was a New Deal creation, subsidizing the securitization of mortgage debt. FDR’s successors piled on the subsidies for housing debt and incentives directed at low-income borrowers. Kaboom.


Then there’s the UAW, born in 1935. For decades the UAW steadily traded away domestic auto market-share to imports and transplants to keep its aging membership toiling away toward their golden pensions and collecting wages and benefits twice those of their competitors. It worked for a while.

But now Kaboom. Rahm Emanuel thinks that the answer to all these failed government policies is more of the same.

Of course, the problem wasn’t so much with the original New Deal policies, but the fact that the powers granted to the government and to its favored interests were so shockingly abused. The bright young men of the New Deal may have designed some useful programs. But then the bright young men went on to the next new thing, and the programs got taken over by time servers and placemen.

The same will happen to Obama’s government-centric ideas—assuming that they even work in the first place.

In my view, the increased centralization of health care, energy, education, and so on will hasten the day when the whole project of the progressive educated elite hits the buffers.

And the people that get hurt will be the trusting independent voters who just voted innocently for Hope and Change.

Not Your Father's GOP

Kathleen Parker is a conservative columnist who went off the reservation during the recent campaign with an article praising Christopher Buckley for endorsing then-candidate Obama.

Then she got some hate mail.

Now she’s got an article in the Washington Post that urges Republicans to get G-O-D out of the party.

The fact is that a number of elite Republicans don’t really like the idea of the Republican Party as the party of the aspirational white working class.

You’ll find, if you investigate, that a common denominator in aspirational groups is a belief in God. It goes back at least to the Protestant Reformation. And so, if the party of Lincoln becomes the party of Palin and Joe the Plumber you can expect a lot of God stuff. And that’s a problem to people like Parker.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

I’ve heard this from a number of conservative friends, professional types with money in the bank. And I understand. Enthusiastic Christians like the Christian conservatives of today’s conservative movement have always been an embarrassment to established conservatives. Their naivete, their faith, their certainty—well they just aren’t out of the top drawer.

Sorry. Count me out of the exodus. If the Republican Party ceases to be the party of the moneyed professional class and becomes the party of the aspirational working class, then I’d rather stay than quit.

In my view the aspirational working class has taken it in the chin these last decades. The political elite has made it more and more difficult to be independent and aspirational and we know why. Ordinary people are only interesting to a political elite if they are useful to its program of power. In the present western world, ordinary people are useful to the elite if they are victims. They are useful if they are frightened. They are useful if they are dependent.

The aspirational working class is composed of people that used to be victims. They used to be frightened. They used to be dependent. But now they are climbing. Now they are succeeding. They’d like the nation’s politics and culture to recognize their achievement and honor their culture.

It seemed like it was only yesterday that the political elite loved the white working class to pieces. That was when they were the principal victim group that the elite wanted to sponsor. But the elite has gone on from class warfare to race politics and gender politics—that’s where they mine for new victims today. Today the white working class is an embarrassment, with its bitter embrace of God and guns.

Anyway, so what if the Republican Party becomes the party of working-class and middle-class aspiration? There might be more people interested in that kind of party than you might think, God or no God.