Obama's Speeches: Extraordinary or Contemptible?

Yesterday, May 21, 2009, President Obama gave a speech on terrorism in which he attacked the previous administration and set the face of his team against "torture."

Conservatives are enraged. Mark Steyn called it "revolting and contemptible" on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

Over at The Atlantic James Fallows is still excited about the president's speech at Notre Dame last Sunday, "another extraordinary performance" to rank with the race speech in 2008, the Prague speech on nuclear weapons, and the Georgetown speech on long-term economic policy.

What made these presentations extraordinary was not any single phrase or sentence, nor any paragraph-long flight of fine language... Instead the power of those speeches comes from the quality of their thought -- from the ideas and truths the speaker is trying to grapple with:

It goes without saying that conservatives don't think that way at all. Hugh Hewitt comments on a central paragraph of the president's terrorism speech:

BHO: All too often, our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight. But all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us, Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists and citizens, fell silent.

HH: Mark Steyn, this is a deeply dishonest statement. It lacks the specificity that would allow people to rebut it, and it is an attempt to give himself credit for that which he does not deserve, the national security success of the last eight years, and to diminish that success.

You can see what is going on here. Liberals love the rhetoric that the president is using. They do it themselves all the time, distancing themselves morally from the actions of the US government and the American people. They do it on Pearl Harbor, on Hiroshima, on Vietnam, and Iraq.

For conservatives, this distancing is outrageous, for it supposes that liberals are helpless victims, borne along by the tide of governmental malfeasance. Conservatives cannot accept that. Conservatives live lives in which they are knocked upside the head by liberal political power every day. Whaddya mean, helpless victim?

But for liberals like James Fallows and your liberal friend next door, President Obama's rhetoric is the very essence of moral inquiry. It is exhilarating to live in a time when you can listen to a president who says such wise things. I remember a liberal friend who was utterly bewitched by Candidate Obama's race speech in 2008--in the week before Obama threw Reverend Wright under the bus.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental question here. Liberals and conservatives can't both be right about President Obama. Someone is living a fantasy here, and someone is going to get a nasty rendezvous with reality.

Well, it ain't gonna be me! But you never know. Maybe we conservatives are so blinded by our "hate" that we can't see reality. Or maybe not.

But here's a reality check. The point about President Obama is not that he is a left-wing radical. Maybe he is' maybe he isn't. The point is that he is saying and doing exactly what mainstream liberals want him to say and do.

We know that Obama's politics causes Obama Derangement Syndrome in conservatives. The question is: what do moderates, particularly moderate women think. And what will they think in 2010 and 2012?

That is the question.

UK Parliament Falls on Sword

As the Parliament in Britain has become less and less powerful, it has become more and more corrupt. The last two weeks have been full of reports of outrageous expenses claimed by Members of Parliament. My favorite is the Conservative MP Douglas Hogg, who got the taxpayer to pay for cleaning the moat at his country house.

So Prime Minister Gordon Brown has decreed that Parliament will no longer answer to itself--like a "gentlemen's club"--but will answer to an outside regulator.

This means that the great institution that once toppled a king is going out into the night, never to return.

There have been a couple of articles pointing out that "gentlemen's clubs" would never have tolerated the trotters-in-the-trough attitude that has overwhelmed the mother of parliaments. Writes historian Andrew Roberts

If club members were caught doing half of what it turns out MPs have been up to, they would immediately be forced to resign their memberships and never show their faces again.

Clubs and associations belong to a different world from today's world. The club is a voluntary self-governing association. It believes in trust and ancient liberties, responsibility and respect.

But we live in the age of the overweening expert. People can't be trusted to do the right thing. You have to have a professional ethicist to tell them what to think.

You can see this attitude here in the United States. Banks can't be allowed to govern themselves. You have to have a central bank to tell them what to do, and when that doesn't work you add an additional layer of regulation.

Auto companies get saddled with intransigent unions, and can't adapt to new market conditions. So what do you do when the auto company goes bankrupt? You stiff the bondholders and give the company to the union--supervised of course by expert regulators in the government.

There's a reason why our founding fathers set up a republic with limited government. It's because they believed that people ought to be self-governing. They ought to be free, and they ought to be responsible. And they ought to have the power to show their mettle.

But that was in the old days before the rise of the progressive educated class. The educated class has nothing to do except regulate and second guess. So they have systemically demolished the old world of freedom and responsibility and replaced it with a system of administrative oversight and regulation.

It's just as well that the whole thing will collapse in ruins pretty soon. Because that will give us the best chance in generations to pick up the pieces and resume the great American experiment: freedom and responsibility under law. As Ronald Reagan said:

[America's] still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.

What a concept!

"Smattering" of Voters Kill CA Tax Props

There was only a "smattering of California voters" out yesterday according to Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times. but they voted down all but one of Governor Schwarzenegger's propositions to fix the state budget hole by increasing taxes and juggling spending allocations.

The tax increases didn't just go down. They went down big. Here are the numbers as of Wednesday morning.

Proposition	Yes vote	No vote
1A - Rainy Day Fund	34%	66%
1B - Education Funding	33%	66%
1C - Modernize Lottery	37%	63%
1D - Child Services Funding	35%	65%
1E - Mental Health Budget	34%	66%
1F - Elected Official Salaries	74%	26%

The main proposition was Proposition 1A. It would raise taxes now and create a rainy day fund later. The other propositions would reallocate special funds into the general fund, allow the state to borrow against future lottery proceeds, and prevent increase in elected officials' salaries in any year in which there was a deficit.

Today, of course, Governor Schwarzenegger is accepting the will of the voters and vowing to move forward.

“We face a staggering $21.3 billion deficit and in order to prevent a fiscal disaster, Democrats and Republicans must collaborate and work together to address this shortfall,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “The longer we wait the worse the problem becomes and the more limited our choices will be.”

But the real potential for disaster is the one that Schwarzenegger doesn't mention. Suppose the state cut spending and the world didn't end?

That is a prospect that doesn't bear thinking about.

But maybe President Obama will bail the state out. Why not? He's bailed just about everything else out in the last 100 days. Why not California?

Obama and Abortion at Notre Dame

If you were the leader of a pro-abortion party and you scored an invitation to a university that symbolizes the pro-life position, what would you say?

The answer is pretty obvious. You would de-emphasize your pro-abortion policy actions and emphasize the importance of everyone honoring other peoples' positions on high-profile moral issues.

Then you would go back to Washington DC and resume business-as-usual.

And that is what President Obama did when he spoke on May 17 at the University of Notre Dame.

So I think it is missing the point to suggest that Obama was lying through his teeth, as Rush Limbaugh did on Monday, or that Obama scored a major triumph, at William McGurn does in the Wall Street Journal.

The fact is that liberals are in strategic retreat on abortion, for the polls indicate that Americans are slowly becoming more pro-life. It's not hard to see why.

It's the reality of the thing. If you are a woman, there is one thing that you really ought to take seriously. Making babies. You can for a while, understandably, exult in the liberation of the sexual revolution which allows you, for the first time, to control your baby-making. But you find, in time, that this control is a poisoned chalice. Why? Because you find that you are controlling your fertility not for yourself but for your sexual partner.

It's foolish for women to go to bed with a man unless he has already made a commitment to love her forever. Because otherwise she's just a piece of meat to him. And it's easy for dead meat to get diseased.

It's foolish for women to build a life that doesn't include marriage and family. Even if you are the cleverest woman in France, like Simone de Beauvoir, what profiteth a woman if she gain the whole world, but lose her "partner" to a bevy of mistresses--and no children?

Right now, as the high tide of pro-abortion politics begins to turn, the poster boy for abortion can afford to make generous speeches at a Catholic university. Later on in the retreat our Democratic friends won't be so calm and collected.

As my Greek friend says: You only know what your dog is like when it is being hunted.

Fixin' to Go Wrong on Obama's Watch

We've said it before, and we'll say it again. The whole point of electing an Obama adminstration is so that liberals can get to do some really stupid things, and live out the deluded fantasies they have cooked up in the liberal bell-jar.

And then we can upchuck the whole thing: Obama, Pelosi, big spending, the works.

Victor Davis Hanson reads the through the ingredients. He reviews six different issues:

• Rule of Law. Strong-arm bailouts and bankrupties are not good. They mean that political power is substituting for the rule of law.
• Energy. The Obama policy is to say No to the common sense of going for natural gas and oil and nuclear while alternative energy technologies ramp up.
• Debt. You can't make the numbers add up without actual confiscation, so the whole thing will "blow up in the administration's face."
• National Security. "Very schizophrenic. W[e] keep FISA, Patriot Act, rendition, military tribunals (Gitmo for now?), Predator attacks, Iraq and Afghanistan, while we trash their Bush origins," etc.
• Civil Discord. Obama is sowing disunity.
• Race Relations. More discord. The president invokes race wherever he goes.
  

You can see what is going on here. Obama is sowing the whirlwind. And yet all he is doing is executing on the standard liberal playbook.

Where will it end? It will end, in my view, sooner than we think. The Democrats exploited a tactical advantage in 2005-2008 as they played on the American people's natural discomfort with an unpopular war, and executed on a cynical cold-cock politics to stop any reform of their clunking welfare state.

But now they own the store. And Americans are already organizing in opposition to Obama's knee-jerk liberal policies.

The American people deserve better than this.

Palin Speaks the Language of Women

The Republican Party is known as the Daddy Party--a little rough and gruff at times. Everyone knows that the Democratic Party is the Mommy Party. It will try to make everything better with a check.

What Republicans and conservatives need, I've written, is a Mommy Conservatism. But it ain't easy.

How do you persuade the moderate white middle-aged woman voter to sign onto reform? You are asking her to change a government school system that is all she has ever known. You are asking her to agree to health system changes that will confuse and annoy her aging mother.

After watching the YouTube video of Sarah Palin's Right-to-Life speech in Evansville, IN, I'm here to say that Palin is one that can lead us to a woman-centered conservatism.

At least, she knows how to speak the language of women.

Most women don't think in the strident language of male politics. They think in terms of the "dilemmas" they have faced in their lives.

And that is how Palin spoke in Evansville, reported by the Washington Post.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told an antiabortion audience in Indiana on Thursday night that, "for a fleeting moment," she considered having an abortion after learning that her son Trig would have Down syndrome.

The experience, she added, "now lets me understand a woman's, a girl's temptation to maybe try to make it all go away."

Ultimately, Palin said, she decided she had to "walk the walk" concerning her long-standing antiabortion views.

This is the way that women talk. This is the way that conservatives need to talk. And if conservatives learn how to approach women as women, appreciating and respecting the "dilemmas" of a woman's life then we will earn the right and the support we need to reform the welfare state.

And make it not just a woman-friendly thing, but a human-friendly thing.

Changes at Road to the Middle Class

We've decided at Road to the Middle Class to surrender to progress and go to Google's Blogger for our blogging platform.  

The reason is two-fold.

• The RMC comments feature never really worked very well.
• It's much easier to manage the blog and to post using a fully-featured blogging platform instead of home brew.

So now roadtothemiddleclass.com changed.  New blog posts are now hosted at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.  Comments are hosted at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com. 

But this doesn't mean much change to you, the user.  That's because, through the magic of xml feeds, you can still read the latest blogs on the home page of christopherchantrill.com  as though nothing had changed.

And you can still click the "comments" link at the bottom of each blog post.  And you can still click the "more" link on recent blogs to see the full post.

The difference is that now, when you want to see a full post or you want to comment and you click on a link, you'll be redirected to americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.  

But what do you do when you want to get back to christopherchantrill.com?  No problem.  Just us the menu across the top of the page at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com, just as you would at  roadtothemiddleclass.

Sounds simple.  But you may encounter problems.  If you do, be sure and make a comment below, or email us.  Then we can fix the problem.