If Only the MSM Did Their Job

Conservative politicians have one big advantage over their liberal friends. They know the the mainstream media will do a good job criticizing their proposals.

Whenever a Republican president offers a new program you will be sure that there will be a "But critics say..." zinger towards the end of every news story on the program. In that paragraph all the usual liberal suspects will unload on the program.

You can say that's unfair, but at least it keeps conservative politicians on their toes. They have to think about what the opposition will say, and how it will look in the inevitable "But critics say..." grafs. They know that a beneficial conservative reform has a battle on its hands from the first trial balloon to the final signature in the Rose Garden.

Poor President Obama. What with a year and a half of adoring media coverage the MSM hasn't done its due diligence on his program. Without a serious effort to source and write those "But critics say..." on the stimulus, on the cap-and-trade bill, and on the president's proposed health makeover, nobody really knew what would happen to the president's program once it got to Congress. Nobody really knew what the American people would think when they got to see the details.

Of course, when the American people start to look at the details of any government program they say: "What's in it for me?" Like it or not, that's how politics works. That's why, as Irving Kristol said many years ago, if you want to help the poor you've got to deal in the middle class. Result: Social Security and Medicare.

There's a real problem with the president's health reform. There's nothing in it for the American people. Nearly everyone has health insurance. When you look at the 45 million uninsured, it turns out that they are mainly young people, the unemployed, and the rich--i.e. people who don't need health insurance, don't think they need health insurance, or who are consciously skipping health insurance until they get a job. So when you want to help the uninsured (and introduce rationing to cap costs on Medicare by the back door) you pretty soon find out that you have a problem. There will be nothing in the program for the average American. That's what sunk HillaryCare.

Same with cap-and-trade. Some people are going to get stupid green jobs and subsidies, but most people are just going to have to pay more for energy. What's in it for me?

The answer is: not much. And if the mainstream media did their job the American people would have found out about all this a year ago.

Meanwhile, we will have lost another opportunity to reform Medicare. And that's the real elephant in the room.

Blue States Will Suffer Under Obama

Back in the Nineties and the Oughties, advanced people were talking about the new "creative" economy. Their notions were boosted by people like Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life.

The notion was that people that worked in creative occupations were concentrating into creative-friendly "ideopolises" and that these metrosexual cities with their vibrant creative life were the wave of the future.

Obviously, in President Obama the creative class has elected one of their own.

But Joel Kotkin in The Blue-State Meltdown and the Collapse of the Chicago Model asserts that the creative class model is a mirage. Worse, the creative-class illusion is bankrupting the big blue states like New York, California, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of creative work becoming more important as we outsource manufacturing to low-wage countries like China and India. The problem arises when blue-state elites privilege themselves and their political supporters and put a thumb on the scales.

The model they develop nurtures a highly-paid creative elite to pay for a large and expensive public sector. New York City is the prime example. Its financial elite pays for the services and the public-sector jobs for which New York is famous.

Left out in this model are all the ordinary people in the middle that work in the private sector at more ordinary jobs. And worst off of all are the workers in the declining industrial sector in the blue states. The creative class has an "instinctive distaste for 'sprawl,' cars, and factories," and its distaste has real-world effects in the anti-business politics of blue states.

Many blue-staters thought that Obama would rescue them from their decline. But that now seems unlikely. Obama "policy is tilting to favor all the basic blue-state economic food groups—public employees, university researchers, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the major urban land interests." The old rust-belt interests need not apply.

Kotkin judges that this Obama tilt will not end happily, not for the blue states at least. The red states will continue to grow because their economies are not suffering so much under the clipping and training and meddling of liberal elites.

One day soon, the old lunch-bucket crowd will understand that the Republican Party best represents its interests. But it seems that they are determined to have one more fling with the Democratic Party and its addiction to political power as the solution to all problems.

Obamacare Inflection Point

Never mind all the bloo-hah about too fast or too reckless. The problem with Obamacare is that Democrats don't like it. Here's Donald Lambro quoting Democrats:

"I don't like the idea of raising taxes in the worst economic crisis since World War II," said Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, chief negotiator for the Blue Dogs. He warned his party last week that "there's no way they can pass the current bill on the House floor. Not even close."

In the Senate, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said he could not vote for a bill financed by a tax on employee healthcare benefits, warning that his party could lose 10 to 15 Democrats if such a tax ended up in the bill.

So, now the question is: what do we do next? Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) has some ideas. First of all, he lists the three dishonest selling points in the Obama campaign.

1. People can keep their existing health insurance. No they won't, not with a "public option."
   
2. Quality won't be compromised. Oh yeah? With the government in the middle between patient and doctor?
   
3. The massive new benefit won't cost anything to the middle class. Here, I gotta bridge I want to sell you.
   

Well, this is baloney, Jindal says, and the Democrats know it. So let's abandon the partisan game of three-card Monte, and let's try a bipartisan approach,

Here is Gov. Jindal's proposal.

• Transparency: posting prices and outcomes on the Internet.
• Consumers should benefit when they lower their own healthcare costs by better health care shopping or by healthier lifestyle.
• Medical lawsuit reform.
• Insurance reform. Make insurance more portable and cover more pre-existing conditions.
• Pooling for small businesses, self-employed, etc.
• Pay for performance in bringing down the 75% of healthcare dollar that goes for chronic conditions related to lifestyle
• Tax credits to the poor to help them buy health insurance policies.

There. That wasn't that hard, was it. But it reflects the reality of real life. In real life you get to improve things a little bit at a time. You don't get to be the savior of the nation, Mr President.

The best thing is to keep saviors confined to religion and the moral/cultural sector. It's best to keep them out of politics.

If Taxes Start to Bite Dems

It was easy for Democrats to persuade economically conservative/socially liberal voters to turn up their noses at the socially conservative President Bush. But now that Obama is talking tax increases, things are not so simple. Democrat officeholders are starting to worry about their rich voters.

Could 2010 be a replay of 1994? Stay tuned.

Why the Hurry Mr President?

President Obama took office promising a era of transparency and openness in government.

Well, you could understand that he would want to violate that pledge when pushing through the trillion dollar stimulus package. When you do your traditional post-election payoff to supporters you really don't want to let too much of the sausage-making see the light of day.

But in the case of health-care reform and of energy reform the president is proposing an utter transformation, a revolution, in the way America does business on health care and energy taxing and regulation.

It cannot be, Mr President, that this sort of thing is rushed through in the dead of night. It cannot be that it is passed on bare partisan majorities.

Because when you stiff-arm your agenda through, Chicago style, you are not obtaining the consent of the governed. You are setting up conflict for years to come.

The great culture war in which we live was not started by the religious right. It was started by liberals ramming their agenda through Congress and the courts. It was intensified by liberals refusing to debate their opponents honorably when opposition arose.

If you liberals ram through your agenda on health care and on "cap and trade" you will be not just doing an unjust thing, you will be making a strategic error.

The reason that Democrats got elected in 2008 was partly due to the natural political cycle: throwing the Republican bums out after eight years of Bush. But it was partly due to the intense partisan campaign conducted against President Bush right through his administration, representing him as a mad-dog partisan when he wasn't.

But now that Bush is gone, people can revert to their natural political selves. And people are naturally conservative. This is a center-right country.

The time is going to come, very soon, when liberals are going to find themselves in strategic retreat. The question will be: are they willing to lose gracefully, like conservatives in the years after the New Deal through the 1960s? Or are they going to be intransigent like the South on slavery in the 80 years between the founding of the United States and the Civil War.

It's time for thoughtful Democrats to start thinking about this. Chances are that 2009-10 will be a great high-water mark for Democrats and liberals, before a long withdrawing roar.

With the hyper-partisan health and energy agenda, the chances are that Democrats are putting themselves in the same overstretched situation as the German Army in the summer of 1942, just before the Red Army began its counter-offensive on the left shoulder of the Nazis' great salient into the southern Soviet Union.

The city around which the Red Army made its counter-offensive was called, at the time, Stalingrad.

Those Liberal Feelings

It's liberal feelings versus conservative values. That's the mantra you hear from a number of conservatives these days. Conservatives are steadfast and true, with their lives founded on timeless rational values. Liberals are skittering all over the lot, depending on what they feel today.

But I disagree. It is liberals that are guided by disengaged reason, proposing relentlessly rational schemes for the bureaucratizing of everything into a comprehensive universal set of rules.

It is conservatives that believe in life and love, mothers and babies, fidelity and families. What could be more emotional than that?

The truth is, of course, that humans operate at many levels; that is our magic. We are instinctive, we are emotional, we are rational.

The point of conservatism is grounding. We believe in embodied reason. We believe in the one and only fleshly life that we are given, and we experience ourselves as connected in a web of responsibility between the dead ancestors and the generations yet unborn. We feel the tug of the past and also of the future.

That is why conservatives cannot get away from the burr under the modern saddle, abortion. For abortion cuts the cord between the generations. It privileges the adolescent present, the whims of the moment against the claims of eternity.

In the modern world of disengaged reason people have come to believe in the metaphor rather than the reality. Our liberal friends believe in the generation of creativity rather than creating a new generation. They seek immortality in creative work of originality, rather than in the creation of children to carry their genes into the future.

Well, nature takes care of things like that. If you don't have children you won't have immortality, not unless you are Einstein. The way things are going, there won't be any liberals by 2100. Just as there won't be any Europeans.

Liberals may be driven by feelings, but their feelings are curiously disengaged, learned responses to the world taught to them by their government teachers and government university professors. These learned feelings teach them to honor the principle of rational government control, that whenever you have a feeling, it should lead to a government program.

As for me, I don't get it. I don't understand how anyone could live in that kind of a culture without going mad.

I say: Give me the life I am given, and the glorious divine madness that is conservatism.

And to heck with liberal rational control and its mindless rational government programs!

Rationing Smashioning

The New York Times is hauling out bioethicist Peter Singer this weekend to sing the praises of rationing, according to NRO.

Not that Obamacare has anything to do with rationing. Oh no. President Obama has specifically told the nation's governors not to talk about it.

Come on. Mr. President. We weren't born yesterday. We understand that underneath the massive pushing and shoving on your health care plan is a direct route to rationing.

If you have a government program that gives out goodies then you have to have rationing.

All resources in this world must be rationed. The most just method is to ration goods using the price system. In this system the poor get less than the rich. That's unfair, of course, so many people try to help the poor out with charity.

There are other ways of rationing. You can force everyone to stand in line for resources on a first-come first-served basis. Everyone pays for resources at work and then stands in line for them. Problem is, as the Soviet Union showed, you get less of every kind of resource. Where's the justice in that?

Of course there's a third method. The government can sequester all resources and give them out as a reward for political loyalty. That seems to be the method preferred by the Obama administration. That is, if the stimulus plan is any guide to its political philosophy.

But which is the most just? It's a good question. It depends whether you are rich or poor, or, like Peter Singer, an academic that gets paid for thinking up bioethical policies for government programs.