Yes, a Teachable Moment, Mr. President

Everyone knows what a "teachable moment" is. It's when the liberal brings down the hammer and you are supposed to admit that you were wrong about some arcane point of liberal theology.

So when President Obama mumbled something about a teachable moment with respect to the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., ordinary Americans were ready to upchuck

But the racial incident now known as Gates-gate is showing signs of breaking the mold. Because the rules have changed.

No doubt Harvard scholar "Skip" Gates thought he was onto a sure thing when he railed against the white cop called out to investigate a reported burglary at his house in Cambridge, MA. After all, when you are a famous black-studies professor you can't turn down an opportunity for publicity. Publicity is the name of the game.

And no doubt President Obama thought he was onto a sure thing when he injected the Gates incident into an awkward press conference about his awkward health policies.

And no doubt New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd just thought it was a cheap opportunity to say something clever about "the arc of civil rights dramas from Jim Crow to Jim Crowley." What a humiliation for a man like Gates who summers on Martha's Vineyard, darling!

But it didn't turn out that way, because the rules have changed.

For years and years, liberals have been telling us that blacks can't be racist because they don't have any power. This has always been a lie because the whole point of the Civil Rights Acts was to give blacks power, to establish that blacks had the power to vote, and send federal troops to enforce that right if that's what it took.

Never mind about that. Liberals do stuff like that all the time. It is called abuse of power.

What tripped up Gates and Obama is that the Gates incident involved two powerful black men and a white man who, of all things, is a racial profiling instructor. It also involved routine audio and video of the incident. So it turned out that the white cop was truthful in his report of the incident and Gates was not.

Also, as Michael Barone points out, the guy facing the big risk in the Gates affair was the white cop. If he had lied (as Gates appears to have done) or if he had tried a cheap shot (as Obama appears to have done) then all the power of the race industry would have descended upon him without mercy.

Now we learn that the black cop photographed at the Gates incident, Sgt. Leon Lashley, has also suffered in this incident. He sent a letter to President Obama with Sgt. Crowley telling him that he's been attacked as an Uncle Tom for his support of his fellow police officer.

Well now. Isn't that interesting.

It's a reminder, as if we needed one, that in all the political maneuvering of the "Do You Know Who I Am" people there are usually innocent victims. In the liberal race politics of the last half century the victims have usually been the white working class, suitably scapegoated as "red-necks."

But now we are reminded that it's not just the white working class that gets caught in the cross-currents of liberal racism and power politics. Blacks get tossed around as well.

Yes indeed. We just had a teachable moment. But the guys that need a spot of "larnin'" probably aren't going to get the message. Professor Gates ought to be ashamed. President Obama ought to be ashamed. But don't wait around for that to happen.

But we can take comfort in the honest and honorable conduct of Sgt. Crowley and Sgt. Lashley. There are actually a lot of worthy Americans in these United States who do the right thing, even when nobody is looking. They even do the right thing after their betters have lashed their backs to ribbons with the cat-o-nine-tails.

It's enough to make you proud.

ObamaCare: Defeat Now or Later

Either ObamaCare will pass in some form, or Congress will buckle and pass a face-saver. Either way, the question is: What happens next?

People who are adamant about killing ObamaCare at once fear that once the new subsidies and special-interest deals have been enacted into law we will never get back to the status quo ante. On this view we must defeat it now or water it down to a minor new subsidy for the uninsured.

Then there's the Leninist argument: the worse the better. On this view we need a political cataclysm in order to reverse the century-long trend of the welfare state. What better than for the Democrats to pass an unpopular government health takeover in the teeth of grass-roots opposition that gets stuck in the gullet of the American people?

I admit that my preference is for ObamaCare to pass and for the American people to rise up and send a president and Congress to Washington in 2013 to repeal it. I don't think that we can avoid this kind of confrontation if we are ever to reverse the welfare state and chart a new course based on the principle articulated by British Conservative Party leader David Cameron.

Cameron said: There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state.

This articulates the essential conservative position. If you want to do societal things, like help women and children, you don't have to do it with a government adminstrative program. There is another way. In fact it is better not to get the government involved.

Why? Why shouldn't we have government programs where we come together to do things collectively? Well, the simple answer is: Force. Whenever government does something, it does it with force. Do we want health care to be a question of force, where we force some people to provide health care for other people? Do we want education to be a question of force. where children are forced to go to school for twelve years according to a syllabus that has been determined by political chicanery?

Conservatives say that there has to be a better way than force. In fact, there is. And if you want to know what it looks like, look around you at the amazing things that get done without government compulsion.

Sitting Next to a Liberal

I just finished Harry Stein's I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Liberal. It's a quick read, and full of fun and frolic.

But underneath is the rather grim truth. Liberals don't want to hear from the loyal opposition to them, the ruling elite. The educated progressive class ditch friends that disagree with them. They ditch academics that disagree with them. And they think it is perfectly OK, as the book's title says, to embarrass a conservative at the dinner table.

Conservatives can get mad at this, but getting mad rather misses the point. Because it is worse tham that.

One of the key things that any political elite must do is keep in touch with the plebs. Any ruling class--and the progressive educated elite is one such--will commit injustices and will be corrupt. Power corrupts, as Action wrote.

So if you are serious as a political elite you must make sure that you are listening to the people. Not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the necessary thing to do.

By keeping in touch with the people you get to know what is bothering them. That means that you can figure out how to diffuse their anger and perpetuate your power.

If the liberals have stopped listening then they are shortening the life of the Liberal Era. Because they are raising the odds that some day soon, some conservative will raise a head of rebellion against the liberal power elite. And if liberals are blindsided by the rebellion, they won't be able to react appropriately and decisively, as a power elite must do. So maybe one day soon a routine injustice will spark a major movement and end up toppling the liberal elite from its perch.

Or maybe liberals will wake up just in time.

But according to Harry Stein, liberals are so deeply embedded in their liberal enclaves that it is probably too late for them to wake up. Their ideological conformity is so deep that nothing can disturb their dogmatic slumber.

Palin Loaded for Bear

Some how I've gotten the idea in recent months that Sarah Palin couldn't take it. She was whining too much at the media instead of taking it like a man. I don't know where I got the idea. I must have read it, and heard it from every liberal friend.

Anyway, what would a liberal know about Sarah Palin?

But the Palin exit speech, delivered at the inauguration of her successor as Alaska Governor, certainly didn't sound like a whimper. It sounded like a declaration of war.

Palin spent a lot of time talking about the armed forces, and then just to emphasize the point, reminded the media that the armed forces were there to protect them. Oh, and by the way, lay off the children of my successor, she added.

Then it was on to remind everyone of her extraordinary record as governor, getting the Alaska gas pipeline off dead-center.

Here's how it sounded to me. Palin is positioning herself as the candidate of conservatives and moderates. She's not really running as a movement conservative but as an American patriot who believes in America, independence, self-reliance, faith, reform, small government, and neighbors.

Who believes in that sort of stuff? Well, there's the 40 percent of Americans that style themselves as conservative, and the 35 percent that style themselves as moderate. You could say it's a start.

There are two kinds of politicians in America. There is the kind like President Obama that follows the liberal trade-winds. It's the kind that hopes, by staying right in the middle of their political party, that she'll eventually be rewarded.

Then there are the politicians that make their own weather. I am thinking Ronald Reagan. Even in 1980 he ran as the outsider. Even in 1980, after a decade and a half in national politics he just wasn't considered "safe."

Sarah Palin is like that.

It's been pretty obvious since Palin first emerged as a national politician that she makes her own weather.

But that won't make any difference to the doubters. People will be predicting that she just doesn't have what it takes right up until the day of her election as President of the United States.

Obama Wasn't Elected to Go Liberal

As President Obama pushes his government takeover of health care his approval numbers are tanking. What's going on?

Clark Judge thinks he knows. The American people didn't elect Obama to implement a liberal agenda. They elected him to rein in government spending.

What the Obama people failed to understand was that the election of Mr. Obama in 2008 began in 2005. That was when pollsters started picking up that a big segment of George W. Bush’s 2004 vote was becoming disaffected, not over Iraq (as many Democrats later imagined) but over spending. This group was enraged by the growing deficits, saw passage of the Medicare prescription drug benefit in the first Bush term as a minus, not a plus, and later in the second term was repulsed by the emblematic Alaskan bridge to nowhere. So they abandoned the GOP in 2006. In 2008, they remained disaffected. Many were attracted to Mr. Obama personally and embraced the historic change he seemed to epitomize regarding race. The result was that again they voted Democrat.

The Obama people must know this. After all, they ran a center-campaign full of talk about transparency, getting rid of corruption and lobbyists, and choice. Just like the congressional Democrats ran in 2006.

Evidently they don't care. They figure, following Rahm Emanuel, that you should never let a crisis go to waste. They believe that if they rush through their agenda it will be a fait accompli and will never be reversed.

Well, maybe they are right. It worked for Social Security and the Great Society. Why not try it on again?

But there is another possibility. The Dems might remind people why they voted for Ronald Reagan in 2000 and against Clinton in 1994. For the new generation of voters, the ones who believed that Obama meant "change," it might teach them a bit of political reality.

For the truth is that the Democratic Party is not the party of hope and change. It is the party of the welfare-state status quo. It is the party of patronage. It is the party of the education blob. It is the party of the trial lawyers. It is the party of extreme environmentalism.

Every American voter needs to be reminded of this from time to time. And every new voter needs to be taught it.

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.