Palin Hits the Independent Spot

Michael Barone writes today that voters are expressing their frustration with the Obama administration but they aren't at all sure they can trust the Republicans as an alternative.

As William Galston points out in his New Republic blog, during Obama's presidency voters have been growing more conservative but remain disdainful of Republicans.

Now, supposing you were a politician wanting to take advantage of this situation. What would you do? Why, you'd probably endorse Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman in NY-23, as Sarah Palin has done. You'd say, on your Facebook page, that Doug Hoffman is a good conservative who stands for "smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty." You'd take the NY Republican Party to task for nominating a candidate so liberal that "there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race." Then you'd finish with something like this:

Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.

A few weeks ago I wondered about the title of Palin's upcoming book: Going Rogue. Now I understand. Going rogue means running against the Republican establishment when running for Governor of Alaska. It means working around the Washington establishment and aiming for the sweet spot in the post-Obama electorate. It means not being a good follower but acting as an outsider willing to disturb the status quo and willing to risk the long shot.

A few weeks ago, when Palin ignited the "death panels" flap Pat Buchanan noted that Palin certainly knew how to frame an issue. It was the respect that one professional gives to another.

Liberals all think, after the 2008 campaign, that Palin is a lightweight.

But if there is one thing you should never do in politics, it is this: Never underestimate the opposition.

Don't Worry About NY-23

Some people are getting too worried about "losing" NY-23. We are talking about the special congressional election next week in New York's 23rd District, in which NY voters are electing a successor to John McHugh (R), nominated to be Secretary of the Army.

OK. It's true that some Republican leaders have endorsed the offical Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, and other have endorsed the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman. Oh No, some people are worrying. That will split the conservative vote and elect a Democrat.

Seriously, we have more important fish to fry. And the elections of 2009 give conservatives a free pass on deciding what it will take to win elections in 2010 and beyond.

The GOP leaders nominated Scozzafava on the assumption that a nice non-controversial moderate Republican was the safest choice to retain the NY-23 seat in the (R) column. It looks like they were wrong. Dead wrong. But hey, everyone makes mistakes. The trick is not to repeat the same mistake over and over again.

Meanwhile in Virginia the conservative Republican candidate, Bob McDonnell, seems to be running away from the Democrat Creigh Deede.

In New Jersey, the moderate Republican Chris Christie is only level-pegging against incumbent Democratic billionaire Jon Corzine, with independent Chris Daggett creating a stir.

What will be the result? Well, whatever it is, it will tell the political professionals, and also you and me, a lot about what it will take to win in 2010.

The fact is that, with Obama in the White House and the Tea Party movement entering the arena, we don't know what will move the needle. Is it a centrist GOP? Is it a hard-right GOP, purged of the RINOs? Or is it a moderately conservative GOP that can attract the Tea Partiers?

And what, exactly, do the Tea Partiers want?

My guess is that a week from now we will start to get a feel for what the 40 percent of Americans who call themselves conservatives, and the 35 percent of Americans who call themselves moderates or independents, really want.

Liberals, a mere 20 percent of Americans, need not apply. You chaps better get what you can, while you can. Because politics is going to be different after Obama.

Realigning Election in Britain?

In the US the Noughties is associated with George W. Bush and Iraq. In Britain it was once associated with the brilliant political wizardry of Tony Blair.

But now the voters in Britain think of the clunking failure of Gordon Brown. It's not just that his decade-old boast of "ending Tory boom and bust" has come crashing down around his ears. It has now become utterly obvious that Labour's welfare state is utterly failing the poor. Nothing remarkable here. We all know on the right that the welfare state utterly fails the poor, in its dependency culture and its rotten inner-city schools.

In Britain, the Conservative Party is doing something about it. Former party leader Iain Duncan Smith now heads up an organization called the Center for Social Justice. It is proposing radical changes in welfare, basically emulating the US welfare-to-work strategy that President Obama is busily dismantling.

Then there's a proposed school reform being led by Michael Gove that amounts to a mega-charter program on the Swedish model. that basically allows any sensible group to set up a charter school free of the local education blob.

All this is discussed in a think piece today at Conservative Home by Tim Montgomerie. He calls it "The plan to turn Britain blue [i.e. Conservative] for a generation."

The plan is anchored in the Conservative education and welfare strategies, but also aims to win the support of centrist "values voters." This means, I suspect, nice middle-class women who want a greener, kinder society.

The very simple political idea is that there are an increasing number of people out there who see their vote as an ethical responsibility as well as an act of self-interest. These 'values voters' deserted the Conservatives in 1997 because they were uneasy at aspects of the nation created by the Thatcher-Major years even though they had benefited from them. They - to use Iain Duncan Smith's borrowed expression - wanted to vote for a party that wasn't just 'good for them' but was also 'good for their neighbour'.

In 1997 the Labour Party successfully defined the Conservatives as the selfish "nasty party." Many voters didn't want to be thought of as nasty. They left the Tory party and voted for the centrist party, the Liberal Democrats. A major initiative of party leader David Cameron has been to "love bomb" the Lib Dems and bring them back.

It is monstrous, of course, to consider conservatives as "nasty." If you want nasty, then how about the party that has demolished the culture of the working class and its institutions and corralled the remnants into crime-ridden public housing estates and barracked their children in dreadful schools.

The trick, of course, is to redefine conservatives as the nice party, and Labour as the nasty party, just as conservatives in the US are working on presenting the Obamites as Chicago thugs and Tea Partiers as patriotic Americans.

When that has been accomplished the next task is to rebuild the civil society of "little platoons" and "mediating institutions" and show these values voters how the conservative way is better than the top-down, government program way of the left.

This is a big educational task. Most centrist people of good will in Britain and the US dutifully think that it is government's job to provide the safety net and do all the "nice" charitable things to make society caring and compassionate. They do not yet "get" Cameron's central message: "There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state." Nor do they get that government is always and everywhere about power, and not about caring and compassion.

But the time to start is now. And if anyone can do it, David Cameron is the man to do it.

US conservative politicians will be watching Cameron closely. For those of us that Hope for Change, there is the dream of repeating the Reagan-Thatcher partnership with a ???-Cameron partnership. Who will that ??? be? A Sarah Palin? A Bobby Jindal? A Mitch Daniels? Even a Mitt Romney?

Stay tuned.

Worse Than a Crime

I seem to be dragging the Talleyrand quote out a little too much. But it applies to so much of the Obama administration's policies that I just can't help myself. So let's tell it like it is.

The Obama administration's policy on demonizing its enemies, which clearly comes right from the top, is worse than a crime, it's a blunder. And that comes through loud and clear in Krauthammer's Friday column about the Obamites' war on their opponents, particularly FoxNews. He paraphrases Madison:

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests... They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other -- and an otherwise imperious government.

Let's sharpen his analysis. To adapt another European thinker, Clausewitz: Politics is civil war by other means. Each side of the partisan divide, deep down, wonders what the other side would do when push comes to shove. Liberals were paranoid about Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. They worried about what Dick Cheney was doing behind the scenes.

That's why it's important for the president to work hard at seeming to be fair with his opponents. It keeps the paranoid fears down to a low rumble. And, liberals, despite what your leaders told you, George W. Bush worked pretty hard at that.

President Obama is working on seeming fair to his opponents. In fact he is clearly targeting his opponents with the full power of the US government. The problem with that, as with any all-out offensive, is what do you do for an encore? Suppose President Obama manages to cow the opposition and the economy still goes south? Suppose that the war in Afghanistan continues to spiral downwards? How do you deal with your opponents when you have already unleashed the full power of the government against them?

With politics as with armies, you only really get one chance, because once you commit your army to battle you use it up. You come out of the battle with an army that is much weaker than what you started out with.

Here we are after nine months of the Obama administration and already the Obama agenda is busted. Americans are divided on health care. They are "green" but not if it means sharply higher energy costs. They stood by when the Obama administration passed a "stimulus" bill that mostly stimulated its supporters, but they didn't like it. The fact is that after a mere nine months, the Obama mandate is busted.

So we go back to the correlation of presential election forces.

Republican Margin of Victory/Defeat: Selected Demographic Groups -- 1996-2008
	1996	2000	2004	2008
White Men	+9	+24	+25	+16
White Women	-5	+1	+11	+7
African Americans	-72	-81	-77	-95
Hispanics	-51	-27	-9	-36
Overall	-8.5	-0.5	+2.4	-7

We can already start to imagine what the numbers will look like in 2012. White men will be back to +25, or maybe more. White women will be up to +15. African Americans will be at +90 but theturnout will be way down.

The big question will be Hispanics. I'd guess that Obama will be lucky to get -25.

So why would President Obama and his troops be out there making enemies? I always thought that the #1 priority of a politician was: Don't make enemies. President Obama seems to be awfully careless about this. Maybe it didn't matter in the one-party city of Chicago.

But what do I know? But my guess is that the Obama all-out campaign against its opponents is worse than a crime, it's a blunder.

Obama's Scapegoat of the Week

It really goes beyond irony. Here we have the president who ran on post-partisan politics, getting beyond the petty squabbles in Washington DC.

Yet surely no president in modern memory has used polarization and scapegoating as consistently and routinely.

Never mind the tired Blame-it-on-Bush tactic. Just think of all the others he has accused of wickedness.

Yesterday it was the bankers. The federal pay czar demanded that companies taking money from the TARP fund should reduce their compensation--by as much as 90 percent.

Before that it was the insurance companies, whose search for profits, as everyone knows, is the reason that health care costs are so high.

Now the president is threatening three special interests in what Mark Tapscott calls:

Barack Obama and his White House capos muscling recalcitrant opponents and promising to crush those who don't get in line.

They are muscling the US Chamber of Commerce:

Now the White House actively encourages an exodus of high-profile firms from the nation's most prominent voice for business, with the prospect of billions of dollars of "green industry" subsidies being a prominent lure.

There are the doctors:

If the doctors would drop their demand for medical malpractice lawsuit reforms and support Obamacare, Reid would quickly move the $247 billion bill to spare them from scheduled cuts in Medicare reimbursement.

Otherwise their Medicare reimbursements would fall sharply. (Stop press: Reid failed in a test vote to move the bill forward yesterday).

Then, of course, there is the war against FoxNews. Heigh ho.

Let us raise all this to the dignity of a Law of Political Scapegoats. "The last refuge of a political scoundrel is the scapegoat."

There are some politicians who reach for a scapegoat as their first refuge, but they are beyond the pale.

There's nothing wrong with scapegoating, per se. It's obviously a necessary part of human society. When things go wrong, you need to load all the guilt and the failure on a convenient victim and cast him out--hopefully with all the guilt and failure--so you can make a fresh start.That's what Rene Girard argues in Violence and the Sacred.  In a democracy, this process is called an election.

But there must be a limit to this. And I suggest that, for a politician, the limit on scapegoating should be this: the scapegoat must be another politician.

In other words, if President Obama wants to blame someone for everything going wrong, it must be another elected politician. No fair blaming the doctors or the insurance companies.

Why does everyone hate the insurance companies? Because government policy has put them in an untenable position. They are expected to deliver unlimited medical care in return for a fixed monthly premium. Who can do business under those conditions? What happens when they try to limit their costs? They are pilloried as corporate monsters.

Or the bankers. The government keeps playing games with money and credit. For instance, it decided that more people should be able to buy homes, and bullied the banks into lending more money to sub-prime borrowers. After home prices soared and then collapsed when the sub-prime borrowers couldn't service their loans, the politicians blamed the bankers, their reckless lending practices, and their bonuses.

It's up to We the People to do something about this. Whenever a politician hauls a scapegoat onto the political stage for ritual humiliation, we must avert our eyes from the public execution and start looking for the man behind the curtain.

Meanwhile, here's some advice to President Obama.

Mr President, I have a feeling that there is a natural limit to the scapegoating that a politician can get away with, a point at which the people stop falling for the scapegoat play. And I think you are getting close to that limit.

Just a word of advice from one American to another.

Obama in Trouble

It's too easy to keep your head down and get distracted by the he-said-she-said of the daily political show.

You know how it goes: Will the administration succeed in quarantining FoxNews? Will the "public option" get into the final health bill? When will the president make a decision on Afghanistan? Will the Democrats allow a vote on subpoenaing the records of Countrywide Financial?

All this tactical noise drowns out the greater strategic question. And that question is: Just how deep in trouble is President Obama?

My guess is: deeper than we know. Deeper than we can imagine. That's why we are seeing all the desperation flapping around and crude strong-arming.

It's always hard to see the future. Heck, the future doesn't even know the future. But it is clear that the political plates are shifting. As Jonah Goldberg writes, recalling the stories of the Indonesian tsunami in 2004:

Before the tidal wave crashed on shore, beachgoers stood around and idly gaped as the water drastically receded. Bewildered, they didn't realize they were looking at the prelude to a calamity.

That's what is happening right now. The tide is going out. Something is about to happen. Politicians are still going about their normal business, buying and selling votes as they always do, but there is a eerie stillness that makes everyone look at each other with a questioning look.

Everything the administration is doing is wrong. Its stimulus program should have been an emergency tax cut on the payroll tax, not a giveaway to Democratic voters. The cap and trade should have enabled nuclear power and hydrocarbon drilling, not taxes and green-energy subsidies. The health care reform should be increasing transparency and market responsiveness, not creating more subsidies for slacker liberals.

If the economy is to recover quickly and effectively it needs to be freed up from the weight of government, at least for a while. It seems that President Obama and his advisers don't get that. Why would they? They are all liberals, and have lived all their lives in the liberal bubble.

It's the American people that will have to pay for all this. As they start to grasp the enormity of the situation, they will start to become very angry. They will demand new leaders, and they will make sure that they get them.

Dividing America

President Clinton's response to the Monica Lewinsky affair in early 1998 was to get Dick Morris to conduct a poll, the Washington Post reported.

When Morris reported that Americans would favor his impeachment or resignation if he lied under oath, he says Clinton replied: "Well, we'll just have to win, then."

That started the highly partisan conflict with the Republican Congress that ended in Clinton's impeachment in the House and trial in the US Senate. Arguably, it started the 50-50 Red-state/Blue state division that has dominated US politics down to the present.

The divide certainly hasn't really helped Republicans. But the rage against Bush certainly helped Democrats win in 2006 and 2008.

Now the Obama administration, with its popularity waning, has decided to take a highly partisan tone with its opponents. It has decided to argue that FoxNews is not a real news network, but an arm of the Republican Party.

Well, FoxNews certainly features a number of conservative commentators. And it certainly does feature news that is embarrassing to the administration. But the combative Obama response, David Limbaugh writes, is troubling.

Instead of selling its agenda the old-fashioned way -- by convincing the unconvinced -- it attacks those who dare to articulate and air the opposing point of view.

You can understand why the frustrated Obamites might think they need to up the ante on their opponents. They are political fighters and political fighting is what they do. But viewing this long term, it can do nothing but hurt their cause.

Let's count the ways that this will hurt the administration:

1. It will elevate FoxNews as the official opposition to Obama.
   
2. It will encourage anyone that has a beef with the administration to watch FoxNews.
3. It will encourage fence-sitters to take a look at FoxNews to find out what is going on.
4. It will energize the opposition.
5. It will lead to more and more political thuggery as the Obama administration tries harder and harder to gain traction.

There's a reason why political tradition requires that the political parties bury the hatchet after an election. It is that government becomes almost impossible when everyone is all mobilized to fight on every single issue. That's why politicians typically try to pass legislation that has a large bipartisan majority. If you pass something on strictly a partisan basis, then the other side will mobilize to reverse it at the first opportunity,

Let's look at the Bush tax cuts to see how this works. In the 2001-02 recession the Bush administration wanted to cut tax rates to stimulate economic recovery. But Democrats were opposed. It was impossible to obtain a bipartisan consensus.

So, to get the economy moving and to win the next election, the Bushies pushed their tax cuts through on a partisan budget vote, needing only 51 votes in the Senate instead of a filibuster-proof 60 votes. The tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2010. Democrats have been salivating ever since to get at the revenue that the tax cuts for the rich took away.

But when President Bush wanted to reform Social Security he understood that budget shenanigans were inappropriate. He needed a bipartisan majority. Democrats were opposed to his plan and it was clear that a bipartisan majority wasn't possible. So Bush accepted defeat, and Social Security didn't get reformed,

The Obama administration clearly doesn't believe in that sort of politics. They seem to be intent upon a huge change to health care without creating a national consensus and a bipartisan majority in Congress. They seem to be determined to get something, anything, as long as they win.

This is a strategic error of monumental proportions. Nothing but tears will come of a close-fought partisan victory on health care.

The problem facing the Obama administration is not that FoxNews is an arm of the Republican Party (Thank goodness it isn't!) . The problem is that Obama campaigned as a moderate and he is governing as a liberal. The problem is that his program is broadly unpopular with the American people, and the more they learn about his agenda, the less they like it.

As I said. The Obama administration is just creating trouble for itself. How much, nobody can tell. That's why we have federal elections every two years.