No Way Out vs. Worst Bill Ever

Last week, Nancy Pelosi unveiled the final House health reform bill, a 1,990 page monstrosity that The Wall Street Journal calls the "worst bill ever."

Coincidentally, Peggy Noonan's weekly op-ed moaned about pessimism in the nation's elite, a feeling that there is "no way out" of our present difficulties. We are ruled by America's luckiest children, Peggy mourns, people who have never been foreclosed upon.

They are stupid and they are callous[.]

My op-ed this week deals with the nasty little situation the Democrats are in, the one that drives the "no way out" meme. This is the first time that Democrats have come into office during the nail-biting stage of a recession. It's hard for them. Usually in a recession, it is a Republican president in charge and the Democrats are barracking from the sidelines, asking why the insensitive president hasn't got everyone back to work yet.

But I think that the "no way out" chaps are weenies, like Falstaff on the day of battle telling Prince Hal that "I would 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well." (Henry IV Part I) Sorry, Sir John, but to win the war you first have to win the battle.

I happens that I have just started reading the monumental German History 1770-1866 by James J. Sheehan. It starts with a discussion of the transition from traditional corporate political organization in Germany to the centralized bureaucratic state.

The paradigmatic centralized state is, of course, the France of Louis XIV. Centralized administration concentrates power and resources at the center and makes the state into a unitary weapon in the hands of its ruler.

But, of course, bureaucracy has its limits. It cannot adapt to changing situations at all well. And it tends to run down over the years, becoming a mechanical monster that spins its wheels, using up resources without delivering any power for traction.

The absolutist monarchy developed into the welfare state, most notably beginning with Bismarck in the 1880s. Bismarck's intention was to enroll the working class into the patronage system of the state, brining the workers inside the power structure rather than continuing on the outside creating trouble.

The question is, as we contemplate the "worst bill ever" that concentrates all health care into the state, when does the administrative model reaches its limit? Can it compete against the more decentralized capitalist system?

Let us not be romantic about this, and think just in terms of what is good for the people. The question for me is: how does the administrative model work for the high game of politics in 2009? How does it serve the interests of the political elite in maintaining power and satisfying its supporters. Or does it create too many enemies, people outside the charmed circle?

My guess is that the administrative system will eventually crash and burn, for a number of reasons, including:

• Overpromising of the benefits
• General inability of bureacracies to adapt
• Excessive consumption of resources to maintain political power
• Population decline due to unwillingness of welfare state adults to have children
• General lack of vigor in welfare state populations
• Inability to maintain enough resources for military power
  

The thing about politics and the human condition is that you can always stop and change before you really have to, before you hit the wall. But usually, we don't.

But I am an optimist. I hope that the American people do not feel there is "no way out." And I hope that the American people will take one look at PelosiCare and ObamaCare and upchuck everyone from Obama to Reid to Pelosi.

We'll know tomorrow after the off-off-year elections whether the Great Upchuck has begun.

ObamaCare and the War over the Welfare State

For Republicans and conservatives ObamaCare is like a Halloween nightmare.

Everything we hate about liberalism is contained in the 1,000 page monstrosities being dragged through the Congress by its liberal leaders: more taxes, more bureaucracy, more mandates, more price controls, more compulsion.

How can the Democrats be proposing this madness? Surely they can't believe that the monstrous Pelosi bill, a 1,990 page behemoth, will solve anything? Pessimists like Mark Steyn say that government health care is a path of no return. Once people get "free" health care you can never get them to live like free men and women: paying for what they get.

Steyn may be right. But it seems to me that there is no avoiding the climactic battle to decide the war. I am not necessarily talking about the Clausewitzian decisive battle. That notion is tied up with the Prussian need, as a small nation, to beat its enemies swiftly before a conflict turns into a war of attrition.

What we are seeing, in this desperate Democratic gamble, is more like the Ludendorff offensives in early 1918. The Germans threw everything they had against the British in Picardy and more or less destroyed the British Fifth Army. Then they turned south and drove the French back toward Rheims. But the offensives petered out; the breakthrough didn't occur, and the Allied defense held. After that, the German retreated, step by step, until the Armistice in November.

We are in a similar situation. The Democrats are making one last desperate gamble to impose their administrative, compulsory, universal welfare state on the United States. It is the last moment that anyone can pretend that the bureaucratic method can deliver social services, or indeed anything except a police force or an armed service.

There is no way that we can avoid this climactic moment, the high water mark at the end of a vast tide of the welfare state. We must fight against it, bravely and truthfully as the Loyal Opposition. We must have faith that, one fine day, the American people will turn from the meaningless and degrading world of the welfare state, which makes adults into adult teenagers.

The last time that the Democrats tried this the American people upchucked and we got the election of 1994. If anything, the opposition to the Democratic agenda seems to be forming faster and more effectively than in the Year of the Angry White Male.

There is a simple way of understanding what conservatism is all about. You can call it the Affirmation of Ordinary Life. If you take away the tasks and the challenges of ordinary life--work, marriage, children, family, and the many struggles and sacrifices that accompany it--then you strip life of its meaning.

Which may explain why studies show that liberals are less happy, less generous, and less honest than conservatives.

CNN's Conventional Wisdom on Palin

There's one good reason at least to read the MSM: to get the conventional wisdom. So Alexander Mooney's CNN piece on "Palin's high risk, high-rewards strategy" is helpful.

We learn that Palin is too hot to handle for the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia, because it will rile up the left and turn off the moderates. We learn that Palin's poll numbers have gone down in the last year, except with the conservative base.

But the conventional Mooney admits that there's an upside to the Palin strategy. By endorsing Doug Hoffman in NY-23 and challenging the GOP establishment she is staking out a Tea Party strategy. She may not appeal to moderates; people may not think she is ready to be commander-in-chief. But the Republican base loves her. And then there is this:

Moreover, as the Tea Party movement has made clear, a passionate grassroots movement now exists, ready to embrace a leader.

Now let's see. Let's think back to a presidential candidate that was written off by the conventional wisdom of the time as too lightweight, too divisive: couldn't appeal to moderates.

I remember well attending a Republican presidential caucus in 1980. I entered the caucus a Bush supporter, but the dogged enthusiasm of the down-market Reagan supporters, people that looked like blue-collar Democrats, made me into a Reagan supporter by the end of the evening.

Why was I a Bush supporter? Because he was the safe choice. Because I believed the MSM poison about Reagan the extremist, Reagan the lightweight.

The thing about a charismatic politician like a Reagan or a Palin is that once nominated, they can talk over the heads of the MSM directly to the American people.

And they can demonstrate to the American people that they are not at all the caricature created by Democratic activists and their bribed apologists in the mainstream media.

Maybe in 2012 the American people will be exhausted by the Obama administration's lies and failures. Maybe they will want a safe pair of hands. If that is so, then there will be plenty of insiders qualified for the job.

But maybe they will want someone with a record of standing up the the corrupt establishment, a candidate with the courage to take on the old guard and win.

If that is what the voters want, then they will be looking for someone very much like Sarah Palin.

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.