Double Digit Unemployment: The Wasted Year

Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment went over 10 percent. Here are the basic stats:

Unemployment	10.2%
Jobs Lost:
Household Survey	589,000
Establishment Survey	190,000

The really disturbing thing is the continued hemorrhaging in the Household Survey numbers. In previous recessions the employment in the Household Survey picked up earlier and stronger than the Establishment Survey, reflecting, experts assume, the formation of new businesses. Today's numbers seem to indicate deep damage in the small business/startup sector.

It all adds up to the biggest presidential blunder in modern times. All through the winter I was wondering if Obama and his people were really going to continue with their damn-the-torpedoes agenda. I thought that they couldn't be so stupid as to focus on their liberal white whales while ignoring the only thing that mattered: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

I was wrong, and they didn't. So now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Charles Krauthammer has already pointed out in "The Myth of 08, Demolished." that the 2009 elections have told us that Obama's win was a fluke, a perfect storm that elected a left-liberal in a center-right country. The reversion to the norm was sharp and severe.

But the fact is that we ain't seen nothing yet. Obama has wasted a year on the non-stimulus package, the fiddling over healthcare and the madness of a climate change bill.

Obama should have been working like mad on fixing the "too big to fail" culture on Wall Street, on cutting the cost of government so that businesses can start up and expand and create jobs for Americans.

But he didn't, and that year can never be recovered. It is down the toilet.

Let's just call it "Obama's Wasted Year." It was a year in which Democrats tried to ram their extreme left-wing agenda on America: government takeover of health care, government takeover of energy, government goodies for Democrats, bailouts for unions and Wall Street. Probably the only thing they'll get will be their dreadful "porkulus" bill.

Guess what? America watched all this, and said: No Thanks.

Next year will be different. Next year Americans will be saying something different: Hell No!

The Affluent Suburb Question

The exit polls have spoken. Affluent suburban voters are returning to the GOP. Uber-analyst Karl Rove agrees. Here's Rove in the Wall Street Journal:

The trend here is that suburban and independent voters moved into the GOP column. The overall shift away from Democrats was 13 points in Virginia, 12 points in New Jersey, and eight points in Pennsylvania.

What is going on? Michael Barone has the answer. Affluent suburbanites are back to voting their pocketbook. That's a change from the recent past.

High earners in non-Southern suburbs have been voting Democratic since the mid-1990s largely because of their liberal views on cultural issues[.]

It's the "social liberal, economically conservative" political axis. For ten years, since Democrats began seriously demonizing the Christian Right, affluent suburbanites have leaned to the Democrats. On social issues like abortion and gay marriage they didn't like the intensity of the Christian Right. But now economic issues have come to the fore.

A health-care bill financed by either higher taxes on high earners or on those with generous, employer-provided health insurance, looks like a hard sell in high-earner constituencies.

This gives conservatives a golden opportunity to do a bit of "consciousness raising" among the affluent set. Affluent voters inside the conservative movement have long ago accepted the Christian Right as "one of us." We see the liberal line on the "religious right" as anti-religious bigotry.

We know that enthusiastic Christianity is the best way for newcomers to the city to change their culture from the fatalist peasant culture to the purposeful commercial culture. A strong dose of Christian doctrine turns the undeserving and the failing poor into productive and happy citizens imbued with the spirit of democratic capitalism. For men there are the rules: work hard, stay sober, stay faithful; for women there is the loving relationship with Jesus.

But the folks in the affluent suburbs don't get to hear the conservative message. They go to liberal public schools and liberal colleges and all they know is the liberal line and liberal anti-religious bigotry. They weren't listening to conservatives because they didn't need them.

But that was then and this is now. The affluent suburbanites voted for Obama thinking they were doing their bit for racial progress; they were "ready for a black president." They thought they were getting a moderate, post-partisan president. After all, the MSM wasn't exactly stretching itself to report on Obama's left-wing past, corrupt connections, and curious way of getting damaging court records released on his political opponents.

But now the health reform bill is before Congress. It collapses the US medical care system into a vast health bureaucracy in order to pay for the health care of slacker liberals. And guess who's going to pay for it? I'll tell you: the social liberal, economically conservative small-business owners and high-tech entrepreneurs of the affluent suburbs.

For some reason, the Obamites neglected to tell them that part of their agenda.

The movement of the affluent suburban voters into the GOP column is a golden opportunity for conservatives. It means that for the next election cycle or two they will be listening to us. We need to reach out to them, using a language that is comfortable for them. Now we can get our message out to them.

That message must be that "social liberal" sounds good, but, in the hands of liberals it isn't very social and it isn't very liberal. We need to communicate the idea that social liberalism works only if society has well-developed social and cultural norms, standards of personal and social behavior that most people follow. If you don't encourage that then you have to run everything with law and government supervision. You have to do it the liberal way, with the government interfering not just in economic regulation but as smoking Nazis, food Nazis, life-style Nazis.

And don't be fooled. Under this liberal fascism we'll end up under the rule of the liberal bedroom Nazis, too.

If we can talk to the affluent suburbs and teach them a little tolerance for the social conservatives then maybe we can solve conservatism's big problem: The Affluent Suburb Question.

Then we will really have Karl Rove's conservative majority.

Voters to Obama: Stuff It.

The voters have issued their first bulletin on Obama's America, and their verdict is unequivocal. You can stuff it. You can put it where the sun don't shine.

The blowout governor's race in Virginia where Bob McDonnell beat Creigh Deeds by 58% to 41% was a shocker. Only three years ago Democrat Jim Webb swept into the US Senate and it looked like the Old Dominion was settling into the D column. But that was 2006, when everyone and his brother was teeing off at President Bush. They were shocked, shocked at the laughably mild corruption and overspending of the Congressional Republicans. This is 2009. Now we know what corruption means. Now we know what overspending means. Put a D on it.

Even the terminally corrupt blue state of New Jersey decided it had had enough, and voted in a Republican governor. Chris Christie won by four points, 48% to 44% over Democratic Goldman Sachs jillionaire Jon Corzine. New Jersey is a poster boy for out-of-control government. It's not that the government is corrupt. It's not that government workers now earn 50 percent more than people in the private sector. It is more basic than that. What's the point of all that spending, just sluicing into the gutter: failing to educate the poor, smashing the low-income family to smithereens, encouraging people to look to handouts from political patrons rather than their own efforts? No really. What is the point?

The only dud in the Republican firework show was NY-23 where the Democrat Bill Owens beat the Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman by three points. But let's look on the bright side. The race has sent a message: The GOP party bosses can't ignore the base; it deserves to have a least a reasonable facsimile of a conservative candidate in the R column. And conservative Republicans can't afford to get into a cat fight with Republican moderates. Otherwise the Democrat will win. We're in this together, folks.

The exit polls are daunting, if you are a Democrat. Here's the scoop from ABC News:

• "A vast 89 percent in New Jersey and 85 percent in Virginia said they were worried about the direction of the nation's economy in the next year"
  
  
• "In Virginia on Tuesday, voters who were "very" worried about the economy concern supported the Republican winner, Bob McDonnell by a wide margin, 77-23 percent. In New Jersey, [very worried voters] backed the Republican Chris Christie by 61-34 percent[.]"

Back in the good old days of FDR and the New Deal, that could never have happened. Back in those days FDR and his Brains Trust were focused like a laser on connecting their policies with helping the working man.

Yes, I know that the New Deal didn't help the working man, but the working man thought that FDR and the Democrats were fighting for him against "them."

Obama and the Obama Democrats have lost the plot on this. Their "stimulus" bill was a goodie bag for Democrats and governments, not a jobs program for the American people.

And the Democratic health reform proposal has recently been described as "111 new bureaucracies" by Congressional Republicans. No Fair! the Democrats have responded:

A Democratic source dismissed the list of "bureaucracies" as an exaggeration, calling them "demonstration projects" instead.

Yes, and we know what "demonstration projects" usually turn into: Huge mega-bureaucracies that can never be reduced, controlled, or eliminated. Not until Attila the Hun rides over the horizon.

Don't worry, folks. The Democrats still don't get it.

Election Day Prognostications

It's Election Day, and hopes are high in the conservative camp. Our Democratic friends seem to think that Republicans and conservatives are badly split.

The line seems to be that conservatives are turning towards extemism and scorning nice unifying moderates in the Republican Party.

Maybe so. But some experts seem to think that Obama won last year because conservatives stayed home to teach the GOP a lesson. They knew they were electing a lefty, but they didn't care.

And it's beginning to seem that independents are warming to the conservative message of smaller government, lower taxes, and less intrusion into private life.

At any rate, I'd say that if conservatives win the trifecta, with McDonnell winning in Virginia, Christie winning in New Jersey, and Hoffman winning in NY-23, then it is really, really big.

If Christie loses in New Jersey, then we can chalk it up to ACORN and the corrupt Democratic vote machine. That would just be a really big result.

If McDonnell wins in Virginia and the others lose, it's pretty discouraging. Look for ObamaCare and bureaucracy coming out the ying-yang.

But I expect encouraging results. Here are two bellwethers. First the young blogger John Hawkins. His schtik is a numbers game. Today it is "Three Reasons the Conservative Movement Should Be Grateful to Rush Limbaugh."

Hawkins tells that he got the liberal line from his college professors about politics, and he wasn't impressed.

It was an eye-opening experience to be told that America needed to abandon its military and use non-violent resistance as a defense strategy.

So what did the conservatives have to say, he wondered? Well, the only conservative he knew about was Rush Limbaugh. (Hello liberals: How come he couldn't check out conservatives at college? What happened to Conservatism 101: From Burke to Palin? Eh?) So he started to listen to America's Doctor of Democracy at the off-campus Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.

That's just one of the things that Rush Limbaugh has done. Hawkins:

He helped inspired a whole new generation of conservatives. Personally, I'm a conservative because of Rush Limbaugh.

Then there is Michelle Bernard from the conservative Independent Women's Forum. Quoted in a roundup of pundit opinion at The Hill, she pitches the notion that independents don't like the sharply partisan tone of the Obama administration.

Democrats are losing independents in droves... Independents had believed that the President would govern from the center and truly work with both sides of the aisle. Today, many of them appear to question this.

There's a pretty simple reason why this is happening. Obama campaigned as a post-partisan center-left moderate. He is governing, or seeming to govern as a left-wing partisan. That represents a fundamental betrayal of trust.

If Obama were truly a moderate then his signature health reform proposal would include Republican agenda items so that it could be a bipartisan reform. But it isn't. He has deliberately adopted a divisive strategy to try and shame and bully opponents into submission rather than build a coalition.

My guess is that the Obama first year will go down as a textbook example of How Not to Do It.

But then that makes complete sense. The whole idea of the canonical government administrative bureaucratic Circumlocution Office is: How Not to Do It.

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.