"Some Subterfuge is Historically Necessary"

It's one thing when President Bush "lies" about WMD. Actually he didn't lie. He stated that, on the most reliable information, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

But it's another thing when it comes to pushing through a massive new government program which will be almost impossible to "rescind." In that case, according to John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

"Putting on my amateur historian's cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted."

So. It's OK for liberals to lie about a massive upheaval, a seizure of one sixth of the nation's economy. That's OK because it is historically necessary.

But woe betide if Republican President Bush puts a bit of polish on his argument for invading Iraq.

The real reason for ObamaCare, according to John Cassidy, is that achieves two political goals for Democrats. It makes "the United States a more equitable country" and it helps keep Democrats in power, long term.

Well, looking really long-term, government mandated equality doesn't improve equality and meanwhile destroys "civil society," the web of voluntary organizations that is the real warp and weft of human sociability.

Anyway, the question really becomes: What do the American people want, and how hard are we willing to push to get what we want? We'd better face facts. The educated and cultural elite are perfectly happy with increasing government power. In fact, they want more more for the government. They think it means more power for the elite.

Properly, the national elite, through their domination of the aristocratic branch of government, the judiciary, should have stopped the expansion of government power. But they didn't. They have stood by for a century and applauded, and rumbled about historical necessity while politicians have steadily increased government power and piled taxes, regulations, and restrictions on the American people. We cannot look to the national elite to protect freedom.

So it's up to the American people. Do we care that we are going to be shoved into government health care, designed for the convenience of the governing elite? Do we care that we are being manipulated into a grateful dependency which will more or less force us to vote our corrupt masters into power again and again rather than risk the horror of losing our benefits?

Democrats either hope or believe that they can get this cram-down through and make most of it stick even if they lose their majorities in Congress in 2010.

Maybe they are right. After all, their experience is that you can always ratchet up government spending with another government program. Once you have got your program in place then you can get to work expanding it.

But then maybe they are wrong. Maybe the US has reached the tipping point on government programs. Maybe we are reaching a historical turning point, and the Democrats have gone a bridge too far.

The only way to find out is to find out.

But whatever happens it has to start with a massive off-year election in 2010 with at least a 50 seat pickup in the House of Representatives for the GOP.

Anything less than 35 seats means that the Democrats have won and that the American people want more benefits rather than more freedom.

Health Care: No Win Without Fight

On the face of it, the 220-215 win for the Democrats' health reform bill in the House of Representatives on Saturday November 7 is a discouraging moment for conservatives.

But let us look on the bright side.

If the United States is to turn from the path of ever-increasing government, then there will have to be a decisive battle over the future of the country.

The politics of the last decade, of so-called 50-50 America, has been a period in which neither side in the great debate attempted to go for a big win.

Bill Clinton was elected in the aftermath of the Bush recession, and found pretty quickly that he didn't have a mandate for comprehensive government health care. So he trimmed his sails and tried to do the same thing incrementally.

President Bush never tried to go whole hog on the conservative agenda. He just tried to get whatever the political process would allow him. Education? Ted Kennedy put the hammer down to prevent school choice. Taxes? Democrats were completely opposed, so the Bush tax cuts were temporary. Medicare drug benefit? Bush passed the least bureaucratic solution possible.

But when Democrats elected Barack Obama last year they decided to push for a breakout. So this year they have been running a cram-down, trying to get all of their signature agenda items passed before opposition could mobilize.

Obviously they have failed to do that. But like World War I generals, they are unwilling to call off the offensive once it becomes clear that a breakout is impossible.

Really, our Democratic friends are presenting conservatives and Republicans with a gift. They are creating the opportunity, as their advance grinds to a halt, for a decisive counter-offensive. If Democrats lose 50 or more seats in the House next year, and if Obama loses in 2012 it will be a decisive message from the American people to the political class.

It will say that the expansion of government power of the last century is over. It will say that the American people really do believe in freedom.

But first we have to win, baby.

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.