Barack's Tin Ear

How could the man that demolished the Clinton machine make such a mess of his first year as president? That's the question that Michael Goodwin asks today.

Come on now, Mr. Goodwin. It's not that hard. I thought we worked all that out with Robert Redford and The Candidate. Of course, we were supposed to think that the clueless candidate, creature of his handlers, was the stereotype for Republicans. Democrats, we all knew, were principled reformers that hardly needed packaging. Not like the Richard Nixon of Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President.

Well maybe so. But I have a suspicion that President Obama is the closest we are likely to come to an empty suit of a president. It is pretty obvious that he lacks the experience in the dirty work of day-to-day government administrative leadership.

But let's get back to Goodwin, who writes that Obama doesn't seem to care that the country is giving up on him.

Voters by a large margin have said for months they don't want the health-care overhaul he's pushing, so he pushes harder. They want less spending and debt, so he doubles down on pork, bailouts, handouts and taxes.

Let's go on.

They thought he would deliver bipartisanship, and he gives his hard-left allies the keys to the kingdom.

His vision is little more than a string of gauzy utopian platitudes glued together with fear, as when he told fellow Dems yesterday that the flawed health-bill represented "the last chance" for reform.

The last chance? Forever?

His charge that bankers have an obligation "to help rebuild the economy" by making more and presumably riskier loans boggles the mind. Low standards are the hair of the dog that led to liar loans and other housing disasters. By all means, let's do it again.

When something goes wrong, it's not his fault. "Fat-cat bankers," "greedy" insurance companies, doctors who do amputations just for the money, special interests, the media -- the media! -- have all taken their turns being blamed for what he hasn't fixed.

The buck doesn't stop on his desk!

Well. You can see where this is leading. Some time, maybe half way through next year, the American people will decide that they really don't like Barack Obama.

They will decide that they never did like him. In fact you will find that only about 47 percent of voters remember voting for him.

Added to that you can expect that unemployment will be dragging out for years. Why? Because the Democrats, determined not to learn the lessions of Reaganomics, are pushing the failed policy of government jobs bills instead of tax rate cuts for business and entrepreneurs.

Nancy Pelosi says that Democrats are ready for a tough fight next year. We are preparing for it, she says.

Good. But if the American people really don't like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and if unemployment is up around 10 percent, and if inflation starts up in the fall of 2010. Well. It only takes 41 seats to take back Congress.

The Obama Double-Cross

Politicians always betray us. That's because they promise us things that they can't possibly deliver.

It's not really their fault. We insist that they promise us impossible stuff. What's a pol to do?

But it seems to me that President Obama has made the double-cross into a principle of government.

The current health bill is the prime evidence of this. President Obama and the White appear to have made all kinds of insider deals with the major health care special interests. They did a deal with Big Pharma, presumably promising to limit price controls on drugs. They did a deal with the insurance companies, promising to force Americans to get health insurance. It return Big Pharma paid for a bunch of ads and the insurance companies didn't bring forward Harry and Louise to worry on national TV about the administration's plan.

Of course they also had a nod-nod-wink-wink deal with liberals on single payer. They would go as far as they could towards single payer using a disguised single payer system they called the public option.

They also had a deal with AARP. They would kill Medicare Advantage so that AARP could sell more Medigap policies.

But they have reneged on their deal with the insurance companies, because Congress lacks the backbone to levy really stiff fines on people who don't sign up for health insurance.

And who knows when they will renege on their deals with the other special interests?

But the administration seems to think that the double-cross is just politics as usual. Maybe that's the way they play it in Chicago.

But there is a wider sense in which the Obama administration has double-crossed the American people.

• There was the promise to lower taxes on 95 percent of taxpayers
• There was the promise to heal the partisan divide
• There was the promise to keep the lobbyists out
• There was the promise of transparency

Yeah. What happened to all that stuff?

A lot of what Obama promised was a change in tone. President Bush promised a change in tone, too, when he became president. And he spent the early part of his presidency trying to do bipartisan deals--like No Child Left Behind.

President Obama has clearly chosen not to do bipartisan. Particularly on his signature health bill. You just can't do a massive upheaval on health care on a partisan basis and have a shred of a claim to embrace bipartisan government.

President Obama's presidency is turning out to be very different, in tone and in substance, from the presidency he promised. He profoundly misrepresented what an Obama presidency would be all about.

That is probably the main reason his popularity is collapsing.

The Health Care Meltdown

Are we finally seeing the collapse of welfare state politics under the weight of its internal contradictions? Er, no. Not yet.

But we are certainly seeing the Democrats in a very uncomfortable place. But not to worry, writes the AP's David Espo.

"Our bottom line is that the bills as they are coming through will genuinely slow the growth of health care spending, both public and private, by about 1 percentage point a year for an extended period," said Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

So that's all right.

But why? Why do the Democrats insist on this crazy, unpopular, unjust nationalization of health care. Byron York has been talking to an unnamed Democratic strategist. There's three ways in which the Dems are committed to this madness.

1. House leadership view. Dems like Pelosi have waited forever to pass this universal health program, and if they lose 20-40 members next year, it's a price they are willing to pay. (Easy for them: senior Dems represent bombproof liberal districts.)
2. White House view. There will never be a better time to do it than right now. (They don't have an election next year.)
3. Senate View. They figure that vulnerable Dems like Dodd and Reid are vulnerable anyway. Health care won't make that much of a difference.

But why push on when they know that the public is against it?

"Because they think they know what's best for the public," the strategist said. "They think the facts are being distorted and the public's being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders. And they are going to make the decision because Goddammit, it's good for the public."

I think there is a name for this. Delusion.

That's why I think that the next two election cycles are going to be the most important since the New Deal elections of 1932, 1934, and 1936, which set the United States upon the current statist path.

We need a decisive turn in national politics that sends an unmistakable message to the political elite, the educated elite, and the cultural elite. This is the message:

Change your ways or we will change you.

Above all we must send the message that the whole point of the United States is freedom, the freedom to live your life without government politicians, government experts, and government bureaucrats breathing down your neck. It's in the Declaration of Independence:

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

It's not that hard, surely.

"Whole Foods Republicans?"

Everyone worries about the Republican big tent. It never seems to be large enough.

The latest worry, from Michael Petrelli, is that a majority of college-educated voters went for Obama: 53 percent.

According to exit-poll data, a majority of college-educated voters (53%) pulled the lever for Mr. Obama in 2008—the first time a Democratic candidate has won this key segment since the 1970s.

That certainly is a problem. But what's the solution?

What's needed is a full-fledged effort to cultivate "Whole Foods Republicans"—independent-minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics. These highly-educated individuals appreciate diversity and would never tell racist or homophobic jokes; they like living in walkable urban environments; they believe in environmental stewardship, community service and a spirit of inclusion.

So how to woo these voters to the Republican column? The first step is to stop denigrating intelligence and education...

The same is true for Mrs. Palin's inability to name a single newspaper she reads...

Even more important is the party's message on divisive social issues. When some Republicans use homophobic language, express thinly disguised contempt toward immigrants, or ridicule heartfelt concerns for the environment, they affront the values of the educated class.

Hmm. The thing is that Republicans don't do these things. They just don't believe in big government solutions to intelligence and education; they don't like the elite press that sneers at them. And they don't like the liberal bullying on race, sex, and the environment.

In the conservative view, the Whole Foods set has drunk the liberal Kool Aid. They've bought the liberal snobbery: We are the enlightened people and conservative Christians are ignorant yahoos that don't deserve to be taken seriously.

Obviously a political party can't treat the Whole Foods set as liberal dupes. That goes against Rule 1 in politics that you don't insult anyone. It turns waverers into opponents and opponents into enemies.

But what Republicans can do is go to work on liberal lies: brand the Democratic Party as the nasty party. There's an real upside to a campaign like that. It happens to be true.

Everything that liberals touch is nastified. Social Security? A terrible deal for educated people. Government health care? Treats educated people like idiots. Education? A dysfunctional mess that threatens the education of educated people and their children. Cap and trade? A top down monstrosity of taxing and subsidizing that treats the American people like delta-minus morons to be shoved around like numbers.

While George W. Bush was president the Democrats had a free rein to characterize all conservatives and Republicans as idiots. The Whole Foods crowd went along, because they were flattered to be in the in-crowd.

But Obamanomics and ObamaCare make it pretty clear that the Whole Foods crowd are to be the piggy-bank for liberal plans. Somehow that didn't get much play in the awful Bush years and in the immaculate campaign for Hope and Change.

Whole Foods shoppers are right now finding out what Obama is doing to their pocket books, what he will do to their children's education, and what he will do to the environment. Think waste, fraud, and abuse.

Let's be nice to the Whole Foods shoppers. They are good people. They just made the mistake of listening to the propaganda from the nasty party and believing it.

Now they know what we know. Government is force, and politicians are only interested in power. Educating the people? Saving the planet? Fabulous way of winning elections, baby! Fools 'em every time.

Job Killer! Job Killer! Job Killer!

That's the Republican refrain for now. Whatever President Obama and the Democratic Congress does, Republicans condemn it as a "job killer."

ObamaCare? Job killer. Cap and trade? Job killer. $787 billion stimulus? Job killer. Copenhagen Climate Summit? Job killer. EPA's CO2 regulation? Job killer.

Trouble is: they're right.

But then everything the government does is a job killer. Everything the government does is born of some frustrated scribbler who is irate that the unhampered market doesn't provide what he wants it to provide, for free.

Then he makes the fateful step. Let government do it.

Trouble that government makes a mess of everything it does, including war and policing.

Meanwhile the Obama administration goes on its way, taxing, spending, and regulating as fast as humanly possible. Barney Frank has a comprehensive financial regulation bill ready for the floor of the House. Did you know?

But all that is just noise.

The real trouble for the president is that the wheel of fortune is turning, as Victor David Hanson writes.

The real trouble is that the Democrats are whistling past the graveyard, as Mona Charen writes.

The real trouble is that climate change is the new socialism, as Charles Krauthammer writes.

The real trouble is that the IPCC scientists really were trying to pull off a trick to hide the decline in the Briffa tree proxy results that brought the whole Hockey Stick temperature chart into question, as Steve McIntyre shows.

The real trouble is that politicians always and everywhere want to increase the power of politicians. And the only way they know to do that is to bribe the electorate with free money.

The only solution to our troubles is limited government. That means limited power to regulate the economic sector. It means limited power to tax. It means limited power to spend.

"There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state." David Cameron said that a few years ago now, and it encapsulates the conservative critique of the liberal administrative state.

Humans are social animals, not statist animals. Humans are citizens, not subjects. They are civilians, not soldiers.

And courtesy of President Obama and his little helpers, we are getting a national seminar in why this is so.

It's not just that government is a job killer. It's that government kills almost everything it touches. That's because government is force, and human society grows out of sociability, good will, cooperation, fellow feeling.

When will our Democratic friends ever realize this and stop proposing their poison gas proposals?

The truth is that they never will. They get whacked upside the head every now and then. In 1980. In 1994. Then they go quiet with their statist plans for a season. But then their love of power and bossiness takes over and they return with new ideas for force and compulsion, and making the state bigger and the people smaller.

Will it never end?

Next Up: Tea Party Convention

Our liberal friends have a foolish habit of not taking conservatives seriously.

They can't help looking at the great sprawling conservative movement and seeing a train wreck about to happen. (Conservatives, by contrast, are always afraid that liberals are about to take over the world.)

Take the latest political head-scratching from Dan Eggen and Perry Bacon Jr. at the Washington Post.

Buoyed by their success in capsizing a moderate Republican candidate this fall in Upstate New York, tea party activists and affiliated groups are unveiling new political action committees and tactics aimed at capitalizing on conservative opposition to health-care reform, financial bailouts and other Obama administration policies.

So what is the upshot?

The strategy poses both an opportunity and a risk for the beleaguered Republican Party, which is seeking to take advantage of conservative discontent while still fielding candidates who appeal to independent voters.

Well, yes, sort of. But it kinda misses the point. After all, the problem with the NY-23 election was that the Republican Party in New York selected a candidate who did not appeal to independent voters. She was designed to appeal to moderates that voted for Obama in 2008. But those moderates are history.

Look. The NY Republicans made what seemed, in the spring of 2009, to be a canny choice. But the ground was already shifting under their feet.

The takeaway from NY-23 is that, if the Republican Party bigwigs knew then what they know now, they would never have chosen Dede Scozzafava. The sweet spot has moved decisively to the right.

What we are seeing right now is a healthy, vigorous debate in the conservative world about where conservativism goes next, what its issues will be, and what political vehicle will transport the movement into the future.

It's true that it is just possible that a new political party will emerge out of the process. And it might replace the Republican Party. But it is not likely. The Republican Party is not split. It is not in the situation of the Whig Party where it couldn't decide what to do about slavery.

If anything, the conservative world is in a fantastic place right now. All the disaffected voters that deserted the Republicans in the 2000s have been energized into activism by the leftward lurch of the Obama administration. And there is nothing like a common enemy to unify the quarreling factions of a big sprawling movement.

Then there's this. The Tea Party movement is planning a convention in February, the National Tea Party Convention. It is sponsored by Tea Party Nation, American Majority, National Taxpayers Union, Smart Girl Politics, and SurgeUSA. It is scheduled for February 4-6, 2010.

Who do you suppose the featured speakers are? Republicans Sarah Palin (R-AK) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN). What does that tell you?

And let us not forget that Sarah Palin is the antithesis of a party workhorse. A major source of her popularity in Alaska was that she took on the corrupt establishment of her Republican Party when she ran for election as Governor. And that was after establishing a reputation as an anti-corruption reformer.

Sarah Palin is clearly aligning with the new independent conservative force that the tea party movement represents. She will appear, as she builds political strength over the next two years, as a new broom looking to sweep out the musty establishment of the Republican Party.

The opportunity is great, and the strategic situation is ideal. We have a Democratic Party lurching well to the left of the American people and pushing unpopular policies on health care, environment, and bailouts with party-line votes in Congress.

You couldn't do a better job of doing everything possible to unite the opposition if you tried. Thanks, fellahs!

The Separation of Science and State

The current ClimateGate flap does not tell us anything new. We already know that scientists are completely in the pocket of the politicians. This was made transparently clear recently on CNN when scientist Michael Oppenheimer sounded like a politician and climate auditor Steve McIntyre sounded like a scientist.

We know why this is so. Money. Follow the money.

Modern governments want to gin up the moral equivalent of war so that they can mobilize the resources of the nation to fight it. The preferred way of ginning up a moral equivalent of war is to get the scientists to declare a disaster. Maybe social scientists declare poverty a disaster. Physical scientists declare the environment or the climate a disaster. Politicians butt in, announce that the science is settled, and declare the moral equivalent of war.

In the case of climate it is the United Nations ginning up the crisis through the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The idea is to create a moral equivalent of war on an climate crisis and invest the United Nations with global taxes so that it can lead the fight.

I believe it is time for all people of education and feeling to stop this assault on our freedoms. The only thing government is any good at is war, real war. When it tries to gin up moral equivalents of war it just makes a mess. Think education, health care, pensions, welfare.

In the United States we express such broad-scale political sentiments in our Constitution. So here is the text of a proposed Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Amendment - Freedom of Science

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of science, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Back in the Dark Ages, we know, government and religion were closely linked. The king derived his right to rule from God and the priests derived their power from association and support of the king.

In the pre-scientific age, this compact arrangement made sense, but by the 18th century it had become an embarrassment. It made the church into an appendage of the crown, and a rather feeble one at that.

So the Founding Fathers called for a dis-establishment of religion in the Bill of Rights. The result is that the United States is the most religious country in the world among developed nations.

Thomas Jefferson called this arrangement the separation of church and state. It succinctly symbolized the whole concept of the separation of powers within the government between legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

In his seminal work The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism Michael Novak has differentiated not just government but the whole of modern society into three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector and the moral/cultural sector.

These three sectors are, and ought to be, separate and divided centers of power. In part, this is agreed by all. Everyone agrees that the political sector should not dominate the moral/cultural sector, nor the moral/cultural sector issue orders to the political sector. Everyone agrees that the economic sector should not dominate the political sector.

But some reactionary liberals find it very hard to deal with the idea that the political sector should not own and dominate the economic sector.

And we know why. Liberals live for political power and political power is nothing without power over the economic sector. Some day they will get their comeuppance. But that is not our concern today. We are concerned about science.

The ClimateGate scandals demonstrate that association with the political sector has utterly corrupted the scientists. And we know why. Money. Money is the mother's milk of science, and scientists will do anything to get it. So they go along with power plans of the politicians, and serve up politically motivated science, "settled science," as they call it, to the politicians in return for research money.

It is time make a break with the past and advance boldly into the future. We must end the government domination of science. Science cannot prosper as an established appendage of government. It can only be corrupted. So science must be separate from government. We must have a separation of science and state.

It won't be easy. Science is embedded in government schools, government research labs, government research foundatations, government universities. And of course there is the relation between the Department of Defense and military science.

But we must begin the journey. Science must not, and should not be, of right, an appendage of government. And the start of that journey is an act of disestablishment. Science must be separate from government and must no longer waste its prestige in pandering to the shabby manipulations of professional politicians.

Let us begin the journey today.