Government Doesn't Work

The lesson of the hot-crotch bomber incident is not that, as Secretary Napolitano said, "one thing I'd like to point out is that the system worked."

No Madam Secretary. Do not insult us with that kind of talk.

The lesson is that once more, the cumbersome, complicated, bureaucratic security system failed to prevent a terrorist from carrying out a terrorist act. As The Wall Street Journal says:

The lesson here is the same as Flight 93 on 9/11 and shoe-bomber Richard Reid, which is that civilians willing to act in their own self-defense are a crucial part of "homeland security." The willingness of passengers and crew to identify potential threats seems more useful than more onerous airport screening, which only gives terrorists the satisfaction of knowing they have made air travel even more unbearable. The new rule to keep passengers in their seats in the final hour of some flights seems all too typical of arbitrary rules that inconvenience innocents but not terrorists.

And guess what. If you get up in the last hour of flight no doubt they'll want to arrest you. Although maybe if you are a Black Panther, you won't. That's the record of the Obama Justice Department thus far. Rules apply to ordinary Americans but not to favored clients of the Obama client state.

This all reminds me of the whole point of the Second Amendment: "A well-regulated militia..." You can have all the armed forces and police and security services in the world, but it still comes down to the individual citizen stepping up and protecting himself and all of us. Government doesn't work.

There's a good side to all this. After the last decade of cynical political game-playing by the Democrats on terror and on economic policy and a host of other things, they are now in charge and they are responsible. Didn't connect the dots? Democratic problem. Fannie and Freddie still belly up? Democratic problem. Unemployment in the stratosphere? Ask your Democratic friend about that.

The coming year, 2010, is going to be an annus horribilis for the Democrats and it couldn't happen to more deserving people. We are in this mess because of their failed model of top-down expert administrative statism lubricated by shameless Chicago-style machine politics. If they get away losing less than 50 seats in the House I'd say they can call it a miracle. Democrats deserve to lose 100 seats in the House and a switch in the Senate too.

It probably won't happen for one simple reason. The American people are too nice to give them the boot they deserve.

Anyone still not sure about a New Years resolution has got it now. Vote them out. All of them. Vote them out early and often.

The Two Obamas

Just when we thought that we had President Obama pegged as a egoistical ditherer with a tin ear and a Chicago-machine appetite for thug politics, along comes Peggy Noonan on Christmas Day.

Apparently we have got it all wrong. Obama is nice to his staff, carefully preps himself before meetings, and genuinely cares about doing the right thing. Here's an Obama aide:

The president, he suggested, tends toward the long view and the broad view. "Here's what I know about him. He still has this amazing ability to tune out the noise from Washington, read the letters from the people, listen to their concerns, listen to his advisors, hear both sides, absorb all the information, and make the decision that he honestly feels is right for the country."

His base, his silent majority, still loves him, although quietly. Yes, the aide knows that everybody else is giving up on the president.

He is aware that Obama is "perceived as alternately too weak and too Chicago, too left and too right, too willing to compromise and too beholden to his majority, too detached and too much meddling in too many things." The administration needs "to do better in resetting the story and telling it the way we want it told."

Let's leave out the cheap shots, above "resetting the story," and dish out some honest advice.

Mr. President, if you honestly just want to do what is best for the nation then you have to stop the cheap rhetorical tropes. You must not just tell the truth but be seen to tell the truth.

• Stop the cheap stuff about "false choices."
• Stop the endless blaming of Bush
• Stop all the "I" stuff
• Stop insisting on the impossible in your central, landmark initiative. You can't offer more health care for less in a program of subsidies and administrative regulation.
• Stop the 60-vote-in-the-Senate partisan strategy

All the above stuff is incompatible with the wise-father story that your aide is serving up to Peggy Noonan.

If the president really is the worthy and sensitive leader that his aide represents to us, then he has some serious rethinking to do. And the rethinking should not be about the message. It should be about the stuff that Obama knows that isn't so.

This is a great mysterious world and there are many things we don't know. But there are a lot of things we do know about government. Mainly we know about what doesn't work. You could say that there is a "settled science" on a lot of this. But liberals are reluctant to admit it, because liberal politics is based upon a lot of knowledge that isn't so.

Mainly, what we've learned about government in the modern, democratic era, is that it is wasteful, inefficient, and it divides people. Or as we say here at roadtothemiddleclass,com: cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, deluded.

So the government that governs best governs least. The best government is a limited government that requires its people to cooperate among themselves to produce and acquire the needful things of life. The worst government is a government that meddles and interferes in everything and plays favorites.

Mr President, your aide says that you are a worthy man that is appreciative and listens well, thinks through things and then makes decisions. If this is so, then the reason for the Other Obama, the one that has made such a mess of his first year as president, is that he's got a fundamentally wrong view of the world. Much as you are earnest and determined to do the right thing, it must be that you don't understand how the world works and how it could be made to work better.

The first thing you could do is call in a bunch of Republican moderates and ask them what you are doing wrong. After all, they are the kind of people who might actually break ranks and support you if you made an honest effort to propose policies that they could support.

Otherwise we conservatives are going to persuade the American people that we understand their needs and their dreams better than you do. And if that happens, you are toast.

Merry Christmas, Mr. President.

Monopoly Monay, Bush, and Obama

Just imagine what would have happened if President Bush had said, just after sending the troops into Iraq and passing the Bush tax cuts:

"We can't continue to spend . . . as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money."

Well, the scorn of the comics on Saturday Night Live would have been the least of his problems.

But now comes President Obama, the bright political star of 2008 worrying about wasting the taxpayers' money. He's got to be kidding. Writes Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal:

Whatever one's view, [the health bill's] trillion-dollar-plus cost is an agreed given. Days earlier the public saw Congress vote to raise the debt ceiling by almost $290 billion to make room for the needs of the $800 billion stimulus bill, the unprecedented $3.5 trillion budget, and the House's approval Dec. 16 of a new $154 billion jobs bill. Amid this President Obama said Monday: "We can't continue to spend . . . as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money."

As a convinced conservative and partisan, I almost want President Obama to give us more of this. Because it is clear that, however the mainstream media may shield him, people just hate his agenda--which is to spend the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people like Monopoly money.

President Obama wants to spend more money on government health care. He has already spent a lot more money on government education. He wants to spend more money on government energy projects. He is spending more money on welfare, partially rolling back the Clinton-era welfare reform. He is planning a big jobs bill to spend more money.

The problem is that we know that all these things just treat taxpayers' money as Monopoly money. People waste government health-care dollars because it's not their money. People waste education dollars, K-12 to college, because it's not their money. Corporations waste money on hare-brained green energy projects because the government subsidies give them free money. Jobs bills are known to be less effective in creating jobs than tax-rate cuts for businesses and business owners.

And President Obama talks about Monopoly money? President Bush would never have got away will nonsense like that.

Nor, I suspect, in the end, will President Obama.

Bleeding Health Care?

Darn it! I was thinking about comparing the ObamaCare health care bill to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but Michael Barone has beat me to it!

Of course, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the effort of the Democrats in 1854 to extend slavery northwards to Kansas and Nebraska, if the settlers wanted it.

Sen. Stephen Douglas (D-IL) thought that he was cooling the heat of the slavery question with this act, but instead he fanned the flames of the slavery issue into Bleeding Kansas and a civil war.

The Republican Party was created in angry response to run-up to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It won 46 seats (from zero) in the House of Representatives in the elections of 1854.

The election of 1854 was a maelstrom. The American Party (the anti-immigrant "Know Nothings") won 62 seats (from zero) and the Democratic Party lost 73 seats, going from 157 seats to 84 seats. The Whigs lost 11 seats. The Dems and the American Party formed a coalition. At that time there were only 252 seats in the House.

(The problem for the new Republicans--against slavery and for truth, justice, and the American Way--was that the Democrats picked up 48 seats in 1856 while they picked up 44, so the Democrats still ran the House. It wasn't until 1858 that the Republicans became the largest party in the House, and 1860 that the Republicans became the majority party. They actually lost seats in 1860 and became the majority party because the southern states seceded.)

Michael Barone thinks that ObamaCare might be a rerun. We don't know how unpopular the Kansas Nebraska Act was. No polling in those days. But we know how unpopular ObamaCare is.

On the health care bill, there can be little doubt about public opinion. Quinnipiac, polling just after the Senate voted cloture, found Americans opposed by a 53 percent to 36 percent margin. Polls suggest that Democrats may suffer as much carnage in the 2010 elections as they did in 1854.

So let's make the comparisons. Barely a month after President Obama was inaugurated a new popular political movement, the Tea Party began to erupt, in direct opposition to his agenda. There happens to be a popular political figure rather similar to Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was a rough-hewn, ill-educated politician, with little experience, from the frontier state of Illinois. Sarah Palin is a rough-hewn politician from the frontier state of Alaska. And so on.

Of course, nobody can know what will transpire next year--or beyond. The Democrats seem to think that President Obama's popularity will go to 60 percent when the American people find out what is in the bill.

But I do like the idea of Democrats losing 73 seats in the House. Wow. That would teach someone a lesson.

Tsunami or Happy Ending?

Democrats are touting the notion that their health bill will become popular once people start to experience the goodies. The Politico's Manu Raju writes:

[B]ecause some of the most popular insurance reforms in it will take effect sooner than other parts of the bill, [Democrats] think Republicans will have a hard time getting voters to line up against it...

[Tom Harkin (D-IA) listed a handful of measures that would take effect soon, including a prohibition against denying coverage for children with pre-existing conditions and a provision allowing children to stay on their families’ policies until age 26 — even though most of the benefits don’t take effect until 2014.

He could be right, of course. But at Contentions, Peter Wehner sees a tsunami of voter rejection.

Few Democrats understand the depth and intensity of opposition that exists toward them and their agenda, especially regarding health care. Passage of this bill will only heighten the depth and intensity of the opposition. We’re seeing a political tsunami in the making, and passage of health-care legislation would only add to its size and force.

That's why we have politics and elections. So we can judge who is right on the prognostication front.

It is incontestable that the Democrats are sending us further into the subsidy swamp, and creating huge problems down the road. Says The Wall Street Journal edit page:

WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.

Apart from political rage, people are going to try to avoid these costs.

Leaving aside the politics, we should understand what is going on here. When politicians start handing out free stuff they raise the costs for everyone else. That means that most people have to take the government program because the alternative is too expensive. So? Let everyone jump into the government program. It may not be great, but it is something, and we all share the cost of public goods.

Well, the problem is that the poor get screwed. Medicaid is already a mess because health providers are so poorly reimbursed that they don't want Medicaid patients. That means lousy care for the poor. We know of course that schools for the poor are lousy. And welfare just destroys the low-income family.

Meanwhile federal government employees get 40 percent more than private sector workers, and state-and-local government employees earn 37 percent more than private sector workers. Every private sector enterprise and its employees have to pay for all this. Since government spends about 40 percent of GDP that means that every business owner and every worker has to pay for that 40 percent every day before they earn a dime for themselves.

That means that it's too expensive to hire the poor and the unskilled, because they are just too expensive when you have to pay for government as well as the worker.

And as the unintended consequences come in, politicians think up a new way to subsidize their supporters.

We know that the liberal welfare state will blow up eventually. If things can't go on forever, they won't.

The only question is whether the American people can defuse the bomb before it goes off. One indication would be if they turn against the Democrats that are pushing "affordable" health care down the nation's throat.

Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. Stay tuned.

Cash for Cloture and Beyond

You have to give the Democrats credit. They know that ObamaCare is unpopular. They know it is going to cost them seats in Congress. But they are going ahead anyway. And last night, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) got the critical cloture vote he needed to pass ObamaCare through the United States Senate.

It's easy to sneer at "cash for cloture," the deals that Harry Reid has done to secure the last few votes for the watered-down ObamaCare. But the fact is that deals like that are always a last-minute feature of major legislation. This is not new or modern. Judas Iscariot needed thirty pieces of silver (probably a fortune back then) to betray the Son of God. What's a few hundred million to a senator? It's not as if it's Harry Reid's own money.

For conservatives the question is: What next? Is this just another step in the ongoing enlargement of government, the conversion of a free society into an administrative satrapy of the progressive educated elite? Or will this turn out to be a great turning point?

The answer to the question is: White women.

The Democratic coalition is a coalition of minorities, including, improbably, if you like, the biggest minority in the nation: white women. Up to now, white women have supported the Democratic agenda enough to keep the welfare state rolling forward.

It's easy to understand why. The modern welfare state advertises itself as woman's helper. It offers health care, education, and welfare, all of which are dear to every woman's heart, the resources she needs to care for her family.

But what if this wonderful help turns out to be a terrible mistake? Suppose government welfare turns out to destroy marriages and families among the poor? Suppose government education fails to educate and lazily "dumbs down" education to make life easier for teachers? Suppose that government healthcare becomes an indifferent bureaucratic machine, as it has in England and Canada, with Orwellian committees called NICE designed to limit care?

The task for conservatives is to persuade middle-class women to look the gift horse in the mouth, to realize, on closer inspection, that the winning proposition made by persuasive politicians is not good for women. It is not good for their young children. It is not good for their husbands. It is not good for their aging mothers.

Because, quite simply, a bureaucratic administrative state is necessarily a one-size-fits-all state. It is rigid and rational. It has nothing to do with love. It have nothing to do with compassion. It has nothing to do with caring. It is a creation of politics and power. And that has nothing to do with women and the way they experience their lives. Woman stands at the opposite pole from rigidity and rationalization. To a woman everything is unique, personal, and special: her life, her family, her children.

Perhaps the only person who can persuade women away from the welfare state will be a woman. Perhaps it must be a woman. Perhaps that woman is Governor Sarah Palin.

Blindsided by the Left

No. I'm not talking about the White House. I'm not talking about the way that the managers of ObamaCare didn't see the revolt from their lefty base coming.

Although you would have to say that this White House bunch must be about the worst political operation in living memory.

I'm talking about Me. I feel completely blindsided. And that's not because I still haven't seen The Blind Side. No, what has me flummoxed is this: I never thought that the Angry Left would explode over the Individual Mandate.

Here's what the Kos Kids and the Keith Olbermann and Howard Dean are all in a twist over. They are outraged that the health bill as it stands includes an individual mandate (Americans are forced to buy health insurance) but doesn't include the public option (Americans are forced to buy health insurance, either from an insurance company or, wonder of wonders, from the government.)

So? What's the big deal? Compulsion is compulsion, ain't it?

That's that you think. That's what I thought. We wus wrong.

Didn't you know that it is utterly unacceptable to Force Liberals to Buy Health Insurance from an Insurance Company! Injustice! Not to be endured! Keith Olbermann says he'll rather go to jail.

See, liberals have no problem forcing you and me to go get our health insurance at the DMV. They don't care a whit about subjecting Americans to the indignity of bad service from SEIU members. No problem with that.

But don't you dare force a liberal to buy health insurance from an insurance company! Over that our liberal friends will take to the streets, will go to jail.

I don't think that our liberal friends realize what they are communicating to us with this utterly screwy hissy fit. I don't think they understand the ObamaCare is the biggest political screw-up in modern times. I don't think they realize that they are setting up the perfect storm in 2010. I don't think they realize they have utterly split the Democratic Party and they have utterly unified Republicans. Michelle Malkin:

Social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, the GOP leadership, Sarah Palin's heartland supporters, conservative think-tank intellectuals, D.C. and Manhattan conservatives, Big Business and small-business conservatives, Joe the Plumber conservatives, and every stripe and flavor of conservative in between are all united against the Democrats' proposed government takeover of health care. All.

Now you would have to say that forcing all conservatives into a united front takes a rare talent. After all, conservatives amount to 40 percent of the American people. That's a lot of people.

But it takes even more talent to split the Democratic Party. Between the Angry Left and the liberal think-tankers, between unions and trial lawyers. And so on.

And over the individual mandate. I just didn't see it coming!