Obama's Bubble Politics

Politicians and pundits have had a grand old time recently, criticizing bankers and consumers for their reckless lending and borrowing. Just as they had a grand old time tarring all businessmen with the brush of Enron back in the tech bust of 2000-01.

Remember Enron? Seems like a faraway time from the trillion dollar deficits of 2010.

But now that we are seeing the Obama myth in free fall, after the year the locusts ate, it is time for knowing analysts to give their heads a knowing shake about the Obama political bubble.

As with credit bubbles, the Democrats did it to themselves.

The US is a center-right country. You can tell that from Gallup's poll of political orientation. Right now, the US is 40 percent conservative, 21 percent liberal, and the rest moderate. So for Democrats to get into power they need a meltdown like 2008. And they need to dissemble, to represent themselves as not really as liberal as they are.

Let's face it. The Democrats are masters at the art of appearing not quite as liberal as they really are. They field good conservative candidates to run in Republican districts. They have the mainstream media to pretend that liberals are really moderate. They have the schools to fill heads full of lefty mush. And at election time they can conjure up the votes to push the odd toss-up into the Dem column. Think Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Al Franken (D-MN), and the October surprise prosecution of Ted Stevens (R-AK).

But there's a problem with being too clever by half. You end up with a president and a Congress that don't represent America. You create a political bubble that, just like the Fannie Freddie credit bubble, is going to pop some day.

With Obama and the Democrats, that day is here.

The Dems did a fantastic job of contesting the legitimacy of the 2000 election. Then they did a fantastic job of harrying President Bush over Iraq. Then they did a fantastic job of critiquing the tired and corrupt Republicans in 2005-06. Then they did a fantastic job of getting conservative candidates to run for Congress in 2006 and 2008. Then they did a fantastic job, backed up by the MSM, of selling the left-liberal Obama as a moderate.

Now look what they've done. They've given the US a president and Congress way off the center-right center of gravity.

We all know what happens when you gun the housing market with cheap credit to unsustainable heights. You get a nasty collapse, much worse than you would have got without the preceding bubble. Housing prices go into the toilet.

Same thing in political bubbles. Now all the cunning poliltical leverage that the Democrats worked into the system over the last decade is unwinding. And that means that the defeats that the Democrats will suffer in 2010 will be worse than the normal mid-term correction. Maybe much worse.

Politicians are competitive chaps, and they fight hard to win their glittering prizes. But what the American people need is a government that reflects their mood. If they want some nice new programs, as they did in the 1998-2000 period, they should get them. If they want deficits cut and spending cut, as they do right now, they should get it.

Thinking long term, it does no good to game the system. What you need to do is persuade the American people, not just in a slick election campaign, but year in, year out, on the basics of what American stands for and what the government should do and not do.

Democrats are going to pay a frightful price for their bubble politics, and you ain't seen nothing yet.

Is Obama Serious?

The White House line after Massachusetts seems to be full speed ahead. That seems to be the usual Obama way, from the campaign through the first year. No change for the fiscal meltdown. No change to fight the recession. Just stay with the game plan.

Now, after three losses in a row, in states that voted for Obama in 2008, the Obama White House is again signaling no change in the agenda.

For Republicans and conservatives, the word is: Go ahead, make my day. Give us a Republican Congress in 2010.

As Mark Steyn wrote over the weekend, Obama ran for president "as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer." But let's give him credit. He's governed as something he really is: a left-liberal big-government partisan.

That's fine. But the American people have just said, at the voting booth, that they don't like the real Obama one bit. The real Obama is not what independents voted for, not at all. They thought they were voting for the candidate that was presented to them: a post-partisan, post-racist, centrist.

In a way, you can understand that Obama could feel that he might as well stay true to his beliefs. Whatever he can get done, he gets done, and he nails it up on the barn wall as a win. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

But there's a problem with that strategy. The ordinary Democratic officeholder that is facing reelection in November isn't going to go along. He or she is facing wipeout, and probably isn't going to want to go quietly.

That adds up to a split in the Democratic Party. And that is not going to be good for the president's agenda.

Of course, all the talk of fighting and staying the course may be bravado to keep the media busy while the president's team plans a pivot.

Or the president may be serious. The truth is that all his options are bad options, right now. The president faces an annus horribilis with nothing but bad news. Maybe the best thing to do is to hunker down and sweat it out.

But maybe, by hunkering down, he will lead the Democrats in Congress into an historic meltdown comparable to the 1938 mid-term elections when the Dems lost 80 seats in the House.

Noonan: Nuts vs. Creeps

It sounds like gang warfare, but Peggy Noonan has redefined the political arena. It's not the Dems vs. the Reps, she says, but the Nuts versus the Creeps.

Back in 2006 and 2008 the Democrats succeeded in persuading the voters that they were not so Nutty as the Creeps were creepy.

In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort. In 2009 and 2010, they looked at his general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations—health care, cap and trade—and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, "Uh-oh, he's a Nut!"

Enter Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie and Scott Brown.

But the Republican candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, and now Scott Brown in Massachusetts, did something amazing. They played the part of the Creep very badly!

They ran, if you like, as practical, pragmatic moderates, concerned about taxing and spending. Oh, and debt. I read someone this week who reminded me that ordinary Americans have had a terrible personal lesson on debt in the last couple of years. Naturally, they are concerned that the government hasn't learned the lessons they learned.

Personally, I think that the Creep image is unfair (but then, probably so is the Nut image.) The reason we had so much spending in the last decade was that, after the budget got balanced in 1998, American voters felt it was time for a little party. That's why Candidate Bush ran as a compassionate conservative in 2000. Green-eyeshade conservatism wasn't going to sell.

But the truth is that there is no such thing as a compassionate government. There is just taxing and spending. The core functions of government, as articulated by Britain's Norman Tebbit, are simple and have nothing to do with compassion.

It must provide not only external but internal security, allowing its citizens to go about their lawful businees freely, and criminal and civil justice systems as well as a currency and the regulatory and legislative infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade.

But that is it. Everything else, from health care to education to infrastructure, is not a Must-have; it is a Nice-to-have.

In the Twenty Teens it is going to be back to basics: Cut taxes, cut spending, cut, cut, and cut again.

And over everything else will be this overarching question. Why do government employees earn 30, 40, even 50 percent more than comparable workers in the private sector?

When you ask that question, the political struggle ceases to be a question of the Nuts vs. the Creeps. It becomes the Makers vs. the Takers. That's a book, by the way, by Peter Schweizer: Makers and Takers: Why conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more, are less materialistic and... Well, you get the picture.

Will They, Can They Change?

If you are a teabagging conservative, it seems obvious that the Democrats must change. The American people have taken a look at the Obama agenda and have decided that they don't want any part of it.

So, obviously, the Democrats will change, right?

Maybe not. Maybe they can't change. Maybe they are welded to their high-taxing, high-spending administrative state, and nothing can change them short of political Armageddon. For, as Daniel Henninger reminds us, the Democratic Party is nothing if not the political committee of the public sector as a whole.

It all started in 1962, according to Henninger.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force.

That political act set up the current public sector in which public employee unions feed money to Democratic politicians in return for favors.

They broke the public's bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.

If you've wondered why public sector employees earn something like 40 percent more than private sector employees, now you know.

On this political model it makes complete sense for the Democrats to propose a vast increase in the administrative supervision of health care. It will create more public sector jobs up and down the food chain, from academicians serving on comparative effectiveness committees to nurse's aides doing hospital donkey work.

Yes, you say, but all this saddles the American people with swingeing taxes and suffocating regulation and, in the end, doesn't really deliver much health care. Why would anyone do that?

So? What's the problem? It increases the number of public sector workers, and the number of votes for Democrats. And anyway, it's too late for the Democrats to stop now.

The great fear, for any independent or Republican, is that Democrats will trim their sails enough to convince the American people that they have heard their message. Yes, the president will say. We get it. And ordinary people, who just want to get on with their lives, will keep their Democratic congressman, and vote to give President Obama a second term.

But the president and his administration probably won't get it. Maybe they can't. To understand why, read the comments responding to David Brooks's New York Times article on "The Great Leviathan," where he argues that President Obama must stop acting the Hobbesian absolute monarch, and be a proper American leader. Says Brooks:

If I were President Obama, I would spend the next year showing how government can serve a humble, helpful and supportive role to the central institutions of American life. Even in blue states like Massachusetts, voters want a government that is energetic but limited — a servant, not a leviathan.

But the top commenters will have none of it. Things are such a mess after Bush that top-down dirigisme is essential, they say. You are a nice chap, says one commenter, but "your expression of respect for the American people at present is not justified."

See the mindset here? The American people cannot be trusted; they must be directed to do the right thing. Not coincidentally, it will be New York Times readers that will do most of the directing.

Leadership, they say, is mostly about selecting good people. Government comes down to staffing. And we know that the people Obama has appointed to executive positions in the federal government think and act like the Brooks article commenters. Just as the old landed aristocracy believed in "blood" our educated progressive class believes in intelligence and rational administration. Every problem needs a rational administrative solution. Every hammer needs a nail.

So the bad news, that the Obamis probably won't do their "pivot," is also the good news. Democrats won't really change. Not until it is too late.

As Lenin said: you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. You won't get political change until the old regime hits the wall.

And maybe that's the best way to understand our liberal friends today. They are like the French aristocracy in the last years of the ancien regime. Even those that know that something is wrong just don't have a clue what to do about it.

MA Voters Send Obama an Anniversary Present

OK. So I missed on my prediction. Scott Brown won "the people's seat" from Massachusetts in the US Senate by a five percent margin, not the six percent that I predicted. But hey, it's better to be an optimist!

On to the Wednesday morning quarterbacking. What does this present from the voters to President Obama on the anniversary of his inauguration mean? Fred Barnes has a five point analysis that I think hits all the bases. But the key, I think, is his point 2: "Independents are lost to Democrats," at least for now, and most probably until they get fed up with the next Republican administration.

Yeah. I'll say. The big success for Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles was in persuading moderates and independents to vote for them. They did it by fielding moderate-to-conservative candidates in Republican-leaning districts. OK. Good tactics. Then they blew it by tacking hard left after Obama was elected. And so they have lost independents and moderates for the next ten years.

Because all a Republican candidate has to say when some moderate-to-conservative Democrat is running against him is "Remember ObamaCare!"

What the Dems coulda, shoulda done was spend a couple of years doing comforting moderate things, like tinkering with health care, tinkering with global warming, and getting the economy on track. Then they could have tried the liberal stuff, after building a relationship with their new moderate recruits.

Instead they went for broke, figuring that they would get their Moby-Dick energy taxes and government takeover of health care through before the voters could stop them. So the moderates pretty quickly understood that they were a one-night-stand, and that they were being used.

Another thing on the moderate/independent front. Scott Brown picked up the support of the Tea Party movement people. So now it looks as though the Tea Party movement is not going to split the Republican vote as everyone was predicting. Now it looks as thought the Tea Party movement will be a benefit to Republican candidate. The Tea Party movement may be composed of people that are disconnected from the Republican Party. But they are obviously people of conservative temperament.

I'd suggest to by liberal friends that it's about time to stop with the "teabagger" pejoratives. All you chaps are doing is driving the Tea Party folks into the arms of the Republican Party.

Palin Watch:

Sarah Palin weighs in on her Facebook page, and the main point is a suggestion to Democrats that they come up with a better plan on health care.

Scrap your current health care bill and start from scratch... We need common sense solutions like reforming malpractice laws, allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines, giving individual purchasers the same tax benefits as those who get coverage through their employers, and letting small businesses pool together to provide insurance for their employees.

"Common sense solutions." As Pat Buchanan says, that lady sure knows how to frame an issue.

Conservatism in One Paragraph

Norman Tebbit's claim to fame was that he was Margaret Thatcher's rottweiler. Her enforcer, if you like. In fact, he was a skilled politician who just missed being Prime Minister. Now he's Lord Tebbit and sits in the House of Lords.

But in the run-up to the British General Election, which must take place before June, Lord Tebbit is blogging for the Daily Telegraph. In a recent blog he set down in one paragraph a succinct political philosophy about the powers of government which could be embraced by all conservatives.

A state must have a territory over which it is sovereign, and a people who owe it allegiance. It must have the capacity (and the will) to defend its territorial boundaries and its people from aggressors. It must provide not only external but internal security, allowing its citizens to go about their lawful businees freely, and criminal and civil justice systems as well as a currency and the regulatory and legislative infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade. Nothing else has to be provided only by the state. Health and education provision and physical infrastructure may be provided by or precipitated by the state or others, but they are not core functions of the state.

It really doesn't get any simpler than that. Let's do again, with bullets.

• A state must have a territory over which it is sovereign, and a people who owe it allegiance.
• It must have the capacity (and the will) to defend its territorial boundaries and its people from aggressors.
• It must provide not only external but internal security, allowing its citizens to go about their lawful businees freely, and criminal and civil justice systems as well as a currency and the regulatory and legislative infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade.
• Nothing else has to be provided only by the state.
• Health and education provision and physical infrastructure may be provided by or precipitated by the state or others, but they are not core functions of the state.

I think that this needs to be put up in lights. 

Let's Count Some Chickens

Nobody knows what will happen in the special Senate election in Massachusetts Tuesday. Will the enthusiasm of Scott Brown supporters get him Ted Kennedy's seat? Will the Massachusetts Democratic machine put Coakley over the finish line by fair means or foul?

Nobody knows. So let's count our chickens and imagine the effect a Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) would have.

1. It would make it really difficult to pass ObamaCare. Dems are coming up with all kinds of ways to shove it through, from delaying the certification of Brown's election to passing the Senate bill in the House and avoiding another vote in the Senate. But the answer to all such shenanigans is: Make My Day.
   
   
2. It would stiffen the backs of the other Republican senators in New England. There are the gentle ladies from Maine, Sen. Olympia Snowe and Sen. Susan Collins. They might be less inclined to buy into Democrat adminsitrative bureaucratic expansions if they had a Scott Brown next door. There is Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH). Right now he is sponsoring the dreadful Obama deficit reduction commission. After we Dems have trashed the budget let's set up a figleaf commission to force us to make tough choices. With a Scott Brown next door, Gregg might think twice about pulling Democratic chestnuts out of the fire.

You can see the benefit of a Scott Brown. It would be substantial. But first we need to get him elected. I predict Scott Brown by six points.