Culture War and Civil War

The exit of Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) has sent shock waves through the political world. What did he mean by it?

But for a politician to complain about the partisan atmosphere in Washington, DC, as Bayh did in explaining his departure is a little rich. What did you expect, Senator?

Washington, DC is full of partisanship when the ends and means of government are in contest. Such as right now. It was pretty hot in the 1930s when the president was calling businessmen economic royalists and sending lefty activists into the federal government to shake things up. And the Supreme Court was ruling the NRA unconstitutional.

There's a culture war going on, on abortion and marriage. And there's a civil war on the role of government. You'd expect things to be testy.

Still, as marriage activist Maggie Gallagher writes, most people hate it. Even successful politicians like Evan Bayh hate it.

Evan Bayh is tired of being the middle patch of ground in a culture war that never seems to end, never seems to get anywhere.

Culture war is not a term we hear that often anymore because, well, the crucial center of American politics is sick and tired of the very idea of culture war.

No doubt the culture war is going on, and no doubt nobody is winning. And as to the civil war over the role of government, the failure of Obama '09 means that the Democratic breakout attempt has failed and it is back to stalemate on that front too.

But just because the center is sick and tired of the war means nothing. People in the middle are always war weary. Wars are fought by combatants, and the sufferings of the people in the center are called "civilian casualties" and "collateral damage."

But the reason that nobody is winning is that neither side presently has the strength and the creativity to win. Forty percent of Americans may call themselves "conservative" but the twenty percent that call themselvers "liberals" seem to hold their own pretty well, despite being outnumbered two-to-one.

But the Bayh decision is at least a clue to the future.

The decision of Evan Bayh to leave the United States Senate seems to tell us that the good old era of Democrats talking a good conservative game at home and voting with the liberals in Washington is coming to a close. Since that game benefited Democrats it is not surprising that the consternation about Bayh is greatest in Liberal-land.

The Obama '09 campaign was clearly a wakeup call to Americans. They don't want whatever it was that Obama was serving up. Now what? We'll see after the next elections.

The culture war front is even more fraught. Maggie Gallagher herself is involved in defending the legal attack on California's Proposition 8, the one that said you can't call gay marriage marriage. A gay federal judge in San Francisco is telling conservative America, in case they were wondering, that they needn't expect justice from a gay bench.

My feeling is that the culture war will turn when women wake up to the fact that the sexual revolution was a disaster for women, making them into pure sex objects to be consumed at will. You read Wendy Shalit's review of the state of the hookup culture on campus, and you wonder: how do college girls put up with this abuse? (We know why they put up with it: oppression, pure and simple.)

As for the civil war about the role of government? That will turn when the government runs out of our money.

I guess that's what Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point is all about.

You Just Don't Get It, Mr. President

We conservatives are living in a kind of hog heaven, right now, what with Democrats in a retreat that is getting close to a rout. We predicted something like this. Only we didn't expect quite such a meltdown. My prediction was a year ago: "Obama's First Fumble."

Guess what I wrote? I wrote that the stimulus bill was a mistake. I said that people were expecting something different, something serious after years of Republican "corruption."

Voters were told that the new administration of President Obama was going to put the corruption and the partisan wrangling of the Clinton-Bush years behind us and clean up government. But right now it looks like same-old-same-old.

I said that, after the meltdown the previous fall, upscale voters expected an administration that "would get serious and urgently fix the economy."

How right I was. And that was just the beginning with the unserious, same-old-same-old stimulus bill. Since then we've seen the unserious, same-old-same-old cap-and-trade bill, and then the grand-daddy of them all, we had the administrative monster of ObamaCare.

Here we are, a year later, and the Obama administration still hasn't done anything serious on the economy.

But now, get this. Peggy Noonan reports President Obama telling US Senators:

"If the price of certainty [i.e., getting reelected] is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression . . . the result is going to be the same. I don't know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us in this fix in the first place."

Good God, Mr. President. Don't you realize that, contrary to your assertion, YOU are continuing exactly the same proposals that led us to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression? How can you expect the result to be different when your policies are same-old-same-old?

I'm afraid that you may have been reading too much of The New York Times. You see, Mr President, it wasn't greedy bankers and silly quants that got us into the financial mess. The real problem was the tsunami of debt unleashed by Fannie and Freddie, the $5 trillion in too-big-to-fail government-subsidized mortgage debt that engulfed the housing market. The greedy bankers were just sluice operators on the Grand Canal of government subsidized credit. Of course, they should be executed, pour encourager les autres, but that doesn't alter the fact that government created the problem.

And Mr President, from where I sit, you have done nothing to solve this problem. In fact, if anything, you are sluicing credit at the housing market worse than before, in the desperate hope of seeing signs of life before you are up for reelection.

As for the rest of your agenda, the way I see it, you are just applying tired liberal nostrums, the knee-jerk reaction of legislating or administering another subsidy, setting up new political special interest or propping up an old one, whether it's in education, health care, or energy. Green energy jobs. What a joke.

Evidently you don't have a clue, Mr. President. I suspect that most Democrats don't have a clue either. They all read The New York Times and listen to NPR and so they live in the cocoon world of liberal self-congratulation, just like you.

But the Democratic officeholders you were lecturing are reading the polls and they know that something bad is coming. They don't know what, but they know, as practical politicians, that it is time to get in out of the rain.

I can't say I'm upset by all this. I can't say I'm surprised. I wanted you to be elected, Mr. President, because I felt that once the American people got a real taste of Democratic governance, legislative and executive, they would be ready to upchuck. After the American people had hurled their lunch all over the incumbent politicians, I reckoned, then a chastened "educated class" might be ready to stand aside, for a brief moment, to allow some genuine reform. And by that I mean reform that doesn't increase government spending and doesn't increase government regulation.

But first we have to go through the maelstrom of 2010.

Here's a another prediction. In 2011 the political landscape will be utterly transformed. I'll tell you, Mr. President. It can't come soon enough.

Confucius and the Community Organizer

That excellent force for law and order, Lt. Chan of the San Francisco Police Department often had resort, during the process of unraveling a crime, to a maxim of Confucius.

Here is one retailed by Karl Jaspers in Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus.

When asked, "What is the first thing to be done in order to promote a renewal in disastrous circumstances?" Confucius gave a remarkable answer: Words must be set aright... [For] language is constantly misused, words are employed for meanings that do not befit them...

If the language is in disorder, everything goes wrong.

Now this saying of Confucius gives me remarkable hope. For the defining characteristic of this time, when the Community Organizer-in-chief is president, and language is in disorder, is that the community is organizing itself.

President Obama is a man who thinks of himself as having a remarkable gift with words. It is patently obvious, after a year of his presidency, that he abuses this gift damnably. He uses words in order to mislead. And the worst of his abuse is his promise that, if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.

His language is in disorder.

It is clear, moreover, that the deeper the president gets into trouble, the more he grabs recklessly for le bon mot to get out again. And he's not too careful about the truth. The contrast with President Bush is palpable. Liberals made a huge fuss about the Iraq "lie," but the truth is that President Bush was always very careful about what he said. He understood that every word was engraved in the book of history.

So, the first thing to do, when the president uses words for "meanings that do not befit them" is that we, the people, must set words aright.

And wouldn't you know, the people are. The people began this work within a month of the president's inauguration.

And here is the beauty of this process. The president is a practitioner of a profession that believes that when the people hurt a community organizer must go down among them and organize them. Mr. Obama himself started out organizing the folks in South Chicago who had been laid off from the big steel plant closures.

But the problem was that the steel plants were never going to open again. The good paying union jobs were gone forever, and Barack Obama, organizer, was never going to get those jobs back again. Barack Obama was organizing people for a useless war.

The left-wing world view sees the people has helpless victims, camping out in the ruins left behind by a rapacious capitalism, waiting for left-wing radical suits to come and rouse them into a fighting force. That may be true of South Chicago. But it is not true of the United States as a whole.

America is a middle-class country. The middle class does not wait around helplessly like victims. The middle class organizes itself for action and, once organized, it gets going.

And this is exactly what the Tea Party movement is doing. To me, the representative figure is Republican congressional candidate Les Phillip. Glenn Reynolds reports:

He is running against Republican Parker Griffith in Alabama's fifth congressional district. Mr. Phillip, a black businessman and Navy veteran who immigrated with his parents from Trinidad in his youth, got his start in politics speaking at a tea-party protest in Decatur, Ala., last year. "Somebody had to speak," he told me, "so I stepped up."

That was the America that Alexis de Tocqueville experienced in the 1830s in which people just stepped up to join associations to get things done.

That America still lives in us today. And the tingling feeling that I am getting is that this America is heading into the most remarkable political season in our lifetimes. Why? Because the governing elite is out of touch.

It is commonplace to accuse both parties of being out of touch, but I believe that maligns the poor benighted Republicans. They would like to do what needs to be done, but they are afraid.

It is the "educated class" that is out of touch. It is out of touch because, for the last century, it has been in broadcast mode, telling the people what to think and shutting out voices that disagreed with it.

All along the water was rising behind the dam, but the educated class and its political arm, the Democratic Party, kept the sluices closed. Now the water is about to overtop the dam. If things go well, the water will cascade down the emergency spillway. If things do not go well, then the water will take out the dam and let loose a raging torrent.

Here, today, in 2010, the American people are determined that "words must be set aright," and they are determined to have nothing to do with the artful, and increasingly desperate words coming out of TOTUS, the teleprompter of the United States.

Either way, as the sports announcers say, it's going to be one for the record books.

Dems Make Ryan's "Roadmap" the Issue

Will it work? Since the US budget came out to universal raspberries last week the Obama administration is trying a Full Alinksy. They are diverting attention from their own budget by making Rep. Paul Ryan and his "Roadmap for America's Future" the issue, according to Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal.

Well, it's not surprising. Ryan's Roadmap turns Social Security into a genuine savings program and it replaces Medicare with a voucher program. Can't have that! So the Dems are pulling out the Medi-scare playbooks and blaming the Republicans--for what, exactly? I thought that the Democrats were in power.

Some Republicans are acting scared. They are worried that the Democrats will demagogue the issue and scare seniors. Some "anonymous" House members are griping "to the press that Mr. Ryan doesn't 'speak' for them."

I say: Bring it on. This is a political battle that Republicans are going to have to fight sooner or later. Sooner or later, the welfare state--and that means Social Security and Medicare--are going to hit the wall.

But the question is: What do Americans want now? Americans are frightened by deficits, but not so much that they would accept reducing their entitlements.

Most likely, of course, the Democrats will win the argument, as they did when President Bush tried to privatize Social Security in 2005.

They will win up until the day that the US defaults on its debt and the grim international bankers from China in 2035 summon the US crisis negotiating team to Beijing to discuss swingeing spending cuts.

And the American people are probably right to resist reform until the system actually breaks. Because if we reform now then it will just encourage our Democratic friends to find new ways to spend money and we'll end up broke anyway.

But the time is now to start thinking about what a genuine welfare society, rather than today's government dependency welfare state, would look like;.

Surely there is a better way to protect people against the tribulations of old age than a government program. Surely there is a better way to help grannie than taxing young working families trying to start a family and buy a house.

Broder Spills Beans on Palin

It had to happen. But why now? Sooner or later, some liberal commentator was going to see through the red mist of liberal rage and understand that Sarah Palin is not just a empty head but a skilled politician.

And why did it have to be the dean of liberal pundits, David Broder? Here is his judgment on last weekend:

Her lengthy Saturday night keynote address to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville and her debut on the Sunday morning talk show circuit with Fox News' Chris Wallace showed off a public figure at the top of her game -- a politician who knows who she is and how to sell herself, even with notes on her palm.

Let's go on.

Blessed with an enthusiastic audience of conservative activists, Palin used the Tea Party gathering and coverage on the cable networks to display the full repertoire she possesses, touching on national security, economics, fiscal and social policy, and every other area where she could draw a contrast with Barack Obama and point up what Republicans see as vulnerabilities in Washington.

Her invocation of "conservative principles and common-sense solutions" was perfectly conventional. What stood out in the eyes of TV-watching pols of both parties was the skill with which she drew a self-portrait that fit not just the wishes of the immediate audience but the mood of a significant slice of the broader electorate.

This is just what we don't want liberals to know at this stage of the game. No, no. Let's all just make silly jokes about making notes on her hand, and all the rest. Let's give Palin another year under the radar.

(That Robert Gibbs: how dumb can you be to mention Palin's hand notes at the White House? It raises Palin to the presidential level. I thought it was Politics 101: you never raise up the small fry opposition.)

Personally, I think that Broder is overdoing it a bit. I don't think that Sarah Palin is at the top of her game. I think she is still learning the craft of a national politician, and has a ways to go yet. But you can see already that, populist or not, she is going for the center. No more compassionate conservatism. Palin's book is drenched in references to "common-sense conservatism." And her speech was the same. It was all about common-sense solutions and ridiculing the silliness and lack of common sense in the Obama administration.

When the nation self-identifies 40 percent conservative and 36 percent moderate, you can see that "common-sense" and "conservatism" covers a majority of the electorate.

Common sense isn't enough, of course. You need empathy. And this report of Sarah Palin's visit to Walter Reed Army Hospital starts to build a narrative of Palin the empathetic. Says Anthony Tata, a retired Brigadier General:

As the leader of thousands of troops in combat, I’ve been honored to visit hundreds of wounded and had the privilege of burying too many friends and fellow warriors. Accordingly, my “insincerity detector” is pretty good and I give Governor Palin high marks. She was in the moment with those Soldiers and families. All wrapped in one person, she was leader, mother, friend, grateful American, and grieving parent.

You can't pay for stuff like that. It fills you with hope for change.

The Welfare State Hitting the Wall

How will it end? The welfare state, that is. Will it end with a bang or a whimper?

We are getting a glimpse at the welfare state in crisis because there are a bunch of countries in the world right now where the government is in serious economic trouble.

There's Greece. The interest rate on Greek sovereign debt has sky-rocketed and so the Greek government is in a cash crisis. The helpful Greek civil servants have gone on strike, presumably to protest any potential cuts in government spending. Since Greece is in the Euro system, its troubles affect all countries in the Euro area. Ministers are shuttling to and fro deciding what to do.

There's Argentina. President Cristina Kirchner has just sacked the president of Argentina's central bank.

In his place she named Mercedes Marcó del Pont, a Yale-trained economist who has expressed the view that central bank autonomy ought to be limited.

So that will enable Kirchner to pay foreign creditors with central bank reserves. Can you spell i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n?

But Venezuela takes the cake. Last month Venezuela devalued the Bolivar by about 50 percent, finally caving in to reality. But, of course, President Chavez is trying, even now, to deny reality by threatening retailers that raise prices.

The government, which threatened to shut down or seize retailers that were seen gouging prices, closed about 1,900 retailers and nationalized a supermarket chain controlled by France's Casino Guichard-Perrachon S.A. (CO.FR).

Like that will really get food to the poor.

This is not a pretty picture. It shows that the welfare state will not go quietly. It shows that left-wing politicians will loot the state of all its wealth in an effort to stay in power. It shows that there is no way around an economic maelstrom at the end of the welfare state era.

And then the whole thing starts again.

Listen folks. This is not that hard. Hard money. Limited government. Clear and transparent regulation of the private sector. No crony capitalism. Pretty soon the poor get to prosper and the country climbs into the developed world.

But no. People want to take the short cut. They think like peasants. They think that businessmen are no different than the landowners that oppressed them for centuries. They want to line their pockets with other peoples' money. They think that evil businessmen are stealing them blind.

As Goldfinger told James Bond: You are a fool Mr. Bond, and a fool must pay for his folly.

Palin's Lemonade Stand

It seems our lefty friends didn't like Gov. Palin's speech in Nashville, TN, last Saturday. But it wasn't the content, or even her hair, that caught most of the interest. It was her hand.

Maddened into a frenzy by the TOTUS meme, our lefty friends made a lot of unprintable comments related to the notes that Gov. Palin had scribbled on her hand.

As usual, Palin has turned lemon into lemonade by making a point of waving her notecard hand at her personal appearances. That's what a skilled politician does, by instinct. In fact that's how you can tell a skilled politician.

Meanwhile, Jonathan V. Last at the Weekly Standard looks at the Obama numbers and tells us what is happening to the president's support. The weaker parts of his winning coalition are leaving the sinking ship.

Back in 2008 Obama's core support was upscale professionals, blacks, and young voters. The "Jacksonian" voters (i.e., Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen that first turned out for Andrew Jackson 190 years ago!) and white ethnics were slow to rally to Obama's standard. It is the Jacksonians and the white ethnics who are falling away now. They are falling away from the president and maybe falling away from the Democratic Party.

Hmm. Now who do you think would really appeal to those folks? Who do you think could make them feel that he really understands them?

Exactly, Senator. That "he" is a "she."

The McGovern wing of the Democratic Party has always had a problem with the white ethnics that once were the core of the party. On defense, on race, on the regulatory state, on sex, the McGovern Democrats are poles apart from the white ethnics. Up until Obama the post Vietnam Democratic presidents have been moderate Southerners. So the antipathy between urban liberals and the white ethnics was blurred.

But President Obama is a full-on McGovern Democrat. And the old-line white ethnic voter is finding out that the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party just doesn't understand and doesn't appreciate them.

The truth is that the rise of the Republican Party since the nadir of 1964 has never been about the brilliance of Republican Party politicians and ideas. The story has always been that, about once each decade, the elite liberals toss out another member of the old New Deal coalition. And the only place for the homeless faction is the Republican Party.

But now something is different. Now the Republican Party has a headline politician who could be picked by Central Casting to appeal to the disaffected Jacksonian and white ethnic Democrats.

Her name is Sarah Palin.