This is not Obama's Rubicon

In this curious moment of history, the political world seems to be holding its breath.

That's because we can't be sure if we are watching tragedy or farce as the Democrats try to push their signature health reform over the finish line.

Michael Gerson is talking about Caesar crossing the Rubicon. He sees President Obama is throwing the dice in one more effort to win the big one. But Gerson doesn't really mean it. Caesar's action was an act of war against the Roman Republic, and Caesar was a powerful player in Roman politics in the way that President Obama is not. He doesn't see Obama about to take over the Roman Empire, but on the cusp of a strategic mistake.

If Democrats try to ambush Republicans in the "health care summit" on February 25th, surely it will just inflame partisan Republicans. If Democrats pass the health reform on a strict party-line vote using "reconciliation" it will be an act of provocation. You can't pass a gigantic takeover of the health care industry on a party-line vote. You must, in the immortal words of Noam Chomsky, "manufacture consent."

No, the correct classical allusion is King Pyrrhus, of whose victory over the Romans, the king said that one more such victory and he would be undone. That's what Rich Galen thinks. You don't want to win close fought victories that leave your opponent enraged. You want to win overwhelming victories that leave your opponents defeated and discouraged.

You can't help wondering, as we head forth into the second year of Obama, whether the Obama chaps are really ready for prime time. The Obama administration doesn't seem to understand the idea of strategic concentration, of the German concept of the Schwerpunkt. You get the feeling that the Obamis believe the liberal notion that government is a facilitated meeting where we get all the stakeholders together and they all agree, after a little coaching, that the liberal way is best.

You can do that in the liberal school system and in the liberal university. That's because the students need the grades so they can get their credentials and get the hell out. But politics is civil war by other means. It is a dance of power, and power is a wasting asset.

Has any American president wasted his power like Obama?

Maybe the Obamis are about to come up with a secret weapon to win the battle over ObamaCare. But somehow I doubt it.

Some weeks ago Michael Barone compared ObamaCare to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Back then Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) thought he had a brilliant plan to solve the slavery issue. Instead, he inflamed the issue, led the Democratic Party into a catastrophic mid-term election, and brought on the civil war.

Democrats think that their ObamaCare will finish their decades-long work to provide health care for all. President Obama apparently thinks that once ObamaCare passes then we'll never have to come back to the health care question again.

This shows a startling misunderstanding of politics. Nothing that the government does is settled. That's because everything the government does is force. And the people on the receiving end of force don't like it.

Politics is civil war by other means. The whole purpose of politics is to get your way without provoking the other side into taking up arms against you. That is why it is best to try to govern by consent rather than by pitched battle, to keep the opposition divided and demoralized rather than energized and enraged.

But it looks like our Democratic friends are going to have to learn this the hard way.

The Box-Canyon Presidency

You have to hand it to the president. He is nothing daunted by the unpopularity of his agenda. Nothing daunted by the decisive electoral losses in Virginia, in New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Never mind that. Just power on with the Big Push to get ObamaCare over the line, somehow, anyhow. Because once it's enacted it will be impossible to repeal it. Or so the assumption goes.

The Wall Street Journal edit page seems to think it's Ben Hur and Jack Hawkins on the deck of the Roman trireme all over again. "ObamaCare at Ramming Speed" they call it.

The larger political message of this new proposal is that Mr. Obama and Democrats have no intention of compromising on an incremental reform, or of listening to Republican, or any other, ideas on health care.

They are going to ram it through with Chicago Rules.

Never mind that this country is built upon the notion of the "consent of the governed." Power is power, and you don't go to Washington to play patty-cake.

The problem for the American people is that the president is flying us up a box canyon. That's the kind of canyon that's too narrow to turn in, with a rock wall at the end. When you fly up the canyon there is no turning back, and no way to power up over the rock wall at the end.

Maybe we'll be able to kick out 70 or 80 House members in November. Maybe we'll be able to elect a conservative in 2012. But the bigger problem remains. The huge administrative welfare state is just sitting there getting bigger every day. And President Obama is giving a tremendous lurch to make it even bigger.

We know what happens in the end. You get a country like Argentina that just dumps its debt every generation. Last time around it seized the bank accounts of ordinary people. Or you get Greece, where the public employees are taking to the streets to defend their indefensible salaries and retirement benefits. Government is, in the end, an armed minority extracting requisitions from the peasantry.

It's a shame, because it's the ordinary people, the Democratic voters, that will suffer when President Obama (or his successor) flies the airplane into the rock wall. They will be the people without parachutes, that tied their livelihood to the government and its benefits. They will be the people "eating the paint off the walls."

It's all very exciting, of course. But its when things get exciting that people fall off.

The Problem with Tax Cuts

OK, There isn't a problem with tax cuts, especially broad-based marginal rate cuts. But there is something to keep in mind.

Here's what I mean. As Glenn Beck told us at CPAC on Saturday, the US was in a big depression in 1920. Unemployment was nearly 12 percent. Deflation was on big time. Production was off by 20 percent and more.

Then the Harding-Coolidge Administration cut income tax rates from 77 percent top rate to 25 percent. And it cut federal spending in half.

The result was a barn-burner of a boom, the extension of prosperity to the broad middle class. But it ended in tears in 1929. Why? Because debt got out of control. The same thing happened in the 1960s when Kennedy cut tax rates. The go-go years ended in huge bear market and a decade of inflation and recession. And in the 1990s when Congress cut capital gains taxes, the resulting boom ended in the NASDAQ meltdown of 2000-2001.

The only exception was the Reagan boom of the 1980s. But the Reagan era balanced the 30 percent Reagan-Kemp-Roth tax cuts and some moderate spending cuts with a tight monetary policy. Those were the Volker years.

There's a lesson here. When you cut tax rates and government spending you set off a prairie fire of economic growth. If you aren't careful, you'll get a debt explosion as well, and debt explosions end in tears. So it is absolutely essential to keep monetary policy (and broad credit policy, e.g. Fannie and Freddie) in check. We know why, because we've just lived through it. When you leverage debt too high then people can't service their debt when the economy turns south.

To you chaps at the White House: this advice is free. You won't listen of course. But you'll wish you had when inflation starts nipping at your heels, and President Obama becomes the most unpopular president in modern memory.

Why, things could get so bad that Republicans may end up running against Obama for the next 50 years, just as Democrats ran for decades against Herbert Hoover.

The Trouble with Specifics

The Tea Party movement is coming up with a Contract from America for this fall. It's a grab bag of conservative favorites, from ending runaway spending to tax reform and transparency. What it doesn't do is address the only two things that matter. They are Social Security and Medicare.

Actually, Social Security is not that big of a problem. But Medicare is. Say what you will about ObamaCare, but it had a plan to curb Medicare spending: Rationing with death panels. Never mind if it was a stupid plan. Never mind whether it would have worked. It was at least a plan.

Of course the big impact of Medicare is still a decade or so away. That's when baby-boomers like me will be seriously hitting the last-six-months-of-life syndrome and chewing up health care like you wouldn't believe. Meanwhile there are plenty of things that can be done to curb the cost of government. But every one will hit a powerful special interest. Here, just for giggles, is the current state of the game on government spending. It's from usgovernmentspending.com, of course.

United States Federal State and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2010
Amounts in $ billion
Pensions: $987.4
Health Care: $1,081.6
Education: $1,041.8
Defense: $896.2
Welfare: $750.1
Protection: $350.0
Transportation: $269.3
General Government: $133.1
Other Spending: $581.7
Interest: $309.2
Balance: $104.4
Total Spending: $6,504.7

It can't be emphasized enough that the big dollars are all in the big four: Pensions (i.e., Social Security and government employee pensions), Health Care (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid), Education (the Blob), and Defense. Welfare is up by 50 percent, on account of the recession, but that will probably subside.

The big problem is that the government is paying for pensions that people ought to save on their own, and it is paying for health care for seniors that they ought to be paying on their own.

Not all people. But most of us. There's a role for government in helping people who have failed to provide for themselves, although families, churches, unions, and fraternal associations would probably do a better job. But the big problem is that government has promised gigantic benefits that it can never deliver. Politicians made those promises in order to win elections.

When the government runs out of money, it won't be the politicians that will suffer. It won't be the educated liberals that will suffer. It won't be the professional classes and the businessmen. It will only be the lower layers of the middle class. It will be the poor and the near poor. They will suffer. They will have to go without the health care that can make the last years a little more comfortable.

Yet it was the poor and the near poor that the modern welfare state was supposed to help.

It's a bit late to say this now, but government is just the wrong agent to provide any of these services. If you want insurance against risks, buy insurance. If you want to stop working, do some saving. If you want the comforts of health care, get a job.

But that's what we must work for. A government that only does the things that absolutely require force. Defense. Policing. Law. But humans have always been freeloaders, and they always will.

Meanwhile, let's watch the political system dance around the 800 pound gorillas in the room: Social Security and Medicare.

Which Party Will Split FIrst?

In National Review, Henry Olsen worries that the Republicans may split like the Whig Party in the 1850s. He doesn't see the present dissatisfaction with President Obama translating into Republican victory.

I see the current state of affairs as an intensification, perhaps even a culmination, of four interrelated 25-year political trends: a growing distrust of conservative and liberal ideologies, a growing movement away from the two parties and toward political independence, increases in the racial-minority (which usually means Democratic-voting) share of the population, and a growing inability of the Republican party to bridge the gap between its populist and elite wings.

Olsen sees the possibility, "the specter of a serious independent, populist presidential candidacy for the first time in a century." That's because he doesn't think the Republicans can heal the split between its populist and elite wings.

You can see the potential in Dorothy Rabinowitz's recent sneer at Sarah Palin's populism. Rabinowitz doesn't like

the unsavory echoes of her regular references to "the real America" as opposed to those shadowy "elites," now charged with threats to the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of all real Americans.

This from a woman who has done sterling service exposing the threats to life and liberty by the myrmidons that witch-hunted day-care providers like the Amiraults of Massachusetts. The functionaries were doing the bidding of elites enamoured with the fashionable notion of "repressed memory."

On the other hand, you could say that Palin is the likely vehicle for an independent populist candidacy, and she's a Republican. How lucky can you get?

Look. There's no telling what may happen in the next few years. It is clear that the political tides are shifting. But they may not lead to a split in the Republican Party. They may split the Democrats.

Here's Pat Caddell, once George McGovern's polling wunderkind many years ago, complaining about the Chicago politics in the Democratic Party. He's been chucked off a Democratic campaign after complaining about union thugs, according to Jon Ward in The Daily Caller.

“What I said about Andy Stern and the SEIU? Sure, they’re thugs,” said Caddell, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who until Monday* had an informal advising role with the primary challenger to incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet.

Sounds to me as if Pat Caddell ain't gonna work in this town no more. But hey, he can probably make his bones as an on-air pundit, so what's the worry?

The point is that the Democrats have their troubles too. President Obama got to be president by appealing to moderates. The Democrats focused like lasers on recruiting moderate candidates to run in Republican-leaning states and districts. With President Obama governing way left, all these elected Democrats are peering ahead in the political fogs worried sick about icebergs. Evan Bayh has taken off in a lifeboat, and now it looks like Pat Caddell has taken a header off the fan-tail.

Some conservatives have already pointed the finger at Greece and its financial crisis and warned that this is how the welfare state ends. I doubt if that will happen soon, but strains in the welfare state will doubtless set off fights among passengers and crew.

You think Republicans have troubles? Democrats have them too.

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.