Why Blacks Vote Big Government

The great generation of African Americans that came to maturity before the civil rights revolution were not all Democrats. Some of them turned into eminent conservatives. So 74-year-old like Walter Williams confesses that it's a great disappointment to him that so many blacks support big government.

[T]he unique history of black Americans should make us, above all other Americans, most suspicious of any encroachment on personal liberty and most distrustful of government.

When blacks were slaves, government had laws to repress them. Now that blacks are free, government fails to protect them from crime and fails to educate their children. Why would blacks support a party that betrays them so cruelly?

Here's a couple of reasons why. The first is a universal. Nobody objects when the government wants to cut you a check. In fact the smallest measurable time interval on Earth is the time between getting a check from the government and deciding that you deserve it.

Second, we turn to developmental psychology. It finds that many people, particularly those with marginal skills, experience life as a power struggle between the people and the powerful. That is why Al Gore in his presidential campaign said that he was fighting for the people against the powerful. (If only!) People that think like that attach themselves to a powerful patron---for protection from the other powerful forces in society. They "go along to get along." Does the powerful patron exploit them? Sure, but think how much worse it would be without his protection.

People emerge from out of this world view when they acquire the skills to make it in the city (and often acquire enthusiastic Christianity). They begin to think that they can make it on their own (or with God's help). Then they start to believe in liberty and Don't Tread On Me.

In his book The New Americans Michael Barone shows how almost all immigrant groups to the US go through this process of emergence. The ones that experienced the heaviest repression in the old country (the Irish and the blacks) are the slowest to emerge from the "people vs. the powerful" mindset. When they do, they start to feel like Americans, rather than hyphenated Americans.

That's why the question asked by the MSNBC reporterette of an African American at a tea party rally is canonical. She wondered if he didn't feel uncomfortable, you know, being surrounded by all those white people. His reply was classic.

"No, No. These are my people. Americans."

Get it?

I have a dream. That one day, almost all African Americans will think the same.

Irresistible Force Meets Immovable Object

Fred Barnes thinks that the Obama administration has deliberately ramped up to ramming speed (shades of Ben-Hur) in an effort to get as much of the liberal agenda enacted as possible before Congress is purged of its liberal galley slaves in November.

Meanwhile Peggy Noonan reviews the movement of rejection that is building in the heartland. On immigration, the political class has ignored the concerns of ordinary folks (for the understandable reason that they don't want to lose the Hispanic vote) and ordinary folks just aren't going to take it any more.

Maybe you can call the Obama-Reid-Pelosi trireme an irresistible force, but, as the picture in the Journal shows, it looks like it's heading over a waterfall.

As a former Brit, I've been watching the campaign over there for the General Election on Thursday, and I've been marveling at the difference in the political atmosphere. Over there in Britland, you see a surly lot of voters that are fed up with their political elite. But they don't seem to be riled up enough to do anything about it. They grumble and whine, but that's all they do. They expect their leaders to come up with the answer.

Over here, the difference is palpable. People are just as pissed off, but they are are not sitting around waiting for leadership. They are getting up off their duffs and doing something about it.

And I mean both liberals and conservatives. Our liberal friends have just come off an eight-year effort discrediting everything the evil George W. Bush ever said or did. Hey, it worked! It got them the best result for Democrats in an election since 1964.

Now we've got conservatives and Tea Partiers revved up and they are taking to the streets and the telephones and the internet in a determined effort to do something about the radical, socialist, Marxist President Obama and his rubber-stamp Congress. The elections this November are shaping up as the biggest political earthquake since 1994. And very likely more.

Is this a great country or what?

Whatever Happened to the Third Way?

Back in the Nineties, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were advertising something new in politics. They called it a Third Way between left and right.

Bill Clinton talked about the New Democrats that understood the limits of big government and got elected when Ross Perot split the conservative vote, and Tony Blair led a rejuvenated New Labour Party to a stunning victory in 1997.

How then did the Democrats offer up Barack Obama with his trillion dollar stimulus and his two trillion dollar ObamaCare? And how come that the Labour Party in Britain is running third in the polls for the General Election on Thursday? That set Michael Barone wondering what had happened to the "Third Way."

Both parties have moved well to the left. Barack Obama and Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, head governments that are running budget deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product. Both are promoting higher taxes and expansion of government programs.

So what's so wrong with the Third Way strategy that both parties have dumped it? There's no indication that the Third Way has lost popularity with the voters. But the "lurch to the left" has certainly run into trouble, so much so that the left is blaming the voters as bigots (Britain) and racists (US).

The answer to the problem is simple. The liberal elite in both countries never really believed in the Third Way. The Third Way was always just a tactical maneuver.

Instead the liberal elite believes in itself. It believes that the enlightened elite should guide the political sector and that the political sector should closely micromanage the economic sector. The moral/cultural sector should stay out of it except when it speaks with a liberal or secular voice.

There's no point in being an enlightened, educated elite unless you get the power and the prestige as well. A lightly regulated, self-responsible economic sector would be no fun at all to the liberal elite, for it would suggest that the elite and its expertise was unnecessary.

The fact is that this is nothing new. Ever since Rousseau in the 18th century the educated class has believed that it was born to rule, and it has argued tirelessly that nobody else was morally or ethically fit to rule. Not the middle class, not the capitalists, and certainly not the religious leaders. And of course the working class, bless their hearts, needed guidance.

There's a problem with this political philosophy. It is that the educated elite knows nothing about the practical things of making and doing. It wants to stand around naming and blaming, taxing and spending. And it also wants to thrill to the roar of the crowd. But its plans and programs always end in corruption and failure.

There will be more "Third Ways" in our future, and more New Democrats and New Labours. The liberal educated elite moves tactically to the center whenever it needs to. But after it gets elected it soon gets back to its old habits, and we end up with Obamas and Browns.

One wag recently went to the London zoo and decided that Gordon Brown "is like a camel in a filthy mood."

Who knows what Barack Obama will look like after another year or two as president?

Trying to Fire Up the Base

So President Obama is finished with implementing the care and feeding of his public-sector supports in his stimulus package and the federalization of health care. Now, according to Michael Barone, he has switched to playing politics, firing up the base for the mid-term elections.

Yes. Now he's dangling financial reform in front of voters mad at fat-cat bankers, and dangling immigration reform in front of Hispanic voters. But will it work, writes Barone?

[I]f policy doesn’t work, try politics. Gallup reports that “very enthusiastic” voters favor Republicans 57 percent to 37 percent in congressional elections. Will attacks on Wall Street, deep-sixing the cap-and-trade bill, and getting beaten on immigration change that? The Obama Democrats hope so. But I wouldn’t bet heavily on it.

Evidently the president thinks that he can paint Republicans into a corner as the paid puppets of Wall Street and the bigoted enemies of hard-working immigrants.

One thing about President Obama. He always exudes a remarkable self-confidence, as if he knows what he is doing.

But does he?

Is he really going to win by dividing the American people on immigration? We know that Gov. Jan Brewer's popularity (R-AZ) has skyrocketed since she signed the law on immigration status enforcement. We know that the 2006 immigration effort crashed on divisions in both parties and the American people's strong opposition to any amnesty for illegal immigrants until border security was improved.

After a year of President Obama, the dominating fact of his presidency is the willingness to go against the will of the American people in implementing items on the liberal agenda. For a conservative it is breathtaking, because conservatives always feel that they must have the American people pushing at their backs in order to make headway against the steady trade-wind of the mainstream media and the educated class. It was breathtaking when President Clinton fired the White House travel office back in 1993. No conservative would think of committing such blatant patronage, not in plain sight. But Clinton understood that he would get a bye from the Democrat-friendly media. Likewise, President Obama knows that he can do unpopular things because he's sailing downwind, with a friendly media wafting him along.

Unless.

Unless the American people rise up and vote him down.

The question for this fall is: will the dividing line fall in the right place for the president or not?

Let us think of the president's politicking not as a threat but an opportunity to redraw the lines on the playing field.

Surely the Dodd financial reform bill presents a once in a generation opportunity to tell the American people the truth. It's not Republican Senators that are in the pockets of Wall Street, as they think on Comedy Central. Come now, folks, you can't believe something like that. It's Wall Street that's in the pockets of the Democratic Party. That's why Wall Street pays big bucks to Democrats and not the other way around.

Let me repeat this, because I don't want to be misunderstood. To understand power relations, you need to know, as Lenin insisted: Who Whom. Who is sucking up to whom, who is paying tribute, and who is collecting tribute?

Back when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House of Representatives in November 1994 the first thing he did was sent the word out to K Street that there needed to be more business contributions to Repubicans, and more Republicans working for the lobbying firms. Who whom.

But the American Association of Retired Persons, the fabled AARP, doesn't pay tribute to anyone. The president goes to the AARP, not vice versa.

So let's grab the opportunity to change the minds of the American people. It's not Republicans who encourage "too big to fail" banks. It's Democrats.

There's a similar opportunity on immigration. The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the mainstream media have done a bang-up job on selling the idea that the American people--and Republicans and conservatives in particular--are bigoted nativists.

And not just in America. Prime Minister Gordon Brown thinks the same of his own white working-class Labour supporters. Now there is an opportunity to establish another narrative.

It's not the people that are the bigots. It's the educated elite that are the bigots, cruelly allowing illegal immigrants to enter the country and be forced to live in the shadows where they become victims of every kind of discrimination and shakedown. Instead we should finish the fence, enforce the law, and then write an honest and fair immigration reform bill.

For too long, Republicans and conservatives have been afraid of their own shadows. It's time to meet the cynical manipulations of the Democrats, take principled, honorable positions on issues the American people care about, and boldly seek to persuade the persuadable.

Pity a Poor Tory

In the British General Election set for Thursday May 6, the opposition Conservative Party is only leading by about 6 points in a three way race.

The Conservatives are proposing a radical reform of education and a radical reform of welfare. On education, they are proposing the Swedish system, which allows almost anyone to open a school and get government money. On welfare they are proposing some sort of move towards limiting open-ended benefits. And they are, nod, nod, wink, wink, proposing more spending cuts and fewer tax increases in their program to reduce the deficit, running at 12 percent of GDP.

Tory leader David Cameron has made a determined move towards the center, trying to woo the voters of the center party, the Lib-Dems. They call it "love-bombing." But what happens? The Lib-Dem leader, Nick Clegg, makes a big impression in the first televised debate between the party leaders (the first ever in Britain) and all the young voters swoon.

Finally, the London Economist gives Cameron a luke-warm endorsement:

According to the magazine’s lead editorial, the Tory leader is “much closer to answering the main question facing Britain than either of his rivals is. In this complicated, perhaps inevitably imperfect election, he would get our vote.”

Well, that's nice.

The problem the Tories face in Britain is in the numbers. There is a left-liberal party, the Labour Party, a center-left party, the Lib-Dems, and only one major center-right party, the Conservatives. Yet right now the Conservatives, in the lead, are struggling to rise above 35 percent in the polls. The fact is that, unlike the US, Britain is a center-left country. People just expect, as a matter of course, that the government provides unlimited public services. Any proposal to reduce spending is scorned as "Tory cuts," proof that the Conservative Party is the "nasty party."

Many Conservative supporters in Britain are complaining that Cameron has gone too far left. But what is he to do? If he stays right, then he can't pick up the precious people that vote for the Lib Dems. If he goes left then he risks losing voters to the anti-EC party, the UKIP. He's obviously made the judgment that the best strategy is to move left.

You can see the Conservative problem best by comparing Britain with the US. Here in the US we have a vibrant conservative movement that provides the energy for talk radio, Fox News, the conservative blogosphere, and a conservative Republican Party. And on top of that the movement just budded like a hydra, and produced the Tea Party. All this grass-roots and intellectual ferment keeps the Republican Party tethered to the right. It cannot move too far to the center, which you might call the easy, RINO option. It must persuade independents and moderates to move to the right.

In Britain, nada. No conservative movement. No Tea Party. What can a conservative politician expect to achieve without grass-roots enthusiasm?

On top of that, it turns out that for the US, there is a God in Heaven, and presto, we have a president who is playing John Wayne in a 21st century Western, and driving all them moderate dogies right onto the conservative range.

Pity the poor Tories in Britain. They just can't seem to get a break.

What Politicians Really Think

A political "gaffe," according to Michael Kinsley, is when a politician tells the truth. It is like an actor "breaking character."

In Britain today, in the middle of their General Election campaign they, are enjoying a "gaffe" committed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown was accosted by a 66-year-old Labour supporter who asked him about "immigration from Eastern Europe, tuition fees and the national debt." Brown handled the woman pretty well, but was overheard later describing her as "a bigoted woman."

Shades of Barack Obama describing the Pennsylvania voters in small towns that lost jobs years ago.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Politicians are a funny lot. On the one hand they claim to care about the people and their needs. On the other hand they ruthlessly exploit them and divide them in their election campaigns. And behind their backs they sneer at them or patronize them.

The joke is on the politicians, of course. Voters wouldn't care about immigration if the politicians ran a sensible immigration policy and if there wasn't such a demand for low-skilled workers created by the welfare state. Voters wouldn't care about the debt if politicians had done their job properly and refrained from gunning the economy to buy votes. Voters wouldn't care about free trade if the politicians hadn't created subsidies for powerful industries that allowed them to ignore the global market trends. And voters wouldn't care about race if politicians didn't inject "racism" into everything.

What this all adds up to is a corrupt and cynical elite that ought to have been pitched out of power half a century ago. They've bribed the electorate on the one hand, and betrayed them on the other. They talk about the short-term vices of corporations but they themselves never think beyond the next vote and the next election.

Power is power, and powerful people hang onto power, in politics, in culture, and in the commanding heights of the economy.

In the short term, of course, powerful people get what they want: money, power and the love of beautiful women. But in the long term all powerful people manage to do is stave off the inevitable. And that only makes the inevitable adjustment--or explosion--bigger than it needs to be.

What a shame.

Announcing: usfederalbailout.com

Last week I read a solid article by Nicole Gelinas in Investors Business Daily: "Wall St. Bailouts Would Be Invited, Not Prevented, Under Dodd's Bill". Gelinas is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

So, you say? Dog bites man. Presumably that's the whole point of the Dodd bill: to make Wall Street go cap in hand to the politicians when they get into a mess selling the government's paper. What's the deal?

Here's the deal. The article included a table that listed all the outlays and guarantees that the Feds have made to bail out the finance industry and others since the liquidity crisis of August 2007. You might be interested to know that the total in outlays and guarantees is just a little north of twenty trillion dollars. Yes, that's trillion with a "T".

I gotta have that, I said.

Fortunately, the numbers are easily available from the website of the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP). SIGTARP issues a quarterly report to Congress, and Gelinas got the numbers from there.

Bingo! I went to the SIGTARP website, downloaded a couple of pdf files, and voila: usfederalbailout.com, now a TARP bailout page at usgovernmentspending.com. Naturally the site uses the world-beating technology of usgovernmentspending.com to present the information in an appealing and compelling fashion just like its sister sites.

However, modesty prevents me from coming up with a single bottom line number like Gelinas because, in my view, outlays and guarantees are apples and oranges. So I have come up with three numbers:

1. Actual Federal Outlays in securities purchased and money loaned to bailed-out corporations.
2. Net Federal Outlays including repayment of loans by the bailed-out beneficiaries (for the big banks have mostly paid back their emergency loans).
3. Federal guarantees. That's the big number, rather like the unfunded liability of Medicare. It starts with the guarantee for Fannie Freddie bonds at $5.5 trillion.

Of course, the site is still under construction, and I have to update some numbers from the St. Louis Fed.

But if you want to know how much all these numbers add up to you'll have to go to usfederalbailout.com. The exercise will do you good.

Now I want to know why the domain usfederalbailout.com was available for little old me. Ain't anyone paying attention out there to all this except me and Nicole?