Obama Boxed In

There is always a presumption in presidential politics in favor of the president. He has his bully pulpit, his status as head of state. What the president wants, when the chips are down, he usually gets.

But is President Obama's position on the debt-ceiling talks as strong as it seems and as the mainstream media wants us to think? I suggest that the president's position is in fact strategically very weak.

Oh yes, the president can win any tactical fight. He can use the mainstream media to make the Republican opposition look extreme and partisan. The question is: would he want to if he wants to win reelection?

The president's basic problem, as I developed in "Where Obamanomics Went Wrong," is that he chose the wrong economic policy back in 2009. Now he is starting the reap the whirlwind, with a weak recovery, a danger of inflation, and still no bottom in the housing market. And he's scared the wits out of the business sector, as gambling king-pin Steve Wynn admits.

I'm telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs.

They talked this way in the late 1930s. Business has gone on strike, they said.

I can understand Obama's tactics. From his point of view, he wants to get as much liberal stuff on the wall before they ring down the curtain on this "liberal hour." The problem is, of course, this. What if this isn't just another "liberal hour" but the "Liberal Last Act," after which America turns a corner, demands real change and gets a Republican who does a real number on entitlements, and never lets a liberal in the Oval Office again?

The president is gambling that he can keep most of his agenda, win reelection, and avoid a complete blowout in the 2014 second mid-term. It's easy for him: win or lose, he'll still be America's First Black President, with all the perks and privileges of a former president. For the American people, his gamble could result in a generation of hard times.

Tea Party Grows Up

The big question about the Tea Party has always been: is it for real? It's all very well to have rallies and infuriate liberals, but can the Tea Party move the needle?

For two years liberals have been busily telling us that, in addition to being a bunch of rich racists, it was all a storm in a teacup, an astroturf outfit, engineered by the billionaire Koch brothers.

Then came the 2010 election and clear victories for Tea Party inspired candidates adding up to a once-in-a-generation flip of 63 seats in the House of Representatives.

So now the question has shifted. This year the Tea Party turned out fewer people at rallies. Does this mean that the Tea Party is peaking? Not according to its activists.

In the Washington Post Amy Gardner reports that the Tea Party is shifting its priorities "to focus more on policy."

The strategy appears to be working, both on the presidential campaign trail, where most Republican candidates are eagerly embracing tea party priorities, and in Washington, where loyalists are setting the terms of the debate over taxes and spending.

Ned Ryun in the American Spectator agrees. And then there is the fact that people don't really know what the Tea Party stands for, and are uncertain about associating with it. Yes. Liberal slurs on the Tea Party actually do work! Jason Hoyt of the Florida Alliance has experienced the effect.

Jason related that he speaks at many non-Tea Party events, and will ask the audience to raise their hands if they consider themselves part of the Tea Party. In one women’s Republican group, only three or four raised their hands. Then Jason asked one of them what her definition of “being a part of the Tea Party” was. She stated the core principles of the Tea Party movement (limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free enterprise) perfectly. Jason then asked, “Based on that definition, who here believes they are part of the Tea Party?” Everyone present raised her hand.

Yes, but what about the future? Here is Ken Emanuelson of the Dallas Tea Party:

I'm confident that the Tea Party's best days are still ahead, whether it calls itself the Tea Party, or something else. If you want to see a true revolution, just wait until the center-right grassroots finally succeed in making common cause with the center-left and minority grassroots against the public/private crony corporatist establishment. If and when that happens, game over. I think the proper term is, "sea change."

Yes. The thing about the United States is that it is peopled by people that up-sticked from wherever they are to change their lives. There is no reason to suppose that the can-do attitude has completely disappeared from the American experience.

Cahoone and "Neutralist" Liberalism

The starting point of Lawrence E. Cahoone's Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics is that the "neutralist or proceduralist liberalism" of left and right (i.e. Rawls and Nozick) is inadequate.

[Neutralism] either contributes to chronic social problems or blocks attempts to address them. Most troublesome is the rigid distinction of the political from the social and particularly the cultural spheres of life.

The problem is that "political theory has become more specialized, purified, and rationalized... Active citizenship, the language of public duty, and... cultural context..." have been cast aside by our liberal friends. Politics reduces to "rights, opportunity, and prosperity." For libertarians it reduces to "individual liberty;" for egalitarian liberals to "individual liberty plus cash." Missing from this view of society is the idea that politics and economics issue from society; they are not free-floating universal ideas good in themselves. The Good must be anchored in actual people and actual community.

This notion is the increasingly ubiquitous idea of "civil society" and Cahoone defines it in four ways.

First, civil society expresses the "priority of the social, the conviction that extant societies gain their norms from within, not from government, Church, or military organizations."

Second, Cahoone states the importance of "spontaneity," the idea that civil society lives in a space between the contractual relations of Toennies' "Gesellschaft" and the "Gemeinschaft of shared traditional morality."

Third, civil society is "intrinsically local," arising out of people living together or living near each other. Nineteenth century Populism was an attempt to express this against the hegemony of elites.

Fourth, for Cahoone, civil society means holism, "the total ensemble of social relations and culture." It is that whole that should drive "political affairs."

Of course, it is the holist view, that society and culture should drive politics, that is problematic for our liberal friends. The whole thrust of modern liberals is to short-circuit the local and traditional--experienced by liberals as benighted and cramped--in favor of the universal and global. But it is, of course, their politics of the universal that has bombed the local community to rubble, and bombed until it bounced the local community of lower income folks that have a less robust defense against the hegemony of the elites than the ordinary middle class. It is the opposition to the local and the particular that drives liberal opposition to modern conservatism, modern enthusiastic Christianity, and most recent of all, liberal opposition to the Tea Party.

Lawrence Cahoone, using modern philosophical ideas deveoloped in the last 50 years, says that "neutralist" liberalism can't deliver the kind of society that most of us want. What does that mean? It means that sooner or later, "most of us" will insist on change, whether liberals like it or not.

Frankly, we'd prefer that liberals work with us on this. But there is always the other possibility, that liberals will fight rather than switch.

That would be a shame.

Cahoone's Civil Society

Over the years, I have come to believe in this one infallible rule of life. It goes like this. If I am wondering about some problem of political philosophy, chances are that some chap has written a book solving it.

It's obvious, really. I've been spending most of my adult life working and raising a family. And I'm not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer. Not dumb or something, but certainly not genius category.

Now my biggest problem over the years is this. We conservatives need a thinker who will refound the conservative tendency in the latest and greatest concepts from the world of ideas.

Up to now the best that I'd encountered were Michael Novak and his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and Berger and Neuhaus and Empowering People.

But they don't light a candle next to Lawrence E. Cahoone and his Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics.

Cahoone begins with a critique of "neutralist" liberalism, the idea that liberals are just neutral adjudicators in the world. In fact, of course, neutralism is impossible, because any political action in the world is action towards a vision of the good. Then Cahoone formulates a "postmodern" conservatism using his deep and broad knowledge of 20th century philosophy. And we are talking here of everyone through Habermas and the neo-pragmatists, the latest, greatest idea that at every level of reality that we experience there are irreducible facts that are not just combinations of elements from a lower level.

The point about conservatism, Cahoone writes, is that it looks at society as a whole, that culture, politics, economics, and living-together are all of a lump; in this lump it is culture that is primary.

Liberals have their own heroic story of individuality and democracy and progress, but the values... are worldly and immanent. Modern conservatism contacts ultimacy via a non-political, ultimate transcendence that is left vague.

Conservatism is big on authority, and authority is an interesting space between compulsion and complete freedom.

Hannah Arendt clears a space for authority. Authority can only exist in the absence of both force and persuasion...

We may characterize, but not explain, the authority in the way Aristotle understands the person with phronesis [practical wisdom or prudence]: the authority is someone who habitually gets it right.

Cahoone has a solid definition for "what government must be or do."

Government must be legitimate and good... These minimal conditions of good government are: assurance of the survival of society... the enforcement of law; prevention of conquest; and avoidance of tyranny, corruption, the intentional punishment of the innocent or the intentional reward of the guilty.

And there is this:

There are four main goods internal to the notion of civil society: membership, freedom, civility, and dignity.

Well, that's a start, and I have not really begun to internalize the breadth and depth of Cahoone's argument. But you'll be getting a lot of Cahoone from me in the near future. After the debacle of Obama we are going to need some really good ideas to get American back to its place as the city on a hill, the last best hope of man for people who must have freedom.

Tactics, Smashtics

You can allow our Democratic friends this. They really know how to do short-term political tactics, using the bully pulpit and the mainstream media to control the political narrative. Now it looks like the president will humiliate the Republicans in the debt-ceiling debate, as the president and the Democrats refuse a debt-ceiling deal with serious spending cuts. Because who could be cruel enough to deny seniors their Social Security Benefits, even for one day?

What the president and the Democrats don't seem to be thinking about is what comes next. It's understandable that they are utterly opposed to any spending cuts before the end of FY2012. But would the president really want to win the election if he knew what is coming after the election?

Sooner or later, after the massive deficits and quantitative easing, the United States government has got to get back to a balanced budget and has got to cut spending. And that means cutting spending on Democratic voters, because there is no other spending. Otherwise we are heading for a sovereign debt default and that is going to hit Democratic voters with a sledge-hammer.

The usual scenario for Keynesian economics is that, after the easy money and the big deficits, the economy is triumphantly back on track and can handle higher taxes and hard money. But what happens if the stimulus fails to bite? Then you are faced either with serious inflation as the easy money really starts to take down the value of money, or a nasty recession as the government gets to the end of its credit and has to tighten its belt. If it then decides to raise taxes as well, then of course, growth will sputter, revenues will decline, and the fiscal situation will worsen.

The big risk for the Obamis is that the economic recovery may not last until the election in November 2012. However the Democrats succeed in blaming eevil House Republicans for starving grannie, the fact is that the average independent voter will be judging the president on the economy. For the average Joe and Jane, the economy is not good, and it's not likely to get better.

Let's close with a military metaphor. In the long retreat of 1943-45 the German Army was still the tactical match of its opponents. The trouble was that it was overwhelmed strategically. And so after every tactical victory it still had to retreat. The same is true of the great Democratic Ascendancy. The trouble with socialism is that it eventually runs out of other peoples' money. And then the people that voted for it are worse of than before. We are seeing this in recent reports of economic Armageddon in the black community.

What does it matter if you can win a tactical victory on the debt ceiling and put off spending cuts? You still haven't solved the sovereign debt problem.

Can't Guarantee SoSoc Payments Mr. President?

Now I'm confused. Back in the maelstrom of 2008 I remember talking to a young Democrat about pensions. Much better rely on the government, he said, than on Wall Street. And at that point in history, he had a point.

But now comes President Obama during a teeny-weeny battle over the debt ceiling, the sort of minor spat we have every two or three years. All of a sudden the president is doing the FICA shuffle. Here is the president reneging on Social Security in an interview with CBS chappie Scott Pelley:

Pelley: Can you guarantee, as president, those checks will go out on August the third?

Mr. Obama: I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.

Wait a minute Mr. President. I thought that Social Security Benefits were protected by a Trust Fund. I thought the Trust Fund was secured inside a Lock Box. So how come all of a sudden on a day in July you up and say, well, who knows if there will be any money to pay those Social Security Benefits? You know, the Social Security Benefits sequestered away in a Trust Fund, hidden away in a Lock Box. I just don't get it.

In fact, I would even go so far as to recall, in deepest sorrow, President Truman's words at the end of World War II. Truman said, after the surrender of Germany:

This is a solemn but a glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day.

Thank goodness the sainted Roosevelt did not live to witness the day that President Obama threatened America's senior citizens with the suspension of their Social Security Benefits. Here is what President Roosevelt said about Social Security:

We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.

The idea was, I understand, that by making believe that the FICA taxes were earmarked for Social Security people would believe that the government had set up a real insurance program instead of a pay-as-you-go Ponzi scheme. But now at least we know, thanks to President Obama, that it is all a mirage, always has been, always will be.

So now I'm inclined to call up my friend and ask him whether he is still so confident about the safety of his future Social Security Benefits. The thing about relying on Wall Street--meaning for the average person Fidelity or Vanguard or some greedy banker--is that if they run off with my money I can get them put in jail. But I can't do that with your average "damn politician." He'll just fly off on his Boeing 747 into the sunset and look down his nose at me.

He might even laugh at me.

Democratic Death Wish?

I think I see what President Obama is trying to do on the debt ceiling crisis. He is trying to get the House Republicans to agree to a tax increase and thereby split the Republican Party. Maybe. It's worth a try, anyway.

But maybe he should be looking at the big picture. A debt deal that increases taxes now and promises smoke-and-mirror spending cuts tomorrow will continue the present economic malaise of low growth and high unemployment. Will that get the president reelected in 2012?

The chaps at the American Enterprise Institute took a look at recent efforts to fix government budgets. In "A Guide for Deficit Reduction in the United States Based on Historical Consolidations That Worked", Andrew G. Biggs, Kevin A. Hassett, and Matt Jensen found that successful budget deals featured mostly spending cuts. Here is Arthur Brooks's report on their findings:

On average, failed attempts to close budget gaps relied 53 percent on tax increases and 47 percent on spending cuts. Successful consolidations averaged 85 percent spending cuts and 15 percent tax increases. Some of the most successful financial comebacks—like Finland’s in the late 1990s—involved more than 100 percent spending cuts, so that taxes could be lowered. The spending cuts by the successful countries centered on entitlements and government personnel.

It really isn't that hard. Government spending is a weight on a nation's economy. If you want to get the economy moving then you have to reduce government spending. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

I wonder if the president isn't missing the forest for the trees. It's possible he could get the Republicans to bollix themselves up and agree to a tax increase. And maybe that would get the president reelected in 2012. Or maybe not.

But the fact is that we are coming up to a crisis point where the American people are going to have to decide what kind of country they want the US to be. I just feel that the best way for liberals to keep their high-tax, high-spending state is to avoid budget crises. The liberal line works best if we are just considering one issue at a time, so that we can focus on the emotional appeal of the usual victims suffering from a lack of health care or housing or counseling. If we have a big crisis then people are going to be ready for a big deal and they are going to be more receptive to deep cuts in wasteful spending.

Just saying.