The Problem of the Knee-Pad Media

You tell it like it is, baby!  Or, as the saying goes: You go girl!  Yesterday a concerned citizen in Virginia had something to say to the media assembled at a Romney event:

I think you’ve been suck ups…I think you've got your embroidered knee pads from the White House, buddy. That’s what I think.

Welcome to the Age of the Knee-Pad Media, Jan Crawford of CBS News, Patron and Founder!



No, that wouldn't be fair to Jan who, according to some chap at the American Spectator, is a fair-minded journalist.



Look, we all know that the mainstream media runs interference for the Democratic Party, and liberals generally.  Hey, that's life, and that's why Republican presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan can appear out of nowhere in the polls and win.  Because for a brief interlude every four years, paid media can push back against the relentlessly liberal free media and win.



But there's a Bigger Problem here.  When the mainstream media and the educated elite gang up to produce a single, vetted view of reality, it means that the whole place could be going to hell in a handbasket and nobody would know, because nobody in the knee-pad media was writing stories about hell and handbaskets.



My favorite poster-boy issue for this is the collapse of marriage in the lowest 30 percent.  Back in 1960, 66 percent of the white lowest 30 percent aged 30-49 was married.  Now it's 48  percent.  What about the top 20 percent, the educated class?  Marriage down from 90 percent to 83 percent.  This problem manifests itself in a retreat from work and marriage among lower-class males.  What do liberals do?  They write about how well women are doing like Hanna Rosin and her End of Man: The Rise of Women.  Don't you get, Ms. Rosin, that the whole point of modern society is to put the men to work so that they will stay out of trouble.  The word "career" is a clue to the cunning plan, because it comes from the French for racetrack.  Make the men run around a racetrack instead of raping and pillaging, and selling women and children into slavery.  Get it?  Yet you brilliant liberals are all pushing women into the working, career world, while men wither on the vine.  You just don't get it.



The fact is that the liberal welfare state is collapsing.  That is the truth behind the Crash of 2008 and the death-throes of the Euro.  There. Is. No. More. Money.  The Crash of 2008 was caused by egregious subsidies for mortgage debt combined with government penalties for lenders that didn't lend to sub-prime borrowers.  But liberals are still wittering about greedy bankers.  Don't you read history, liberals? Governments always blame the bankers when their finances go south.  They punish the bankers then go right back to borrowing from them.



Government education?  A disaster area from government K-12, especially in the inner city, thru the college education bubble where gullible students are picking up $100,000 in debt for a degree in Communications just so that Democrat-voting professors and administrators can stay in the pink.



Government healthcare?  Obama's brilliant ObamaCare has provoked business to go on a hiring freeze, because nobody knows what it will all cost.  Anyway, health care doesn't really make that much difference.  It's the basic stuff, from public health to asepsis to vaccination to antibiotics, that makes the difference.



Government pensions?  They have got all the states bankrupt, and worse to come.



Here we have a gathering storm of incalculable risks, and the mainstream media is focused upon Republican extremism and gay marriage.



Back in the day, lefty Antonio Gramsci fulminated about the injustice of the bourgeois "cultural hegemony."  He meant that the bourgeoisie got to define "common sense", what Juergen Habermas called the taken-for-granted culture, the reality that everyone agrees upon.  So he set in motion a lefty attempt at creating its own cultural hegemony, where liberals and lefties would define commonsense reality instead of the bourgeoisie.



The problem is that the bourgeoisie had never set up a Committee of the Whole Bourgeoisie to define cultural reality.  The common-sense reality that developed in the 19th century just growed.  When people like Marx and Engels insisted that reality was not what the bourgeoisie said it was, they had a chance to change hearts and minds.  And they did.



But in today's culture, with the left self-consciously trying to control the culture, we are in a situation where the cultural elite is consciously trying to prevent alternative voices from getting a word in.  Liberals are deliberately removing the canary from the mine, tying down the safety valve.  That is what the whole paraphernalia of multiculturalism and "hate speech" is for.  Suppose things are badly wrong. Suppose that we need to change our government radically before the US enters sovereign default and all the little people find themselves "eating the paint off the wall?"  How would anyone know before we drive off the cliff?


Look.  Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board announced that it would be buying $40 billion in mortgage backed bonds every month until the economy improves.  It is basically saying that the Obama economic policy has failed and that now, after 3 years of recovery, the government needs to goose the economy.  Is the knee-pad media writing about that?  Oh no, they are criticizing Mitt Romney for daring to criticize the brain-dead Obama foreign policy.  As the Wall Street Journal says today:

Mr. Bernanke is also tacitly admitting how lousy the Obama-Bernanke economy really is.  For all the back-slapping by the Fed and the White House about how they've saved us from a Great Depression, four years later the Fed is aknowledging that the \recovery is rotten, that job creation stinks, and that their policies haven't helped the middle class.

 "A bold plan" says the knee-pad New York Times.



If the mainstream media were doing its job, President Obama would be down 10 percent in the polls.  Instead we are still getting knee-pad reporting about how intelligent and wonderful the president is, this about a president, the nation's commander-in-chief, who attends about 50 percent of his daily intelligence briefings, and didn't attend one in the week leading up to the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

They Hate Their Jobs

If you want to understand the extraordinary sight of all those beloved teachers going out on strike, led by the delightful Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, I have four words for you.



They Hate Their Jobs.



In fact, I have a brilliant new insight for you.  Whenever you see a militant labor union, you are looking at people that Hate Their Jobs.



It took me a while to understand this.  Here is how I got there.



First of all, we must understand that in this glorious era of freedom, we western humans are yoked to the wheel of work like never before.  It all started with the Venetian slave sugar plantations on Cyprus right after the Crusades, where entrepreneurs learned to make big money from big sugar profits from their slaves.  The slave plantation business eventually developed the "gang system" where highly disciplined gangs of slaves under an overseer were put to work doing repetitive work hoeing or cutting or chopping.



Then came the industrial revolution in which entrepreneurs developed the "factory system" where armies of workers were put to work in highly disciplined teams doing repetitive work, eventually on assembly lines.



There wasn't much the slaves could do about their condition but the assembly line workers formed labor unions to fight the bosses that had, in the Marxian terminology, "commodified" them.  Our lefty friends call this "resistance."



Today, our liberal friends like to write nostalgically about the good old days of good union jobs at good wages, but Michael Barone begs to differ.

As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.

What's the betting that those public school teachers Hate Their Jobs?  I've known a public school teacher or two.  They seemed remarkably cynical.  Why wouldn't they, working in a huge organization with rigid rules where the individual is just a cog in the machine?



Now here is my flight of fancy.  When a movement of "resistance" develops against something, it won't stop until it destroys it.  Private sectors unions destroyed the steel industry, destroyed the airline industry--PanAm, Eastern Airlines, anyone--and they are in the middle of destroying the auto industry.  Because the workers in those industries Hate Their Jobs.  I've met a unionized pilot or two.  And they Hate Their Jobs, because they are treated like numbers.



Now it's the turn of big government.  We conservatives are all complaining about the liberal politicians and the unions conspiring to bankrupt state and local government.  But I think we are missing the forest for the trees.  The basic problem is that government workers Hate Their Jobs.  They are tiny cogs in a great big government factory doing mind-numbingly stupid repetitive tasks.  So they have combined into unions and all they care about is getting their pay and getting out and getting their pensions.



As the government employee unions demand more and more, and the politicians promise them pie in the sky, the government employee unions are slowly but surely destroying government as we know it.



If government were run by the Republicans this would all be a national scandal.  But, of course, everything except the Pentagon and the highway department is a liberal program.  So the lapdog mainstream media keeps its lip buttoned.  No matter that government education of children in child custodial facilities is a disaster, and a double disaster in the inner city.  No matter than Medicaid is a basket case.  No matter that child protective services is a joke.  No matter that all the entitlement programs are broke.  No matter that subsidized wind farms are making billions of dollars on government subsidies and raising energy prices on ordinary consumers.  See no Evil, hear no Evil, speak no Evil.  That's the program of the mainstream media.



But, of course, the people are gradually waking up to the fact that they are being screwed.  Don't look now, but maybe there is a movement of resistance gathering strength: from Tea Party to Chick-fil-A to 2016: Obama's America.  Usually, a movement of resistance forms when it is far too late.



But maybe the conservative movement of resistance doesn't matter.  Maybe the government employee unions are going to destroy big government all on their own without needing the help of Tea Partiers and Chick-fil-A customers.



Just because the Hate Their Jobs.

Smart Ain't Enough

One thing about our Democratic friends:  in the day-to-day political trench warfare of sound bites and talking points, they are the champs.  As smart as paint.  That's what Long John Silver told Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island.  "You're a lad, you are," said Silver, "but you're as smart as paint."



But of course, politics is not just smarts, playing the game of sound bite tit-for-tat.  There are bigger issues behind all the combat and the day-to-day one-upmanship.



So it makes complete sense that less than a week after the successful Democratic National Convention--boy, how it helps to have the mainstream media singing in the choir--the whole narrative gets chucked into the toilet when Islamists in Egypt and Libya celebrate 9/11 by trashing US facilities and murdering US diplomats.  It makes No Drama Obama look like No Clue Obama.



I was looking up Antonio Gramsci today.  He's the chap who decided that the bourgeoisie had achieved cultural hegemony by making its ideas part of the "common-sense" culture of the nation.  Why shouldn't the left do the same thing in reverse?



Brilliant idea, Tony.  The only thing is that the bourgeoisie never self-consciously set out to create cultural hegemony.  The bourgeois lived as they lived, and they developed their cultural memes as they went.  They never said: wow, we need to develop cultural hegemony in order to dominate the politics of the western world.



But you, Tony, decided to do just that.  Lefties would set out on a long march through the institutions so they could achieve their own cultural hegemony, and then rule from the solid base of that cultural domination of society.  And, to a great degree, liberals in the US have achieved that cultural hegemony.  Liberals dominate the media, dominate the schools, the university, Hollywood, the foundations.  They hold a remarkable power in the land.



But suppose the American people wake up one day and decide that they hate the world that liberals have built for them?  That is the risk.  Every political dynasty holds power in part due to its cultural hegemony, because it gets to tell its story and others don't.  But eventually, of course, people may decide that the narrative doesn't match up with the reality, that the glorious vision of the future doesn't match the grubby reality of power politics.  Cultural hegemony does not give you a lock on power.  It is just part of the trappings of power, whether the ruling class set out to achieve cultural hegemony or not.



So it is one thing for President Obama to give a high-toned speech about progress towards our goals.  It is another thing if the next day it turns out that the unemployment rate is down because 400,000 people dropped out of the workforce.  It is one thing to talk about getting out of Afghanistan one day and have crazed militants attacking US consulates the next day.  With all the cultural hegemony in the world, "events, dear boy" can quickly make the story and the reality out of joint.



That is where our liberal friends are at in these latter days.  They have been spinning their narrative about all kinds of things: that supply-side economics is trickle-down economics, that the Crash of 2008 was caused by greedy bankers instead of GSE-driven mortgage subsidies, that President Bush was a mad deregulator rather than a middle-of-the-road compassionate conservative that passed government-centric No Child Left Behind and Sarbanes-Oxley.



There is only one problem with all that stuff.  It is rubbish.  It is liberals pretending to themselves that everything is fine and that the Republicans are a bunch of yahoos.



Eventually all this clever spinning and cultural hegemony catches up with you.  And it could be that it's catching up with liberals this year.  

The History of the Ego

I've always thought that Michelangelo's vestibule and staircase to the Laurentian Library in Florence represents the Birth of the Ego.   At that moment, the artist and the architect ceased being a mere craftsman executing art for a client, but a fully fledged ego.  Now art was about the artist, not about the art.

But I was wrong.

In "Religious Evolution," a paper published in 1964, Robert Bellah puts the birth of the ego much earlier.  He puts it back in the Axial Age when Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhim, and Confucianism all began.  He calls them "historical religions", to differentiate them from the archaic religions that came before.  In the historical religion, the idea of the "self" clearly appears.

The identity diffusion characteristic of both primitive and archaic religions is radically challenged by the historic religious symbolization, which leads for the first time to a clearly structured conception of the self.  Devaluation of the empirical world and the empirical self highlights the conception of a responsible self, a core self or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over against itself, a reality which has a consistency belied by the fluctuations of mere sensory impressions... [T]he historic religions promise man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.  The opportunity is far greater than before but so is the risk of failure.

And that is why, in the historic religions, we see for the first time the idea of the rejection of the world and the phenomenon that Rodney Stark calls "upper-class asceticism."  If the risk is so great then maybe it's best to retreat from the world in meditation or monastery.

Charles Taylor in his Sources of the Self talks a similar line, talking about the old "porous self," vulnerable to powers in the universe, and the new "buffered self" which is safe from spirits and demons.  With the porous self, evil just happens, but with the buffered self it is evil action of the self that entices Satan up from Hell.

There's a piece by Jeffrey Lord today about how liberals hate the middle class.  Exactly.  Liberals hate the responsible ego.  They hate American individualism, because they hate the responsible ego of the Axial Age religions.

But what about liberals?  They experience themselves as caring, compassionate communitarians, but are they?  Not a bit of it.  Let's tell the story of the Egos of the Western World.

The modern age begins with Descartes and his proclamation: "I think, therefore I am."  Let us call this the birth of the Rational Ego.  The 17th century and then the 18th century were full of rational ego heads.

But then what?  Obviously the next Big Thing is Romanticism, the reaction against the Age of Reason. What do we call those ego heads, your Rousseaus, your Herders, your Schillers?  We call them Creative Egos or Expressive Egos.  They are all about the transcendental work of art, the work of genius, the man who towered over the age because of his instinctive intellectual or artistic brilliance.

Next up, obviously, is the post-Napoleonic baby boom that burst upon the world in the 1840s.  Now we see the Revolutionary Ego.  The generation of Marx and Engels, according to Charles Taylor, combined the Rational and Expressive impulse.  The first baby boomers looked at the world and their creative feelings were outraged.  So they went out and built a science that would completely remake society according to their transcendent aesthetic plan.  Check Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

In the mid 19th century we also see the emergence of the Business Ego, as the industrial revolution went into overdrive and great railroad and steel corporations emerged from nowhere.  The Business Ego is a combination of the Responsible Ego and the Creative Ego, and that is why liberals hate it so much.  They don't like the Responsible Ego, and they resent the incandescent creativity of the great businessmen, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Fords, the Waltons.  The achievements of the great business titans make liberal achievements seem puny, and they don't like that.  So liberals came up with a great idea:  why not call the great business titans Robber Barons?  No wonder the modern titans, the Gateses and the Buffetts, are careful to kowtow to their liberal masters.

Now we come to the late 19th century and the Progressive Era and its educated ruling class.  Here we see the birth of the Educated Ego, the dynasty of the people that think they have a right to rule ordinary Americans because they are educated.  Never mind that their ideas and their plans have devastated the middle-class culture of the Responsible Ego.

Maybe you think that the age of the great dictators calls for a new kind of ego, the Dictatorial Ego.  But the Dictatorial Ego is merely the final development of the Revolutionary Ego.  Nothing new there.

The next Big Thing is the Sixties.  But what should we say about the generation that tuned in, turned on, and dropped out?  Perfectly simple.  We should recognize the 1960s as the age of the Adolescent Ego.  That's when adolescent behavior reached critical mass and was celebrated by the great and the good.  It involves the Creative Ego but it's all done using Daddy's credit card in Mommie's basement.

Now here's a new idea.  Strictly speaking, the lower class and the underclass ought to be pre-egoic, because they don't experience responsibility for themselves, but only the distant "they" who are responsible for their problems.  But our liberal friends tend to exhibit members of the underclass to us as poster boys and girls for our greed and insensitivity towards human needs.  Once these people have been plucked out of obscurity and exhibited for the 15 minutes of fame, they become egos.  So we should call them Victimized Egos.  They aren't really victims, they just play victims on TV.

What about the environmentalists?  As celebrants of the cult of the Precautionary Principle, we should call them the Precautionary Egos.  They have come up with all kinds of reasons why nobody but themselves can be trusted to do anything.  They have revived the idea of upper-class asceticism and mapped it onto the oppressive regime of educational supervision.  So we have a combination of the Ascetic Ego and the Educated Ego.

Hmm.  That means that the Axial Age produced both the Responsible Ego and the Ascetic Ego.  Because, in my view, the ascetics, chaps like the Buddha, were total ego heads, whatever they said at the time.  If they weren't ego heads, we wouldn't know about them, right?

What about the good guys, the modern conservatives?  Well, the point about us is that we blend carefully and respectfully several ego themes.  We still honor the Responsible Ego, like Mitt Romney.  But we have certainly partaken of the Rational Ego and the Creative Ego in our celebration of modern business.  We are Communitarian Egos in our support for civil society and the mediating structures, the only true expression of community in the modern era that protects ordinary people from the power of the megastructures, big business and big government.  And we are Tolerant Egos.  No particular virtue there, of course.  We have to be tolerant, because we lack the cultural power to order other people around.

And what about President Obama?  How about the Failed Ego?

The Three Strikes Democrats

What is wrong with the economy?  Why won't it rebound from the depths of the 2006-2009 recession?



Simple.  The Obama administration has got the three basic things wrong.  Three strikes, and you are out!



Strike one: Government Spending.  There is one simple thing to understand about government spending.  It is a weight on the economy.  Yes, there is a grain of truth in the Keynesian idea of stimulus, but not much.  Look, it stands to reason.  Government does stuff that people won't do on their own without the spur of government compulsion.  Obviously, businessmen and consumers will have already sniffed out the best profit opportunities and price bargains before the government steps in.  So it stands to reason that government will be doing the Solyndra stuff, paying for things that do not pay.  Education and health care, of course, are just Solyndra writ large.  But if you want to grow the economy, you need to reduce government spending.



Strike two: Money and Credit.  Juergen Habermas calls money a "steering medium."  Its purpose is to help people figure out what to make and what to buy.  Sounds simple, but of course the credit system is much more than that, and the clue is in the word itself: "credit" which comes from the Latin credere, to believe.  The whole money and credit system runs on the faith in the "soundness" of the other guy, that he or she will honor his obligations, even when the going gets tough: especially when the going gets tough.  But governments have always been mucking around with the system.  In the first place they need to borrow money, so they are big players in the money market.  In the second place they are always using their market and their sovereign powers to influence the money market, usually by pushing for cheap credit, or inflation.  Government manipulations of the credit system can help in the short run, and are needed to win wars.  But in the long term, the credit system needs to be allowed to do its job, to get money from where it is to where it is wanted.  If you mess with the credit system you will end up with bubbles and crashes.  If you want to grow the economy you need to stop messing with the credit system.



Strike three: Regulation.  Everyone agrees that the economy cannot run without laws and regulations.    Everyone agrees, in principle, that the laws should prevent people from "externalizing" their costs.  But that's easier said than done, because people disagree about the future.  Is burning fossil fuel a benign act, or does it compromise our future with resource depletion and global warming?  But regulation is also a temptation for powerful interests to implement their agenda using their political power.  Dense administrative regulations benefit existing large players against new small players.  So whenever you implement new regulations you are probably helping the big interests and harming the little guy.  Think Sarbanes-Oxley that has introduced huge regulatory burdens on corporations and Dodd-Frank that has increased regulatory burdens on banks.



You can see why it's Three Strikes against the Democrats.  In the first place, they believe in more government spending.  Years ago, they used to justify it on the basis of justice.  But now that government is so big and so intrusive they have started to justify government spending as "investment."   But government spending is still waste.



Democrats also believe in manipulating the credit system.  That's why they blamed the Crash of 2008 on "greedy bankers" instead of their own crazed mortgage credit subsidies.  The whole game of central banking, whatever it once was, has now completely subjugated the money and credit system to the needs of government.  The whole business of subsidy and credit manipulation is poison to the health of the economy and the prosperity of ordinary Americans.



Then there is regulation.  In the old days, the socialists believed in the nationalization of the means of production.  That was a complete bust.  But now the socialists and their heirs, the "progressives" realize that they can occupy the commanding heights of the economy much better by regulation and administrative control of private industry than by outright nationalization.  For one thing, under nationalization, the losses of the nationalized companies had to be covered by borrowing and taxes, but under regulation, private business has to find some way or other of staying in business.  Under socialism, the monkey is on the government's back; under administrative regulation the monkey is on the corporation's back.  But the result is the same.  You create distortions and waste in the economy that eventually, like a building in Havana, crashes to the ground because nobody was taking care of it.  Regulation hurts the little guy.



Fix any one of these, and the economy will improve.  Fix any two of them, and the economy will really improve.  Fix all three, and it's Katy bar the door.



How come this is so hard for people to understand?

The Speech at the End of the Liberal Universe

One of the reasons that I created usgovernmentspending.com back in 2007 was that I was getting fed up with the way that Democrats always acted, year in and year out, as if we were doing nothing for children, for seniors, and leaving the poor to starve.



Please.  This year, according to usgovernmentspending.com, we are spending $1 trillion on government pensions, $1.1 trillion on government health care, $0.9 trillion on government education, and $0.7 trillion on government welfare (above and beyond Medicaid).



So the president in his soaring acceptance speech talks about doubling down on education:

I promise you – we can out-educate and out-compete any country on Earth. Help me recruit 100,000 math and science teachers in the next ten years, and improve early childhood education. Help give two million workers the chance to learn skills at their community college that will lead directly to a job. Help us work with colleges and universities to cut in half the growth of tuition costs over the next ten years.

Just a minute, Mr. President.  We are already spending $941 billion a year on education.  What on earth are you proposing here?  What about all the money we are already spending on government education?  Because, given the dismal results that government education has turned in, I have another idea.  It is this.

Why in the world would we put politicians in charge of education?

I mean it, Mr. President.  Politicians are the residual legatees of the hunter-gatherer war-party.  The idea is to attack the neighboring tribe in a dawn raid, kill the men and take the women, and take over their territory.  Loot, plunder, and rapine: that's what politics has always been about.



But in the last two centuries, as the ruling class stopped believing in God, politicians have stepped into the empty place left by the death of God.  They have started preaching gospels of hope like revivalist preachers.  Not hope in the life hereafter, but hope in the here and now.  That's what the welfare state is all about: loot.  That's what taxing the rich is all about: plunder.  But now the secular agenda of fighting for loot and plunder is joined to the transcendental moral agenda of fighting for good against evil.  It is good to force others to pay for your loot, and it is evil for the rich to keep their ill-gotten gains.



In the last century, the game has changed again, as women have got the vote.  Now politicians don't just talk about loot and plunder, but of the leader's love for his wife, the leader's devotion to the education of children, the leader's determination to care for the sick.  Those chaps know what they are doing.



But the problem is that the politicians keep talking as though we weren't already spending $941 billion a year on education, $679 billion a year on welfare.  They say: We've got to make education the best in the world!  We've got to help the folks down on their luck!  As if we are not already spending obscene amounts already.



The real agenda at the end of the liberal universe is how the heck do we get out of this mess?  How do we take all these profoundly social tasks away from the residual legatees of the tribal fighters and the warrior lords of the land?  How do we return social assistance and mutual aid to the carers and the helpers and away from the fighters and the dividers?  Imagine what we could do with the $4 trillion a year that gets sucked up into the welfare state and then spread out to the supporters of the politicians, less a finder's fee to the political class.



The answer to the question is, of course, in the person and the life of Mitt Romney.  We must accept that capitalism is "creative destruction" just as Joseph Schumpeter told us.  It is a cold and heartless system, but it delivers prosperity like you wouldn't believe. Whatever we may dream of, capitalism is the only thing that works on the economic front, and Mitt Romney has practiced capitalism full throttle. Mitt Romney knows capitalism.



So much for the system side of life.  But then there is the human side of life, the "lifeworld," the world of humans as social animals.  You could do a lot worse that the Mormons, with their "fairly strict" moral world, where everyone has to contribute time and money to social purposes, and young men have to go on an adventure of service before they can get their sacred underwear.  And then they have to go through the chairs and serve as bishop of their ward and president of their stake when the call comes.  Mitt Romney's life is a witness to the Mormon approach to realizing people's social nature as social animals.  Mitt Romney knows the social life of caring and sharing.



What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?  Who knows?  But at least we know one thing.  We know what it isn't.  We know that it isn't Barack Obama's world of of politics as secular religion.

Nobody Home?

It's unfortunate for the Democrats that their God-and-Jerusalem convention blunder came on the same day as the hot excerpts from Bob Woodward's latest White House tell-all book.  Bob suggests that there is nobody home at the White House.  From Speaker Boehner about the debt-ceiling deal:

"The president was trying to get there. But there was nobody steering the ship underneath him," Boehner told Woodward. "They never had their act together. The president, I think, was ill-served by his team. Nobody in charge, no process. I just don't know how the place works. To this day, I can't tell you how the place works. There's no process for making a decision in this White House. There's nobody in charge."

And then Bill Clinton reminded us that, all in all, it's just as well that presidents can't run for a third term.  The dear old chap does run off into the weeds.



After Wednesday, September 5, 2012 you can see why things like governments, corporations, and campaigns need good management and organization.  When you have a bunch of people gathered together in some cooperative endeavor it is really hard to make things happen, to make the trains run on time.



The real hit on the Obama administration is that it failed to adjust its agenda in January 2009 from rushing through the liberal agenda to fixing the economy.  No surprise there.  Liberal governance is built upon the idea that the economy can take care of itself.  While the economy takes care of itself liberals will apply the patches and programs needed to make it just and fair.



That works most of the time, especially if like Kennedy, like Carter, like Clinton, you are coming into office about a year after the bottom of a recession.  But the evil Bush cunningly delivered the economy to President Obama before it had really started to fire on all cylinders.  And Obama just went ahead with business as usual, assuming that the hallowed Keynesian recession remedies would work.



Only they didn't.



In my view, the economy needs, above all, to fix the underwater mortgages.  I don't know what the best way is.  Inflation?  Liquidation?  Principal adjustment?  Who knows.  But until the credit system is working, with all normally "sound" borrowers back above water, you can forget a booming economy.  Capitalism works on credit.  Credit means faith, confidence, etc.  When people don't have faith in the other guy then they start to put their money under the mattress, buy gold, and hunker down.



I read someone the other day who wrote that the Obama people don't understand money.



Somebody else wrote that the problem with financial crises is that the last big one usually happened before anyone now working in finance was old enough to go to work.  So the people trying to solve the crisis are usually flying without a seasoned instructor in the cockpit who has seen it all before.



It would help to have someone in the cockpit that really understands finance.  Let's see.  Would that be a chap who spend a couple of decades dealing with failing companies?



Nah.  Much better to go with a community organizer that can deliver a really good speech in a stadium.



Meanwhile, is anybody at home at the White House?