My Responses to the Bain Question

The experts tell us that, besides the 47 percent issue, the president will be raising the Bain Question.  They mean, I presume, that President Obama will attempt to embarrass Mitt Romney with his record at Bain Capital, at which he... well, after Romney left, Bain bailed on an attempt to turn around a Kansas City steel company.  One of the guys laid off was a man whose wife later died of cancer.



You can see why they do this.  The average man in the street just sees Romney or Bain as a "boss" that can create or more significantly destroy jobs as the mood takes him, while keeping their own jobs and perquisites safe.  If you think of the average uncommitted voter as a woman with a job in a social service or health care or education bureaucracy, you can see how the attitude makes sense.  In a bureaucracy people normally take care of themselves before the organization.



But how should Mitt reply to the "Bain Question" on Tuesday night?  Here are a few responses that I've cooked up.  Probably they aren't as good as the ones the debate preppers are coming up with.

• It's interesting that both the president and I have had experience with failing steel mills.  The president served a term as a community organizer in South Chicago where they had lost thousands of jobs when steel plants closed.  I wonder how many jobs the president saved.  The truth is, when a company is in trouble it is really hard to save it.  At Bain we tried, but we didn't always succeed.  But here is the point.  There is no getting around the fact that, for investors, such a failure means little more than a financial loss; for the workers it means a devastating end to their dreams, and I always tried to remember that when I worked at Bain.
  


• It's always been interesting to me how success and failure are rated differently in business and politics.  In business, it is considered a plus to hire someone that has been through a couple of failed startups or turnarounds.  In politics, a failure is considered poison.  That is why politicians go to such enormous lengths to cover up their failures.  Like the killing of the US Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi.
  


• Look, in business you win some and you lose some, and you are deeply conscious that, win or lose, there are peoples' lives depending on you.  The president's campaign has spent $100 million or so on negative ads to make sure that there isn't a single person left in America that doesn't know that Bain, two years after I left, closed a steel mill it had tried to turn around.  Bully for you, Mr. President.  Now can we get back to how we get this economy out of the ditch so Americans can get jobs again?
  


• Good point, Mr. President.  Bain Capital did screw up sometimes when it tried to turn around failing companies, and thousands of people suffered.  Now can we get back to the US economy, and how millions of people are suffering because of your mistakes: how in 2009 you decided that the way to heal the economy was by distributing about a trillion dollars among special interests that supported your campaign?  Or that you decided to burden the economy with the enormous costs of Obamacare before you knew that the economy was getting back on track?
  


• Good point, Mr. President.  Now can we talk about your mistakes, which are rather more to the point, since you have been in charge of the economy for the last four years?  I remember thinking, back in early 2009: wow, these guys don't get it.  They don't realize that all their grand plans for big new liberal spending programs have got to be put on the shelf until they get the economy moving again.  I remember wondering back then what the damage would be from that huge strategic mistake.  Well, now we know.  An economy that is growing at 1.3 percent a year.  Less than last winter.  Less than last year.  Less than the year before.  It's time for a change, Mr. President.

You get the point.  Really, who cares any more about Bain Capital except a few crazed liberals?  The question for America is which candidate looks as though he has thought about the nation's problems and has actually come up with a plan to fix them.  Investing in more teachers and more job training doesn't cut it, Mr. President.  And as for green jobs, please, Mr. President.  That dog won't hunt.

The Debates: A Word to You Liberals

I guess that it was good for liberals to have Joe Biden throw out some red meat last night, on the 47 percent and all.



So Joan Walsh gets to write that "Biden Wiped the Floor with Biden" in Salon.  In reply, Rush Limbaugh this morning said that Ryan's performance was rather like a son trying to deal with the embarrassing behavior of his blustery father.



But think of this.  In two straight debates the Democrats have allowed Romney and Ryan to speak directly to the moderates while they have been speaking to their base.  A week ago the president just emitted his usual base-pleasing platitudes.  Last night Joe Biden played the angry old white man.



Wait a minute.  I thought that the Republican Party was supposed to be the party of angry old white men.



Now, either we have here a strategic error of monumental proportions or we have something worse.  We have the fact that the Democrats don't have their base nailed down.



The experts tell us that the independents and women hate the partisan bluster and name-calling.  Or at least they tell us that when Republicans refuse to do the decent thing and cave to a Democratic initiative.



My guess is that the conventional wisdom isn't quite true.  Voters don't want politicians to be angry until they are angry.  Then and only then do they want anger in politics.  Liberals were angry about the results of the first debate, so they wanted Joe Biden to be angry about Romney's 47 percent remark.  I'd say, on the other hand, that liberals are angry about the 47 percent remark because it came a bit close to home.  Liberal politics does encourage dependency.



In any case, suppose you were an independent voter, the classic kind that doesn't pay much attention to politics, but you are concerned this fall about the direction of the country.  You've seen two debates thus far in which the Republican candidates seem to have developed thoughtful ideas about governing the nation in the next four years.  What are they to think about the Democratic candidates?  President Obama appeared to be in a supercilious sulk, and Vice-President Biden seemed to be channeling Willy Loman.  You almost expected him to blurt out "Attention must be paid."



Yes.  Willy Loman.



Could it be that we are approaching Death of a Salesman for liberals?  Somehow the old charm, the old success has gone.  Liberals are sitting at the bar staring at their beers wondering what went wrong.  And they are angry.



Now, of course, the received opinion on Arthur Miller's famous play is that it is monstrous for society to treat an old guy like that, deceive him with the salesman culture of charm and manipulation.  After all, we know that the success culture is all an illusion.



Maybe liberalism is like that.  For decades liberals have lived a fantasy, and now, as their movement has aged, the fantasy is collapsing into failure and anger and ruin.



So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

Timid Camille on 2012 Choice

Art teacher Camille Paglia is conservatives' favorite liberal, for obvious reasons.  She whacks feminists and Naomi Wolf around, and she actually listens to talk radio.



(Does that really mean that this lesbian is really a crypto-conservative?)



Anyway she's got a book out, Glittering Images, and so she's doing interviews.  So what is she doing to assist in the 2012 meltdown of Obama?  She's voting for the Green Party candidate.



Oh please, Camille.  What a high-school cliquish, blonde-WASPy thing to do.  How in the world could a tough Italian girl from gritty upstate New York descend to that?



Why won't she just vote for the Republican and show that she's got a brain?  Because of a very high-school cliquish reason.  Because of Newt and Santorum -- eeeuugh!  But she thinks that Romney is a moderate, and that makes it safe to vote Green rather than vote for Obama to keep the nerds out.

There are three people on the political landscape whom I absolutely loathe — Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Dick Cheney — that delusional and mendacious war-monger.

I guess that Paglia just doesn't like competition in the personality stakes.  After all, Newt is a guy rather like Camille, fizzing with ideas, some of which are pretty interesting.  Rick Santorum is a Catholic with the courage of his convictions, just like Camille in the art world, and he was prepared to go down to defeat as a Catholic pro-life conservative in the moderate blue-collar state of Pennsylvania.  Surely Paglia could respect that?  And Dick Cheney the bogeyman that liberal mothers use to terrify their children?  Come on, Camille, you've been reading too much partisan swill.



Still, the wonderful thing about Camille Paglia is that she does get out of the liberal bubble and actually listen to what's going on in flyover country.  She rails against ObamaCare and the Big Brother surveillance state:

What in the world has happened to the Democratic Party? Its passivity towards this awful takeover of our lives by a know-it-all government, as shown by the way Obama has governed by constantly going around Congress — appointing czars and one new layer of bureaucracy after another.

And who is fighting against this? Not liberals.

Listen — a huge point I want to make is that the protest against the surveillance state has, with only a few exceptions, been mainly coming from the Right and not from the Left! Talk radio has been seething with this issue for years.

 Here's the thing, Camille.  The reason that liberals go meekly forward accepting the expansion of the administrative state is that they think they run it.  They get to tell people what to do from their positions in the bureaucracy, the university, and the media.



They don't get the obvious point that the monster will one day devour them.  And you too, Camille Paglia.

Two Stand-up White Guys

Right there in the center of the liberal narrative is the idea that you can't trust regular white guys--you know, the ones that obeyed the law, went to work, followed the rules, and all that stuff.  It is time for regular white guys to stand aside, finally, and give way to a diverse America that has made room for the traditionally marginalized, women and minorities, and all that.  That's the liberal narrative.



Behind the idea is the notion that regular white guys have benefited unfairly from America's white-bread, Protestant, patriarchal, western European culture, and it has a point.  But liberals never asked what kind of America is left when you toss the regular white guys and their ideas out onto the ash-heap of history.



Well, now we are finding out, because although liberals talk the talk of diversity, when it comes to walking the walk they always trot out liberal white guys instead of regular white guys.



And I include President Obama in that category.  There is nothing in President Obama except white-bread western liberalism.  There is no "authentic" African American in him.  He is just a hot-house flower from liberal finishing school.  His anti-colonial philosophy is not an idea that came out of West Africa but out of European intellectual salons.



But the thing about regular white guys is that they have this inchoate sense of doing the right thing.  Call it noblesse oblige or the code of the gentleman, if you like.  Liberals don't have that sense; they already know they are doing the right thing before even thinking about it.  The liberal white guys that go into politics are people that believe in political power, their political power.  Think Carter, Clinton, Obama.  And of course, Obama is the worst.  His administration has committed abuses of power that, in a Republican administration, would have prompted the mainstream media to cry out to the heavens for justice.  The ends justify the means, right bro'?



Now come Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  Regular white guys.  They have always done the right thing, and always acted as if they must be seen to be doing the right thing as well as actually do it.



Of course, the irony about Romney and Ryan is that they are not quite regular white guys in the sense we all think of it: of coming from solid WASP Bushy northeastern stock.  They are oddballs; they are strivers, and they are "minority" candidates from traditionally marginalized groups.   Romney is a Mormon, and Mormons have had their travails in the wilderness, and even now your average liberal girl will wonder whether it is "ethical" for her to be in Utah.  Ryan is an Irish Catholic.  A century ago and more, in the days of "No Irish Need Apply," the Irish Catholics were definitely on the margins.



But the whole point of Romney and Ryan is that they are solid doers and achievers.  You expect them to tell you what they plan to do and then you expect them to execute on their commitments.  Who, really, ever expects President Obama to execute?  And what about Bill Clinton?  The point about Clinton was that you never knew what the guy would get up to.



The beauty of the 2012 First Debate was that it so clearly demonstrated the difference between a regular white guy and a liberal white guy.  Regular white guys really have to work to earn the trust of the American people.  Liberal white guys are different.  They have the mainstream media to do the heavy lifting for them.



It's great to have the liberal mainstream media do your heavy lifting for you.  Until the moment that you have to lift a heavy wooden beam on your own.

Dems Go the "Lying Liars" Route

So far in my Kant course at the University of Washington the philosophy prof has emitted two political zingers.  I regret to say that neither were high-toned reflections of his philosophical knowledge.



One zinger was a put-down on former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, representing him as a knuckledragging mouthpiece for a theocratic state.  The other was repeating the current Democratic talking point that Mitt Romney won the debate last week because he lied.



It is astonishing how educated people like you and me just parrot the partisan talking points of our political masters.  I mean, couldn't this chap come up with a zinger out of Horkheimer or Rorty?



Look.  All politicians lie.  They lie because we the voters insist on it.  We cannot stand the truth.  But if Mitt Romney lied in the debate then what about President Obama?  He insisted that Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut.  Which is true if you leave out the other half of his tax plan.  On the one hand he proposes to reduce incomes taxes by reducing the tax rates.  On the other he proposes to balance that by eliminating tax loopholes.



Romney's proposal is standard Republican boilerplate that goes back at least to President Reagan's 1986 tax cut, which reduced tax rates across the board and also swept away a whole forest of deductions.  The philosophical, political and practical reason for this is that all deductions and subsidies create distortions in the economy, and that reduces economic growth.  Moreover, as Republicans (and occasionally Democrats) have reduced tax rates the overall share contributed by the rich has gone up.  See here.



But you can see the appeal of the "lying liars" attack.  It gets the partisan government university professors all riled up and you need your supporters to be all riled up in order to be certain that they will get to the polls and vote.



Here is a thought that just occurred to me.  The big hit on the Democrats this election will be in the African American vote.  President Obama just shamed the whole African American community with his Affirmative Action performance in debate.  They say that the purpose of negative ads is to demoralize the opponent's supporters.  And if you are an African American you have to be ashamed of the president's performance.



All of which goes back to the assumption in most of the polls that the turnout in 2012 will at least approximate to 2008.  I suspect that this is utter fantasy.  My guess is that African Americans are going to revert to normal voting turnout, Hispanics are going to turn off the president, and Republicans are going to be crawling over broken glass to get to the polls.  And then there are women.  What will women think about the negative body language from President Obama last week?  They will think about cheating husbands trying to hide something from them with reduced eye contact and scowls.



They say you should live in the moment, forgetting about the hopes of the future and the glories of the past.  That probably applies in spades this October.  There will probably not be a better month to be a Republican and a conservative again in my lifetime, and maybe in yours.



And if it all ends in tears?  Hey, live in the moment!

Liberals Racing Over the Cliff

Here's what really has me gasping.  If you look at the finest lefties, from Marx to Habermas, they are trying to imagine a way for humans to get out of the trap of exploitation.  For Marx, the problem was the exploitative monster of capitalism and the answer was the wonder of socialism through revolutionary communism that would return to an age of true community.

For Habermas the problem is now the entire rational system world, business and government, that run by rules.  They are engaged on systematizing and colonizing the "lifeworld," the face-to-face communicative interaction between human and human.  The point of the systems world is that everything ends in an up-down decision, rationally arrived at.  But the lifeworld is a world were people oppose truth claims and come to a communicative consensus.

So look at the administrative wonderland of Dodd-Frank, the financial regulation that subsumes the financial system in a dense web of administrative oversight.  Writes Peter J. Wallison:

Dodd-Frank is by far the most comprehensive and restrictive financial regulatory legislation since the Depression era; its effect on regulatory costs for financial firms at all levels has been and will continue to be substantial, with severe adverse consequences for credit availability.

But that isn’t all. The Financial Stability Oversight Council — an agency established under Dodd-Frank and consisting of all the federal financial regulators — has now begun work on identifying the nonbank financial institutions that will be declared systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).

The point is that the government will have enormous administrative power over the SIFIs, so they will naturally become crony capitalists currying favor with their overlords.  But there is more.

Title II of Dodd-Frank gives the secretary of the Treasury the authority to seize any financial firm he believes is likely to fail in the future and hand it over to the FDIC for liquidation. If the firm objects, the secretary can apply to a court for a ruling, but the court has one day to decide whether the secretary has acted unreasonably.

So the government now will have instant life-or-death power over any financial institution.

Now the whole point of the financial system, the credit system, is getting money from where it is to where it is wanted.  Now the government will be in the middle, thinking about the electoral consequences of the financial system and forcing the financial system to back up its political agenda.

Think Fannie, Freddie, and the Community Reinvestment Act.  The politicians really showed how good they are in running the mortgage financing system.  So now their political approach will be extended to the financial system as a whole.

What liberals want is to have administrative control over the whole of society.  They want to crush the lifeworld and bring everyone into a client relation to the government.

But the whole point of the left-wing critique for the last 200 years is to deal with the terrifying power of modern capitalism and modern government.

Yet the only solution that the moderate left can imagine to any problem is to jack up the power of government.

This can only end in tears.  Liberals will continue to gather power into the government in their frightened response to the disasters that their politics has caused.  But then the government will run out of money.

We can already see what happens next by taking a look at Europe.

The Question of the 47 Percent

Our liberal friends, in their apoplexy over the presidential debate Wednesday night, excoriated their champion Barack Obama for not raising the question of the 47 percent.  The 47 percent are the people that Mitt Romney told a supporter would be voting for Obama whatever the Romney campaign did.



Romney was expressing the platitude that, in any presidential election, there are only a few percent of the voters that are "persuadable."  Of course, our liberal friends interpreted Romney's remarks, as they have a right to do, in the worst possible light, as proving that he didn't care about the 47% that would never vote for him.



Romney has responded variously to this "gaffe", first of all explaining his position and lately saying he was "completely wrong."



It all proves the power of the mainstream media, that they can make a scandal out of nothing.  After all, the profession of a politician is learning how to divide the country up so that he gets 51 percent of the vote.  What could be controversial about that?



It is after the election that the winner calls for everyone to forget their divisions as Republicans and Democrats and all come together as Americans.



The winner doesn't call for unity out of virtue, but out of the practical necessity of trying to minimize opposition to his program in the interregnum between elections.  It is for this reason that politicians typically try to fashion bipartisan compromises when they craft legislation.  "Bipartisan compromise" is here a polite word for buying off the opposition with concessions so that they will support the overall legislation.



Barack Obama is an interesting case with regards to the 47 percent.  When he won the 2008 election, he got 53 percent of the vote to John McCain's 46 percent.  Just a hair away from 47 percent.  Let us ask about the that 46 percent.  What has Obama done to persuade them that we are all Americans and that he would govern in the interests of the entire 100 percent of America?



Not much.



The guy that sent the bust of Churchill, the colonialist, back to the Brits apparently did not think about Churchill's advice to victors: Magnanimity.  He's the guy that told a meeting of House Republicans: "remember, I won."  He's the guy that was having to buy the votes of Democrats to pass his unpopular Obamacare.  He's the guy that called out ExxonMobil by name in the presidential debate as an example of a corporation feasting on subsidies.  He's the guy doing recess appointments when Congress is still in session.  He's the guy planning to rule by executive order in his second term.



By the way, lefty thinkers like Juergen Habermas have a word to describe the domination of the economic and political system by business and the administrative state.  They call it "internal colonization.  They mean that, just as the European imperialists blew away the native political and cultural system in their 19th century colonies, so the administrative state (think ObamaCare) blows away and colonizes the face-to-face "lifeworld" in the modern First World.  It's an irony that Barack Obama, the anti-colonialist in foreign policy, is hell-bent on colonizing Americans with his administrative welfare state.



Look, politics ain't beanbag.  But Obama, who ran for president as a man who would heal our partisan and racial divisions, has governed as a partisan and a race warrior.  He has reversed the normal practice of playing the partisan to get elected and then working across party lines to fashion bipartisan compromises.



It became clear quite soon after Obama's election that many people in the 46 percent that voted against Obama felt they had targets on their chests. That's why Seattle's 29-year-old Keli Carendar came out of nowhere to organize a Tea Party in the deep blue city of Seattle.  That's why the Republicans gained 63 seats in the House of Representatives in 2010.  That's why people I know that aren't really politically active are energized this year to vote out President Obama.



How widespread is this feeling?  Well, let's just say that the first debate on Wednesday night scored 67 million TV viewers, 15 million more than the first debate in 2008.  That might mean something.  It might mean that voters are more energized about the 2012 election than they were about the 2008 election.



Now why would that be?