Obama as the Liberals' Bigger Problem

I wrote a nuts-and-bolts review of President Obama's Galesburg speech yesterday.  The main reason was to get the details out of the way so that I could think about the predicament of the president -- and of liberals in general.

Indeed, the president's situation tells us a lot about the predicament of ruling classes in general.

Like I always say, government is force; it always comes down to men with guns, and it's telling that every government department these days seems to want its own SWAT team.  Politics, the trade of people who want to govern, is division.  And system, the stock in trade of every bureaucracy, is domination, the bending of other humans to your will.

You see all these themes at work in the president's speech.  There are the rhetorical sallies against the opposition, the "us" versus "them" of ordinary political divisiveness.  There is the setup for force, the "inequality" that shows that you can't leave the economy to deliver prosperity on its own.  Government force is needed to rectify the inequality.

Then there was the laundry list of "new" government initiatives: outsourcing, green jobs, innovation, infrastructure, universal pre-K, student and mortgage loan fixes, tax subsidies for saving, urban renewal.

Considering that our big challenge was to fight "inequality" you'd have to think that the laundry list was pretty tattered: time-worn bureaucratic ideas, fixes to previous failures, and a new pre-K system to let the ruling class dominate the education of pre-schoolers.

Conservatives right now are obsessing about the "low-information voters" that Obama targets, the disengaged people that that just get a whiff of politics from Obama and the mainstream media, and think that the president is battling evil forces on their behalf.

But I think that the bigger problem is the rank-and-file Democrats that just have faith in the president and the welfare state, the kind of people that the president always features as a backdrop to his speechifying in a public arena.  We are not talking about the ankle-biting progressive base, and certainly not the elite educated class of New York Times readers.  We are just talking about ordinary folks, maybe with a government job in education or health care.

When the president calls for a program for worker training or a new program to extend schooling to pre-schoolers these rank-and-filers nod their heads in agreement.  Of course "we" need to do that, they think.  What a good idea!  And they could never afford to do it on their own.

The conservative answer to this is threefold.

First of all the government isn't "we."  The government is "them," the ruling class ruling "us," the people.

Second, these good social initiatives are not the sort of thing you would want let politicians, the dukes of division, control.  Politicians are good at dividing people into warring armies for a battle, not into bringing people together for the benefit of all.  Don't mention the politician's assistants, the experts: they will do anything and say anything for another grant.

Third, all these new programs end up being a yet another way for the ruling class to dominate us.  Education is a prime example.  The reason we have an exploding home-schooling movement is that many people don't like other people dictating how their children will get an education.  They especially don't like it when the other people do it very badly.

But the bigger problem, the one that is demolishing the whole liberal project, is that government never knows when to stop; it's incapable of prudent course corrections.  In capitalism, you are always striving to change and to improve; your profit tells you immediately whether you are on the right track or whether you have to change.  But government is different.  It never changes until disaster strikes.

There is no mystery about this.  Government is force, the governing class is the warrior band.  Wars and battles are won by the side that gives up last.  So perseverance is the one great virtue in the warrior and the politician.  Never, never, never, never give up, said Winston Churchill.  Easy for him to say, for it's not the rulers that suffer when the government screws up.  The problem for the rank-and-file is that they are the ones that actually pay the butcher's bill when the army gets defeated or the government screws up another big program.  Napoleon gets to ride back from Moscow to France in a horse and carriage.  The French poilus had to struggle through the Russian winter.

In other words, when the government screws up the people suffer.  And the ruling class skips off to its next gig.  All those good folks in the backdrop to the president's speeches:  when the money runs out they will get screwed.  But don't worry about the Obamas and the Anthony Weiners and the Lois Lerners.  They will do just fine.

Obama at Galesburg, IL

Everyone has been panning Obama's Galesburg speech.  But what did he actually say?  I've been going over the transcript so you don't have to.



He was telling, as he should, a story.  Here's the problem.  It's

proud Maytag workers losing their jobs when the plant moved down to Mexico... teachers whose salaries weren’t keeping up with the rising cost of groceries...  Of young people who had the drive and the energy, but not the money to afford a college education.   

Back in the old days, there was "a sense that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and decent benefits, the chance to buy a home, to save for retirement, and most of all, a chance to hand down a better life for your kids."  But now, with, technology, outsourcing and weaker unions, it's over.



Used to be that with increased productivity, workers would share the benefit. No more. The 1% income quadrupled; ordinary family got bupkus.  And now the housing bubble, with its juiced up finance, has burst.



But now we've fought our way back from the Great Recession and

we saved the auto industry; took on a broken health care system.  (Applause.)  We invested in new American technologies to reverse our addiction to foreign oil.  We doubled wind and solar power.  (Applause.)  Together, we put in place tough new rules on the big banks, and protections to crack down on the worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies...  [and] we locked in tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans, and we asked those at the top to pay a little bit more.

We've made a good foundation but we are not there yet.  In fact things like inequality have gotten worse, due to things like "Washington" and the sequester. It's harmed growth and "our military.  It's gutted investments in education and science and medical research."



So what's he going to do?  Here are the bullet points:

• "We’re going to continue to focus on strategies to make sure our tax code rewards companies that are not shipping jobs overseas"


• "good jobs in wind and solar and natural gas"


• "open more manufacturing innovation institutes"


• "building things" like ports, bridges.  Rebuilding "our transportation systems... our power grids... our communications networks"


• Education: universal preschool; connect students to internet, "redesigning our high schools", "train workers for changing jobs", student loan fixes, "shake up the [college] system"


• Mortgage refinance for "every homeowner".


• Tax reform: "make it easier for workers to put away money"


• Poverty: rebuild run-down neighborhoods, increase minimum wage

Then the president does a sell job on Obamacare.



It all comes down, he says, to the "good job with decent wages and benefits, a good education, home of your own, retirement security, health care security".



You can see why the reviews aren't too good.  All this stuff is silly small ball, trying to plug the leak in the dyke.  It shows, if anything can, that we have come to the end game of the liberal administrative state.



But let us back up and look at his shining vision, of decent wages, education, home ownership, retirement, health care.



Why in the world would anyone think that a politician and his experts could do a better job than thousands of business owners and millions of consumers?  Let's do our own bullet points.

• Sure, you can legislate decent wages and benefits.  But first you need  entrepreneurs with new ideas.  And because of capitalism's "creative destruction" you need generation after generation of entrepreneurs, all the time.  No entrepreneurs, no ideas: no wages and benefits.


• Education?  It is government's dead hand that has caused the crisis in education.  We still have the system that experts designed in the 1830s to teach literacy and industrial discipline to the children of immigrants.  And now literacy is collapsing in the inner cities.  We must take education away from government.


• Home ownership?  It's the government meddling that caused the crisis.  Canada has never had a mortgage interest deduction, never had Fannie and Freddie. Yet they have a greater percentage of homeowners than we do.


• Retirement security?  How about government getting out of the credit markets and stopping its policy of inflation so that ordinary Americans can save from their wages, get a decent 3-4 percent interest, and see their capital keep its value.  When government keeps mucking around with the credit system it always ends up wiping out the small saver.


• Health care?  It's the government's clumsy interventions that have ruined health care.  Imagine: if government got out of the game then health care could be like Walmart: everyday low prices for the bargain shopper.  And there would still be plenty of room for pricey boutique health care for the fashionable and the well to do.

The good thing is that President Obama daily reminds us how bankrupt our liberal ruling class has become.  The bad thing is that he is flying millions of good Americans up a box canyon with his fantasies of wonderful government programs that will deliver the good jobs, education, retirement and health care that everyone wants.



Government is force; it always comes down to men with guns.  How is more force going to provide a good job for every American?

It's Still Bush's Fault?

I had an email from one of my fans a day or two ago.  Here is what he wrote:

PLEASE look now to see that for the first time in five years, the federal deficit is on track to truly be under $1 trillion. This will be the first time since the 2006/2007 fiscal year under George W. Bush that the annual deficit has been below $1 trillion.



Right now, the total federal debt is stuck on $16.738 trillion, and the annual deficit is on track to go under $800 billion for the fiscal year, which ends September 30, 2013.



Give George W. Bush full credit for being the first U.S. President to give us a $1 trillion annual deficit. That was in the 2007/2008 fiscal year. And give George W. credit for leaving office as The Great Recession raged and the annual deficit for the next year, the 2008/2009 fiscal year, soared to $1.9 trillion. Four years later, under President Obama, the deficit has diminished significantly. Again, this will be the first year in five years that the annual deficit of our federal government has not been more than $1 trillion!



You can see for yourself at www.treasurydirect.gov.

Really, one shouldn't engage with this sort of thing, because it is so clearly culled from a Democratic talking point (Dems are good at that).



Yeah.  Let's review George W. Bush's big fiscal mistakes.  The real mistakes, not the Democratic talking points, as in "he fought two wars on the credit card."  Earth to Dems: All wars are fought on the credit card.

1. He should have ignored Dem talking points in 2002 about a "jobless recovery" and jawboned the Fed to get interest rates back to normal. But really, how can you go against the Zeitgeist?


2. He should have started the pushback against Fannie and Freddie much earlier.  But really, how can you argue against "affordable housing" until half the nation is underwater?


3. He should have abandoned his "compassionate conservatism" and been flinty hard on domestic spending. But people felt that it was time to ease up on budget balancing.  And the Dems were planning to demagogue on drugs for seniors forever.


4. He should have gone into Afghanistan, whipped the Taliban's ass, and got out.  He should have gone into Iraq, whipped Saddam's ass, and got out.  20/20 hindsight.

Yes, it's true that revenue is up in FY13.  Let's check the Congressional Budget Office for their latest Monthly Budget Review.  They say that so far, receipts are up $263 billion for the year and outlays are down $129 billion.  But here's the kicker for FY13.

Taxes withheld from workers’ paychecks rose by $130 billion (or 10 percent)...



Nonwithheld receipts rose by $89 billion (or 27 percent); $66 billion of that increase occurred during the tax-filing season (February through April)."

That's because rich bitches like me took a bunch of capital gains in 2012 before the tax rate went up, and greedy corporations issued special dividends at the end of the year.  We paid the tax on those gains in our January estimated and our April tax payment.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bankrupt mortgage twins, are expected to pay $82 billion to the Feds this year, as opposed to -$5 billion in 2012.

The faith that Democratic partisans demonstrate in their party talking points is impressive.  It is a faith that is almost religious.



The thing for them to remember is that the talking points will keep on coming right up until the money runs out.  See Detroit, City of.  At that point the little people, with their government benefits and their savings accounts, will be screwed.



But the politicians, the Weiners and the Spitzers, will all have their money safely stashed offshore.  No need to worry about them.

Obamis: Advancing or Retreating?

The poor Republicans seem to be tongue-tied about immigration.  Should they climb aboard the amnesty-now, fence-later bandwagon?



Or should they just say No Thanks, Mr. President?



On the one hand there are people that say that the president and the Democrats are driving the national agenda and skillfully dividing the Republicans.



On the other hand the polls show that the people don't give a damn about fixing immigration.  Not when the economy is in the dumps.



And the president and the Democrats need to distract the American people from the putrid swamp of scandals from A to Z.



My guess is that the answer is all of the above.  Yes, the Democrats smell a winner on immigration, because any bill seems to deliver more voters to them in the future.  And it seems to confound the Republicans.



And by filling up the national attention with gun control, immigration, and race the president can take all the oxygen out of the room on scandals.  Although I suspect that they are not taking as much oxygen out of the room as they hope.  Probably more important for them is to keep the leftist base on-side with issues that it cares about.



But I think that the whole question of President Obama is a distraction.  The only thing that matters right now is thinking about how we can get the support of the American people to fix our broken government and our broken economy.



The solution to our national economic problem is stark and simple.  Stop growing government.  Start reducing the free stuff.  Start lowering barriers to commerce. Stop using commerce purely as food for the government sector.



That's the easy part.  The hard part is convincing the American people to change.



As in Mitt Romney.



Look, you can say all you like about Mitt Romney, but all the guy ever did with his whole life is to turn around ailing institutions.  In his business life he turned around failing businesses.  In his political life he turned around the failing Salt Lake Olympics and the failing Massachusetts government.  When his church said Jump he said how high.  But the American people said No, particularly the white rural voters that are suspicious of corporate power.



In many ways, people are right to be suspicious of corporate power.  With or without the backing of government, capitalism is a force for "creative destruction."  It does in the economic sector what Michelle Obama wants to so in the political sector.

He [Obama] is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Actually, when applied to politics, this is a lie.  Politics is all about recruiting people into becoming mindless followers.  You can see that when you read about the IRS employees following the exact routine prescribed by their supervisors in handling Tea Party 501(c)4 applications.  They are not particularly offended by the political favoritism.  They just want to know the rules so that they can apply them mindlessly until it's time to collect that pension.



Modern business started out that way, with plantation slavery and industrial discipline.  But it found that human slaves weren't productive enough.  Just like the German army, it needed a different kind of person: "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility."



What we need is our own Michelle to get Americans to engage in their own lives, becoming "people of the responsible self" in the economy and in their personal lives instead of helpless victims cadging for a piece of the free stuff.  What we need is someone who can speak to the rural whites and persuade them to surrender to the market.



Hey, and then in twenty years or so, maybe we can persuade African Americans to stop trying to cadge benefits from Obama's "stash" and instead decide to risk wading into the mainstream of America.



But we can't do anything about the future while we are reading the Obama tea-leaves and wondering what he is going to do next.

"We Paid Our Dues"

The opening salvos in the City of Detroit bankruptcy were fired off last week.  The great question, of course, is what happens to the city employee pensions.  You see, in many state constitutions there is a clause that states that the pensions of government employees cannot be tampered with.



There is often also a clause that the doctors must be paid, but that is another story.  But here is the kicker: The constitutions do not tell us who is to pay those pensions.



The great state of Michigan is one of the states with a pension provision.  You can't take the pensions away from those deserving public employees.  No sir.  And so, last Friday, a judge in Michigan declared that the pensions of city employees could not be reduced.

Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sided with creditors including retired city workers who fear Detroit will not pay pensions in full.

She wrote that the governor of the state of Michigan had no right to "diminish or impair pension benefits."



A firefighters' union official chimed in on this.

Al Grant, Secretary and Treasurer for the Retired Detroit Police and Fire Fighters Association said:



“Hey, you made a promise. You just can’t say, ‘Eh, forget about that’. They kicked the can down the road long enough, and they said, ‘It’s not my problem. I’ll be out of office. I won’t be there’. It’s all catching up now. I don’t think it’s right for us to have to take any hit. We paid our dues.”

Now there are famous last words: "We paid our dues."  It reminds us of the famous last words of the bank depositor: "They said it was safe."  That's what the People of the Victimized Self always say.  "They" did it to me.



But we can see what the governor is looking to do about the inviolability of pensions as set forth in the constitution.  Here is Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr:

“All we’re talking about in this restructuring is the unfunded component of those pension funds,” Orr said. “There are going to have to be concessions. Concessions may be different for each fund. And they’re going to be focused on the unfunded component.”

Ah yes.  Brilliant.  You could express the evolving strategy in the form of a child's riddle:

"When is a pension plan not a pension plan?  When it isn't fully funded."

It's really pretty elegant.  Look, any amount that the government employee has contributed to her pension, she should get.  Any amount that the government has contributed to her pensions she should get.  But any amount that was promised and that has not actually been paid: that's up for grabs.



Why not?  After all, the union leaders aren't fools.  The politicians they supported for election aren't fools.  If they wanted the city employee pensions to be bullet-proof they should have all agreed in a smoke-filled room that there would be no "promises" where pensions were concerned.   The government would put the monies in every year.  Period.



But in fact both sides of the bargaining table opted for shining promises rather than cash on the barrel-head.  Promises are cheap.  Cash on the barrel-head is expensive.  It means tax increases or cuts in spending right now, not way off in the future.



But what do we do now, now that the "blue social model" is broken?  Walter Russell Mead is in problem-solving mode:

At Via Meadia, we’ll be looking for practical ideas for making Detroit work again; this crisis is a challenge for everyone who cares about the future of the United States. It’s not enough to find fault with what has been done in the past; what matters is figuring out how to make a better future. We’d like to see more competition between the left and the right to develop creative approaches to the problems of Detroit: that’s the kind of intellectual and political competition the whole country needs.

 Hum.  Yes, of course we all want to get beyond the blame game and make a better future.  But on the other hand we obviously can't start to solve the problem until certain people get out of denial.  And the people in denial in this case just happen to be the whole liberal ruling class.



In other words, if liberals want conservative help and conservative money to fix the problems that they caused with their unscientific faith in the power and efficacy of the liberal administrative state then they have to admit something to themselves (let alone to conservatives).  They have to admit that their blueprint for a better future is in fact upside down, and amounts to a blueprint for a bankrupt future.



Because until that happens we will just be throwing good money after bad.

Politics as "Political Warfare"

I am reading Angelo Codevilla's War: Ends and Means under the influence of my usual rubrics: Government is force; politics is division; system is domination.  And, of course, that politics is civil war by other means.



There's a chapter on Political Warfare, which is devoted to interstate conflict short of outright war.  It's a sorry tale because in the 20th century the US was so bad at it.  For instance, Saddam Hussein between 1991 and 2003.

Between 1992 and 2003 Iraq's Saddam Hussein reversed the military outcome of the Gulf War.  Politics was his "weapon of mass destruction."  With it he hampered the Americans' will to deal with him, destroying what respect the Americans had earned in the Arab world by their display of military force in 1991...



[H]e calibrated his challenges to a level high enough to embarrass the Americans, but just below what would make it necessary for them to come get him.

The problem for the United States foreign policy is that we really don't want to conquer the Middle East or Islam.  We just want them to join the game of international capitalism and start trading.  So we slap the students when they get too unruly in the classroom but we don't force them to kow-tow to our superior force.



But I am reading Codevilla's ideas on political warfare as they apply to US domestic politics.  He is discussing the message that a conquering side wants the combatants on the other side to hear "in deeds as well as words":

We are here to win.  We have totally devoted ourselves to winning.  We have what it takes and we know what we are doing.  You can count on our winning.  You and everybody else will depend on us for your lives and for your futures.  We have a well-deserved reputation for being kind to those who join us and for making those who stand in our way wish that they had never been born.  Moreover, if you think about it, our side deserves your adherence because we are the more in tune with the standards by which you live that are our opponents.  These people will soon be either cadavers or prisoners.  You have a rare and fleeting chance to show you belong on our side and not theirs.  Don't miss it!

Now you know what Michelle Obama meant when she told a rally at UCLA what Barack Obama would mean to the students:

He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed. 

Now the question that faces Republicans after the end of the Obama era is precisely how to infect the body politic with this sort of conquering, you'd-better-join-the-winning-side message.



It was easy for Democrats in 2008 because the mainstream media had spent eight years telling Americans that Bush was a stupid fool that was leading America to disaster.  And low and behold in 2008 the economy did tip into disaster on Bush's watch.  It didn't matter that the proximate reason was the epic failure of Democrats to push "affordable housing" by using Fannie and Freddie to push mortgages at people that had no business borrowing money.



As I keep saying, Obama could have followed a moderate course and implemented a few goodies on the health care front with a bipartisan majority, and could have focused like a laser on turning the economy around.  With that kind of agenda he could have established a Democratic majority to last for a generation.



But instead he has pushed everything on the liberal wish list from stimulus to national health care and has crippled the economy.  So it is going to be possible by 2016 to argue to the American people -- without the help of the mainstream media -- that things just can't go on like this any more.  That Republicans have a plan to fix the economy, and that people should come aboard because the Democrats that promised them so much really don't care about them.  Democrats only care about their divisive liberal whack-job interest groups and they don't care about ordinary Americans like you and me.



Americans aren't really ideological.  They don't really get capitalism, but they don't really get the threat that big government programs represent to them and their families either.  Why not have a program for health care?  For childhood education?  What could be the harm in a program that puts a little money in my pocket?



So the only way to do the right thing is for the American people to see with their own eyes what a mess liberalism makes of everything.  Ronald Reagan helped the American people wee that a generation ago.  Now it's time for another presidential candidate to make the same appeal.



It's not hard.  Government is force.  Politics is division.  System is domination.  The more you have the worse it gets.

Changing the "Narrative"

Hugh Hewitt spent three hours yesterday interviewing Mark Leibovich about his new book sensation This Town:Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital.  It's a tell-all about the players in Washington, DC.



Why do the elected and the appointed officials decide to "stay on" after their official careers end?  What's the point of all the legislating and regulating and influence peddling and gamesmanship?

The influence that is being peddled is only secondarily about the legislation and the regulations. It is primarily about the overall media envelope which is shaping the public opinion which is truly shaping the legislation and regulations.



It is all about the awful term, the "narrative."

OK.  So Washington, DC is all about the power, but the power needs a story, a story about how things are and how they should be.  Just like the postmodernists tell us.



So the question for conservatives is: How do we change the narrative?  How do we change it from the current narrative which is that somewhere, somehow some helpless victim is being held down by some powerful force, whether white privilege or corporate greed, and government is the solution?



Because if we conservatives can't produce a good narrative after eight years of Obama, we should hang it up and go home.



The trouble is that you can't say, dipping into centuries of conservative thought, that of course Obamacare wouldn't work, because a rigid administrative system never works.  You can't say that of course regulating the banks never works because the government's interest isn't economic justice but cheap money from the credit system with which to buy votes.  You can't say that of course the supposed dangers of fracking or of oil pipelines are ridiculous, because then you are diving into the swamp of "safety" as in "Mr. President is it safe?"



But you can represent the ruling class as clueless and out of touch, as in:



"After seven years of economic incompetence, we need jobs.  So why did the Obama administration pass huge tax increases and hand the health care system over to the IRS?  Does the IRS know how to create jobs?"



"President Obama and his friends tell us that we must stop using fossil fuels. because the seas are going to boil and the ice is going to melt.  So what does he do?  He gives subsidies to his friends so they can buy pricey green cars on the cheap.  Then he gives subsidies to his crony capitalists so they can make a fortune out of wind farms that kill birds.  Meanwhile Americans don't have jobs."



"The beltway elite and their lobbyist friends want an immigration bill so we can amnesty millions of illegal immigrants, while people who obeyed the law get shafted.  They want to let in millions of new immigrants while millions of Americans don't have jobs."



I'm confident that there are thousands of campaign consultants and speechwriters that can do a much better job than I can.



But the problem for me is that at the level of political rhetoric we are not dealing with the basic problem.  For me the basic problem is the idea that government has any business in health care.  What? You think politicians and activists have a clue about how to deliver health care?  That a monster education blob can deliver education to children?  That the government can relieve the poor and lead them to productive lives?  What are you smoking?



Because the unspoken error is that you can order anything in the world by force.  That you can do anything with politics except divide people.  That you can do anything with an administrative system except dominate people.  As in:



"President Obama seems to think he can improve health care by ordering insurance companies and employers around.  Oh yeah?"



"President Obama seems to think he can improve race relations by injecting politics and Reverend Al Sharpton into race relations.  Oh yeah?"



"President Obama seems to think he can make the oceans recede by getting the EPA to regulate the coal miners out of business.  Oh yeah?"



In the end we are going to send the ruling class liberals packing by creating a narrative that makes them into pompous idiots. Somehow, somewhere, there is a word-meister getting ready to do that.  I wish I knew his name.