Post Cantor: Why are Dems So Negative About Tea Party?

Ever since the Tea Party showed its ugly mug five years ago, our Democratic friends can't seem to decide whether it's a nothingburger or a frightful threat to everything we know and love -- a KKKish assembly of racist sexist homophobic gun-toting extremists.

Moments after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) got primaried by Tea Party-ish economics professor Dave Brat, DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz quickly shot off a tweet to show how shocked she was over the Tea Party, according to Katie Pavlich.

So, do people still have questions? The Tea Party has taken control of the GOP. http://t.co/lAZ0ObfEa1
— D Wasserman Schultz (@DWStweets) June 11, 2014

So now the Tea Party isn't dead.  It's a mortal threat to the Republic, or at least to progressive values.

Look, I get why the Tea Party is a threat to the Republican establishment.  It makes it hard for them to play their role as the Outer Party, opposing the Inner Party progressive line but going along in the end in return for some quid pro quo.  E.g., immigration.

But the Democrats? If the Tea Party is such a monstrosity, why not keep quiet and let the racist sexist homophobes destroy the GOP?  Because the Dems are taking over the world with their Emerging Democratic Majority of minorities, women, educated and young.  Right?

The truth probably is that the Tea Party poses a real threat to the entire ruling class, Inner and Outer, because it threatens to offer an opposing narrative to the ruling class PC narrative.

Think of it from the liberal perspective.  They've managed to marginalize and intimidate the Christian Right and they have turned what might have been a libertarian Silicon Valley into dutiful liberal crony capitalists.  They have tagged the middle-class Republican Party as the Party of the Rich and with Obamacare they are 90 percent of the way to adding another permanent entitlement to the welfare state.

But then along comes this rag-tag band of Tea Partiers that just didn't get the message or the threats.

Here's what troubles me about the Tea Party question and also immigration.  I think that our ruling class could be a little more understanding about the concerns of the Tea Party and specifically the immigration question.

Look, for a nearly rich guy like me, immigration doesn't matter too much.  But for the average American it does matter.  If you are a low-skilled person then your wages are seriously degraded by competition from both legal and illegal immigrants.  Legal immigrants lower the formal economy wages; illegal immigrants push the whole low-skill economy off the books, which means that you aren't earning Social Security points and you can't buy a house because to the credit agencies you don't have income.

Right now the Democrats are playing a pretty cynical game.  They are sucking up to Hispanic immigrants and branding everyone that has a doubt about immigration reform as a racist.

But the support for immigration reform is not that deep and broad.  After educated goo-goo liberals, the only people really in favor of immigration reform are Hispanics who still have family they want to bring to the US.

Get that?  Established Hispanics don't care about immigration.  It's just the new arrivals that, understandably, want the rest of their family over here.

I think that what really scares the liberals is that the Tea Party is a bottom-up movement.  It's not like the New Left of the Sixties that were radical children of liberal parents. That was the ruling class kids cutting up a little until they wormed their way into the professoriat.  Perfectly harmless, if you are a liberal.

But the Tea Party is different.  It got started by nobodies like Keli Carender.  OK, so she's not completely a nobody, because she did some post-grad work at Oxford in England.  But the point is the Keli and many other Tea Party leaders aren't the daughters of a Somebody in the ruling class.  So the ruling class asks: who is Keli Carender: who are her people?  If you are a ruling-class member you have to worry about the Tea Party.  What is it really about?  What does it want?  Where will it end?

Probably the Tea Party will just end up as a temporary disturbance to the Force, a footnote to history.  But you never know.

Student Loans: Poster Child for Government Failure

Conservatives like to account for President Obama's serial illegalities by saying that he hates America -- or hates something.

But there is a simpler explanation.  The federal government is so screwed up that it is impossible to deal with its messes without illegal administrative action.  Because by the time that Congress could get around to fixing the problems, they would have got worse, much worse.

The current flap over student loans is a case in point. President Obama has signed an executive order limiting payments by student borrowers. Writes Amanda Paulson:

The memorandum he signed would, among other things, allow more borrowers to cap their student loan payments at 10 percent of their income. He also directed the government to renegotiate its contracts with federal loan servicers like Sallie Mae to improve services for borrowers.

After decades of subsidizing universities and offering university student grants and loans we have got to the point where the current generation of students is so indebted that it can't afford to get married and buy houses.  So the government proposes to forgive the loans that students have been encouraged to take out to finance their education.

No surprise, of course.  If you subsidize something you are going to get more of it. And colleges educating the subsidized students are going to increase their fees and their costs, because they can.  And the increasing cost of a college education is going to encourage politicians to "do something" to ease the difficulties that students experience in paying for college and then paying off their loans.

So President Obama finds that he has to act and "do something", because otherwise his party is going to get buried at the next election.

I've written that it's madness for students to take out loans to finance education because the whole point of a loan is to anticipate income.  In general in the loan business, if you can't show the income and you can't show proper collateral then you don't get the loan.  What student can anticipate their income for the next 20 years at age 18?  And then it's cruel to convert that loan into an crook equity deal where the government gets to take up to 10 percent of your income.  Talk about the road to serfdom.

So the current student loan system stinks, in theory and in practice.

Now President Obama, just in time for the November elections, proposes to limit student loan repayments to 10 percent of income.  He's already determined that students should have their loans forgiven after 20 years, or 10 years if they work for government.

(Yeah.  Where's the justice in that, given that government workers make 50-100 percent more than private sector workers for the same job?)

But the bigger issue is how to stop the government doing stupid things like subsidizing colleges and students and then compounding the error when things go south.  The Wall Street Journal reviews a book by a retired Yale Law professor Peter H. Schuck today: "Why Government Fails So Often."

To be successful, [Schuck] argues, a public policy has to get six things right: incentives, instruments, information, adaptability, credibility and management. The federal government tends to be bad at all of these.

Well yeah, whatever all that pompous stuff actually means.  Conservatives would just say that it's impossible for government to do these six things, for any program.  Because Hayek.

But I am a radical simplifier, and I think it all boils down to this.  Government is force and the only thing the government knows how to do is declare war and bash its enemy over the head.  If it isn't a war then government shouldn't be doing it.

On that view it is obvious that the government has no business in the student loan business.  Who or what, after all, is it fighting against?  Ignorance?  Poverty?  Greedy bankers?  Pusillanimous college administrators?  Early marriage?  Big families?

Well, the current student loan debt is said to be up there are $1 trillion.  It is clear that things are going to get worse before they get better.

And there's an even bigger question than the incompetence of government and President's illegal government by phone and pen.  It is this.

When are liberals going to cry uncle on the utter failure of big government, this metastasizing cancer on the American body politic?

Exactly.  They will cry uncle when big government really starts to bite into liberal lives.  And they will blame the Koch brothers.  Or the greedy bankers.  Or the racist white working class.  Or corporate greed.

Anti-Piketty: He Even Gets "Père Goriot" Wrong

The liberal sensation of the spring has been Thomas Piketty's Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century in which the good French professor brandishes Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac at us in order to prove that r > g and the rich will go on getting richer and the poor poorer unless.

Unless we set up a cadaster of global wealth to make every rich person completely transparent, set up confiscatory income tax rates on the 1% and tax them 1-2% of their wealth every year.  What could go wrong?

Otherwise we'll find ourselves back in the extreme rentier income inequality so richly evoked by the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac.

Of course Piketty's phony-baloney good-time rock and roll inequality of r > g, that the rate of return on capital is always bigger than the rate of growth, is nonsense.  First, because a major component of the rate of return on capital is simply time preference, that you must pay people not to spend their money on present goods.  Second, because a lot of capital is needed just to maintain the existing stock of capital before it can be used to create growth.

But the other argument, that the rich will keep getting richer and the poor poorer, unless... is also phoney-baloney good time rock and roll too.  At least according to Balzac.

So let's get back to Balzac, and particularly Père Goriot, the novel that Piketty wants us to accept as a moral of the grossly unjust rentier society. (Rentier means a holder of French government bonds, or rentes). I'd seen Père Goriot as a TV serial decades ago, but had never read it.  Now I have.

The term "Père" is meant to be patronizing, as we would say "old man Goriot" or "Geezer Goriot."  But the gravamen of the novel has nothing to do with the inevitable rich getting richer.  It is about the folly of people that are ready to spend away their entire fortunes to get a leg up in the social world of beautiful women, fashionable salons and the well-connected.

Both Goriot, impoverished businessman, and Eugène de Rastignac, an impoverished young noblemen, think nothing of money except as a leg up into the world of the beautiful people.  Goriot had a flourishing business as a grain merchant; he'd started up using revolutionary connections in the 1790s and he used the fortune he'd accumulated to launch his girls into high society with big dowries.  Then he sold the business to save his daughters the embarrassment of having a father in "trade."  Then he gave away the proceeds of the business sale to provide his daughters with cash to buy stuff.

Rastignac arrives in Paris with an introduction to a wealthy relative, and soon sees that he'll need money to cut a dash in high society, so he sends to his mother and sisters for money.  Then he is given a lesson in social climbing by Vautrin, a man in the criminal underworld: marry the rich young heiress, says Vautrin.   Nobody in the Paris of 1819 seems to have any idea of actually working for a living, except Goriot, who has an idea for making pasta in Russia.

The inescapable moral of Père Goriot is that money runs through peoples' hands like water, because they are not really interested in money, but in the things that money can buy.  And they are perfectly content to spend today's money on the hope of social climbing tomorrow.

So Piketty has got it completely wrong.  The best way to lighten the load of the rich is not to tax them out of their gourds but to encourage them to spend money on social climbing.  And think of all the jobs that creates for tailors, hatters, dressmakers, milliners, coachmen, farriers, stables, and on and on.  Not to mention professors with cunning ideas to increase the power of government.

The Party of the Ruling Class

How do we deal with the meme that sank Mitt Romney, the idea that he was an unfeeling rich man that didn't care about "people like me."  Mona Charen makes the point directly.

Many Republicans now recognize that they must propose reforms that speak to middle- and working-class voters, and shed their image as the party of the rich.

But what is it that makes the Republican Party the "party of the rich?"  Is it that the rich Koch Brothers push the Republican line?  Or that Mitt Romney laid off a union steelworker? Perhaps it's because the Republican Party does not rush in with a new program when people are hurting.



But it was George W. Bush who said: "when people are hurting, the government's gotta move."  And this was the guy that didn't care about New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina.



OK, so the Democratic Party is the Mommy Party that believes that you must rescue little Johnny from everyone of his escapades.  The Republican Party is the Daddy Party that believes that when Johnny goes off to college it's time for helicopter parents to fly back to the pad and let Johnny figure things out on his own.



But the Democrats still get a lot of mileage out of the "party of the rich" meme even though you and I know that most rich people -- especially 2nd generation liberal trustafarians, and certainly the ones living in the richest zip codes -- vote Democratic.  Of course they do.  Their mothers get them into selective colleges by hook or by crook and they come out as good conforming members of the ruling class.



William Tucker just went to a class reunion at his top-ranked New England college, and he was just about the only Republican voice there in a class that includes one Nobel prizewinner and one on the way. "All of my classmates have prospered to a degree that none of us would have anticipated when we were swilling beer and pulling all-nighters back in the day."

There’s a predictably high portion of doctors, lawyers, research scientists, and college professors, but also an uncommon number who seem to have stumbled into finance, almost inadvertently.

And they are all liberals.  Tucker attends breakout sessions where everyone agrees with the liberal agenda except him.

When I arrived around 9 a.m. an earnest group of about 50 classmates and their wives was already deeply engrossed in the question of how to save the nation’s spirit. This time the discussion was more unguarded. “We’ve got to make this non-partisan,” said one panelist. “We’ve got to get Republicans involved.” “Of course Republicans are wrong about everything but we’ve still got to make them feel like they’re a part of it,” said another. After another hour of this I stood up and said once again I disagreed with every word but didn’t want to take up people’s time. “No, tell us what you think,” they insisted. So I let loose.

Talk about a meeting of the ruling class!  You can't make this up.  Tucker tells the group to "several gasps of disapproval from wives in the audience" about "a small museum in Colorado" that spent two years getting regulatory approval to divert a stream to build a generator. I mean, you can't just let people run around diverting streams in Idaho, darling!



And they call the Republican Party the "party of the rich."



Now there's no doubt that if you called Tucker's classmates and their wives "the rich" to their faces they would be insulted and the wives would gasp.  They know they can't be the rich because they are Democrats and the Republican Party is the "party of the rich."



So what's the strategic thing to do?  It probably won't work to counterattack with "so's your father" stuff.  It doesn't matter that the Democratic Party is the party of the rich and the crony capitalists.  Frontal attacks tend to be very costly and end up achieving nothing.  See: World War I.



No, I suggest creating the meme that the Democratic Party is the "party of the ruling class," the people that won't let you alone, that want to boss you around about everything from stupid light bulbs to baking wedding cakes.



The point about the "party of the rich" meme is that liberals want ordinary people to think that Republicans are callous moneybags swilling martinis up at the country club that just "don't care about people like me."



The point about the "party of the ruling class" meme is that conservatives want ordinary people to think that liberals are bossy meddlers swilling Chardonnay up at the faculty lounge that won't leave you alone and insist on telling you how to live your life.  Everybody knows some stuck-up little academic Hitler that uses their teaching or administrative position to make life miserable for everyone around them.



I know.  Just one little meme isn't going to change the world.  But it's a start.

Bergdahl: Obamis Just Don't Understand Honor

Many conservatives are puzzling over why, just why, the Obama administration would get itself into such a mess over the Bergdahl prisoner exchange.  How could anyone treat Bergdahl's likely desertion as just a matter of missing a class on Monday?

The answer is simple.  It is honor.  Lefties don't understand honor, male or female.  And especially they don't understand military honor. The whole point of the left has been to expunge honor from the culture, except for the honor-among-thieves culture among lefties and community organizers.  Yeah.  It's one thing for Obama's Organizing for America buddies to "have his back."  But not for the rest of us.

If you want to understand the whole question of honor, a good place to start is James Bowman's Honor, A History. It comes down to this, writes Bowman:

 [T]he basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it.

But it is not just the act of bravery that is important; it is the reputation for bravery.  And by bravery we mean the reputation for standing in line with your fellow kinsmen or fellow soldiers and not running away in the heat of battle.  In the Greek hoplite honor and bravery meant literally standing in the shield line and not breaking away, for victory in hoplite battle usually went to the side whose shield wall collapsed last.

That is where the duel comes in.  The aristocratic duel is a corruption of the code of honor.  It goes beyond the idea that my deeds of courage speak for themselves; it says if that you attack my reputation for bravery I will kill you.

In the development of the modern nation state the idea of honor developed from bravery among kinsmen to bravery among hoplite soldiers to bravery in the army of the nation state.  That is why the bravery of Sergeant York in World War I is such a big deal and why the cowardice of Private Eddie Slovik in World War II was such a big deal.

And that's why the apparent desertion of Sgt. Bergdahl is such a big deal to the men and women in the armed forces.  It's about their loyalty to to their buddies, then their unit, and finally the United States.  That is the code of honor in the US armed forces.

Obama & Co. don't understand that because they have a different code of honor.  It is not to family, not to nation.  It is to the movement, the progressive movement, or whatever the current left-wing thing is at the time.

Obama & Co., with Hollywood, celebrate the anti-hero who makes a point of declaring that he does not owe loyalty to family or to his city or his nation.  So to them Sgt. Bergdahl's hesitance about doing the army thing is only natural.  That's how Obama & Co. feel too.  Enough of this nationalist nonsense!  Peace and Justice!  And that's how the mainstream media seem to owe loyalty to Obama and his agenda rather than to the United States and the rule of law.  In their code, the United States and the military are rather shabby things.  And the constitution was drawn up by slave-owners.  What matters is to fight racism, sexism, and inequality.

Of course all along the Obamis have known that they need to bow to the national gods.  They must say that there is no blue America or red America, but just one exceptional America, and when their minds are focused by the need to win the election they can stay on message.

But they don't really believe a word of all that exceptionalism crap.  They just say it because they must.  Just as they know they must wear those stupid American flag pins.  Their loyalty and honor code is, we might suggest, the the honor code of the community organizer.  The loyalty and the celebrated acts of bravery are the acts to advance the banner of progressivism.  Like the UAW and the Battle of the Overpass.  Or the Movement against the Vietnam War.  Or the Battle for Women's Rights, or the Battle for Marriage Equality.

I would argue that the entire left-wing movement is really a crazed millennial cult.  That everything it does leads to a dead end, whether the economic dead end of communism, the free-stuff dead end of the welfare state, the reproductive dead end of feminism and homosexualism, the population dead end of environmentalism.

Actually, we've seen this before.  Rodney Stark has a name for our modernacademic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex.  He calls it upper-class asceticism.  It starts with Buddhism, and the young prince Gautama Siddhartha giving up his princedom, his wife and children, for a higher life.

Ring a bell does it?

According to liberal philosopher Charles Taylor the trick is to combine a commitment to human flourishing with a commitment to something higher.  So you can't reduce life just to human flourishing.  Nor can you reduce it to upper-class asceticism unless you are a liberal trustafarian.

But back on Earth our liberal masters are screwing up royally, because they have selected themselves into an upper-class ascetic cult and are trying to force-feed the rest of us on their divine manna from heaven.  So they wrong-foot themselves again and again, and sooner or later the American people are going to take notice.

The folks that really need to take notice are the millennials, because they are the folks getting most royally screwed by the Obama doctrine.  But first they have to unlearn everything they learned from their liberal unionized teachers from K through grad school.

And the folks that will struggle hardest with that will be millennial women.  Nothing personal, but my life experience is that women actually believe what they have been taught, whereas men tend to think that the whole school thing is a joke.

It will take Religion to end political polarization

Liberals always like to mourn the Republicans of yesteryear: the ones that could work with Democrats to solve problems.  Liberals just hate all the extremism and hate on the right.

But William A. Galston writes in the Wall Street Journal that the polarization works both ways. Using data from a study by Alan Abramowitz from Emory University he shows that Democrats have been getting more socially liberal, and Republicans more economically conservative.  And more and more people are voting on strict party lines.

Democratic support for Cold War anticommunism waned in reaction to the Vietnam War. Republican support for Keynesian economics had given way to the supply-side revolution... All these shifts pointed in the same direction, toward increased unity within each political party and more-intense divisions between them. Today, ideology, policy preferences, partisanship and voting behavior are aligned as never before.

Or you can so it by the numbers.

In 1972, for example, 29% of Democrats called themselves liberal or very liberal, a figure that rose by 18 points to 47% by 2012. During those four decades, the share of Republicans regarding themselves as conservative or very conservative rose by fully 30 points, to 76% from 46%. 

What's the way out?

The U.S. government has become dysfunctional, and there is a shared responsibility to fix it. Leaders must behave differently, which will not happen unless the people insist on a different kind of governance. We can light a candle or curse the darkness.

But that is silly.  The government has become dysfunctional because the people are divided.  They send their representatives to Washington to make a difference: liberals send their representatives to advance gay marriage and abortion and save the planet from carbon pollution; conservatives send their representatives to reform the welfare state and hold the line on the liberal social agenda.

The politicians are faithfully representing their supporters, and they are taking advantage of events to advance their agenda.  That's why the Democrats ran full-speed ahead to pass Obamacare with the majorities they got from disgusted Republicans failing to show up at the polls in 2006 and 2008.  The opposite may happen in 2014 and 2016 as rank-and-file Democratic voters wonder what happened to all the Hope and Change.

What is the answer to this gridlock?  The answer is religion.  Politics is division; government is force.  The current trench warfare is going nowhere, at least until the welfare state runs out of money.

Let us recall the thesis advanced by William G. McLoughlin in Revivals, Awakenings and Reform. McLoughlin argued that, at least in America, when things are screwed up politically you get a religious awakening or revival that resets the moral landscape and ushers in an era of reform.

We can see the McLoughlin effect in the Muslim jihad movement.  The jihadists are not primarily fighting against the West.  They are fighting to found a new moral order in the Middle East.  We western democratic capitalists think they are crazy.  But the moral and political collapse in the Middle East is real, and the jihadis are trying to do something about it.

The first three Great Awakenings, the Puritan one centering in 1600, the Welseyan one centering in the 1740s and the Dwight one centering on 1800-30 were about working people, the people of the subordinate self transforming their lives and becoming people of the responsible self.  The Social Gospel Awakening at the turn of the 20th century was more of a top-down thing encouraging the workers to stay in their working class and let the "academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex" solve all their problems for them.

But in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism Robert William Fogel worried that liberals were losing the plot to a new revival of religion.  Not to worry. By the early 2000s people like John Judis and Ruy Teixeira thought that the danger was over and liberals were beginning a new era of The Emerging Democratic Majority of women, the educated, the young and the minority.

Obviously, today the whole thing is back up in the air.  And if there is going to be a revival of religion you would be starting to see something happening with young people.  Maybe there is, but I can't see it.

Put it this way: the Obama campaign touched a nerve with young people, who flocked to his promise of Hope and Change.  But when president Obama turned right around and betrayed them with the worst economic recovery ever.  There are millions of young people out there medicating themselves with the drugs of license and self absorption, waiting for something.

At some point things will change.  And then the prophecy of Ronald Reagan that you ain't seen nothin' yet will achieve new salience.

We Need a Religion of Limited Government

Young Voices Associate Cathy Reisenwitz has taken a look at the new ideas in YGNetwork's "Room to Grow" proposals, and wonders what's the point.  Forget the "new" ideas.  How about some good "old" ideas?

Here’s a old/new idea: get government out of the way. cut off the spigot. end the subsidies. cut the regulations. help the middle class by allowing the market to work for them.

Cathy quotes Cato scholar Scott Lincicome:

“To advocate new in-kind or monetary transfers (tax credits, wage subsidies or whatever) to the poor and middle class without also fixing the policies that inflate prices and hinder consumption won’t actually permit these Americans to improve their and their families’ lives,” Lincicome writes. “Put simply: who cares if you have a few extra dollars per week from the government if the cost of many highly-regulated and subsidized necessities keeps outpacing any such increase?”

Who cares?  Ordinary people care about their own personal subsidy, their own personal "few extra dollars per week." It's true that "Bankers, lenders, schools, realtors are all 'helped' tremendously by artificially high prices, demand boosts, and regulatory capture."  And it's true that ordinary people get nickels and dimes compared to the C-spots that the big boys get from Big Government.  But ordinary people are attached to their nickel-and-dime subsidies.  Low-paid educated young people say Yea! when Pune-born Brahmin Kshama Sawant calls for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, even though it hurts minority youth and pushes marginal employers off the books.  Middle-income people rely on and support the mortgage interest deduction even though the rich benefit far more.



The trouble is that if you actually come out and propose to cut all the subsidies and transfers you won't get elected dogcatcher.  That's because politics has always been and always will be about looting and pillaging.  Join my free company, the young aristocrat used to say, and you'll get your share of the loot.  Vote for me, the modern politician says, and I'll make those greedy employers pay you more out of their profits.  The Tea Party hates bailouts for big banks, but don't start talking about reforming Social Security and Medicare.



The point about limited government is precisely that it proposes to limit the looting and pillaging.  It says that if everyone backs off their demands for loot we will all be better off in the long run.  But in the long run we are all dead.



In The Faith Instinct Nicholas Wade gets to the heart of the matter.  How do humans control the freeloader and the freebooter, the looter and the pillager?  With religion.  It is religion that says "thou shalt not steal" and "thou shalt not covet."  And religion usually throws in a God that knows what you are doing even if you hide your looting from the people in your community.  God will judge you for your transgressions on the Day of Judgment, and don't you forget it.



The problem is that left-wing politics from Marx to Pelosi says that it's OK to loot and pillage, as long as you are a member of a traditionally marginalized minority.  Hey, it's not just OK, it's the epitome of fairness and justice!  Lefties have made a religion out of free-loading.  As the pundit says: this will not end well.



Obviously, it's not going to be easy to turn things around.  The point about religion, including today's left-wing sects, is that it is faith; you believe in spite of setbacks and defeats, and that certainly applies to our liberal friends.  We won't turn things around with a book or two, or even a rational discussion of the zero-sum game of subsidies and carve-outs.



What it will take is a new religion, one that will inspire millions of people with the idea of limited government without subsidies, and fill their hearts with a new idea of the good.  This will not be a political movement, but a moral and cultural movement that redefines the idea of the good.  It will have to inspire ordinary people to reject the blandishments of politicians and activists, because to the new believers such offers of free stuff are simply wrong, and not just wrong but offensively wrong.



Personally, I don't doubt that the Republicans emerging in the race for President in 2016 know what needs to be done: cut spending, subsidies, carve-outs, reform entitlements, reform education away from the "blob" status quo.  But a politician has to practice the art of the possible, and conduct the charm offensive that gets him to 51% of the vote.  And that, as a famous US politician once demonstrated, means leaning heavily on vague promises of Hope and Change, and blurring the actual details of the Change to come.



I'm with you Cathy Reisenwitz.  But I also know that to get where you want to go will take a long journey, and a transformation in the hearts of millions of Americans.