Trying to Fire Up the Base

So President Obama is finished with implementing the care and feeding of his public-sector supports in his stimulus package and the federalization of health care. Now, according to Michael Barone, he has switched to playing politics, firing up the base for the mid-term elections.

Yes. Now he's dangling financial reform in front of voters mad at fat-cat bankers, and dangling immigration reform in front of Hispanic voters. But will it work, writes Barone?

[I]f policy doesn’t work, try politics. Gallup reports that “very enthusiastic” voters favor Republicans 57 percent to 37 percent in congressional elections. Will attacks on Wall Street, deep-sixing the cap-and-trade bill, and getting beaten on immigration change that? The Obama Democrats hope so. But I wouldn’t bet heavily on it.

Evidently the president thinks that he can paint Republicans into a corner as the paid puppets of Wall Street and the bigoted enemies of hard-working immigrants.

One thing about President Obama. He always exudes a remarkable self-confidence, as if he knows what he is doing.

But does he?

Is he really going to win by dividing the American people on immigration? We know that Gov. Jan Brewer's popularity (R-AZ) has skyrocketed since she signed the law on immigration status enforcement. We know that the 2006 immigration effort crashed on divisions in both parties and the American people's strong opposition to any amnesty for illegal immigrants until border security was improved.

After a year of President Obama, the dominating fact of his presidency is the willingness to go against the will of the American people in implementing items on the liberal agenda. For a conservative it is breathtaking, because conservatives always feel that they must have the American people pushing at their backs in order to make headway against the steady trade-wind of the mainstream media and the educated class. It was breathtaking when President Clinton fired the White House travel office back in 1993. No conservative would think of committing such blatant patronage, not in plain sight. But Clinton understood that he would get a bye from the Democrat-friendly media. Likewise, President Obama knows that he can do unpopular things because he's sailing downwind, with a friendly media wafting him along.

Unless.

Unless the American people rise up and vote him down.

The question for this fall is: will the dividing line fall in the right place for the president or not?

Let us think of the president's politicking not as a threat but an opportunity to redraw the lines on the playing field.

Surely the Dodd financial reform bill presents a once in a generation opportunity to tell the American people the truth. It's not Republican Senators that are in the pockets of Wall Street, as they think on Comedy Central. Come now, folks, you can't believe something like that. It's Wall Street that's in the pockets of the Democratic Party. That's why Wall Street pays big bucks to Democrats and not the other way around.

Let me repeat this, because I don't want to be misunderstood. To understand power relations, you need to know, as Lenin insisted: Who Whom. Who is sucking up to whom, who is paying tribute, and who is collecting tribute?

Back when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House of Representatives in November 1994 the first thing he did was sent the word out to K Street that there needed to be more business contributions to Repubicans, and more Republicans working for the lobbying firms. Who whom.

But the American Association of Retired Persons, the fabled AARP, doesn't pay tribute to anyone. The president goes to the AARP, not vice versa.

So let's grab the opportunity to change the minds of the American people. It's not Republicans who encourage "too big to fail" banks. It's Democrats.

There's a similar opportunity on immigration. The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the mainstream media have done a bang-up job on selling the idea that the American people--and Republicans and conservatives in particular--are bigoted nativists.

And not just in America. Prime Minister Gordon Brown thinks the same of his own white working-class Labour supporters. Now there is an opportunity to establish another narrative.

It's not the people that are the bigots. It's the educated elite that are the bigots, cruelly allowing illegal immigrants to enter the country and be forced to live in the shadows where they become victims of every kind of discrimination and shakedown. Instead we should finish the fence, enforce the law, and then write an honest and fair immigration reform bill.

For too long, Republicans and conservatives have been afraid of their own shadows. It's time to meet the cynical manipulations of the Democrats, take principled, honorable positions on issues the American people care about, and boldly seek to persuade the persuadable.

Pity a Poor Tory

In the British General Election set for Thursday May 6, the opposition Conservative Party is only leading by about 6 points in a three way race.

The Conservatives are proposing a radical reform of education and a radical reform of welfare. On education, they are proposing the Swedish system, which allows almost anyone to open a school and get government money. On welfare they are proposing some sort of move towards limiting open-ended benefits. And they are, nod, nod, wink, wink, proposing more spending cuts and fewer tax increases in their program to reduce the deficit, running at 12 percent of GDP.

Tory leader David Cameron has made a determined move towards the center, trying to woo the voters of the center party, the Lib-Dems. They call it "love-bombing." But what happens? The Lib-Dem leader, Nick Clegg, makes a big impression in the first televised debate between the party leaders (the first ever in Britain) and all the young voters swoon.

Finally, the London Economist gives Cameron a luke-warm endorsement:

According to the magazine’s lead editorial, the Tory leader is “much closer to answering the main question facing Britain than either of his rivals is. In this complicated, perhaps inevitably imperfect election, he would get our vote.”

Well, that's nice.

The problem the Tories face in Britain is in the numbers. There is a left-liberal party, the Labour Party, a center-left party, the Lib-Dems, and only one major center-right party, the Conservatives. Yet right now the Conservatives, in the lead, are struggling to rise above 35 percent in the polls. The fact is that, unlike the US, Britain is a center-left country. People just expect, as a matter of course, that the government provides unlimited public services. Any proposal to reduce spending is scorned as "Tory cuts," proof that the Conservative Party is the "nasty party."

Many Conservative supporters in Britain are complaining that Cameron has gone too far left. But what is he to do? If he stays right, then he can't pick up the precious people that vote for the Lib Dems. If he goes left then he risks losing voters to the anti-EC party, the UKIP. He's obviously made the judgment that the best strategy is to move left.

You can see the Conservative problem best by comparing Britain with the US. Here in the US we have a vibrant conservative movement that provides the energy for talk radio, Fox News, the conservative blogosphere, and a conservative Republican Party. And on top of that the movement just budded like a hydra, and produced the Tea Party. All this grass-roots and intellectual ferment keeps the Republican Party tethered to the right. It cannot move too far to the center, which you might call the easy, RINO option. It must persuade independents and moderates to move to the right.

In Britain, nada. No conservative movement. No Tea Party. What can a conservative politician expect to achieve without grass-roots enthusiasm?

On top of that, it turns out that for the US, there is a God in Heaven, and presto, we have a president who is playing John Wayne in a 21st century Western, and driving all them moderate dogies right onto the conservative range.

Pity the poor Tories in Britain. They just can't seem to get a break.

What Politicians Really Think

A political "gaffe," according to Michael Kinsley, is when a politician tells the truth. It is like an actor "breaking character."

In Britain today, in the middle of their General Election campaign they, are enjoying a "gaffe" committed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown was accosted by a 66-year-old Labour supporter who asked him about "immigration from Eastern Europe, tuition fees and the national debt." Brown handled the woman pretty well, but was overheard later describing her as "a bigoted woman."

Shades of Barack Obama describing the Pennsylvania voters in small towns that lost jobs years ago.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Politicians are a funny lot. On the one hand they claim to care about the people and their needs. On the other hand they ruthlessly exploit them and divide them in their election campaigns. And behind their backs they sneer at them or patronize them.

The joke is on the politicians, of course. Voters wouldn't care about immigration if the politicians ran a sensible immigration policy and if there wasn't such a demand for low-skilled workers created by the welfare state. Voters wouldn't care about the debt if politicians had done their job properly and refrained from gunning the economy to buy votes. Voters wouldn't care about free trade if the politicians hadn't created subsidies for powerful industries that allowed them to ignore the global market trends. And voters wouldn't care about race if politicians didn't inject "racism" into everything.

What this all adds up to is a corrupt and cynical elite that ought to have been pitched out of power half a century ago. They've bribed the electorate on the one hand, and betrayed them on the other. They talk about the short-term vices of corporations but they themselves never think beyond the next vote and the next election.

Power is power, and powerful people hang onto power, in politics, in culture, and in the commanding heights of the economy.

In the short term, of course, powerful people get what they want: money, power and the love of beautiful women. But in the long term all powerful people manage to do is stave off the inevitable. And that only makes the inevitable adjustment--or explosion--bigger than it needs to be.

What a shame.

Announcing: usfederalbailout.com

Last week I read a solid article by Nicole Gelinas in Investors Business Daily: "Wall St. Bailouts Would Be Invited, Not Prevented, Under Dodd's Bill". Gelinas is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

So, you say? Dog bites man. Presumably that's the whole point of the Dodd bill: to make Wall Street go cap in hand to the politicians when they get into a mess selling the government's paper. What's the deal?

Here's the deal. The article included a table that listed all the outlays and guarantees that the Feds have made to bail out the finance industry and others since the liquidity crisis of August 2007. You might be interested to know that the total in outlays and guarantees is just a little north of twenty trillion dollars. Yes, that's trillion with a "T".

I gotta have that, I said.

Fortunately, the numbers are easily available from the website of the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP). SIGTARP issues a quarterly report to Congress, and Gelinas got the numbers from there.

Bingo! I went to the SIGTARP website, downloaded a couple of pdf files, and voila: usfederalbailout.com, now a TARP bailout page at usgovernmentspending.com. Naturally the site uses the world-beating technology of usgovernmentspending.com to present the information in an appealing and compelling fashion just like its sister sites.

However, modesty prevents me from coming up with a single bottom line number like Gelinas because, in my view, outlays and guarantees are apples and oranges. So I have come up with three numbers:

1. Actual Federal Outlays in securities purchased and money loaned to bailed-out corporations.
2. Net Federal Outlays including repayment of loans by the bailed-out beneficiaries (for the big banks have mostly paid back their emergency loans).
3. Federal guarantees. That's the big number, rather like the unfunded liability of Medicare. It starts with the guarantee for Fannie Freddie bonds at $5.5 trillion.

Of course, the site is still under construction, and I have to update some numbers from the St. Louis Fed.

But if you want to know how much all these numbers add up to you'll have to go to usfederalbailout.com. The exercise will do you good.

Now I want to know why the domain usfederalbailout.com was available for little old me. Ain't anyone paying attention out there to all this except me and Nicole?

Dividing Lines: Dems on Immigration

Politics is all about dividing lines. You win elections by drawing a dividing line that gets you 51 percent of the votes. The British Labour Party won the last three elections in a row on the dividing line of "Labour investment vs. Tory cuts."

A corollary is that if you want to divide the American people then you should call in the politicians. They'll do the job for you better than anyone.

Byron York writes today about a new dividing line. The Democrats are dumping the energy bill in the Senate for an immigration bill. The Obamis think that the only way to get the base out this November is to draw a dividing line on immigration.

President Obama hopes to increase Hispanic voting and fire up the Democratic base to avert potentially disastrous Democratic mid-term losses across the country.

You think? I'd say that they are more likely to fire up the Tea Party base and provoke a wipeout. That's the risk in dividing lines. You may find out that you drew it in the wrong place. After all, Hispanics, like most Democratic voters, are concentrated in a few areas. The ones that aren't concentrated probably aren't as passionate about immigration.

I say good luck to President Obama. He is probably the most divisive president in modern history and he is either going to transform America or he is going to ruin the Democratic Party for a generation.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds gets to the heart of this in a link to a piece by Francis Cianfrocca on the Tea Party Movement: Cianfrocca writes about the problem of central planning, its misallocation of resources and its magnification of corruption (you think?):

The endpoint of central planning, if not outright failure, is a much deeper and more intractable division of society into haves and have-nots. After promising a better world for everyone, the progressives will end up creating a society that is more polarized than ever.

Let's generalize this a bit. The endpoint of putting anything into the political sector is to divide society. That's what we've done on education, on welfare, on health care. We have encouraged people to compete in the public square for government subsidies on education, on health care, and on welfare. And they do.

If we want to make America a better society, we've got to heal the divisions. That means that we've got to take politics out of as many things as possible. The science is settled on this. Researchers have found that by putting Americans in a room together to solve a problem they will almost always work together and compromise on a deal that gives everyone something of what they want. It's a win-win kind of thing.

But in politics, it's win-lose, and the loser goes away angry, muttering "wait until next time!"

That's the point of limited government. You limit the power of government and you limit the opportunity of politicians to divide us.

Obama a Socialist? Whatever.

Celebrated author Jonah Goldberg has a think piece in Commentary. "What Kind of a Socialist is Barack Obama?" he asks.

After a lot of thinking he decides that "neosocialist" is as good as anything. But what's wrong with "liberal fascist," Jonah, after the title of your bestselling Liberal Fascism?

But I think Jonah is trying to be too clever. Barack Obama is just the latest in a long line of political leaders that want to use political power to make society conform to their enlightened ideas.

People that go into politics are people who like to wield power. The purpose of law and constitutions is to limit that power. Because, in their own minds, there is no limit to the power they should seek and use--for the betterment of mankind, of course.

It used to be, in the agricultural era, that an elite of landed warriors ran the place. Their idea was to increase the amount of land they controlled, since land was the only source of wealth. War was what they knew, and war was what they did: war on each other and war on the peasants that grew the food that made them wealthy.

Now we have the "educated class" and they want things their way too. The only way they seem to know is through government power.

It will, of course, end in tears, or more likely mass graves. Because there is a limit to what force can achieve. After you have fought off the Huns or the Mongols and after you have tamed the latest generation of lower-class male youth, there's not much that government can usefully do.

The thing about government, all government, is that is goes bad fast. Because it is a system of winning election and rewarding your supporters, it is inherently corrupt.

So it doesn't matter how many left-liberal commentators you have singing your praises, your government-centric economy is inherently corrupt, inherently wasteful, inherently unjust.

You can see it in spades with the Obama administration. Everything President Obama has done has reeked of corruption, waste, and injustice. It started with the $787 billion stimulus that was nothing but a slush fund for Obama supporters. It continued with the GM and Chrysler bailouts in which the bondholders got shafted in favor of the unions that supported Obama's campaign. It reached an apogee with the corrupt bargain of the corrupt, wasteful, and unjust ObamaCare bill.

Now the Obama administration is pushing a financial reform bill that will vastly increase political (not regulatory) control over the finance industry.

I've said now for years that we needed Obama. We needed him so that the American people could decisively upchuck him and his style of big government politics.

Then we begin the noble task of getting government and government force out of the vital social tasks before this nation. We need to get government force out of health care, out of education, out of welfare, and out of retirement.

There is a simple reason why this is important.

It is because, as philosopher Ringo Starr says, "Everything the government touches turns to crap."

It's just not a good idea to have the education of children turn to crap. It's not a good idea to have grandma's health care turn to crap. It is not a good idea to have the relief of the poor turn to crap.

But I repeat myself.

Silence on Fannie and Freddie

It's good to learn that General Motors and Chrysler are doing well and are paying back their bailout loans, made through the federal government's TARP fund.

You'd think, from the MSM coverage, that all is hunky-dory. Why, according to the administration, the total cost of TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, will only be $127 billion.

The administration expects the total cost of TARP to be less than $127 billion, though Mr. Allison [from the US Treasury] said improvements at American International Group Inc. and General Motors Co. could change that figure.

Erm. So why aren't we hearing anything about Fannie and Freddie, the government-sponsored mortgage giants, once the ATM of former administration officials, and now in government receivership?

OK, here's a report from Peter J. Wallison in The Wall Street Journal.

Losses at Fannie and Freddie are expected to be $400 billion. The latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is $381 billion. But maybe the Obama administration knows something we don't know.

Last Christmas Eve, Treasury removed the $400 billion cap on what the government might be required to invest in these two GSEs in the future, and this may tell the real story about the cost to taxpayers. In typical Washington fashion, everyone has amnesia about how this disaster occurred.

Yes. If you talk to your liberal friend, amply informed by The New York Times, he will have very little grasp of the Fannie Freddie debacle.

And that's the way it's supposed to be. Don't inquire too much about the many government messes that liberals have dreamed up over the years and are too proud to admit failure. Don't inquire too much about the bottomless pit that we taxpayers are committed to dig for the politicians who promised affordable housing for people that couldn't afford it.

And what about the bondholders at General Motors and Chrysler that got haircuts? We are not talking about the stockholders. The are risk-takers. We are talking about widow-and-orphan bondholders. The happy-talk news items and GM and Chrysler aren't talking about that. They are talking about GM and Chrysler repaying the government, not the bondholders.

There's a quote from Ringo Starr, the Beatle, that seems to address all of this. According to the philosopher from Liverpool:

Everything the government touches turns to crap.

No kidding.