If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you’re not a racist, you’ll have to vote for someone else in 2012 to prove you’re not an idiot.

From Amnon.

From Ed Morrissey.

Back at the end of October in 2008, Peggy Noonan hurriedly jumped on the express train to the Finland Station, endorsing Barack Obama in quite warm terms, and dismissing regrets or apologies by pointing to the mandate of heaven.

[L]et’s be frank. Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves.

On Wednesday, President Obama gave a news conference to share his thoughts. Viewers would have found it disappointing if there had been any viewers. The president is speaking, in effect, to an empty room. From my notes five minutes in: “This wet blanket, this occupier of the least interesting corner of the faculty lounge, this joy-free zone, this inert gas.” By the end I was certain he will never produce a successful stimulus because he is a human depression.

Actually I thought the worst thing you can say about a president: He won’t even make a good former president.

His detachment is so great, it is even from himself. As he spoke, he seemed to be narrating from a remove. It was like hearing the audiobook of Volume I of his presidential memoirs. “Obama was frustrated. He honestly didn’t understand what the country was doing. It was as if they had compulsive hand-washing disorder. In ‘08 they washed off Bush. Now they’re washing off Obama. There he is, swirling down the drain! It’s all too dramatic, too polar. The morning after the election it occurred to him: maybe he should take strong action. Maybe he should fire America! They did well in 2008, but since then they’ve been slipping. They weren’t giving him the followership he needed. But that wouldn’t work, they’d only complain. He had to keep his cool. His aides kept telling him, ‘Show humility.’ But they never told him what humility looked like. What was he supposed to do, burst into tears and say hit me? Not knowing how to feel humility or therefore show humility he decided to announce humility: He found the election ‘humbling,’ he said.”

Read the whole thing.

Rich Lowery explains how the democrat minority lucked into control of both electoral branches of government and then proceeded to self destruct.

The frustrations of minority status can drive a political party batty.

The temptation is to substitute belligerence for thought, insist on a self-destructive purity, lash out at the American public and question the wisdom and viability of the country’s institutions. Indulging in these tendencies almost always makes a party’s position worse rather than better.

The Obama Democrats may be the first party to engage in this self-defeating behavior—borne of a frustrated desperation—while holding the presidency and both houses of Congress by substantial margins.

Through an accident of timing (a national election coinciding with a financial crisis) and the exhaustion of the Bush-DeLay Republicans (who lost power almost by default), liberals took the commanding heights of the federal government while remaining a minority disposition in our national life. In short, they became a rump majority.

Through President Obama’s alchemy, these temporarily enlarged congressional numbers were supposed to be transformed into a permanent realignment. It hasn’t worked out, obviously.

In the last 20 months, Democrats have had the power to do almost everything they want, except command the allegiance of the public. That has made them and their allies feel embattled, isolated and perpetually aggrieved. They act like a forlorn minority at the same time they control every lever of elective power in Washington.

The ultimate source of the Democrats’ discontent is quite simple: They’ve lost independents. In 1994, in taking Congress, Republicans won independents by 14 percentage points. In 2006, in taking it back, Democrats won independents by 18 points. In the latest Gallup survey, Republicans lead among independents by 11 points. ...

The pollster.com average of Obama’s approval rating among independents is a dismal 37.9 percent. This meltdown should have launched a thousand agonized liberal op-eds, conferences and strategy papers on how to win back the center. If, that is, liberalism had any realistic sense of its limits.

In the midst of a catastrophic loss of the middle, Obama’s supporters exhort him to get more angry, insistent and ambitiously liberal. Having already pushed for a bridge too far, they want to go farther still. When they can’t, they conclude it’s a damning indictment of Obama’s failure of nerve and the nation’s ungovernablility.

There’s little acknowledgment that the country is in a different place than they are. To the extent there is, so much worse for the country, which is condemned for its backwardness and intolerance. The majority is not just wrong on immigration enforcement and the Ground Zero mosque, it’s contemptible. Who knew that the American public would get accused of bigotry more often after electing an African-American president than before?

As former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner writes, liberals “are expressing deepening alienation from our nation and turning on the American people with a vengeance.” They thought they had a mandate from heaven in 2008 and can’t bear the thought that they deluded themselves. They’ve gone from triumphalism to a petulant and uncomprehending tantrum in less than two years. The rump majority looks more exhausted by the day.

1:29 video.

[I]ndependent voters… in 2008 voted like Democrats and in 2010 voted like Republicans.

Is it a backlash? It seems cooler than that, a considered and considerable rejection that appears to be signaling a conservative resurgence based on issues and policies, most obviously opposition to increased government spending, fear of higher taxes, and rejection of the idea that expansion of government can or will solve our economic challenges.

—————————————————
The Financial Times looks at the Obama Presidency and concludes: There will probably be no health care bill. Obama has nothing to talk about in the State of the Union speech he recently postponed. This will not be a transformational presidency, and the White House needs to change direction and heads need to roll, or he’ll be in worse trouble next month.

Italians scientists propose breeding living cattle backwards to a genetic match with the extinct aurochs. Heck cattle descended from Herman Goering’s similar program are available, but they are intending to use Highland cattle and the Italian Maremma.
———————————————————
Frank Fleming, at PJM, reveals more Game Changing moments from 2008:

Barack Obama’s rumored drug use was a lot more recent than most people think, but he vowed to never do it again after he woke up one morning with Joe Biden as a running mate.

Read the whole thing.

The Washington Times reports that Eric Holder’s Justice Department is again roadblocking federal efforts to investigate incidents of voter intimidation in Philadelphia during the 2008 presidential election by Black Panthers costumed as security guards and brandishing billy clubs.

The systematic efforts by the Obama Administration to protect their own partisans from prosecution are outrageous and have every possibility of developing into a serious scandal capable of inflicting major harm on a presidency already in serious trouble.

The Justice Department has told the federal attorneys who filed a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party for disrupting a Philadelphia polling place last year not to cooperate with an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The commission last week subpoenaed at least two Justice Department lawyers and sought documents from the department to explain why the complaint was dismissed just as a federal judge was about to punish the New Black Panther Party and three of its members for intimidating voters.

On November 3, the fairy tale died. The election results in Virginia and New Jersey dismantled the self-satisfied, just-so story that Democrats have been telling themselves about last year’s election.

The story goes like this: In 2008, Americans voted for change not just in the nation’s leadership, but in its fundamental political orientation. They wanted a shift to the left not seen since 1932. The nation’s political map had been utterly transformed. Barack Obama owned the suburbs and independents, and laid claim to formerly secure Republican states. An outdated GOP had been reduced to a rejectionist husk clinging to rural areas and the South.

A more modest rival interpretation explained it differently: A charming young man running against a Republican party debilitated by its association with an unpopular war and a politically toxic incumbent won a solid 7-point victory nationally. He sounded reasonable and moderate, and won for his party something important, if not necessarily epoch-making: a chance to govern after the other side had blown it.

The Republican sweep of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey is flatly incompatible with the first, heroic interpretation of 2008. If things changed so fundamentally, they wouldn’t have snapped back so quickly.

Read the whole thing.

Daniel Henniger explains that economic fears drove independent voters to flee the Republican ticket and vote for Barack Obama, whose calm tones and competently-run campaign promised he could handle the crisis. The economic crisis was not resolved quickly. Democrats chose not to adopt the conventional policy of cutting taxes, preferring to regulate and spend. The public’s unease has been increased rather than assuaged by the Administration’s determination to advance an extreme partisan agenda, even in the face of declining public support.

Independent voters across the U.S. have become like the massive cattle herd John Wayne drove from Texas to Kansas in “Red River.” These voters are spooked and on the run, a political stampede that veered left in November 2008 and now right a mere year later. They will keep running—crushing incumbents, candidates and political models of the left and right—through November 2010 and onto 2012 until they find a person or party capable of leadership appropriate to our unsettled times. And yes, Virginia, the possibility of a man on a white horse in 2012 is not out of the question.

Exit polls in New Jersey and Virginia said the economy was on voters’ minds. Unemployment is near 10% and may stay there for a year. But it’s deeper than that.

This isn’t just another turn in the business cycle. On Sept. 15, 2008, the economic structure of the U.S. imploded. Lehman Brothers, a synonym for the American financial bedrock, filed for bankruptcy. On June 1, 2009, General Motors, once a synonym for American economic primacy, filed for bankruptcy and was effectively nationalized. In the nine months between these two iconic events, the American people were riveted to news of economic distress.

The signal event of the 2008 presidential election was the day in September when Sen. John McCain “suspended” his campaign to deal with the financial crisis. Within 48 hours, his candidacy stood naked. Mr. McCain’s instincts were right; The American people wanted leadership. But he didn’t have a clue how to provide it. The restless herd ran toward Barack Obama.

Now they’re ready to run toward someone else. They just did in New Jersey and Virginia.

This is not normal. A new American presidency, especially this one, should not be in this much trouble 10 months into a four-year term. Nor would it be if not for the economic events that fell out of September 2008.

Absent the immediate need to steady the credit markets and deal with a deepening recession, the Obama White House would have introduced—and passed—its restructuring of the U.S. health-care system in early spring. Instead, voters watched Congress create and pass a nearly trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill, and then erect the world’s tallest national budget—a towering $3.5 trillion. They watched the Obama Treasury, now hard-wired to the Federal Reserve, intervene massively in the structure of the private economy. There was an attempted federal climate-control bill, an attempted expansion of union organizing rights (card check) and second thoughts on free-trade agreements.

Only then, in June, was this hyperactive government able to introduce its health-care proposal—the public option, the remaking of the insurance industry, a 5.4% tax surcharge, the expansion of Medicaid.

After his election, Mr. Obama’s strongest attribute was limitless self-confidence. He was a man aglow with knowledge, control and . . . leadership. Now, with the scale and cost of Mr. Obama’s ambitions so clear, the question many voters are asking is whether the Obama government’s reach exceeds its grasp or abilities—or any government’s.

The most acute voters know these are not normal times. The Obama vision so far looks a lot like the social-market economic model of Europe, where leaders such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel give homilies about the “crisis” of capitalism. If American voters then look toward Asia, they see rising economies using capitalism to supplant Europe.

American voters know they’ve reached a long-term economic tipping point. Which way to go, old West or new East? They understand the challenges are growing while the politicians seem to be shrinking.

So the Republicans “won” Tuesday. Now what?

Just as the Democrats in 2008 ran mainly against “Bush,” the Republican political model seems to be to let Democratic failure dump states like New Jersey and Virginia into their control. But I think most voters, no matter their party registration, know that in the past 12 months the stakes for them have suddenly become larger than political “control.”

Unless leadership emerges equal to the new world voters see they have fallen into, volatility in America’s election returns is going to be the norm for a long time.

The moral is that personal charm and a reassuring manner are powerful tools in gaining middle-of-the-road support in American politics, but keeping the support of a coalition including the ideologically uncommitted requires a kind of leadership which Ronald Reagan had and which Barack Obama lacks.

Obama already seems already far more likely to go down in history as a surly extremist who achieved election by temporarily feigning a false bonhommie, à la Jimmy Carter, than a genuinely transformative president like Reagan.

Going for a New Deal-style massive entitlement program in the midst of recession, after quadrupling the deficit, will never persuade independents that this administration is responsible and pragmatic.

It’s not often that a plum ambassadorship goes to someone who isn’t a career foreign service officer or a big bucks campaign contributor, but Pres. Obama has nominated Anne Slaughter Andrew to be the ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica.

Hmmm.

The prospective diplomat is an Indiana Univ. trained atty who currently is Principal of New Energy Nexus, LLC, and, according to the WH release on her nomination, “advises companies and entrepreneurs on investments and strategies to capitalize on the New Energy Economy.”

But Andrew is also wife of ex-IN Dem chair Joe Andrew, who was tapped by Bill Clinton to be DNC from ‘99 to ‘01 who also was a big backer of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in her ‘08 bid—until five days before the must-win IN Dem primary last year, when Andrew with great fan-fare threw Clinton under the bus, endorsed Obama, urged all his fellow Hoosiers to vote for Obama and called up party leaders and fellow superdelegates (Andrew had that status to the Dem convo because he was an ex-DNC chair) to basically shut the nominating contest down after the IN primary and get behind Obama.

In a public letter that at times was melodramatic and angst-ridden, Andrew wrote: “Why call for superdelegates to come together now to constructively pick a president? The simple answer is that while the timing is hard for me personally, it is best for America. We simply cannot wait any longer, nor can we let this race fall any lower and still hope to win in November. June or July may be too late.”

Well, the contest did run until June and Obama still somehow made it to the WH. But for Joe, this was a selfless act: “My endorsement of Senator Obama will not be welcome news to my friends and family at the Clinton campaign… If the campaign’s surrogates called Governor Bill Richardson, a respected former member of President Clinton’s cabinet, a ‘Judas’ for endorsing Senator Obama, we can all imagine how they will treat somebody like me.”

Geee, somehow he managed to survive and somehow the current Sec/State must have an amazing amount of equanimity and grace not to have choked on this administration nomination.

In the depths of the financial crisis last year, people like Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Greg Fleming (then of Merrill Lynch), JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein were telling everyone that candidate Barack Obama was a “moderate,” and moderation was what this country needed.

What a difference a year makes. They won’t admit it in public—but in private conversations, the top guys on Wall Street are feeling burned.

The guy who seemed like such a steady voice—vowing to curb runaway spending and restoring order to the banking system and the economy as a whole—is instead so driven to achieve his big-government policy goals that he and his policy people are ignoring their own economic advisers on the severe economic costs that his agenda will cause.

I’m told that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers have both complained to senior Wall Street execs that they have almost no say in major policy decisions. Obama economic counselor Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, is barely consulted at all on just about anything—not even issues involving the banking system, of which he is among the world’s leading authorities.

At most, the economic people and their staffs get asked to do cost analyses of Obama’s initiatives for the White House political people—who then ignore their advice.

It’s almost the opposite approach, the Wall Street crowd complains, from the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, whose main first-term achievement—deficit reduction—was crafted by his chief economic adviser, Robert Rubin.

Like Obama, Clinton and Rubin promised to raise taxes on the “rich,” and they did. But Clinton didn’t raise taxes to embark on a wild-eyed redistribution of wealth and massive programs. In the early Clinton years, Rubin convinced the president that he needed to avoid the grim consequences of runaway spending—and after the Republicans took Congress in ‘94, it was no longer an option.

Of course, the Clinton tax hikes came at a cost—before the tech boom ignited the economy in 1995, growth was mediocre at best. But government spending remained under control, and lower interest rates followed, as did an economic recovery.

Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.

As one CEO of a major financial firm told me: “The economic guys say that when they explain the costs of programs, the policy guys simply thank them for their time and then ignore what they say.”

In other words, the economic people feel that they have almost no say in this administration’s policy decisions.

Get out the shovels and start burying it, folks, before it starts to smell. It’s dead. The Obama Revolution is over. The high tide of American leftism has crested. The Retreat from Moscow is on.

In 2008, a glib and fortunate beneficiary of a massive legacy of liberal guilt was able to smooth talk his way into an electoral victory based on a sudden market crash created by the combination of long-standing democrat housing market interventions combined with well-founded fears of the possibility of his election.

Ironically, it was Mr. Market’s bipolar panic attack which actually assured that the nightmare of his own imaginings could and would become reality. The GOP turned chicken, too, and chose what the bosses thought must be the safest play, nominating the geriatric and politically incoherent John McCain, who ran an uninspired campaign, trying to oppose age to youth and promises of less to promises of everything paid for by somebody else. Everything fell apart at once. So the least qualified, most radical candidate ever, a community organizer and Alinskyite radical, whose best friends have been black Communist poets, Weathermen cop killers, and racist clergymen, waltzed into the White House, accompanied by a Star Wars bar’s assemblage of exotic representatives of the radical fringe, all bent of bringing Socialism to America.

He spent a few trillions in a matter of weeks, assuring a dimmer future to a generation of Americans, then gleefully nationalized General Motors delivering control of America’s largest auto maker to the UAW’s commissars. Barack Obama took to heart Rahm Emanuel’s dictum about using an economic crisis as an empowering opportunity. But that power was only on loan. The American people were frightened and willing to put their faith in the two party system, roll the dice, and give the party which had been out of power a chance. Their decision had only been based on the “we’re tired of A and unhappy, let’s try B for a while” approach. The assertion by democrats and by Barack Hussein Obama that the 2008 election gave them a mandate for Socialism has been proven wrong.

Obama in 2009 has wound up just like Napoleon in 1812. Flushed with a string of victories, armed with an unfilibusterable Congressional majority, backed by an enormous army of labor unions, interest groups, and activist organizations, funded by George Soros, allied to the mainstream media, and well-supported by the mass artillery of the leftwing blogosphere, the Obama Administration even succeeded in negotiating free passage for the invasion from large corporations like Walmart and the pharmaceuticals companies (no doughty Belgium in 1914, they). As always, capitalists will willingly sell the rope used to hang free enterprise to the bolsheviks for short term profit as long as the sellers get assurances that they themselves will be hanged last.

But the denoument is worthy of Tolstoy. The Grand Armee of Socialist Ideology, despite all its votes in Congress; its media support; its grand alliance of corrupt businesses, unions; the AMA and the AARP; ACORN and George Soros has been brought to a crashing halt. Its morale is crumbling. It is in complete disorder, and it will soon be in full retreat. Barack Obama has been dealt a devastating defeat, one which will permanently shatter his image of invincibility, and placing Barack Obama, the democrat party, and the American left on the defensive, struggling to avoid complete and total ruin.

The left is crying out that it was the weak and inferior forces of the Republican Party and the American Right that brought them low. I’m a Movement Conservative and a rock-ribbed Republican myself. I wish that it were so. But the truth is the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement have no such capabilities. What defeated Obamacare was the American People.

Barack Obama believed the American People are so stupid, so selfish, and so greedy that they would fall for democrat promises of health care free lunch, all the health care everybody needs or wants, paid for by the upper tiny few percent of staggeringly rich taxpayers (who won’t even miss it anyway). Uncle Sam will just nudge the taxes on Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the guys at Goldman getting those multi-million dollar bonuses up just a notch, essentially sneaking into their bedrooms and removing some extra spare change from the tops of their bureaus, and granny gets her hip replacement gratis, and Tiny Tim will walk again, even if Bob Crachit has no insurance.

None of these promises were true, of course. The democrat “health care reform” was never going to bring ordinary Americans the kind of care US Senators get, “just like me,” as Obama promised so persistently during the campaign. What it was going to do, obviously, was to create a new and enormous federal entitlement program necessitating a massive increase of government’s share of the US economy. Socialism would have made a scarce and desirable service, medical care, cost free, obviously dramatically increasing demand. Most Americans would inevitably pay more and get less, as the health care butter got spread by the federal knife onto ever more slices of bread.

America today is a rapidly aging nation. The time to offer the Woodstock Generation a nice socialist health care system was 40 years ago when we were young and perfectly healthy, and could not imagine ourselves ever really needing it. Today, there are lots of Boomer generation geezers out there who have a real personal interest in just how health care reform will affect them now and who are old enough to know better. A lot of people tried sharing the granola and peanut butter supply back on the commune in 1969. They know just how “sharing” works out.

It was not Dick Armey and Rush Limbaugh who showed up with greater strength and larger funding or who beat back the democrat advance with superior cunning. It was the American People, who are experiencing this country’s economy right now, who saw Obama’s stimulus package and his bailouts, who paid their income taxes, and who are beginning to become afraid, very afraid of where Barack Obama’s economic policies are leading us. It was the American People that said, No, we do not believe there is really such a thing as a free lunch. It is the American People who are turning out at those Town Halls, and whose negative opinions are showing up in all the polls. It is the American People, not the Republican Party, that has defeated Obamacare.

Aided by a dishonest and partisan media, which scrupulously avoided investigating the facts and which faithfully reported the democrat party line, clown comedian and ultra-liberal Al Franken finally successfully stole last year’s close race for the senate seat from Minnesota when the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to interfere with an accomplished crime and instead declared him the winner.

The honorable exception in the major media was, as usual, the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election.

As Chris Cillizza explains, the key to Franken’s successful election theft was: (1) being the first to bring in highly-paid talented legal big guns to manipulate a post-election ballot review process in his favor, and (2) media allies representing an artificially contrived and completely partisan recount as decisive and meaningful. Franken keeping his repulsive and excruciatingly vulgar personality under wraps for the duration helped a lot, too.

How did Franken manage to wind up on top? ...

Marc Elias, a Democratic election attorney with Perkins Coie, was on the ground in Minnesota within days of the near-tie on election day. Elias spearheaded a series of legal victories in the early days of the recount that effectively defined the universe of votes that were counted and led to Franken going from behind on election night to ahead when they recount ended. By the time Ben Ginsberg, the Republicans’ election lawyer par excellence, got deeply involved, it was already too late. ...

When the statewide recount ended, Franken led by 225 votes. ... it’s hard to overstate how important the fact that Franken was (seemingly- JDZ) ahead was to setting public perception regarding the legal fight that ensued. Coleman was forced to be the aggressor legally, claiming that all sorts of ballots had been illegally counted (and not counted) while, through it all, the fact that Franken led by 225 votes hung over the proceedings. Voters tend to lose interest in politics quickly—particularly after an election as nasty and long as this race was—and that sort of fatigue played right into Franken’s hands. ...

Franken’s problem throughout the race was, well, himself. ... When the race ended in a tie, Franken did something very smart; he stayed out of the spotlight. He was rarely seen or heard and when he did pop into public view it was during an occasional visit to Washington when he was huddling with potential colleagues and getting briefed on issues by potential staffers.

When, oh, when will the Republican Party learn to play politics professionally against thugs, thieves, and liars? Watching Norm Coleman get rolled was like watching the team from St. Fauntleroy’s Academy for Young Gentlemen take on the Bowery Boys Reformatory team on the football gridiron. No contest at all.

He notes that lost elections have previously been claimed to mark conservatism’s final defeat very prematurely. The difference this time seems to be a vacuum in our national leadership and a new accommodationist internal (Brooks, Frum, Douthat) movement urging conservatives to concede on liberal positions and scuttle toward the center in hope of finding a majority.

Voegeli disagrees, arguing that we should nail our colors to the mast; and, like Whittaker Chambers, resolve to stand upon the side of truth and liberty however adverse their prospects.

One measure of its strength is that conservatism’s policy victories often engender conservatives’ political defeats. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 paved the way for Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, in the same way that the success of the surge in Iraq in 2007 took the war off the front page in 2008, and made it impossible for John McCain to gain electoral traction as its chief advocate. The tax reduction and simplification achieved by the tax reforms of 1986 cleared the canvas for liberals to immediately begin advocating new increases and complexities. Even as the memory of the great crime wave from 1960 through 1994 has been effaced by the expectation of safe streets over the past 15 years, liberal activists and writers are laying the groundwork for a campaign against America’s “scandalously” high incarceration rates. Their “logic” is that safe streets have rendered full prisons unnecessary-rather than full prisons having rendered safe streets possible.

In short, America’s political division of labor finds conservatives cleaning up liberals’ messes, and liberals sweeping into the newly tidy spaces to start making new messes. If that’s true, what is to be done? ....

The danger liberalism poses to the American experiment comes from its disposition to deplete rather than replenish the capital required for self-government. Entitlement programs overextend not only financial but political capital. They proffer new “rights,” goad people to demand and expand those rights aggressively, and disdain truth in advertising about the nature or scope of the new debts and obligations those rights will engender. The experiment in self-government requires the cultivation, against the grain of a democratic age, of the virtues of self-reliance, patience, sacrifice, and restraint. The people who have this moral and social capital understand and accept that there “will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out,” according to David Brooks. Instead, liberalism promotes snarling but unrugged individualism, combining an absolute right “to the lifestyle of one’s choice (regardless of the social cost) with an equally fundamental right to be supported at state expense,” as the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel once described it. Finally, the capital bestowed by vigilance against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is squandered when liberals insist on approaching street gangs, illegal immigrants, and terrorist regimes in the hopeful belief that, to quote the political scientist Joseph Cropsey, “trust edifies and absolute trust edifies absolutely.”

Conservatives have no guarantees that they will be able to save the American experiment from those who cavalierly dissipate the capital required to sustain it. They can only struggle to prudently reconcile the experiment’s deepest needs with the exigencies posed by today’s circumstances and threats. If that reconciliation ultimately requires nothing short of morally disgusting compromises that give up basic principles, the conservative will, instead, cheerfully commit to doing his duty for the duration, fully expecting to die on the losing side.

Read the whole thing.

—————————————————
But a recent Gallup Poll shows we still outnumber liberals and our numbers are growing.

40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004.

Karl Rove notes that now that he’s in office Americans are getting basically the opposite of what Barack Obama promised during the campaign. Obama has continued some of his campaign rhetoric, but has again and again contradicted himself by continuing Bush Administration national security policies.

Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush’s military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an “enormous failure” and a “legal black hole.” His campaign claimed last summer that “court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists.” Upon entering office, he found out they aren’t.

He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate “consequences” for “a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones” on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Now’s he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a “quagmire” and ordered more troops to that country. He isn’t calling it a “surge” but that’s what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.

On the other hand, during the campaign, Obama promised fiscal moderation, and in that department, too, he is delivering the exact opposite of those campaign promises.

Mr. Obama campaigned on “responsible fiscal policies,” arguing in a speech on the Senate floor in 2006 that the “rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy.” In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he pledged to “go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work.” Even now, he says he’ll “cut the deficit . . . by half by the end of his first term in office” and is “rooting out waste and abuse” in the budget.

However, Mr. Obama’s fiscally conservative words are betrayed by his liberal actions. He offers an orgy of spending and a bacchanal of debt. His budget plans a 25% increase in the federal government’s share of the GDP, a doubling of the national debt in five years, and a near tripling of it in 10 years.

On health care, Mr. Obama’s election ads decried “government-run health care” as “extreme,” saying it would lead to “higher costs.” Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it, saying, “It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system.”

Making adjustments in office is one thing. Constantly governing in direct opposition to what you said as a candidate is something else. Mr. Obama’s flip-flops on national security have been wise; on the domestic front, they have been harmful.

In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called “the projection of appealing images.” All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image “becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself.” Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out.

Mr. Obama’s appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America’s security interests.

Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

Jonah Goldberg reminds readers that the voters threw out the GOP majority in Congress in 2006 because of corruption scandals. But replacing them with democrats has not proven to be a very effective cure, has it?

Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 in no small part because of their ability to bang their spoons on their high chairs about what they called the Republican “culture of corruption.” Their choreographed outrage was coordinated with the precision of a North Korean missile launch pageant. And, to be fair, they had a point. The GOP did have its legitimate embarrassments. California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were fair game, and so was Rep. Mark Foley, the twisted Florida congressman who allegedly wanted male congressional pages cleaned and perfumed and brought to his tent, as it were.

Of course, it wasn’t as if Democrats were without sin. Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson was indicted on fraud, bribery and corruption charges in 2007, after an investigation unearthed, among other things, $90,000 in his freezer. Then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was busted in a prostitution scandal.

But that’s all yesterday’s news. Let’s look at the here and now.

Read the whole thing.

Ross Douthat argues the position more tentatively than I would.

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

Certainly Cheney himself seems to feel that way. Last week’s Sean Hannity interview, all anti-Obama jabs and roundhouses, was the latest installment in the vice president’s unexpected – and, to Republican politicians, distinctly unwelcome – transformation from election-season wallflower into high-profile spokesman for the conservative opposition. George W. Bush seems happy to be back in civilian life, but Cheney has taken the fight to the Obama White House like a man who wouldn’t have minded campaigning for a third Bush-Cheney term.

Imagine for a moment that he’d had that chance. Imagine that he’d damned the poll numbers, broken his oft-repeated pledge that he had no presidential ambitions of his own, and shouldered his way into the race. Imagine that Republican primary voters, more favorably disposed than most Americans to Cheney and the administration he served, had rewarded him with the nomination.

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

I think Douthat is mistaken in supposing that Dick Cheney is unlibertarian or that, because he’s been willing to defend roughing up the three most prominent captured Al Qaeda conspirators to save LA, that Dick Cheney is wedded to a “national security state.”

Even smart and reasonably conservative members of the national commentariat too frequently check their skepticism at the door and buy into the river of BS discharging from the polluted streams of the establishment media. That alleged “national security state” amounted to some unnecessary navel-gazing memos and essentially the continuation of exactly the very same data-mining practices which the federal government began carrying on under Bill Clinton and the same covert scrutiny of overseas correspondence that went on under every other president since the 1940s.

Personally, I suspect that, given a chance, Cheney would prove more conservative about foreign commitments and a lot less Wilsonian than George W. Bush.

It’s true that Dick Cheney, in the manner of all dangerously competent and articulate national conservative figures, has been on the receiving end of the MSM’s scorched earth policy, which has systematically portrayed him as the living equivalent of Darth Vader. In reality, Dick Cheney is a salt-of-the-earth hometown American guy, just an exceptionally bright example of the genre. Real acquaintance would make Americans recognize Dick Cheney as the super-competent downtown businessman, the guy who runs the annual barbecue in his capacity as head of the local Rotary, the avuncular man of affairs you turn to when you need advice on complicated financial matters.

I think Ross Douthat is right in believing that we’d have had the odds overwhelmingly against us running Cheney last Fall, and maybe we would still have lost, but in that case we’d have been better off for fighting the good fight, and we’d have proud of having supported a worthy candidate instead depressed over being associated with a dufus like McCain.

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”...

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”

Last November’s election and the radical policies of the Obama administration have resulted in widespread ongoing gun and ammunition stockpiling and hoarding prompted by direct fears of new regulations and even federal gun confiscation.

The week Barack Obama was elected president, the amount of criminal background checks related to the purchase of firearms jumped 49 percent over the previous year, FBI statistics show.

It’s a trend that hasn’t ceased to stop, as background checks for firearm purchases have continued to increase in the months following the November election, when compared to the same time a year ago.

February alone witnessed a 23.3 percent jump, and January and December weren’t too far ahead, with 29 and 24 percent increases, respectively.

Fears of possible anti-gun legislation that’s being considered by the Obama administration might be contributing to the rise in sales, as well as the teeter-tottering economy.

The angst seems to be somewhat legitimate, although at this time it’s unclear whether a push to reinstate the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly referred to as the “assault weapons ban” will be successful.

“Well, as President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Attorney General Eric Holder said during a press conference last month that focused on growing violence in Mexico.

According to the State Department, drug cartels are using “automatic weapons and grenades” in confrontations against Mexican army and police units. The idea is by putting the ban back in place, the flow of guns into Mexico would be reduced.

Enacted in 1994 under then-president Bill Clinton, the assault weapons ban prohibited 19 specific firearms in addition to the possession, manufacturing and importation of the semiautomatic assault weapons and ammunition clips with more than 10 rounds for civilian use.

Though a bill to reinstate the act hasn’t been introduced in Congress yet, and Holder hasn’t given a timeline for when that might happen, numerous other pieces of legislation have been. Six U.S. House of Representative bills are currently being considered, the most troubling of which, gun-rights advocates say, is H.R. 45, known as the Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009.

If the legislation is successful, it would require a license for handguns and semiautomatic firearms, including those people already own. License applicants would have to under go a background check and take a written firearms examination, meant to test the applicant’s knowledge of safe storage and handling of guns, as well as the risks associated with the use of firearms in a home, legal responsibilities of owners of such weapons and “any other subject, as the Attorney General determines to be appropriate.”

Furthermore, “the bill would make it unlawful in nearly all cases to keep any loaded firearm for self-defense. A variety of ‘crimes by omission’... would be created. Criminal penalties of up to ten years and almost unlimited regulatory and inspection authority would be established,” according to Gun Owners of America, a non-profit lobbying organization led by former senator Bill Richardson.

The bill would also make it unlawful to sell or transfer a “qualifying firearm” to any person who is not licensed.
Other legislation includes H.R. 17 which would reaffirm the right to use firearms for self-defense and the defense of a person’s home and family; H.R. 1074 would permit the interstate sale of firearms as long as the laws of the states are complied with and adhere to federal law.

Bill Morris, Military Pro owner, said sales at his shop have increased as rumors about possible legislation circulate.

“A lot of customers are afraid that the guns they enjoy shooting so much for sports are going to be restricted,” Morris said. “A lot of the firearms people use for hunting and have used for a long time are being threatened.”

Ashville Citizen Times:

A judge on Tuesday sentenced two former Western Carolina University students to probation for dumping a dead bear on campus with Barack Obama campaign signs on its head.

Brothers Marvin Caleb Williams, of Wilkesboro, who was 20 at the time of his October arrest, and Mathew Colton Williams, who was 18, said nothing in court and declined to comment after the hearing.

Their attorney, Kris Earwood, told District Court Judge Richlyn Holt that the brothers “deeply apologize” and were shocked their action was perceived as a political statement.

“This was just a very bad choice by two young boys,” she said.

The brothers were kicked out of the university, Earwood said, and are going to community college. Both pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

Personally, I’d be glad to buy those brothers a beer.

There’s a collective outcry from conservatives bemoaning the “generational debt” that President Obama is in the process of placing upon this country, particularly its youth. They’re right, of course. But why complain?

It seems only fitting to me that the voters responsible for electing Obama ought to be saddled with the consequences. Let ‘em pay.

Jennifer Rubin observes how quickly Barack Obama has persuaded last autumn’s conservative turncoats to reconsider their wardrobes.

It’s not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War, but the president has lost David Brooks.

Well, well. First Chris Buckley and now Brooks. Usually it takes more than a month for presidents to disappoint those they have bamboozled during the campaign. But, as Brooks points out, Obama threw caution to the winds when he unveiled his monstrous budget.

[The] Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward. ...

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

————————————————————

Chris Buckley:

Hold on—there’s a typo in that paragraph. “$3.6 trillion budget” can’t be right.The entire national debt is—what—about $11 trillion? He can’t actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, “Well.”

Now let me say: Unlike Rush Limbaugh, I want President Obama to succeed. I honestly do. We are all in this leaky boat together—did I say “leaky”? I meant “sieve-like”—and it would be counterproductive, if not downright suicidal, to want it to go down just to prove a conservative critique of Keynesian economics. ...

One thing is certain, however: Government is getting bigger and will stay bigger. Just remember the apothegm that a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.And remember what de Tocqueville told us about a bureaucracy that grows so profuse that not even the most original mind can penetrate it.

If this is what the American people want, so be it, but they ought to have no illusions about the perils of this approach. Mr. Obama is proposing among everything else $1 trillion in new entitlements, and entitlement programs never go away, or in the oddly poetic bureaucratic jargon, “sunset.” He is proposing $1.4 trillion in new taxes, an appetite for which was largely was whetted by the shameful excesses of American CEO corporate culture. And finally, he has proposed $5 trillion in new debt, one-half the total accumulated national debt in all US history. All in one fell swoop.

He tells us that all this is going to work because the economy is going to be growing by 3.2 percent a year from now. Do you believe that? Would you take out a loan based on that? And in the three years following, he predicts that our economy will grow by 4 percent a year.

This is nothing if not audacious hope. If he’s right, then looking back, March 2009 will be the dawn of the Age of Stimulation, or whatever elegant phrase Niall Ferguson comes up with. If he turns out to be wrong, then it will look very different, the entrance ramp to the Road to Serfdom, perhaps, and he will reap the whirlwind that follows, along with the rest of us.

DFMF, 94-95:

It was the start of my senior year in high school… and one day she [his mother] marched into my room, wanting to know the details of [his friend’s] arrest. I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry. I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.

Personally, I always experience a dramatic increase in skepticism when I observe the argument from intimidation underway. Whenever people point to a bien pensant media consensus as established and inarguable fact, I start looking around for the alternative theory.

As to Obama’s native born status, I’ve read Internet rumors that say his grandmother supposedly said some time somewhere that he was born in a hospital in Kenya, but I’ve never seen any form of reliable report confirming that.

I’m well aware, and support the fact, that the United States traditionally bases citizenship both on jus sanguinis (citizenship by right of blood descent) and jus soli (citizenship by right of birth on US soil). I also think that if a person elected to national office by 60-odd million votes as the result of a process as expensive, time-consuming, and elaborate as a US Presidential election were to be disqualified by an arcane, subsequently eliminated, technical and ill-conceived provision of 1960s era citizenship laws, that it would be a disaster.

But I do also think the law is the law, and Barack Obama’s citizenship status, which undoubtedly features a number of occasions for questions, ought to have been thoroughly and openly explored before the democrat party ever nominated him.

I think it is probable that democrat party member state officials in Hawaii are telling the truth, and Obama’s birth certificate is real, valid, and in proper order, but I also wonder, if that is the case, why has he spent more than $800,000 (at last count, which was some time ago), fighting lawsuits in numerous states to resist allowing it to be released.

Obama’s effort and expense at litigating only makes sense if there is something to hide. (In an earlier post, I suggested that perhaps he was really named Sue.)

Beyond the alleged birth in Kenya to a slightly underage US citizen mom, there are also obviously live possibilities of problems with conflicting dual citizenships held contrary to US law. Obama might very well have been adopted by Mr. Soetero. His admission to Indonesian schools apparently required Indonesian citizenship. If Obama lost his US citizenship by adoption as a juvenile, he would have had to take official steps later to restore it.

Obama could have in the past claimed to be a British subject by virtue of his father’s Kenyan nationality. It is reported that Obama travelled to Pakistan in 1981, at a time when US citizens were not allowed to enter the country. Those circumstances suggest he could have used a different passport at the time.

There can be no doubt that the national news reporting organizations allowed political partisanship to deter them from undertaking the questioning and scrutiny of the candidacy of Barack Obama that would normally be expected. It would not be hard to argue that, at this point, the country would be better off, our electoral processes better served, simply by averting our eyes from what is bound to be, at most, some technical disqualification, faced with plunging the country into an appalling and unprecedented leadership crisis (and perhaps making that idiot Biden president), but it is simply not true that no rational basis for skepticism of Barack Obama’s eligibility for office exists.
——————————————-

Earlier posts.

Obama’s primary campaign left Hillary feeling like Poland, and Obama’s presidential campaign left John McCain feeling like France. The political blitzkreig combining media support, misdirection, and image continued on, right over the Congressional Republican minority, with the passage of the unread Stimulus bill.

Paul Schlichta, at American Thinker, suggests Republicans need to go back to staff college and start studying the Campaign of 2008 in order to figure out how to defeat his next offensive.

The audacity and speed with which Obama railroaded the stimulus bill through Congress took Republicans by surprise. It shouldn’t have; it was a logical extension of his campaign tactics.

Like the spear-carrying soldiers of Ethiopia, overwhelmed by Mussolini’s tanks and poison gas in 1936, the Republicans simply don’t know what hit them in last year’s election. Some felt that they had conducted an old-fashioned 20th century campaign while Obama mounted the first truly information-age 21st century political blitzkrieg. Others blame the blatant media bias, the race issue, or the unprecedented scale of fund raising and spending.

The first month of Obama’s regime has provoked a similar bewilderment. A dazed Congress hastily authorized a huge document, filled with hidden booby traps like RAT, that none of them had actually read, let alone comprehended. Republicans are now cowering in corners, wondering what atrocity will come next

Anyone hoping to launch a successful counterattack must first analyze Obama’s campaign and assess the factors that contributed to its success.

Mr. Schlichta fails to remark that General Recession has played a major role in panicking the civilian population into supporting “liberation” by Mr. Obama. Unreasoning fear caused voters to plump for an alternative, any alternative to Republicans who were inevitably tarred with responsibility for alarming economic developments during the final months of the lame duck Bush regime.

Personally, I think General Recession is already mightily indignant over the socialist measures recently adopted, and I believe that he and Marshall Inflation will before long turn on Mr. Obama, waging scorched earth war on his economy. The suffering public will inevitably assign responsibility where it belongs: to democrats, and the Emperor Obama’s Army of supporters will begin getting a whole lot smaller.

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is… subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

Both economic and cultural populism are politically potent, but in America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has always been much more powerful. Americans do not resent the success of others, but they do resent arrogance, and especially intellectual arrogance. Even the poor in our country tend to be moved more by cultural than by economic appeals. It was this sense, this feeling, that Sarah Palin channeled so effectively. Her appearance on the scene unleashed populist energies that McCain had not tapped, and she both fed them and fed off them. She spent the bulk of her time at Republican rallies assailing the cultural radicalism of Barack Obama and his latte-sipping followers, who, she occasionally suggested, were not part of the “the real America” she saw in the adoring throngs standing before her. Palin channeled these cultural energies more by what she was than by what she said or did, which contributed mightily to the odd disjunction between her professional resume and her campaign presence and impact. ...

Palin never actually boasted of ignorance or explicitly scorned learning or ideas. Rather, the implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

This form of intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society since World War II. It is not as exclusive or as anti-democratic as cultural elitism is in other countries, because entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not as difficult as it once was, at least for the middle class. Indeed, most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. They can speak of growing up in Scranton, even as they raise their noses at dirty coal and hunting season.

Nor is membership in the intellectual upper class determined by diplomas hanging on the wall. Palin could have gained entrance easily, despite the fact that she holds a mere degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. Although the intellectual elite is deeply shaped by our leading institutions of higher learning, belonging to it is more the result of shared assumptions and attitudes. It is more cultural than academic, more NPR than PhD. In Washington, many politicians who have not risen through the best of universities work hard for years to master the language and the suppositions of this upper tier, and to live carefully within the bounds prescribed by its view of the world.

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead—a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.

This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.

Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies who greeted her arrival on the scene as a kind of deliverance. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog’s Best Essays of the Year.

According to the latest Rasmussen Poll, public support for the democrat party’s so-called Stimulus Package is now in the minority, having declined to 37%.

Like the Daschle nomination, the Stimulus Package is visibly in serious trouble, and it appears very likely that the Obama Administration will soon demonstrate all over again the hasty retreat which is already becoming recognizable as this administration’s favorite, and most relied upon, political strategy.

Barack Obama made his way upwards to the Senate, his party’s nomination, and the Presidency by a combining an attractive image with studious avoidance of commitment to any controversial position which might expose him to attack.

It was easy to carry water for the democrat party’s ultra-liberal base and special interests, as well as for the Daley machine, while keeping one’s head down, and voting “Present!” on the hottest issues back in the Illinois State Senate. It was even easier to vote with the democrat majority some of the time, and be away campaigning, in the US Senate, when decisions which might cost something needed to be made.

Barack Obama is, as time goes by, going to find it harder to hide in the White House.

He won’t always be able to backtrack quickly, and issue a mildly rueful “I screwed up” press statement to dodge the bullet and get off the hook. In the end, he is going to wind up forced to commit himself one way or another on the big decisions that matter to America and the world. And, when he produces a national or international disaster, humiliation, or defeat, he is not simply going to be able to take it back or smile apologetically to an indulgent press corps, say: “I screwed up,” and get a free pass.

Character counts in leadership, and Barack Obama has made himself a political career by substituting charm for character. The Obama magic mirror, in which admirers can see whatever they want to project upon it, was a great way to get elected, but it is never going to protect its owner for four years.

There’s a serious debate in this country as to how best to end the recession. The average recession will last five to 11 months; the average recovery will last six years. Recessions will end on their own if they’re left alone. What can make the recession worse is the wrong kind of government intervention.

I believe the wrong kind is precisely what President Barack Obama has proposed….

Yes, elections have consequences. But where’s the bipartisanship, Mr. Obama? This does not have to be a divisive issue. My proposal is a genuine compromise.

Fifty-three percent of American voters voted for Barack Obama; 46% voted for John McCain, and 1% voted for wackos. Give that 1% to President Obama. Let’s say the vote was 54% to 46%. As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009: 54% of the $900 billion—$486 billion—will be spent on infrastructure and pork as defined by Mr. Obama and the Democrats; 46%—$414 billion—will be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me.

Then we compare. We see which stimulus actually works. This is bipartisanship! It would satisfy the American people’s wishes, as polls currently note; and it would also serve as a measurable test as to which approach best stimulates job growth.

I say, cut the U.S. corporate tax rate—at 35%, among the highest of all industrialized nations—in half. Suspend the capital gains tax for a year to incentivize new investment, after which it would be reimposed at 10%. Then get out of the way! Once Wall Street starts ticking up 500 points a day, the rest of the private sector will follow. There’s no reason to tell the American people their future is bleak. There’s no reason, as the administration is doing, to depress their hopes. There’s no reason to insist that recovery can’t happen quickly, because it can.

As a side note, this editorial makes it clear that Rush Limbaugh has become the main conservative source of leadership for the Republican Party.

Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election marked the first time a Democrat won a majority of all votes cast for president since 1964. Political scientists had widely forecast a Democratic victory in 2008 based on the faltering economy and the shift in party identification. But there were reasons to temper confidence in such forecasts. First, similar predictions had failed in 2000, and Obama faced a candidate viewed as far more moderate than he. Second, and most significant, Obama is black. If ever there was a situation where the old politics of race would drag a Democrat down, this was it. Why, then, did Obama win? Closer examination of exit polls points to a surprising conclusion. Obama won because of race—because of his particular appeal among black voters, because of the changing political allegiances of Hispanics, and because he did not provoke a backlash among white voters. ...

The percentage of blacks voting for the Democratic presidential candidate rose from 88 percent in 2004 to 95 percent in 2008; the percentage of Hispanics voting for the Democrats rose from 56 percent in 2004 to 67 percent in 2008—swings of 7 and 11 percent. White voters, the largest racial group, increased their support of the Democratic candidate by just 2 percentage points, from 41 percent for Kerry to 43 percent for Obama. Changes in turnout further magnified the swing in support. Whites represent a dwindling share of the electorate: 81 percent in 2000, 77 percent in 2004, and 74 percent in 2008. Blacks, by contrast, increased from 10 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2004 to 13 percent in 2008; Hispanics increased from 6 percent in 2000 to 8 percent in 2004 to 9 percent in 2008. Of the two effects, increased support of Democrats by nonwhite voters was critical. Had the racial composition of the electorate stayed the same in 2008 as it was in 2004, and had whites remained as supportive of Republicans as they were in 2004, Obama would still have won the popular vote, albeit by a much smaller margin. But, had Blacks and Hispanics voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004 while whites cast 43 percent of their vote for Obama, McCain would have won.

Republicans cannot increase white birthrates or diminish black and Hispanic, but they could relinquish Nativism and recognize that illegal aliens overwhelmingly come here to perform work that Americans want and need done at wage rates Americans can afford to pay.

Conservative leaders (Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin among others) made a big mistake in whipping up the base on the illegal aliens issue. Roman Catholic ethnic voters who work for a living and have strong family values are natural Republican voters. We just need to woo them away from the politics of dependency and group grievances. We need to stop playing law-and-order games with respect to people really guilty at root only of the voluntary exchange of labor for money made illegal by ill-considered, out-of-control immigration laws mired in occult political processes and intractable to reform.

———————————-

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.