Walter Russell Mead argues that Barack Obama is starting to look much more like Herbert Hoover.
President Hoover brought some convictions with him to office about how the economy worked, how government worked, and what his role as President should be. As the Depression deepened, he did the best he could within those limits, but nothing seems to have made him reconsider the mix of progressive ideas that he brought with him to the White House. As months of failure and disappointment grew into years, he doesn’t seem to have questioned those core ideas or to think about ways in which the economic emergency might require steps that in normal times would not be taken. He not only failed to end the Depression; he failed to give people a sense that he understood what was happening. Over-optimistic forecasts issued in part to build confidence came back to haunt him. To the public he seemed fuddled and doctrinaire, endlessly recycling stale platitudes in the face of radically new economic problems.
That’s beginning to sound a little like the current President’s predicament. Unless Lady Luck should emerge from retirement to sprinkle some growth dust on the economy, the President could find himself looking more Hooveresque by the day. Worse, President Obama faces problems that Hoover did not have — notably the five shooting wars on his hands in Afghanistan, tribal Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and now, apparently, Yemen.
Jim DeMint: Your tax dollars at work: $2 million grant to build a “culinary amphitheater,” wine tasting room, and gift shop in Richland, Washington. That makes sense, with the federal deficit where it is, everyone needs a drink.
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Cedar Falls, Iowa wants keys to residents’ homes. It’s for their safety.
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Kayleigh via Jose Guardia: Keynesianism is the equivalent of pouring your can of soda into a glass and trying to claim that, because the soda is now in the glass, you have more soda than if you had not poured it into the glass.
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Michelle Malkin: Woe is Weiner: No skillz to pay the billz. But don’t worry, he has a job offer with a higher salary. And he has a pension.
Barack Obama, Today show, February, 2009 (around 4:27): “Look, I’m at the start of my administration. One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable. I’ve got four years. … A year from now, I think, people are going to see that we are starting to make some progress. There’s still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done on three years, then there’s going to be a one term proposition.”
James Taranto: “Unlike homosexuality, heterosexuality is amenable to therapeutic remedies–or so Anthony Weiner and his fellow House Democrats would like us to believe.”
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Pam Geller quotes Muslim woman (throwing a backpack onto the DC Red Line train and exiting): “Praise Allah. I’m going to kill the world.”
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Jeff Dunetz: Obama’s Israel Policy: “F*** The Jews, They Will Vote For Us Anyway!â€
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Mark Steyn (reporting on last night’s NH debate): “John King makes Tim Pawlenty look like Lady Gaga.”
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Barack Obama: “I wish I could tell you there was a quick fix to our economic problems. But the truth is, we didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we won’t get out of it overnight. It’s going to take time.”
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Iowahawk: “The world is not a high school regional moderated debate & clarinet competition. It’s a high school parking lot gang fight.”
We should not listen to journalists, politicians, or academics who lecture about overpopulation, looming environmental catastrophe, or general unsustainability — if they live in a house over 2,500 square feet and fly more than once a month. Unfortunately that covers most of our alarmists. Otherwise these megaphones simply are medieval grandees seeking indulgences and penances through loud lectures against what they enjoy in the flesh. …
It is wise to navigate through the news and elite wisdom through two landmarks: anything that Barack Obama says will be airbrushed, improved, or modified to fit facts post facto; anything Sarah Palin says or does will be contextualized in Neanderthal terms. Teams of Post and Times volunteers now sort through Sarah Palin’s email; not a reporter in the world is curious about what Barack Obama once said about Rashid Khalidi or the Columbia University GPA that won him entrance to Harvard Law School. Accept that asymmetry and almost everything not only makes sense about these two cultural guideposts, but can, by extension, explain the 1860-like division in American itself. …
Go to Europe and see the left-wing desired future for America: dense urban apartment living by design rather than by necessity; one smart car; no backyard or third bedroom; dependence on mass transit; political graffiti everywhere demanding more union benefits or social entitlements; entourages of horn-blaring, police-escorted technocrats racing through the streets on the hour; gated inherited homes of an aristocratic technocracy on the Mediterranean coast, Rhine, Danube, etc., exempt from much socialist and environmental law; $10 a gallon gas; sky-high power bills; racial segregation coupled with elite praise of illegal immigration and diversity; and unexamined groupthink on green issues, entitlements, and the culpability of the U.S. Drink it all in and you have the liberal agenda for an America to be.
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.
–From a letter to John Taylor of Caroline (June 1798)
Kevin Drum complains that we conservatives view lefties like himself unfairly.
Reading Tim Pawlenty’s paean to double plus supply-side-ism yesterday made me wonder, once again, why conservatives think we liberals are opposed to it. I mean, if it actually worked, why would we be? It’s politically popular, and by their accounts it would generate trillions of dollars in extra revenue that we could use to finance our beloved lefty social programs. What’s not to like?
The only answer I can come up with is that conservatives are now completely invested in their theory that we liberals loathe rich people so much that we don’t care. We all want to screw the wealthy so badly that we’re willing to forego the elections we’d win and the mountains of revenue we’d gain if we lowered their taxes. We hate them that much.
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This is an interesting example of mocking a proposition without actually denying it.
Barack Obama is an excellent representative of the same political philosophy held by Kevin Drum and he is renowned for explicitly advocating increased taxation for purposes of “fairness” even if higher rates resulted in lower growth and less revenue being collected. He said exactly that, and by so doing defined himself, in one of the most famous of his campaign debates.
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So, are we conservatives being unfair? Would left-wingers like Kevin Drum and Barack Obama ever really support tax cuts for wealthier Americans if that was what it took to grow the economy and provide government with the funding the left desires to spend?
The answer is No. Left-wingers will never accept the reality that growth can only be achieved by lower taxes. The notion that allowing the rich to keep more grows the economy and benefits all is unacceptable. The left has ridiculed and dismissed this commonsensical proposition as “trickle-down economics.”
Leftism is fundamentally based on envy and societal division, and its route to power relies on agitating the passions of the masses, on mobilizing them on the basis of their animosity toward those better off than themselves. A theory of economics that proposes that failing to punish the rich will make everyone better off fundamentally contradicts leftism’s basic methods and ideology.
The psychology of the left is one of bitter resentment and hatred of anyone better off than oneself. The true leftist would rather everyone were worse off, as long as no one was permitted to be better off than anyone else.
This is the classic peasant mentality, which is the subject of a thousand bitter Eastern European jokes.
“An angel appears to a poor peasant, and informs him that God has taken pity on his sufferings and has sent a messenger to relieve his hardships. The peasant, he is told, may make one wish, and the angel will grant his desire. There is, however, a catch. The angel informs the peasant that, whatever he wishes for, his neighbor will receive also, and that neighbor will be given twice as much. The peasant reflects a moment, and tells the angel: ‘Pluck out one of my eyes.'”
(or woman) who does not possess the same conventional pop culture familiarity with Longfellow’s poem and Paul Revere’s 18th of April in ’75 ride to warn the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord that the British were coming.
Sarah Palin, unfortunately, in her characteristically more extreme version of the politician trying to bloviate for the media who engages mouth without fully engaging brain, made a syntactical hash of Paul Revere’s ride and laid herself open to accusations by the left that she was astonishingly ill-informed on supposed fine points of America history with which every member of the elite community of fashion is naturally intimately familiar.
A bit painful to watch, but short.
All the glee on the left provoked the learned Professor Jacobson to quote Revere’s actual account, which by one of life’s strange coincidences happened to fit Sarah Palin’s garbled narrative very nicely. It was all just more persiflage, of course. Palin really did misspeak, but the good Professor’s factual rejoinder quite effectively disarmed the smug lefties and drove them into full retreat, muttering unhappily to themselves. Bill Jacobson decisively closed down discussion on this particular incident.
The reality is that Sarah Palin obviously knows approximately as much (or as little) as any typical contemporary American adult about Paul Revere’s ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord. What happened is that Palin tried to combine more than one conceptual thread while distracted, and tied her verbiage into knots. When she is not paying attention, Sarah Palin does not express herself coherently and does not necessarily say what she means to say. Instead, she produces some kind of untidy substitute for what she needed and intended to say, and the result is too commonly a very unsatisfactory and naive sounding failure featuring some form of gaping vulnerability.
Palin is not as glib as many politicians, and she is not as careful as most politicians, so she has a well-recognized tendency to expose herself to this kind of unfavorable interpretation and ridicule from the left.
All politicians are fallible and human, and all politicians are capable of misspeaking when not paying attention, tired, or distracted.
Palin is not unusually ill-informed or even uniquely capable of gaffes. She is just not as cautious and characteristically self-protective as most politicians. There is no doubt, though, that her proclivity toward verbal confusion and gaffes is a serious weakness and a great vulnerability. Her credibility as a presidential candidate rests on her successfully making the effort to overcome these kinds of weaknesses. If Palin isn’t willing or able to improve, she is not going to be nominated.
Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas contended in his Milliman Lecture (.pdf), delivered May 19th at the University of Washington, that US economic growth has been roughly a consistent 3% per year over the last two centuries. There have been deviations from the pattern as a result of wars and financial downturns, but the American economy has consistently returned to the same trend line.
The recession which began in 2008, however, seems possibly to represent a fundamental change. Economic activity has not resumed growth. We have not returned to our customary trend line.
Instead, policies adopted by the Obama Administration and the democrat party congress elected in 2008 may have systematically reduced the American rate of economic growth to levels comparable to those of major European countries.
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You or I read all this and shudder at the terrible news, but the progressive Matthew Yglesias basically accepts Lucas’s analysis and sees this as cause for awarding Obama laurels.
[A]ccording to Lucas, is that Obama’s policies have caused us to deviate permanently to a lower, European-style growth path. The initiation of Social Security didn’t do that. Nor did its expansion in the 1950s. Nor did the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, Title I federal aid to schools or the War On Poverty. The Clean Air Act didn’t do it. Nor did the Clean Water Act or the Americans With Disabilities Act. George W Bush’s expansion of Medicare didn’t do it. Nothing about the growth of the welfare state in postwar America was able to jar America off the American-style growth path and put it on the European path. And then along came Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act and a few other bills, and like magic we’re Sweden. Forget the economic implications of this. Think about the history! Think about all the unfair knocks Obama’s gotten from the left. A leading economic scholar thinks Obama’s domestic agenda has been far-and-away the most consequential in American history. It’s kind of a big deal.
In other words, when we look around at the ruins of the US economy, the devastated housing market, massive unemployment, a crisis forcing Americans to reduce their life-styles and expectations, a shrinking economy, the financial industry departing overseas, the possible end of the US dollar as reserve currency, and a forced American retreat from military investment and commitments, as most of America despairs, we find the American left rejoicing over the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams.
If there was ever any question as to what the left’s agenda was ultimately directed, as to exactly what its goal really was, well, now you know.
Walter Russell Mead rants brilliantly on the subject of Barack Obama’s singular ineptitude at framing American Middle Eastern policy: “As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the “sour spotâ€: the position that angers everyone and pleases none.”
I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week. Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes irresistible.
“Here lies our sovereign king,†wrote the Earl of Rochester about King Charles:
Whose word no man relies on.
Who never said a foolish thing
Or ever did a wise one.
This seems to capture President Obama’s Middle East problems in a nutshell. The President’s descriptions of the situation are comprehensive and urbane. He correctly identifies the forces at work. He develops interesting policy ideas and approaches that address important political and moral elements of the complex problems we face. He crafts approaches that might, with good will and deft management, bridge the gaps between the sides. He reads thoughtful speeches full of sensible reflections.
But the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time. He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies. He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street. He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks†but for months not days.
Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history. Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.
Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.
Michael Barone cites 1,372 waivers from Obamacare, the NLRB’s intervention to prevent Boeing building an assembly plant in South Carolina, and an innovative attempt by the IRS to apply gift taxes to certain 501(c)(4) organizations guilty of supporting Republican candidates.
Punishing enemies and rewarding friends — politics Chicago style — seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and the IRS’ gift-tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors.
They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government.
One thing they don’t look like is the rule of law.
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Warner Todd Huston finds the same “Chicago Way” of doing things applies also to White House press pool access.
The Boston Herald recently found itself excluded from the press pool covering presidential visits. The Herald angrily reported finding out the reason for the ban.
The White House Press Office yesterday refused to address its policy on choosing local reporters for pool coverage, after the Herald was denied full access to the president’s Boston visit this week in part because the administration didn’t like the newspaper’s coverage. A press staffer’s e-mails cited a Mitt Romney op-ed that ran March 8 on the front page, challenging Obama’s policies the same day the president came to town for a fund-raiser.
