Quote of the Day: Ben Franklin on Public Financing

Ben Franklin:
"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

Follow the link to the "Best Political Essay of 2010".

Can America get out of its economic tailspin?

Spengler, the bad news guy, delivers more bad news. For both major political parties in the U.S. and for the American people. He used to work on Wall Street. I think his views are worth considering. Read the whole thing. A few excerpts:

Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination and then the presidency by offering the same program that Peter Pan gave the Darling children: Close your eyes, think happy thoughts, and you will be able to fly. "Yes we can" in the meantime has changed to "No he can't," as America lost five million jobs in 2009 and its effective unemployment rate, including so-called long-term discouraged workers, rose to 22%, a level unseen since the Great Depression. . .

America is the world's most successful state, and the one with the greatest longevity in its present constitutional form. But neither of the major parties is presently capable of governing it. The Republicans have been hoping that rage against Obama's failed economic policies would carry the party through the November congressional elections. But it is entirely conceivable that the Obama presidency will implode as quickly as the Obama campaign metastasized during the 2008 primaries, and that the electorate will call the Republicans' bluff.

Americans understood well enough in early 2008 that the traditional leadership of both parties had led them into a dead-end. . . .

Obama appealed to the voters' bottom-dollar hope that a new face in the White House would reverse the tide of misery. He did not have to offer specific promises: he only needed to give the voters the opportunity to kid themselves, which they were eager to do considering the unpleasant taste of the alternative. . .

Americans need to be told that they will need to invest before they can consume, and that the cure will take years rather than months to take effect. It's not a happy message, and no one in politics is willing to deliver it - if indeed anyone in politics understands it.

He offers some other specific suggestions for making painful adjustments to recover from the end of a 25-year cycle of wealth creation. "Not just a dip in the business cycle".

Another unsettling bit of information about the economy of the Western world (which may have come from an earlier Spengler column) is that the inflation of home prices in California came in part because people in Europe saw California real estate as one of their few options for investment. The western world has been living in a financial Hollywood fantasy.

Revolt against Arrogance

On the Scott Brown victory and the ability of power to corrupt:

Democrats in the present instance were on the receiving end of the public's anger and exasperation due to their stubborn refusal to hear other people's viewpoints about health care reform or to acknowledge that terrorists and suicide bombers qualify for the barest minimum of constitutional sympathy. Wise Republicans, should the GOP soon snatch back the power it lost in 2006 and 2008, will warn party members against the same kind of tone-deafness. The people won't take it. Maybe you think they should. Well, they won't. Don't try it.

Democracy has its obvious imperfections, but if you live under one, you'd better buy into the idea -- as Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Obama himself clearly haven't. The Democrats' view of democracy is monarchical. Shut up! They happily explain: here's what we're doing. . . .

I've a theory that American politicians aren't worse, intrinsically, than they used to be; they're vastly more powerful -- that's the point surely. They're more powerful because government itself is more powerful, not to mention more bloated, more self-centered, more everything except mindful of mere voters. Emphasis mine.

Read the whole thing.

Come to think of it, Scott Brown put the matter with great precision in his now-famous answer to David Gergen's question about responsibility for the maintenance of "Ted Kennedy's seat." Not Kennedy's seat, "the people's seat," Brown replied in setting Gergen straight.

Let Brown keep up that style of talk, that kind of thinking, and Massachusetts in two years could renew his lease on the seat. . . .

VDH:

Elite liberals are not good class warriors. Factor in multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi’s government mega-jet or Barack Obama’s various overseas junkets or the big Wall Street money that went into Obama’s near billion-dollar campaign coffers, and it is hard to take seriously Obama’s constant war against “them.” The voters have figured out that their president likes the elite plutocracy and the lower middle classes, but not so much the wannabe rich who aspire to cross his hated $250,000 income threshold — at which point suddenly they become unpatriotic, unwilling to pay their fair shares, and reluctant to spread the wealth around.

It is not particularly smart to constantly demonize the entrepreneurial classes, promise to raise income, payroll, health-care, and inheritance taxes on them, and expand government regulations — and then wonder why they are not creating more jobs.

Arrogance comes at the State level, too. Taxes are for the little people.

Media Reaction to the Scott Brown Victory

A new openness has appeared in some quarters of the media since the Scott Brown victory. Mary Katherine Ham via Reason:

As of last night, the media have finally started to change their tune on the Tea Party movement. I was shocked to hear Chris Matthews concede that Democrats had not learned to talk to those critical of the administration, to assuage their worries. Perhaps that was partly because their picture of those critics was painted by...Chris Matthews, who called 60-something veterans "terrorists," and compared peaceful protesters to aspiring Timothy McVeighs. Maybe that had something to do with the lack of engagement.

Pollster Frank Luntz had a hard time finding Coakley supporters to participate in a focus group. The New York Times belatedly notes pent-up anger of the electorate -- at -- something. An "intelligence failure" within the Democratic Party? At the New York Times? Or both? From the comments:

Does anyone else find it as astonishing as I do that Obama blamed even *this* on Bush?

It’s simply too funny for words…

Plus, Wretchard links a video which I think of as the Revenge of BUSHitler The disturbing lust for power evidenced by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and company is different in magnitude and substance from Hitler's vicious lust for power. And the current senatorial leadership style (bribing fellow senators with taxpayer money, special deals for rich people in Nevada, tax exemptions for insurance policies won by unions, etc.) is really different from Hitler's. That's one thing that makes the video so naughty). Many congressional Democrats have got to be pretty upset that Obama characterized the Coakley/Brown contest as a referendum on the administration's agenda. And the President was absolutely right. Many people used their vote for Brown to "send a message" to Washington.

This puts congressional Democrats in a difficult situation. And now even Paul Krugman is about to give up on President Obama's ability to ram a liberal agenda through against the will of the majority of Americans. Devotees turn on false prophets with a special vengeance. (Then again, many people have already given up on Paul Krugman. Heh.)

Sissy Willis gives an inside perspective on the importance of social networking to Scott Brown's win. Bloggers watched and publicized the Democrats' sleazy actions. Much of the legacy media was caught by surprise (maybe not on election day, but during the weeks before the election). Bloggers had some fun with the Coakley campaign. And with Keith Olberman. And with others in the media (even from Australia). Hooray for the New Media. Wretchard decides it's a good thing to let people watch Olberman's over-the-top slander of Brown, for old times' sake. Ditto Big Journalism. Follow the "Cornell Cow College" link for a few chuckles (example: President Obama and others made Rush Limbaugh the "leader of the Republican Party" just by repeatedly calling him the leader. Why can't Olberman be made into the "Leader of the Democratic Party" by repeatedly honoring him with this title? After all, he is a proud graduate of an Ivy League University.)

Olberman must really think his personal ideology is important if it justifies his "noble lies". Oops: now Jon Stewart has piled on.

Boston Globe columnist James Carroll is still stuck on stupid. Voters rejected Coakley because they hate women. There can be no other explanation. Is it the Ivy League universities that make people in the chattering classes blind with such frequency to any idea that doesn't divide people up into identity groups?

What will Republicans do now that Scott Brown won?

Glenn Reynolds on the diminished importance of the GOP in Scott Brown's election. Plus notes on the importance of pragmatism and some ideas about the future. He links Captain Ed:

In the wake of an unimaginable political victory in Massachusetts for Republicans, the celebratory mood is understandable. Scott Brown came out of nowhere in a period of three weeks to wrest the crown jewel of Democratic Senate seats from Harry Reid, to deny Barack Obama his supermajority, and to give new energy to a movement that had already managed to stall Obama’s signature legislation for months longer than anyone really expected. Those circumstances have not just launched new energy but also prompted some fantasies that will inevitably come crashing back to Earth. . . . .

We didn’t cross a finish line last night — we crossed the starting line.

Many things can go wrong if the GOP does not handle the Scott Brown win correctly.

What will Democrats do now that Scott Brown won?

Scott Brown, Republican, won the "Teddy Kennedy Senate Seat" decisively - beyond the margin of ACORN, the margin of lawyer, and the margin of Franken-style recounts. Many Democrats are in shock. Ann Althouse hopes the President, a "man of change", can change and become the President she thought he could be when she voted for him.

But there had been reports that President Obama intended to press even harder in his liberal agenda if Scott Brown won. Wretchard:

What’s really interesting is whether the current political crisis will lead to a recovery of the center or whether it simply presages wilder maneuvers. One thing to watch, I think, is what happens internally to both political parties. I think both parties are carrying dysfunctional mindsets which came into existence in eras long gone by. Can the Democratic party “reform” itself? The shadow of 1968 is still like a monkey on its back. Can the Republican party do likewise in its own way, and thus can politics realign itself in such a way that a new stability based on sensible and productive policies can emerge?

One thing I am convinced of is that Barack Obama is not the man to do it. His ideas are old in the worst of ways; not as in validated by long weathering but as in repeatedly rejected by history. But they are all he has. And the really scary thing about his aloofness and indifference is that he may really live in a place that you can’t go.

So my guess is that while he has no money and no prospect of getting any, the President knows only one move: double down again.

It will be fascinating to watch how the Democrats adjust to this new reality.

VDH:

The best thing that could happen to Barack Obama is more Democratic losses in hodgepodge elections that might yank away our young transfixed Narcissus from his mesmerizing reflecting pool.*

Almost immediately after Obama showed his ideological cards last spring, I suggested in the first weeks of his presidency that the bait-and-switch president would soon face a Carter/Clinton moment in which he could either press on with his polarizing ideology, damage his party for a generation, and eventually end up churlish and sneering at the electorate, who did not appreciate his exalted morality and genius — or triangulate and follow the Dick Morris/Bill Clinton model of talking and acting sort of centrist.

Who knows after Obama’s Scott Brown moment?

*Update: Official White House "Narcissus views his reflection" Photo. Do the White House photographers read VDH? Do they like Obama? Note also the quote of President Obama by departing representative Marion Berry.

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

Democrats Insult Women in Massachussets

It's almost as if Democrats have a slow-moving death wish with regard to the "Teddy Kennedy Senate Seat". First, they pushed a woefully unprepared Caroline Kennedy for the seat. And now they're telling people to vote for a DA who took brazenly wrong legal actions based upon political considerations, because she is a woman. This is a vile insult to the vast majority of women in the country. (Ann Althouse voted for Obama).

Are people on the Left aware that Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas came down on Coakley's left with regard to protection of the rights of the accused?

. . . as DA in Middlesex County, Coakley opposed efforts to create an innocence commission in Massachusetts, calling the idea “backward-looking instead of forward-looking.” Of course, that’s sort of the point — to find people who have been wrongfully convicted. So far, there have been at least 23 exonerations in Massachusetts, including several in Coakley’s home county.

I followed Dorothy Rabinowitz' pieces exposing the travesties of the Amirault trial - she won a Pulitzer Prize for her series on this case. First-rate reporting. There's a book, in case you are not familiar with the Amirault case - a nightmare of child abuse by "investigators" and adult abuse by prosecutors. Coakley's conduct in the re-prosecution, as described by Rabinowitz, was absolutely despicable. And she has recently defended her actions.

Recalling to mind the Salem witch trials of long ago, Rabinowitz writes:

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

Some on the Left give Coakley a pass because of her politics. Glenn Reynolds on the old Lefty arguments for excusing gratuitous brutality, corruption, etc. in order to usher in utopia: "You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, revolutionary truth is better than bourgeois truth, yada yada."

On the other hand, Coakley did go out of her way to keep a man who was later convicted of raping his 23-month old niece with a hot object - probably a curling iron - out of jail, apparently for political reasons (the rapist's father was a union representative who was getting donations for a Coakley election campaign). Would it really be a victory for women to elect this person to the U.S. Senate just because she is a woman? Where are the Duke 88 and the media when you need them to oppose special treatment for rapists? (Obama came down on the right side of the law in the Duke case).

It is astounding to me that Democrats would choose a person with a record like Coakley's to run for this seat. But Democrats really have had a lock, pretty much, on this senate seat for a long time. And identity politics is big in Massachusetts.

Additionally, Coakley DID have most of BIG JOURNALISM pulling for her. Thank goodness for new journalism and for local papers in Massachusetts who stood up to the New York Times and its sister publications. From the comments at the link:

Coakley is not the prosecutor, she is the persecutor. She deserves to be in prison. An immoral prosecutor is the most dangerous official of all.

Martin Luther King Jr. day, 2010

It's still a remarkable experience to read the Letter from Birmingham Jail. King's classical education shows.

And the speech from Memphis the day before he was killed, when he recalled another encounter with death, seems prophetic. Only 39 years old when he died.

Today, we have a black president, wildly popular at the time of the inauguration, but losing support fast. We have different race problems today than the ones MLK Jr. faced.

Shelby Steele, a man with a black father and a white mother (like the President), has an interesting theory about President Obama's fall from the heights, based largely in his own personal experiences. Steele did not think that Obama would be elected, because he thought the inconsistencies in Obama's political approaches to the issues would become too apparent before the election. He was wrong about the election. The mainstream media was pretty much united in its support for Mr. Obama, and he had the psychology of the American people in his favor.

Steele was right in his forecast that Obama would face failures in his efforts to promote his policies if elected. Part of Steele's theory about the dilemma of black public figures involves the idea that America is now "racially sophisticated":

The essence of our new "post-modern" race problem can be seen in the parable of the emperor's new clothes. . .

The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication—joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees — in this case the emperor's flagrant nakedness.

America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency. . . (emphasis mine)

Mr. Steele's article makes interesting reading. Not everyone agrees with him. But I think he was right about this:

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

Whatever you think of Mr. Steele's analysis, we still have some distance to go toward Martin Luther King's dream of a more colorblind society. President Obama's election may have been an important step in that direction. The voters elected a black president. His inauguration day was a day of healing for many, and a day of hope for more consideration toward people with views differing from the positions of the new congressional majority. That part of the hope started to fade within hours of the inauguration. Disappointments have piled up rather quickly since then.

By now most of us have learned to see Obama as a real person rather than just as a symbol. His election (along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress) has been tremendously costly and damaging to the country in a number of ways. The issues which alarm me the most involve the steamroller-like movements to concentrate power in Washington, the reckless use of taxpayer money and the tremendous increases in the advantages of political corruption. Other people have similar concerns, as well as serious concerns about the economy and foreign affairs. Liberals have their own disappointments with the President. Obama himself had foreseen than many would project their own hopes onto him and be disappointed.

Things are not going well for President Obama. I think the country would be much better off today if we had had a clearer picture of Barak Obama as a person and as a leader, rather than just as a symbol, before the election. Many of his actions since taking office are consistent with his actions before the election, but few people knew much about his history - despite his two autobiographies. The mainstream media's fawning treatment of Obama is a primary reason that we knew so little about him.

President Obama has shown a few signs of more realistic political insight and maturity over the last two or three months. Maybe he can turn things around to some extent.

Update: What happened to MLK's Dream?

Zo goes after the missteps of both Liberals and Conservatives.

Looking back on a Decade of Unexpected Conflict

Firecrackers, bottle rockets, etc. kept me holed up with our dogs (all once refugees from the mean street life) in a little room as the New Year started. Even normally fearless Little Buddy joined us when the explosions started coming fast and furious. The dogs all barked bravely at the noise from the media room, where the sound of explosions was pronounced. They made a show of defiance. Maggie, especially, acted like she wanted to go out to confront the evildoers, but when given a chance, she backed out. They really wanted to get away from the confusing sounds. So we all moved to the little office facing the vacant house next door to wait out the shooting.

I clicked over to a post by Jules Crittenden, reviewing the decade just past. He started his reminiscence on the last day of 1990s, as the "Vacation from History" (George Will's term, I think) wound down for him at the Mount of Olives. He then went to Bethlehem for a "New Decade" celebration that seemed sort of prescient. Interesting stories and reminders.

"It was a perverse decade. . . "

That's for sure.

"It forced me to take sides. I never wanted to do that, and generally, like most, had successfully avoided doing so. . . ."

Read the whole thing.

I'm going to look for some more positive developments in the coming decade. Here, the fog has ended the shooting of fireworks. The geriatric dogs are O.K. The cats are hiding. Maggie and Little Buddy were anxious to return to guard duty outside. Troy is still in the house with Lucky, relieved to have a time of calm. Me, too. David slept through the whole uproar.

Hope the coming year is a good one for you.