Views on the News
April 7, 2012
Views on the News*
The conventional wisdom about the 2012 Presidential race
has been this: Reelection efforts are all about the incumbent and this
incumbent is beatable, because President Obama’s job approval rating
has consistently been below 50%, and this also reflects above all a poor
economy, and voters vote their pocketbooks. It’s true, the conventional
consultant wisdom continues, that Republicans aren’t too popular either,
but if the election is a referendum on Obama, and if Republicans can just avoid
getting in their own way by raising wacky social issues or scaring people about
their own plans for Medicare, and if the GOP can raise money, hammer away at
Obama, and put together a first-class voter turnout operation in key states, then
Obama should lose, and an Obama loss means a Republican victory. A conventional,
cautious, backward-looking GOP campaign effort against President Obama is as
likely to produce a close reelection for the President as a close defeat. Republicans would be making a
mistake if they spent the fall simply assuming, or hoping, that the late break
will be sharply against the incumbent, as in 1980, or that the
incumbent’s rally will fall short, as in 1992. A forward-looking campaign, more like
Reagan’s in 1980 and Clinton’s in 1992 since it will not depend
solely on unhappiness with the incumbent. The Republican
candidate must be able to describe a different, and clearly better, future for
the country:
· Can he explain how an Obama second term would be even more dangerous
and damaging than the Obama first term has been?
· Can he explain that we’re heading off a cliff of debt and
deficit if Obama’s fiscal policies are allowed to continue?
· Can his campaign make vivid the harm Obama’s tax hikes and
regulations will do to the economy, and Obama-care to
our health care system and our country?
· Can he explain what a second term of Obama judicial appointments
will have on our federal courts?
· Can he explain the damage an Obama second term will do to
self-government, and limited government, and constitutional government in
America?
· Can he conduct a campaign that describes how much more dangerous
the world might look in 2016 if we continue Obama’s foreign and defense
policies?
· Can the Republican campaign present a choice of paths for the
future, à la Paul Ryan’s budget and his explanation of it, rather
than simply complain about the recent past and the difficult present?
Republicans will need to run a campaign
that explains.
Explanation, as opposed to
denunciation of others or celebration of self, hasn’t much characterized
the campaign of the likely Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, so far. If Romney, assuming he’s the
nominee, can’t lift his general election campaign above the level of the
primary contest, he’s likely to lose, so the irony is that a Romney victory in the primaries will then
pose the ultimate test of his ability as a turnaround artist.
(“Forward, March!” by
William Kristol dated March 16, 2012 published by The
Weekly Standard at http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/forward-march_634907.html
)
Something's happening to President Obama's relationship
with those who are inclined not to like his policies, and they are
now inclined not to like him. Supporter’s
level of dislike for the President has ratcheted up sharply the past few
months. What is happening is that the President is coming
across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who's not operating in good
faith. This is hardening positions
and leading to increased political bitterness, and it's his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad
thing, it's a big fault. The shift started on January 20th,
with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide
birth-control services the church finds morally repugnant. Events of
just the past couple of weeks have contributed to the shift. There was the open-mic
conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Obama pleaded for
"space" and said he will have "more flexibility"
in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done
their thing. Next, a boy of 17 is shot and killed under disputed
and unclear circumstances. The whole issue is racially charged, emotions are
high, and the only memorable words from the President's response were, "If
I had a son he'd look like Trayvon." Now the
Supreme Court arguments on ObamaCare, which have made
that law look so hollow, so careless, that it amounts
to a characterological indictment of the
administration. All these things have
hardened lines of opposition, and left opponents with an aversion that will not
go away. I am not saying that the President has a terrible
relationship with the American people. I'm only saying he's made his
relationship with those who oppose him worse. From the day Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind
of the American people was financial calamity - unemployment, declining home
values, foreclosures. These issues
came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its
spending, its taxing, its regulating; is America over,
can we turn it around? That's what the American people were thinking about. The President had his mind on health care. And so the
relationship the President wanted never really knitted together. Health care was like the birth-control
mandate: It came from his hermetically sealed inner circle, which operates with
what seems an almost entirely abstract sense of America. Obama has a
largely nonexistent relationship with many voters, and a worsening relationship
with some of the people who voted for him last time. Really, Obama cannot win the coming election, but the
Republicans, still can lose it.
(“Not-So-Smooth Operator”
by Peggy Noonan dated March 29, 20212 published by The Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577312043447691520.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
)
GOP White House
contenders think the President is taking
the country down the path to "European socialism," but they are
wrong since it is actually something much more radical. Few knew of his
carefully calculated plans for using the democratic process to gain power and
bring about "social change" on a large scale. Obama has unleashed a juggernaut of
legislation and regulations on industry that rival the New Deal in scope. From the moment he stepped into office,
Obama has used his power to redistribute capital and bring corporate America
under state control. Among other
things, he has:
·
Forced all large banks, including healthy
ones, to take federal bailout money while forcing them to pass stress tests
before they can get out from under state control.
·
Forced banks to renegotiate private mortgage
contracts to forgive principal payments for customers while ordering the banks
to liberalize their lending practices and even open branches in blighted and
unprofitable areas outside their service area.
·
Signed sweeping regulations that give the
state new authority to control the entire financial sector, from banks to hedge
funds to insurance companies to even car dealers.
·
Crafted unprecedented powers to monitor and
redirect the capital flow of all financial firms in the Dodd-Frank Act, as well
as adjust their capital requirements and even shut them down and restructure
them.
·
Renegotiated the terms of Detroit creditor
contracts so autoworkers get preferential treatment at the expense of shareholders
while preserving the high union cost structure that bankrupted GM and Chrysler.
·
Centralized control of the health care
industry through 2,730 pages of new mandates that bring insurance companies and
drug-makers under the supervision of the state and force the wealthy to
subsidize the uninsured at a starting cost of $1.6 trillion.
·
Transferred an additional $1 trillion in
private taxpayer wealth to welfare programs and public works projects, which
have increased dependency on the state to record levels.
All of
these measures put more power in the hands of the state and, in the case of
health care, exert more control over the individual lives of Americans. As such, few are popular. The
tactic he used to do this was to make capitalists the enemy of the people. By using media propaganda to convince
enough people who lost their jobs or homes in the financial crisis that they
were victims of Wall Street "exploitation, " and by fomenting class
envy between "the 99%" of Americans he
imagines as "struggling" and a nebulous 1% overclass of "millionaires and billionaires" and
"fat cat bankers" he demonizes as "greedy." History
provides a harsh reminder of how such class warfare ends if carried out to its
extreme. Less than a century
ago, Karl Marx, another trained lawyer who never spent a day in the private
sector, portrayed a life-or-death "class struggle"
between capitalists and workers and published blueprint for worker revolution,
"The Communist Manifesto."
·
Abolition
of property and land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
·
Abolition
of all right of inheritance.
· Confiscation of the property of all
emigrants [those leaving the country] and rebels.
· Centralization of credit in the hands of
the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive
monopoly.
·
Centralization
of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
· Extension of factories and instruments of
production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands,
and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
· Equal liability of all to labor.
Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
·
Combination
of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the
distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the
population over the country.
·
Free
education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory
labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Marx
argued that capitalism splits industrial society into two hostile camps: the
"bourgeois," whom he
described as anyone employing a worker, owning a business or making money from
investments, and the "proletariat"
that he figured made up the other 90% of society. He claimed that the wealth controlled by
the top 10% "exists solely due to
its nonexistence in the hands of those (other) nine-tenths." In other words, profits produced by
merchants, entrepreneurs and investors don't really belong to them. Marx believed they were stolen from
workers and that workers would one day rise up and, justifiably, "wrest, by degrees, all capital from the
bourgeois." Turning the
tables, the working class would then become the ruling class, though Marx
believed this would happen in stages.
Socialism was the first or "lower"
phase of communist society, he envisioned, where democracy and vestiges of
capitalism are still present but only as a means to an end. The
final or "higher" phase of
communism abandons state capitalism altogether and runs a centrally planned
economy under a new constitution. Marx
argued the dreams of the "individual"
should be sacrificed for the "collective." "Individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must
unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations."
Actually it wasn't Marx who said that, it was Obama,
in a little-noticed 1995 interview he conducted with a liberal Chicago journal. Marx also called for abolishing the
traditions, institutions and religions of the old order, arguing that the
masses couldn't fully serve "the State" if they still clung to
religion. When the Bolsheviks
struck in 1917, their leader, V.I. Lenin, immediately declared war on banks, scapegoating "vile" and "greedy"
bankers and merchants for all the problems of the underclass, and he seized
banks and shops, since for the revolution to succeed, Lenin said he had to
first control capital. Nationalizing
medicine was also key. If the communists controlled health care,
Lenin said, they could own and control families, from cradle to grave. Lenin's other main target was the
education system. If the Reds
socialized schooling, from kindergarten to college, they could brainwash the
masses into serving the state instead of their own "selfish" interests. By 1920, Lenin had established "free" universal health care (excluding the "deprived class" of merchants) and
"free"
higher education for all (except for the sons and daughters of merchants, who
were blocked from college). He also
had succeeded in nationalizing all commercial banks as well as transportation. The new ruling class finance soaked the
rich with punitive taxes, redistributing their wealth and shook down bankers. Does any of the above sound familiar? Such class warfare battle lines have,
tragically, been redrawn in America, the same capitalist nation that
defeated Soviet communism only two decades ago, and on one side are the people
who create wealth and on the other are those who loot it and this election may very well decide who wins.
(“Obama Pits America’s
Makers Against Its Takers” dated March 30, 2012 published by
Investor’s Business Daily at http://news.investors.com/article/606265/201203301828/obama-echoes-communist-manifesto-in-blueprint-for-change.htm
)
Democrat strategist James Carville insists a Supreme
Court decision striking down the mandate for everyone to buy health insurance,
and perhaps the rest of the 2,700-page law, would work
to Obama’s political advantage, but instead it will be a devastating
rebuke to the President. The
idea is that an albatross would be lifted from Obama and he would be freed in
his bid for reelection from attachment to the most unpopular program enacted
during his presidency. The crown
jewel of his presidency will have been repudiated as unconstitutional. His pretensions of uniquely knowing how
to get things done in Washington will be shattered. Obama will be a
diminished political figure. He
will become a lesser president, far from the top ranks where he has envisioned
himself. Assuming ObamaCare is voided, Republicans
will still have plenty to say about health care. They can remind voters of the promises
Obama made about his plan that were false. Nor will bureaucrats in Washington have a
strangle-hold on the health care system if the Obama plan is struck down. We’ve already seen bureaucrats in
action with Obamacare only minimally implemented. And with ObamaCare
gone, a threat to individual liberty will have been turned away. Never in more than two centuries of
democratic government in America had individuals been told they must buy
something or else. The easiest
thing for Republicans to turn aside will be enraged Democrats and their allies
in the media. Republicans will always be treated to a breathtaking media
double standard. When
conservatives join a liberal ruling, they’re applauded for rising above
their political leanings. When they
form a majority in a conservative decision, they’ve stooped to political hackery. If ObamaCare is invalidated, we’ll hear far worse. Chief Justice John Roberts will be blamed
for letting politics reign on the Court. Hypocrisy this
thick will crumble under its own weight when the Court does the right thing,
and America will be fully justified in rejoicing.
(“A Lose-Lose Case”
by Fred Barnes dated April 9, 2012 published by The Weekly Standard at http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/lose-lose-case_634909.html
)
Not even the
most die-hard, partisan Democrats would dare argue that the Obama recovery has
been especially vigorous: instead, they argue that the new president
was dealt an impossible hand. Nearly three
years after the Great Recession officially ended, the jobless rate is still
above 8%, the longest stretch of such high unemployment since the Great
Depression. Add back in all the
discouraged job seekers and the part-timers who wished they had full-time gigs,
and the unemployment rate is just shy of 15%. While the economy is growing, it’s
not growing rapidly. At this point in the typical post-World
War II recovery, the economy was growing at an average pace of nearly 5%. The Obama recovery has managed just over
2% average annual GDP growth. Indeed,
take-home pay for US workers, adjusted for rising prices, has actually fallen
over the last year. Then
there’s the moribund housing market - recent data show home prices still
falling; nationwide, they’re off a third from their 2006 peak, all the
way back to levels last seen in 2003. All in all, Obama’s economic rebound
kind of feels more like a bust than a boom. His defenders insist that’s not his
fault, that the Great Recession was not only nastier than any other economic
downturn since the 1930s but also different; it wasn’t caused by an oil shock or a sharp spike in interest
rates. Economic downturns caused by
a financial collapse, they argue, are typically followed by lackluster
recoveries. This excuse
doesn’t quite make it off the runway. A Federal Reserve study from late last
year looked at the behavior of recoveries from recessions across 59 advanced
and emerging market economies during the last 40 years. The Fed found, to no great surprise, that
recoveries “tend to be faster”
after severe recessions, such as the one we just had. It’s the “rubber-band effect”: The deeper
the downturn, the more robust the rebound, unless government messes things up. This same Fed study found that bank or
other financial crises “do not
affect the strength” of subsequent recoveries. A recent analysis from JP Morgan
suggests that housing might explain half of the Obama recovery’s
underperformance versus the Reagan recovery. While President Reagan cut long-term
marginal tax rates, Obama tried a massive burst of federal spending. One empowered private enterprises, while
the other empowered government. Of
course, economies will eventually
recover on their own, as this one seems finally to be doing, but Obamanomics shouldn’t get much credit for it.
(“O’s lame excuse”
by James Pethokoukis dated March 30, 2012 published
by New York Post at http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/lame_excuse_15jqc1xL9eJRTNwywqEJbJ
)
Anyone who still believes a word on energy out of Barack
Obama's mouth has to be a complete idiot or
completely clueless, because the man is a veritable
lie-machine. Every speech, every utterance and aside, is
designed to mislead , whether by misstatement,
omission, or outright licentious license.
A real leader takes responsibility and gives credit, but Barack Obama
takes credit and shirks responsibility. He has to lie because he wants to
be the father of all success, while failures are a symphony of blame-shifting,
George Bush, the tsunami, those bastards the Canadians who want to send us
"sharia-free" oil, in other
words, anyone but Barack? He is now
the "Energy President," taking credit for the portion of the
Keystone XL pipeline still being built, after he rejected the entire pipeline twice, and the
particular leg of the pipeline that is going forward didn't need his approval,
and the increase in production is happening on private land, something Barack
couldn't prevent. Obama has done everything
in his power to destroy the oil
industry in America, virtually shutting down production in the Gulf of Mexico,
off our continental shelf, and in and around Alaska, anywhere he could, except
on private land. While claiming that America has only 2% of the world's reserves, this
number is a perfect example of the man's ever-abating affinity for the
truth. It counts only the reserves from wells currently pumping, while
America has 1.4 trillion barrels of recoverable oil which is enough to meet all
of our energy needs for more than 200 years, without imports from
enemies. There are people who voted for Obama in 2008 not because they
were progressives, but because they bought into the chimera of hope and
change. The price of gasoline is high because Barack Obama wants it to be
high. He told us, over and over again how
raising the price of energy has always been his plan to win the future, and his
strategic retreat from his only successful policy is exactly that: a
strategy. The President's imbecilic battle against the fossil fuel industry,
prosperity, and energy self-sufficiency is a losing proposition, disastrous for
our economic well-being. He wants it both ways: waging war against
fossil fuels while taking credit when, in spite of his best efforts, oil
production increases. Yet Barack
Obama's endless war on energy is not just about restricting oil production; he wants
to destroy the coal industry as well. For this he tasks the
EPA. Every policy from Obama's EPA seems to hurt
the economy, the consumer, and the nation in general. The
administration recently celebrated the closing
of the 100th coal power plant since 2010, and the EPA has issued new regulations on CO2,
which will prevent the building of any coal plants in the future. Since
coal provides 45% of our electricity needs, and we are not replacing the
generating capacity, at some point there will be rolling blackouts. As
the President promised, the price of electricity will "necessarily
skyrocket." Later this year, the EPA will introduce rules regulating
hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to maximize gas extraction. If
Obama wins re-election, he will shut down fracking in
an attempt to kill natural gas as well. In reality, no fossil fuel will
ever be acceptable as a source of energy to rabid environmentalists like our
President. All this is done in the
name of climate change. The myth of global warming
is behind every Obama decision on energy. He believes that green
energy is the future, despite its uselessness in the present as a viable
replacement for fossil fuel. It is too expensive and inefficient. Climate change radicals like our President insist on nothing
less than American economic suicide in order to prevent something that might
happen in a hundred years. This is why Barack wants high energy prices, because he believes he is saving humanity. It
is a mistake to call Obama an idealist who means well, or an evil man intent on
the destruction of the nation. In reality, he is
a dogmatist who wants his way or no way, and he thinks he knows what's best for
the nation and humanity, and Obama will give it to us even if America is
destroyed in the process.
(“Obama’s Endless
Energy” by William L. Gensert dated April
4, 2012 published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/obamas_endless_energy.html
)
The White House sicced its
meanest attack dogs, Media Matters and MSNBC, on Rush Limbaugh, but they
couldn't knock him off the air and their advertising boycott has failed. Even the Washington
Post admits the conservative talk-show giant has survived a month long crusade
to cow sponsors and stations into dropping Limbaugh over intemperate remarks he
made about a coed fan of ObamaCare. Turns out the ad losses were far fewer
than liberal Media Matters claimed in a running tally on its website. In fact, virtually all of Limbaugh's
long-term sponsors stuck with the show, in spite of relentless brow-beating by
both Media Matters and MSNBC, which also works closely with the White House. There is evidence the
left's campaign backfired, as Limbaugh's ratings soared and attracted new
sponsors and his 20 million listeners stuck by him. Many are members of the
TEA Party, fed up with Obama's government overreach. So, indirectly, Limbaugh's survival also
reflects the strength of the TEA Party movement. Yet the left has also been writing the
conservative group's obituary. Michael Moore just months ago proudly predicted that
Occupy Wall Street would dwarf the TEA Party in size and influence. Today, Occupy Wall
Street is broken and its promised "spring offensive" never materialized. In a delicious irony, the few rabble left
in Manhattan have taken to booing and heckling Moore as a "1%er" and "$50-millionaire"
whenever he drops by for a photo op.
There are more and more stories that show how out of touch with reality the left is, especially about the
conservative movement's popularity, and the conservative and the TEA
Party impact will be heard loud and clear in November.
(“The Left Misreads Popularity
of Limbaugh, Tea Party” dated March 30, 2012 published by
Investor’s Business Daily at http://news.investors.com/article/606319/201203301853/limbaugh-survives-white-house-mauling.htm
)
*
There is so much published each week that unless you search for it, you will
miss important breaking news. I try
to package the best of this information into my “Views on the News” each Saturday morning. Updates have been made this week to the
following issue sections:
· Bibliography
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/welcome/bibliography.php
· Philosophy
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/intro/philosophy.php
· Civil Rights
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/Culture/civilrights.php
· Health Care
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/Culture/healthcare.php
· Legal at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/legal.php
· Foreign Policy
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/fp/foreignpolicy.php
David Coughlin
Hawthorne, NY