Obama: Genius of Being There?

Some conservatives like to think of President Obama as an empty suit.  Who knows?  Who knows anything about a public figure, given that public figures live by publicity, and we peons really know  nothing about them?

But the facts are that President Obama and his team won two presidential elections.  So the team won ugly, you say; but the president and his team still won.  I suspect that the bottom line reason for the president's success is that the American people aren't ready to move on from the entitlement state, and they won't be until they lie buried in its ruins.  Why should they?  As long as you can get free stuff, why worry?

So the president's policy is simply "Tax, Cut, and Pray" according to  James Pethokoukis, as in: cut defense, tax the rich, and pray the slowdown in health costs continues.

Every military commander has a idea in his mind about how his army is going to win, and the only way that Obama wins through is if the continuous explosion in health cost abates.  So naturally he believes that ObamaCare will "bend the cost curve."  The president and his liberal advisors have to believe that, otherwise they would have to "do something" about it.  And really, the only thing they care about is the next election, and you certainly don't win the second midterm by telling your base that the gravy train is ending.

It helps, in the fog of war, to cut to the chase, and I have been doing so with Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics.  The point he makes, again and again, is that the price system is the only thing we know that can coordinate an economy of strangers.

And the reason it works is that the price system and the system of profit and loss force people to fix their mistakes.  Here is Sowell in Chapter 7: Big Business and Government.

People make mistakes in all fields of human endeavor but, when major mistakes are made in a competitive economy, those who were mistaken can be forced from the marketplace by the losses that follow.  In politics, however, those who were mistaken can often continue to survive by doing things that were never contemplated when their positions and their powers were created.

We have been seeing this from President Obama recently.  He proposes a universal pre-K program even though the governnment's Head Start program has been shown to have no measurable long-term effect on the pre-K children it serves.  Why not?  It may not help children but it certainly gives mothers a break and it will provide lots of jobs to deserving Democrats.

Now, it is fair to say that we need the government to do things that the private sector would not do on its own.  But really, are we saying that people would not save for retirement without Social Security?  That they would not make provision for end-of-life health care with Medicare?  That they would not raise children into competent adults without government education?

And are we to say that a government program that fails to respond to and correct its mistakes is better than a private sector provision that does, that must, correct its mistakes?

It's pretty obvious why we have all these government programs.  It's because we humans are all secret freeloaders.  We cannot resist the idea of someone else paying for our free stuff.

Politics is the art of gathering a band of brothers to get out there and get some free stuff, and President Obama seems to understand that at a deep instinctive level.

Because promising your supporters free stuff seems to work right up until the moment that the free stuff runs out.

Call the president a genius.

The Tao of Obama

In the week that the stock market ignored the prospect of the sequester but fell out of bed at the hint that the Fed might stop printing money, let us meditate on the Dao of Obama.

Dao, or Tao, means The Way, the unthought, unplanned Way of the person that is beyond being nice, beyond doing the right thing, beyond doing the just thing.  It is just The Way.

So let us run the Dao Chapter 38 in review.

The highest good is not to seek to do good,
but to allow yourself to become it.

It is easy to think of President George W. Bush as a man that always sought to do good.  Maybe he never become goodness, but he certainly tried.  But Obama?

The Master does not force virtue on others,
thus she is able to accomplish her task.
The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.

Boy, doesn't that tell it like it is about Obama and the administrative welfare state.

The kind person acts from the heart,
and accomplishes a multitude of things.
The righteous person acts out of pity,
yet leaves many things undone.

The one thing we know about President Obama is that he always acts out of strategy.  After all, that's what "fundamental transformation" is all about, making, molding, forcing America into a different social, economic and political pattern.  Because of the superior righteousness of the progressive program.

The upshot to all this is the great peroration in Dao 38.

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

In the Tao of Obama, what is there other than the Tao of community activism, the instinctive practice of Alinskyism, the manipulation of the rage of the mob?

And notice what is implied with the idea that, when justice is lost, there is ritual.  It means that people are reduced to enacting the old forms without any faith that they will achieve anything.

In fact we are talking about people mumbling the old forms as the great tidal wave of force, of power lying in the street and taken up by young men with guns, gathers strength and sweeps over them, engulfing and destroying everything and everyone with its blind and heedless power.

In these times, when the old Tao of the American Way is lost, we hope for goodness.  But goodness, in the Chicago Way of the Obamis is lost, and so we hope for kindness.  But kindness does not apply to a ruling class that believes in hitting back twice as hard.  And so we hope for justice.

Justice? What hope of that when the supporters of the president get to cop all kinds of special carveouts and privileges?  When the insider rich get new privileges in the same bill that raised taxes on the rich overall?  So we hope for ritual.

Ritual?  Why in the Obama years we don't even do the budget resolutions and "regular order" appropriations.  In fact, we don't really even do the replacement ritual for regular order appropriations any more, the "continuing resolutions."  Because now we lurch from debt crisis to fiscal cliff to sequester.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

What do you think, America?  

Are we into the beginning of confusion, or right in the middle of it?

GOP Civil War: Does it matter?

Conservatives seem to be having a grand old  time arguing about what to do.  Should we be sidelining Tea Party extremists with Karl Rove?  Or teaching Rush a lesson with S.E. Cupp?

Should we return to the William F. Buckley Jr. policy of supporting the most conservative politician that can get elected? Or should we be doing full-bore conservatism, as Rush always recommends?

Who, in other words, will own the future?

Who knows?  The fact about US politics is that the marginal voter is a lot more liberal that an average Republican candidate, and a lot more conservative than the average Democratic candidate.  So getting elected is always a crap-shoot; you need to get your people to the polls, but you need to avoid turning off the moderates and the partisans in the other party.

Everyone wants the government to spend money on them, but they think that someone else should pay more in taxes.

In the next four years, I suspect that the big political story will be the gradual collapse of the Obama permanent campaign, the ability of the Obama people to define political reality.

In the last decade we have experienced an extraordinary political campaign by the entire liberal universe.  It started with the campaign to demonize President Bush as the "selected, not elected" president, and it extended into the opportunistic campaign against the Iraq War.  Then it morphed into the 2006 mid-term campaign when the Democrats ran a slate of center-right candidates to take back the House of Representatives.  Then, of course, it was the campaign to elect Barack Obama as a post-partisan moderate.  Then there was the push for ObamaCare.  In the last two years it has been a campaign against Republican obstructionism.

During the whole decade the Democrats and the media have managed to achieve an astonishing message discipline as they seamlessly switched from one phase to the next.  How did they do it?  I think they did it because of the utter determination in liberal-land to restore the liberal project.

The problem is that the resumption of the liberal project is going to end in the most almighty mess: debt default, entitlement cuts, inflation, hardship.  The "manufactured consent" (thanks Noam Chomsky) of the last decade is going to collapse.

When that happens it won't matter how the conservatives and the beltway Republicans have been arguing and posturing in the months after the 2012 election.  Politics will become a whole new ballgame, and it will all depend on the mood of the American people.  Will they want to blame insurance  companies for ObamaCare, or the federal government?  Will they blame Obama and Helicopter Ben Bernanke for the inflation or greedy oil companies?  Will they blame the Democrats for the bad economy or obstructionist Republicans?

In the new environment it will all depend on the qualities of the individual candidates running for election and the excellence of their campaigns.  Because there are always people that want to loot the corporations on one side, and people that want to get the government out of the way on the other.  The question at election time is which approach wins the support of the folks, the so-called "low information voters" in the middle.

So I say, let's have it all out between the conservative and Republican factions right now.  Then, when 2014 and 2016 come along, let's fight the elections and win them.

And stop worrying about whether the other guys will ruin the party.

What Women Want, Pt 37

Yes, what do women want?  It's the eternal complaint of men, because our lives are much simpler than women.

First we want a job, the kind of job that means that women will give you a second glance.  Then we want to get laid.

Women are more complicated because they want to be able to conceive, raise, and launch children.

So what about President Obama's universal pre-K proposal?  Is that what women want?  To get their children off their hands so they can get back to work and continue their careers?

Not exactly, writes Penelope Trunk.  Never mind that "Universal pre-K is bad for everyone."  And she has the links to prove it.

• Preschool does not help most kids.   The children of educated parents don't need pre-school; they are better off playing.  Boys especially.
• We do need good childcare. "Parents who are home with their kids want to have a break from their kids."  Of course, that's what the schools do for us.
• Universal pre-K is 1950s feminism.  It assumes that women want careers.  But actually most women want to raise their children and work part-time.
• Schools are a waste of time.  Middle-class parents are waking up to this.  After all, universal schooling was intended to train up the children to be factory workers.
• What about dead-beat dads?  Promote marriage and go after dead-beat dads.  So more women can stay home and raise their kids.

In other words, writes Trunk:

In light of the overwhelming evidence that kids and parents are better off without preschool, let’s use the funding for universal pre-K to help parents create safe, stable environments where they stay home with their four-year-old kids.

Hey!  Why stop there?  Why not end the hugely expensive programs paying seniors like me huge pensions and healthcare bills and return the money to the workers so that they can work less and spend more time with their children?

The Welfare State is Here to Stay?

Get a grip conservatives, writes Heather Wilhelm in her review of Peter Berkowitz's Constitutional Conservatism.  The welfare state is here to stay.  What conservatives -- libertarians and social conservatives -- need to do is propose how to reform it.

The easy response to that is Peggy Lee's.  Is that all there is?  All we can hope for is a little fiddling at the margins of big government?

But that pessimistic outlook ignores the difference between morality and politics.

Politics is the art of the possible, and right now politics is a contest of voting for free stuff.  And who can ignore the lure of the free stuff?  Not conservatives.  Conservative Carrie Lukas recalls the temptation of subsidized pre-school:

I lived in one of those celebrated European cities, Vienna, Austria, for two years, during which time they created a city-wide subsidy for  “preschools”...  When I no longer had to pay almost anything for my 4-year-old daughter, I signed her up for a longer day to make it easier on me.  I also enrolled my 2-year-old for the mornings.

So now the Obama administration is proposing not just universal pre-school but a jump in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour.  Who  couldn't benefit dropping the kids off or from more money at an entry level job?

The RedState guys propose that conservatives act like a wrecking crew, by proposing an even higher minimum wage--especially for fast-food and nail-salon workers--to teach those suburban moms a lesson.

But they only show that right now, "free stuff" rules, and so conservative politics must continue to dance around the disaster that is welfare state politics, trying to limit the damage.

"Real change," requires more than politics.  It requires a moral revolution, the kind of revolution that led to the American Revolution and the end of slavery.  That is what it would take to enroll the folks that I call "people of the marginalized self" into the ranks of the People of the Responsible Self.

In other words, welfare moms have to believe that having a child out of wedlock is a damning sin, because it ruins their child's life.  Middle-class Americans have to believe that breaking up is a damning sin because it utterly demoralizes their children.  Laid-off middle-aged workers have to believe that it is a damning sin to come up with a back ailment and get on Social Security's disability program instead of sucking it in and taking a job with less status or accepting a cut in pay.

People don't think that stuff up and change their lives on their own.  Instead they get swept up in the hysteria of a great moral movement, like the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s.  Think about gays all suddenly deciding that the most important thing in the world is gay marriage.  Where did that come from?

The thing about moral movements is that, although they are led by leaders, you can't turn them on and off like a light switch.  They answer the demands of the age, the inchoate feelings of the multitude that something is wrong with their lives.

But once you've got a moral movement on the march, then the politics is easy.  But that time is not yet, so that's why Peter Berkowitz is probably right.  Conservatives need to do the right thing, for now, and nibble around the edges of the welfare state.

But some day, come the revolution...

The Kids are All Right. But...

What's the matter with kids today?  Why are they just sitting there taking it from the old 'uns like me?  If you ask me, they should be in the streets digging up cobblestones.

Instead, they are out voting for Obama and they are all in favor of bigger government.  That's what The New York Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg found out when she went to the liberal college town of Missoula, Montana.

Sam Thompson, a 22-year-old environmental studies major at the University of Montana here, considers himself “fiscally conservative” but opposes cuts to Medicare; he expects to need health coverage when he grows old. Aaron Curtis, 27, a graduate student, admired Jon Huntsman, a moderate Republican, but could not stomach Mitt Romney’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

But really, what do you expect?  Here's a kid who's presumably spent his entire youth incarcerated in a government child-custodial facility, and about the only adults he's known have been the unionized, tenured, government functionaries we call "teachers." What else would he think?

The whole point of the Gramscian "long march through the institutions" is to get first crack at the young 'uns and "form their minds" as they used to do in Jane Austen novels.

But there is one thing to remember.  It's one thing to ram your ideology down the throats of the young.  The ultimate question is: will it work?  When the young heads full of mush get out in the world will they find that the ideas and the ideology that the tenured government functionaries have dished out actually work in their lives?

That's where we are with the millennials.  Their liberal teachers have taught them all the liberal PC stuff about the wonders of big government and the horrors of the patriarchy.  They have made girls into enthusiastic rowers and degreed them to a fare-thee-well.

And they have filled them full of propaganda about saving the planet and honoring traditionally marginalized minority communities.

But what's the point if there are no jobs for people with degrees in environmental studies?  What if the heavy lifting on the environment was done 40 years ago?

What if the government runs out of money for education and health care?  Do those millennials have a backup plan?

The point is that the ruling class of educated liberals have socialized the young generation to be nice obedient liberal drones, to be perpetual teenagers, in the words of Mark Steyn.

They have also socialized the young 'uns in "expressive individualism."  That's a fancy word for creative artist, and the notion goes back to the Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century.

Expressive individualism is a fine thing, except that it's not very social, and humans are social animals.  The creative artist presents his--or latterly her--artistic vision to the world and then stands back waiting for the hosannas.

Only the world doesn't give a damn for his or her artistic vision.  In the classic Romantic narrative, the Romantic hero thereupon commits suicide, as in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

Obviously, to take a Kantian approach, this is nonsense.  If everybody gave up and committed suicide where would we be?

There is worse.  The whole cult of the creative artist is a canard.  The most creative thing that almost anyone can do is to marry and create children and then create healthy, useful adults out of those children.  One in a million gets to be a famous artist or a famous scientist or a famous politician.  For those lucky few, immortality is obtained by individual creative endeavor.  But for the rest of us, immortality is our children.

The Big Lie of liberalism is the idea that the mainstream of courting, marriage, career, children is a boring cop-out for the conformist people of the racist, sexist, homophobe 1950s.

Of course, if you plan to be a supernova, then the conformist mainstream is nothing but a red dwarf.  But what if you are not cut out to be a supernova?  Then the only way for your life to mean something is to marry, have children, and leave this world with a goodly clutch of grandchildren.

That's something that the millennials will shortly be learning, good and hard.  Writer Sarah Hoyt's son already understands how hard things are going to be.  She writes:

I was talking to my son the other day and he said “Everyone in my generation has flat given up.  The height of our ambition is to someday have a job that actually allows us to live independently.  There’s no grand dreams for us.”

It's a pity that decades of liberal big government are going to make it really hard to live a mainstream life of career, children, and family.

I'd say that if the millennials have any grit in them at all, they will be really angry when they finally figure things out.

Rile up the Base for 2014

OK.  I get it.  The president's strategy for the next two years is to rile up his base for the 2014 mid-term elections.  So that's why his State of the Union speech was all about the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Violence Against Women Act, the minimum wage, more crony climatism, and more government planning, as in "manufacturing hubs."

Oh, and maybe some minor tweaks on Medicare, paid for by the wealthiest seniors.

If you wanted to enrage the rank-and-file opposition you couldn't do better than President Obama last night.  Just about everything he said goes against every sentiment that throbs in the heart of a conservative.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. President, what about your anti-science policies on climate change and wages?  We know, and the science is in on this, that the crude notion of carbon dioxide as the main driver of runaway climate change is questionable.  And we also know that the minimum wage creates unemployment.  I'm shocked, shocked at the blithe way in which you ignore settled science.

I listened to Thomas Hayes-Morrison on the radio yesterday.  He teaches business at his local college in Gainesville, Florida, and said simply that the folks he teaches, who are all trying to better their lives, voted for Obama because they wanted to keep their benefits.  Really, you can't blame them.  The economic outlook is cloudy and there is a big storm over the horizon.  Who wouldn't want a bit of insurance with a government benefit?

So when will those good folks be ready to say that it is time for a change?   that is the great political question.  And the answer is simple: When they are even more afraid.  When that government benefit doesn't seem like insurance at all, but a bus shelter about to be carried away by hurricane-force winds.

The president seems to be betting all his cards on getting his base out in 2014.  Really, that seems like a long shot, because in second midterms the incumbent president's party almost always loses seats.  I'd say that the best strategy would be to try to limit losses.

But what do I know.  Maybe the president in a genius and Nancy Pelosi will storm to victory in the House in 2014.

But the lesson from military history is that when you make a big gamble--like the Germans on the Western Front in early 1918--then the cost of failure in incalculable.