Does Obama's Charm Offensive Matter?

According to Peggy Noonan, the Republican senators that dined with President Obama last week had nice things to say about the president.  But one of the senators pointed out his lack of leadership.

At certain points in the conversation the president, according to the senator, said that even if he wanted to agree with the Republicans on certain specific questions there would be a rebellion in his own party: “He said that a few times. But that’s an abdication. You have to lead! You have to educate as only a president can with a bully pulpit, you have to bring your party along.”

At the American Spectator Peter Hannaford talked about Trojan Horses and an invitation to betrayal.  The White House's idea is to get just enough Senate votes to send a bill to the House to undo the sequester.  Then, when the House rejects it,

Obama’s mouthpiece, Jay Carney, will say with a straight face, “He did everything he could. He worked with Republicans in the Senate, but the House just wouldn’t let go of its protection of millionaire and billionaire tax loopholes.”

Well maybe.  But I'd say that any Republican politician in Washington DC knows by now that you cannot trust the president on anything.  Whatever agreement you think you have, the president will change if he thinks he can score a point on you.

I just can't believe that any successful politician (and they are all successful to have made it up the greasy pole to Congress) would want to trust President Obama further than they can throw him.

Naturally, they say nice things to Peggy Noonan, and naturally Peter Hannaford is worried.  But really, here is a president that didn't want to talk to the Republicans until, all of a sudden, he lost a round in the blame game.  You don't think that these veteran politicians can smell weakness?

Michael Barone said it straight out about Obama and the White House.

They're flailing. That's the impression I get from watching Barack Obama and his White House over the past week.

The fact is that Obama is doing what any Democrat president would do.  He is putting off the inevitable day when the Democratic base will have to start eating "give-backs": cuts to their sacred entitlements.  The only way that a Democratic president will be able to sell cuts to the Democratic base is when the city walls are crumbling in a fiscal earthquake.  Until then, don't expect any leadership on spending from any Democratic leader.

Rahm Emanuel is justly famous for his remark that you never want a crisis to go to waste.  But the full truth is that in politics you can never do the difficult thing unless there is a crisis.

Unemployment: The Household Survey Story

Yeah, yeah.  Unemployment was down this month from 7.9% to 7.6%.  Hurray! A robust recovery is finally here!

Only it ain't.  As all red-blooded Americans know, the Unemployment Rate is computed from the Labor Department's Household Survey, using the Labor Force and the Employment Level numbers.

Last month the Employment Level was up by 170,000.  Which is OK, a so-so number.

But last month the Labor Force number was down by 130,000 people.  A bad number.

Here's what the numbers would look like if we got into a real recovery.  You would see the Employment Level going up by 300,000 to 500,000 per month.  And initially, you would see the Labor Force number going up even faster.

Why?  Because when discouraged workers get the word that there are jobs out there they start to look for work.  And then they get included in the Labor Department's count of the Labor Force of people that have jobs and people that want jobs.  So, in a robust recovery, the Unemployment Rate may actually go up for a while.

So the fact is that we are still not in a solid recovery.

No surprise there.  You want a solid recovery?  Then you, the government, need to implement policies that encourage people to produce and consume.  You need to produce a solid monetary policy, not an inflationary monster that merely keeps the government's interest cost down.  You need to curb crony capitalism in all its guises.  And you need to cut government spending.  You need to cut tax rates.

Our liberal friends have lately taken to whining that cuts in government spending reduce the gross domestic product.  So they do, because government spending is included in the GDP.  That's what happens when the indices are designed by people that believe in Keynesianism.

But in reality government spending, all government spending, is a weight on the economy.  It leaches wealth and prosperity out of the economy.  You want to fix a sluggish economy?  Then cut government spending.

Done that?  Good.  Then cut spending some more and while you are at it, cut tax rates.

That, Mr. President, is what I call a balanced program to fix the budget and revive the economy.

The reason we have all this stupid Keynesianism and inflationism is that the people getting government spending handouts screech like banshees when the checks stop coming.  I mean everyone, from Social Security recipients like me to crony capitalists getting lots of lovely green subsidies.

(Golly, who knew that dear old Uncle Warren Buffet was getting green subsidies from his investments in wind and solar?  That guy sure knows how to make a buck on the government's dime.  Right now he is benefiting from the delay of the Keystone pipeline, 'cos the Bakken oil has to move over his railroad instead of environmentally cleaner pipelines.)

Politicians are practical people, so they listen to experts that come up with rationalizations for what comes to them naturally.  The Keynesians give the politicians a reason to delay biting the bullet.  So they do.

People want free stuff, and politicians give it to them.  Until the money runs out.  Then the politicians move on and the people are stuck eating the paint off the walls.

The "Mordida" of Liberal Politics

The problem of all government power is that it tends towards protecting the power and privileges of a ruling class.  Back in the old days, the ruling class of the South ran a racial privilege system to keep the blacks down.  Fast forward to today, and the ruling class of educated liberals run a class and race privilege system to keep minorities and women on the liberal plantation, particularly in corrupt states like California, New York, and Illinois.

Item: Victor David Hanson's lament about the liberal "Mordida", the "bite" you are supposed to pay for the privilege of living in California.  Who would want to live in Texas with its 110 degree summers and "fossil-fuel" air conditioning sneers Gov. Jerry Brown, (D-CA).

Translated, Brown's retort meant that despite California's sluggish economy, high taxes and poor services, it's still worth staying there to enjoy its beautiful climate -- especially along the 1,000-mile-long coast, where most of the state's elites live comfortably without a need for high-priced air conditioning.

Ah yes.  The liberal elite makes sure that it's summertime and the living is easy for educated liberals.  But what about non-liberals living in California?

But it is not such an accommodating a landscape if you are in the shrinking middle class and seeking a good-paying job in energy, construction or manufacturing; a safe daily commute on good roads; reasonable taxes; an affordable house; or a good public school.

But where is the political movement to curb the power of educated California liberals that make life a hell for others so that they can live on the balmy California coast?

Item: Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the one that requires certain southern states to get pre-approval of election practices from the US Justice Department.  It's up before the US Supreme Court right now and the Chief Justice of the United States asked the US Solicitor General about racism in the South. H/T Daniel Henninger.

Chief Justice Roberts: General, is it the government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?

General Verrilli: It is not, and I do not know the answer to that, Your Honor. . . .

Chief Justice Roberts: Well, once you said it is not, and you don't know the answer to it?

General Verrilli: I—it's not our submission. As an objective matter, I don't know the answer to that question.

I see.  So does that mean the South still has to bow the knee to the liberals in the US Justice Department for another 50 years, or not?

I don't know about you, but in my personal experience, the most racist people I know are blacks.  And the most bigoted people I know are gays.

It's no mystery why this should be.  People know when to shut up.  Whites know that they can get into trouble with racist talk.  Ditto gay-bashing.  But liberals condone racism in their black clients and anti-straight bigotry from their gay clients.  There is nothing more delicious than spewing hate out to people that can't fight back, at least if you are a racist or a bigot.

If you go back a century, then if you are a liberal you can pat yourself on the back for helping the working stiff.  But today the low-income working stiff isn't working and the low-income woman isn't married to the father of her children, and liberals should be ashamed.

If you go back half a century, then if you are a liberal you can pat yourself on the back for helping the African American.  But today minorities and women are hardest hit by the worst economy in the last 50 years, and liberals should be ashamed.

Over the past century, Progresssives-liberals-progressives have done some good things.  They have also done some terrible things.

America's agenda for the next 50 years, whether liberals like it or not, is going to be unraveling the tangle, the "bite" of injustice resulting from a century of big-government liberalism.

The sooner we start, the less people will suffer.

Hugo Chavez and Charismatic Leadership

Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.  I mean the wicked witch or wizard of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.

His passing is salutary, because he is a solid example of a charismatic leader.

People turn to charismatic leadership, according to Max Weber, when ordinary political leadership seems to be failing -- in "times of trouble", according to Reinhard Bendix in Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait.

Hence, in times of trouble the "natural leader" is neither the official nor the master whose authority is based on the sanctity of tradition, but the man who is believed to possess extraordinary gifts of body and mind.

We may disagree about whether Venezuela was really in a "time of trouble" when Hugo Chavez was elected president, but the lower orders certainly felt so.  In the AP's piece,

"Chavez masterfully exploits the disenchantment of people who feel excluded ... and he feeds on controversy whenever he can," Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka wrote in their book "Hugo Chavez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela's Controversial President."

 This is the left-wing approach to politics that goes back to Marx and Engels and the Communist Manifesto.  Exploitation, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal", is the core of the Marxist message.  You are suffering because you are being exploited.

No doubt in many South American countries the poor are being exploited.  In The Other Path, Hernando De Soto explained how the exploitation works.  It was basically that everything in the formal economy was decided through politics, through negotiation between powerful special interests.  So if you were a campesino, coming to the city of Lima from the altiplano in the high Andes, you were outside the patronage/clientage system and its constellation of interests, an unwelcome disturbance to the status quo.

Let us admit that for the campesino, the outsider, a charismatic politics is the rational solution to his problem.  He wants a shakeup to the status quo, hoping that, in the fallout, he will get some crumbs.  He wants a leader who will fight for the people against the powerful.

In reality, of course, the charismatic leader is a monster that collapses the entire economy through his endless resort to government force.  Capitalism may be exploitative, but that is because it is inhuman.  It just matches supply and demand through the price system.  If you are a low-skilled campesino, then you don't get to charge a very high price for your labor in the city, particularly if you need to be a member of a union, or need to be worth more than the minimum wage before you can get a formal job. And that, you are likely to judge, is unjust.

But capitalism doesn't care.  Once you get some skills it will mindlessly include you in the system.  Because now you are worth more.  If you really apply yourself and acquire some unique skills in high demand, it will shower you with money.

The trouble is that the charismatic leader is worse than inhuman.  He is demonic.  He delights in upsetting all human relations and resorts to physical force and compulsion, gulags and extermination camps, on principle.  He is a war leader, not a negotiator or a builder.

Which brings us to Barack Obama.  Obviously, Obama is a charismatic leader, but not, perhaps, a great one.  He owes his presidency more to the eagerness of the mainstream media to waft him aloft and to ordinary Americans eager to elect our "first black president" than "extraordinary gifts of body and mind."

And Obama is not only an Affirmative Action charismatic leader; he is also not a nice guy.  Quin Hillyer:

Just the other day at lunch, a friend of mine, a businessman with good connections across the country, recounted a conversation he had with a Democratic insider while Obama was in the midst of his first presidential race. “It’ll take the American people five years,” said the insider, “to realize what Obama’s really about and what he’s really like.” Then, presumably, the public would catch on to his manifold defects.

Yeah.  Now they tell us.

In Venezuela they had a real charismatic leader.  In the US we only have a fake one.  That, if you are looking for it, is merely proof of American exceptionalism.

Because, after five years Americans are beginning "to realize what Obama's really about" and they don't like it.  At least that's what recent opinion polls are telling us.

Conservative Concern for the Poor

Arthur Brooks, he that wrote about conservatives giving more to charity than liberals, is chiding conservatives for not caring enough about the poor.

An April YouGov.com poll—which mirrored every other poll on the subject—found that only 33% of Americans said that Mitt Romney "cares about people like me." Only 38% said he cared about the poor.

Conservatives rightly complain that this perception was inflamed by President Obama's class-warfare campaign theme. But perception is political reality, and over the decades many Americans have become convinced that conservatives care only about the rich and powerful.

So what should conservatives do to change perceptions?  Well, writes Brooks, for a start they should emphasize that out of control Social Security and Medicare is "imperils the social safety net for the neediest citizens."  Never mind the teachers' unions: the problem with education is that "poor children and their parents deserve better schools."

Well, yeah!  That's what conservatives are always trying to say.  The problem is that nobody wants to hear it.  And why is that?  Well, the big thing is that your average middle-class grandma says that "they" had better not touch "her" Medicare.  Then in the next breath she worries about health care for the poor.  And on education, your average soccer mom cares only about the special program that her Asbergers kid qualifies for.  What politician wants to mess with that?

The problem is that, at every turn, Democrats manage to demagogue conservatives onto the defensive, by recklessly promoting more "free stuff."  You can understand that the poor like "free stuff."  When you don't have very much, then you won't foolishly look a gift horse in the mouth.  But we middle-class entitlement beneficiaries are the problem.   It's our addiction to free stuff that legitimizes big government and its waste and injustice.  Worst of all was that obviously middle-class young woman that baited Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign:

“You’re all for like ‘yay freedom and all this stuff and yay pursuit of happiness,’” the student said. “You know what would make me happy? Free birth control.”

If you want to know what our big problem is, it's right there.

And that's why I say that we can't fix the problem until we are going over the rapids.  Because only then will the allure of "free stuff" finally lose its luster.

There is another way.  It is called religion.  While politics has always offered free stuff to its supporters, religion has been the human way of getting people to be social rather than selfish, to ask first "what am I giving" rather than "what am I getting."

Because the only way you can deal with the young woman that wants her free stuff is by shaming her.  The way that liberals shame conservatives about their lack of concern for the poor.

Why President Obama Keeps Campaigning

The Austrian caped crusader Joseph Schumpeter wrote that, considering that politicians are professional election-winners, it's amazing that they do any governing at all.

And President Obama seems to want to prove his point.  Everyone is writing articles right now about how the president is ignoring governing for the more enjoyable job of politicking. "Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate?" asks Michael Barone.

The conventional wisdom is that the president is amping up the political volume, including the funding of his permanent campaign vehicle, Organizing for America, in order to win back the House of Representatives in 2014.

How could that be?  A president has never taken back the House in his second midterm, nor ever got into a double-digit increase in any midterm.  My guess, though, is that the president and his people are just trying to avoid the usual second-term debacle.  They are fighting hard just to stay even in 2014, and even will be good enough.

After all, their second-term goal is to get Obamacare implemented and beyond the hope of repeal.  For that they need to maintain enough power in Congress to prevent a wrecking crew from getting to work.

And anyway, the Obamis are doing plenty of governing.  They are writing regulations and issuing executive orders to advance the progressive agenda as far and as fast as humanly possible.  When we say that the president is politicking, not governing, what we really mean is that he is doing everything in his power to avoid ever compromising with the Republican agenda.

The main thing for Obama is to get to the next presidential election without the roof falling in.  And how likely is that?

Those of us that want a new and a better America need to understand that it won't come with political reform or with bipartisan deals with the Democrats.  It will only come after the moral and economic collapse of the administrative welfare state.   It will only come after liberals have completely lost their moral and cultural power, and the administrative welfare state has run out of money.

In that sense, President Obama is doing our work for us.  His resistance to spending cuts and his insistence on tax increases only bring forward the inevitable collapse.  A practical and bipartisan president that sat down with Republicans to plan entitlement reform and school-choice reform would be a president that was preserving the welfare state for future generations at a sustainable level.

Instead, the president seems to want to go for broke.  And broke is probably what he will get.

It's a pity, but minorities and women will be hardest hit.

Beyond Sequester

Over at America's go-to website on government spending, we have a little notice displayed in these sequestered times.

usgovernmentspending.com's numbers are based on official budget numbers. Until the president's budget is released in mid-March, we won't be able to show the impact of the sequester. Meanwhile, see budget detail page here.

Actually, of course, if you went to usgovernmentspending.com and created your own custom chart, you probably would need a magnifying glass to see the difference before and after sequester.

You can understand President Obama's situation.  He is sitting on an untenable budget situation.  Unless and until the feds cut spending sharply we are going straight towards debt default and maybe hyperinflation.

But what can a Democratic president do?  The whole of left-liberal politics is founded on "more."  More spending, more programs, more administrative welfare state.  The Democrats just don't do "less." That's why they call spending cuts "austerity."

But how do you do the politics of "less?"  It's a good question, and the answer is not very palatable.

You wait until the wolf is at the door.  The verdict of the 2012 election made that clear.  Yes, the American people know there is a problem.  But they are not ready, yet, for the turn-around artist to come in and fix things.  The moral drama was palpable.  Here you had Mitt Romney, whose entire life has been devoted to turning around "dysfunctional" organizations.  Here you had Barack Obama, who entire life had been devoted to left-wing activism.  The American people chose Obama, by a few percent.  But they kept the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, just in case.

Let us recall the point of politics, as described by H.L. Mencken.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Or take the prophetic words of Rahm Emanuel:

 You never let a serious crisis go to waste.

These are meaty quotes, but they underlie a truth about the human condition.  Politics is for emergencies.  It is for the moment when everything is at risk.  At moment of peril humans come together and look for a leader to lead them out of the land of Egypt.

The eternal problem is to make the politicians go away after the emergency is over.

And so we will never do anything about the welfare state until our nation is threatened with ruin if we don't do something.

In my view, the business of being social animals is characterized by the yin and yang of politics and religion.  Politics is the force end of the animal, and is easily corrupted into a project of freebooting and freeloading.  Its fully corrupted form is the robber band that rapes and pillages.  Religion is the project of converting humans into willing cooperators.  Its means is not the club of force, but the conquest of the mind.  It is easy converted into a battle of orthodoxy against heresy.  Its fully corrupted form is the union of politics and religion in totalitarianism.

The challenge for conservative politics is not so much the politics as the religion.  We all know the systems we need to impose to reduce the degree of political and governmental force in our society: more markets, more civil society.  But we don't know how to build a moral movement to persuade the American people to give up the politics of free stuff for the culture of free-dom, the culture of the marginalized self for the culture of the responsible self.

My guess is that the movement and the moment will come.  But not before a bone-rattling financial Armageddon.