Stromata Blog

How Much Recovery?

Returning to the news media after a spell of attending to family matters, I see that the recession is over. Huzzah! It wouldn’t be over, I realize, if a Republican were President. The empirical proof of that assertion is that, on the eve of the 1992 election, the economy had expanded for five consecutive quarters, the last three at rates above four percent – yet Bill Clinton could assert without fear of MSM contradiction that the country was mired in the worst recession in 60 years.

It is, nonetheless, refreshing to see that the advent of Barack Obama has improved economic reporting. The media are suddenly attentive to GDP growth and aware that employment is a lagging indicator. Let’s hope that they’ll remember that when President Romney or Daniels or Pawlenty or McDonnell is digging his way out of whatever blend of stagflation President Obama leaves behind.

The third quarter’s 3.5 percent growth rate made Wall Street happy for a day. Then investors looked at the numbers more closely, and the market lost all of its gains and more. There’s no doubt about the expansion, but, after stripping out the temporary effects of home buyer credits and auto rebates, the rebound is anemic. Ominously, consumer spending declined in September, after the expiration of the props to housing and automotive purchases. The implication is that the third quarter looked better than it really was, because it borrowed activity from the future. Genuine growth apparently was in the one to 1.5 percent range.

Given the sharpness of the contraction, the recovery ought to have begun more robustly. Furthermore, even if it were impressive, its continuation would face an enormous obstacle: At some point, the Federal Reserve Board must either drain the unprecedented liquidity that it created fight the financial panic, or it must allow inflation to run amok. The former will put a damper on the economy, perhaps provoking a new recession. That’s what happened in 1981 and 1982, as Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker labored to take the “flation” out of Nixon-Ford-Carter stagflation. The alternative is much worse. Barack Obama knows little history, but surely someone will at some point introduce him to the Weimar Republic.

President Reagan’s corrective for the effects of a planned deflation was freeing the economy: lower taxes, less regulation, fewer barriers to trade. President Obama has made clear his determination to go in the opposite direction. Except among those who believe that the Reagan boom was completely detached from the Reagan Administration’s policies – just a lucky coincidence, as it were – it’s hard to imagine that opposite actions will produce equally fortunate outcomes.

Dorothy June McVay Veal, March 1, 1922 – October 19, 2009

My mother died this morning, peacefully in her own home, as she had hoped. Her body had been slowly shutting down over the past few months, but her mind was clear. Until a few days ago, she read the Wall Street Journal every weekday. Up to the end, she would wake up now and then to tell my brother or sister, who were looking after her, about her comical dreams.

June (she always went by her middle name) McVay was born in Lacon, Illinois, on March 1, 1922, the second daughter of Thomas Newkirk and Leta Lockwood McVay. Granddaddy McVay made some mark on the world, or at least on the kitchen. He was a ceramic chemist who, among other accomplishments, produced the first piece of corning ware (an ashtray, which mother kept on display until a rambunctious child – not me – dropped and broke it one day). In 1928, he accepted a position as Professor of Ceramic Engineering and Mineralogy at the University of Alabama and brought his family from Illinois to Tuscaloosa.

Mother once described to me her first encounter with Deep South fauna. Granddaddy had purchased a newly built house. He took his wife and daughters there one evening to see it for the first time. When he turned on the hallway light, the floor was blanketed with thousands of cockroaches.

That was, incidentally, long before the abolition of poll taxes. In Alabama, newcomers had to pay the tax retroactively to age 21 in order to be eligible to vote (a way to keep Yankee migrants off the rolls). Granddaddy, undeterred, paid 16 years of back taxes so that he could cast just about the only Republican vote in Tuscaloosa County. Grandmother thought that was a waste of money and wasn’t able to vote until the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964 (so she got to cast her very first ballot for Barry Goldwater).

After graduating from the University of Alabama (where life as a professor’s daughter was a challenge), Mother enlisted in the Marine Corps. In high school, she had been Alabama state typing champion, and her contribution to winning World War II consisted of typing reams of personnel records. Corrections were forbidden; any mistake necessitated tearing up the document and starting over. Since males were incapable of doing such work, they were sent off to the Pacific while the women fought to battle of the keyboard. Thanks to their efforts, we don’t have to eat sushi today unless we want to.

A few weeks after V-J Day, PFC McVay married Lieut. (JG) Edward DeKalb Veal, Jr., a Coast Guard officer whom she had known in high school. For the first couple of months following the wedding, they couldn’t obtain married housing, and their life could have formed the basis for the plot of a screwball comedy. In time, that problem was remedied, and their first child (me) was born in November 1946, followed by another son, Ken, two years later. There was then an eight-year interval before the births, two years apart, of my sisters Janie and Katie.

Mother was a full-time housewife until the girls reached school age. She then got an education degree and worked for several years as a teacher.

My father’s job as a sales engineer with Honeywell had taken us to Freeport, Illinois (HQ of his tiny division), Seattle, Cleveland and, after I went off to college, Denver. When he retired, the family stayed in Colorado. Dad and Mother bought a book store in Cripple Creek, a picturesque one-time gold mining center that aspired to be a tourist trap. They operated the store happily, with no particular interest in making a profit, until Colorado allowed Cripple Creek to legalize gambling. Unlike most of their neighbors, they thought that casinos would bring the town no good. Events proved them right about the town, but the influx of starry-eyed gaming investors was good for them personally. They sold the store building for ten times what they had paid for it and retired to a life of traveling and leisure, including trips to Europe, an Atlantic crossing on the QE2 and other pleasant junkets.

Dad died in 2003. Mother remained active, enjoying time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren (four so far) but slowly accumulating ill health. Not too many months ago, she came to the conclusion that she wouldn’t go on much longer. The thought did not depress her. The last time that I saw her, over Labor Day weekend, she was in good spirits. She said that she was proud of her descendants and glad that she had lived as long as she had. I said good-bye to her then, hoping that it wouldn’t be for the last time. But all that is mortal must end.

May her memory be for a blessing.

What Would Ike Have Done?

Dwight Eisenhower was the first President to be famous for playing golf. (Recall the riposte to Birch Society founder Robert Welch: “Ike isn’t a communist; he’s a golfer.”) But, much as Ike loved the game, I doubt that he would have approved of this:

Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy high-mileage cars that was part of President Obama’s stimulus plan, Uncle Sam is now paying Americans to buy that great necessity of modern life, the golf cart.

The federal credit provides from $4,200 to $5,500 for the purchase of an electric vehicle, and when it is combined with similar incentive plans in many states the tax credits can pay for nearly the entire cost of a golf cart. . . .

The golf-cart boom has followed an IRS ruling that golf carts qualify for the electric-car credit as long as they are also road worthy. These qualifying golf carts are essentially the same as normal golf carts save for adding some safety features, such as side and rearview mirrors and three-point seat belts. . . .

The IRS has also ruled that there’s no limit to how many electric cars an individual can buy, so some enterprising profiteers are stocking up on multiple carts while the federal credit lasts, in order to resell them at a profit later. . . .

This golf-cart fiasco perfectly illustrates tax policy in the age of Obama, when politicians dole out credits and loopholes for everything from plug-in cars to fuel efficient appliances, home insulation and vitamins. Democrats then insist that to pay for these absurdities they have no choice but to raise tax rates on other things—like work and investment—that aren’t politically in vogue. If this keeps up, it’ll soon make more sense to retire and play golf than work for living.

But remember, if we don’t subsidize electric vehicles, raise taxes and wreck the economy, the oceans will rise and drown us all!

“H.R.C.” = “Hapless, Ridiculous, Clueless”

There’s something about those initials!

On the clueless side, here is Hillary Rodham Clinton, explaining “soft power” to a Russian audience:

So that’s what smart power means — take nothing for granted, ask all the questions you can possibly have, come up with the best answer that’s humanly possible, (inaudible) knowing that (inaudible) may not get 100 percent right, and then make the best decisions you can to implement them. So we are very committed to engaging in this smart power approach and doing everything we can to work with our partners around the world on (inaudible).

Thank heavens we no longer have national leaders whose philosophy was to take lots of things for granted, not ask questions, come up with mediocre answers that they assume are 100 percent right, and make not particularly good decisions to implement them!

On the other hand, the new regime of smartness has led to what must be the most futile nine months of foreign policy failures in American history. The dumb guys who preceded the Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House must have just been lucky.

A different H.R.C. illustrates how wretchedly “smart power” has worked so far. That’s the U.N. Human Rights Council, which yesterday voted overwhelmingly to endorse the Goldstone Report: 25 yea, six nay, 11 abstaining, five refusing to vote at all. Central to the report is the accusation that Israel deliberately murdered civilians during its incursion in the Gaza Strip last winter. Indifferent though it has been toward Israeli interests, the Obama Administration recognized this libel for what it was and promised to stop the report from moving further. Blocking it in the Human Rights Council was unlikely, given that body’s antisemitic majority, but getting only five other “no” votes (Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine – and all honor to them) is pathetic. Among the abstentions and nonvoters were Belgium, Bosnia, Britain, France, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Slovenia and Uruguay. Russia, apparently determined to prove that it gave absolutely no quid pro quo for our concessions on European missile defense, voted “yes”.

In his speech to the U.N. last month, the President held up joining the Human Rights Council as a sign of how much better he is than George W. Bush. The delegates applauded furiously. A lot of good that applause has done us and our closest Middle East ally.

The Logic of the Anti-Columbians

On this most reviled of national holidays, let’s reflect on what the contemners of Christopher Columbus actually condemn, by necessary implication if not in their conscious intent.

The Admiral of the Ocean Sea, whatever his personal virtues and defects, was not essential to the European discovery of the New World. Had he never lived, we would now celebrate Cabot Day or Hudson Day or some other eponym. The progress of European seafaring and the desire for less impeded routes to the Indies guaranteed that America would be found within a few years of the turn of the 16th Century. One can even dispense with all of the great explorers; by 1500 and likely well before then, a host of anonymous English and Breton fishermen were casting their nets off Newfoundland.

It follows, then, that, if one wishes to denounce Columbus’s achievement and the subsequent European settlement, he logically must denounce the developments that made those events imminent and inevitable, namely, advances in technology, wealth and population. If you like the concept of a world in which the great majority of humans die in infancy and all but a minuscule percentage of the survivors scratch out a subsistence living, by all means lament that Europe ever reached a stage at which it could explore the earth and send emigrants to another hemisphere.

The settlers did not, it is true, act in accordance with enlightened, abstract, liberal principles; that is, they did not turn around and go home. Let’s grant arguendo that their interest in bettering their lives at the expense of the natives was deplorable, but shouldn’t we also deplore the conditions that made the success of the Conquistadors possible?

First, America in 1492 was, except for Australia, the most technologically backward of the continents. That backwardness wasn’t just bad luck. The Amerinds had invented the wheel, and they used it for children’s toys. Their metal working was solely for ornamentation rather than practical use, so that they scratched their fields with wooden hoes and their warriors fought with obsidian weapons. Literacy, mathematics and astronomy were devoted to the glorification of rulers and gods; they laid no foundation for the natural sciences.

Second, and probably more important, the wealthiest and most impressive New World civilizations suffered from political institutions that guaranteed failure in the face of any severe challenge. (Some of the North American groups, such as the much admired Iroquois, did better, but they were too few and poor to resist the white tide for long.) By weight of numbers, the Aztecs and Incas could have defeated Cortez and Pizarro. What decided the issue was the rallying of subjugated tribes in favor of the Conquistadors. The prospect of alien rule was less terrible than the reality of Montezuma’s and Atahuallpa’s tyrannies, within which anyone outside the tiny ruling caste was regarded as essentially not a human being.

Third, the alleged crimes of the invaders were rather pale next to the regular practices of the invaded. The Conquistadors abolished cannibalism and human sacrifice, wars to obtain sacrificial victims, and the panoply of bloodthirsty gods. Though Christianity was imposed on the natives and emanated from an utterly unfamiliar mental world, they never sought to return to the sanguinary rites of their aboriginal faith.

Columbus Day commemorates not a lone man but a series of men and events. They were not the actions of saints unblemished by greed, bigotry and brutality. Without them, nonetheless, the world, both Old and New, would be a more miserable place.

Why Not All the Prizes?

Besides being a peacemaker without peer, Barack Obama is an author (Literature), is at work healing the planet and reforming health care (a double in Medicine), will stop the rising of the seas (Physics), has done even more for prosperity than for peace (Economics) and obviously has great Chemistry with Norwegian America-bashers.

The best commentary that I’ve seen on this turn of events is by the Times of London’s chief foreign correspondent:

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

My only disagreement is with the phrase “risks looking preposterous”. That shark was jumped decades ago.

Funniest commentary is by lefty Richard Cohen. Too good to excerpt.

Jonah Goldberg:

The only thing that really bothers me is that this comes just days after the Obama administration turned a blind eye to the Dalai Lama and told the world that it’s at least considering a separate peace with the Taliban. That’s grotesque. Meanwhile, there are real peace activists and dissidents out there whose dungeons will stay just as cold and dark for another year because of this. Indeed, this news comes during a year when the Iranian people rose up against tyranny and were crushed. Surely someone in Iran — or maybe the Iranian protestors generally — could have benefitted more from receiving the prize than a president who, so far, has done virtually nothing concrete for world peace.

But a friend has pointed out the bright side. Anything that the President might have have done in an attempt to earn the Prize was likely to be disastrous. Now that he has it, he can go ahead and reinforce Afghanistan, knock out the Iranian nuclear project, deep six the Goldstone Report, invade Honduras, etc. without fear of losing his Nobel laureate status.

Quote of the Day

Jen Rubin on whether it is unpatriotic to be glad that the Olympic Games won’t be coming to Chicago in 2016:

The Washington Post — hardly a bastion of Obama-bashing — looked at the Olympic myths and concluded that the Games never pay for themselves, don’t deliver a job boost for the host city, don’t result in a net boost to tourism, don’t permanently change the landscape of the host city, and don’t result in any permanent increase in sports participation for the host country. . . .

So if conservatives would rather not take an event that is a net cost (sometimes in the billions of dollars) to the U.S., then perhaps they aren’t rooting against America but are rooting for some sobriety about our international priorities, something that is in short supply.

It was, after all, not the Games that most conservatives groused about but the misuse of the president’s prestige and the symbolism of a misdirected and egocentric sales job. Funny how conservatives are pleading with Obama not to Jimmy Carterize himself — stand up to the Russians, don’t contradict himself on Afghanistan, don’t be upstaged by the French on Iran — while liberals are all too happy to let him advertise his spinelessness for all to see. . . . For my money, let him win the war and set out to sell the world on America as a shining city on the hill, not the coolest sports venue.

What Presidents Must Accept

Do you remember what George W. Bush said when his proposed Social Security reforms began to encounter opposition?

As we move forward in the coming weeks, I understand that members of Congress from both parties will want to engage in a vigorous debate and contribute their own ideas. And I welcome those contributions. I welcome any sincere attempts to improve legislation before it reaches my desk. But what I will not accept are attempts to stall, or drag our feet. I will not accept partisan efforts to block reform at any cost.

And do you recall being annoyed by the clear implication that good faith opposition to the President’s program was impossible, that to be against it was to be an insincere partisan? What about the suggestion of impatience with the Constitution itself, a document that gives the legislative branch a more vigorous role than simply perfecting what the executive puts forward?

You remember none of that? Congratulations – your memory is in good working order, for none of it happened.

The quotation is from President Obama’s radio address yesterday about health care reform.

If the President Had Stayed Home

Jim Lindgren muses that critics of the President’s dash to Copenhagen may be mere opportunists:

I have been surprised at some of the criticism of President Obama for going to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics. Few commentators bother noting that, had Obama NOT gone to Copenhagen, many would have been blamed him for Chicago’s losing its bid.

Most of us would have quite reasonably — though erroneously — attributed at least Chicago’s elimination on the first ballot (if not necessarily its defeat) to his not attending.

And some critics might have called him arrogant for just “phoning it in” and assuming that merely sending the First Lady was all that was needed to wow the world.

What Professor Lindgren overlooks – at least if he has in mind conservative critics – is that there are hardly any non-UN-affiliated international organizations less popular on the Right than the Olympic Committee. If the post-vote narrative had been that the IOC magnates had punished the United States for not sending our President in person to kowtow before them, I’m pretty sure that I know what the reaction would have been from 99 percent of the dexterosphere: Who are these global bureaucrats to treat the Leader of the Free World as a servant at their beck and call? Maybe the King of Spain and the President of Brazil have no more important concerns than the situs of sporting events, but the reason why they can take time off in Copenhagen is that our President is responsible for the safety of the whole world.

While no conservative would be likely to endorse health care nationalization or cap-and-tax just because the President didn’t try to bail out Mayor Daley’s foredoomed enterprise, the Administration could have garnered a modicum of right-of-center good will by being seen as at odds with a famously supercilious, corrupt and anti-American clique. Another opportunity for “smart diplomacy” gone to waste.

Muffing “Smart Diplomacy”

According to their own account, the Brazilians were highly nervous about their chances of snaring the 2016 Olympics. Here was a marvelous opportunity for the “smart diplomacy” that is supposed to be the backbone of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy.

What if the President had arrived in Copenhagen to announce that Chicago was withdrawing and the U.S. was endorsing the Rio bid? President Lula da Silva’s tears of gratitude would then have been directed at least partly toward America.

Our position in Latin America has declined rapidly this year. The Administration has tried to arrest the negative trend by making an enemy of Honduras, a strategy that only enhances Hugo Chávez’s prestige and influence. A magnanimous gesture toward the hemisphere’s second largest country would garner far more good will than demanding that a Chávez protegé be returned to power, sneering at an ally’s constitutional procedures and threatening to ignore the results of its scheduled elections.

There would have been no down side. An in-touch White House would have known how far behind Chicago was and that we would, as the saying goes, be “fixing a sure thing”. Quite in the tradition of Mayer Daley (the real one, not Junior), actually.

Not Even the Bronze

When Fred Barnes and the New York Times concur, the Millennium must be near. The Times (admittedly, the sports section, not the editorial page) has a less than worshipful account of President Obama’s Olympic lobbying:

President Obama not only failed to bring home the gold, he could not even muster the silver or bronze.

A 20-hour mission across the ocean to persuade the International Olympic Committee to give the Summer Games of 2016 to Chicago ended with the president’s adopted hometown finishing fourth of four candidate cities.

Although Chicago might have lost to Rio de Janeiro for reasons that had little to do with Mr. Obama, the fact that he made himself the face of its bid invariably meant that its defeat would be taken as a stinging rejection of its favorite son.

Losing out on the Olympics, of course, is not the sort of war-and-peace issue that defines a presidency, and the embarrassment will presumably fade in a news cycle or two. But it provides fodder for critics who are already using it as a metaphor for a president who, in their view, focuses on the wrong priorities and overestimates his capacity to persuade the world to follow his lead.

Mr. Obama looked glum as he returned to Washington on Friday afternoon and said, “I wish that we had come back with better news from Copenhagen.” He portrayed the defeat as if it were little more than a lost game of pickup basketball. “One of the things that I think is most valuable about sports is that you can play a great game and still not win,” he said in the Rose Garden. . . .

Mr. Obama’s decision to become the first American president to lobby the Olympic committee in person, just two weeks after saying he was too busy with health care legislation, was a gamble from the start. It was predicated on the theory that Mr. Obama’s star power overseas — “the best brand in the world,” as his advisers have put it — was luminescent enough to make the difference. . . .

A sense of stunned bewilderment suffused Air Force One and the White House. Only after the defeat did many advisers ask questions about the byzantine politics of the Olympic committee. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior adviser and a Chicago booster who persuaded him to make the trip while at the United Nations last week, had repeatedly compared the contest to the Iowa caucuses.

But officials said the administration did not independently verify Chicago’s chances, relying instead on the Chicago 2016 committee assertions that the city had enough support to finish in the top two. Mr. Obama, Michelle Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Ms. Jarrett worked the phones in recent weeks without coming away with a sense of how behind Chicago really was.

Fred Barnes draws the not very recondite morals from this story:

First, when an American president voluntarily takes up a fight and loses badly, it’s a big deal. Obama could have stayed out. Having the summer Olympics in Chicago doesn’t involve the national interest. But he thought the matter important enough to fly to Denmark and make the pitch for his hometown in person. He put his prestige on the line, only to be slapped down. He can’t blame George W. Bush for this one, though his minions may try.

We know the world loves Obama. What the action by the International Olympic Committee demonstrates is that being loved isn’t the same as being influential or taken seriously or respected or feared – the traits of many of Obama’s predecessors in the presidency. If he can’t deliver on a vote of the IOC, does he really have the clout to pressure the mullahs in Iran into giving up their nuclear ambitions? Maybe not.

Second, Obama’s aides assured reporters the president wouldn’t be put in a position where he could be embarrassed. But that’s exactly what happened. The White House gang thought the IOC was poised to ratify the president’s bid for a Chicago Olympics. Hardly anyone else shared that view, including the Japanese, who figured Tokyo wouldn’t be picked but Rio would be and Chicago would finish last.

The issue here is one of incompetence. Somebody – maybe more than one person – didn’t scope out the inclinations of the IOC’s voting members adequately or utterly misread how a personal appearance by the American president would be received. Imagine if something like this occurred on a national security issue. Then the media would demand accountability. The Olympics issue is hardly as consequential, but that shouldn’t inhibit the press in seeking accountability.

Third, where was the charisma, the skill in persuading people to see things Obama’s way? The media has built Obama up as a communicator who’s the equal of Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt. True, he’s delivered several fine speeches, but all of them before he became president. Now he’s either lost his touch or never was the orator the press said he was.

I don’t suppose that the President’s speech to the IOC was a decisive factor in Chicago’s defeat. When you lose by ten runs, does it matter whether you sent in the wrong closer? Still, it was about as unpersuasive a spiel as one can imagine, almost a parody of the narcissism that has become the principal feature of Mr. Obama’s oratory:

Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night, people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of the U.S. Presidential election. Their interest wasn’t about me as an individual. Rather, it was rooted in the belief that America’s experiment in democracy still speaks to a set of universal aspirations and ideals. Their interest sprung from the hope that in this ever-shrinking world, our diversity could be a source of strength, a cause for celebration; and that with sustained work and determination, we could learn to live and prosper together during the fleeting moment we share on this Earth.

Now, that work is far from over, but it has begun in earnest. And while we do not know what the next few years will bring, there is nothing I would like more than to step just a few blocks from my family's home, with Michelle and our two girls, and welcome the world back into our neighborhood.

Just as in his speech to the U.N. last week, the President singled out his own election as an historical turning point. Sure, he added, “It isn’t about me”, but whenever a guy says that, you know that he believes it is. There’s no escaping the implication that, but for the American voters’ wisdom in choosing Barack Obama, we would not be able “to learn to live and prosper together”. Maybe the Olympic bigwigs, for all their faults, have a different idea of the turning points of history.

Failure in Copenhagen may not have been a “killer rabbit moment”, but, like that famous Jimmy Carter incident, it is one of those events, minor in and of itself, that defines and illuminates the weaknesses of an Administration. Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, etc. are complicated matters, whose flow of news often swamps the public’s comprehension. The Olympics are simple, and botching them so badly can’t easily be spun away.