Fourth of July weekend. The fireworks, pageant, pomp and parade have stirred this blog to wakefulness. For the information of the few who may care, it took a vacation while its author (me) strove to finish a couple of projects that needed concentrated attention. Both are now taking up less time, so perhaps I’ll resume paying attention to the world.
Quite a bit has moved on since my last post. A quick, quasi-twitterish rundown of reactions and thoughts:
The economy trudges sideways. When the President defends his performance by saying that unemployment could be 15 percent instead of 9.5, we know that he’s out of arguments. I don’t expect a severe downturn. How far down can we go after the past couple of years? What we can do is slide steadily into a California-like morass, where repaying debt becomes imperative and the means to do so fade away.
The choices are, as Clausewitz said about choices in war, “simple, but the simple is difficult”. One, for which the President has already hinted his preference, is a high-tax economy in permanent recession. A second, advanced by former economist Paul Krugman, is another spree of “stimulus” spending, a gamble that the strategy that has failed so far will succeed if only sufficiently reinforced.
If those were the only two options, I’d go with Professor Krugman. There’s a chance, however slender, that the hyper-Keynesian analysis is right. If it is, borrowing another trillion or two to fling at government payrolls and random make-work programs will multiply the loaves and fishes enough to feed the world and pay the baker’s overdue bill. And if multiplication fails, we’ll wind up in about the same place as under the eternal recession strategy, albeit the decline will be faster and harder. The difference is between a faint hope and none at all.
Happily, we do have another way: Mitigate the tax and regulatory uncertainties that burden the private economy, and give it the chance to recover naturally, as it has after every past recession. That prescription would require, at a minimum, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, repealing Obamacare, and halting the outflow of unexpended “stimulus” funds. The last will be painful, because it will force state governments, the principal stimulus beneficiaries, to cut their employees’ numbers and pay. (The argument for the Obama plan was that it would fund lots of “shovel-ready” construction projects. The reality: Construction employment is down, while state and local government employment has risen throughout the recession.)
The justification for the pain is that this strategy has a better chance of working than either of the others, accompanied by a lower cost of failure. Bumping along for a decade will be better than relentless decline or a spectacular implosion.
The President looks more and more like that baseball phenomenon: the hot rookie who can’t learn how to hit a curve ball. The biggest curve so far is, of course, the Gulf oil spill. The more we learn about the lethargy of the Administration’s reaction, such as its lackadaisical response to offers of assistance from foreign countries, its refusal to waive the Jones Act, its establishment of a slow-moving “oil spill commission” notable for a shortage of scientific expertise and its preference for finding villains rather than solving problems, the more it seems that Barack Obama is incapable of turning his attention to any matter that doesn’t excite him ideologically. In this case, not even the likely impact on his reelection prospects pricked his indifference.
Throughout this crisis, the President has been vigorous only once: when he strong-armed BP into agreeing to bypass the judicial system in settling claims for damages. Maybe that arrangement will speed the course of justice. Maybe it will create a huge, politically influenced slush fund. Whatever the outcome, the maneuver bespeaks a low level of Presidential concern for legal processes and for the right that even inept, unpopular defendants have to impartial adjudication under the rule of law.
Afghanistan is the war that the President declared we must win. Almost everyone agrees that putting General Petraeus in charge of it boosts the chances of victory. I don’t see any reason to dissent from that consensus. Nonetheless, as a supporter of the campaign, I can’t help wondering whether the commander-in-chief is fully behind it.
Public opinion, reverting to its isolationist default position, is unenthusiastic about staying the course against the Taliban. When sentiment turned against Obamacare and cap-and-tax, the President swung into full politicking mode: speeches, town halls, press releases, frenetic e-mails to Obama Organizing for America, coordination of tactics with the Democratic Congressional leadership, and so on and on. The waning of support for his Afghan policy has elicited – almost nil.
I doubt that the President has been overcome by modesty and decided that his pounding the turf for a position is counterproductive. It’s hard not to wonder, does he want to defeat the Taliban, or does he want to be able to say, a few months from now, “We gave it our best shot, General Petraeus couldn’t turn things around, time to skedaddle”?
An interesting sidelight was RNC chairman Michael Steele’s opportunistic attack on the war, which he swiftly retracted, doubtless because this is an issue on which Republicans overwhelmingly support what (we hope is) the President’s view.
Immigration is another issue where I agree, admittedly more on general philosophy than specifics, with the President – and another where his sincerity can rationally be doubted. He just delivered a jeremiad proclaiming that he would propose rational immigration reform, except that those blasted Republicans will oppose him. That would make marginal sense if the Republican Party had majorities in Congress. The last time I looked, the President’s party held 59 percent of the seats in each House. Is the GOP minority really the obstacle? Unanimous Republican opposition couldn’t stop a bill in the House of Representatives, and there are enough pro-reform Republican Senators to thwart a filibuster. Yet somehow The One is impotent.
Could it be that the Democratic Party likes Hispanic votes while its labor union allies don’t like adding immigrants to the work force? In those circumstances, shouting loudly and doing nothing is the ideal triangulation.
The Supreme Court will soon add Elena Kagan to its imperial ranks. Dean Kagan is superbly qualified in the sense that she will show up for work, not ruffle her colleagues, understand the issues presented to the Court at least as well as any of roughly 10,000 other American lawyers, and hire bright clerks from Harvard Law School who will fashion rationales for whatever political position their boss wants them to take.
The Justice-to-be’s testimony had a strong whiff of the Clintonesque: Reality is the product of clever words. I expect that she will become our first truly post-modernist judge.
Shannen Coffin has summarized Dean Kagan’s involvement in what would (gee, everybody must get tired of saying this) be a major scandal if Republicans were involved.
The most interesting/appalling aspect of this affair is the light that it shines on certain progressives’ infatuation with abortion.
Partial-birth abortion nauseates not only pro-lifers but many people who ordinarily sympathize with the pro-abortion position. That is why large Congressional majorities voted to ban it.
To anyone who was for abortion in general but uncomfortable with crushing infants’ skulls during delivery, the conclusion of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that there is no medical need for the latter must have come as a relief – or would have if the Clinton White House, with Elena Kagan at the point, hadn’t suppressed that datum. To Miss Kagan, ACOG’s opinion was “a disaster”. Did she have such an emotional investment in such an inhumane practice? Or was she unable to perceive what it entailed? In either case, we have the consolation that President Obama hasn’t chosen a Justice prone to excessive empathy.
Metric football can go back to sleep. The U.S. team made it to the knockout round for the first time since 1930 and was knocked out. In 2090, we can revisit this “sport”.
Yes, some of us do care. Welcome back.
Posted by: Devon | Saturday, July 03, 2010 at 08:09 PM