Stromata Blog

Notes on a Very Strange Election

Whatever those of us who must live through it may think, future historians will love the Presidential election of 2008, the story of which reads like an Allen Drury novel without the understatement and restraint. Only a full-time blogger can really keep up, but I’ll take advantage of a quiet Friday evening to make a few observations on the latest developments.

• According to polls, most of the public thinks that the media are working for an Obama victory. That is a majority of Americans-in-the-street, not readers of Instapundit and NRO Online. As if to prove the vox populi right, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post promptly declared that journalists are “mad” at the McCain campaign, supposedly because its ads are so much worse than any before in electoral history. Well, that’s a matter of perception, and we can judge the quality of Mr. Kurtz’s current perceptions from his endorsement of the truncated quotation (about whether the war in Iraq is a “task from God”) that ABC’s Charlie Gibson deployed last night to attack the GOP Vice Presidential candidate. It takes deep-rooted partisan determination to turn a prayer “that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them [U.S. troops] out on a task that is from God” into a declaration that God is on our side. Given that Howard Kurtz enjoys a reputation of being “fair and balanced” by MSM standards, I think that we can say unequivocally that the debate about “media bias” is over.

  Obviously, conservatives would prefer that the Left not have so formidable a propaganda juggernaut at its disposal. Nonetheless, no right-winger has proposed doing anything about it beyond drawing attention to its existence. A fair number of leftists, outraged by their adversaries’ tiny breaches in the media barricades, have demanded that the government emasculate Fox News and talk radio. The contrast tells much about which side of the political spectrum is the side of liberty.

  The best way to deal with media partisanship is, paradoxically, to encourage it. The First Amendment guarantees the right of the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC et al. to give full-throated backing to the candidates of their choice and to denigrate Republicans to any extent short of libel (which means, per New York Times v. Sullivan, to any extent at all). They should be proud of their freedom. If they aren’t, we should be proud of it for them, while reserving the right to mock absurd distortions. Honesty is the best policy, and a brazenly opinionated press (which is what our country has had for most of its history) is better for everybody than one that covers up its ideological one-sidedness.

• An odd reaction to the Palin interview, shared by Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, is that the candidate should have answered less straightforwardly. David goes so far as to call her “under-informed and over-confident” because she didn’t bob and weave. Now, maybe Jonah is right that “the responsible thing” is to “use code phrases to dodge offering firm answers” on foreign policy questions. If so, Governor Palin certainly said nothing a tenth as provocative as Barack Obama’s threat to make military incursions into Pakistan. (The New York Times has now reported, truly or otherwise, that incursions are our policy, drawing predictable (though doubtless impotent) ire from the Pakistani army.) Governor Palin also didn’t strike me as “under-informed”. Unlike her questioner, she knew that the “Bush Doctrine” is a cloudy concept, and she accurately denied that Georgian membership in NATO would automatically commit the U.S. to going to war in that country’s behalf. If she blundered elsewhere, the media charitably kept silent. To my mind, her willingness to answer hostile questions directly is a good sign, and the fact that her answers were sensibly conservative is a better one.

• If I needed a reason not to vote for Barack Obama, he gave me one yesterday when he announced that one of the objectives of his vision of “hope and change” is to “make government cool again”. One doesn’t have to be an adamantine libertarian – and I’m not – to shudder at that phrase. Whether the government does a little or a lot, it should be looked on as an instrument for carrying out limited purposes – and one that needs to be watched closely to prevent the misuse of its powers – not as an object of sentimental devotion elevated above the rest of society. It’s obvious that Slick Barry hasn’t spent his spare time reading Liberal Fascism.

• And if I need a reason to wonder about the competence of The One’s staff work, I’ll look no further than his new ad criticizing John McCain for not using a computer or e-mail. It’s a silly criterion for evaluating a candidate. Those are tools, not credentials. (In fact, no President yet has made any significant use of e-mail while in office.) In any event, a campaign team with half a wit among them might have wondered, before shooting the commercial, whether there might be some reason for a guy who suffered visible damage to his arms not being adept at pecking on a keyboard. They might even have done elementary research; it’s not as if John McCain’s life is a closed book. It turns out that he’s physically unable to type.

  What I find most telling about this incident is that Senator McCain himself stated earlier this year that he isn’t e-mail savvy but did not mention the reason. Skipping the chance to elicit sympathy is more admirable than it would be for him to have the world’s greatest blog.

• Finally, the most amazing political event of the week is the apparent recovery of Republican prospects in the Congressional elections. No one predicted this upswing, and it may turn out to be a bubble. Assuming, however, that it’s a real phenomenon, it may be less a “Palin Effect” than an abrupt reversion to the mean.

  The Republican calamity in 2006 resulted from a relatively small shift in votes. Polling gives such grainy pictures that we don’t know for sure what that shift represented. One view is that Americans as a whole have moved to the Left. An alternative explanation is that the least attached Republican voters dropped away, disheartened by the travails of the War on Terror, the constant fingernail scraping of liberal pundits and GOP politicians’ less than firm adherence to their professed principles.

  If the second hypothesis is correct, the addition to the ticket of Governor Palin – best known for fighting against Republican corruptionists – reminded voters who had drifted away from the party what they liked about it. Senator McCain couldn’t successfully woo them on his own, owing to his record of hostility toward the Right, topped, of course, by the McCain-Feingold Act. But now he looks like a genuinely independent thinker rather than a man who pokes conservatives in the eye for fun, and the Republican Party looks much less like the party of pork and spending than it did a couple of weeks ago. Under those circumstances, much of the internecine hostility of the past two years seems to have faded, and the waverers are again taking heart. If they remain in that mood, this election may look more like 2002 than 2006.

This has been an optimistic post, so it must conclude with the standard caveats: A week is a long time in politics. One swallow does not make a summer. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Well, you know the litany. Much can go wrong between now and the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. On the other hand, much can continue to go right. Whatever the direction, more strangeness is bound to come.

Addendum: Oh, my! Instapundit points to a Forbes article from way back in 2000 detailing Senator McCain’s path-breaking use of the Internet during his first Presidential campaign and calling him “the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist”. Could the “aw, shucks” stuff about computer illiteracy have been a devious ploy to lure Slick Barry into an embarrassing blunder? Maybe the old coot ain’t so addled after all.

Lipstick and Sensitivity

Did Barack Obama intend to call Sarah Palin a “pig” and John McCain an “old fish”?

How would I know?

It’s certainly not implausible. His audience took the lines that way and liked them. He is surrounded by people who make little effort to disguise their loathing of Republicans in general and Governor Palin in particular. If he uttered a deliberate slight, it may never have occurred to him that offense could be taken.

Still, only a mind reader can know for sure, and I have yet to meet anyone who is literate in telepathy. Of course, that’s true of many, many similar kerfuffles that have erupted in recent political history. Did George Allen intend to apply a newly coined racial epithet to a dark-skinned operative from his opponent’s campaign? Did Trent Lott mean to endorse segregation? Many commentators were very sure about those cases. Quite a few have also been sure, of late, that there is a racist subtext to Republican mockery of “community organizer” as a shining Presidential qualification. Every statement made by public figures (especially right-wing public figures) is nowadays scrutinized for racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other contemporary sins, to the point where one almost expects them, in self-defense, to script their offhand in advance and have them reviewed by diversity consultants.

But what do we learn from this scrutiny? If we infer from subtle verbal clues that Candidate X is, in his inmost heart, prejudiced against women, blacks, foreigners, Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, necrophiliacs or whatever, we may convince ourselves that he is an unsatisfactory human being – just like every other person on this planet. Elections are not, however, contests in competitive sainthood. The object is to make the best choice to carry out a particular set of duties. Someone who tells crude jokes or secretly harbors stereotypes based on race, religion, sex or ethnicity may nonetheless be able to put bias aside and perform admirably at his job. Bear in mind, too, that his opponent may be no less bigoted but merely better at covering up.

The first Queen Elizabeth wisely said that she had “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”. Passing verbal slips, jokes, offhand comments, outbursts of irritation, gendered pronouns and the like through the filter of Political Correctitude in order to draw conclusions about character is to peer through dark, clouded windows. This whole pig-and-lipstick business will do a bit of good if a few liberals wake up to the absurdity of modern hyper-sensitivity. Our country would be a better, or at least a jollier, place if Barack Obama could say what he thinks about his rivals and be judged by whether it makes sense, not by its conformity to artificial proprieties.

In other words, what was wrong with his statement wasn’t the business about fish and pigs and lipstick but the assertion that he – the Chicago machine loyalist, the buddy of Tony Rezko, the legislator who got government money for his political donors and voted against switching funds from the “Bridge to Nowhere” to Hurricane Katrina victims – is more of a reformer than a governor whose career was built on fighting corruption within her own party. One might, if sensitivity did not reign, say it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Barack and Taxes

Until last weekend, Barack Obama was the first Presidential candidate since Walter Mondale to promise unequivocally that he will raise taxes. On Sunday, that promise reached its expiration date. He told ABC that his proposed tax hikes for “the rich” will be postponed if the economy is in recession next year.

Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush’s tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy.

Nevertheless, Obama has no plans to extend the Bush tax cuts beyond their expiration date, as Republican John McCain advocates. Instead, Obama wants to push for his promised tax cuts for the middle class, he said in a broadcast interview aired Sunday.

“Even if we’re still in a recession, I’m going to go through with my tax cuts,” Obama said. “That's my priority.”

What about increasing taxes on the wealthy?

“I think we’ve got to take a look and see where the economy is. I mean, the economy is weak right now,” Obama said on “This Week” on ABC. “The news with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I think, along with the unemployment numbers, indicates that we're fragile.”

“Obama Tax 3.0”, as the Wall Street Journal labels it, makes economic sense but contradicts what Democrats have been telling us for the past several years. Speaker after speaker at their Denver extravaganza declared that the country is already sunk in a state of unprecedented misery, for which a major culprit was “Bush’s tax cuts for the rich”. Now the Democratic candidate says that curing the economic malaise requires keeping its alleged cause intact.

The Journal generously opines that Senator Obama’s change of heart shows an improving grasp of the effect of taxes on the creation of wealth. Maybe, but to my eyes it’s more like flailing. Raising taxes isn’t popular, even if only a small percentage of taxpayers are directly affected. President Clinton discovered that in 1994. The lesson didn’t matter to Slick Barry so long as he was The Inevitable One. Now, feeling less confident, he blurs the punitive side of his tax program.

He insists, however, that the benevolent side, the “middle class tax cuts”, will go forward, without mulcting “the rich” to offset them. Implicitly, then, he rejects the Democratic Party dogma (enacted as the “pay-go rule”) that all tax reductions must be “paid for”. If sincere, that is a welcome shift toward the GOP position, but one need not be a hardened cynic to doubt that a Democratic President and Democratic Congress will follow through. In the same interview, Senator Obama declares that extending EGTRRA tax relief, as John McCain advocates, will “blow a hole through the budget”. How will an Obama Administration avoid the same “hole”? Once the election is safely over, tax relief for the middle class is almost sure to go the same way as Bill Clinton’s similar promise in 1992.

If the income tax cuts do materialize, the middle class will be little, if any, better off. Weighing against them will be the candidate’s proposed corporate tax increases, which he hasn’t yet suggested be put on hold. As Ronald Reagan once remarked, “Corporations don’t pay taxes; they collect taxes.” A corporation is an abstraction; its tax burden falls on real people: shareholders, employees or customers. Economists disagree about the exact division of the costs, but there’s no denying the impact on ordinary Americans. Shareholders consist largely of pension funds and other retirement plans. Joe Sixpack’s 401(k) account pays part of ExxonMobil’s taxes. Workers and consumers pay the rest in the form of lower wages and higher prices. U.S. corporate tax rates are already among the world’s highest; the Obama program would make them worse.

Also painful for the middle class, needless to say, will be the Obama anti-energy mania, keeping all cheap and practicable sources off-limits while squandering capital on a government-mandated switch to expensive alternatives.

Discussing tax policy in terms of “the rich” versus the rest is in any case far off the mark. The income tax system is already steeply progressive. As of 2006 (the latest year for which data are available), taxpayers with 30 percent of the nation’s income paid 60 percent of all income tax. Their average tax rate is over 20 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of the taxpaying public endures an average income tax rate of three percent. Given those numbers, politicians who want to be solicitous of the middle class need to look elsewhere: to corporate taxes, as noted above, or to payroll taxes, which last year produced $180 billion more in Social Security revenue than was paid out in benefits. Republicans have at various times proposed channeling some or all of that surplus into personal retirement accounts. Democrats, preferring that the government spend the money, have been adamantly against.

The best that one can say about candidate Obama’s tax ideas at this point is that he is not so much in favor of “soaking the rich” as confused about the whole subject. Well, maybe that’s better than Walter Mondale.

Quote of the Day

From a reader on Commentary’s blog, Contentions:

When [the media] see that prayers are being offered at the Democratic National Convention, then they eagerly report this so that some of those benighted Christians will switch over and vote Democrat. Thus Obama can talk about his personal faith, his prayer life, his devotion to the church – he can even preach at a church on Sunday – and all of this will be celebrated and put front-and-center for everyone to see as an example of how attractive he is. When a conservative speaks of the relevance of her prayer life to her decisions, or when she says that she thinks a certain decision is God’s will, or so on, then this is a subject of fear and loathing, and if it is reported it is reported in order to show everyone what a dangerous wacko this is.

We’re so used to this asymmetry that it barely gets any notice. When a liberal professes to derive political opinions from religious principles (e. g., that the welfare state is an imperative of Christian charity), neither conservatives nor liberals denounce him as a fundamentalist zealot trying to impose his faith on secular society. The Wall of Separation is, it seems, unbreachable only on the Right.

Dux Femina Facti

I’m surprised that the obvious classical tag isn’t already on the lips (virtually speaking) of every right-wing blogger. Maybe nobody reads the Aeneid any more. Certainly Sarah Palin has led Republicans out of their two-year-long slough of despond, and in a fashion worthy of an Allen Drury novel.

Who wouldn’t roll is eyes at this plot? An underdog Presidential candidate picks the little known, female governor of a three-electoral-vote state as his Vice Presidential running mate. Scarcely has he introduced her to the world but the media resound with unflattering rumors. Amid the clamor, she reveals that her unmarried daughter is in a family way. (Babies, Lies and Scandal screams one tabloid.) In a trice, wagers are laid on when she will be dumped from the ticket à la Tom Eagleton. The conventional wisdom is that her selection was a desperate maneuver undertaken with only cursory vetting.

Then she delivers her acceptance speech. The publicity draws one of the largest television audiences that has ever watched an hour of a political convention. She starts a bit nervously but soon swings into a fluent precis of her background and career, interwoven with deft jabs at “our opponent”. It is by far the best speech of the convention. The first subsequent poll gives her the highest favorable rating of any candidate of either party.

We aren’t allowed to read ahead, so we don’t know how this story ends. Does the hockey mom from Wasilla go from triumph to triumph, take the oath of office beside President McCain, and look forward on the last page to becoming President herself? Or is this a tragedy, in which the pressures of a relentless campaign overwhelm the young and naïve aspirant?

We know what ending the great majority of reporters and pundits hope for and will do their utmost to bring about. Governor Palin is getting the kind of scrutiny that Barack Obama dreams of only in his nightmares. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ have already faded away, but you can bet that every provocative sentence ever spoken from the pulpit of Wasilla Bible Church will be broadcast on MSNBC. No need to say what will happen if a counterpart to Bill Ayers or Tony Rezko turns up, at however great a remove, in Sarah Palin’s past.

On whether Governor Palin is the next Margaret Thatcher, as her more enthusiastic admirers aver, I’ll reserve judgement. Lady Thatcher was a thinker as well as a doer. We don’t yet know a great deal about Mrs. Palin’s political thought. For the time being, it’s enough that her candidacy has had the delightful effect of compelling Senator Obama to explain why his experience (a few years each as a “community organizer”, a minor league lawyer, a state legislator and a Senator running for President) is more impressive than hers (city councilman and mayor of an Anchorage suburb, member of the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, governor).

The only way to keep the comparison from being an embarrassment is to adopt the recursive position that campaigning for President is itself good preparation for the Presidency. No candidate has ever made such a case before. That fact by itself gives sufficient insight into its validity. (The ghost of William Jennings Bryan may wish that he had thought of it.)

Barack Obama has the sort of record that traditionally would fit a Vice Presidential nominee: an up and coming figure with talent and potential in lieu of a long list of accomplishments. If the Democrats were presenting Clinton-Obama this year, no one would quibble with the second banana’s qualifications for the number two job. Their denigration of Governor Palin only emphasizes the emptiness at the top of their actual slate.

Mrs. Palin’s presence in the race also plays havoc with Slick Barry’s pretense of being a great reformer. She overthrew an entrenched, corrupt party establishment. He sedulously cooperated with one many times more entrenched and corrupt. As David Freddoso acidly observes,

There must be someone out there who remembers the 2006 election, in which [Senator Dick] Durbin and Obama together thwarted the efforts of bipartisan reformers who had reached across party lines to clean up their city’s politics. In that election, . . . the two senators endorsed, as a “good, progressive Democrat,” a man named Todd Stroger. Both Obama and Durbin knew well that Stroger would continue to use the Cook County payroll as a private fund to support the politically connected — they just didn’t care.

Stroger, a man described by liberal Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn as “an unimaginative legislative drone” and a “machine hack candidate,” won his race with Durbin and Obama’s help. As expected, he went on to shutter health clinics, lay off hundreds of nurses and dozens of prosecutors, and raise taxes — all in order to pay for the hundreds of unqualified but politically connected patronage workers that he and various politicians had “sponsored” for county jobs. John Stroger, his father and predecessor, had even taken the wise step of putting Tony Rezko’s wife on the county payroll.

Obama notes that his opponent, Senator John McCain, voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time. Obama sides with Mayor Richard M. Daley 100 percent of the time, whether in regards to Stroger’s election or anything else that helps keep Chicago politics dirty. That is the real Barack Obama — not the smooth-talking Greek god who plays a reformer on television, but the man who has never met a Daley-backed Chicago pol he could not support. He doesn’t work against politicians for whom Tony Rezko raises money.

If Barack Obama had fetched up in Juneau instead of Hyde Park, and had subsequently been elected governor of Alaska, the Bridge to Nowhere would be adorned with Greek columns and perhaps a mega-sized statue of The One. If Sarah Palin were a Chicagoan, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t be the friend and ally of Richard M. Daley, Todd Stroger and Tony Rezko.

It’s strange how this already strange election has become at least transitorily chiastic: Obama vs. Palin instead of Obama vs. McCain. Stranger still, the man whom the media have treated for months as semi-divine, ever since he upended the “inevitable” Hillary, is struggling to stay in the lead.

Addendum: The Weekly Standard [link for subscribers only] notes an historical parallel between Governor Palin and another governor who was plagued by a scandal more consequential than the pregnancy of an unmarried daughter:

As every schoolboy knows, Grover Cleveland was the Democratic candidate for president in 1884, and in the course of the campaign, a Republican newspaper reported that Cleveland (who was not married) had once fathered a child. Naturally, his campaign was caught flat-footed by the story, but Governor Cleveland wired some famous instructions to his staff: “Whatever you say, tell the truth.”

The truth was that Cleveland had once formed an “illicit connection” with a widow named Maria Halpin, and a baby had been born. The evidence was not conclusive that Cleveland was the father, but he had assumed responsibility for the child and refused to dissemble about the matter when running for president. Americans were impressed. Holier-than-thou Republicans were made to look silly, Cleveland came across as brave and honorable, and he won the election.

Cleveland, by the way, had been just another lawyer in Buffalo when he became the “Veto Mayor” in 1882, cleaning up political graft, and was elected the reform governor of New York later that year, taking on the powers within his own political party. Sound familiar? On election night 1884 his supporters gathered at polling places and sang the following tune:

Hurrah for Maria,
Hurrah for the kid;
We voted for Grover,
And we’re damned glad we did!

THE SCRAPBOOK wonders if this famous quatrain might be adapted for Election Night 2008.

Off the Campaign Trail

The first time that I watched the Republican and Democratic conventions, I was nine years old, and, though my grasp of civics was rudimentary, they were fascinating. The Democrats had contests for both the Presidential and the Vice Presidential nominations. The GOP’s gathering offered no suspense, but I did get to see my first cogently expressed political speech when the governor of my then home state, Arthur B. Langlie, defended the Eisenhower Administration’s record and principles in a classic keynote address.

Even then political conventions had passed their glory days and were dwindling into staged, scripted spectacles. (“Infomercials” isn’t an inapt label). That evolution was doubtless inevitable. Nonetheless, I don’t have to applaud it, and I don’t have to spend the next two weeks parsing its products. Hundreds of pundits and tens of thousands of other bloggers will tirelessly do that. For myself, I’m signing off from campaign trail watching until the Republican convention ends. After this post, you won’t see the words “Obama”, “McCain”, “Biden” or [blank to be filled on August 29th] on this site until September 5, 2008, at the earliest.

After that vacation, I shall, I hope, be refreshed enough to endure what looks to be one of the most peculiar Presidential campaigns in our country’s history. The Obama-Biden ticket consists of the Senate’s first and third most left-wing members, according to the National Journal’s analysis of voting records. (Self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont ranks fourth.) Both nominees are fine practitioners of the debased contemporary style of oratory, in which argumentation consists wholly of slogans and shibboleths. Off the teleprompter, both are prone to say odd or nonsensical things. Neither has ever accomplished much except to read speeches that were praised at the time but produced not a memorable phrase, much less a noteworthy idea. Each carries a burden of potentially embarrassing associations, the one with ideological extremists and corrupt political fixers, the other with lobbyists (which would be fairly innocent, had his running mate not spent the past two years demonizing professional petitioners for the redress of grievances).

Add to that the handicap of feverish support from personality cultists and Angry Leftists, and one has what would, in normal political times, be a prescription for electoral suicide. Obviously, the times are not normal. Just how far from normality they have drifted is yet to be seen, but “it harrows me with fear and wonder”.

Subtext Messages

The text was “Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee”, but the subtext of the 3:00 a.m. (coincidence?) IM was, “We’ve got no idea what we’re doing.”

The Obama campaign’s Vice Presidential gimmick was that his loyal worshippers supporters would be the first to learn whom The One had anointed as His Second. In fact, old-fashioned news organizations reported the story hours earlier. All that the high-tech notification accomplished was to wake up Obamaphiles who don’t turn off their cell phones when they go to bed. They’ll probably blame George W. Bush for their interrupted sleep.

It would have been hard in any event to keep the choice absolutely secret until the official announcement, but the campaign made it impossible when it arranged for a Secret Service detail to be dispatched to Senator Biden’s home late Friday evening. That step could, of course, have been put off till after the announcement. Steps could also have been taken to diffuse media attention, e. g., by placing orders for campaign paraphernalia in the names of a raft of alternative tickets: Obama-Biden, Obama-Bayh, Obama-Kaine, Obama-[Chet] Edwards, Obama-Clinton, etc.

The Obama operation didn’t even try. Either they were too amateurish to realize that in Washington any secret not actively protected will leak prematurely, or they didn’t really care about keeping their promise that their followers would be “the first to know”. It’s hard not to suspect that the objective was simply to harvest a few million cell phone numbers, which will, I expect, receive many more Obama ads during the next three months.

Further reading: Patrick Ruffini, “Epic Text Message Fail? Media Gets Biden News Hours Before Supporters”

The Silliest Political Attack in American History

When I chanced across the news that John McCain doesn’t know how many houses he and his wife own, my first thought was that the Senator’s thoughts aren’t focused on his material possessions, which struck me as admirable. Why should a lawmaker and Presidential candidate be au courant about such things, particularly when his schedule for the last couple of years has allowed very little time at home? Better for him to have sound opinions on foreign policy, taxes, energy, etc. and leave his balance sheet to his accountant.

Barack Obama, however, regards indifference to one’s wealth as a vice rather than a virtue. It shows that his opponent is “out of touch”. Next up, I suppose, will be a denunciation of the McCains’ “spendthrift” donations to charity. (A piece in left-wing Harper’s Magazine has already claimed that the recipients of their roughly $200,000 a year in gifts are not “the pattern of giving you’d expect from someone who has cultivated an anti-elitist image”.) After that, Obama surrogates will witheringly point out that the average Joe didn’t have Mr. McCain’s opportunities for foreign travel in the late 1960’s.

This election may be amusing after all.

Wind Power or Hot Air?

Which state gets the largest percentage of its electricity from wind power, the latest green fave? Vermont? Oregon? Taxachusetts? Maine? It must be some environmentally hyper-conscious place, right?

The answer is George W. Bush’s home state, Republican-dominated Texas. Today’s Wall Street Journal explains why:

In this year’s great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. . . . In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%. . . .

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. “It’s kind of schizophrenic behavior,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. “They say that we want renewable energy, but we don’t want you to put it anywhere.”

Texas is the notable exception. It –

is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Similar environmentalist obstacles have been thrown up, the Journal reports, in Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maine and New York.

Should we be surprised? It’s been obvious for a long time that liberals’ preferred approach to energy issues is lowering the country’s standard of living. Their bêtes noires aren’t only coal and oil but any source of power that isn’t utterly impracticable. If somebody devised a way to generate electricity by magic, you can bet that the greenies would rush to revive laws against witchcraft.

Audacity Pure and Simple

Yesterday Barack Obama accused the National Right to Life Committee of forgery. The charge , if true, is an appalling blot on the NRLC’s scutcheon. If false, it suggests that the Democratic nominee-presumptive is audacious about more than just hope.

The background: In 2003, when Mr. Obama was an Illinois state senator, he chaired a committee that killed a bill to require that medical care be given to infants who survive attempted abortions. Essentially identical federal legislation had passed both Houses by unanimous votes, with the endorsement, astonishingly enough, of the National Abortion Rights League. Senator Obama has in the past explained his opposition by stating that the Illinois measure omitted a clause, included in the federal one, explicitly disclaiming any intention of contradicting Roe v. Wade. He has also said that he would have supported a bill with that disclaimer.

A week ago, the National Right to Life Committee found and reproduced records of the committee meeting, showing that the disclaimer was in fact added, after which Senator Obama still proceeded to vote nay. (For more details, vide, Kevin Vance, “Obama’s Abortion Distortion”.)

Questioned by David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network last night, after his joint appearance with Senator McCain at Saddleback Church, Senator Obama heatedly declared, in response to a question about whether the NRLC was right to assert that “you misrepresented your position on that bill”:

[T]hey have not been telling the truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported – which was to say – that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born – even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade.

That statement can’t be read as anything but a claim that the documents brought forward by the NRLC are not authentic.

If Senator Obama is correct, if the NRLC has produced forgeries à la the notorious Rathergate papers, it has a duty to apologize, fire the personnel responsible and make full amends. At the very least, it should refrain from further intervention in the Presidential race.

If, on the other hand, the candidate is bearing false witness, it hard to see how he has any honorable alternative to withdrawing his candidacy. Groundless accusations of quasi-criminal conduct are utterly inconsistent with fitness for the world’s most important political office.

Update (8/18/08): The Obama campaign has conceded that the NRLC is substantively correct, but instead of withdrawing and apologizing for its forgery accusation has substituted a hitherto unvoiced and rather far-fetched rationale for the candidate’s opposition to the state bill. Toujours l'audace! (Thanx to Jill Stanek.)

Taking Sides in Berlin

A column in today’s Wall Street Journal (Matthew Kaminski, “Obama and the German Question” invites another perspective on Barack Obama’s Siegessäule rhetoric.

Much has been made of the need to improve America’s image in Europe. This narrative is some two years past its sell-by date. President Bush may not be popular at home or on the Continent, but America is again the ally of choice. On Iran, Russia, China and the Mideast, the big players of the European Union eagerly and pragmatically seek out U.S. leadership; in the surprise twist of this century so far, France leads the way.

Berlin is the exception. Its foreign policy can be charitably described as inconsistent and confused – and infused with a strain of anti-Americanism hard to find among other European ruling elites these days.

Germany’s government is a “grand coalition” between conservatives and socialists. The leading figure among the latter is Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who used to be former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s chief of staff.

Like his previous boss (Mr. Schröder is now on the Kremlin’s payroll at gas giant Gazprom), Mr. Steinmeier nurtures friendly ties with Moscow and is cool toward Washington. Chancellor Merkel’s instincts lead her in an opposite direction, yet she has shown little leadership on foreign policy of late, possibly to avoid a costly fight before elections.

Russia is a major concern to European leaders today, as Tsar Prime Minister Putin grows steadily more authoritarian, anti-American and irrational. It wasn’t a major topic of the Siegessäulesprache, but the few words devoted to it took an unambiguous stand. Quoth Senator Obama:

In this century — in this city of all cities — we must reject the Cold War mindset of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

That is the Schröder/Steinmeier line: See only good in the Kremlin. David Frum rejoins:

Russia has reverted to authoritarian rule. It uses its oil and gas to muscle its neighbors. The rulers of Russia are almost certainly responsible for the assassination of one of their most effective critics on British soil — and for the murder of dozens of journalists at home. These are facts, not delusions born of some “Cold War mindset.”

[And here and here are more to read about the current state of Russian liberty.]

Did Slick Barry realize that he was taking sides in an important European debate? Perhaps not. Did he mean to pass lightly over Russian misconduct? Not necessarily; the passage may have been “just words”. Nevertheless, it means more than a little when an immensely popular American politician stands on German soil and endorses a key tenet of Germany’s anti-American Left. At the very least, the political climate will now be colder for our friends in that country. The next President, whoever he is, will have to live with the consequences.

Quote of the Yesterday

Denis Boyles wrote this before the Siegessäule Oration:

Ultimately, with Obama, it’s the substance problem. Not drugs (inhaling, Obama truthfully said, was kind of the point of smoking marijuana), but content. Obama’s speeches are like Cocteau Twins’ songs. Each one is a sugar hiccup of audacious hope: they sound great, but the words don’t mean anything, no matter which language is used.

“Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

A Song We Can Believe In (or at least hum)

Speaking to a huge and receptive audience today, Barack Obama could have performed a valuable service for our country. He professes to regard Afghanistan as the crucial battleground in the War on Terror. He must be aware that our European allies have, with a few commendable exceptions (of which Germany is not one), given the Afghan government only faint-hearted support. The main reason for that reticence is that European public opinion strongly favors doing nothing.

So here he was, in front of a crowd of 200,000 admirers and every television network on the continent – an unsurpassed opportunity to make the case for the Afghan campaign directly to Hans and Jacques. But he didn’t. Instead, he delivered a standard, gaseous campaign speech, complete with a cringe-inducing tribute to his personal genealogy and a vacuous “This is our moment” refrain. Afghanistan got one paragraph. As a paragraph, it was okay, but it did not lay out the reasons why what happens in that distant land is important to the future of the civilized world. The chance to open a crack in the wall of European indifference slipped away, maybe because Senator Obama did not know how to seize it, maybe because he wasn’t all that eager to try. He has never told us why he regards Afghanistan as vital and Iraq as a throw-away. What could he say to his fellow citizens of the world?

On the more positive and uplifting side, Jim Geraghty has discovered that Slick Barry has unexpected talents as a lyricist. Half of the following stanza is from that monument of 1980’s vacuity, “We Are the World”, the rest from the Siegessäule Oration. (Jim tells which is which, so I don’t have to.)

We can’t go on pretending day by day
That someone, somewhere will soon make a change.
This is the moment we must help answer the call.
But if you just believe there’s no way we can fall.
The world will watch and remember what we do.
Let us realize that a change can only come when we stand together as one.
We cannot afford to be divided.
These now are the walls we must tear down.
This is the moment when we must come together.
They’ll know that someone cares, and their lives will be stronger and free.

The lines almost hum themselves, whether or not the words make much sense.

Welcome to Jerusalem!

Shortly before Barack Obama was due to arrive in Israel’s de jure capital, an Israeli Arab ran amok with a bulldozer. Luckily, he was killed before he could murder anyone. (Sixteen people were wounded.) A Jerusalem Post columnist suggests a lesson that the candidate might want to ponder:

Although subsequent investigation may prove different, there’s good reason to believe Ghassan Abu Tir’s bulldozer terror attack was deliberately staged as a greeting gift for you, Senator Obama.

He belongs to the same Jerusalem family clan as imprisoned Hamas official Muhammad Abu Tir, so he is likely to have had ties to radical Islamist elements. He was shot dead as he was driving his bulldozer up King David Street straight in the direction of the King David Hotel, which you were due to check into later in the day.

And the timing of the incident was logical, since such an attack would have been much harder to pull off after your arrival, when the heavier police presence on the street would have stopped Abu Tir’s rampage even sooner than was the case.

What was the message, then, that Abu Tir was likely trying to deliver to you? Well, let’s consider some of the few facts about him that we already know. His village of Umm Tuba is one of those fortunate Arab neighborhoods on the periphery of Jerusalem that is not cut off from the rest of the city by the security barrier. Thus it is one of the better-off Arab communities in the capital – just like Jebl Mukaber and Sur Bahir, the neighboring Arab villages that produced the perpetrators of the previous two terror attacks in Jerusalem, including the original bulldozer rampage just three weeks ago.

So keep in mind, Senator Obama, that the gainfully employed Abu Tir was probably not one of those Palestinians you spoke about earlier on your trip, whose motivation to carry out terror was primarily due to economic deprivation. Nor is he likely one of those who shared your dream to see a Palestinian state rise up alongside Israel.

His message to you was that some things are not negotiable, and some people do not really wish to be negotiated with, at least not on any terms but their own; that Israel’s crime is not what it does or where its borders are, but its very existence; and that no matter which president sits in , those basic – or, one might say, sacred – principles will remain unchanged. . . .

[W]e need a US president wise enough to understand the need for diplomacy, yes – but equally so, one strong and courageous enough to utilize America’s incomparable might when diplomacy fails.

In short, we need a president who won’t be bulldozed by those who hold in contempt the values that both the US and Israel stand for. That, Senator Obama, is the message you can send back home from Jerusalem, on the day after the blood spilled by Ghassan Abu Tir practically on your doorstep ran down King David Street.

And what did Senator Obama say a few hours after the act of terrorism?

What I think can change is the ability of the United States government and a United States president to be actively engaged with the peace process and to be concerned and to recognize the legitimate difficulties that the Palestinian people are experiencing right now and recognize that it is not only in the interest of the Palestinian people that their situation improves – I believe that it is in the interest of the Israeli people.

It looks like Ghassan Abu Tir’s message was not successfully delivered.

“Even Obama Cannot Change the Past”

That saying from Aristotle used to be translated differently, but now we know what ‛o theós really refers to. The Man from Change obviously doesn’t agree with the dead white male Greek. His positions may appear to meander across the political spectrum in close coincidence with electoral convenience, but he will be the first to tell us that on all these matters – from the desirable future status of Jerusalem to the success of the “surge” in Iraq – he has been like a tree that’s standing by the water.

Some non-worshipers shake their heads and conclude that arguing about what Slick Barry said last year isn’t worth the effort. Jennifer Rubin responds with four good reasons why his attempts at historical revisionism matter:

#1: He doesn’t tell the truth. His lack of credibility on this and matters small and large (e.g., he never heard Wright’s hate speech, he played a major role in immigration, he always thought the surge would work) reveal him to be, at the very least, not offering anything resembling New Politics and, at worst, entirely untrustworthy.

#2: All his bouncing around is evidence of inexperience. He will confound our allies and embolden our foes because he says silly things or doesn’t understand what he is saying or doesn’t realize the import of his words.

#3: It reveals that he is weak and subject to persuasion by whichever group he is in front of at that moment. Before the netroots, unconditional talks sounded good, but no longer. In front of AIPAC “Undivided Jerusalem” sounded good, but not when trying to play the “honest broker” with the Arabs.

#4 . . . : Obama is stubborn and won’t admit when he makes an error. This is the Bush-redux argument. (The “You don’t want another bullheaded president” argument.)

Let me add one more item: Senator Obama’s indulgence in implausible reconciliations of past and present statements evidences an internal conviction that he is so charismatic, clever and convincing that ordinary mortals can be counted on to fall in readily with this week’s version of reality. “Arrogance” has become an overworked accusation, but it is a real phenomenon, and the junior solon from Illinois has a case so hyper-developed that Bill Clinton himself looks humble by comparison. The negative consequences for the Big He were more personal than political. The country may not be so lucky during an eight to ten year Obama reign.

A Ten-Year Presidency

Barack Obama is touring Afghanistan. The Daily Telegraph picks up an interesting quote:

Mr Obama did little to disappoint critics who accuse him of arrogance. He said the objective of the trip was to “hold substantive discussions” with national leaders “who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to ten years [emphasis added]”.

Is there something about the length of the President’s term of office that those of us who have never taught constitutional law don’t understand? Or is this the first trial balloon for repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment?

The paragraph just quoted is the only negative bit in the story, showing that the “Torygraph” is as easily duped by Slick Barry as any other outfit. For instance,

Senator Barack Obama has demanded plans be drawn up immediately for US troops to be redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Visiting Kabul on the first stop of his first major overseas trip since winning [sic] the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Mr Obama described conditions in Afghanistan as “precarious and urgent”.

“I think the situation is getting urgent enough that we have to start doing something now,” he told CBS television. “We can’t wait for a new administration otherwise it will be a year before new troops arrive.” . . .

Mr Obama has placed defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda at the centre of his foreign policy.

How close to the centre? You can search the “Issues” section of BarackObama.com in vain for one word about Afghanistan or the Taliban or al-Qa’eda. The safest prediction in the political marketplace is that, by about noon next Guy Fawkes Day, Mr. Obama, whether Senator or President-elect, will have joined the rest of the transnational Left in its conviction that Afghanistan is no more worth saving than Iraq.

Further reading: Jake Tapper, “Obama’s Butterfly Effect”
BeldarBlog, “MSM covers up both Obama’s arrogance and imprecision in interview gaffe during Afghanistan/Iraq trip”

Barry’s Words

Gregory S. McNeal:

In view of his non-existent record, Obama’s words must merit greater scrutiny because they are the only remaining measure voters have for what Obama believes. Those words have been woefully inconsistent over the totality of Obama’s short career, and are full of generalities like “hope” and “change.” In fact, the only consistent theme in his campaign is one policy change after another. All politicians modify their positions (including McCain), but usually those changes take place over a few years and as circumstances dictate. Obama’s changes on dozens of issues came about in just three and a half years and not for policy reasons, but for political gain.

But let’s be fair. At the core of Slick Barry’s shifting words about Iraq is an unchanging principle. A year ago, USA Today interviewed him and reported,

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday [July 19, 2007] the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

The danger of “a potential genocide in Iraq” has receded, but the candidate’s attitude toward America’s most important Arab ally remains unaltered. The Washington Post – sounding almost like a cog in the VRWC – summarizes:

The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome — that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves.

It is, nonetheless, a natural view for an isolationist left-winger, who knows little about the world outside Hyde Park and cares less. “Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

Something to Talk About

Thirty years ago, a Palestinian woman led a terrorist attack that killed 37 Israelis (including ten children), wounded 76, and ended only when she and her team were themselves gunned down at a police barricade. Their goal was to disrupt peace talks between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat. In that, they failed. The negotiations went forward and led to the Camp David accords and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Nonetheless, killing Jews was enough to turn Dalal Mughrabi into a Palestinian heroine, after whom numerous schools and other buildings have been named.

The Jerusalem Post now reports that the Palestinian Authority has asked Israel to turn over Mughrabi’s remains as part of the forthcoming prisoner exchange.

“We want to turn Dalal’s funeral into a national wedding, a major celebration,” the Fatah official [a close associate of PA “president” Mahmoud Abbas] said. “The operation she carried out off the shores of her hometown of Jaffa was heroic and exemplary. She will always be remembered as a symbol for the Palestinian women’s struggle.”

Next week Barack Obama plans to meet with “President” Abbas. Senator Obama is fond of lecturing Americans about our bad habits. Could he perhaps preach a few words to Abbas about the indecency of “a major celebration” in honor of a multiple murderess?

Quote of the Day

As the Dow slides further into bear market territory, the WSJ Political Diary (subscription-only but cheaper than you think) suggests that factors are at work other than the poor state of the housing market and the Fed’s timidity about defending the dollar:

Are global investors anticipating a Barack Obama victory in November and the economic storm that his high-tax and anti-trade policies would bring? . . .

Now some smart analysts have decided to quantify the relationship. They find a definite inverse correlation between Mr. Obama’s probability of winning the election (as measured by the Intrade political futures market) and the ups and downs of the stock market. Intrade provides a trading market where investors can bet on who will win the election – such betting markets have a record of performing better than polls in forecasting election outcomes. University of Michigan Economist Mark Perry was perhaps the first to uncover the relationship between this Obama index and asset values. Radio host and fund manager Jerry Bowyer notes on CNBC.com that investors would have good reason for wanting to flee U.S. markets ahead of an Obama victory. Increases in capital gains and dividend taxes alone will “mean very large additional levies on investors.” Mr. Bowyer adds: “Of course, this affects stock prices. It is ludicrous to suggest that adding taxes directly on an asset class would have no effect on its value.” . . .

The lesson here for investors is to keep an eye on the betting markets as a leading indicator as to the direction of stocks. “If the political winds keep blowing left,” says Dan Clifton of Strategas, an investment advisory firm, “the market is going to tank. In that case, I advise, get out of the market while you still can.”

Also worth noting is that the latest market declines coincide with Senator Obama’s blurring of his image. Maybe, as some posit, that’s a slick political move. Its extraordinary clumsiness hints, however, that the candidate is in fact as ill-prepared for higher office as his sparse record and patent unfamiliarity with public affairs portend. The prospect of a President as bumbling as Jimmy Carter, as uninformed as Warren G. Harding and as personally radical as George McGovern hardly bodes well for a Dow-friendly future.

Update (7/15/08): MSN.Money columnist Jon Markman has the same idea, expounded in considerably greater detail.

Creating a disincentive for the rich to get richer may sound good in an election year, but it doesn’t make for great industrial policy. Especially at a time of broad economic stagnation when home prices are still plunging, consumer spending is weakening, credit is in short supply and a weakened financial system is already repellent to all but the bravest entrepreneurs.

Right or wrong, Wall Street’s message is that a policy of stripping more money from people with proven records of creating wealth to give more to people who are shopping for Asian-made goods at dollar stores will only exacerbate the tenuous current economic climate, not help it.

Days of Whine and Poses

Obviously it was impolitic for Phil Gramm to say that the U.S. is “a nation of whiners” in the throes of a “mental recession”. He quickly tried to backtrack, and Senator McCain, whom he has been advising on economic matters, suggested that he has lost his chance for any post more consequential than ambassador to Belarus.

Eppur si muove. By the standards of our past (if not by those of modern Europe), “nation of whiners” is right on the mark. The confident, resilient, ingenious Americans, who seized independence from the world’s mightiest empire, settled a continent, forged the most prosperous nation in the history of mankind, assimilated tens of millions of immigrants, pivoted three times from peace to total war, and through all vicissitudes maintained and expanded their freedoms – are they not now an endangered species? The grumpy old sages who forecast that a prosperous republic would in the end succumb to moral and mental softness can’t be facilely refuted on the basis of current evidence.

The ultimate measure of whether a country can survive is whether it can endure a long war. If it can’t, it will eventually give way to its enemies. By that test, the United States is in serious trouble. If Iraq has been a traumatic challenge, will public opinion tolerate a serious war, one with casualties of several thousand a month, rather than a thousand a year? Will any future President dare risk such a confrontation?

Opponents of the Iraqi campaign pretend that they object to it only on cost-benefit grounds, but that is patently untrue of the vast majority. When the going was easy, the war was popular – even among liberal Democrats. But when the enemy kept fighting back, courage failed. Were it not for George W. Bush’s willingness to sacrifice popularity for the sake of victory, our country would have suffered the most humiliating military defeat in our history, and all the world’s mufsidun would today be ecstatically pummeling the Great Satan wherever and whenever they could.

This easy discouragement is what the old moralizers expected any time a people became too contented and comfortable. They would be unsurprised, too, by the panicky reaction to current economic conditions. To judge by polls, the country is in the worst shape since pollsters started asking the public to opine – worse, for instance, than in 1980, when the unemployment and inflation rates were 7.5 and 13.5 percent, respectively. Only those who take fat years for granted could be so nonplused by the present slowdown.

In the course of castigating Senator Gramm, the usually sensible Dean Barnett illustrates my point:

Contra Gramm, there are fundamental problems with the economy that have given the American people a serious case of agita. Many Americans have seen the value of their homes depreciate dramatically in recent times. They’ve also seen a huge increase in fuel prices. Both of these situations are beyond the typical American’s power to address. . . . The causes of the insecurity are real, and the diminishment of the typical American’s economic situation is equally real.

Contra Barnett, anyone who bought his current home more than about three years ago is likely still to have a substantial profit, the recent pullback is of concern only to homeowners who are overburdened with debt or who plan to exit from home ownership in the near future, falling housing costs are a boon to new buyers, and gasoline prices, in relation to family income, are not especially high. The “diminishment of the typical American’s economic situation” isn’t an illusion, but it is a modest decline from a high peak. A generation ago, it would have passed almost unnoticed. Now we hear cries about a second Great Depression.

Further evidence of a pampered existence is the fashion for hypersensitivity. The schoolyard chant has morphed to, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are really, really hurtful.” Men who have never faced genuine challenges – moan and groan about using “man” as a generic noun. Or declare that particular ethnic slurs are so unspeakably horrible that they cannot be mentioned even to condemn them and must be excised from works of literature. (I merely sigh at the earnest fellow who condemned the word “niggardly”; no doubt there were Victorian spinsters who wouldn’t let “factotum” escape their lips.) Pari passu the bounds of “inappropriate conduct” have expanded so far that one can hardly avoid violating the rules of the new etiquette. A legion of perpetually offended, constantly angry poseurs has replaced the brash, cheerful, thick-skinned Americano of yesteryear, and the alteration is not for the better.

It occurs to me that, though he never speaks of it, Senator Obama may see the state of the nation as I do. He proposes high taxes, high energy costs, expanded government regulation and an approach to terrorism that is bound to generate more terrorists. Perhaps he believes that the best way to restore the national character is to strip away the placid comfort we have been enjoying. Hasn’t his wife told us, “Barack Obama will require you to work”. Maybe to suffer, too, but it will be for our own good in the end.

Then, once the citizenry has reacquired the virtues of self-reliance, persistence, stoicism and hard work, it can vote out the saviors and get back to acting like Americans instead of European fainéants.

Alternatively, we could prove the moralizers wrong by keeping both our comforts and our virtues. While I’m not entirely sure how to accomplish that, it seems worth a try.

Patriotism in Practice

Slick Barry Obama won’t question anybody else’s patriotism. The impression he wants to leave is that he is high-minded, even if his surrogates are not. What he does in substance is craft a concept of patriotism so nebulous and abstract that no one not being directly paid off by an enemy government can be labeled “unpatriotic”.

If, as Barry intones, all those who believe themselves to be working to perfect America, who are “loyal to America’s ideals”, are American patriots, then the ranks of the patriotic must embrace many surprising figures: Benedict Arnold, Banastre Tarleton and Robert Rogers thought it best for America to remain under the British Crown; Jefferson Davis, for it to split in two; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, for it to play second fiddle to Stalin. In our own day, Americans have joined the Taliban and al-Qa’eda in their zeal to improve their country through the imposition of worldwide shariah. Patriots all! Who is so base as to doubt them?

Having no windows into men’s hearts, we cannot know that those listed did not “love their country”. Their subjective feelings are not, however, any of our business, and a definition of “patriotism” built around feelings is of no practical or political interest.

The reason for regarding patriotism as a virtue is not because it is an especially fine and lofty emotion but because government can function more effectively and less oppressively if a solid majority of the population is patriotic. C. S. Lewis concludes an excursus on love of country with this utilitarian observation:

Patriotism, then, has many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step – has already begun to step – into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least prepare for their defense. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for “their country” they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. [The Four Loves, p. 47 (1960)

Those who are patriots by Senator’s Obama’s standards do in fact judge their country’s every action “in a purely ethical light”. Practical patriots, by contrast, are not disqualified from examining ethical considerations, but, if their opinions do not prevail in the government’s counsels, they do what they can to carry out its policies vis-à-vis the rest of the world nonetheless. Practical patriotism enables those in charge of forming and executing national policy to weigh the nation’s interests prudently. It also improves the likelihood of success. Nothing is more heartening to one’s enemies than the impression that a fifth column exists within your own borders to stultify your leaders’ military, economic and diplomatic initiatives. There’s little doubt that al-Qa’eda and other mufsidun draw hope from the conviction that America’s massive resources will not, in the end, be deployed against them.

But what about Nazi Germany? Should a “practical patriot” have helped Hitler overrun Europe?

The reductio ad Hitlerum has become the standard objection to “unthinking” patriotism, yet Hitler is no more an argument against patriotism than Dr. Mengele is against medicine. Few governments display Hitlerian pathologies, and the United States is distinctly not one of them. Toward the exceptions – of which the Ba’athist regime in Iraq was, let me note, a conspicuous instance – resistance is justified. Elsewhere, it is possible to strive for desirable reforms without undermining all that the unreformed authorities try to accomplish.

What is missing from Senator Obama’s version of patriotism is the recognition that a country worth loving is worth our aid and comfort even when we are sure that it is in the wrong on a particular question. While he offered tepid dispraise of Moveon’s infamous “General Betray Us” ad, he has yet to rebuke, much less repudiate, cities and colleges that hamper military recruiters, or bureaucrats who take it upon themselves to publicize military secrets, or the many members of his own party who look forward to trying American officials for “war crimes” (a notion that somebody in the Obama campaign shares or shared), or even the Democratic Congressman who pretty much called on al-Qa’eda to assassinate Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. If, as candidate Obama asseverates, “America is the greatest country on earth”, is there any reason not to question their patriotism?

Addendum: On the lighter side it wouldn’t be an Obama oration without elementary errors of historical and numerical fact. PowerLine takes note:

Then there’s this:

I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, I listened to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I would have thought that pretty much everyone – certainly every Presidential speechwriter, and every Harvard Law School graduate! – knows that these are not the “first lines” of the Declaration, which begins, “When in the course of human events....” What, exactly, accounts for the fact that Obama is not a laughingstock?

Finally, this:

As we begin our fourth century as a nation, it is easy to take the extraordinary nature of America for granted.

“Fourth century?” The United States of America came into being in 1789. We have just recently begun our third century. I suppose Obama would say that the 21st century is America’s fourth, just as Minnie Minoso played major league baseball in five decades. As always with Obama’s howlers, you should ask yourself: would the press have bought it if it came from Dan Quayle?

How Scary Is Barry?

A candidate who accuses his opponent of wanting to prolong the war in Iraq for a hundred years and undermining Mississippi levees may not be in the best position to whine that the other side will “try to make you afraid of me”. But toujours de l'audace d’espoir:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run,” said the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’”

In similar comments at a Chicago fundraiser last Thursday, Obama told supporters that Republicans would try to portray both him and his wife Michelle as “scary.”

“They’re going to try to make me into a scary guy,” he said last week. “They’re even trying to make Michelle into a scary person. Right? And so that drumbeat – ‘we’re not sure if he’s patriotic or not; we’re not sure if he is too black.’”

Well, I don’t think that Barack Obama is “scary” – not in the sense that anybody would run away from him in a dark alley. What I would call him is “cocky”:

Obama: From Promise to Power by David Mendell . . . opens with an anecdote of then-senatorial candidate Barack Obama walking around the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, hours before he gave the speech that launched his national reputation.

Obama’s response to a comment that “he seemed to be impressing many people of influence in this rarefied atmosphere”: “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some game.”

At that point, Mr. Obama had achieved quite a bit less in politics than LeBron James in basketball, to put it mildly. He’s come up fast since then, but isn’t his ball handling still on a rookie level? He’s learning how to pivot but executes clumsily. Just this morning, he announced his support for amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, made urgently necessary by a judge’s decision that the current law doesn’t allow our government to eavesdrop on communications between foreigners, both on foreign soil, if their exchange is routed through the United States.

Backing that legislation was certainly an eminently sensible, non-scary stance. Then the Angry Left complained, and Senator Obama changed his mind. Now he will try to make the bill ineffective by deleting the provision protecting telecommunications companies from liability if they intercept calls in reliance on FISA orders. Without that safeguard, cooperative executives risk their shareholders’ money in costly litigation against the Left’s lawfare warriors. Even Senator Obama has enough economic savvy to know that making patriotism expensive isn’t the way to get more of it.

Still, I'm not scared. How can anybody be scared of a guy whom the likes of Daily Kos can intimidate? He knows he “can play on this level. I got some game.” Well, the Washington Generals had “some game”, too.

Addendum: The more I think about Senator Obama’s half-gainer double reverse bellyflop (to shift the sports analogy), the more absurdly amateurish it seems. Will his advisors tell us tomorrow that he didn’t know the telecom provision was the most controversial part of FISA reform, or that he didn’t realize it was included in the House bill that he (briefly) endorsed?

Were I a Democrat, I might be wondering whether my party would be well-advised to nominate a standard bearer who makes Jimmy Carter look astute. The convention isn’t over yet. In fact, it hasn’t begun. The delegates are legally free to vote for anyone. And there are Democratic presidentabiles who don’t sound like teenagers. (At least, some GOP stalwarts think so.)

Our Future First Couple

Barack:

Osama bin Laden and his top leadership — the people who murdered 3,000 Americans — have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

I begin to understand: We should have invaded Pakistan instead of Iraq!

That would certainly have been a more interesting conflict. Pakistan’s army and air force are larger, better equipped and more professional than Saddam Hussein’s ever were, and we would have to reach the country either through amphibious assault or by making a deal for bases in India. Also, war with Pakistan would have satisfied the First Liberal Principle of War-making: minimal relationship to American national interests. We’ll leave to one side the question of how easy it would be to locate Osama in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier and serve an arrest warrant.

Michelle:

When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

So the callousness of bigoted doctors in the pre-civil rights South (who in any case had no effective means of treating syphilis) is a reason to prohibit life-saving medical research today? I’d like to say something humorously dismissive, but, frankly, I’m appalled. Can we at least extract a promise from Senator Obama that, should he be elected President, this woman will be required to remain strictly silent about all matters of public policy for the next four (or eight) years?

Eeek! Those Horrid Conservatives!

Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s Designated Liberal, penned a truly odd column today. It is, in essence, an ad hominem “proof” that conservatives are wicked, wicked people, and that their misdeeds both stem from, and demonstrate the fallacy of, their philosophy of government.

Again and again, it is the most zealous and high-minded conservative soldiers who lurk behind the movement’s foulest deeds. Richard Nixon, for example, always turned to what he called “right-wing exuberants” when he needed something really dirty done. Among the most exuberant was Tom Charles Huston, a famously idealistic leader of the Young Americans for Freedom, who drew up the administration’s notorious plan for domestic spying. “What does it mean,” asks historian Rick Perlstein, “that the member of Nixon’s staff who was closest to the conservative movement, who was best-versed in its literature and its habits, was not merely the most ruthless malefactor on Richard Nixon’s staff but the one most convinced he was acting on principle?”

What it means is the same hard lesson that conservatives school us in every generation: that “ideas have consequences” -- just not the ones they’d like us to believe are coming down the pike. Should we be surprised that, of the virtuous House freshmen of 1994 who have left government, almost half have become lobbyists? . . .

Supercorruptionist Jack Abramoff offers the most painful example. Here was a man so zealous in his dedication to principle that he once served as a director of The Conservative Caucus’s apparently defunct Political Action Committee. During his lobbying days he enjoyed the assistance of the good-government group Citizens Against Government Waste and the pundit Doug Bandow, a man who had actually written a book deploring Washington’s corrupt ways. . . .

The comfortable course of action for Democrats will be merely to pocket the coming windfall, to burble about how they have lifted the curse of ideology from the land, to replace the current gang of free-marketeers with their own gang of free-marketeers, and to resume the merry triangulations of eight years ago. . . .

Another route is possible, though. If they are willing to go beyond the regal rhetoric of post-partisanship, Democrats might find that they are, for the first time in decades, running against a philosophy of government that has utterly discredited itself. Should they choose to make 2008 a referendum on conservatism itself, they might deliver the knockout blow. They should start with the bad ideas that have delivered such disastrous consequences.

I’ll skip the easy and obvious tu quoque, viz., the Democratic Party’s long and spectacular record of corruption. Instead, let’s examine Mr. Frank’s history and logic.

Tom Charles Huston, assigned the task of drafting a rather stupid and never implemented domestic surveillance program, was “the most ruthless malefactor on Richard Nixon’s staff”? John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H. R. Haldeman, John Dean and Chuck Colson (pre-conversion) have slipped Mr. Frank’s memory? None of them was notable as a zealot for conservative ideas. The Nixon Administration was, in fact, wary of conservatives. A few were included in the Cabinet: Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Simon, Mel Laird, Casper Weinberger, Maurice Stans and a couple of others. The only one ever implicated in Watergate and associated Nixonian misdeeds was Maurice Stans; he was acquitted of all charges.

Jack Abramoff may have once headed a minor PAC, but the offenses for which he went to prison involved lobbying on behalf of Indian casinos, which I’ve never thought of as a first-tier conservative crusade.

Doug Bandow is a curious target. For the past couple of years, he has been loudly calling for American abandonment of Iraq, another not-exactly-conservative crusade.

Still, let’s grant that being a conservative does not confer sainthood. Mr. Frank neglects to explain why the sins of right-wingers derive from ideas like limited government, ordered liberty, economic freedom, individual responsibility, respect for tradition, and support for a strong national defense. After all, it’s not unheard for leftists engage in criminal acts without believing in any of those principles. Doesn’t Ockham’s Razor suggest that we attribute malfeasance to impulses common to all mankind, such as the Seven Deadly Sins, rather than posit one set of causes for the Right and a different, non-ideological one for the Left?

Also, if we are going to judge political positions by the personal qualities of those who espouse them, perhaps we should put aside anecdotes and look at empirical research.

George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. ‘One sometimes gets the impression,’ he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, ‘that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.

Orwell was making an observation. But today a whole body of academic research shows he was correct: your politics influence the manner in which you live your life. And the news is not so good for those on the political Left.

There is plenty of data that shows that Right-wingers are happier, more generous to charities, less likely to commit suicide – and even hug their children more than those on the Left.

Peter Schweizer, whose words I quote, has written a book (Makers and Takers – one guess how he thinks the political spectrum divides between them) summarizing data from the General Social Survey that show conservatives to be, on average, more compassionate, honest, selfless, [insert virtue here] than liberals. He hypothesizes that the difference springs from “modern progressive ideas” that “bring out the worst in people”.

I’d like to believe that, too, but we don’t actually know the direction of causality. Maybe conservative ideas appeal most strongly to happy, well-adjusted individuals and progressive ones to nasty malcontents. That would not tell us that conservatism is better, only that it attracts a nicer clientele. It might nonetheless be a tissue of fallacies. I’ve witnessed many a debate in which the better human being was the worse reasoner. For instance, I know nothing about Thomas Frank’s uprightness of character; I do know that he can’t out-think Winnie-the-Pooh.

I do hope that the Obamacrats take up his recommendation “to make 2008 a referendum on conservatism itself”. I doubt, though, that they’ll be interested. The last time the question was put to the electorate on terms like that was in 1994.

The Obama Cliché Machine

It’s easy, so easy that no intelligence is required. Take whatever John McCain proposes. Declare it to be a continuation of a failed Bush policy that will do nothing for families and will help big business. An Obama spokesman with the delightful name Hari Sevugan ran Senator McCain’s call for lifting the federal ban on offshore oil production through that sense-shredding machine and came up with, “John McCain’s plan to simply drill our way out of our energy crisis is the same misguided approach backed by President Bush that has failed our families for too long and only serves to benefit the big oil companies.”

Well, President Bush does back that approach, but how has it failed? It hasn’t been tried. Since 1970, U.S. oil production has fallen by over three million barrels a day even as world production has nearly doubled. Those who have “failed our families for too long” have been the liberal politicians who have refused to allow the opening of new oil fields or the mining of oil shale within our borders.

Why, too, I wonder, would expanded drilling “only serve to benefit the big oil companies”? Are Big Oil executives the only people who drive cars, fly on airplanes, use electricity or buy products made with plastics? Viewed from Obamaland, I take it, America is a country of peasants from sea to sea, to whom energy prices are of no concern.