Differing Perspectives on America

Historian Dale Light offers an interesting summary of how the candidates and their supporters view the country.

One benefit of this interminable Democrat nomination process is that fundamental issues do get discussed -- no I'm not talking about health care, or foreign policy, or the war, or any of those other transitory things; I'm talking about things that really matter in the long run, such as how the candidates and their supporters see America.

By now it is clear that "Hillary!" and her supporters see America solely in terms of competing interest groups. This is pretty standard for mainstream Democrats, has been ever since the rise of the "broker state" concept in the Roosevelt years. It's a social science vision of the country and in terms of electoral politics it consists of identifying and pandering to a sufficient number of interest groups to accumulate a majority.

Tonight in his North Carolina victory speech, "O-ba-ma!" went out of his way to disparage that sociological approach to America, emphasizing instead common approaches to common problems. This is at first glance similar to the unifying nationalistic themes on which Republican candidates have run ever since the party's inception in the middle of the nineteenth century. But there is a significant difference. Republicans love the country for what it is and what it has been as much as for what it might be in the future. Obama, with his strong liberal and radical associations, focuses almost exclusively on negative aspects of the American experience, and talks instead about an ideal America that has never been, but which he promises to bring into existence.

I think he's being a little too rosy with his description of Republicans, but his point is that, all in all, Republicans are more apt to view the country as a whole--the history, the institutions, the traditions--as being a net positive. (I include conservatives with this group, but they also view government as being naturally, and detrimentally, expansionistic. As the last few years have shown, not all Republicans believe this, too). I also understand Light's point about the Clintonian factionalism, but we also have a long tradition of that in our politics, despite the express desires of the founders. Finally, Obama truly is a Progressive with a belief that a group of experts--with Obama in charge--can lead our nation to a virtual (or, to some apparently, a very real) Heaven on Earth. We just have to trust him.

The More Things Change

From Time (h/t):

The Middle American's faith is not merely grounded upon nostalgia and emotion. He believes in a system that did work and in large measure still does; a brilliant, highly adaptable system, heir to the Enlightenment and classic democracy, with innumerable, ingenious, local accretions. But the country has become too complex and the long-hidden inequities too glaring for the system to continue without drastic changes. The Middle American's education does not dwell upon the agonizing moral discrepancies of American history—the story of the Indians or the blacks, or the national tradition of violence. He quite sincerely rejects the charge that he is prejudiced against the blacks or callused about the poor. He cannot believe that the society he has come to accept as the best possible on earth, the order he sees as natural, contains wrongs so deeply built-in that he does not notice them. His sense of indignation is all too easily served by the fact that so many reformers have gone beyond the reform as being too slow, and are using methods ranging from rude to downright totalitarian.

Oh, that was written in 1969.

Obama of the Working Class: Their Evil Values Are Just Blankies

Not unlike other wealthy faux-populists who wish to manipulate poor and working class citizens for their own aggrandizement, Barack Obama apparently thinks that the change that will bring unity will entail an optimistic lunge past some of those wicked security blankets... you know, like religion:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The people need hope; they need handed to them what they could never really achieve on their own (right-wing rhetoric promise what it might). They need to pay their dues and contribute their votes for the benefit of those fortunate few with the brains (and, often, the high salaries) to coordinate their numbers.

ADDENDUM:

By some coincidence, general politics came up as a topic of conversation on the job site today, and somebody (I won't say whom) noted that minorities and others of the Left's harbored special interests (such as inner city residents with children in public school) have not gotten a very good return on their political investments. One might say that they cling to their multiculturalism or socialism or antipathy to people who make something of themselves.

Just sayin'.

Charity with Other People's Money

When things go wrong for people, society ought at least to weight the costs of helping, even when the problems are wrapped up in the esoteric complexities of modern finance, but when I read news like this, I can't help but wonder from where the money's coming:

The legislation is likely to draw on elements of the Democratic plan such as letting states issue $10 billion in tax-exempt bonds to refinance subprime loans and permitting homebuilders and other money-losing businesses to reclaim previously paid taxes.

Democrats also want to provide $4 billion to states to buy up and refurbish foreclosed homes, a plan that the administration opposes as a bailout for lenders and speculators. ...

There is also bipartisan backing for $200 million in new money for debt counselors to help homeowners negotiate with lenders.

I'm sympathetic, of course, to any plan that solves problems by cutting or returning taxes, but if these steps are worth taking, shouldn't there be at least some discussion of what other area of government is going to be sacrificed?

An Assassinated Mythology

The following passage from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism struck me as relevant to the (thankfully abated) speculation of Barack Obama's assassination:

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. As if on cue, Dallas was christened "the city of hate." A young TV reporter named Dan Rather heard a rumor that some Dallas schoolchildren had cheered when they heard the news of Kennedy's death. The rumor wasn't true, and the local Dallas CBS affiliate refused to run the story. Rather made an end run around the network and reported the story anyway.

Rather wasn't the only one eager to point fingers at the right. Within minutes Kennedy's aides blamed deranged and unnamed right-wingers. One headline proclaimed the assassination had taken place "deep in the hate of Texas." But when it became clear that a deranged Marxist had done the deed, Kennedy's defenders were dismayed. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights," Jackie lamented to Bobby Kennedy when he told her the news. "It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."

Or maybe not, the Kennedy mythmakers calculated. They set about creating the fable that Kennedy died battling "hate" — established code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because liberals were desperate to imbue Kennedy's assassination with a more exalted and politically useful meaning. Over and over again, the entire liberal establishment, led by the New York Times — and even the pope! — denounced the "hate" that claimed Kennedy's life. The Supreme Court justice Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdom — as he could always be counted upon to do — when he theorized that the "climate of hatred" in Dallas — code for heavy right-wing and Republican activity — moved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.

The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the side of social progress? The fact that Kennedy was a raging anti-communist seemed not to register, perhaps because liberals had convinced themselves, in the wake of the McCarthy era, that the real threat to liberty must always come from the right. Oswald's Marxism sent liberals into even deeper denial, their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism. And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories metastasized, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. "Cui bono?" asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. Answer: the military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance, of course. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald "had an extreme dislike of the rightwing."

Amid the fog of denial, remorse, and confusion of the Kennedy assassination, an informal strategic response developed that would serve the purposes of the burgeoning New Left as well as assuage the consciences of liberals generally: transform Kennedy into an all-purpose martyr for causes he didn't take up and for a politics he didn't subscribe to.

Lighter than Expected

Well, the memo's gone out. The You Tube videos are in production. The party line: McCain's got a temper! Watch the video over on RIFuture. Watch as the Senator rips a chair right out of the floor of the bus like Sam Kinison and pins the reporter's note-taking hand in the overhead storage compartment.

Actually, while he's understandably a little impatient with persistent questions that he has repeatedly declined to answer to the reporter's satisfaction, his comportment remains (though I shudder to use the word) statesmanlike. I'm no major fan of McCain's, but really: how clear do the Progressives wish to make it that they haven't any care whatsoever for reality? Reality is what you make it, eh guys? Repeat the line enough. Expect that many people won't actually watch the video all the way through. Make it reality.

Well, if that's the game, allow me to scroll down a post to Pat Crowley's once-more-unto-the-breach speech for the Obamanation, in which he explicitly admits that he votes multiple times in a given election (emphasis added):

I would rather vote for someone I liked and not get them in then vote for someone I didn’t like and help them succeed.

See! Corruption admitted! Pass it on.

Who Wants to Kill Barack?

When speculation becomes front-page news, one gets the impression of legend building. If Barack Obama wins and lives to tell the tale, he'll be the One Who Lived. The great hope whom they managed to protect (unless the reality disappoints terribly):

His wife, Michelle Obama, voiced concerns about his safety before he was elected to the Senate. Three years ago, she said she dreaded the day her husband received Secret Service protection, because it would mean serious threats had been made against him.

The thing is: I've yet to hear of any actual serious threats being made. The fears appear all to be grounded in assassinations from decades ago. The Kennedys and King (somehow the attempt on Reagan's life is never mentioned).

Of course, more than one narrative can be constructed around the idea of a dead candidate, and I, for one, can't think of any more dangerous act — in a culture that produces semi-annual mass murders perpetrated, it seems, mainly for posthumous attention — than to splash across the news media fears of having to write a candidate's murder into the history books. That risky behavior raises an interesting question, though: Who would benefit most from the candidate's death?

More Derb on Mrs. O

John Derbyshire has done what few non-college professors are willing to do: he's actually read Michelle Obama's senior thesis. Overall, he believes (and I agree) that it will and should have minimal effect on the presidential race, but he makes a worthy point:

... the slight negative is negative because the thesis reveals a cast of mind that most voters find deeply unattractive. Plainly Mrs. Obama had that cast of mind in 1985. Recent remarks suggest she still has it. The fact that Barack Obama chose her as a wife and seems to get on well with her, indicates that he shares it. It's that deeply, unrelentingly critical way of thinking about the U.S.A., and about most of our citizens, that characterizes the "victicrat" — the person who has been taught, or who has taught herself, that she is a pitiful figure buffeted by hostile forces, whose only hope for survival is to return the hostility, and to band together with others like herself ("the Black community") for mutual aid, all of them in a hostile posture to the out-group.

Most Americans don't see our country like that, and have a low opinion of people who do. Millions of white — or, as Mrs. Obama writes, "White" — Americans would love to have had the breaks Mrs. Obama had, and resent the fact that they didn't have them because they don't belong to a designated victim group. They resent the ease with which two beneficiaries of those breaks can parlay their victim status into two six-digit salaries and a seven-digit house, without ever doing any kind of work that adds to the nation's wealth or security. And they especially resent that people who have attained those heights of success, with the assistance of those breaks, seem to nurse nothing but hostile emotions towards the country that made it possible for them.

This "slight negative" for the Obama campaign has been a tremendous negative for race relations over the past few decades, and to the extent that an Obama presidency reinforces the victimhood separatism of our recent history, it will prove to be a net loss for interracial harmony.

A President You Can't Get Out of Your Head

In today's Providence Journal, a young Ivy Leaguer with a hyphenated name adds too my still-short list of old-man moments (note the sentence that I've italicized):

But that is all that I have ever known as an adult: a reviled America under George Bush, and a Congress dominated by petty bickering instead of big ideas. The 2004 election offered an opportunity to vote for a Democrat, but few people my age were excited about Kerry. I have come of political age at a time when America is divided, disliked, and fading as the leader of the Free World. There is a thirst among young Americans for a new era of politics at home and abroad and for an America that is creative at home and respected abroad. And there is an overwhelming sense that only one person can usher in that new era: Barack Obama.

I was a bit younger than Mr. Cook-Deegan at the time, but my how that sentiment brings me back to the late-'80s/early-'90s. You want divided and disliked, whippersnapper? Take a look at the video that the British band Genesis aimed at our president in 1986. And as for our "fading leadership," I remember high school debates about Japan's ascendancy. (A curiosity for consideration at another time: Doesn't it seem that those who believe that the United States ought to be chastened by the world are often illogically quick to worry about our diminishing stature?)

Further stoking my incipient fogeyism, young Master C.-D. writes:

Now, at 22, I am a voting adult who comprehends the consequences of that election. I have friends from high school serving in Iraq. Now I understand the grave danger of alienating the Muslim world. I have traveled to over 25 countries. Nearly everyone I meet tells me how his or her respect for America has plummeted during the Bush presidency.

Central among the convictions of which the last decade of life has disabused me is that a twenty-two year old in modern society is necessarily (put aside legality) "an adult." "I was only a sophomore in high school," Patrick writes of the 2000 election, "I did not really understand what was going on." Myself, at 32, I'm daily more appreciative of how little I really understand what's going on.

But I do know enough to question the "nearly everyones" whom a traveling college student is likely to engage in discussion. I'd have to make a tally before I could confidently claim to have visited over 25 cities. One needn't travel far, however, to understand that this world contains all sorts of people, and that the best of them make decisions based on whether they are right or wrong, not on whether they will meet the approval of a foreign moral authority or bring into unadulterated harmony factions with wildly divergent beliefs and interests.

I wonder: Does our Brown history major understand the danger of not alienating the Muslim world? It's telling that he turns to personal conversations, rather than historical studies, to determine what his country ought to do.

Ah, this g-g-g-generation — "free from any huge upheaval like the 1960s" growing up "in a time when young men and women... have [all] had the same opportunities" in a post–Cold War, Internet-besotted era marking "an opportunity in history for the world to come together in a new way." Somehow, I suspect that many boys and girls have, in fact, not had the opportunity to be nation-hopping globalists. Some of them might even think to include 9/11 in a survey of their generation's formative experiences.

These colts of the academic world, chomping at the bit to apply their knowledge in the service of all that they have learned to be Good, would do well to consider the thoughts of elders with whom they disagree. Peggy Noonan, for example, has some edifying things to say about Mr. Obama:

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it's his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?

And there is a context. So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you're losing America, you really don't want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry with President Barack, will that mean America is bad?

Patrick Cook-Deegan hears a "catchy new song with the sweet phrase, 'President Barack Obama.'" It's an infectious tune, I imagine, among those who trust (as I once did) that the world beyond the graduation podium is practically humming with the promised life. And the lyric suggests that those old-time Americans ought, if the world is good, to lose. It's progress, my aged friends. We must step aside so that fields of plenty may sprout on land that we only managed to trample in our own time.

We non-matriculating students of history — and of current events — may wonder whether we are merely clearing a path for an assault, an invasion, against which a dahoo-dorray refrain will prove to be little protection.

Roland Benjamin: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do (to Make You More Productive)

Elements of Senator Obama's economic plan described in this Washington Times editorial have the makings of a staggering economic impact. If you subscribe to the notion that individuals should earn as much as their skills, talents, and minds will permit, then you will be incredulous at the alternative Senator Obama is presenting to the household earning around the median income level (the middle class, as defined by the IRS).

The National Center for Policy Analysis put out this synopsis of the plan:

... Obama has gone hog wild over "refundable tax credits":

• He promises a $4,000 refundable tax credit to finance college tuition for students who spend 100 hours performing community service.
• There will be a refundable 10 percent mortgage-interest tax credit for married couples who take the $10,900 standard deduction because their itemizable deductions (including mortgage interest) fall below that level.
• Taxpayers will also finance a $500 refundable tax credit to augment a $1,000 savings-account deposit made by families earning up to $75,000.

In addition, Obama also promises to triple the EITC benefit for minimum-wage workers:

• For a married couple with two children working full-time and earning the minimum wage, their refundable EITC would rise from $3,225 to $9,675.
• He would increase their refundable child-care tax credit to $3,000 and offer a refundable $1,000 tax credit to partly offset their $1,500 Social Security taxes, which had already been more than offset by their nearly $10,000 refundable EITC.
• If they put that $1,000 in the bank, they would get another refundable tax credit of $500.

Now consider what this means to a typical family of four assuming the following:

• The breadwinner is capable of earning $18.25/hr with his or her skills, talents, and mind. The oldest child is about to enter her first year at a community college and can work 6 hours per week at minimum wage to offset tuition costs (or augment household income) or can choose to simply work 100 hours of community service.


• The other child is sufficiently young to receive existing or new child tax credits.


• At the $18.25/hr job, the breadwinner can insure the family's health at a co-share cost of $73/week through his or her employer.


• At higher earnings levels they are able to itemize deductions including $8,144 of mortgage interest.

Under Obama's plan, the breadwinner has a new option for choosing an employer or career.

In other words, if the household decides to work as productively as possible while encouraging the daughter to contribute to the household income, then the family will net $206 per year more than if the breadwinner simply takes a minimum wage position. Tax dollar redistribution will close the rest of the gap to the tune of more than $25,000 via refundable credits, reduced contributions into social security, and public funded health care.

I cannot grasp how providing incentive for nearly half of the population to work at less than 40% of their productive capacity could help our economy.

This plan mutates the "Welfare Trap" into a malignant monstrosity that entices all households earning below median income to work at a significantly reduced productive capacity in order to qualify for the progressive expectations of an "enlightened" society.

In contrast, we can only hope that the American spirit, as described in this piece in the Aspen Times, will prevail:

... [among] common traits are that he isn't looking for anything from anyone — just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field.

Of course, I think the writer underestimated the "Angry" demographic by singling out one segment within this category. With a few exceptions to the broader depiction, we can all list scores of individuals who behave according to the above statement yet do not fall into the writer's narrow demographic.

As the social safety net morphs into the predominant lifestyle, individuals fitting the above description will have a more and more diminished say on election days. In the state most likely to proceed down this path, Rhode Island could be the first to experience its consequences. The saying "Last one out, turn off the lights" comes to mind.

Geldof - Press Has Shortchanged Bush's Successful Africa Policy

Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof is chastising the US Press corps for under-reporting the positive effect that President Bush's Africa policy has had:

Mr. Geldof praised Mr. Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement.

Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, "has done more than any other president so far."

"This is the triumph of American policy really," he said. "It was probably unexpected of the man. It was expected of the nation, but not of the man, but both rose to the occasion."

"What's in it for [Mr. Bush]? Absolutely nothing," Mr. Geldof said.

Mr. Geldof said that the president has failed "to articulate this to Americans" but said he is also "pissed off" at the press for their failure to report on this good news story.

"You guys didn't pay attention," Geldof said to a group of reporters from all the major newspapers.

Bush administration officials, incidentally, have also been quite displeased with some of the press coverage on this trip that they have viewed as overly negative and ignoring their achievements.

And more...

Mr. Geldof said that he and Bono, U2's lead singer, have "gotten a lot of flak" for saying that Mr. Bush has done more for Africa than any other U.S. president.

Mr. Geldof said that "the main thing now is asking the candidates, 'What are you going to do?'"

Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, has "put in place a whole foundation" in the form of aid for disease prevention, government institution building with accountability measures, and investing capital in African countries to build up their economies.

"The next guy really must take it on," Mr. Geldof said, referring to the next president.

If the press has underplayed the success of such policies that liberals would otherwise find compelling (say, if a Democrat had implemented them), then what else has the media underplayed or spun differently? In some simple minds, the man can do no good.

Michelle Obama: "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country"

Michelle Obama just said these words:

...What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something -- for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change...

Instapundit has a round-up of various reactions to Michelle Obama's comments, including John Podhoretz:

...Michelle Obama is 44 years old. She has been an adult since 1982. Can it really be there has not been a moment during that time when she felt proud of her country? Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics?

Mrs. Obama was speaking at a campaign rally, so it is easy to assume she was merely indulging in hyperbole. Even so, it is very revealing.

It suggests, first, that the pseudo-messianic nature of the Obama candidacy is very much a part of the way the Obamas themselves are feeling about it these days...

Second, it suggests the Obama campaign really does have its roots in New Class leftism, according to which patriotism is not only the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first refuge as well — that America is not fundamentally good but flawed, but rather fundamentally flawed and only occasionally good...

And third, that Michelle Obama — from the middle-class South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Princeton 85, Harvard Law 88, associate at Sidley and Austin, and eventually a high-ranking official at the University of Chicago — may not be proud of her country, but her life, like her husband’s, gives me every reason to be even prouder of the United States.

Unfortunately, this kind of talk by Michelle Obama is not new. (Nor is the topic of liberal fundamentalism new, as this 1984 WSJ editorial reminds us. Some reflections on the broader issues can be found here, where this linked post offers these clarifying thoughts from Richard John Neuhaus:

Politics and religion are different enterprises...But they are constantly coupling and getting quite mixed up with one another. There is nothing new about this. What is relatively new is the naked public square. The naked public square is the result of political doctrine and practice that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business...

When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked...

The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church...

The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate...

The founding fathers of the American experiment declared certain truths to be self-evident and moved on from that premise. It is a measure of our decline into what may be the new dark ages that today we are compelled to produce evidence for the self-evident.)

In that context, John O'Sullivan explains Obama this way in The Obama Appeal: He's post-racist, but also post-American (available for a fee):

...More important even than that is his recent rhetoric on American unity. Obama has mastered the lost art of delivering patriotic speeches that sound sincere and sensible. Such rhetoric used to be a Republican specialty, but liberal opinion long ago bullied them out of it ("super-patriotism"), and now they have lost the knack. The American people retain a taste for patriotic unity, however, and will likely respond to it with added respect when it comes from a post-racist black American.

But there are two kinds of American unity: the natural unity of citizens with equal rights, and the managed unity of groups with equal rights. These are in direct conflict with each other. Obama's rhetoric is undoubtedly sincere, but it gives the impression that he favors the first sort of unity when he actually wants to ratify and advance the second. A glimpse at his speeches and programs demonstrates that he is committed, like all the Democratic candidates, to such policies as racial preferences, multiculturalism, liberal immigration laws, and the transfer of power from America's constitutional republic to non-accountable global bodies and international law. For Obama is not merely a post-racist; he is a post-nationalist and a post-American too...

Apparently a post-American world view means it is acceptable not to wear a USA flag lapel pin as he runs for the USA Presidency. Or to attend a church where, if whites said the same things in reverse at their churches, they would be labeled racists. [ADDENDUM #1: More on the latter from Kaus, Kaus, Cohen, Hill, Dreher, and Knippenberg.]

This world view suggests We Are Paying Quite a Price for Our Historical Ignorance, a problem Ronald Reagan warned us about in his 1989 Farewell Address:

...Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I've got one that's been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I'm proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won't count for much, and it won't last unless it's grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over thirty-five or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood...Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the midsixties.

But now, we're about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.

So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important...If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

So, as an antidote to this ahistorical, multicultural and relativistic world promoted by the Obama's, we would do well to go back and rediscover the first principles of our American Founding and ponder what it means to educate Americans in our unique heritage:

Calvin Coolidge:

...In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...

Mac Owens:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."... The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

Roger Pilon:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision...the method by which we justify our political order...liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government...indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Contrary to Michelle Obama's viewpoint, the American Founding - however imperfectly practiced over the years - is something to be proud of for a lifetime.

And even a "plagiarizing" Barack Obama assures us that those American Founding principles aren't "just words." As a first step to show their seriousness that they are not "just words," perhaps Barack and Michelle Obama could acquaint themselves with and develop some pride in these core principles of the very country he seeks to lead and which gave each of them the freedom to live the American Dream as they have. As a next baby step, they could even encourage their partisans to hang posters in their campaign offices which celebrate that Founding instead of the late murderous communist thug Che.

If they are unwilling to take those tangible steps, then I agree with Kathryn Jean Lopez, when she writes: "Maybe the Obamas do take after the Clintons. It's all about them too."

More on the left-wing messianic posturing by Obama from Lopez, Steyn, Charen, Krauthammer, Last, and Brooks.

[ADDENDUM #2: More from Lowry, Hanson, Derbyshire, Goldberg, Henninger, Stuttaford, Geraghty, Lopez, Samuelson, Blankley, Levin, Malkin, Hemingway here and here, and Stein, a blogger for that right-wing attack machine, Mother Jones. Bronson writes: "I think pride in the country doesn’t come from what the government or the military or even our heroes do; I think it comes from realizing that every day, in every thing we do, we are making our country into something new. If you don’t believe in where we came from, how can you expect to get to someplace worthwhile?"]

Or, as Malkin writes: "When Republicans talk about broken souls in the context of civil society, the nutroots start screaming about the obliteration of the church-state line. When the Obama campaign uses the same rhetoric to get him elected to the White House, everyone swoons."

[ADDENDUM #3: Goldfarb writes this about Obama's attempts to clarify his wife's comments: "It's still the same creepy message. Apparently the only thing that might redeem this country in the eyes of Michelle Obama is the election of her husband as president of the United States. That's not good enough. This implies that the Obamas aren't running for office in order to serve the country that they love--because this country has, in fact, been so good to them--but in order to save the country from itself."]

Liberal fundamentalism is alive and well, albeit with some fancy new packaging.

The Latter Day Kennedy? Not Really.

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby doesn't think JFK would be amused by the association of Che Guevara with a presidential candidate whom some have crowned as his (JFK's) political heir:

In December 1962, Kennedy offered a blunt summary of the Castro/Che record. "The Cuban people were promised by the revolution political liberty, social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the campesinos, and an end to economic exploitation," he said. "They have received a police state, the elimination of the dignity of land ownership, the destruction of free speech and a free press, and the complete subjugation of individual human welfare." Eleven months later, in a speech intended for delivery on the day he was assassinated, Kennedy regretted that Castro's "Communist foothold" in Latin America had "not yet been eliminated."

Were he alive today, it's hard to imagine JFK feeling anything but contempt for those who extol a dictatorship that has been crushing freedom and human beings for nearly 50 years. And it would surely pain him that so many of the cheerleaders are members of his own party.

The lionizing of Che, a sociopath who relished killing and acclaimed "the pedagogy of the firing squad," is not just "inappropriate." It is vile. No American in his right mind would be caught dead wearing a David Duke T-shirt or displaying a poster of Pol Pot. A celebrity who was spotted with a swastika-festooned cap or an actress who revealed that she had gotten a tattoo depicting Timothy McVeigh would inspire only repugnance. No presidential campaign would need more than 30 seconds to sever its ties to anyone, paid staffer or volunteer, whose office was adorned with a Ku Klux Klan banner. Yet Che's likeness, which ought to be as loathed as any of those, is instead a trendy bestseller and a cult favorite.

Judging from the policies that the fashionable Left promotes, it's not always a simple matter to discern whether it's the symbol of revolution that so captures the movement's imagination or a deep-seated sympathy with the lustful totalitarian impulse.

Anticipating History

Mark Steyn's good today on Obama worship:

... it seems to me that Barack Obama is the triumph of flesh, color, and despair over word — that's to say, he offers an appealing embodiment of identity politics plus a ludicrously despairing vision of contemporary America (sample: "Trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart") that triumphs over anything so prosaic as a policy platform. Mrs. Clinton, the earthbound wonk, is reduced to fulminating that this race is about "speeches versus solutions." But a lot of Democrats seem to have concluded that Hillary's the problem, and Obama's speech is the solution. ...

On the other hand, if you’re running for president not as an unexceptional first-term senator with a thin resume but as the new Messiah, the new Kennedy, the new Gandhi, the new Martin Luther King, you can’t blame folks for leaping ahead to the next stage in the mythic narrative. Around the world, a second instant sub-genre has sprung up in which commentators speculate how long it will be before some deranged Christian-fundamentalist neo-Nazi gun-nut deprives America of its fleeting wisp of glory. Setting a new standard for fevered slavering Obama-assassination porn, Earl MacRae warned Canadians in the Ottawa Sun this week:

To be black and catapulting towards the presidency on charm, intellect, and popularity is unacceptable to the racist paranoid and scary in America the beautiful... They do not want to hear that he is a better American than they are, these right-wing extremist fascists in the land of America who no doubt believe it's God's will Barack Obama not get to the White House, no method of deterrence out of bounds, in their zealotry to protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom's apple pie, and the cross of Jesus in every home.

My own feeling, although I believe that anybody who thinks in these terms dramatically misunderstands God's operation, is that a better interpretation would be that Obama's on a divine mission to keep Hillary out of the White House. Either way, the nation is probably charging toward another daydream respite from history, with an even more calamitous cost for inattention.

Perhaps it's a subconscious sense of this truth that leaves so many desperate for fantasies — murderous or otherwise.

"We Have Been This Young Before"

Some interesting reading from Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic:

All this even before we attend to the elimination of poverty. And into this unirenic environment strides Obama, pledging to extract us promptly from Iraq and to negotiate with our enemies. What is the role of a conciliator in an unconciliating world? You might think that in such conditions he is even more of an historical necessity-but why would you think that all that stands between the world and peace is one man? George W. Bush was not single-handedly responsible for getting us into our strategic mess and Barack Obama will not be single-handedly responsible for getting us out of it. There are autonomous countries and cultures out there. The turbulence that I have described is not caused by misunderstandings. It is caused by the interests of powers and the beliefs of peoples. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Islamabad, Gaza City, Khartoum, Caracas-does Obama really believe that he has something to propose to these ruthless regimes that they have not already considered? Does he plan to move them, to organize them, to show them change they can believe in? With what trick of empathy, what euphoria, does he hope to join the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds in Iraq? Yes, he made a "muscular" speech in Chicago last spring; but I have been pondering his remarks about foreign policy in the ensuing campaign and I do not detect the hardness I seek, the disabused tone that the present world warrants. My problem is not with "day one": nobody is perfectly prepared for the White House, though the memory of Bill Clinton's "learning curve" is still vivid, which in Bosnia and Rwanda cost more than a million lives. My problem is that Obama's declarations in matters of foreign policy and national security have a certain homeopathic quality. He seems averse to the hurtful, expensive, traditional, unedifying stuff.

Breaking Campaign News at the Katz Household

John McCain just became the first candidate of the season to turn me off with an automated political telemarketing call just as we were succeeding in getting all the children to bed. Couldn't McCain-Feingold at least have done the good deed of preventing that?

What Harm Could Four Years Do?

Cliff May has a point:

This year's election will be unusually consequential. In 2006, Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress. Democrats also now hold a majority of governors' mansions and state legislatures. The left long has been regnant on America's campuses, in the mainstream news media, in the entertainment industry, and in the unions.

A Clinton or Obama victory would put all levers of power into the same hands. What would Democratic -party bosses do with that? How about statehood for Washington, D.C., which would provide two new Democratic votes in the Senate? How about appointing judges who regard the Constitution as clay, and using immigration policy to expand the Left's electoral margins? These and other creative maneuvers could create an anti-conservative majority that would last a generation or more.

Most worrisome of all: Americans today are engaged in a conflict as serious as any we have ever fought. Romney and McCain get that. Perhaps Hillary Clinton does, too, though you wouldn't know it from anything she's said recently. But does Barack Obama? Or does he think it's all a big misunderstanding, one that can be resolved through talk, appeasement, global anti-poverty programs and a sincere effort to make ourselves inoffensive to those sworn to destroy us?

Thinking hard about such questions over the months ahead would be not just alright; it would be commendable — and conservative.

Whitehouse's Actions Commensurate with Danger

RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, Ocean Drive) has personal experience with the dangers of global warming:

Scientists say the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

Repeating the mantra of frustrated environmental advocates across the world, Whitehouse told a supportive audience that President Bush should "lead or get out of the way."

Whitehouse said he has seen the evidence of rising temperatures locally.

The senator said he was alarmed to see the cherry tree at his Providence home bloom in January, and expressed concern over the warming of Narragansett Bay, and how even just one degree can throw the delicate ocean ecosystem off balance, often with dire consequences.

The good Senator is so alarumed that he's going to sell all but one of his properties and split his profits between scientists and all of the people who will experience economic harm from stringent policies aimed at reducing the damage.

Sorry; couldn't keep a straight face. The Senator's actual course of action is to make high-profile speeches and work toward the election of "a president that will lead the nation, and complement the Democratic majority in Congress." No word on whether such a leader would pressure the hoities on Martha's Vineyard to accept the terrible inconvenience of windmills in their views and perhaps even in some areas in which they like to pleasure cruise.

So, Tu?

I didn't catch the State of the Union last night, but I've explained, before, that I have a hard time getting riled up for state of the x speeches.

I will say that I continue to be struck by the irrational hatred of George Bush on the Left. Much of the fire, it seems to me, derives from his having twice stood in the way of Democrat rule, of destiny. No doubt Obama owes much to a nearly messianic narrative. He'll unite the country... without compromising the liberal vision. The heavenly gates of Camelot will pour forth their glory. Rolling Stone will lie down with the Nation.

Whoever has the honor of carrying the torch for the Republicans should brace himself, if he wins the general election, for some of the most vile treatment in American political history.

Stimulus Package

The stimulus package:

- Individuals must earn at least $3,000 to get a $300 rebate
- 117 million people will get rebates, 35 million of whom don't pay taxes
- Higher-income individuals would receive up to $600
- Couples could receive $1,200 plus $300 per child
- Rebates would be limited to individuals earning less than $75,000 and couples earning less than $150,000.

Next year, those paying taxes will be taxed on the "rebate" as regular income. Those who don't make enough income to be taxed will not. Does that still make it a rebate? At least a partial one for taxpayers. But it's simply a handout for non-taxpayers, not a rebate. Incidentally, according to the AP report:

Bush has supported larger rebates of $800-$1,600, but his plan would have left out 30 million working households who earn paychecks but don't make enough to pay income tax, according to calculations by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. An additional 19 million households would receive only partial rebates under Bush's initial proposal.

So money intended for the average American tax-payers was pulled so it could be sent to non-taxpayers. Nice.

Additional components:
- The AMT will also be suspended for 2007
- Businesses will be given incentives to invest in equipment
- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be temporarily allowed to buy mortgages of up to $625,000, exceeding a $417,000 federal limit.

Not included:
- Extension of unemployment benefits
- Provide additional food-stamp aid

Hey, is it an election year or something?

Let's Not Spin the Spin, Mr. Donnis

Over on Not for Nothing, Ian Donnis chortles about Hillary: The Movie, noting:

Among the things we learn from Ann Coulter and a host of other putative experts is that Hillary is "worse than Nixon." OK!

I'm disinclined to rush to the movie's defense as anything other than a political production, but this particular selectivity of information is indicative of the difficulty that folks on the Left and Right have communicating. Ian narrows in on the most easily dismissed commentator (among his own crowd), Ann Coulter, and the most outrageous comment (among his own crowd), which she didn't even say. Names like Michael Barone and Larry Kudlow (let alone Barack Obama) would presumably carry less of the ha-what-trash factor for liberals. Throwing out the Nixon cliché — as the gold standard for political corruption (outside of RI, anyway) — avoids uncomfortable discussion about just how manipulative and deceitful the Clintons actually are.

Nothing to Hope for...

Mark Steyn's Sunday NRO column is a bit uneven, but much can be forgiven of the man who turns such masterful phrases as this:

Terrific. In a Huckabee administration, nothing is certain but hope and taxes. Did he poll-test the line? Was it originally "What I didn't raise was tobacco"? Or did he misread the line? Did he mean to say "hogs"? Is there any correlation between taxes and hope? If you cut taxes by 20 percent, does hope nosedive off the cliff? Not for those of us who were hoping for a tax cut. And is there any evidence that he "raised hope"? Hope of what? Huck's line is a degradation of FDR: We have nothing to hope for but hope itself.

Apart from the politics, that last line certainly sums up my life just about now. Make a good t-shirt.

Chris Mathews Thinks New England Democrats are Racists

We close-minded, xenophobic, mouth-breathing christianists are used to being called racists. I wonder how our fellow New Englanders of the "progressive" variety feel when the talking heads at MSNBC lump them in with us simply because they voted for Hillary over Obama in New Hampshire? (via Michael Graham)

JOE SCARBOROUGH: What the hell happened in New Hampshire?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:“You remember the Lone Ranger and Tonto? I think paleface speak with forked tongue. You hear me? Forked tongue....

I thought this was over. I thought it ended with “macaca."...

I thought white voters stopped being what they didn’t want to be. You know what it tells me? People aren’t proud of who they are. They aren't proud of who they are. If they want to vote for Hillary Clinton, fine. Why don’t they say so?

SCARBOROUGH: I’m used to people saying that we in the South have problems.

MATTHEWS: Tell me about it,

SCARBOROUGH: But talk about New England.

MATTHEWS: Boston? BOSTON? [with a tone of incredulity]

MATTHEWS: There’s different kind of prejudice in the North than in the South. But it exists. It may not be “I think I’m better than you,” but it might be "I don’t want to live next door to you.”

Calling All Armchair QBs - New Hampshire

New Hampshire voters just did what they do best--go against the Conventional Wisdom (or the establishment, in the case of McCain). All sorts of theories are out there about how the media misread the Democratic race. One interesting theory is that perhaps McCain pulled independents away from Obama because--to the NH independent voter--it looked like McCain needed them more. Maybe. Another is that people lied to pollsters--the Bradley effect--about voting for Obama.

Or maybe crying helps.

Exit polling showed that Clinton did much better among women of all ages than Obama. And while the youth vote that was supposed to come out for Obama did, there just aren't as many of them as we think. That's nothing new: pandering to the youth vote is sexy but doesn't yield substantive results. As Clinton showed, it's all about the older women (Except you Mom!) and traditional Democrats. Bottom line for the Dems is that the real contest is a generational one.

On the GOP side, McCain won as predicted, if not by as much. Romney came in 2nd (again), which both reflects a belief that he is everyone's second choice and that he may end up being the consensus GOP candidate. Regardless of perception, the fact is that Romney leads the delegate count with two seconds and a first in Nevada {thanks Jon} Wyoming (which has more delegates than NH, by the way--just not the publicity). Huckabee got no real Iowa bounce, but he wasn't paying much attention to NH to begin with. It's all about South Carolina for him. Then there is Giulianni, waiting for February...Meanwhile, the role that independent voters will play in party primaries will lessen significantly.

Ironically, despite the heavy play that domestic issues are getting in this election, maybe the NH results show that both parties voted for the candidate they believe to be the strongest on foreign policy.

Emotional Populism

Iowa rewards populists. That's how Mike Huckabee and John Edwards and, to a certain extent, Barack Obama did so well last week. According to George Will, Huckabee and Edwards are cut from the same cloth (more on Obama in a bit) and their class-warfare dependent messages are flawed:

[Huckabee] and John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa, encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. Edwards and Huckabee lament a shrinking middle class. Well.

Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.

Huckabee told heavily subsidized Iowa -- Washington's ethanol enthusiasm has farm values and incomes soaring -- that Americans striving to rise are "pushed down every time they try by their own government." Edwards, synthetic candidate of theatrical bitterness on behalf of America's crushed, groaning majority, says the rich have an "iron-fisted grip" on democracy and a "stranglehold" on the economy. Strangely, these fists have imposed a tax code that makes the top 1 percent of earners pay 39 percent of all income tax revenues, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent, and the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent.

But the class-warfare card is played so often because it works well, at least for a while. And a lot of people really think that their acute economic frailty is due to some "other" taking money away from them--or at the least, taking more than their "fair share." However, both think that government is the solution. Will, again:

Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity. Each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them, and who therefore think opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.

The way to achieve Edwards' and Huckabee's populist goal of reducing the role of "special interests," meaning money, in government is to reduce the role of government in distributing money. But populists want to sharply increase that role by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth. Populists, who are slow learners, cannot comprehend this iron law: Concentrate power in Washington and you increase the power of interests whose representatives are concentrated there.

Yet, Will thinks Obama is different:

He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

But he is a liberal and there is little doubt in my mind that his "reform" will also see a growth in government. Obama has also flirted with populism here and there--particularly the everyman, we-shop-at-Target variety--and mixes it in with a "unity" theme; all in an attempt to appeal across the political spectrum. It worked in Iowa and probably will in New Hampshire. For sure, Obama is a fine speaker and comes across as pleasant and likable. And while various wonks have been explaining that his rhetoric is "short on details," that hasn't hurt him so far. In fact, it is his ability to speak in heartwarming generalities and pleasant platitudes that has made him so appealing.

That makes him a populist of another sort.

While Huckabee and Edwards appeal to the emotions of fear and distrust and anger--which is generally viewed as the more traditional vein of populism--Obama is also a populist by appealing to the desire for hope and happiness via a non-ideological, "agent for change" image. The common denominator revealed in the rhetoric and records of all three is that none is afraid of turning to government to "help," but a government run by them, not the elite "other." Obama is similar to JFK and Reagan and even Bill Clinton in that he offers a hopeful message. But whereas the first two integrated their core philosophies into their rhetoric--indeed, they were persuasive because they believed in their philosophy (as for Clinton, he believed what he said, at the time)--Obama tends to hide his real governing philosophy--left-liberalism--behind his appealing rhetoric. At some point, Obama will have to begin to explain his ideas....won't he?

Speaking of Practices They Dislike

My previous post cites the environment — global warming, specifically — as a religiously founded cause that allows believers to dismiss complications to their unrelated aversions, especially business. National Review's Rich Lowry argues that John Edwards is seeking to capitalize on that underlying impulse:

It is rare indeed to hear a politician brag about his fistfights as a child as Edwards does to establish his credentials for the "epic fight" ahead. Persuasion and negotiations are anathema to him and he explicitly forswears them: "People say to me, as president of the United States I want you to sit at a table and negotiate with these people. Never." He's willing to talk to Iran, but not to Pfizer. One is only a terrorist-sponsoring enemy of the United States, after all, and the other is a drug company.

For all its populist grievance, Edwards has a certain conservative appeal based on filial piety. He brings up his grandparents and parents constantly, and frames his fight against corporations in terms of all the striving our forebears have done to secure a better future. He complains that the mill where his father worked has now closed. In a change election, Edwards sells a kind of nostalgia, as if fighting the corporations will end the capitalist churning that so discomfits his listeners.

Anybody know the amount of CO2 released by a nuclear explosion? Alackaday. Some there are, perhaps, who believe that Iran is fighting — albeit in a different manner — the "dark corporate forces [that] are responsible for everything [Edwards] doesn't like" in his "down-home Manichaean vision" (magnificent phrase).

Frightening Enough to Induce Vomiting

And I'll share it with you:

[Hillary] might even be shameless enough to put [Bill] on the Supreme Court, where he could ruin the law of the land, as many of his own judicial appointees are already doing in the federal courts.

From an equal-opportunity take-down column by Thomas Sowell.

Another Anecdote in Support of Limited Government

Some news stories, like this one below about the just-passed Omnibus bill in Congress, need no further commentary:

[South Carolina Senator] DeMint's office put a finger in Sen. Dick Durbin's (D-Ill.) eye last night:

Durbin: “For 46 hours and 8 minutes—the Senator from South Carolina has had an opportunity to go to the Internet and see this bill in its entirety, with his staff, and to read every page...Please, do not come to the floor and suggest that this is a mystery bill which no one has seen. For 2 days, this has been posted on the Internet . You have had your chance. Every Senator has had a chance.” – Senate Floor, 12/18/07

According to Senator Durbin’s math: Every Senator had 2,768 minutes to read 3,417 pages of legislative text that included next year’s spending for every domestic program of the entire federal government and many new policy changes.

According to Senator Durbin’s math: A Senator that downloaded the bill when it was posted at 12:15 a.m. Monday morning would have had to:

• Read nearly 1.25 pages of the bill every minute for 46 hours and 8 minutes,
  
• Not sleep,
  
• Not eat,
  
• Take no bathroom breaks.

After Durbin's speech last night, DeMint asked him on the floor if he'd read the bill. He did not answer.

And some people are silly enough to think that a public sector filled with politicians like Senator Durbin and unelected, unaccountable, physically remote, and faceless bureaucrats have only pure motives and are capable of solving our national problems!

It is always worth reminding ourselves that it is the underlying incentives created by policies, not the publicly-stated goals, which drive actual behaviors long after everyone has forgotten about the legislative details. See the first part of this post and pay particular attention to this important post.