A Second Hand Conjecture

In one sense, today is an historic day. We’ve now sworn in our 44th President, in yet another peaceful transition of the leadership of our government.

But it seems to me that the only other way to see this day as historic is to view Obama based on his skin color. Isn’t that exactly the opposite of what MLK was getting at.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I think the celebration is over the top, both in cost, and extravagance. The liberal double-standard is in play, as President Bush spent less on his parties, and was derided more. But, such is neither here nor there.

I expect President Obama will not meet the rather high expectations of his supporters, nor the worst fears of his detractors.

May God keep President Obama and our country safe.

Some other interesting quotes that come to mind right now.

I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

* Speech in Detroit, Michigan (1963-06-23)

Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.

* The Measures of Man (1959)

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While I’m certainly not in disagreement that maintaining a ban on torture techniques in military interrogations should be an objective of the incoming Obama administration, Joe Klein’s pitch for it in his latest column takes us somewhere far beyond the overwrought. In it, Klein openly fantasizes about watching Donald Rumsfeld stripped naked and abused, as punishment for his part in incurring the permanent national stain of Abu Ghraib. How permanent is the stain according to Klein? He wants to erect a memorial monument to the victims of sleep deprivation on the National Mall. Yeah.

But this isn’t merely theatrical, it’s a confessional revenge fantasy. By his own admission, the mere mention in a newspaper of a prisoner standing in a stress position has Klein ready to torture former government officials as an act of retribution. It should be within his capacity to imagine that in a combat theater, inspiration for reciprocal abuses is even easier to obtain.

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You know you’re in an American recession when British observers start reflecting on the inevitability of American decline, and volunteering their allegedly privileged perspective gained from the fall of the British Empire (Mark Steyn, as always, excepted). So it is that Matthew Parris joins an old tradition and writes this of the incoming Obama administration:

Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline.
(The Times)

It should still be within our memory of course, that it was widely believed that Richard Nixon held this dubious distinction in 1968. Indeed, Nixon himself believed it, and his assessment that the United States had passed into decline informed almost all of his foreign policies. Mr. Parris’ countryman, the historian and strategist Paul Kennedy, had thought even more seriously on this issue and concluded in 1987 that the apex of American power had been reached in the 1970s, after which the United States had passed into another ultimately nonexistent long-term decline.

Retrospectively, this is all rather embarrassing. The United States is naturally vastly more powerful today than it was in the 1960s or 1970s, and the structure which enabled those gains commercially, socially and politically, remains unassailed. Given past experience, it’s entirely likely in coming years that we will feel similarly embarrassed by the current declinism.

But Mr. Parris is obliquely correct on one matter though:

Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country’s fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.
(The Times)

The experience of Nixon –pursuing policies to cushion the fall of an America which was just beginning to scale new heights– might suggest that it doesn’t really matter what Obama thinks. But if Americans themselves genuinely started to believe in their impending decline, and shelved their ambitions in favor of the crowded retirement home of great powers, they could actualize the prediction.

As with American greatness in light of her continental scale, vast and growing labor force, enormous capital resources and limitless dreams, a prophecy of American decline is largely contingent on whether or not Americans can be persuaded to self-fulfill it. If they cannot, that faint light on the horizon is another dawn, not an inevitable sunset. After all, the retirement home for the false futurists of American decline is an even more crowded house.

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Hypothetically imagining he had the power to subpoena the president-elect, Michael Isikoff identifies the top five questions the public requires answers to relative to Mr. Obama’s knowledge of, or involvement with, Governor Blagojevich’s criminal misconduct.

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The naval nerds at Information Dissemination are unimpressed with Juan Garcia, Obama’s pick for Navy Secretary. They had been hoping for some substantial change in policy and strategic direction, and consider the relatively obscure Mr. Garcia a vote for the status quo. A lot of that going around.

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After the John Brennan experience, Obama is having trouble finding qualified intelligence experts who are ideologically acceptable to liberal bloggers. Pleased to see we have our security priorities in the right place.

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McQ on Obama’s health care “reforms”: “One of our commenters here says since it is inevitable we should try to influence its implementation instead of fighting it. Reminds me a bit about some discredited advice concerning rape.”

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Hmm. It seems that media reports filed on November 5th explicitly stating that Obama met with Governor Blagojevich to discuss his Senate replacement, are suddenly disappearing from the web.

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Whilst most elected Republicans are still preoccupied in pledging to work with (or for) the Obama administration, Sarah Palin isn’t having any of it.

This is significant criticism, because it is vitally important that a Republican leader emerges who can command a media platform, and will articulate regular opposition to the Obama administration on national policy. Naturally, whoever does emerge to shoulder this burden will be perfectly placed to continue that opposition in the next presidential election.

There’s certainly no point in looking to the decimated and newly submissive ranks of congress for this leadership. As in 1976, political reality mandates that it must come from outside Washington. Interestingly, Palin possesses an advantage over Reagan when he sought to become this kind of external leader of the opposition: she holds political office and can reinforce her criticism with independent action, as the new pipeline with Canada demonstrates.

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Michele Catalano writing at Pajamas Media yesterday, defending Obama’s call for (at one point) mandatory community service,  gets it completely wrong. To backtrack a little bit for those who haven’t been paying attention the last week or so, at President Elect Obama’s website, www.change.gov, there’s an agenda section. At one point part of it read like this:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year

(emphasis mine)

This quickly led to a swarm of criticism. Some of course went slightly overboard and likened it to slavery, as the opportunity to note the irony was just too hard to pass up I suppose. Others saw this as Obama building his “Marxist” personal army.

Now those points can be argued against and rightfully so, but that doesn’t mean their main thrust is wrong. Reacting to the criticism, the well oiled Obama online team quickly replaced the text, taking out the required part and changing it to an incentive based service. So good for them, but the piece by Michele Catalano defending it is defending the wrong aspect.

There are thousands upon thousands of high school and college students, as well as adults, doing some form of community service right now. Service to your community is an altruistic thing; it is a way of perhaps giving back to a community that has given to you. It is a way to reach out to a community, to help others who may not be as fortunate as you, to teach young adults about sharing, caring, and helping others, to do something out of the goodness of your heart that will benefit your community. This is not slavery. This is not forced labor. This is outreach. It represents values. Slavery is an act that benefits no one but the person who owns the slave; community service benefits both the giver and receiver and helps make the world a better place and leaves a general good feeling for everyone involved. It is not comparable to slavery.

(emphasis again is mine)

Respectfully to Michele, yes, this is exactly forced labor. Look, no one is saying the end is a bad result, it’s the means with which it’s achieved that is wrong. There was benefit from slavery but that doesn’t mean it’s not wrong, and who benefits has nothing to do with its definition. If you had a slave you could have him or her volunteer at the homeless shelter every day and do a lot of good, but it would still be completely immoral to do so, not because of the work that the person is doing but because the person has no choice.

So this is where she gets it wrong. No one criticising the required language is arguing community service is bad, or not a lofty goal. Millions of people think serving the army is a tremendous good that benefits both giver and receiver (receiver being the US citicizens of course), but no one argues that the draft is either moral or a good idea. So defenders can talk about how much good community service can do all they want, but they need to remember no free man should be compulsed into your definition of “doing good for the community”.

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I’m signed up to recieve emails for Zogby Polls so I too noticed the strange questions a reader at Clayton Cramer’s blog did.

If you knew Barack Obama supported a plan to place a 75% excise tax on the sale of firearms - where a $500 rifle would now cost $875 with tax, would that have made you…

More likely to vote for Obama
Less likely to vote for Obama
No difference
Not sure

If you knew about Barack Obama’s support for national legislation that would overturn concealed carry handgun laws in 40 states, would that have made you…
More likely to vote for Obama
Less likely to vote for Obama
No difference
Not sure

Of course the poll before that asked me what kind of dog I thought Obama should buy his daughters and what they should name it, so I don’t know what to think.

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Don’t complain to me if there aren’t any new posts on ASHC. I’m sitting on a beach in Miami and thus completely out of the necessary frame of mind to bitch about Obama and triumph of statism. Now, these other writers on here have no such excuses I note. In fact, they’re probably sitting at their desks right now wondering “why isn’t Lee posting anything new?” To them I toast a fruity morning cocktail with a plastic palm tree. It’s up to you gentlemen.

Even though this excursion is more business than pleasure, the economic conditions here in South Florida remind me of how much I love vacationing during recession. The worse and deeper the downturn, the better the leisure to be found. Hotels to yourself, fire sale prices for everything, pretty girls in bikinis who are more easily impressed with a boring software executive. It’s a fine time to travel to a tropical paradise. The traditional problem being how to pay for it in a recession. Ahem. As cruel a Catch-22 as there is.

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The New Republic offers a fine if brief overview of the 30 most consequential individuals for the Obama administration. Which reminds me that TNR itself just got a lot more consequential too.

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Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress is upset Fred Barnes and Dick Morris are blaming Obama for the post-election declines in the stock market. Armbruster’s case is a little defensive and misjudged (he cites the New York Times’ opinion, as if that would mollify critics), but then the transition from implacable critic of a government to determined apologist for a proto-government has been swift for all at TP.

However, in a general way he does have a point to object on I think. People are out to make cash gains where and when they can in this market, and opportunities have been rather few lately. To the extent that there was a specific macro cause, it seems to me the abrupt election day rally was the more likely culprit for the subsequent sell-off. That is what we’ve seen in other isolated spikes on events this year. The Saturnian habit for feeding yourself by eating your children, rather than letting them grow up to sow the fields, if you will.

Although it should be said that Dick Morris’ point that provoked Armbruster’s ire is not entirely unreasonable either. There’s certainly some incentive for selling on a small gain now, if you expect capital gains taxes to be substantially higher later. Comprehensively rejecting that as a buried motive is not reasonable.

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Apparently we’re assigning the .gov domain extension used by federal agencies to campaign slogans now. Although, there is a certain literalism to this one I suppose.

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So we had an election. For those in the new opposition the outcome was variously enviable, troubling, or contemptible. For the victors it was…what else, an occasion for gathering an enormous outdoor rally at an urban theatrical stage to chant.

For my own part, I’m always somewhat reluctant to criticize the phenomenon of Barack Obama, because I cannot do so without confessing I miss the point itself. That’s because I possess a certain immunity to his allegedly irresistible charm. I miss the intimate personal connection supposedly conveyed through elaborately choreographed and cinematically lit mass spectacles, I find his celebrated speeches largely barren of purpose, and perhaps above all, I remain permanently unmoved by the emotional ecstasy his presence provokes in so many.

It should be acknowledged as true that if these impressions precondition your criticism, you do miss the point of Obama as political leader and cultural phenomenon on a profound level (and I surely do). For the critic, this can pose a difficulty that one must become an opponent of the phenomenon itself, rather than just its policy projects. And for the moment, that is to be the adversary of a powerful political tide.
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Interesting:

[W]e are on pace for the worst reaction to an election since Truman won in 1948.  Interestingly, the only times the DJIA has ever declined by more than 1% [are] the day after a presidential election when the Democratic Party won complete control.
(Bespoke)

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Yes, Obama has made history and been elected president. I didn’t vote for him nor support him, but I have supported every US president in my lifetime and President Obama will be no different. I am going to disagree with him on plenty of stuff I imagine, just as I disagree with my friends and family on plenty of stuff, but he’s still the President of the United States of America, and I will want to see him do the best for this country.

The slate is wiped clean today, the benefit of the doubt is given, let’s move forward together.It’s a new day, a day to rise above partisanship and just all be Americans.

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It occurs to me that the sequence of cocktails is the best political indicator I know of on election night. In 2004 I was attending a Democratic election party and early on everyone was drinking wine and martinis in stemware, or beer and soda in tall glasses. The ambiance befit the beverages: general levity and young merriment. Sporty coquettish girls with wide white toothy smiles dominated all conversations.

But when it became clear that the exit polls predicting a Kerry victory were wildly mistaken, and field reports were coming in on cell phones of Karl Rove’s successful mobilization effort, it wasn’t long before the assembled Democrats had exchanged their drinks for short glasses filled with dark brown fluids. To match the new taste for scotch and bourbon whiskey, the sporty girls seemed to disappear and old men began to dominate conversations.

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Alan Reynolds at Cato asks “How’s Obama Going to Raise $4.3 Trillion?”

Altogether, Mr. Obama is promising at least $4.3 trillion of increased spending and reduced tax revenue from 2009 to 2018 — roughly an extra $430 billion a year by 2012-2013.

How is he going to pay for it?

Read the whole thing for an overview of what Obama is promising in inscreased spending and loss of tax revenues and how his rational for paying for it falls far short of the goal. How will we pay for all this? It’s something I’ve wondered for a long long time and have only found hand waving about corporate loopholes and better efficiencies savings that seem absurd on their face.

That leaves 3 options as I see it. We will do one or some combination of

1. Increase the national debt
2. Raise taxes
3. Cut Spending

Increasing the national debt may not be as politially feasible in the near future as it has been in the past (at least I hope), so it’s clear that can’t account for all of it. I’m not sure how much more the democrats will be able to tax the rich and corporations. I mean, they might try, but I don’t think it will give them the returns they would hope for. So that leaves raising taxes on the rest of us and cutting spending. Any whats the only part of the budge the democrats have been known to favor spending cuts for? The military.

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Under McCain and Obama's tax plans 43% and 44% would pay no income tax respectively

Fewer and fewer people are paying income tax and even less will be with either candidates tax plan. I don’t think this would be such a problem if we didn’t have such high spending, growing entitlements, and if so many of these zero income tax filers weren’t getting additional handouts from the government (especially under Obama’s tax “cuts” ie. handouts).

It has been said by an unknown author “[Democracy] can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury…” and this is where we’ve been heading for awhile. I think just as a tax plan can be too regressive, it can be too progressive in that it places too high a burden on “the rich” resulting in them leaving (atlas shrugs) or seeking tax shelters, and at the same time having too much of the population with no civic tax obligation leaving them no incentive to constrain public spending (hey, it’s not their money right?)

(HT Greg Mankiw)

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You’ve probably heard that John McCain has denounced Barack Obama’s ’spread the wealth’ formulation for tax policy as . It’s an inflammatory but not unjustified charge, as a good definition for socialism is the equitable distribution of wealth to the community, coercively enforced by law.

But here’s a troubling aspect: suppose the electorate doesn’t mind if it is socialism?

(more…)

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I’ve been seeing this amusing banner ad for Obama popping up all over the web. Given the behavior of some of ACORN’s representatives, it might not be an illegitimate question.

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The collision of Mr. Obama’s ambitions with the architecture of reality is going to be a thunderous thing to hear. Be prepared.

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I’m experiencing a little déjà vu over the invective that’s starting to pour out of the left against “Joe the Plumber.” It has a decidedly reminiscent over-reactive, hysterical feel to it of the anti-Palin crusade. Here’s a typical example of what I mean from a Kos diarist:

“I have watched the Joe Plumber video several times and this right wing nut is nothing but a liar.”

Uh-huh. Regular Nazi threat to the republic that plumber.

Probably not the wisest attack. As my friend Jason puts it: “Joe the Plumber is Pennsylvania and Ohio personified.” By consequence, team Obama might want to restrain the volume on this sort of immoderate ideological raving to the fullest extent that they can.

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What a day for indignity. Just when I’d stopped shaking my head at the image of Paul Krugman accepting the Nobel Prize, I read two of my most cherished heroes offering rather embarrassing endorsements for bad things.

Christopher Hitchens, always aloof from the elderly McCain, has been pushed into a categorical and insulting rejection in Slate, animated mostly by a festering hatred of Sarah Palin that seems to grow more infected by the day. It’s not quite an Andrew Sullivan endoresement in that it lacks the enchanted fascination with Obama, but it’s still advocacy that makes you wince at the superficiality.

But worse is yet to come. Francis Fukuyama, in his most aggressive Obama endorsement yet, reboots history in The Times (adapted from the Newsweek piece) by denouncing the entire edifice of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution for capitalism and democracy as destructive and driven by uneducated American swing voters, who are stupid enough to endorse the philosophy he once championed as the endgame of civilzation itself.

Sad affairs. I suspect I shall have to become an antiquarian for these men’s opinions in order to remain a fan. Their current thinking seems only demonstrative of the strangely stupefying effect partisanship for Obama can have on otherwise able minds.

(ht: Ghost of a Flea)

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Senior Democrats gave a conference call briefing to their top outside donors last week. Things are pretty grim according to them. Obama had once signaled that he didn’t want support from 527 type PACs, but with his support eroding rapidly in most swing states that’s changed.

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For two weeks, as John McCain’s national polls first rose above Obama and then solidified there, Democrats protested that the popular vote was irrelevant. Look to the state polls said they, in a sensible but amusingly opportunistic argument for the electoral college (for those of us who recall the venom of 2000). Alas, this was a comfort built upon something of an illusion, given that few state polls were available after the Republican convention. That’s begun to change of course, and for the first time Rasmussen has given McCain a slim electoral college advantage.

(more…)

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Tim Reid travels to Mount Clemens, Macomb County Michigan, to talk to white working class female voters. Macomb County should be core Democratic blue country, but it was here that Stanley Greenberg first identified the “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s, and Reid thinks we just might be seeing the ground shift once again:

The Times spoke to dozens of women here – perhaps the key demographic in this election – in an area that is 88 per cent white, has one of the highest unemployment and home repossession rates in the country, and will play a big role in determining who wins Michigan in November. It is a crucial swing state that no Republican has won since 1988 but where Mr Obama is particularly vulnerable. Nearly all said that they were still undecided. Yet the disturbing fact for Mr Obama was how many said that they had been leaning towards him – until Mrs Palin entered the race.
(The Times)

Read on>>

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Boy, this was an awfully interesting exchange. Democratic strategist Mark Penn, absurdly invited by Brian Goldsmith to argue the press has been soft on Sarah Palin, instead slams the media for counterproductively biased and vindictive coverage:

(more…)

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According to a new Associated Press poll 46% of the public thinks Barack Obama is too inexperienced for the presidency, and only 36% say the same of Governor Palin. So much for that line of attack.

In contrast with both, a staggering 80% feel Senator McCain has the right experience for the job. An almost unbelievable contrast of opinion in a presidential election.

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Obama’s “new” tactic to regain the initiative in the election is to portray McCain as out of touch with ordinary Americans. Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t this the old tactic? Patrician wife, seven houses, price of milk, Salvatore Ferragamo footwear and so forth. I seem to remember that being the heart of their complaint for months. And didn’t it, you know, fail?

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Panic grips the Hill, with Democrats planning to distance themselves from Obama and/or abandon criticism of McCain. Geez. Snap out of it guys. You have the most compelling presidential candidate you’ve had since perhaps John F. Kennedy. Almost every conditional variable in the election is heavily slanted in your favor. If you can’t win this one, you can’t win a presidential election.

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Seth Weinberger picks up Foreign Policy’s “10 Worst Policy Ideas” for Obama and McCain and adds some commentary. What’s immediately striking to me is how few objections FP offers to McCain’s foreign policy proposals. A peculiar thing, if you’re familiar with the doctrinal tilt of the pub. There’s really only one they single out against McCain (League o’ Democracies), the rest is purely domestic politics. By contrast Obama comes in for scorn on four (NAFTA, CAFTA, Pakistan, Iran).

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It was early and he’s modified his views somewhat (and somewhat not), but young state senator Barack Obama couldn’t have been more mistaken about the causes and conditions of the 9/11 attacks.

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Not so encouraging.

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According to the Associated Press, a sequence of interviews with Democratic leaders has revealed this to be the political plan being recommended to the Obama campaign:

1. Tie the Republican to an unpopular President Bush.
2. Let no charge go unanswered.
3. Stress plans to fix the economy.

Well, I’m not sure any of these items is good advice, with a possible qualitative exception on #3.
(more…)

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(photo: Brian Long)

Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice president of the Canadian Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is concerned that Sarah Palin’s decision to have Trig, may lead to a reduction of abortions in Canada through positive example.

This is perhaps demonstrative of how different perspectives on abortion can be in the United States on both sides. It is frankly uncommon to see a senior figure among even the staunchest American defenders of abortion rights, argue that a decrease in their exercise would be undesirable. Indeed, such an opinion is more commonly confined to the most extremist fringes of radical feminism, or within the vile eugenics and zero population growth movements.

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“Tattered Hope” by Nathan Rupert

Jason at postpolitical and I often get into testy email arguments about Barack Obama’s alleged “arrogance.” He is quite Greek in the sense that he thinks hubris is the fatal flaw at the heart of all political downfalls. I don’t entirely agree with that, nor with his contention that Obama represents an emblematic example of arrogant leadership. At least no more so than any other politician.

On this matter Jason is of course much more in line with majority opinion on the right than myself. Many conservative bloggers have argued for Obama’s arrogance for so long, it once was merely a kind of premonition.

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Some thoughts on why Barack Obama’s effort to portray Sarah Palin as “Pat Robertson with ovaries” (as Andrew Romano inelegantly puts it), isn’t working out so well.

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Ah, “community agitator.” I remember those. Berkeley, SDS, that sort of thing. Dissenting, QuakerDave shows the mostly good side (no Tom Hayden). All said for and against, it’s still a damned strange thing to put on your resume.

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Last week I noticed that Sarah Palin had exceeded Joe Biden slightly in Google returns. Understandably, that has now become an avalanche (Biden: 5.6 million | Palin: 22.4 million). Although it plainly doesn’t exceed John McCain or Barack Obama’s returns as Robert Legge strangely argues.

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Democratic consultant Doug Schoen: “Their 50-state strategy is insanity. If they don’t use their financial advantage where they need it most, and put every thing there and blow it out, they are at deep risk of losing.”

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Jason Linkins takes exception to my reading his Huffington Post editorial about the silly ‘lipstick’ controversy as a suicide fantasy. He protests in his defense that he didn’t want to shoot himself, he wanted to shoot other people. Wonderful. How about nobody gets shot and you lighten up Jason.

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Taking his cue from Us Magazine’s five free issue incentive to dissuade subscribers from canceling over their anti-Palin cover story, TennesseeFree proposes Obama should offer five free personalized social programs to every fleeing voter. I’d caution the electorate against any such offer. Even with a beneficiary of only one, don’t underestimate the government’s ability to still find a way of making you stand in an endless line to fill out triplicate forms.

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Longtime Clinton ally Leon Panetta pronounces Barack Obama “intimidated” by Sarah Palin, and lost in a deepening cycle of reactive defense. With McCain now winning a majority of independents and erasing the gender gap, the blood is most definitely in the water. It’s now a legitimate question to ask whether McCain can finish him off. My sense is that the Obama campaign isn’t too many more mistakes removed from a serious structural collapse in a significant segment of its support outside the Democratic ranks. Panetta is quite right, Obama needs to regain the initiative and fast.

On that matter Jonathan Freedland is pessimistic. So much so, that he is evidently consumed with stomach pains of grief. He warns us that the entire planet will seek revenge against the United States if we fail to appoint Obama president.
(more…)

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Boy, this is an unwise move. Perhaps my Tory colleagues are right and Gordon really is tempermentally unfit to govern. It’s an enormous risk and a pointless one, in that it cannot help Obama. British interference in American governance…well, we settled that one at the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

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According to a new Rasmussen survey 62% of Americans believe encouraging economic growth is more important than reducing income inequality. 51% also say the federal government exerts too much control over our economy as it stands. It would be wise of the McCain campaign to emphasize which candidates value which most.

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Caroline Glick via Ace of Spades
Caroline Glick is an astute observer of our political situation. She is based in Jerusalem.
“McCain’s strategic grasp of the requirements for a successful
presidential race provide an important lesson for policy-makers and
political leaders.”

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Tom in Paine has a blistering take on the MSNBC commentariat’s demands for the intervention of Hillary Clinton against Palin, as a kind of childhood psychodrama: “The more you listen to them the more you realize that instead of supporting Obama, a package of Pampers will do.”

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