“ Once the Democrats know that the debt ceiling will invariably be raised, they have no incentive to play ball. The end result will be another raw deal that is worse than doing nothing.” There is much hullabaloo in the media about John Boehner’s shot across the bow in the upcoming battle over the debt ceiling this fall. Specifically, Boehner warned that he “will again insist” on the” simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase.” The question is what Boehner means by insisting “again” on spending cuts greater than the debt ceiling increase. Does he view the failed Budget Control Act (BCA), super committee, and sequester of defense spending as a success? He has yet to denounce last year’s failure, so why should we look forward to a repeat performance? The first step in remedying our debt ceiling strategy is to acknowledge the failures of the past. When Republicans caved on raising the debt limit last year, we referred to the final Boehner proposal as a ground ball into a double play. Not only did Boehner fail to secure any transformational downsizing of government in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, he actually stymied our leverage in future budget battles. As we’ve noted, Mitch McConnell and House appropriators have already signaled that they will never cut one cent below the discretionary budget caps established in the BCA. Hence, the BCA served only to lock in the record spending levels of the Obama-era. The only real cuts that originated from that deal were the sequester cuts to the military that Boehner agrees we should now vitiate. So how would he do things differently this time? In retrospect, it would have been better to pass a clean increase of the debt ceiling and live another day to fight in future spending battles than to pass the BCA. The BCA ruined our leverage for the next ten years as Democrats and Republicans alike refuse to spend below those statist levels. Moreover, it has engendered a gratuitous schism in the conservative coalition by pitting spending hawks against defense hawks and forcing Republicans to go through the embarrassment of undoing their own scheme. Finally, the deal failed to achieve the primary objectives of averting a credit downgrade and slowing the national debt. The debt has increased another $1.3 trillion in the 9 ½ months since the debt ceiling was raised. That’s about $5 billion per day. After the hyped dollar-for-dollar cuts, there is not a single major program or agency that has been eliminated. The irony is that the debt has increased so rapidly following last summer’s deal that we are already talking about the next debt ceiling battle. Do we really want a repeat performance? Going forward, there are only two options: A) Republicans can telegraph the message to Democrats that they will never raise the debt ceiling without prior passage of something similar to Cut, Cap, and Balance – and that they would be willing to go to the brink. B) They admit that they are too scared to take this to the brink, and as such, agree to let Obama raise the debt ceiling. There is no option C, which would repeat the mistakes of last year. In other words, it is insane to tell the Democrats that you would never let the deadline pass, yet demand concession for the debt ceiling increase. Once the Democrats know that the debt ceiling will invariably be raised, they have no incentive to play ball. The end result will be another raw deal that is worse than doing nothing. This has occurred time and again throughout every budget battle and it’s time we end this insanity. We don’t need to hear the tough talk and bravado if there is no intent to carry through with it. Boehner noted at his speech before the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit that “we shouldn’t dread the debt limit. We should welcome it.” He punctuated that belief by calling the debt ceiling “an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction.” Undoubtedly, the debt ceiling will provide us with yet another opportunity to expose the Democrats as the statist European-socialists who are apathetic to our debt crisis. However, there are all sorts of actions; some are good and some are bad. Grounding into a double play is worse than striking out. Sadly, based on our painful experience from last year, inaction might be superior to the action that will evolve from the ranks of the consultant class of the Republican Party. Cross-posted from The Madison Project
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It’s Deja Vu All Over Again With Debt Ceiling Fight
It’s hard to think of a more liberal Republican that occupies a more consequential position in Congress than Fred Upton. It’s not just the fact that the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the most powerful House panels, is a big supporter of green energy. It’s not just the fact that this same man was the Thomas Edison of the incandescent light bulb ban . It’s about Republicans shedding an image of hypocrisy. Upton is charged with oversight over Obama’s Solyndra-like loan guarantees, yet he pushed for the same type of loan for United Solar Ovonics, whose parent company recently filed for bankruptcy. If we’ve learned anything from the past decade of congressional politics, it’s that we need a clean break from the Republican party of the past – the party that supported practically everything that we now hold against Obama and the Democrats. Whether it was green energy venture-socialism, bailouts, stimulus, campaign finance reform, handouts to labor, expansion of government-run healthcare, price and wage controls, tax increases, funding for abortions, funding for the UN, or bloated spending bills, Upton was a leading voice for big-government and a centrally planned economy. In fact, the only time he became a penny pincher was when it came to missile defense. Is this the man we need running the most important domestic policy committee? Fortunately, we are no longer stuck with a liberal in such a position of leadership. Once again, staunch conservative former state rep. Jack Hoogendyk has stepped up to the plate for the daunting task of challenging a 26-year veteran chairman. In 2010, he came out of nowhere to garner 43% of the vote against Upton, even though he was outspent 20-1. His issue position statements read like a wish-list of a well-informed Tea Party conservative – from private Social Security accounts to proposed elimination of four government departments. But in Hoogendyk’s case, he has a record to back up those commitments. He was rated the most conservative lawmaker in the state House of Representatives for several years during his three-term tenure. He was a leader on all social and fiscal conservative issues; from fighting affirmative action and big labor to pushing for spending cuts and government transparency. Since leaving the state legislature a few years ago, Jack has led numerous grassroots and tea party organizations. He has fought for ballot initiatives against several social liberal causes. In a state where there are many Big Labor Republicans, Hoogendyk is leading the charge to make Michigan a right-to-work state. This is exactly the type of comprehensive conservative fighter we need in Congress. In 1986, Upton primaried a sitting Republican by running to that man’s left. He has been running to the left field foul line ever since. Now it’s time to return the favor. Hoogendyk has everything going for him; all he needs is our support . Like all liberal incumbents, Fred Upton is now attacking his conservative challenger “from the right.” He has voted for an RSC budget for the first time in his career, and has even opposed the Ex-Im Bank! He is clearly worried because he has spent more money on attacking Hoogendyk than he has against any past primary opponent. His crony venture-socialists are coming to the rescue with a $2 million bailout to save him from a candidate that has raised $80,000. We have some time left until the August 7 primary. Fred Upton helped shut the lights off on American households; it’s time to shut the lights off on his special interest congressional career. Anyone who cares about liberty, free markets, and the future of a bold-colored Republican Party should help out Jack Hoogendyk or the PACs that are supporting him. Let’s get to work. Cross-posted from The Madison Project
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It’s Time to Dump Upton for Jack Hoogendyk in MI-6
The Crusader : The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan By Timothy Stanley (Thomas Dunne Books, 464 pages, $27.99) On the dust jacket of Timothy Stanley’s The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan , Paul Gottfried offers this “Advance Praise”: “Stanley’s biography of Pat Buchanan combines meticulous research, including the fruits of multiple interviews, with highly accessible prose and judicious judgments.” The sheer heft of this 455-page volume, the first full-length biography of the journalist, commentator, assistant to two presidents, and three-time presidential candidate, seems almost enough to confirm at least the first part of Professor Gottfried’s assessment. The few paragraphs in the book that do not have at least one endnote are mainly composed of one sentence. Taken together, those notes fill 53 pages, followed by a 7-page Bibliography. The thoroughness of Stanley’s effort is even more impressive when you consider that the bulk of the book covers only the last 20 years of the 73-year-old Buchanan’s life, from the time of his first run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992. It’s not that the earlier years are unimportant—indeed, those decades, more so than anything that has happened to him since 1992, made Buchanan what he is today—but Stanley, an Oxford University historian whose specialty is the United States, could have added little to what Buchanan himself had to say about his life in his 1988 autobiography Right From the Beginning . In fact, when he covers some of the same material—for instance, in his discussion of a meeting held in the living room of Buchanan’s McLean, Virginia, home in January 1987, when he was considering a run for the Republican nomination in 1988—Stanley leans heavily on Right From the Beginning , to the point where those who have read both books may experience a sense of déjà vu . Stanley sees the 1992 campaign as a major turning point in Buchanan’s life, though I would argue that the change wrought was personal rather than political. As Stanley himself notes, Buchanan decided to forgo a run for the nomination in 1988, when he might have succeeded in uniting more of the conservative movement than he did four years later, because “He was a private man who disliked large crowds and strange faces.” Making the decision to run in 1992 required rising above that aspect of his personality. Stanley, however, sees the change as primarily political, and his judgment is summed up in the title of Chapter 12: “Pat Becomes a Paleocon, Runs for President.” Life is never quite that simple, as historians well know—and as other passages of Stanley’s own book make clear. In that chapter, Stanley pins Buchanan’s intellectual conversion—from the right wing of mainstream conservatism to paleoconservatism—on his reaction to George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order” and the Gulf War. He emphasizes the growing friendship among Buchanan and columnists Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, forged by their mutual opposition to the war. While that friendship was of great importance in helping Buchanan to clarify his thinking in the run-up to the 1992 race, it reflected the evolution of Buchanan’s thoughts on foreign policy in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism (which Stanley treats in the preceding chapter). In Right From the Beginning , Buchanan had written that “The raison d’être of any realistic (i.e., nonideological) American foreign policy must be the preservation of the Republic.” In 1988, that meant that “Containment Is Not Enough,” the title of the chapter on foreign policy in Right From the Beginning ; three years later, it meant “Now That Red Is Dead, Come Home, America,” the headline of the pivotal op-ed Buchanan published in the Washington Post on September 8, 1991 (which does not make an appearance in Stanley’s book). In between, and tying the two together, came Buchanan’s contribution to the Spring 1990 issue of the American Interest , “America First—and Second, and Third.” Between 1988 and 1991, the circumstances had changed, but the principle had remained the same. Buchanan’s transition from a longtime supporter of free trade to a more nuanced position of “fair” or “managed” trade likewise did not represent a change of principle, though that may be hard to see until we understand what principle was at stake. In Right From the Beginning , at the end of a section in which he calls the prospect of a “trade war” with Asian countries “an act of almost terminal stupidity for the West,” Buchanan writes: The Republican party should stand for traditional values, even when that means standing against laissez-faire ; we should set our sights on something higher than the bottom line on a balance sheet. The greatness of a country and the goodness of its people are not to be measured by its GNP. It is one thing to believe that the federal government should not interfere with healthy competition; it is another to believe that the federal government should make it easier for American corporations to profit by transferring production and jobs overseas. To insist on free trade when it has begun to harm the American interest and the interest of the average American is to turn a worthy ideal into an ideology. Stanley repeats the oft-told story of Buchanan’s heart-wrenching visit to a paper mill in New Hampshire, where, just days before Christmas, all of the workers had been fired. By Buchanan’s own account, the plaintive appeal of a worker, imploring Buchanan to save their jobs, affected him deeply. But it is painting with too broad of a brush to say, as Stanley does, that on that day, “Buchanan the Republican was dead. Buchanan the populist was born.” Up until then, Stanley writes, “For Pat, the trade issue had always been an intellectual conceit.” But four pages earlier, he describes a fundraising letter that Buchanan had written as “an attack on free trade,” and traces the genesis of the letter back to a conversation between Buchanan and Buchanan’s Uncle Bob 15 years earlier, at the 1976 Republican convention. Life is messy, and tracing the intellectual development of someone like Pat Buchanan is undoubtedly hard. But The Crusader sometimes reads as if Stanley sketched out the narrative of the biography first and went searching for the supporting details later. And considering the wealth of endnotes, he gets a surprising number of details wrong. That Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo is a Hispanic-American would undoubtedly come as a surprise to his Sicilian grandparents. Paul Gottfried is repeatedly described as a philosopher, though his academic training is in history. Sam Francis certainly “lost about twenty pounds,” but only before he went on to lose perhaps a hundred more, in a diet that began more than a year earlier than Stanley says it did. This particular paragraph about Francis contains at least a half-dozen errors of fact (despite three endnotes), and ends with a description of Francis’s death that is appallingly abrupt. Joe Sobran receives similar treatment in the very next paragraph. A description of a meeting between Buchanan and Russell Kirk at Kirk’s Piety Hill in the weeks leading up to the March 1992 Republican primary in Michigan leaves the impression that Kirk and Buchanan barely knew each other and left the meeting estranged. But the two men first met when Buchanan was serving in the Nixon White House (Kirk, in his posthumously published memoirs, The Sword of Imagination , describes Buchanan at that time as “the ablest of the President’s inner circle”), and Buchanan secured a Washington appointment for Kirk, who, though grateful, turned it down because “he did not mean to be converted into a cultural bureaucrat.” In the last years of his life, Kirk frequently, and proudly, recalled his role as Buchanan’s Michigan campaign chairman, and he describes Buchanan as a friend in the last pages of his memoirs. Buchanan, for his part, dedicated his 2007 Day of Reckoning “To Russell Kirk (1918–1994), Friend and Teacher,” and describes Kirk as “the great conservative scholar and author and chairman of the Buchanan Brigades in Michigan in 1992,” noting that “he seems ever to grow wiser as I grow older.” Stanley clearly relishes controversy, which leads him to place undue emphasis on rather unimportant events, often not involving Buchanan at all (or involving him only tangentially). By the time I reached the final page of text—the Acknowledgments—it hardly seemed surprising to read this line: “I didn’t know where to start my research, so I googled ‘Buchanan right-wing activists crazy’…” Still, it struck me as an odd admission from an Oxford historian. And yet, despite all of these problems, I would recommend The Crusader to anyone interested in Pat Buchanan and the brand of right-wing populism he exemplified in the last decade of the 20th century. Professional historians all too often succeed in meticulously documenting the details, while missing the big picture (or getting it entirely wrong). But Stanley, despite his errors and overgeneralizations, has largely captured the essence of Buchanan and Buchananism. Approach The Crusader the way you would view an Impressionist painting: If you spend too much time examining the brush strokes, the work of art will get lost. Take a step back, regard the canvas as a whole, and the broader truth of the artist’s work comes into focus. Remember, though, to take any particular details you read in The Crusader with a grain of salt—even when they come with an endnote.
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The Devil Is in the Details
Obama has decided that he’d like to tussle with Romney in the economic playground this week, releasing an ad that has echoes of Gingrich’s SuperPAC spots but with even less factual basis. It’s cleverly named “Steel.” My favorite line from the video: “Those guys were all rich. They all had more money than they’ll ever spend.” They aren’t even trying to cover up the class warfare these days. It’s just gross. To say nothing of the fact that Mitt Romney wasn’t even at Bain Capital during these layoffs, the person who was actually leading the charge on these steel factory shut downs happens to be an Obama bundler . But it’s irrelevant anyway because I reject the entire premise. Sometimes jobs are lost and companies go bankrupt. Just ask Obama, he knows . On a conference call with Mitt Romney’s Senior Campaign Advisor Ed Gillespie, it became clear quickly that the Romney camp is happy to have this fight. In the coming week, the Romney campaign says they are going to focus on Obama’s tax & spend record , the failed stimulus , Obama’s debt being on track to come in larger than the last 43 president’s combined , as well as the well-documented hoodwinking of the American taxpayer through failed green investment programs like Solyndra . Of note on the call was the mention of more specificity around entitlement reform and the need to create a sustainable Social Security & Medicare system for future generations. Entitlements, and specifically Social Security, is somewhat of a sore spot for the conservative base when it comes to Governor Romney. He took the opportunity early in the primary season to attack Governor Perry for calling Social Security a ponzi scheme which many conservatives believe it to be . For many, Romney’s position wasn’t bold enough and played into conservative fears of a moderate candidate unwilling to tackle an issue that has been front and center on the minds of the Tea Party, not to mention the addition of the all new entitlement, Obamacare. The campaign informed me that Governor Romney has gone into great detail on his plans already though I’m not convinced that what currently sits at MittRomney.com qualifies as “specific” at least as it relates to Social Security. President Obama has had three years in office, during which time he has attacked every serious proposal to preserve and strengthen America’s entitlement programs. Mitt Romney has laid out the approach he would take to modernizing America’s entitlement programs, guaranteeing their continued vitality for future generations. Mitt’s proposals will not raise taxes and will not affect today’s seniors or those nearing retirement. He proposes that Social Security should be adjusted in a couple of commonsense ways that will put it on the path of solvency and ensure that it is preserved for future generations. First, for future generations of seniors, Mitt believes that the retirement age should be slowly increased to account for increases in longevity. Second, for future generations of seniors, Mitt believes that benefits should continue to grow but that the growth rate should be lower for those with higher incomes. With just those two simple steps, and no change in benefits for those at or near retirement, America can guarantee the preservation of the Social Security system for the foreseeable future. The Republican nominee must be someone who is committed to saving Social Security. Mitt will ensure that America honors all of its commitments to today’s seniors and strengthens the program so that it is financially secure for future generations. Hopefully the campaign will work to provide a little more detail around this soon to alleviate the concerns of the base and to provide ammunition against the inevitable “Romney wants to destroy Social Security ads” that will undoubtedly be coming soon. Romney will kick off his economy focused week at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa tomorrow. Follow @BenHowe
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In Response to Obama Attack Ad, Romney to Tackle Economy & Entitlements
Obamunistas are saying that Obama is cool, and Romney is not. But cool to whom? Cool is in the eye of the beholder. I have to admit that if you are an aging hippie who never grew up, still think that the counterculture of the 1960s was the highwater mark of American civilization, reject America’s capitalist economic system as inherently unfair and uncool in the grubby pursuit of profit, see America’s historic world-leading prosperity as crass materialism causing global poverty, and regard America’s world dominating superpower military as the tool of global imperialism, you would see Obama as very cool for bringing your values into the White House. Ditto that if you are a mental infant throwback stuck in the last century who thinks global socialism and Che T-shirts are cool. But social and cultural conservatives would have just the opposite view. For them, Romney is the personal embodiment of their values. His personal life is right out of Ozzie and Harriett , Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best . The practical relevance of his Mormonism is that he is personally devoted to these values at his core. The offbeat theology of Mormonism is not at issue because he is not a Mormon theologian. Moreover, his professional life involves the core of entrepreneurial capitalism. It has been all about the finance of struggling smaller and mid-size companies so they can grow into successful larger, national companies, creating boomlets of real jobs in the real world. Romney’s whole business life has been about the capital in capitalism, which means he knows first hand how the system works, and how to fix it. This is why he should personally appeal to the Tea Party as well as to social conservatives. To the Left, therefore, Romney represents the personification of everything they hate (the precise word for today’s Left). A straight-laced Mormon who personally deeply believes and lives out traditional family values who is also personally a successful businessman, himself a card carrying member of the top 1%, from Wall Street to boot. That frankly makes this election even more high stakes. For Romney is personally carrying the flag for cultural conservatism like no other candidate could. If he wins, he completely shatters left-wing mythology and demonology regarding social conservatism, the top 1%, and Wall Street. This is why social conservatives and Tea Party conservatives should now come together and enthusiastically support Romney. Add to that the rejection that would involve of the personal embodiment of the Left, Mr. Cool himself, the product of a 1960s hippie and a self-avowed African communist. Indeed, for the Barack Obama/Nancy Pelosi/MSNBC Left to rise to power, and then be repudiated by the voters, would be far more of a defeat for the Left, and victory for conservatism, than if the Left and Barack Obama had never won at all. For their ideas would then have been tried and failed and repudiated by the American people. How ironic it would be for the anti-Reagan, who did everything just the opposite of Reagan in power, to end just the opposite of Reagan. Instead of reelected in a historic landslide, with his political progeny going on to dominate American politics for nearly 30 years, a generation, he is defeated for re-election, possibly by a landslide, with his party quite possibly routed in Congress, and nationwide. That would quite possibly inaugurate another generation of Reagan conservatism, as the nation goes back to basics with the three Rs, Romney, Rubio and Ryan, restoring the American Dream, traditional American prosperity, and superpower peace through strength. Given the alternative, Obama’s re-election and the continued decline and fall of America into Hugo Chavez style socialism, or worse, in a second Obama term, this election is among the most critical and consequential in American history, rivaling 1860, 1932, and 1980, a true Paul Revere moment for the American people. A Historic Veep Pick In this context, Romney’s pick for his vice-presidential running mate will be highly revealing as to how he intends to govern, and highly consequential as to whether he can reconstitute the Reagan majority coalition. Romney needs to recognize that the country is so polarized and so ideologically divided that he cannot gain by trying to appeal to liberals and slice off a few votes from the Left. Liberals and the Left are going to vote for Obama in any event. Yes, Romney should try to appeal to votes in the middle, but he also needs to recognize the best kept secret of American politics — half of independents are independent not because they are in the middle, but because they are to the right of the Republicans. They are independent because they think the Republicans are too liberal, not because they think the Republicans are too conservative. That is why the Reagan coalition could dominate American politics for a generation. This is why Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is such a unique, historic opportunity for Republicans. He would enable Romney to bring together and maximize the Reagan coalition again of Republicans and independent conservatives because he is such an appealing conservative. But he brings an added ingredient that is so critical to the future of conservatism and the Republican Party — a powerful, grassroots appeal to the burgeoning Hispanic vote that is not committed to the ideological Left. The truth is that America’s Hispanic population is growing rapidly and will become a bigger and bigger proportion of the electorate in coming decades. Bottom line, there is no meaningful future for conservatives or Republicans without an appeal to the Hispanic vote. Rubio does so well in appealing both to Hispanics and conservatives, including social conservatives and Tea Party conservatives. He consequently presents the embodiment of opportunity to change the future course of American politics for decades. That change would start this year. In 2008, Obama took the Hispanic vote by 66 percent to 29 percent. But that vote is deeply alienated from Obama now after his miserable first term performance for Hispanics. They have suffered a depression under Obama, with unemployment well into double digits for his entire term. The disaffection is so broad that the latest data shows a net outflow of illegal immigrants from America, as real people vote with their feet to flee Obama’s economic oppression. Imagine the alienation that suggests among the Hispanic population of American citizens that remain here, for surely they are aware of the hardship suffered by their ethnic brethren, if not personally experiencing it themselves. They are already living the nightmare of the American Dream receding before their eyes like the Cheshire Cat. They are ripe and ready for change with the right appeal. Rubio on the ticket would draw much needed attention as well to Romney’s own Hispanic background. While Romney has the demeanor of a WASP, he in fact is not a Protestant, not an Anglo-Saxon, and actually not even white actually but a person of color in fact with his Hispanic heritage back to his family’s roots in Mexico. I predicted in this column the 2010 Tea Party landslide a year and a half before it happened! You can go look that up. I am now predicting a Romney-Rubio ticket would beat Obama by more than 10 points. That is based on the precedent of the Reagan-Carter 1980 race. Obama has been on a worse trajectory than Carter since 2009. Obama’s polls versus Romney are already much worse than Carter versus Reagan at this point in 1980. But I picked the actual 1980 election result state by state in the summer of 1980 when the polls had Reagan losing by high double digits. My prediction for this year’s race is no longer so far ahead of the curve already. Dick Morris is also predicting a 10 point win for Romney. But even with 41 percent of the vote going to Obama, which is the same final percentage that Carter got, and what I am predicting for this year, that would still be a sad result for America. That 40 percent of America would vote for such an openly far left extremist as Obama, after a whole term of experience with him, and be fooled by Obama’s cheap, transparently false and dishonest, Latin caudillo rhetoric, means we will still be a nation in trouble even after such a sweeping victory by the conservative party. You can take the percentage of the vote going to Obama as a dangerous infection of the body politic by lethal Marxist or at least neo-Marxist antibodies. Can America survive with such a high percentage of the voting public, albeit a distinct minority basically nuts? But I have to inject at this point an endorsement of Bret Stephens’ May 1 Wall Street Journal column on the Veep sweepstakes, “Anyone But Condi.” He addresses there the floated name of Condoleezza Rice for Romney’s VP. Stephens notes, “A mid-April CNN poll finds that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has unmatched name recognition and a favorable rating of 80% among GOP voters. She’s also the person Republicans would most like to see on the ticket.” But Stephens goes on to accurately describe the problem: Ms. Rice was a bad national security adviser and a bad secretary of state. She was on the wrong side of some of the administration’s biggest internal policy fights. She had a tendency to flip-flop when it came to the president’s core priorities and her political misjudgment more than once cost Mr. Bush dearly. She was a muddler of differences at the national security council. Her tenure at State was notable mainly for the degree to which the bureaucracy ran her, not the other way around. Among her blunders was the 2006 Iraq Study Commission which brought Jim Baker back to advocate yet another strategic surrender to the Left; the Bush Administration’s strange Jimmy Carter style cave-in to North Korea’s nuclear program (lifting key sanctions “in return for exactly nothing”); her mishandling of the notorious 16 words in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union, giving life to the narrative that Bush lied about the intelligence; the premature ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that allowed Hezbollah to declare victory; and opposition to a U.S. attack on the nuclear reactor North Korea had built in Syria, leaving Israel to do the job. In other words, she was at best a confused liberal academic behind the scenes that never got anything right, not a second coming of Jeane Kirkpatrick. She won’t bring any black votes to the ticket, and may alienate the base as the truth comes out enough to boot the whole election. Leave her in the pasture at Stanford. Is This Cool? While Romney is quite cool for conservatives, Obama’s gross mishandling of the anniversary of the killing of Bin Laden indicates his potential to tarnish his cool even to liberals by Election Day. Obama made the killing of Bin Laden all about Obama in a classless display of uncool, nerd-like misjudgment. We heard all about the great courage showed by Obama from the safety of Washington, D.C., where only his political bacon was at stake, while the killing of Bin Laden was actually due to the great courage showed by the Navy SEALs in their perfect execution of one of the most daring raids in world history, risking their very lives on the ground in Abbottabad, Pakistan. After rising politically by assailing Bush’s intelligence policies in the harshest possible terms as illegal war crimes, he was more than happy to take credit for the results of those policies, which led American intelligence to locate Bin Laden so he could be killed. Never even the slightest tip of the hat from Obama to Bush for his actually more central role in the ultimate killing of Bin Laden. Also in the May 1 Wall Street Journal , former Attorney General and federal judge Michael Mukasey notes Lincoln’s grace right after Robert E. Lee’s surrender taking no credit for himself, but noting the bravery of those who risked and lost their lives for their country, then focusing straight away on reconstruction and the civil rights of liberated blacks. He notes Eisenhower’s address once the success of the Normandy invasion was established. Again taking no credit for himself for the invasion he led, Eisenhower addressed the troops who had actually risked their lives instead, saying, “One week ago this morning there was established through your coordinated efforts our first foothold in northwestern Europe. High as was my preinvasion confidence in your courage, skill and effectiveness…your accomplishments…have exceeded my brightest hopes.” He mentioned himself only to personally congratulate the troops, saying, “I truly congratulate you upon a brilliantly successful beginning…. Liberty loving people everywhere would today like to join me in saying to you I am proud of you.” Mukasey noted as well George Bush’s address after the capture of Saddam Hussein, in which Bush again took no credit for himself, but attributed the victory to “the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator’s footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers…. Their work continues and so do the risks.” Bush again only mentioned himself to personally congratulate the those who had actually demonstrated the courage, “Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them.” Obama, in sharp contrast, explained the killing of Bin Laden to the nation like this: I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing of Bin Laden the top priority… even as I continued our broader effort….Then after years of painstaking work by my intelligence community I was briefed…. I met repeatedly with my national security team….And finally last week I determined that I had enough intelligence to take action…. Today at my direction…. Mukasey observed that it was hard to imagine Lincoln or Eisenhower taking credit for the heroic actions of others. Was Obama’s crass obtuseness in this event cool? It took a caller to a Washington radio station to cut to the full truth of the matter: Obama was responsible for the killing of Bin Laden the same way Richard Nixon was responsible for America landing on the moon.
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Mitt Romney, Conservative Cultural Icon
