I have a confession to make. I am a thirty-something pundit on television and radio and I am frequently aggravated by many twenty and thirty-something pundits on television and radio. It is even a non-partisan aggravation. We all make mistakes and I am sure someone can be critical of me for the same reason I find so many up and coming political pundits so aggravating, but I try to do my homework. I do keep a Lexis-Nexis account. I do read my history books. Mistakes happen, but it seems a lot of up and coming soon to be somebodies are making needless mistakes. This may sound like a Matt Lewis inspired “get off my lawn” screed, but put very simply, a lot of pundits of the twenty and thirty-something variety have absolutely no sense of history. For them, partisan politics began at Bush vs. Gore and history did not exist before November of 2000 . Made worse are the pundits who decide to completely re-write history to fit their narrative, no matter how wrongheaded, foolish, or just plain dumb their re-write is. A good example of what I’m talking about comes from Ben Domenech’s excellent Transom . Ezra Klein, who once said no one pays attention to the constitution because it is so old, has decided Jimmy Carter’s “malaise speech” was popular. You will no doubt be not exactly surprised to learn that Hendrik Hertzberg totally believes the malaise speech was awesome too. Hertzberg was the speechwriter. But that gets history wrong. Twenty and thirty-something pundits should know better. As Ben Domenech, himself a former speech writer, notes in the context of Presidential speeches, the Carter speech was popular at first , but historically it is wrong to say it was popular as it came to be viewed very negatively. A pundit claiming it was popular should really note the popularly was fleeting instead of simply claiming it was popular. To this day, when seasoned politicos reference “malaise speeches” they do not mean popular speeches. From Ben Domenech, relevant to the larger question of Presidential speeches: These two pages from Steve Hayward’s book share some reaction. Hayward notes that at the time, The New Republic editorialized that the speech was a “pop sociology stew” filled with “servile flatteries”: “Carter seems to think that teaching us to sing ‘Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella’ can be a substitute for leading us in out of the rain. Fortunately, he utterly lacks the rhetorical skill for such a con job.” The Economist labeled it “amateurism.” One labor leader who had supported Carter in 76 was quoted as saying: “The fault is his, not ours, and asking us to say something nice about America is like Gerald Ford telling us to pin on little lapel buttons and Whip Inflation Now.” The point is that the people responded positively in the immediate, but a critical eye quickly tore the speech apart. It became the starting point for mockery of Carter’s essential failing : that, as Hayward has written elsewhere, that “Carter ran for president promising us ‘a government as good as the people,’ only to discover the people were no good.” This should serve as a reminder that speeches aren’t just assessed in the immediate – it’s whether they have lasting value that matters and determines their relevancy over time. [Emphasis added] Too many pundits say stuff like “the malaise speech was popular” and it seems most of the ones who do are the twenty and thirty somethings who really have no sense of history. I was four years old when Carter gave that speech and I am aware enough of history to know that the reception to the speech hurt Carter. Matthew Yglesias is another example of pundits who just have no basic awareness of things that lead them to ask dumb questions like “Why does Ohio have so many separate medium-sized cities instead of a single giant metropolis?” and pondering why Miami didn’t expand more to the west, etc. Every pundit will make mistakes or get history wrong. I am as guilty as any. But I am noticing more and more that as organizations on the left and right and the media in general rush to build up a core of young pundits, they are getting noncontroversial, readily agreed to by both sides, history wrong. A few weeks ago I talked to a young conservative pundit who will go nameless (no offense for bringing this back up) who mouthed off the standard pablum that Ronald Reagain in 1980 was a shoo-in, everyone knew he would be the nominee, and it was nothing like this year’s primary. He did not know that there was an effort to get Gerald Ford to run in 1980. He did not know that Republican leaders in Washington pushed George H. W. Bush aggressively as a way to stop Reagan. He did not even know that John Anderson had been a Republican before bolting to run as an independent. As pundits get old and eventually die, they will certainly be replaced by younger people. But left or right, I hope they learn to use Lexis-Nexis or at least read through wikipedia before offering up opinions without any historic context of anything that might have happened before George Bush beat Al Gore by a few hundred votes in Florida. Now get off my lawn.
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Forgetting History
When President Obama suggested last week that we might eventually be replacing oil with algae, Mark Whittington of Yahoo suggested that the President had reached his “lunar base moment.” It was an apt analogy. Just as Newt Gingrich’s musings about a moon colony finally made the public cock its head a little when listening to him, so the moment may have arrived when the environmentalism fantasies that inhabit the President’s brain will finally be exposed to the light of day. As things stand now, $5 gas may shift the entire focus of the election onto energy and what the Administration’s faculty-lounge policies have been doing to America’s industrial base. To the public, “clean, green energy” will no longer be a dreamy vision of windmills and solar collectors but the hard reality of spending $100 to fill your tank. There’s one more thing as well. This will be the first issue in four years where President Obama won’t be able to cast reflexive blame on George Bush. The President began his term with an Inaugural Address promise that “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” He has kept that promise. Using the crowbar of the $1 trillion “stimulus,” the Administration has shoehorned much of the country’s energy investment into a Rube-Goldberg sector of the economy made up of the half-baked projects of armchair entrepreneurs plus the off-the-charts dreams of those wanting see the entire planet transformed into an environmental utopia. Prompted by various federal and state government tax incentives plus market-obliterating “renewable mandates,” hundreds of square miles of mountain and prairie have been covered with 45-story windmills that look like the archaeological remnants of a previous race of 80-foot giants. These “wind farms” generally produce electricity that is essentially useless. When the wind blows, windmills can force other forms of generation out of the market because they are free of fuel costs. But those other forms of generation have to be kept running just in case the wind dies down. Last year when temperatures rose to 110 degrees in Texas, that state’s 7 percent “wind capacity” proved absolutely useless in the heat-induced doldrums. And wind “farms,” it should be noted, always talk in terms of “capacity” rather than output. That’s because they only operate about 30 percent of the time. Nobody has yet invented a way to store commercial quantities of electricity and it may be impossible without building facilities of equally gargantuan dimensions — say an entire city block of rechargeable batteries. Without any means of storage, wind power is essentially a nuisance. Then there is solar electricity, which, in order to access, California is now planning to cover dozens of square miles of pristine desert (yes, there is already environmental opposition) in order to prove the world can run on sunshine. Solar energy is a bit more concentrated than wind so that it only takes about five square miles of highly polished collectors to produce 100 megawatts — when the sun shines. In the desert environment, these solar panels will require constant cleaning and polishing to keep them from getting covered with dust and therefore becoming dysfunctional. It’s a labor-intensive task that will require lots of water coming from who-knows-where. And how about the electric car? Caught in the headlock of a government bailout, GM was forced to push its Volt out the door — where it has sat on dealer lots ever since. Sales are miserable, except for the occasional government agency that drops by to place an order. Government patronage of the electric car industry has also produced the $104,000 Fisker Karma, made in Denmark but shipped to our shores so that Leonardo DiCaprio and a few others could buy first editions. Then there was the Bright, which went bankrupt last month, and the Asperta, which failed before that. Now all this wouldn’t be so bad if the Administration hadn’t spent the other half of its time trying to put the fossil fuel industry out of business in order to clear the path for the Green Age. After spending a year failing to pass cap-and-trade, the Administration has doubled down with the Environmental Protection Agency, turning it loose on the nation’s coal plants. The Sierra Club just celebrated the closing of the 100th coal boiler, with more to come. Just what this will mean for the reliability of the electric grid will be revealed this summer when electrical demand peaks. Last August, with temperatures at 110 degrees, Texas consumed a record 68,000 megawatts of electricity with only 76,000 MW of generating capacity on hand. Since then, the EPA has demanded the closure of 10,000 MW of Texas coal. The state has dodged the bullet only by going to court. Industrial states from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin are facing the same dilemma. If the region starts suffering power shortages this summer, will George Bush be there to take the blame? Not that the President hasn’t been playing both sides of the fence. With extraordinary chutzpah, Obama has claimed credit for the increase in oil and gas production through fracking technology. As Newt Gingrich pointed out last week ( chronicled on this site by Peter Ferrara), the only reason fracking has succeeded is that all the new deposits are east of the Rockies and therefore beneath private land. In the Far West, where the federal government still owns up to 80 percent of the territory, the pace of exploration is slower than ever. The Institute for Energy Research has shown that drilling on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management is at an all-time low, only half what it was during the Clinton Administration. How about offshore development? For a few brief months, the Administration actually talked about opening up new areas for exploration. Then came the BP oil spill and since then the Gulf of Mexico is becoming a backwater. Of 51 rig platforms stationed in the Gulf, only 21 are under contract and 15 actually drilling, a utilization of only 41 percent. The rate in rest of the world is 83 percent and in Europe and the Mediterranean 96 percent so there’s plenty of demand out there. Fourteen rigs have left the Gulf over the last two years and the pace is accelerating. Since the Gulf provides 30 percent of our domestic production, this is bound to have an impact. This bureaucratic foot-dragging is recognized all over the oil industry. “These have been the most difficult three years from a policy standpoint that I’ve ever seen in my career,” Bruce Vincent, president of Swift Energy, told the annual meeting of the National Association of Petroleum Engineers last week. “They’ve done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.” And that doesn’t even include the Keystone Pipeline, where the Administration kicked away 700,000 barrels a day, 4 percent of our total consumption. And all this isn’t supposed to have an effect on gas prices? In truth, though, all these considerations are long-range. What is having a more immediate impact is probably the easy money policies of the Fed. Oil isn’t climbing so much as the dollar is depreciating. As the Wall Street Journal notes, if President Obama is ready to reap the reward of rising housing and stock prices, it’s only fair that he accept rising commodity prices as well. This is treacherous territory. Every major downturn since the Arab Oil Boycott of 1973 has been preceded by a run-up in oil prices. It seems to signal an inflationary bubble in the economy that is about to pop. So what can the Administration do between now and November? To be frank, they haven’t a clue. President Obama is a lawyer, not an economist or a scientist. His knowledge of energy is drawn from the chitchat in the faculty lounge. In any case, wherever supply and demand are concerned, Democrats are rarely willing to concede to reality anyway. Bernie Sanders is already yammering about “speculators” and the apologists in the press are lamenting that “the President isn’t to blame for gas prices.” There are even off-the-wall stories claiming that drilling and pipelines will only make things worse. “The Canadian plan [for building Keystone] was to use their market power to raise prices in the United States and get more money from consumers,” proclaimed
Toward the end of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee became so worried about the morale of his troops that he appeared on the battlefield several times, ready to lead his men into action. How did his troops react? They surrounded his horse and forced him to the rear, refusing to go into battle until they were sure he was out of danger. America was then — and was for most of its history — what sociologists call a “deferential society.” People were willing to follow a leader not of their own class. Lee was a Virginia aristocrat married to Martha Washington’s great-granddaughter. He was personally opposed to slavery, he backed his wife’s efforts to set up an illegal school for African-Americans on his estate, and he finally liberated the family’s own slaves in 1862. Yet Lee still felt indebted to his Southern heritage. He had little in common with the journeymen and backwoods farmers who made up his army, yet they were more than willing to defer to his leadership, and it was his military genius that kept them in the war for so long. Deference to leaders who do not necessarily share your background or agree with you on everything is in the fiber of representative government. It is enshrined in the Constitution. In fact, there probably never would have been a Constitution if the Americans of 1787 hadn’t been willing to defer to the “assembly of demigods” (as Jefferson described them) that convened in Philadelphia, closed the doors to the press, sealed the windows to eavesdroppers, and privately debated the future of the nation. We now live in an age when people are less and less willing to defer to leaders who are not of their own class and kind. Exhibit No. 1 is the current rejection of Mitt Romney by Tea Party Republicans and the subsequent elevation of Rick Santorum, a man who has none of the qualities of temperament suitable to a President, but who perfectly expresses the anger and sense of exclusion that is fundamental to the Tea Party. And of course Tea Party Republicans have plenty to be angry about. They perceive, quite rightly, that they are the principal victims of President Obama’s coalition of bureaucrats and government-dependents that is slowly strangling this country. Almost without exception, they are small-business owners, independent professionals, heads of families, people of modest means and backgrounds — just as Rick Santorum describes them. They play by the rules and believe in the old America of effort and opportunity, but they perceive — correctly — that the game is not going to last much longer. With nearly half the population paying no income taxes, with the unemployed languishing for two years on government checks, with ranks of “disabled” swelling on Social Security, with construction cranes dotting the Washington skyline, and with congressmen holding seminars on how to apply for government jobs, they know there is very little room in this economy anymore for free enterprise. Their job — as President Obama so eloquently explained to Joe the Plumber — is to “share the wealth” they have earned through hard work and self-discipline, so someone down the street with no job and four illegitimate children can live on the dole. They are angry, and rightfully so. What they do not perceive is that they are no longer a majority of the country. In fact, they are a minority of a minority — a minority in the Republican Party, which is itself a minority party. They may be furious as all hell, but the general public does not share their anger. Most people are concerned with paying less taxes and maybe getting a part-time job with the school district, so they can get good benefits. If Tea Party Republicans succeed in nominating Rick Santorum, it will be like when the Populists nominated William Jennings Bryan in 1896: a magnificent triumph for a rump faction, but a disaster in the general election. Once Santorum starts spouting about banning birth control and abolishing public schools, he will be like those Populists who were suddenly heard sprinkling their calls for free coinage of silver with vegetarianism and mystical interpretations of the Bible — the things that historian Richard Hofstadter said reflected “too many long nights on the prairie.” In his current best-seller, Coming Apart, Charles Murray talks about how the liberal intelligentsia has isolated itself from the rest of America, with its own cultural icons and reference points that have little or no meaning to the mainstream. That is true. Unfortunately, it is also true of the Tea Party. They have a private vocabulary of Hayek and von Mises, rent-seeking and marginal tax rates, “elitist” and “fungible,” that lights up the neurons of fellow conservatives and libertarians but has little or no meaning to the general public. Take home schooling. Santorum can talk breezily about home schooling his children in the White House, because as a 53-year-old autodidact, he thinks he knows everything. But lots of people in this country — millions upon millions, in fact — don’t think they know everything and want their children taught by people who know more than they do. Granted, they aren’t getting much of that in public schools these days, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t willing to try. They see schools as their children’s opportunity for advancement. If Santorum thinks he’s going to form a majority out of home schoolers, he’s likely to end up as the first candidate in history to lose all 50 states. What the Tea Party needs to do is look for allies. There are other people in the country who share their concerns, if not their bitterness. Who are some of those natural allies? The most obvious are people who have been successful in the private sector but who have remained true to the system that made them. They may have achieved wealth but they haven’t gone aristocratic, become environmentalists, celebrated the “era of limits,” talked about “sustainability,” decided that we’ve got enough wealth in this country and the time has come to divide up what we already have (excluding my part, of course), and settled down to live gracefully on wind and sunshine. In other words, a natural ally might be Mitt Romney, or someone very like him. When the alliance of labor unions, urban Catholics, and Southern rednecks combined to take over this country in 1932, they didn’t do it by nominating Huey Long or Al Smith for president. They did it by choosing a Hudson River aristocrat who had so much blue blood in his veins that he didn’t mind becoming a “traitor to his class” and trashing a few Wall Street plutocrats along the way. They chose someone outside of their class who was willing to speak for them, yet someone prominent and successful enough to become a national hero. And it worked. Cue John F. Kennedy in 1960 for the same result. Tea Party members seem unwilling to do the same. They don’t like Mitt Romney because he is not “one of us.” He had a rich father and went to Cranbrook and Harvard Business School. He lives in Massachusetts and doesn’t feel revulsion while visiting an Ivy League campus. He probably even reads the New York Times. How can he possibly represent us? He doesn’t share our background, our hatred of the press, our disdain for New York and Washington. What they don’t see is that Romney already is a traitor to his class. He didn’t smoke marijuana at Harvard. He didn’t participate in student demonstrations — he was married and raising children, for heaven’s sake! He’s made lots of money, but he hasn’t tried to deflect envy by joining the Sierra Club, hobnobbing with movie stars or celebrating Occupy Wall Street. Romney has lived among the liberal intelligentsia but never become part of it. He’s a natural leader for those struggling independent Americans who make up the Tea Party. Yet they refuse to see him that way. No political movement or candidate has ever gotten anywhere in this country without finding its natural allies. When Ronald Reagan went to the 1976 GOP convention with a chance of stealing the nomination, he took the bold step of naming an East Coast Republican, Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, as his Vice President. He knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere without uniting the party. He reprised this in 1980 by choosing his strongest rival, George Bush, the quintessential Connecticut Yankee. (Bush later did the opposite by choosing a nonentity in Dan Quayle, and it probably cost him the 1992 election.) So ask yourself this: If Mitt Romney wins the nomination, do you think he’ll pick Santorum or Marco Rubio or some other Tea Party stalwart as his Vice President? I would bet the house on it. And if Santorum is nominated, do you think he will choose Romney, or Senators Richard Lugar or Lamar Alexander, as a stabilizing force from the Old Guard? I wouldn’t count on it. And, if not, how can he help from becoming the next Christine O’Donnell or Sharron Angle?
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The Tea Party Needs Allies
In his exchange last night with Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum hit all the buttons that need to be pushed: he went after Gingrich’s penchant for “grandiose” schemes, his lack of organization and focus, his tendency to “pop” and create distracting headlines, the fact that there was a conservative coup against the former House speaker. But I do wonder if he overreached when he brought up the House banking scandal. Santorum accused Gingrich of not doing more about congressional check-kiting because he didn’t want to rock the boat with both parties’ leaders. This set up Gingrich’s rebuttal. Gingrich’s history of being a thorn in the side of leadership, from taking on former House Speaker Jim Wright to fighting George Bush on the 1990 tax increase, is just too well known for that line of attack to be effective. Santorum would have more profitably gone after Gingrich for undermining Republicans to his right, i.e., slowing down the Class of ’94, once he became speaker.
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The Only Santorum Slip
There are two ways to react to President Obama’s latest round of defense spending cuts. One is emotional but somewhat justified. The second is to analyze of Obama’s plans critically to reveal a transformation of our military that is as dangerous as Obama’s transformation of our economy. Since Obama appeared with Defense Secretary Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey in the Pentagon press room last Thursday, many commentators have written and railed at length on radio and television about how these cuts will hollow our forces’ readiness to fight. That reaction is understandable but it isn’t on more solid ground than Obama’s plan, because neither the plan nor the common reaction deals with the real dangers our nation faces. Under former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Obama imposed about $400 billion in defense spending cuts by his “Queen of Hearts” method of budgeting for defense: verdict first, trial after. They ended, for example, production of key weapon systems such as the F-22 fighter, the C-17 transport aircraft, and the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer. Gates imposed those cuts before the Quadrennial Defense Review — “QDR” in the inevitable acronym — was performed. The QDR was supposed to be the congressionally mandated analysis of the threats the Pentagon is expected to deal with and from which its budget is supposed to be derived. But Gates and his team wrote the post-cuts QDR to justify the cuts rather than to justify a budget that answered the threats. In April of last year, Obama praised Gates’s first round of cuts and then ordered a review of defense spending to double them. Last week’s announced plan was the result of that review. It repeated the Queen of Hearts exercise and took it one step further. It took the planned smaller budget, fashioned our military’s future around it, and then made big promises that cannot possibly be kept. The plan announced by Obama and Panetta plans a revision of our force structure: • To refocus our military to meet the rise of China’s military force by “rebalancing” toward the Asia-Pacific region. • To be able to win one conflict and fight another to a stalemate. • To provide standing forces, for a limited time, to engage in new nation-building operations. • To meet every other challenge in space, cyberwar, and other fields of unconventional operations. So if we have to fight China, Israel has to deal with Iran on its own, Europe can deal with Russia, and the Middle East can stew in its own juices. And stalemate is now a strategy. But even that’s a very tall order for a force that may be cut by as much as $1 trillion in spending over the next ten years. Let’s get that bogeyman out of the way first. Just because a Pentagon budget is $700 billion a year doesn’t mean that it will be more effective at deterring or defeating the threats than a threat-based $350 billion a year force might be. The unanswered questions are what capabilities do we need and what will it cost to have them? And there’s the rub. Neither the Pentagon nor, as far as I can determine, the intelligence community has done the essential analysis to determine what we need our military to do. Obama’s plan mentions things such as missile defense, cyberwar, and space operations as targets for investment, but it also plans to pour money into strengthening the failed NATO alliance and other such boondoggles. There’s not enough money to go around. Our NATO allies haven’t invested in their own defense since the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the euro about to slip on Greece and crash down on Italy, that trend isn’t going to be reversed in the foreseeable future. Obama didn’t demand that they do more for themselves, and under his plan we will not be able to do more from them without robbing money from funds essential to performing other plans Obama made. Obama knows that and, to be sure, Vlad Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hu Jintao know it as well. So with all the broad promises, where’s the leaner budget to be spent, and how do we know that it won’t be spent unwisely? For example, Obama’s new-found dedication to nation-building is limited by its own statement that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.” You can’t have it both ways. George Bush’s biggest mistake since 9/11 was to pour too much blood and treasure into nation-building and it failed comprehensively despite the enormous investment. Planning to do less means you will accomplish less. Does anyone believe that Obama will allow further investment in missile defense or the other capabilities we need to thwart China’s rise? I don’t believe he will, and everything he has done to date reinforces that belief. China is investing unknown billions in an area-denial force. Its ships and aircraft aren’t being designed to defeat the U.S. Navy, but only to deny it the ability to intervene successfully in Chinese operations in the Pacific region. Obama’s plan says he will invest in everything we need to counter the area-denial strategy. But the categories of weapon systems Obama plans to use to respond to China — missile defense, a new stealth bomber, undersea capabilities and space-based capabilities — are among the most expensive weapons we ever buy. (A single spy satellite can cost over $1 billion.) With the cuts already in place, and more to come, we simply won’t be able to spend enough to do what Obama falsely promises. The falsity of Obama’s promises is clear from any serious review of his plan. He’s making plans he knows will not — and cannot — be implemented. Based on his transformation of our economy into a government-run enterprise, Obama is — not coincidentally — making it financially impossible for our military and intelligence services to do what they will have to do even under his reduced vision of U.S. military power. There probably are ways to restructure the Pentagon budget. There could be a much less expensive force that would be more capable and effective in deterring and defeating aggression than the current $700 billion a year force. But, right now, nobody knows what it would look like. Back in the good old days (1981-1988) we had something called “defense guidance,” which was the basis for something else called the “POM.” The annual defense guidance process combined the best thinkers from the intelligence community and the military. They’d sit down and — one by one — assess our adversaries’ intentions and capabilities. Once that assessment was done, they would analyze what we needed to have in the military tool box to deter or defeat the threats and compare it to what we already had or we’d already planned. They would propose to retire outdated weapons, resize and reshape our forces, and then come up with an outline of what we needed to pay for and invest in to ensure the threats were answered. That was the defense guidance for the year. At that point, the Pentagon’s bean counters would turn it into the “program objective memorandum” — the sacred “POM” — from which the Pentagon’s budget would be derived. It sounds simple, but defense guidance was an enormously complex intellectual exercise. Until we perform that process again, we can’t know what our military forces need to be able to do to answer the many threats we face. Obama is leading us down a blind alley, and the only certainty is that what we will have — in ten or twenty years — won’t be what we need. That gap in capabilities will, inevitably, be filled. Either with a properly-designed force, or with the bodies of those serving in one that was designed to fit a budget cut rather than the threats.
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Obama Scissorhands
