Today is January 24th. On this date in 1899, Humphrey O’Sullivan patented the rubber heel. I don’t really know what that is all about, but it sounds hilarious . Also on this date in AD 41, Roman Emperor Caligula was assassinated. Guy threw some serious parties, which likely would have been more fun without all the murdering. “Hey look, cake! Now I wish I hadn’t just stabbed Bob. Bob loved cake.” Therefore, it is with heavy hearts that we hereby dedicate today’s post to Bob. He loved cake. OPEN THREAD . Huge Gingrich bounce in Florida | Unlikely Voter “When word came out of InsiderAdvantage’s new Florida poll, I said to myself ‘I’ve heard this story before.’ Newt Gingrich shooting up like a rocket, but confirmation is needed.” (Note, this article is from prior to last night’s “debate”) IMF to World: Gird Your Loins | RealClearWorld “The International Monetary Fund is out with its latest forecast and it expects the global recovery to stall. The above video does a nice job summarizing the findings, but the nickle version is that it’s all Europe’s fault.” ‘A $1 million contract at Freddie was chump change.’ | Jim Geraghty “A Morning Jolt reader who was a consultant for Freddie Mac offers a bit of perspective on what he saw there” Obama the promise breaker | Washington Times “2011 was no Sputnik moment, it was the president’s Solyndra moment” Congressman grills Park Service on Occupy camping | Washington Examiner “‘Let me tell my constituents who want to visit DC this summer that they can come to any park they want to as long as they say they are protesting.’ said Gowdy. ‘Can I tell them that?’” Today’s word of the day comes from Merriam-Webster. spathe : noun a sheathing bract or pair of bracts partly enclosing an inflorescence and especially a spadix on the same axis. Thanks for clearing that up, dictionary. I think I understand the word even less now.
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Daily Links – January 24, 2012
We’re far down the rabbit hole of primary season right now, and that inevitably means that charges and counter-charges are flying so fast that the news cycle can change dramatically from morning to afternoon. Naturally, when things are moving this quickly and emotions are running high, people get carried away. This happens to everyone. A lot of people who sit on the sidelines are too quick to say, “oh, so-and-so totally lost credibility with me by making that argument.” But candidates and pundits in particular are making arguments all day long, day after day; they’re going to grab hold now and then of a story they should know better than to believe or an argument they should know better than to make. Like anything in life, the test of character is not the occasional stumble but the long sweep of your record over time – whether you back off when you’ve dug into an untenable position, whether you learn from mistakes. This comes to mind with yesterday’s confluence of attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record at Bain Capital and his ill-timed quip that “I like to be able to fire people.” To varying extents, the Gingrich and Perry campaigns and their supporters jumped all over him on both counts. A pro-Newt SuperPAC is rolling out a 27-minute documentary attacking Romney’s Bain record; as Erick notes, Perry’s campaign has been pushing a more modest line of attack against the Bain record , but still one that has something of a whiff of desperation about it. Perry’s camp also pushed a downloadable ringtone of Romney’s “fire” line. With time and some context, both campaigns backed off hitting Mitt on the “fire” comment: Perry’s people pulled the ringtone, and Newt told Fox News that the line had been taken out of context . The “fire” comment is the easier call. Romney was making a completely valid point: that people should be able to fire service providers like insurance companies if they’re not getting good service. That’s one of the pro-consumer aspects of the conservative message, and where we part company from liberals who think first of protecting entrenched interests at the expense of consumer choice. That being said, the comment fed directly into the most damaging narratives about Romney, and was emblematic of how he’s much like Rick Santorum in terms of his tendency to use cringe-inducingly tin-eared language when he’s making even valid points. The Bain storyline is a little more complicated, in part because there are a lot of angles to Bain’s business; while Romney’s record, as Jim Pethokoukis notes, includes a lot to be proud of , as Jonathan Last notes, you don’t have to necessarily take that business record as a whole if there are aspects worth defending and aspects worth criticizing . A fair amount of what businesses like Bain do is to step in and take over businesses that are in bad shape. We have an ongoing debate in this country about what to do with failing businesses, but denying they’re failing is not an option – either you shutter or restructure them or you prop them up, and that raises the question of who gets stuck with the bill for propping them up. One of the great scandals of the past 5 years, which has given rise to the Tea Party and to some extent the Occupy Wall Street movement as well, has been the extent to which the answer to that question has been the taxpayers. So, I don’t like seeing pro-free-market Republicans attacking the concept of what Bain does, any more than I liked seeing Romney attack Rick Perry from the left on entitlements. But just because the role of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists is a crucial and necessary one does not mean that they are likely to be popular candidates in today’s general election environment. Criminal defense lawyers, for example may be crucially necessary to our system of justice, but if they have represented a lot of unpopular clients, they are not likely to be politically viable. I continue to think that Romney’s business record is an under-explored political vulnerability (one Ted Kennedy used against Romney in 1994, but didn’t even use all the ads he cut) that the Democrats will exploit ruthlessly. And Romney’s existing defenses of that record are fairly weak . We should not be caught unawares by this in the summer and fall when it’s too late to pick another candidate. In many ways, it’s like the swift boat story. You’ll recall that the centerpiece of John Kerry’s electability argument in 2004 was his military record – not any policy proposal on national security, mind you, but the simple fact of his biography as a war hero. Given that Kerry had decades-old enemies from his activties as an anti-war protestor, it was unwise for Democrats to assume that this biographical narrative alone would go unchallenged in the general election. But that’s exactly what they did, and the Swift Boat Veterans’ ads (especially the ads using Kerry’s own Senate testimony from 1970) did terrible damage to Kerry. Romney’s story is much the same. There’s no serious argument that Romney’s record of supporting free enterprise and job growth in his single term as Massachusetts governor is better than the records of Perry, Gingrich, Santorum and Huntsman; his claim to be a job creation specialist is grounded in his record at Bain, and just like Kerry’s war hero biography, this claim is bound to attract scrutiny. It would be foolishness in the extreme for Republicans to demand that nobody talk about this during the time when we’re choosing a candidate. The harder question, for free-market Republicans, is how to have a serious debate on this point without compromising our integrity and our principles. The fear that Bain, and Romney’s wealth (by birth as well as his business wealth) will be a political liability is hardly fanciful. Look back over the years at the list of wealthy Republican candidates who put their wealth ahead of their limited records in public office. The California GOP has had the worst record: Bill Simon, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Michael Huffington, and Bruce Herschensohn all flopped. The positive example is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proved a disaster for California conservatives in office. Simon, a good and decent man and fairly conservative, faced an opponent with approval ratings so terrible on Election Day that he was recalled just months later – yet the Democrats tore Simon limb from limb with attacks on his private business record. Republicans in other states or at the national level have often found such candidates to be electoral failures or totally unreliable in pursuing our party’s principles in office: Herman Cain, Mike Bloomberg, Carl Paladino, Linda McMahon, Jack Ryan, Pete Coors, Pete Dawkins. (Ron Johnson and Rick Scott being rare exceptions, and Scott only won after a searing campaign against his business record). An understanding of private business is a valuable thing for public officials, but it’s no substitute for experience pursuing good public policies; Jon Corzine was a success in business before he ran New Jersey into the ground, and the most successful businessman ever to be president was Herbert Hoover. It’s entirely valid for Republicans to ask whether we are buying ourselves a similar set of headaches with Romney. The other point I would make about integrity is that it goes close to the core of why a Romney nomination worries me so much: because we would all have to make so many compromises to defend him that at the end of the day we may not even recognize ourselves. Romney has, in a career in public office of just four years (plus about 8 years’ worth of campaigning), changed his position on just about every major issue you can think of, and his signature accomplishment in office was to be wrong on the largest policy issue of this campaign. Yes, Obama is bad, and Romney can be defended on the grounds that he can’t possibly be worse. Yes, Romney is personally a good man, a success in business, faith and family. But aside from his business biography, his primary campaign has been built entirely on arguments and strategies – about touting his own electability and dividing, coopting or delegitimizing other Republicans – none of which will be of any use in the general election. What, then, will we as politically active Republicans say about him? I was not a huge fan of John McCain’s record, but I was comfortable making honest points about the things McCain had been consistent on over the years – national security, free trade, nuclear power, public integrity, pork-barrel spending. There were spots of solid ground on which to plant ourselves with McCain, and he had a history of digging himself in on those and fighting for things he believed in. But Mitt Romney’s record is just one endless sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see – there’s no way to have any kind of confidence that we can tell people he stands for something today without being made fools of tomorrow. We who have laughed along with Jim Geraghty’s prescient point that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date will be the ones laughed at, and worse yet we will know the critics are right. Every time I try to talk myself into thinking we can live with him, I run into this problem. It’s one that particularly bedeviled Republicans during the Nixon years – many partisan Republicans loved Nixon because he made the right enemies and fought them without cease or mercy, but the man’s actual policies compromised so many of our principles that the party was crippled in the process even before Watergate. We can stand for Romney, but we’ll find soon enough that that’s all we stand for. The problem is not entirely without its solutions; one of those is that the only real mechanism conservatives would have for keeping Romney honest is to pour efforts into getting more conservatives elected in the House and Senate, and in particular targeting primary challenges at people who have supported Romney. But that’s a desperate measure, and it still doesn’t answer the question of how we make the affirmative case for Romney without losing our integrity. Which is precisely why we need a hard look now at what we’re getting in return.
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On Romney, Bain and Keeping Your Integrity
Via the Transom , Nick Schulz in the USA Today argues that the recall elections for Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin are more important than the 2012 Presidential elections. The claim that “this presidential election is the most important election ever” is an enduring political cliché, and it’s almost always wrong. Consider this year. It’s likely the 2012 race for the White House won’t even be the most important contest of this year, much less of all time. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is currently the target of a recall effort spearheaded by national public employee unions. If his opponents get enough signatures by Jan. 17, Wisconsin will hold a gubernatorial election this summer. The outcome is crucial to the future of the country. * * * Here’s why the stakes in Wisconsin are so high. Public employee unions understand that the legitimacy of collective bargaining privileges is now in question, as cash-strapped states struggle under the burden of a costly public sector. If they can knock off Walker, they send a powerful signal to other reform-oriented governors not to target collective bargaining. Read, as they say, the whole thing. The reality is that Scott Walker has already passed more significant reforms in a hostile state in one year than most of the current GOP primary field combined. His bold efforts have helped to balance the state budget, end voting corruption, and keep numerous Wisconsin counties and cities fiscally sound. No one in the current field can claim to have accomplished these things in a liberal state during the middle of this recession. While we all analyze, nitpick, prop up and tear down guys like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, the liberals are taking the opportunity to go to war against someone who has actually shown an ability to get a state’s fiscal house in order during the current economic wreck. I’d happily vote for him right now over any other candidate on the ballot, but liberals and union thugs are doing everything in their power and pulling out every dirty trick in the book to cut his tenure short, because their own place at the government trough is more important to them than the fiscal health of the country. We’ll have more as the year goes on about how you can help get involved to beat back the union thugs and stand with Scott Walker. Just remember that the Presidential election isn’t the only one going on this year.
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The Most Important Election This Year
A number of people r ead my post yesterday about Rick Santorum and still are scratching their heads. In my book RedState Uprising I spent a bit of time dealing with “pro-life statists” who will be the death of the conservative movement if we do not start standing up to them. Rick Santorum is a pro-life statist. My friend Ned Ryun introduced me to the term and his post on pro-life statists written in the wake of Congressman Mark Souder’s resignation sums up every issue I have with Rick Santorum. “A hard-line conservative, Souder recently survived a tough GOP primary in the Hoosier State, edging two opponents who held him under 50 percent. Souder’s Republican rivals criticized Souder over his support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program and Cash for Clunkers programs.” I take exception to that description: no real conservative would have voted for TARP or Cash for Clunkers. The mistake made is the assumption that because someone is pro-life means he or she is a conservative. Someone who is pro-life, but votes to expand the state and state spending, is in fact not a conservative, but a pro-life statist. As someone who is deeply pro-life, and became even more so when my daughter was born four months premature, I absolutely believe in the sanctity of life. But I have a problem with many elected officials who call themselves social conservatives, as though that were all that mattered, and then go and vote for more government and more government spending. The bigger government becomes, the more invasive it becomes, the more it becomes the enemy of life and freedom. So these pro-life statists show a deep ignorance of government and freedom: the greatest freedom is economic freedom. I say that because if you are an economic ward of the state, you can neither be politically or religiously free. Exhibit A: China. The invasive state dictates how many children you may have, the free flow of information, and political freedom is not even worth really discussing. I believe one of the reasons that we have gotten to this stage as a country, with the massive growth of government, is because some have thought only one or two social issues are all that matter, and willingly give a pass on pretty much everything else. To those people I would say enough, stop living under an illusion. You must become more comprehensive in your conservatism. Rick Santorum participated in raiding the federal treasury as an earmarxist, perfectly happy to pork away on Pennsylvania’s behalf. He did not join conservatives who fought against No Child Left Behind. He did not join conservatives who fought against the prescription drug benefit. Rick Santorum was part of the problem in Washington. He was one of the Republicans the public rejected in 2006. The voters in Pennsylvania rejected him in 2006 because of his and the Republicans’ profligate ways. Along with Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum led the K Street Project , which traded perks for lobbyists for money for the GOP funded with your tax dollars through earmarks and pork projects. Sure, you can say 2006 was a bad year for Republicans, but in 2006 Rick Santorum fell 18 percentage points behind his Democratic rival and his defeat and terrible campaign can be linked to the loss of four Pennsylvania house seats. That was not a defeat for Rick Santorum. It was punishment. He is a pro-life statist and I see nothing in his career since leaving Washington that shows he has changed his ways. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard coined the term “big government conservatives” in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal . He wrote IS PRESIDENT BUSH really a conservative? When that question came up this summer, the White House went into crisis mode. Bush aides summoned several of Washington’s conservative journalists to a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at the White House to press the case for the president’s adherence to conservative principles. Aides outnumbered journalists. Other conservative writers and broadcasters were invited to luncheon sessions. They heard a similar spiel. The White House needn’t have bothered. The case for Bush’s conservatism is strong. Sure, some conservatives are upset because he has tolerated a surge in federal spending, downplayed swollen deficits, failed to use his veto, created a vast Department of Homeland Security, and fashioned an alliance of sorts with Teddy Kennedy on education and Medicare. But the real gripe is that Bush isn’t their kind of conventional conservative. Rather, he’s a big government conservative. This isn’t a description he or other prominent conservatives willingly embrace. It makes them sound as if they aren’t conservatives at all. But they are. They simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends. And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process. Being a big government conservative doesn’t bring Bush close to being a moderate, much less a liberal. On most issues, his position is standard conservative: a pro-lifer who expects to sign a ban on partial birth abortion, he’s against stem-cell research and gun control, and has drawn the line at gay marriage. His judicial nominees are so uniformly conservative that liberals are furious. That’s Rick Santorum. He sees government as the means to conservative ends. But in using government to get conservative ends he has expanded government and set precedents for liberals to use government in the same ways for more liberal government. Rick Santorum was complicit in making Americans more dependent on government and justified it under the rubric of compassion. Before Rick Santorum was purged from Washington for his pro-life statism, the Washington Post summed up his, George Bush’s, and the GOP’s sins in an editorial titled “Big Government Conservatism.” Back in 1987, when Mr. Reagan applied his veto to what was generally known at the time as the highway and mass transit bill, he was offended by the 152 earmarks for pet projects favored by members of Congress. But on Wednesday Mr. Bush signed a transportation bill containing no fewer than 6,371 earmarks. Each one of these, as Mr. Reagan understood but Mr. Bush apparently doesn’t, amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers’ dollars. One point of an earmark is to direct money to a project that would not receive money as a result of rational judgments based on cost-benefit analyses. Mr. Bush, who had threatened to veto wasteful spending bills, chose instead to cave in. He did so despite the fact that in addition to a record number of earmarks the transportation bill came with a price tag that he had once called unacceptable. The bill has a declared cost of $286 billion over five years plus a concealed cost of a further $9 billion; Mr. Bush had earlier drawn a line in the sand at $256 billion, then drawn another line at $284 billion. Asked to explain the president’s capitulation, a White House spokesman pleaded that at least this law would be less costly than the 2003 Medicare reform. This is a classic case of defining deviancy down. This is why I do not support Rick Santorum. I do not want a co-conspirator to government largess premised on the rhetoric of compassionate or big government conservatism being rewarded.
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Rick Santorum, Earmarxists, and the Pro-Life Statist
Since I highlighted President Obama’s lowlights for both 2009 and 2010 , why should 2011 be any different? There is, of course, plenty to write about and I shall only scratch the surface. If I have omitted anything, I have no doubt that readers will draw it to my attention. Rather than list examples one by one, I shall group them together in three categories — disagreeable, out of touch, and vain. Disagreeable In January, following the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, President Obama won high praise for a speech he delivered at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was praised for this passage in particular: But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized — at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do — it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. Well, it’s a shame that President Obama has made little effort to follow his own advice this year. Three months after the Tucson speech, Obama delivered another speech at George Washington University concerning fiscal policy. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan was invited to sit in the front row. Although not mentioning his name, Obama blasted Ryan’s fiscal plan in a setting where he could not publicly defend himself: The vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That’s not a vision of America I know . While it is true that David Stockman criticized the Ryan Plan, he also said Obama’s attempt to reduce the deficit entirely on the top 2% of the population wouldn’t work either. Yet President Obama managed to omit that small but crucial detail. But why let demagoguery be impeded by fact? During the debt ceiling debate this summer, Obama told House Majority Leader Eric Cantor not to call his bluff, said he couldn’t guarantee that Social Security checks would be mailed out, and railed against tax breaks for purchase of corporate jets despite the fact they were in the Stimulus Bill that he signed into law. By October, Obama was telling Americans that the Republican fiscal plan consisted of “dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” President Obama hardly confined his demagoguery to domestic matters. When Congress demanded to be consulted about American involvement in Libya, he questioned their patriotism. At the very same press conference where Obama ranted about corporate jets he also asserted that “no one should want to defend” Muammar Qaddafi and that Qaddafi had become a “cause célèbre” for some members of Congress. This from a man who said during the 2008 campaign he would never question the patriotism of others. It would seem that President Obama believes he is exempt from his own edicts. In other words, do as I say not as I do. Out of Touch President Obama has also been out of touch with the American people and in one instance was out of touch as to whether he was on American soil. During the APEC Summit last November, Obama spoke of meeting with world leaders “here in Asia.” Except he was in Hawaii at the time. You would think Obama would remember he was in the state in which he was born. Then there times when he seemed to be trying out his best Jimmy Carter impersonation whether he was telling the nation to ” eat its peas ” or asserting that America had gone ” soft ” and had become ” lazy .” All that was missing was the cardigan sweater. Now in the case of the “soft” and “lazy” remarks, it could be said that Obama was commenting on America’s competitive edge and its pursuit of foreign investment rather than the diligence of Americans. Yet it is difficult to take Obama’s critique seriously when he made a point of postponing a decision on approving the Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada until after the 2012 election to appease environmentalists. Republicans have since forced Obama to make a decision about Keystone’s fate within 60 days as part of the payroll tax cut extension. Vain There were also times when President Obama could have used a touch of modesty. It might have spared him the embarrassment of talking through “God Save The Queen” at Buckingham Palace. But as long as Obama can tell his supporters with a straight face, “If you love me, you got to help me pass this bill,” pats himself on the back for doing more for Israel’s security than any other administration in history while claiming he’s accomplished more in the first two years of his Presidency than anyone “with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln,” then one can only conclude that modesty just isn’t in the man’s repertoire. Hopefully at this time one year from now we will await someone else to be sworn in as President of the United States, if for no other reason than I won’t have to write out this damn list every year.
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The Worst of Obama 2011
