According to President Obama, those presidents who grow government the most are candidates for being the greatest presidents. Big glitzy programs count for a lot. In an interview with Steve Kroft of CBS on 60 Minutes Overtime , President Obama spoke glowingly of his contributions: “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.” A key problem, of course, is that the president’s two largest programs, his stimulus package and Obamacare, are both under an avalanche of criticism. The stimulus package led to a rise, not a fall in unemployment, and its pork-barrel provisions are exposed almost daily. Obamacare scores low in the polls; it is heavily challenged in the courts; and all Republicans voted against it and most ran elections against it very successfully in 2010. Presidents Johnson and FDR have similar baggage. In Johnson’s first two years, Vietnam became intractable; and increasing the payments in Aid to Families with Dependent Children gave single mothers incentives to take the cash from the government and not get married. FDR’s major programs of his first two years, the AAA and the NRA, were both struck down by the Supreme Court. And FDR ended up with more than 19% unemployment in 1938 when the countries of Europe, according to a League of Nations survey, had only 11%. Is that the kind of success a president should emulate? If we look at the opinions of historians, however, President Obama may be on the right track. They tend to give high ratings to presidents who announce big programs and increase the national debt sharply. Johnson does well, and FDR does even better — ranking among the top three presidents in most polls. The Arthur Schlesinger Presidential Polls, for example, conducted in 1948, 1962, and 1996, consistently exalted FDR at the top, or near the top. How do historians rank presidents who achieve prosperity and security for Americans? Let’s pose the question this way: What if we had a president who, in his first two years as president, cut federal spending in half; produced budget surpluses in both years; cut tax rates, and slashed unemployment from 12 to 2%? Where should historians rank such a man? The answer is “in last place — the worst president in U.S. history.” That has been the fate of Warren G. Harding, who was president from 1921 to 1923. He accomplished all of the above — the federal budget plummeted from $6.4 billion in 1920 to $3.1 billion in 1923; tax rates on the rich fell from 73 to 56%; and the U.S. slashed the national debt and unemployment during Harding’s two years as president — before his untimely death in office. True, some historians point out, Harding had two major scandals with the Veterans’ Administration and with oil leases at Teapot Dome. His appointees extorted or stole public money, but Harding seems to have known nothing about it. Along these lines, Solyndra and Fast and Furious, two recent Obama scandals, may prove to be as damaging to him as Teapot Dome was to Harding. But Harding’s record at improving prosperity for Americans was strong. And shouldn’t that be a major point in evaluating his presidency? Harding’s humdrum cuts in tax rates and federal spending may lack drama, but they gave Americans jobs. Under President Obama, by contrast, millions of jobs have disappeared, home values are way down, and standards of living have declined. Yet President Obama tells us he likes “what we’ve gotten done” with Obamacare and stimulus spending. So do most historians. But historians are safe with tenured jobs; other Americans get laid off when taxes rise, regulations increase, and debt skyrockets to pay for Obama’s hope and change. And they, more than the historians, will elect the next president in 2012.
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Obama Against Any President
Let’s set the stage for a story about Governor Romney, the candidate for president. The Gallup poll showed him in the lead to win the Republican nomination. Another poll showed him beating the incumbent Democratic president by eight percent. Then, before the New Hampshire primary, Governor Romney made a slip of the tongue, an off-the-cuff statement. Some of his conservative critics pounced on him. The media repeated the “gaffe” endlessly. And Governor Romney lost the Republican nomination. That’s right Governor Romney lost the Republican nomination, and the presidency — to Richard Nixon. That’s Governor George Romney, the governor of Michigan, the father of Mitt, and the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 1968. The Gallup poll and Harris poll had him beating Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Then, in 1967, George Romney explained his increasing opposition to the Vietnam War: “When I came back from Vietnam, I’d had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” Brainwashing? As Rep. Robert Stafford (R-Vt.) said, “If you’re running for the presidency, you are supposed to have too much on the ball to be brainwashed.” Romney looked weak and flustered. The press played up Romney’s naïveté, and Nixon soared in the polls. Romney, far behind, dropped out of the Republican race. Mitt Romney has often followed in his father’s footsteps. Just as George Romney was the president of a business (American Motors) before launching his run for governor of Michigan, Mitt was president of Bain Capital before running for governor of Massachusetts. George Romney was held in contempt by Republican conservatives because he refused to seriously back Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Mitt Romney, in a similar vein, supported socialized healthcare in Massachusetts and has earned conservative ire ever since. But Mitt has explained away his healthcare plan with finesse, and has even promised to dismantle Obamacare if he is elected president. What’s now in focus is his off-the-cuff statement that he likes to fire people. In context, Mitt was describing how he likes to have many health care providers because the competition gives him the choice of firing an inept provider. Romney said, “I like to be able to fire people who provide services to me.” Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have alleged such a statement is callous in a time of job insecurity. Perry, who is now out of the race, has called Bain Capital a “vulture capital” company that fired people and shipped jobs overseas to make money, not to improve America. The media has also been on the attack in the run-up to the South Carolina primary. Will such a “gaffe” sink the son as it did the father? No, Mitt Romney can overcome his remarks, and even gain from them. Father George had no strong comeback from his “brainwashing” comment. He appeared ill-informed, and the more he talked about it, the worse it got. As for Mitt, the attacks on Bain give him the chance to make the case for capitalism in a way that makes it clear he is the one to rescue the U.S. from its current economic stagnation. At one level, he can say that firing President Obama, and his czars, and many bureaucrats as well, is the first step to recovery. More than this, he can describe his actions at Bain. As a venture capitalist, he bought distressed companies, reorganized them, sometimes fired people, sometimes went overseas, and, as a last resort, shut some down. But he also transformed some companies, like Staples and Sports Authority, into spectacular successes. Overall, according to the Wall Street Journal, he more than doubled his investment from $1.1 billion to $2.5 billion on 77 deals. That turnaround is what the U.S. needs today. What should Mitt do? Seize the initiative. Explain that expanding overseas usually means expanding at home. According to a 2004 study by Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter, for every job a multinational corporation expanded overseas, it added two at home. The rising tide floats all boats — and we need a rising tide, not redistribution. As for firing people, that is sometimes essential in a successful capitalist economy. One hundred years ago, carriage makers had to be fired, or laid off, and many worked for Henry Ford making cars. Twenty years later, icemen had to be fired, so they and others could be reemployed making refrigerators. Button makers got the boot because others began making zippers. Cars, refrigerators, zippers, and much else that we value came into our lives because those making inferior products were fired to create more opportunity for the new and better. As Ross Kaminsky points out in “Creative Destruction, Properly Understood,” the old jobs were gone forever, but the new jobs improved our nation and improved opportunities for living here. Sure, not all Americans win in venture capital businesses, but most do. Will Mitt be like his father? If he is, President Obama will better be able to brainwash Americans about “predatory capitalism” and the need for higher taxes to redistribute wealth. But if Mitt takes charge and defends the system that made his family and his country great, he will in the process help make America great again.
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Mitt Romney’s Chance for Glory
Kerry making the natural progression from communist sympathizer during the Vietnam War to Islamist sympathizer during the War on Terror. (Egypt Independent) — The US welcomes the results of Egypt’s parliamentary election, which was characterized by transparency and integrity, said John Kerry of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a meeting with Prime Minister Kamal
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John Kerry Meeting With Muslim Brotherhood Officials In Egypt…
Wednesday Here we are in Chicago. It has been an eventful day. Both Alex and I felt dazed when we got up. I could barely drag my fat old fleshy carcass downstairs and into my pool. But once I did, I felt a lot better. Swimming is like flying, as my smart nephew, Paul Landau, pointed out. Then breakfast, shower, get dressed, rush to bank. “Qui dit ‘banco’?” as the croupiers used to say at the Nassau casino when it was right out of a James Bond movie and I went there in 1966 with Alex in black tie. At the bank, I was notified of a breathtaking overdraft caused by some mischief scam from the Bank of America. Luckily, I could cover it but to think that B of A stoops to cheating good customers like us is really depressing. Then off to LAX with our trusty driver, Mr. Yakubov, from Uzbekistan. Then through security with all of my pals from TSA. They are the nicest guys and gals on the planet. Then, rush, rush, rush over to the gate and onto the plane. It was all going fine except that I had idiotically bought Alex a huge iced tea at Starbucks. She opened the top to put in Sweet-n-lo exactly as I opened my briefcase. She took off her coat with a huge swish and knocked the whole iced tea into my briefcase. Twenty ounces of iced tea and ice cubes on my speech, my anti-colitis meds, my Bose headphones, my passport. I went into shock. The attendants helped but it took a long time to get the water and ice cubes out and I was hysterical. “I guess it would have been worse if I had had a heart attack and died,” Alex said helpfully. My gift from Pop — I just closed my eyes and soon I was asleep just as he used to do when stressed. Next thing I knew, I was having a fabulous cheese enchilada and rice and beans. Then more sleep. Then, I read an article about President Obama blaming the lingering unemployment and problems for the middle class on rich people. That sneaking politician. There is just no necessary causal link between some people being rich and other people being poor in our society. It’s just Marxist nonsense to say there is such a link. People getting rich make other people employed and better off in general. (There are exceptions.) However, attacking the rich as causes of poverty just shows extreme ignorance and a malicious wish to make trouble. It’s the kind of nonsense we expect from dopey college kids — not from the President. Plus, what a HYPOCRITE!!! Mr. O gets a ton of money from rich Wall Street tycoons and always has done so. How dare he pretend that he’s fighting them (and why would he want to?). Plus, if you’re passing out blame for the recession, how about Tim Geithner, who was President of the NY Fed and agreed with every wrong move by Treasury Secretary Paulson that caused the crash? Why is he your Treasury Secretary when he had a huge hand in killing Lehman Brothers, which really started the downhill slide? (And how about the U.S. giving the Europeans advice on how to cut their deficits? That’s actually funny.) Well, bad on you, Mr. Obama, for taking money from the rich as fast as you can and also stirring up the crazies with your class warfare nonsense rhetoric. I really, truly thought Mr. Obama was better than that. Shows how stupid I am. Stupid and insanely trusting. That’s me. In Chicago, we checked into our hotel and went rushing out for dinner at Coco Pazzo. The chicken livers were amazingly good. Then on the way back to the hotel, my wife’s shoe lost its high heel. I took it to the concierge to get it fixed. As I talked to him, an astonishingly beautiful standard poodle, black with a large white collar, came in with a woman wearing a similar outfit. Like an old New Yorker cartoon. Then a malicious e-mail from some psycho about my wife and me. I wrote back, “We have been together for 45 years and we’ll still be together when you are rotting in hell all alone.” Toast and herbal tea, and now it’s time to sleep. Good night, moon. Tomorrow I am speaking in Lake Forest, where my dear friend John Hughes sleeps for all eternity. Talk about a genius. He wrote Ferris Bueller in one 48-hour stretch. I miss him. Thursday A mixed day. I got up at the Peninsula in Chicago, ate my stale toast, dressed, and my wife and I went downstairs to join my pal John R. Coyne, Jr., for lunch in the hotel lobby. John was his usual lively and insightful self. The food was so-so, but the service was just a cruel mockery. That place is beautiful but needs a manager who will get it running right. We talked about politics mostly. Plus lots of reminiscences of the Nixon days, when John, Aram Bakshian, Ken Khachigian, Dave Gergen, Ann Morgan, Jon Hoornstra and many others and I worked shoulder to shoulder to save the Peacemaker. It didn’t work. He was just on the wrong side. Jon, if you’re there, I love your e-mails. What a great President RN was — ending the war in Vietnam, opening up China, setting up serious environmental protection, the first nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet, saving Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and trying to get universal health care through. All with the vicious leftists attacking him night and day. I love him. We talked about the brilliant Lee Atwater and how much he is missed. Then, after much struggle trying to get my wife her food, we left. Long nap, then out to Lake Forest to speak to a delightful group of physicians. Lovely men and women. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Caring. One of them, though, made a point that saddened me immensely. She said that hundreds of thousands of soldiers were coming back from the wars with disabilities. She said that the money burden would be enormous. “However bad it is now,” she added, “it will be worse.” Suddenly it dawned on me. It will be worse about EVERYTHING. Too much of the younger generation has minimal education. Minimal decent work attitudes (generally, not always). Minimal ability to get along with others. The nation’s intellectual capital, self-discipline capital, is vanishing. That’s a catastrophe. That’s it for the USA. Gar-nicht, as my sister would say. When the middle aged who have decent abilities leave the scene, good night nurse. Too sad to dwell upon. My audience was fantastic and I stayed for a long time with them. The great joy of speaking is meeting the audience. I hated to leave. They were literally locking up the room when I left. Then my driver took me back to my hotel. On the way, he told me how his kids had talked him into spending the last of his savings on a cruise to Belize with them and it was so expensive he also had to put some of it on his credit card. A cruise to Belize? Is he kidding? Why not just drive to a really nice neighborhood and park his car there and go for a walk? Putting a cruise on a credit card? Well, I should not throw stones. I make every kind of mistake there is. Every kind.
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Bad On You, Mr. Obama
Kids who visit the park in Douglasville, Georgia, just call it “Hunter Park,” although its proper name is Hunter Memorial Park, and most of the children running around the soccer fields and picnic areas never stop to study the monument that pays tribute to the park’s namesake. He was voted “Most Talented” his senior year at Douglas County High School, where he won acclaim for his artistic abilities, starred in the school play and was editor of the student yearbook, but his name is not well known today, when he would have been 70 years old. Robert Gerald “Jerry” Hunter left his native Douglas County to attend the Citadel, where he graduated with honors. He joined the Air Force, became a fighter pilot, and was deployed to Vietnam. On May 25, 1966, Hunter was on his 34th combat mission when his F-105 jet was shot down near the Laotian border. He bailed out — his comrades saw the parachute — and it was initially believed that he had survived. The 25-year-old pilot was listed as missing in action, and the Air Force promoted him from first lieutenant to captain while rescuers searched for him. Hunter’s family, including his young bride Laura, prayerfully waited for word that he had been recovered safely. Seven weeks later, however, the sad news came that his remains had been found in Laos, where he had apparently died of injuries. First Baptist Church in Douglasville overflowed with mourners at his funeral and local businesses closed early that afternoon in honor of Captain Hunter, Douglas County’s first casualty in the Vietnam War. Hunter Memorial Park was dedicated a year later, when I was in second grade, and I remember as a boy reading his name on the monument at the park. We’ve seen a lot of news lately about young men in parks, but I doubt if folks down home would tolerate any “Occupy Douglasville” protesters in Hunter Park. Jerry Hunter died fighting against communism, after all, and it would be a disgrace to his heroic memory to have the park named in his honor “occupied” by mobs that are clearly Marxist in orientation, if not in name. And if nobody else understands what motivates these protests, certainly the Communists do. “An epic battle is underway for the direction of our country,” the Communist Party USA declared last month. “The Occupy movement is not alone.… We stand with the courageous young people who have sparked this movement and join with the occupiers who are putting themselves on the line to transform our nation and achieve a secure and sustainable future. … The time has come to put people before profits.” There was a time — not really so long ago — when a ringing endorsement from CPUSA would have been the kiss of death for any political movement in America. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the anti-communist sentiments of the Cold War seem as obsolete as the F-105 fighter-bomber (finally mothballed by the Air Force in 1984), while a vaguely Marxist mentality inspires headline-making protests from coast to coast. I say “vaguely Marxist” because most of the demonstrators seem incapable of articulating any coherent ideology or agenda beyond a hatred of the rich, hatred of corporations and banks, and hatred of whomever or whatever else they associate with the “1%” against whom they rant and chant: “We are the 99 percent!” Since these protests began Sept. 17 in New York as Occupy Wall Street, their demonization of the “1%” has been echoed by major national news organizations that strive to ignore the numerous incidents of criminality amid the mob. Even the documented presence of heroin dealers , arsonists , rapists and murderers among the Occupiers is not enough to discredit the movement in the eyes of liberals like Rep. Maxine Waters. “That’s life and it happens, whether it’s with protesters or other efforts that go on in this country,” the California Democrat told CNSNews last week. “So I’m not deterred in my support for them because of these negative kinds of things.” Nor did the Occupy movement lose its liberal friends due to the raving anti-Semitism of protesters who spew hatred toward “Jewish billionaires.” No matter how many criminals and psychotics cluster in the camps of the Occupiers, liberals refuse to repudiate these protests, evidently taking their cue from President Obama’s assertion last month that the movement “expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.” Expressions of frustrations didn’t get a sympathetic hearing at the White House when the American people feeling frustrated were Tea Partiers rallying across the country in opposition to the administration’s left-wing agenda. Not even the “shellacking” of last year’s mid-term elections could convince Democrats to abandon their class-warfare ideology. Capitol Hill is still deadlocked because Democrats insist that deficit reduction must mean more taxes for the rich and less money for defense, rather than removing a single cent from the out-of-control entitlement programs that threaten to bankrupt the nation. The liberal media, of course, would have us blame the budget stalemate on Republican intransigence, but distorted perceptions have become the media’s stock in trade. The same news organizations that scapegoat conservatives for the failures of the not-so-super “supercommittee” are also busy trying to convince Americans that the Occupiers are a non-violent mainstream movement, no matter how extreme their rhetoric or violent their actions . Sunday’s Washington Post prominently featured an op-ed manifesto by the ideologues who claim credit for inspiring the Occupy movement, and the paper also offered Barbara Ehrenreich’s suggested reading list for the soi-disant “99 percent.” First on that list was A People’s History of the United States by former Communist Party comrade Howard Zinn. When the works of known Marxists are so highly recommended in the prestige press, as their way of showing solidarity with anti-capitalist street mobs, we might suspect many in the media have adopted the radical motto of French revolutionaries: Pas d’ennemis à gauche! “No enemies to the left” also evidently describes the posture of today’s Democratic Party, which has drifted so far leftward that the heirs of Marx and Engels might plausibly sue for copyright infringement. Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver once warned , and one consequence of the Democrats’ embrace of left-wing ideas is that opposition to socialism has become “controversial,” as if economic freedom were an extremist concept or merely the narrow partisan agenda of Republicans. Simply telling the obvious truth about the Marxist orientation of the Occupy movement — a fact evident enough to the CPUSA — is sufficient to cause liberals to sound alarms about the danger of a return to “McCarthyism.” Liberal outrage, however, seems to depend entirely on who is witch-hunting whom. Advocates of free enterprise are now routinely besieged by the same Occupier mobs whose efforts are enthusiastically admired by the editors of the Washington Post . Two weeks ago, I found myself briefly surrounded by Occupy DC protesters attempting to storm the doors of an event sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. More recently, hundreds of Occupy Denver demonstrators descended on a hotel that was hosting a conference sponsored by FreedomWorks. The encounter Nov. 11 at Denver’s Crowne Plaza Hotel proved an embarrassment for the Occupiers. The FreedomWorks event was a nationwide gathering of conservative bloggers and evidently the protesters weren’t prepared to confront scores of New Media activists armed with digital video cameras. One of the bloggers, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, interviewed a teacher who apparently brought her students to participate in the Occupy Denver march on the Crowne Plaza. Celia Bard said the students from St. Mary’s Academy were merely there on a field trip to “observe” the protest: “We want them to see the democratic process in action.” But another blogger, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom , interviewed one of Bard’s students who seemed to contradict her teacher’s explanation. “You’re f—ing up our future,” the 17-year-old told Goldstein. “What do you think we learn at school? This is what we learned about.…We’re the 99 percent.” That expression of Occupier sentiment, from a blonde teenager who attends an all-girls Catholic school where tuition is $14,000 a year, was as shocking to me as any report of criminal violence in the protest encampments. It prompted me to write a long contemplation about how so many American young people have been indoctrinated to regard the “New Left” radicals of the 1960s as heroes. What have these kids been taught about the history of that era? And perhaps more importantly, what have they not been taught? While liberals were wringing their hands about the Occupier encampments being removed from parks in New York and other cities, memory called to my mind a monument in a park down home. That monument bears the name of a handsome Georgia boy voted “Most Talented” in his high school, a brave pilot who died fighting for freedom at age 25. Today children play in the park dedicated to his memory, and no one can doubt Douglas County gave her best in what John F. Kennedy called “a long twilight struggle” against the totalitarian menace of communism. Can such a sacrifice ever be forgotten, while our nation’s children are taught to admire draft-dodgers and Marxist agitators? If schools want to teach kids about heroes from the Sixties, they should take a field trip to Washington, D.C., where Robert G. Hunter is one of more than 58,000 names on a black granite wall .
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Heroes Forgotten, Lessons Unlearned
