Month: December 2009

Jim Cornette lets it rip against those, on both sides, who have resisted the opportunity to extend insurance to so many who don't have it or can't afford to get it. It's a TNC classic.

Someone needs to sign these guys:

(Hat tip: TDW)

A reader writes:

I agree that Obama has a chance to reorient American politics the way Reagan did, but I think he first needs to explain to the American public a comprehensive political philosophy.

Like Reagan, Obama ran against a political philosophy that was weakened by current events (2008 meltdown was to laissez-faire economics/deregulation as Stagflation was to Big Government liberalism). Reagan explained that government wasn't always the answer, and was often part of the problem. His subsequent tax and regulatory policies were consistent with his stated philosophy.

Obama's philosophy could be called "pragmatism," but the problem is that while pragmatism might reorient how things get done in Washington, it won't reorient the country's political philosophy because it won't connect with the public.

Voters knew where Reagan would come out on an issue, even if they disagreed with him. If voters ask themselves what Obama will do to address a problem, and the answer is "Whatever government programs/regulations he can get thru Congress," they will both disagree with him (he'll "betray" liberals and anger conservatives) and have no sense of what compromises he will make on subsequent issues.

In an age where government actions is needed, Obama needs to have a simple hook with voters to explain his philosophy, something along the lines of "Not big or small government, but effective governance." Following a period where regulators didn't regulate, because "the market" was never wrong, the public clearly believes that the markets aren't always right, but that government isn't much better.

If Obama can explain his philosophy as a shift from "markets vs. government" to "how to best utilize markets to create opportunity for the general public" has a chance to truly reorient the political landscape.

CPAC will be co-sponsored this year by … drum-roll: The John Birch Society! I think it's a prefect match for today's conservatism: paranoid, angry, convinced of a Jihadist-Communist plot, and deeply deeply populist and, er, white. Genius.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"My only real regret is Bush in 2000. I trusted Bush's incompetence over Gore's insufferable ego. But I suspect that with the invasion of Iraq, the end-result would have been the same. They both would have gone in on false pretenses. And would have failed for similar reasons."

Is it possible to find a worse moment of self-justification, of self-absolution and post-hoc rationalization, than this? So Gore, the one major political figure to publicly oppose the Iraq War before its start, who had nothing to do with the neocons and had been part of an administration that focused with urgency during its waning days on the problem of Al Qaeda — Gore is just as likely to invade Iraq as W? "The end-result is likely the same"? This is absurd on its face.

Gore would certainly have invaded Afghanistan, as any American President would have — and then done nation-building, competently, during the critical period as was consistent with his foreign policy statements and advisers in 2000. A Gore foreign policy cabinet would have been entirely different than Bush's, and you know it. There would not have been the neocon-nationalist alliance that provided the key faction in favor of war in Mesopotamia.

I know you have some visceral dislike of Gore; you think this "ManBearPig" nonsense is somehow relevant, rather than petulant; you seem to have imbibed a meme minted c. 1999 by a bored and malignant gang of Press Courtiers, that Gore is unbearably arrogant and mendacious and a legitimate target of scorn (unlike that compassionate, would-like-to-have-a-beer-with fella' from Texas). And so it seems that you did indeed vote (or rather endorse) in 2000 based on personality. You could at least own up to this as an unmitigated error, rather than entertain us with unlikely counter-factuals.

Yes, I did endorse on personality in 2000 – along with Bush's fraudulent campaign as a moderate – and I have owned up to the error. I guess my sense is that Gore opposed the Iraq war in part out of bitterness. If you look at Gore's record – and at TNR, I was hardly unaware of it – it was full of extreme vigilance about Saddam, willingness to use military force for moral ends (as in Bosnia), and completely conventional neocon views on the Middle East. I can absolutely see him going to war against Saddam if goaded sufficiently. Maybe he would have been persuaded by the intelligence that we didn't actually have the goods on WMDs; maybe his hawkishness would have waned in office as it did in opposition. But knowing Gore, I stick with my point. In office, I suspect he would have been much closer to my position on invasion at the time than he was.

Jim Manzi's long article in National Affairs on the international economic order and America's past and future place in it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves (besides a pair of posts by Friedersdorf). Here's a good-sized chunk that begins by criticizing the stimulus:

Only about 5% of the money appropriated is intended to fund things like roads and bridges. The legislation is instead dominated by outright social ­spending: increases in food-stamp benefits and unemployment ­benefits; various direct and special-­purpose spending relabeled as tax credits for ­renewable-energy programs; increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services; and increased school-based financial ­assistance, housing ­assistance, and other direct benefits. The objective effect of the bill is to shift the balance of U.S. government spending away from defense and public safety, and toward social-welfare ­programs. Because the amount of spending involved is so enormous, this will be a dramatic material shift — not a merely symbolic gesture.

Meanwhile, the federal government has also intervened aggressively in both the financial and industrial sectors of the economy in order to produce specific desired outcomes for particular corporations. It has nationalized America's largest auto company (General Motors) and intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings of the third-largest auto company (Chrysler), privileging labor unions at the expense of bondholders. It has, in effect, nationalized what was America's largest insurance company (American International Group) and largest bank (Citigroup), and appears to have exerted extra-legal financial pressure on what was the second-largest bank (Bank of America) to get it to purchase the ­country's largest securities company (Merrill Lynch). The implicit government guarantees provided to home-loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been called in, and the federal government is now the largest de facto lender in the residential real-estate market. The government has selected the CEOs and is setting compensation at major automotive and financial companies across the country.

On top of these interventions in finance and commerce, the administration and congressional Democrats are also pursuing both a new climate and energy strategy and large-scale health-care reform. Their agenda would place the government at the center of these two huge sectors of the economy, sacrificing some economic vitality for public ­control. The latter program would also create an enormous new federal entitlement.

All told, finance, insurance, real estate, automobiles, energy, and health care account for about one-third of the U.S. economy. Reconfiguring these industries to conform to political calculations, and not market-driven decisions, is likely to transform American economic life.

Manzi defends the article repeatedly in the comments at the Scene.

Brussels, Belgium, 2.05 pm