There is no pit so deep but Christ is deeper still.
—Corrie Ten Boom
That’s the epigram at the head of Ray Ortlund’s blog, from which he took its title; it’s a wondrous and profound truth, and a great comfort for a day like today. Meditate on that, and let that reality fill your mind and heart with the delivering grace of God.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
—Edmund Burke
and I do mean new—Andrew Breitbart’s latest venture, Big Government.com, only launched yesterday. It launched with a splash, though, an exposé of ACORN that would have made the old 60 Minutes proud: ACORN’s Baltimore office facilitating child prostitution and tax evasion. It’s quite a story, and quite a scoop for the folks who pulled it together. Check out the posts.
In a fascinating article on RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende performs a thorough statistical analysis of the following proposition:
In 1994, Democrats failed to pass a healthcare bill, and they lost their majorities. Ergo, if Democrats fail to pass a healthcare bill in 2009, they will be at serious risk of losing their majorities in 2010, so to save their majorities, they should make certain above all else to get something passed.
This is a popular theme in the leftist blogosphere at the moment; but after analyzing it, Trende concludes it’s the exact backwards of the truth.
The 1994 elections weren’t caused by Democrats not supporting Clinton enough. They were caused by Democrats supporting him too much. Democrats who support President Obama more than their districts allow risk suffering a similar fate in 2010, and there are enough of them to cost the Democrats their majority.
As for President Obama, he needs to remember that the failure of Clintoncare didn’t mark the destruction of Clinton’s Presidency. In fact, it marked its rejuvenation. It set that Administration back on the centrist track that saw him leave office with 60%+ approval ratings. I don’t know whether America is center-right or center-left, but I do know that whatever the answer, “center” deserves to be in “all caps” font. The President and his party would do better to remember this.
The common understanding of the Black Sox scandal was fixed in the public mind by Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book Eight Men Out and the subsequent movie adaptation of the same title by John Sayles. As it turns out, that may be a highly unfortunate thing, as an article in Chicago Lawyer magazine by Daniel J. Voelker and Paul A. Duffy reveals. Having gained access to Asinof’s files, the two discovered that his book is not in fact supported by his research; indeed, they’ve concluded that the book is, to a significant degree, fiction.
Those whose reputations seem to have been blackened the worst by Asinof’s fictionalization are the team’s owner, Charles Comiskey, who has been unfairly smeared as a skinflint whose miserliness drove his players to throw the 1919 World Series, and the biggest star among the banned players, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who always insisted on his innocence. Given his stellar performance in the Series that year—he led all qualifying hitters, on both teams, in batting average and slugging percentage, finished second in on-base percentage, hit the Series’ only home run, and seems to have played the field well (at least, he didn’t commit a single error)—I’ve always been inclined to believe him. Given the work by Voelker and Duffy, I think I’ve been justified in that.
Here’s hoping this article is the beginning of a new trial for Shoeless Joe, not just in the court of public opinion but also before the Lords of Baseball; and here’s hoping that the result is the clearing of his reputation and his long-overdue inclusion in the Hall of Fame.
One could say many things about Barack Obama’s speech last night, and analyze it from a number of angles, but in the end, it’s a political speech—only one thing really matters: did it move the needle? From everything I can see, it didn’t; people pretty much are where they were. Those who thought he was wonderful think he’s wonderfuller, those who were already convinced are more so, those who had doubts and questions still have them, those who were opposed haven’t left their positions, and the great debate on the Right seems to be whether the outburst from Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) was inappropriate. (I find it somewhat disturbing that so many people don’t think it was—for his part, Rep. Wilson has quite properly conceded that it was and apologized. I guess the abuse the Democrats gave George W. Bush has skewed some folks’ idea of appropriate behavior.)
There were a number of responses from the GOP which were more constructive, beginning with the official one by Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), a colleague of Rep. John Fleming both in the Louisiana congressional delegation and in the medical profession. Rep. Boustany hit all the key points clearly and concisely, and did a good job of presenting a positive Republican alternative, not just criticizing the President’s plan.
Perhaps the most important GOP response, unofficial though it was, came from Sarah Palin, who by virtue of her unofficial position was able to go beyond the necessary points and respond with greater freedom (and who didn’t have to cover them, since Rep. Boustany did his job so well). In particular, she continued to press on a couple key issues:
Many Americans fundamentally disagree with this idea. We know from long experience that the creation of a massive new bureaucracy will not provide us with “more stability and security,” but just the opposite. It’s hard to believe the President when he says that this time he and his team of bureaucrats have finally figured out how to do things right if only we’ll take them at their word. . . .
In his speech the President directly responded to concerns I’ve raised about unelected bureaucrats being given power to make decisions affecting life or death health care matters. He called these concerns “bogus,” “irresponsible,” and “a lie”—so much for civility. After all the name-calling, though, what he did not do is respond to the arguments we’ve made, arguments even some of his own supporters have agreed have merit.
In fact, after promising to “make sure that no government bureaucrat . . . gets between you and the health care you need,” the President repeated his call for an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of bureaucrats charged with containing Medicare costs. He did not disavow his own statement that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives. . . .” He did not disavow the statements of his health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, and continuing to pay his salary with taxpayer dollars proves a commitment to his beliefs. The President can keep making unsupported assertions, but until he directly responds to the arguments I’ve made, I’m going to call him out too.
You may agree with Gov. Palin or not, but the fact remains that she clearly didn’t see anything new in the President’s speech, and in particular that she didn’t see any sign of a significant overture to folks on the right; from her perspective, it was just more of the same, and more of the same isn’t going to make a difference in a high-stakes debate like this one. That’s why Jay Cost opened his analysis of the speech by saying,
In my judgment President Obama’s address last night was little more than a campaign speech with the Congress as the set piece. Evaluated from that perspective, it was a success. But from the perspective of finding a policy solution—i.e. actual governance—it contributed nothing to health care reform.
In Cost’s stark evaluation, the speech was a flop and an opportunity lost because the President was unwilling to actually act:
However, it failed to address the reason for their doldrums. Democrats need rallying because of internal divisions over actual policy disagreements. President Obama did not deal with those divisions. When you strip away the setting, the soaring rhetoric, the poetic cadences, and all the rest, you’re left with the criticism that both Hillary Clinton and John McCain leveled at him through all of last year: he voted present. . . .
What did last night’s speech contribute to finding a solution [to the divide over the public option]? I’d say that the answer is nothing. The President (once again) refused to get his hands dirty on this issue. He praised the public option to the hilt, rhetoric intended for the progressives, then he hinted that it could be ditched, rhetoric intended for the moderates. At some point in the policymaking process, a choice will have to be made. It was not made last night, which means that this was a governing opportunity lost.
Absent a firm belief in the genius of Barack Obama, it’s hard to dispute Cost on this one. President Obama overreached himself here, trying to load too much freight on his speaking ability and make rhetoric carry a load it simply cannot carry unaided. This was a moment demanding real leadership, not merely exhortation, but the President tried to win it with exhortation alone. The result appears to be that he’s right where he was 24 hours ago, but with one more bullet spent. That doesn’t bode well for his presidency.
Jennifer Rubin comments on the story from the Washington Times:
School-voucher proponents confronted police Tuesday morning outside the U.S. Department of Education, where the protesters demanded that federal officials restore scholarships taken away from 216 D.C. students. . . .
“You may not lock us up, but we’ll be back,” Mr. Chavous said. “We will make sure that we do everything in our power to give our children the education they deserve. I am disgusted by the fact that they can go to great lengths to stop or muzzle the voice of freedom.
“It is fundamentally wrong for this administration not to listen to the voices of citizens in this city.”
The protest against President Obama’s refusal to reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program came the same day that Mr. Obama addressed the nation’s classrooms in a televised speech about the importance of taking personal responsibility for one’s education.
There is, of course, legislation with bipartisan sponsorship to restore the funding. In late July, Sens. Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Diane Feinstein, George Voinovich, Robert Byrd, and John Ensign introduced the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act, which would provide reauthorization for the program for five years. So it seems that the only thing standing in the way of giving D.C. parents what they want—funding for a successful program for kids trapped in one of the worst school districts in the country—is the Obama administration. And the teachers’ union, of course.
Had the Bush administration killed a program like this, the OSM would have been howling about “racism” and “not caring about our children” and whatever else they could think of. But in fact, this was a Bush-era program killed by the Obama administration in partial repayment of the debt they owe the teachers’ union, and so Big Media says nothing. It doesn’t change the fact that a number of poor minority students are now getting a much worse education because the Obama administration cares more about political payback than it does about them.
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 11
Q. But isn’t God also merciful?
A. God is certainly merciful,1
but he is also just.2
His justice demands
that sin, committed against his supreme majesty,
be punished with the supreme penalty—
eternal punishment of body and soul.3
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
Andrew Kuyvenhoven writes (33-34),
The last of the three excuses attempts to play off God’s justice against God’s mercy. Polytheists . . . do that; they call on one god for protection against another. But our God is one (Deut. 6:4), and in the heart of our Father-Judge are no such contradictions. . . .
You and I have to do with a righteous God. He always punishes sin, temporally, eternally, in body and soul. Now our sins are either punished in Jesus—then it is all over—or we have to bear our own punishment.
Dr. Kuyvenhoven is right: God’s justice and mercy are not opposed, but united; and his mercy does not come by simply ignoring his justice. How it does come, how that happens, is the gospel.
That’s not exactly how Charles Krauthammer puts it, but that’s the problem he’s identified:
Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.
Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.
Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob—misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest—from drug companies to auto unions to doctors—in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.
“Get out of the way” and “don’t do a lot of talking,” the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the “mess” from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.
If you don’t believe Dr. Krauthammer, consider this from the Politico article on Barack Obama’s speech to Congress tonight:
2) He will not confront or scold the left. “This is a case for bold action, not a stick in the eye to our supporters,” said an official involved in speech preparation. “That’s not how President Obama thinks. The politics of triangulation don’t live in this White House.”
3) He will make an overture to Republicans. “He will lay out his vision for health reform—taking the best ideas from both parties, make the case for why as a nation we must act now, and dispel the myths and confusion that are affecting public opinion,” the aide said.
You cannot do both of these things at once. You just can’t. You cannot “make an overture to Republicans” without promising to actually consider Republican ideas and integrate them into your program—and to do that, you would have to confront the Left, to tell them that they’re going to have to give up some of the things they really want and to allow the Right to get some of the things they really want. You have to actually follow through on “taking the best ideas from both parties,” which would require actually forcing the Left to compromise, and scolding them for their dogmatic refusal to do so to this point. It’s not triangulation (and when did that become a dirty word, anyway?), it’s recognizing that you can’t eat your cake and still have it.
That the President doesn’t realize this is clear from the fifth point in Politico’s list:
5) Obama will try to reassure the left about his commitment to a public option, or government insurance plan. Aides said they are rethinking what he will say about this. He wants to thread the needle of voicing support for a public option, without promising to kill health reform to get it. But liberal congressional leaders were unyielding in their support for it on a conference call he held from Camp David yesterday, and he’s going to meet with them at the White House early next week.
Again, if he actually wants to make a serious overture to Republicans, the public option has to come off the table; that’s completely unacceptable to folks on the Right, and meaningless “concessions” that make no substantive difference won’t be enough to win any meaningful Republican support. But of course, to take that off the table, he’ll have to confront the Left, in a big way, and so far, he’s shown no stomach whatsoever for doing that (if in fact he’s ever actually wanted to). President Obama has a choice: reach across the aisle, or continue to appease the Left. He’ll have to pick.
As a result, the inestimable Jay Cost (who has to be one of the three or four best political analysts going right now) comes to this conclusion:
I think this will be little more than a change in tone—perhaps from cool/slightly mocking Obama to angry/forceful Obama. From the looks of it, the President is still planning to make all the same points he’s been hammering for months. He’ll ask for bipartisan cooperation while remaining cagey on the public option (a deal breaker for 99% of the Republican caucus). He will again insist the time for debate is over and the time for action is now. He’ll make a not-terribly-compelling case about how this somehow relates to the current economic morass, even though the benefits do not kick in for years. He’ll fearlessly stand up to Republican straw men, who never offer anything except disingenuous attacks.
Which, if that does indeed to turn out to be the best he can do—and if it isn’t, then why haven’t we seen something better well before now?—raises a critical question: what’s the point of this speech? Why is the President doing this? Cost suggests two related reasons:
First, it has begun to believe its own spin that the President is good at giving game changing speeches. But he isn’t really. Nobody is. If the game could change because of a speech, the game would constantly be changing because lots of people can give a decent speech, especially when they have a TelePrompTer. President Obama is a compelling speaker to a relatively narrow segment of the country—namely, African Americans and white social liberals. He inspired them to support his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton—but other voters (including many in his own party) were harder to win over. His Philadelphia speech on race was no Cooper Union; it merely distracted attention from the main question of why he spent so many years in that church. His numbers still fell, and he struggled through the rest of the primaries, even losing South Dakota on the day he declared victory. He then gave big speeches in Europe and Denver, but it was only thanks to the financial panic of last September that he had a breakthrough.
Still, his speechifying seems to give some people a thrill up the leg—and the idea that he’s not just a good speaker, but a game changing speaker, has become conventional wisdom. I think the White House believes that this is actually true.
Second, it does not know what else to do. It looks like Congress is at something less than square one. There is no passable compromise that has been proposed—nothing that can win enough votes in the center without losing the left flank. But now the “Gang of Six” has basically broken up, public approval has tanked, moderates are scared, and if there isn’t bad blood on the Democratic side of the aisle there is at least a lot of finger pointing. If Humpty Dumpty breaks and you don’t know how to put him back together—why not give a speech and boldly proclaim how important it is to put him back together?
Cost believes, and has been arguing, that the administration needs to scale its plan way back and go for incremental health-insurance reform rather than trying to revamp the whole system on the fly; I think Cost is right. If President Obama were to take that tack, he could keep the moderates in his own party and pick up the moderates from the other side of the aisle; with a little creativity, he might even come up with something that could attract support from some conservatives without losing liberals, which would be a huge accomplishment. While he would probably still emerge from this whole fight weakened, producing an actual bipartisan reform package would allow him to recover a lot of face and a lot of his prestige—as well as some of his “post-partisan” image—and thus to salvage a fair bit from an initiative that so far has been a complete fiasco for him. As Cost concludes,
If the President scaled back his ambitions, the final bill would not be as far to the left as the liberals like, but since it is not comprehensive they could at least plan to fight for the public option another day. Then, Obama could pick up enough moderates to pass it, and he could declare victory.
Incidentally, this is how most legislation gets passed in the Congress.
Which suggests, yet again, that Barack Obama would be a more effective president if he’d spent enough time actually doing his job as a legislator to actually understand things like that. As it is, all he can do is give (yet) another speech. If Allahpundit is right and the purpose of this address to Congress is really to push hardliners on the Left to compromise without admitting he’s doing so (which would alienate his base a fair bit more than he already has), then the President may actually accomplish something almost despite himself. We shall see.
one that I’ve been asking as well, in his latest column:
One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess—for a program that would not take effect until 2013!
Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years—more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?
If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election? . . .
If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.
Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.
Hard to argue with Dr. Sowell’s conclusion.
