Category Archives: Politics

The Palin Revolution, one year on

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One year ago today, I was going bonkers, and so was my blog traffic, as the whole political world was going mad at John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. After the truly awe-inspiring disinformation campaign Sen. McCain and his staffers ran to keep his pick a secret, and the wondrous overnight thread on Adam Brickley’s site, with Drew (who turned out to be a staffer with the McCain campaign in Dayton) dropping hints that Gov. Palin would be the pick, to have the news come out and be confirmed was the greatest joy I’ve ever had in politics (not that there are many competitors for that particular honor).

One year later, I don’t take any of that back. I’m sorry for the hammering Gov. Palin and her family have taken, much of which has sickened me; I’m sorry for the lies and smears she’s had to deal with, and for what that says about the state of our political culture. But my respect for her, and my sense that she’s the best leader this country has to put forward, haven’t changed, even through a fairly bumpy year.

Some might say that’s unreasonable of me; but in proper perspective, I don’t believe it is. That perspective, I think, is supplied by a long article Stephen F. Hayward posted a couple days ago on NRO entitled, “The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents.” It’s a good and thoughtful piece, and I commend it to your attention for a number of reasons. Hayward wrote it, by his own statement, to clear away some of the fogginess of nostalgia from the conservative memory of President Reagan and his accomplishments, and also to remind us, almost thirty years on, of the political reality the Great Communicator faced in his day; the piece succeeds quite nicely in both aims, in my judgment. I was particularly interested, though, in this section for its application to the current political situation:

Both [Reagan and FDR] had to battle not only with the other party, but also with their own. Both men by degrees successfully transformed their own parties, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party for a time. This, I suggest, is the heart of the real and enduring Reagan Revolution (or Age of Reagan).

Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan’s experience was similar, as he had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Robert Novak observed in late 1987: “True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford.” . . .

Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980 posed two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. . . .

The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that changing one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition.

As Hayward says, understanding that lesson is critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of President Reagan, or for that matter of Gov. Reagan; and as has been pointed out here before, it’s also critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of Sarah Palin.

This is true in two ways. In the first place, of course, it’s true of her career before last August 29; even more than President Reagan, her political rise was a rise against the establishment of her own party. If you’re not familiar with the story, R. A. Mansour’s post “Who Is Sarah Palin”offers an excellent sketch. Sarah Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla as a political insurgent against a good old boys’ network that was running the town for its own benefit; once in office, she continued to show the guts to buck the town establishment.

Later, having been named as ethics commissioner and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—her big break, and her first big payday—when she discovered that one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich (who also happened to be the head of the Alaska Republican Party) was misusing his position, she blew the whistle, even though it meant resigning her job. Then she ran against the Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, who had appointed both her and Ruedrich; in retrospect, we can say “of course she won,” but it was anything but an “of course” at the time.

Like Gov. Reagan, she was not the choice of the party establishment, but was launching a takeover from outside that establishment; as with President Reagan, her dramatic victory posed as big a problem to her own party, who saw her not as their leader but as someone they had to contain, as to the theoretical opposition. President Reagan never told the Congress “All of you here need some adult supervision!” as Gov. Palin did (earning herself the lasting enmity of the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green), but I’m sure he would have appreciated the line.

This is why she spent the first part of her term in Alaska working as much with the Democrats as with her (supposed) own party: she had to, in order to accomplish things like chopping up the backroom deal Gov. Murkowski had worked out with Big Oil to replace it with a workable new severance-tax law that would be good for Alaska, not just for Big Oil, or to put a bill together that would finally get a process moving to build a natural-gas pipeline from the Northern Slope to the Lower 48.

Now, of course, her opponents like to minimize her accomplishments and carp about this or that, but they’re missing the point: given the fact that she was governing in the teeth of opposition from her own party, working to transform that party as much as to enact policy, it may well be possible to say of her as we can of President Reagan that Gov. Palin did less than she had hoped and less than people wanted—that doesn’t change the fact that, as Gary McDowell said of the Gipper, she did “a **** of a lot more than people thought [she] would.”

This is a point which is especially critical to bear in mind in considering this last calendar year for Gov. Palin. Where before, she was able to work with the Alaska Democrats to get legislation passed—after all, her initiatives were popular, and her war with her own party establishment only helped them in their efforts against Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young—her performance in the presidential campaign made her Public Enemy No. 1 for the national Democratic Party, meaning that the Alaska Democrats could no longer afford to do anythingthat would give her good publicity. (Given the close connections between prominent Democrats in Alaska and the Obama White House, there’s no doubt in my mind that that imperative came all the way from the top.)

This, combined with the time- and energy-wasting barrage of ludicrous, transparently malicious ethics charges, combined to hamstring her administration. The #1 goal of the Left was to keep her from accomplishing anything (yes, I believe that was even ahead of bankrupting her through legal bills, which I figure was #2), so as to be able to portray her in future races as a lightweight who was overmatched by her office. Now, in a rational world, this wouldn’t have worked, because by the numbers, the Republicans had sufficient votes in the legislature to pass her agenda into law; but as already noted, this isn’t a rational world, and a large chunk of the Alaska GOP wasn’t on her side, but rather sided with the Democrats against her. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re faced with having to try to transform your own party.

To complicate matters, this struggle in Alaska has been mirrored on a national scale. The GOP is referred to as the party of Reagan, but it isn’t in any meaningful sense; indeed, I think Heyman overstates the degree to which it ever really was. One can point to Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with America as evidence of a Reaganite legacy, but Rep. Gingrich himself was an insurgent in the party, and the conservative principles of the Contract didn’t really last long; perhaps the most telling thing is that the party didn’t nominate a conservative as its standard-bearer in 1998, but an old warhorse of the pre-Reagan Republican establishment, Bob Dole. Indeed, to this date, for all his success, Ronald Reagan remains sui generis among Republican presidential nominees.

As a result, the national Republican establishment reacted (and keeps reacting) to Gov. Palin in the same way they reacted to Gov. Reagan—belittling her intelligence, mocking her ideas, trying to deny her credit for her accomplishments, and generally trying to tear her down in any way they can, while still trying to make as much use as they can out of her popularity. This, combined with the hostility of the party’s state organization in Alaska, left her with little structural support or cover against the attacks of the Left (an understatement, actually, given that some in the party actually piled on). Collectively, this put her in a very unusual position for an elected official: having her office become a hindrance to her effectiveness and ability to function rather than an advantage.

As such, Gov. Palin’s utterly un-telegraphed resignation is one of those events that was shocking at the time but in retrospect seems almost obvious—we should have seen it coming. We would have, were it not the sort of thing that professional politicians never do. Your typical politician, after all, holds on to power with the awe-inspiring single-mindedness of the clinically obsessed; we knew Gov. Palin to be anything but a typical politician and a woman who could say, “Politically speaking, if I die, I die,” but our expectations are too well shaped by the normal course of events to be truly able to predict that she would defy that norm as she did. Had we been able to join her in thinking outside the box (or perhaps I should say, the straitjacket) of those expectations, though, we would have seen what she saw: that the only way for her to carry on effectively with her mission was to step down from office and go to work as a private citizen.

Which, of course, she has, with verve and gusto and considerable effectiveness. (Google “Facebook ‘Sarah Palin,'” and you’ll get “about 9,520,000” hits.) As Gov. Reagan did, so Gov. Palin has found it necessary to go “into the wilderness”—which is to say, back into the real world outside a government position—in order to carry on with her efforts to shift the institutional GOP back toward its conservative base. The Juneau statehouse was too small, remote and encumbered a platform for her to be able to work effectively; she needed to create a better one for herself. In her use of Facebook, she’s demonstrating her ability to do exactly that—yes, she’ll need to go beyond Facebook as well, but it’s proving a mighty fine place to start—and though she’s dragging much of the GOP elite with her kicking, screaming, and complaining, she is dragging them nevertheless. No matter how much they might protest or wish it were otherwise, she is the one who has set the agenda for the party’s opposition to Obamacare; she is the one who played the biggest part in stopping the administration’s energy-tax agenda cold; and increasingly, she is recognized as the Republican whose leadership matters the most in this country, regardless of official position or lack thereof.

Of course, there are many people in both parties who have a vested interest in changing that reality—Democrats who oppose her, and Republicans who want to contain her—and so the resistance continues. As such, though Gov. Palin’s resignation outflanked them, the efforts to use it against her continue as well. Most of those efforts are pointless and ineffective, since they rest on the assertion that Gov. Palin is finished in politics because she no longer holds office; that doesn’t hold water, both because of their continued attacks and because the American people don’t value being elected to office as highly as politicians do. There is one question, however, that does linger with many people: if she resigned from office once, how can we be sure she wouldn’t do it again if she won the White House?

The answer to that is found in considering both halves of the problem she faced in Alaska. One, the state’s executive-ethics law, does not exist on the national level; were she elected president, she would not be vulnerable to a barrage of bogus charges as she was as governor. The other, the absolute opposition she faced from a majority of her own party in Alaska, is as I said part and parcel of the work of transforming the GOP, and would be a problem for President Palin to some degree as it was for President Reagan. However, there are two good reasons to think that it would be a problem which would be far easier for President Palin to overcome than it was for Governor Palin.

One, if she does in fact end up running and winning in 2012 (or at any later date), she will by virtue of that simple fact have a demonstrated national support base of some 60 million voters. As Barack Obama has already shown, being able to remind people that you won gives you considerable political leverage. That’s leverage far beyond what she had simply by virtue of winning a single gubernatorial election in a low-population state, because that’s a vastly greater number of voters. (Had things played out differently in Alaska, had she had a couple of terms, her re-election and her ability to influence the re-election campaigns of other Alaskan politicians would have started to give her that sort of leverage on a state level, but that leverage would always have been affected by events on the national scene.) As such, she would have a lot more political capital to use to deal with recalcitrant members of her own party, as well as with more conservative members of the Democratic caucuses.

And two, Gov. Palin has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her in the 2009-10 elections. By campaigning for Republican candidates around the country, she has the chance to build a constituency for herself in the national party institution, in three ways. The first, most basic, and most important, is by working to get people elected who share her principles, and who thus will tend out of their own political beliefs and instincts to support the same things she supports. By campaigning, especially in House elections, for the election of true conservatives—and I hope she finds good opportunities to do so not just in the general election but in primaries, working to win nominations for conservatives over establishment types (as for example, dare I say, Marco Rubio in Florida?)—she has the chance to shape the congressional Republican caucuses into bodies which will be more likely to follow her lead, should she run and win in 2012.

The second way is dicier, but still essential: by campaigning for other Republican candidates and helping them win elections, she’ll earn good will and put them in her debt. As the recent behavior of Saxby Chambliss shows, this isn’t as reliable a way of building support as it should be—you just can’t count on most politicians not to welch on a debt—but it’s necessary all the same. You might not be able to count on them returning the favor if you help them, but you can surely count on them not helping you if you don’t.

The third comes back to that whole question of leverage. As I said, if Gov. Palin becomes President Palin, she will have shown by that fact that she has a strong political base; but that will be much more impressive to folks on the Hill if she’s already shown that her base won’t just help her get elected, but also translates into downballot clout. If she flexes real political muscle during the mid-term elections, if she shows that her support is broad enough and strong enough to influence House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the country—if she makes it clear to everyone that being endorsed by Sarah Palin is a good thing for Republican politicians—then the GOP will get the idea that opposing her is not likely to be a good thing for Republican politicians. That will make the congressional GOP and the rest of the party establishment much more likely to follow her lead.

All of which is to say, the next key stage of the Palin Revolution, if it is to come fully to fruition, is the next election cycle; that will be the point at which her leadership will, I believe, really begin to take hold in the party in an institutional way, and the necessary groundwork for the future Palin administration for which we hope. It’s been a hard year for Gov. Palin, but it’s been a year which has produced many good things, too; and as startling and controversial as her resignation was, she has proven that it was not the beginning of the end of her political career, but rather the end of the beginning. The best, I believe, is yet to be; and for that, I am thankful.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

 

Reflections on the case of Mark Sanford

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Down in South Carolina, the calls continue to build for Gov. Mark Sanford to resign his office. It’s a long fall for a man once considered a possible running mate for John McCain last year, and a serious presidential contender in 2012, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter—as much as anything, because Sanford just doesn’t seem to be able to let go and accept the full consequences of his actions. There are those in South Carolina who would excuse him because they don’t trust his lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, and don’t want to see Lt. Gov. Bauer succeed Gov. Sanford; but if Gov. Sanford is that concerned about Lt. Gov. Bauer, he should have thought of that before having an affair. He has dishonored himself and disqualified himself from office; honor demands that he step down, regardless of whether he finds his successor satisfactory or not.

The truth is, at this point, Mark Sanford reminds me of Pete Rose (if not as scummy). Mike Schmidt made a telling comment recently about Rose:

If it were me, and I had lived a lie for 14 years, and I went up to tell the commissioner that I was sincerely sorry for what I’ve done to my family, to the sport, etc., I probably would be back in baseball now and in the Hall of Fame—because I would have been a tremendously remorseful individual. And I would have felt the burden of that the rest of my life, in everything that I did. And I would have, in my travels, been a totally different person.

My lifestyle would have changed. I would have felt an obligation to change and to become someone that the baseball world would once again learn to love after forgiving me. I would have been that guy. And I don’t think Pete has been.

So far, Gov. Sanford hasn’t been that guy either. Had he been willing to confess, step down, take it like a man, and actually take the time to put his life back together to where it really was what he had always presented it to be, his political life would probably already be in the recovery phase; after all, that sort of behavior is so rare among prominent politicians, it would have impressed a lot of people. But instead, he’s trying to hang onto everything he possibly can with both fists, and all he’s doing is making matters worse for himself in the long term. As a result, in the long term, Mark Sanford will matter most in this country as a cautionary tale of how you just never know with politicians, and how they can always let you down.

That doesn’t mean, though, that they always will; there are those who are honorable and faithful, people of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. The hard part is separating them out from the gifted liars who’ve internalized Groucho Marx’s crack that sincerity is the key, and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made; and the only way to make that separation is to let time, exposure and opposition do their work. The great difference between Barack Obama and John McCain last November wasn’t ideological, because Sen. McCain doesn’t have an ideology; the great difference was that, for good or ill, we knew who Sen. McCain is, because over the years it’s all been made very, very clear—but we really didn’t have a clue about Sen. Obama. That’s why there are such an astonishingly large number of people (for this early in his term) coming out and expressing regret for voting for the guy: he isn’t who they let themselves believe him to be.

Now, take this truth, and on the first anniversary of Sarah Palin’s elevation to the national stage, look back in the light of this truth at the battles she’s had to fight this past year. Look back at the PDSers and the plague of anklebiters, the oppo researchers parachuted into Wasilla and the media misrepresentations, and ask: What have they really done? Have they destroyed her? No; they’ve managed to convince a lot of people who would never have voted for her anyway, and they’ve planted concerns in the minds of a lot of potential supporters, but they haven’t done any damage she can’t undo, given time and exposure. What they havemanaged to do, though, is to establish pretty clearly that even given the combined efforts of thousands of motivated people backed by all the money they need for all the digging they want to do, there’s simply no real dirt to be dug up on Sarah Palin.

In other words, all they’ve managed by their efforts is to demonstrate that they can’t bring Gov. Palin down with the truth, because they’ve had to resort to lies, invented stories, misrepresentations, and unjustified charges. I don’t think most people who looked at her in an unbiased fashion had any doubts that she is who she presents herself to be, but at this point I think we can take that as proven—because if she weren’t, we’d have heard about it by now. (And oh boy, would we have heard about it.) If she had had any real skeletons in her closet, they’d have been out of the closet and line dancing on the front lawn of the Juneau statehouse long since. In short, no one needs to worry that Gov. Palin is going to pull a Sanford on us, or that she’s a fake, or that she will in any way prove to be not substantially what we thought she was, because the likes of Celtic Diva, Andree McLeod, David Axelrod and the ADN have done yeoman work for us in ruling out that possibility—not that that’s what they intended to do, but it’s what they’ve accomplished.

The intensity of Gov. Palin’s exposure and of the opposition she’s faced has made this clear in record time: she is, truly, one of the honorable and faithful people in our politics, one of those of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. For all the clouds she’s had to endure, that’s a remarkable silver lining.

(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)

John Mackey, Mark Steyn, and the intolerance of “tolerance”

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A couple weeks ago, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an excellent piece on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal—I posted on it at the time—drawing lessons from his company’s experience with health-care benefits and laying out a free-market alternative to Obamacare. The result has been a nasty backlash from leftists who are outraged to discover that their favorite socially-responsible grocery store isn’t dedicated to all their socialist causes; there is of course a petition (isn’t there always, these days?), which declares,

Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.

“Deceived”? Really? Has Whole Foods ever claimed in the past to support socialized medicine? No, the “deception” is all in the mind of folks on the left. They simply and unquestioningly assumed that because the company is opposed to factory farming and other aspects of the modern agricultural industry, it therefore must be equally liberal on every other point; now, since its CEO has revealed himself not to be a socialist on the issue of the day, they assume he must have been lying about everything else—and must be, among other things, “anti-union.”

Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous. As an example, Michelle Malkin offers this letter from a Whole Foods employee:

I work for Whole Foods, and I am a long time loyal employee. I love our company, and our CEO! John Mackey stands for what he cares about and believes in! This company offers awesome benefits and puts us team members first!

She also cites a commenter on the company’s online forum, who writes,

  • Mackey lectures at Universities about the horrors of factory farming
  • He says “Right now, Americans have to pretend factory farms don’t exist. They turn their eyes away, because there’s no alternative, there’s no choice. Once there is a choice, we will allow ourselves to be outraged.”
  • He makes $1 a year and donates his stock portfolio to charity.
  • He set up a $100,00 fund to help his employees with personal problems.
  • He’s a vegetarian and his company will not buy from producers that treat their animals unethically.
  • He flies commercial, rents the smallest cars, and stays in the cheapest hotel rooms – not because he’s cheap, but because he has no need for largesse
  • He and his wife participate in yoga
  • He gives over $1 million a year to animal welfare groups, education, relief work, and spiritual movements.
  • Employees have full say in who they work with—a new employee must receive a 2/3 vote in order to make it past probation.
  • Employees also vote on all company-wide initiatives
  • There’s a salary book in every store—“no secrets” management believes everyone should know how much everyone else is making
  • Executive salaries are capped at 14 times the lowest workers salary—If they want more money, everyone else has to get more money first
  • Non-executive employees hold 94% of company stock options
  • Pay is linked to team performance—profit sharing
  • At least 5% of annual profits go to local charities
  • Full-timers get 100% of their health care costs paid for—under plans the employees have selected
  • “They just have a lot more respect for you as a person here,” says an employee
And because he had a different idea about how the United States can fix it health care situation, none of this matters? He’s a caring person and many of you want to treat him like a monster. Why? Not because he opposes reform, but because he’s bringing more ideas to the table.

Read her whole post; the person who e-mailed Malkin that comment has a remarkable account of falling in with Mackey and his friends on the Appalachian Trail and spending a few days hiking with him.

As for the commenter and his question: yes, because Mackey had a different idea from the Left, none of that matters; as Andrew Breitbart points out, such is the true nature of the liberal idea of tolerance. You see, it breaks down this way:

  • Tolerance is the highest virtue.
  • Tolerance means affirming everyone no matter what they believe.
  • Except that, since tolerance is the highest virtue, we must not tolerate those who are intolerant.
  • Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who are unwilling to affirm everyone no matter what they believe.
  • Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who do not believe the same way we do about tolerance.
  • Which is to say, tolerance is only for those whose beliefs we find acceptable.

Which is, definitionally, intolerance. I hasten to say, I have no necessary problem with that; there are certainly things which any rational person should refuse to tolerate, and we all have the responsibility to figure out where to draw that line. There’s no law saying that those who disagree with me have to find my opinions tolerable.

However. I do object to people cloaking their intolerance in the language of “tolerance” and calling me “intolerant” for disagreeing with them—that kind of Orwellian Newspeak is something which I find, yes, completely intolerable; and I especially object to them using it as a weapon to expand their own right to free speech while infringing on mine, and on the rights of those who share my positions. If they want to boycott Whole Foods, let them go on ahead—I don’t agree with it any more than I agreed with the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, but it’s their money, they can spend it however they wish—but the organized efforts we’ve been seeing from the likes of SEIU and the Obama administration to silence dissenters on Obamacare are quite another matter.

And if you don’t believe that restricting free speech and silencing dissent from the party line is what this is all about, just look at Canada, and its system of “human-rights commissions”; they’ve turned into ideological kangaroo courts, determining which speech is protected and which isn’t, all based on their own ideas of what they would prefer to tolerate and what they wouldn’t. Fortunately, when they went after Mark Steyn (because the Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like what he said about the effects of Muslim immigration), he fought back, and he had the kind of public profile and financial backing he needed to win; but not everybody is Mark Steyn, and not everybody has the tools and the support to defend themselves effectively, and so the result is still the chilling of freedom of expression.

That’s why Steyn said what he did in his testimony this past February before the Ontario Human Rights Commission:

The Ontario Human Rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and in the cause of such pseudo-human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property . . .—in the cause of pseudo-human rights, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence. . . .

It’s all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day telling a homosexual fifty years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. Or a Jew seventy years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That’s why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril.

He’s right.

Is Rahmbo feeding a backlash?

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There’s a fascinating article up today on The Daily Beast by John Batchelor on “How Rahm Is Reviving the GOP”—one which is particularly fascinating because Batchelor is no GOP apologist. (Indeed, he makes such statements as “Suddenly the disgraced and demoralized Republican Congress has an unearned future,” and “The still lifeless Republicans . . . have avoided any credible renovation or even contrition for their decades of swinishness,” as well as quoting a “Republican partisan” as calling congressional Republicans “cowardly” and “brain-dead.” I should note, I don’t particularly disagree with any of this.) He describes “the superhuman clumsiness of a man who has made himself indispensable to the Obama administration and insufferable to the Democratic Congress,” and goes on to write:

The GOP always knew that Emanuel was a problem that could not be solved and could only be endured while he served three tempestuous terms in the House. But now the beleaguered Democratic majority is learning painfully that Emanuel’s talents for bullying, whimsical favoritism, cheerful power-grabbing, and self-congratulatory earthiness have transformed the first hundred days of the Obama administration’s seamless accomplishment into a second hundred days of blame and gloom. . . .

A twist of fate is that as Emanuel’s authority and ambition grow, reaching for swift closure to foreign commitments, staging bipartisan fantasy cruises, then reaching to construct Democratic-only laws that turn the theory of checks and balances into an unlimited credit card on the Treasury, the polling points not only to a rising tide of facedown Republicans but also to a sinking approval rating for a president who entirely controls Emanuel’s fate. Is there a lesson in the detail that the French Revolution waited too long to turn on Robespierre’s ruthless genius, and by the time the guillotine fell, the ludicrously reactionary aristocracy had rallied throughout Europe and led a counterrevolution that swept liberty into the ditch for another lifetime?

In between those two paragraphs are the details, which really are fascinating—and more than a little disturbing. Read the whole thing, and you’ll understand why Batchelor compares Emanuel to Robespierre.

Edward M. Kennedy, RIP

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There is little on which I agreed with Sen. Ted Kennedy, and I’ve never been much impressed with the Kennedy mythos; what’s more, I think his moral and physical cowardice at Chappaquiddick dishonored him. That said, it’s inappropriate to ignore the good things about people, and especially to do so with regard to one’s opponents; as such, I think it’s important to point out that there truly were some things about Sen. Kennedy that any fair-minded person would find admirable.

I like, for instance, what John Fund had to say:

Ted Kennedy and I didn’t occupy much political space in common, but I always admired his ability to build coalitions for the things he believed in, assemble a first-rate staff and bravely represent a coherent point of view. He was also a man who would answer your questions forthrightly and then invite you to have a drink.

In his last months, he and his wife Vicky also found time to come to the aid of a fellow cancer sufferer—my old boss and friend Bob Novak. He died only a week ago from the same type of brain tumor that felled Senator Kennedy. When the conservative columnist was diagnosed last year, Vicki Kennedy reached out to Novak with the lessons they’d learned about treatment. “He and his wife have treated me like a close friend . . . and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke University, which I did,” Novak wrote in one of his last published columns. “The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone’s life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington.”

He was a powerful, powerful advocate for the causes to which he committed himself—and his dedication was remarkable. As Bill Bennett writes,

Whatever one thought of him, there is no one in the Senate of his force, sheer power, and impact. If you think there is his equal in this, tell me who it is.

He fought hard, and sometimes viciously; but for all that, he seems to have earned a fair bit of sincere admiration and affection even from those on the other side of the aisle. Mitt Romney’s statement captures some of this:

In 1994, I joined the long list of those who ran against Ted and came up short. But he was the kind of man you could like even if he was your adversary. I came to admire Ted enormously for his charm and sense of humor – qualities all the more impressive in a man who had known so much loss and sorrow. I will always remember his great personal kindness, and the fighting spirit he brought to every cause he served and every challenge he faced. I was proud to know Ted Kennedy as a friend, and today my family and I mourn the passing of this big-hearted, unforgettable man.

Requiescat in pace, Edward M. Kennedy.

Further links on Obamacare

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For those who doubt that the purpose of the Democratic health care “reform” is a government takeover of our health-care system—and that the only unsettled issue in their minds is the best way to get there as quickly as possible—watch this:

Those opposed to the expansion of the abortion industry should consider this comment from Ed Morrissey:

On the campaign trail, Obama told Planned Parenthood that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate state restrictions on abortion and repeal the Hyde Amendment ban on federal funding for it, would be his first legislative priority. ObamaCare allows him to pass FOCA without the head-on fight. If the public option remains in the bill and it covers abortion, that will have the de facto effect of repealing the Hyde Amendment. The interstate nature of ObamaCare and the public plan may also allow the Department of Justice to fight state abortion restrictions, such as parental notification, on the grounds that the regulations interfere with interstate commerce. It’s FOCA by other means.

For those still dubious about Sarah Palin’s invocation of “death panels,” ponder this from Nat Hentoff (no fundamentalist Republican):

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model)—as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill—decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law. . . .

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a “very difficult democratic conversation” about how “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care” costs.

And if anyone is wondering why all the fuss—is this really that big a deal?—let Andy McCarthy explain:

These last seven months ought to tell us that the usual political rules don’t apply when predicting this president’s behavior. His purpose is revolutionary change in an American society he grew up understanding to be fundamentally unjust, racist, materialist, imperialist, and the agent of global misery. He is in Washington to transform the nation from the top down. Nationalized health care is key for him. If he gets it, sovereignty shifts from the citizen to the state. By law, government will be empowered to manage minute details of our lives. Over time—when, as the American Thinker’s Joseph Ashby observes, a “1,000-page health-care law explodes into many thousands of pages of regulatory codes”—that is precisely what government will do.

Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision. For my money (if I have any left), achieving it is more important to him than is getting reelected. His poll numbers and those of congressional Democrats may keep plunging (for the latter, there must come a point where that is statistically impossible), but they have the votes to Rahm this thing through.

And if it comes to that, they will most certainly try, unless enough Democrats in Congress get cold feet. Sure, that wouldn’t be what the president promised to get elected, but so far, that hasn’t stopped him yet:

Initial returns on Obamanomics

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Mark Steyn has a good piece up on “Why the Stimulus Flopped” which dissects the president’s economic approach with his usual panache (Steyn’s, that is; the president’s not bad on panache himself, but he’s no match for Mark Steyn):

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects—every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop. . . .

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted—and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

As Steyn sums it up,

The “stimulus” . . . didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about—and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that.

Read the whole thing—it’s vintage Steyn. The only point he doesn’t make is that we shouldn’t have expected the “stimulus” to work, because we had immediate prior evidence that it wouldn’t: namely, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out a while back, the effect of similar political and economic approaches in New York, New Jersey, and California.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

If “high tax rates on the rich, lots of government ‘investments,’ heavy unionization and a large government role in health care” haven’t worked for these states, why would we expect them to work for the country as a whole?

A dissenting view on health-care spending

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There is general agreement that our country spends too much on health care. I’m not so sure that’s actually true.

Why? The key here is recognizing the truth of David Goldhill’s distinction: “Health insurance isn’t health care.” This points us to another distinction, that of spending on care vs. spending on insurance. We tend to run them together, and I would certainly agree that we spend too much on these two things in combination; but we need to understand that in fact they’re two very different things—and I would argue that we should view spending money on them very, very differently.

Money spent on health care proper is money that goes to local businesses, perhaps a local non-profit organization (that would be, perhaps, your local hospital), and to other businesses that employ people to make things and to design new things to make. Money spent on healthinsurance is spent on bureaucrats who generate paper; indirectly, it also goes to subsidize trial lawyers and their campaign contributions to Democratic politicians. A good chunk of what you pay for health care also goes to this purpose, of course, in the percentage of your bill that is used to defray insurance costs for your doctor, your hospital, and so on.

Do we spend too much money on health care? No, what we spend too much money on—far too much money—is bureaucrats and trial lawyers. This is what needs to change most of all if we’re going to bring down the combined cost of health care and health insurance; and if we focus instead on reducing the cost of health care, we’re going to reduce the quality of our care without ever addressing the real problem and the real inefficiency of the current system.

This is, I think, what has happened to health care in Britain under the National Health Service. British cyberfriend David Riddick defends the NHS, in part, on the grounds that the UK spends less on health care than the US, and certainly the share of GDP spent on the combination of health care and health insurance is lower there; but given that they spend a higher percentage of that on bureaucrats, I don’t think that’s actually a good thing. That doesn’t drive good care, because the money isn’t being spent on care, and it doesn’t help the British economy any, either. Bureaucrats aren’t productive for the economy—they don’t create wealth, they don’t create jobs, they don’t create innovation; they just create red tape and paperwork.

The same is not true of much of the rest of the health care sector in modern economies. To take one example, the community where I live is the home of a cluster of orthopedics-products companies that make artificial joints, spinal hardware, and the like—products that relieve people (mainly, but not only, older people) of a great deal of pain and greatly improve their quality of life. These companies employ a lot of people, offering good manufacturing jobs as well as a lot of design and engineering work, and they drive research, as they’re always working on developing new and better products. So far, they’ve weathered the financial storm quite well; people will put off luxuries and elective purchases in tough economic times, but if you’re in pain and you can’t walk right, you’re not going to put off getting a new knee or a new hip if that will solve the problem.

Right now, though, they’re deeply worried about the push to nationalize our health care system, because it’s going to devastate their business. That artificial hip that the president keeps talking about, the one that he thinks might have been a waste to put in his grandmother, didn’t come from nowhere; it probably came from Warsaw, and it employed a number of people. His idea of how to cut health-care costs isn’t going to reduce the amount of money that goes to bureaucrats—it’s going to increase that spending, because we’ll need a lot more bureaucrats to run his program and decide which people are allowed to get new hips and knees. Instead, it’s going to reduce the amount of money that goes to companies like Zimmer and Biomet, which means it’s going to reduce the number of people they employ to design and build their products.

Health care “reform” as envisioned by the Democrats will take money out of their pockets to pay even more bureaucrats; it will shift money from a profitable sector of our economy, one that creates jobs that pay good wages and new products that improve people’s lives, to an unprofitable sector (the government)—and all in the name of spending less money. The contrast with the “stimulus” package is ironic. There we were told, “Spending money is good—increasing spending is good for the economy.” When it comes to health care, though, the government is telling us that spending money is bad, and so we need to hire lots and lots more bureaucrats so that we can cut down on the money we spend on actual health care. In the spirit of the “stimulus” package, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase the amount of money going to companies like Biomet and Zimmer so that they can hire more people and help the economy?

We tend to talk about the cost of health care as if cost were the only side of the coin, and it just isn’t; the money we spend doesn’t just vanish into thin air. Instead, that money goes to actual people, and much of it drives good things in our economy. Health care spending creates economic growth; it’s good for our country. We don’t need to spend less money on care; we need to spend less on bureaucrats and trial lawyers. Unfortunately, the president’s plan gets this backwards; we need to put it right way ’round.

 

Mr. Obama goes to Montana

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and a number of folks in Montana aren’t all that happy about it, or at least about the way it was handled. This letter was written by a resident of Bozeman, Montana; I don’t know them, but I’m confident in the source, especially I’ve had someone else vouch for it as an accurate account as well, so I’m posting it.

Hello All,

By now you have probably heard that President Obama came to Montana last Friday, Aug. 14. However, there are many things that the major news has not covered. I feel that since Bill and I live here and we were at the airport on Friday I should share some facts with you. Whatever you decide to do with the information is up to you. If you chose to share this email with others I do ask that you DELETE my email address before you forward this on.

On Wednesday, August 5th it was announced locally that the President would be coming here. There are many groups here that are against his healthcare and huge spending so those groups began talking and deciding on what they were going to do. The White House would not release ANY details other than the date.

On about Tuesday Bill found out that they would be holding the “Town Hall” at the airport. (This is only because Bill knows EVERYONE at the airport). Our airport is actually located outside of Belgrade (tiny town) in a very remote location. Nothing is around there. They chose to use a hangar that is the most remotely located hangar. You could not pick a more remote location, and you can not get to it easily. It is totally secluded from the public. FYI: We have many areas in Belgrade and Bozeman which could have held a large amount of folks with sufficient parking (gymnasiums/auditoriums). All of which have chairs and tables, and would not have to be SHIPPED IN!! $$$$$. During the week, cargo by the TONS was being shipped in constantly. Airport employees could not believe how it just kept coming. Though it was our President coming several expressed how excessive it was, especially during a recession. $$$$$.

Late Tuesday/early Wednesday Aug. 12th, they said that tickets would be handed out on Thursday 9am at two locations and the president would be arriving around 12:30 Friday. Thursday morning about 600 tickets were passed out. However, 1500 were printed at a Local printing shop per White House request. Hmmmm . . . 900 tickets just DISAPPEARED. This same morning someone called into the radio from the local UPS branch and said that THOUSANDS of Dollars of Lobster were shipped in for Obama. Montana has some of the best beef in the nation!!! And it would have been really wonderful to help out the local economy. Anyone heard of the Recession?? Just think . . . with all of the traveling the White House is doing. $$$$$. One can only imagine what else we are paying for.

On Friday Bill and I got out to the airport about 10:45am. The groups that wanted to protest Obama’s spending and healthcare had gotten a permit to protest and that area was roped off. But that was not to be. A large bus carrying SEIU (Service Employees International Union) members drove up onto the area (illegal) and unloaded right there. It was quite a commotion and there were specifically 2 SEIU men trying to make trouble and start a fight. Police did get involved and arrested the one man but they said they did not have the manpower to remove the SEIU crowd. The SEIU crowd was very organized and young. About 99% were under the age of 30 and they were not locals! They had bullhorns and PROFESSIONALLY made signs. Some even wore preprinted T-shirts. Oh, and Planned Parenthood folks were with them . . . professing abortion rights with their T-shirts and preprinted signs. (BTW, all these folks did have a permit to protest in ANOTHER area)! Those against healthcare/spending moved away from the SEIU crowd to avoid confrontation. They were orderly and respectful. Even though SEIU kept coming over and walking through, continuing to be very intimidating and aggressive at the direction of the one SEIU man.

So we had Montana folks from ALL OVER the state with their homemade signs and their DOGS with homemade signs. We had cowboys, nurses, doctors you name it. There was even a guy from Texas who had been driving through. He found out about the occasion, went to the store, made a sign, and came to protest. If you are wondering about the press . . . Well, all of the major networks were over by that remote hangar I mentioned. They were conveniently parked on the other side of the buildings FAR away. None of these crowds were even visible to them. I have my doubts that they knew anything about the crowds. We did have some local news media around us from this state and Idaho. Speaking of the local media . . . they were invited. However, all questions were to be turned in to the White House in advance of the event. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to think off the top of their head! It was very obvious that it was meant to be totally controlled by the White House. Everything was orchestrated down to the last detail to make it appear that Montana is just crazy for Obama and government healthcare. Even those people that talked about their insurance woes . . . the White House called our local HRDC (Human Resource and Development Committee) and asked for names. Then the White House asked those folks to come. Smoke and mirrors . . . EVERYTHING was staged!!!!!!!!!!!

I am very dismayed about what I learned about our current White House. The amount of control and manipulation was unbelievable. I felt I was not living in the United States of America, more like the USSR !! I was physically nauseous. Bill and I have been around when Presidents or Heads of State visit. It has NEVER been like this. I am truly very frightened for our country. America needs your prayers and your voices. If you care about our country please get involved. Know the issues. And let Congress hear your voices again and again!! If they are willing to put forth so much effort to BULLY a small town one can only imagine what is going on in Washington DC. Scary!!

Ambulance bills subsidize ambulance chasers

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I linked last Saturday to John Mackey’s piece on eight free-market health-care reforms that would actually work and not balloon the deficit. One of the necessary steps he laid out was “Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.” This morning, Sarah Palin elaborated on that pointin a note she posted on her Facebook page:

President Obama’s health care “reform” plan has met with significant criticism across the country. Many Americans want change and reform in our current health care system. We recognize that while we have the greatest medical care in the world, there are major problems that we must face, especially in terms of reining in costs and allowing care to be affordable for all. However, as we have seen, current plans being pushed by the Democratic leadership represent change that may not be what we had in mind—change which poses serious ethical concerns over the government having control over our families’ health care decisions. In addition, the current plans greatly increase costs of health care, while doing lip service toward controlling costs.

We need to address a REAL bipartisan reform proposition that will have REAL impacts on costs and quality of patient care.

As Governor of Alaska, I learned a little bit about being a target for frivolous suits and complaints (Please, do I really need to footnote that?). I went my whole life without needing a lawyer on speed-dial, but all that changes when you become a target for opportunists and people with no scruples. Our nation’s health care providers have been the targets of similar opportunists for years, and they too have found themselves subjected to false, frivolous, and baseless claims. To quote a former president, “I feel your pain.”

So what can we do? First, we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined. For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he’ll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” [1] Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

Dr. Stuart Weinstein, with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, recently explained the problem:

The medical liability crisis has had many unintended consequences, most notably a decrease in access to care in a growing number of states and an increase in healthcare costs.

Access is affected as physicians move their practices to states with lower liability rates and change their practice patterns to reduce or eliminate high-risk services. When one considers that half of all neurosurgeons—as well as one third of all orthopedic surgeons, one third of all emergency physicians, and one third of all trauma surgeons—are sued each year, is it any wonder that 70 percent of emergency departments are at risk because they lack available on-call specialist coverage? [2]

Dr. Weinstein makes good points, points completely ignored by President Obama. Dr. Weinstein details the costs that our out-of-control tort system are causing the health care industry and notes research that “found that liability reforms could reduce defensive medicine practices, leading to a 5 percent to 9 percent reduction in medical expenditures without any effect on mortality or medical complications.” Dr. Weinstein writes:

If the Kessler and McClellan estimates were applied to total U.S. healthcare spending in 2005, the defensive medicine costs would total between $100 billion and $178 billion per year. Add to this the cost of defending malpractice cases, paying compensation, and covering additional administrative costs (a total of $29.4 billion). Thus, the average American family pays an additional $1,700 to $2,000 per year in healthcare costs simply to cover the costs of defensive medicine.

Excessive litigation and waste in the nation’s current tort system imposes an estimated yearly tort tax of $9,827 for a family of four and increases healthcare spending in the United States by $124 billion. How does this translate to individuals? The average obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) delivers 100 babies per year. If that OB-GYN must pay a medical liability premium of $200,000 each year (which is the rate in Florida), $2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium.” [3]

You would think that any effort to reform our health care system would include tort reform, especially if the stated purpose for Obama’s plan to nationalize our health care industry is the current high costs.

So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?

Many states, including my own state of Alaska, have enacted caps on lawsuit awards against health care providers. Texas enacted caps and found that one county’s medical malpractice claims dropped 41 percent, and another study found a “55 percent decline” after reform measures were passed. [4] That’s one step in health care reform. Limiting lawyer contingency fees, as is done under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is another step. The State of Alaska pioneered the “loser pays” rule in the United States, which deters frivolous civil law suits by making the loser partially pay the winner’s legal bills. Preventing quack doctors from giving “expert” testimony in court against real doctors is another reform.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry noted that, after his state enacted tort reform measures, the number of doctors applying to practice medicine in Texas “skyrocketed by 57 percent” and that the tort reforms “brought critical specialties to underserved areas.” These are real reforms that actually improve access to health care. [5]

Dr. Weinstein’s research shows that around $200 billion per year could be saved with legal reform. That’s real savings. That’s money that could be used to build roads, schools, or hospitals.

If you want to save health care, let’s listen to our doctors too. There should be no health care reform without legal reform. There can be no true health care reform without legal reform.

—Sarah Palin

[1] Seehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350370729883030.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
[2] See http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/nov08/managing7.asp
[3] Id.
[4] Seehttp://www.abajournal.com/magazine/new_laws_and_med_mal_damage_caps_devastate_plaintiff_and_defense_firms_alik/print/
[5] See http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Tort-reform-must-be-part-of-health-care-reform-8096175.html