It’s probably too late now, but this administration that’s so fond of appointing “czars” for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:
Available immediately—no point in naming someone whose appointment would only delay matters
Experienced executive, particularly in dealing with large, complex projects
Experienced politician—given the political fallout, the political complications, and the need to keep the public informed, the job would need someone used to working on the national political scene
Experience in working politically with Big Oil, but independent from them—not someone on the payroll of any of the oil companies, but someone familiar with energy issues who has a track record of keeping them honest and cooperative
Some familiarity with the Gulf states, and/or relationships with their governors—wouldn’t need to be someone from that area, but someone who could reasonably expect to work comfortably and effectively with state and local governments in a manner that showed respect and appreciation for the cultures of the region
Ideally, a Republican—it isn’t likely that the GOP would have objected to the establishment of such a position, but if so, naming a Republican would have drawn their fangs, and given the President a bit of a bipartisan boost; also, of the governors of the Gulf states, there are four Republicans, three high-profile (Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Bob Riley), and one who used to be (Charlie Crist), so naming a Republican would help in that regard
Now, it could be that I’m biased, but looking over this list, it seems to me that there’s one person above all others who would fit the bill: as Jason Killian Meath pointed out a couple weeks ago over at BigGovernment, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin.
Currently out of office, she could have taken the job immediately
She pushed through tax reform, replacing the tax code that had been written by Big Oil lobbyists to the maximum benefit of the companies with one designed to benefit the state of Alaska
She’s been a significant player on the national political scene for nearly two years now, enough time to begin to get comfortable, and has shown significant gifts for speaking and other forms of mass communication (government accountability via Facebook would be a significant improvement)
Though not a Southerner, she has campaigned for Gov. Perry, in his primary this year, and with Gov. Crist, during the 2008 campaign, and appears to have a solid relationship with Gov. Jindal, meaning that the necessary working relationships appear to be already in place
As President Obama’s highest-profile critic on energy issues and a former campaign opponent, appointing her to such a position would be seen as indicative of his ability to put the past aside for the common good and to deal constructively with disagreement and differing opinions; it would also have put her in a position in which backing up her previous arguments and assertions against the President would have been to the benefit of the White House—a productive bit of political judo
The only downside here is that if Gov. Palin had performed well in that role, it would have boosted her political standing tremendously (though if she hadn’t, it would have hurt her but still helped the President). But if it was for the good of the country, and also the administration, wouldn’t that have been a price worth paying?
Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology, and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.
Republican victories in 1984, 1988 and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence and in 1996 an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.
The one election in this period that is hard to classify was in 2000 and had a split verdict, with the Democrat winning the popular vote and the Republican the Electoral College.
That makes sense, if you think about it; polls have pretty consistently shown the US to be a center-right country, closer ideologically to the Republicans (though not by a lot), but the Democrats have pretty consistently shown themselves more capable at actually running government, and particularly at doing so in a way that’s consistent with their ideology. Given that the ideological content of the President’s policies is not all that popular right now, anything that makes him and his party look less than competent is bad news—and it’s starting to look like this disaster in the Gulf could be very bad news indeed. Dick Morris wrote in The Hill,
Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.
America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.
Of course, Morris has been anti-Obama all the way along, so it’s not as if there was any support here for the President to lose; but how about Peggy Noonan, a certified Obamacan? From her, we got the anguished cry, “He was supposed to be competent!”
The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. . . .
I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”
This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.
Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.
How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls? . . .
Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.
Of course, the President and other Democrats are trying to blame this one, too, on George W. Bush; but it just won’t wash. President Bush could have blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton—if President Clinton had done his job better, al’Qaeda would never have been able to launch the attack (and Osama bin Laden might not even have been around to try). President Clinton could have spent all kinds of time at the beginning of his term blaming George H. W. Bush for the state of the economy. Ronald Reagan could have done the same with Jimmy Carter, since he inherited an economic mess that might have been worse than the one we’re in. Gerald Ford certainly would have had a great deal to blame on Richard Nixon. The list goes on. None of them did it; they took responsibility, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work solving the problems they’d been given to solve. That’s what Presidents do.
At the rate he’s going, we could expect to find Barack Obama in 2012 still campaigning against President Bush, still blaming everything bad on President Bush, as if he’d never been elected; this incessant blame game is indeed change, but not the kind of change people wanted—it’s unseemly. He needs to accept, as Noonan wrote months ago, that it’s his rubble now. That’s part of being the president, just as it’s part of being the captain of a ship: whatever happens, fair or not, it’s on you, and you need to step up and deal with it. Yeah, you get blamed for things that aren’t your fault. That’s life, it’s happened to every other president; you wanted the job, you got the job—all of it, not just the good parts. President Obama seems to be trying to only accept the good parts, and that has to stop.
To some extent, none of this should be at all surprising; at the time of his election, Barack Obama had no track record of successful executive experience to support the idea that he would in fact be a competent executive rather than just someone who talked a good game. I expected, wrongly, that we would see a major terrorist attempt on U.S. soil during his first year in office, as we had with his two immediate predecessors; I’m deeply glad to have been wrong about that, but not at all glad that the “ineffective, dithering response” I predicted to such a crisis has been the sort of response we’ve seen to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, it’s been worse than I thought, because as well as ineffective and dithering (even to the point of hamstringing the state of Louisiana’s efforts to protect itself), the President’s response has also been remarkably disengaged, which is something I would not have predicted.
During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.
The administration and its allies have been trying to deny, play down, and obfuscate this fact, but the records show the falsity of their denials, and the fact that other oil companies have given more to other politicians really isn’t on point: the only actors here are the Obama administration and BP, and President Obama has been America’s biggest beneficiary of BP money. Has this influenced the way the White House has treated BP in all this? Did it play a part in their decision to “keep a close watch” on BP’s efforts and otherwise let the company deal with the mess as it chose? We don’t know; we ought to. The media ought to be asking, and they aren’t. Eventually, those questions are going to have to be faced, and answered. Right now, it certainly looks as if all that BP money to Barack Obama bought a fair bit of accommodation and slack from his administration.
As a final note, I think the guy who’s come off best in this disaster is James Carville. I’ve never cared much for the man, but I have to respect his honesty and passion on this one . . . this whole story makes me sick, and I’ve never even been to Louisiana—I can only imagine his agony at what’s happening to his home state.
The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare’s shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,
an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).
“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”
Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.
Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .
With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.
To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”
And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?
Former President Bill Clinton returned to his home state Friday to help a beleaguered ally and delivered a broadside against some of the most powerful interests in the Democratic Party.
Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.
He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.
“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here.
Clinton didn’t mention Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s name—the lieutenant governor worked in the former president’s administration—or single out any specific liberal groups. But he didn’t need to.
Halter, who held the incumbent to under 50 percent in the May 18 primary election, has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in advertising from liberal groups and unions angry with Lincoln over her hesitance to support labor organizing legislation and ties to the business community.
It’s a clash that pits the ascendant forces of the progressive left against a centrist Southern Democrat cut from Clinton’s own Democratic Leadership Council mold, a proxy fight that the former president and longtime Arkansas governor sought to underscore by noting that Lincoln’s “opponent is not her opponent.”
This is especially true given the way the whole Sestak story has played out, with the White House trying to focus everyone’s attention on President Clinton (as opposed to, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, whom they admit asked President Clinton to talk to Rep. Sestak on the administration’s behalf). I can’t imagine he appreciates the “when in doubt, blame a Clinton” approach (as Tabitha Hale put it) that the Obama administration is using here.
There’s more to the story than that, though, as Susannah of The Minority Report points out in a piece at RedState; specifically, there’s the relationship between President Clinton and Rep. Sestak. Susannah makes the case—circumstantial but compelling—that President Clinton submarined President Obama here, and that he did so deliberately. If so, this is something neither man wants to come out officially, for differing reasons, but if there’s a better explanation of President Clinton’s conduct during the PA Senate primary, I can’t think of it. And certainly, President Clinton has plenty of reason to want to bring President Obama down—not just for the way the Obama campaign treated the Clintons during the presidential primaries, but for the way the President has treated Secretary Clinton since taking office.
I do have a couple disagreements with Susannah; for one thing, I don’t think she goes far enough—if matters indeed played out as she speculates, I’m sure that President Clinton not only encouraged Rep. Sestak to stay in the primary, but that he actively encouraged Rep. Sestak to campaign on the fact that the White House had tried to buy him off. For the other, yes, James Carville has always worked for the Clintons, but I don’t think we can see their encouragement in Carville’s recent verbal defenestration of the White House, because I don’t think we need to. Carville’s a Democrat, yes, he’s a Clintonite, yes, but before either of those things, he’s a Cajun. He wasn’t speaking as a political operative there, he was speaking as a man of Louisiana, and good for him.
Now, she could be wrong, and I could be wrong, and everything could be just fine between Barack Obama and the Clintons; but given that there’s never been any evidence of that, but plenty of evidence to the contrary, given that it makes the best sense of l’affaire Sestak, and given that President Clinton seems to have come out and declared war on Barack Obama’s base—well, given all those things, at the end of the day, I don’t think we are. I will be shocked if Peter Ferrara’s recent prediction that President Obama will resign before November 2012 comes true, but as for his earlier prediction that the President won’t stand for re-election—that, I suspect, is the Clintons’ goal. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and who ends up being the last one standing. For my part, I wouldn’t bet on Barack Obama.
Steven Brill had a remarkable piece in the New York Times a couple weeks ago on the rise of the education reformers, folks like Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America; I’ve kept meaning to post on it in detail, and I just haven’t had the time to dig into it that deeply. It seems like a remarkably honest piece about the state of our educational system and the reasons for its problems, including the fact that
If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association—together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.
This, of course, creates powerful political inertia—and political inertia makes a virtue of incumbency and stifles change. There’s no question that the teachers’ unions did great things in the past, but in too many places, the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction (as pendula will usually do).
Part of that, on my observation, is that the unions are at least as much about the good of the union leadership as they are about the good of their membership. Certainly, they stand up to governments and school districts to defend their members’ incomes and benefits; but do they stand up to parents and trial lawyers to defend their members’ freedom to teach? The greatest threat to our teachers, it seems to me, is the erosion of their authority driven by our individualistic and litigious culture, and by the spineless failure of principals and other bureaucrats to back teachers who seek to assert that authority by enforcing real discipline; where are the unions in that struggle?
Brill paints a hopeful picture, but this rests on his belief that “there is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country . . . who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.” I’m not so sure about that; we’ll see when push comes to shove, I suppose. There are certainly those who are willing to push the unions a bit and go beyond the “all we need is more money” paradigm, including President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan; but to really challenge them? Well, we’ll see if Mickey Kaus can win the California Senate primary next Tuesday.
Update: I don’t know about Democratic politicians, but there’s certainly one politician in this country who’s unequivocally willing to challenge the teachers’ unions: NJ Gov. Chris Christie.
In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.
When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can’t even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he’s never going to be an outstanding player. . . .
But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn’t see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, but on a certain level he wasn’t participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.
This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. . . . In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.
I think James’ argument is well-taken, and very much applicable to the Sestak scandal. The irony of it all is that the new ethical standards that the Obama White House is now resisting, with some help from a press corps that really doesn’t much want to go after them, are the product of the Obama campaign. The people now insisting that politics as usual is “perfectly appropriate” are the same people who were telling us two years ago that we needed to vote for Sen. Obama because politics as usual is unacceptable. Maybe it was unrealistic then; it still looks bad for them now. As the Wall Street Journalsummed the matter up,
It’s possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.
Then again, George W. Bush merely exercised his right to fire a handful of U.S. Attorneys, and Democrats made that a federal case for years even though it has since gone nowhere legally. The Emanuel to Clinton to Sestak job offer still needs a scrub under oath by the Justice Department and the relevant Congressional committees.
I’ve said before that I think the greatest need in American politics is more politicians who, like Sarah Palin, are independent of the party machines, and thus willing to call out and take down their own party when it deserves it—and particularly for a Democratic equivalent to Gov. Palin. There aren’t many like that on the Republican side of the aisle (Nikki Haley, whom Gov. Palin recently endorsed for governor of South Carolina, is one notable exception; that would be why the GOP leadership down in Columbia is trying to destroy her before she wins the nomination), but if they’re thin on the ground among Republicans, they would seem to be nearly absent among Democrats. The only real figure I can find right now is blogger Mickey Kaus, currently challenging incumbent Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California. His challenge is probably doomed to fail, which is too bad; I have to agree with Jonah Goldberg:
Kaus is way too liberal for me. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be an exhilarating addition to the Senate in the grand tradition of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like Moynihan, Kaus is a fearless asker of hard and unwanted questions. He may have the single most finely attuned B.S. detector of anyone in the journalism business—or any other business.
When I pastored in Colorado, one of the best people in our congregation was an environmental engineer who specialized in groundwater. A lot of his business involved wetlands in one form or another, but he also got involved in housing construction, helping builders avoid basement water problems. I remember him pointing out one house where the basement had been sunk too deep into the ground, for a combination of reasons, putting it down into an underground stream; as a consequence, whatever that family did, they had water in their basement. Seal the outside, seal the inside, nothing they could do could permanently fix the problem, because whatever you do, water always finds its way in.
When he told me about that, my mind immediately went to politics and the whole question of campaign-finance reform—which is a joke, because the whole concept is that you can keep money out of politics. Not totally, to be sure, but that you can control the inflow—that you can limit how much of it comes in, and how, and where. A lot of well-meaning people believe this, but it’s ludicrously out of touch with reality. Laws are fixed, like concrete; money flows, like water; and just as the water will always find its way over, under, around, or through in the end, so too will money. The pressure is there behind it, pushing it in, and the demand is there for it, drawing it in, and so whatever laws you may write and whatever regulations they draw up, all they will succeed in doing is defining the cracks—or loopholes, if you prefer the term—through which the money will inevitably leak.
Want to reduce the importance of money in politics? Well, in the first place you might want to rethink that, since all that would likely accomplish is to further strengthen incumbents and further reduce turnover among our elected officials; but if you do, fine, more power to you. But doing it the brute-force, frontal-assault way isn’t going to work, because it never has. If you want to reduce the importance of money, you’re going to have to find another way. In the battle of water vs. concrete, the water wins every time.
A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,
Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.
“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.
The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.
That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.
Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.
As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”
All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.
In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or in Thailand or in former Eastern Bloc countries it would not be unheard of for union goons to show up on a man’s doorstep to intimidate the man into submitting to the thugocracy’s will. It is not supposed to happen here.
A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama told Wall Street that he, personally *he*, was all that stood between them and pitchforks. Well, Obama’s SEIU buddies decided to break out the pitchforks.
500 SEIU goons showed up on the front porch of a house belonging to a Bank of America Executive. The man’s 14 year old son was home alone and, fearing for his life, barricaded himself into a bathroom.
Here is what is so stark and troubling about this incident: the media was not invited. The SEIU brought along a Huffington Post blogger to shoot some propaganda, but otherwise the media was not invited. Why not? Because this was an act of sheer intimidation. It wasn’t a publicity stunt. Had a journalist, Nina Easton, not lived next door we may never have known this happened.
Friends, this is not supposed to happen in America. More troubling, the former head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, was Barack Obama’s most frequent visitor to the White House last year. Patrick Gaspard, the guy who was in charge of the SEIU before Stern, is now Barack Obama’s political director. Gaspard’s brother is a lobbyist for ACORN.
The SEIU spent last summer beating up conservatives at congressional town hall meetings about health care. Now the SEIU is sending busloads of goons to the front porches of bank executives to intimidate them and their families.
Two years ago, a lot of us on the Right were looking at Senator Obama and saying, “Look at who this man hangs out with, and look at how they operate”—and the response from the Left was outrage that we would try to “play politics” with something so obviously irrelevant. But as this shows, it wasn’t irrelevant. Barack Obama is a product of a political system that sees intimidation as a useful tool in its arsenal for getting its way, and he associates closely with people who think intimidation is a perfectly appropriate tactic to try to get their way; why would anyone be surprised by this? I won’t say I predicted it, but honestly, I should have.
If it isn’t surprising, though, it’s still cause for deep concern, as Erickson points out:
When it becomes fair game to attack and intimidate private citizens and their families to advance a public policy, we cross over from an orderly civil democracy to something decidedly third world.
Had these been tea parties instead of SEIU activists, this would be the front page story of the New York Times.
