Category Archives: Politics

He bowed to the Sa’udis, he bowed to the Emperor, now he bows to Wall Street

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A little over a month ago, the President stood beside Paul Volcker and announced his intention to prevent banks whose deposits are insured by the federal government from engaging in proprietary training. It wasn’t a popular move with Wall Street, and it was certainly a move that would have had downsides, but I believed (and still believe) it was a necessary one, for reasons that were laid out well by Jim Manzi of National Review:

The reason that it is dysfunctional to have an insured banking system that is free to engage in speculative investing is simple and fundamental. We (i.e., the government, which is to say, ultimately, the taxpayers) provide a guarantee to depositors that when they put their savings in a regulated bank, then the money will be there even if the bank fails, because we believe that the chaos and uncertainty of a banking system operating without this guarantee is too unstable to maintain political viability. But if you let the operators of these banks take the deposits and, in effect, put them on a long-shot bet at the horse track, and then pay themselves a billion dollars in bonuses if the horse comes in, but turn to taxpayers to pay off depositors if the horse doesn’t, guess what is going to happen? Exactly what we saw in 2008 happens. . . .

Make no mistake, many banking executives right now are benefiting from taxpayer subsidies. Even if they pay back the TARP money, the government has demonstrated that it will intervene to protect large banks. This can’t be paid back. And this implicit, but very real, guarantee represents an enormous transfer of economic value from taxpayers to any bank executives and investors who are willing to take advantage of it. Unsurprisingly, pretty much all of them are.

I gave the President a lot of credit last month for taking this step. As it turns out, that was premature of me, because he’s now caved to Wall Street, double-crossed Volcker, and abandoned the plan in favor of one amenable to J. P. Morgan and “Government Sachs” (Goldman Sachs was the second-largest donor to the Obama campaign, and J. P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is a particularly powerful and important Obama backer). I suppose his decision two weeks ago to publicly endorse the multi-million-dollar bonuses given to Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein should have been a tipoff that President Obama wasn’t going to have the spine to stand up to them and put the Volcker Rule through; after all, crony capitalists never bring the hammer down on their cronies, only on businesses that don’t support them.

As such, the President’s bold announcement last month now joins his promise that “if you like your current health insurance, you can keep it” and his pledge not to raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 a year in the dustbin of political expediency. Lesson once again: don’t take this president’s word on it until it actually happens.

Barack Obama, crony capitalist

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Score one for Bill Kristol:

Paul Krugman is, I think, right to be amazed by Obama’s embrace of the $17 million bonus given to JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

If Obama’s idea of moving to the middle politically is to embrace Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks, he’s crazy. Usually Republicans are the party of Big Business and Democrats of Big Government, and the public’s hostility to both more or less evens the politics out. But if Obama now becomes the spokesman for Big Government intrusiveness and the apologist for Big Business irresponsibility all at once—good luck with that.

Besides the political snark, though, Kristol has an important substantive point to make as well:

Doesn’t Obama realize how creepy this statement is? “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.”

This confirms the suspicion that we now live in a world of crony capitalism, where if Obama knows and thinks well of you, then you don’t get criticized—but if you’re some guy who hasn’t spent a lot of time cozying up to government leaders, then you could easily be the object of demagogic assault by politicians.

I know many folks think conservatives are pro-Big Business without any reservation, qualification, or exception, but that’s not really true; conservatism, properly speaking, is decidedly anti-crony capitalism. In fact, one of the first signs that conservatives in government are ceasing to be true conservatives in favor of becoming creatures of the Beltway is usually that they begin to favor these sorts of deals; that is, or should be, one of the warning signs for conservative voters.

One other point to note, one which Bill Kristol (being an early supporter of Sarah Palin) undoubtedly knows, is that crony capitalism has been pretty much the normal order of business in Alaska for a long time; whether the people in office were Republicans or Democrats, state policy was effectively set by a bipartisan alliance of senior elected officials and the big oil companies. Or perhaps I should say, that had been the normal order of business, until Sarah Palin was elected governor and began throwing the bums out; and what she began, her successor, Sean Parnell, has so far continued. Taking fresh air, sunlight, and a new broom to crony capitalism has been a big part of her political career so far—and it looks like that’s really what we need in DC now, too. Sounds like a ready-made opportunity for a campaign.

The partisan mindset

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Gerard Alexander, a professor in the political science department at the University of Virginia, contends that liberals have a particular problem with condescension:

American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension. . . .

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government—and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling’s 1950 remark that conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” During the 1950s and ’60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to “the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.” . . .

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid—life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?”

In Krugman’s world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people”—only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. . . .

In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters’ underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or “tea party” gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen. . . .

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety—including fear of change—whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. . . .

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant—they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking.

Where I part company with Dr. Alexander is in his statement that liberals are much worse than conservatives in this regard. That may well be true in his experience, but it isn’t in mine. Read more→

The Left on Sarah Palin: the tack changes yet again (updated)

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It’s interesting, watching liberals try to find some sort of caricature for Sarah Palin that will really stick. They’ve gone through several versions over the last year and a half, but while they’ve managed to give a lot of people a negative impression of her, they haven’t had anything like the sort of success they had in destroying George W. Bush’s public image, and she’s shown a disconcerting ability to blow their efforts away whenever she speaks in public or shows up on camera. That may be why the New York Times has elected to take a new tack: portraying Gov. Palin as a political mastermind.

It’s a remarkable tactical shift, as long as you don’t expect consistency or coherent argument. Ann Althouse, never one to suffer fools gladly (or at all, really), captured the NYT’s shift nicely: “Sarah Palin was a blithering idiot until she became a devious genius.” I feel a little sorry for the NYT, though—not much, but a little; they don’t understand Gov. Palin, because they really don’t understand this country as it exists beyond their elite bubble, and so they can’t predict what she’s going to do next because they don’t really know why she’s going to do it. As Mark Tapscott points out, her political influence and her strong core of support come from her ability to connect powerfully with the broad base of American voters who feel alienated from our government and the elite political class who control it.

That’s also, I believe, why elitist attempts to attack and dismiss Gov. Palin have had relatively little lasting effect; people who’ve only heard the elitist caricature tend to believe it, but that caricature tends not to survive comparison to the actual woman. In the end, if the Left is going to beat her, it’s going to have to do so the old-fashioned way: by accepting that she’s a respectable and serious opponent and trying to convince the voting public to choose an equally respectable and serious liberal candidate instead. The politics of personal destruction just aren’t going to work against her.

That possibility clearly worries our political and media elites—including the conservatives among them, many of whom it seems would rather lose to a liberal of their own class than help elect a conservative from the hoi polloi—because Gov. Palin is a powerfully gifted and effective politician who excels at retail politics, the kind of handshaking and baby-kissing that propelled Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate. They’re used to playing the game of politics by a certain set of rules, and she’s doing everything differently, and it seems to be working; that threatens everything they know. Andrew Malcolm, one of the very few truly indispensable political observers out there, sums it up well:

Fact is, love her or loathe her, Palin is doing everything wrong. Unless the game has changed.

That’s a possibility that should have our elites lying awake at night with cold sweats.

Update: Add the Huffington Post to the list, as Joan Williams declares,

Sarah Palin is playing chess. I don’t know what game the Administration is playing, but they just walked right into her carefully laid trap. Palin, the strategist, is amazing to watch. Her brilliance is her ability to tap in to the class conflicts that drive American politics these days. Obama, whom I have supported since Iowa, just doesn’t get it.

Rahm Emanuel and the limits of apology

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Rahm Emanuel is the latest proof that apologizing is not the same thing as actually being sorry.  Of course, he’s proved that before, since he wields his tongue with all the finesse and remorse of Conan with his sword.  Here’s Gov. Palin’s Facebook note on Emanuel’s latest verbal fusillade:

The newly-released mind-boggling, record-smashing $3,400,000,000,000 federal budget invites plenty of opportunity to debate the merits of incurring more and more debt that will drown the next generation of Americans. Never has it been possible to spend your way out of debt. So . . . let the debate begin.

Included in the debate process will be opportunities for our president to deliberate internally the wisdom of this debt explosion, along with other economic, military and social issues facing our country. Our president will discuss these important issues with Democrat leaders and those within his inner circle. I would ask the president to show decency in this process by eliminating one member of that inner circle, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, and not allow Rahm’s continued indecent tactics to cloud efforts. Yes, Rahm is known for his caustic, crude references about those with whom he disagrees, but his recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.

The Obama Administration’s Chief of Staff scolded participants, calling them, “F—ing retarded,” according to several participants, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities—and the people who love them—is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

A patriot in North Andover, Massachusetts, notified me of Rahm’s “retarded” slam. I join this gentleman, who is the father of a beautiful child born with Down Syndrome, in asking why the Special Olympics, National Down Syndrome Society and other groups condemning Rahm’s degrading scolding have been completely ignored by the White House. No comment from his boss, the president?

As my friend in North Andover says, “This isn’t about politics; it’s about decency. I am not speaking as a political figure but as a parent and as an everyday American wanting my child to grow up in a country free from mindless prejudice and discrimination, free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Mr. President, you can do better, and our country deserves better.

—Sarah Palin

Of course, we’ve heard something like this before from this administration, as the President compared his bowling to the Special Olympics (on national TV, no less); he made a couple apologies and left it behind him. Now, it appears, he’s hoping his administration will be able to do the same again. I have to say, that doesn’t sound to me at all like “Rahm blinking,” it sounds to me like Rahm Emanuel—and Barack Obama!—trying to pass the whole thing off with a pro forma apology that he didn’t even have to make in person. It’s nothing more than the political equivalent of cheap grace, cost-free pseudo-repentance, and it’s just not good enough.

It’s especially not good enough considering that were the shoe on the other foot, were this a club Rahm Emanuel could use against a political rival, he wouldn’t rest until the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on that rival’s political career. Should he be fired? That would seem to me to be out of proportion to the moral offense—though the political offense here, causing further problems for an administration that’s already struggling when to this point he’s been largely ineffective at pushing his boss’s agenda, might be enough to start the deathwatch—but either COS Emanuel or President Obama needs to do something more here than merely make an empty gesture. It’s not enough to say, “Tim Shriver forgave us,” as if that should settle it; if they want real forgiveness, they need to demonstrate real repentance, of the sort that actually costs something. After all, as I wrote after the President’s Special Olympics wisecrack,

Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.” It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter: because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see. They’re the places where the mask slips. That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.

What makes repentance? A change of heart. And at this point, it seems clear that a change of heart is exactly what’s needed here.

What do you mean, “no”?

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A colleague of mine recently made the observation that kids pass through two phases of egocentrism, once around 4-5 and once at the beginning of adolescence. He defined egocentrism as the belief that when it comes to something they want, if they can just make you understand how much they want it and how important they feel it is to them to get it, you will give it to them. If you as their parent (or other authority figure) refuse them, then, their assumption is that they must not have communicated their desire clearly enough, and so they’ll repeat it—believing that if they just repeat it enough times, you will understand and accept that you have to give them what they want because it’s that important to them. As he noted, the challenge of parenting a child in this phase is recognizing the reason behind their refusal to take “no” for an answer and not treating it as pure willful rebellion, while at the same time remaining firm in your answer.

Though this was a lesson in parenting, I have to admit, it set off political echoes in my brain as well.

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you.

“That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people”.

Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He gave only 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year (according to CBS News’ Mark Knoller). That’s more than any previous president—and maybe more than all of them put together.

What that says, exactly, I’m not sure; but it seems to me to be a parallel worth considering.

Political philosophy, article I

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I will not cede more power to the state.

I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

—William F. Buckley

Gov. Palin to President Obama: Please Try, “I’m Listening, People,” Instead of “Listen Up, People!”

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Gov. Palin’s latest Facebook note hits the nail on the head, I think:

We’ve now seen three landslide Republican victories in three states that President Obama carried in 2008. From the tea parties to the town halls to the Massachusetts Miracle, Americans have tried to make their opposition to Washington’s big government agenda loud and clear. But the President has decided that this current discontent isn’t his fault, it’s ours. He seems to think we just don’t understand what’s going on because he hasn’t had the chance—in his 411 speeches and 158 interviews last year—to adequately explain his policies to us.

Instead of sensibly telling the American people, “I’m listening,” the president is saying, “Listen up, people!” This approach is precisely the reason people are upset with Washington. Americans understand the president’s policies. We just don’t agree with them. But the president has refused to shift focus and come around to the center from the far left. Instead he and his old campaign advisers are regrouping to put a new spin on the same old agenda for 2010.

Americans aren’t looking for more political strategists. We’re looking for real leadership that listens and delivers results. The president’s former campaign adviser is now calling on supporters to “get on the same page,” but what’s on that page? He claims that the president is “resolved” to “keep fighting for” his agenda, but we’ve already seen what that government-growth agenda involves, and frankly the hype doesn’t give us much hope. Real health care reform requires a free market approach; real job creation involves incentivizing, not punishing, the job-creators; reining in the “big banks” means ending bailouts; and stopping “the undue influence of lobbyists” means not cutting deals with them behind closed doors.

Instead of real leadership, though, we’ve had broken promises and backroom deals. One of the worst: candidate Obama promised to go through the federal budget “with a scalpel,” but President Obama spent four times more than his predecessor. Want more? Candidate Obama promised that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” but President Obama gave at least a dozen former lobbyists top administration jobs. Candidate Obama promised us that we could view his health care deliberations openly and honestly on C-SPAN, but President Obama cut deals behind closed doors with industry lobbyists . Candidate Obama promised us that we would have at least five days to read all major legislation, but President Obama rushed through bills before members of Congress could even read them.

Candidate Obama promised us that his economic stimulus package would be targeted and pork-free, but President Obama signed a stimulus bill loaded with pork and goodies for corporate cronies. Candidate Obama railed against Wall Street greed, but President Obama cozied up to bankers as he extended and expanded their bailouts. Candidate Obama promised us that for “Every dollar that I’ve proposed [in spending], I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it matches.” We’re still waiting to see how President Obama will cut spending to match the trillion he’s spent.

More than anything, Americans were promised jobs, but the president’s stimulus package has failed to stem our rising unemployment rate. Maybe it was unfair to expect that an administration with so little private sector experience would understand something about job creation. How many Obama Administration officials have ever had to make a payroll or craft a business plan in the private sector? How many have had to worry about not having the resources to invest and expand? The president’s big government policies have made hiring a new employee a difficult commitment for employers to make. Ask yourself if the Obama Administration has done anything to make it easier for employers to hire. Have they given us any reassurance that the president will keep taxes low and not impose expensive new regulations?

Candidate Obama over-promised; President Obama has under-delivered. We understand you, Mr. President. We’ve listened to you again and again. We ask that you now listen to the American people.

—Sarah Palin

Political math, and how to win by not quite winning

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Amazingly, it’s only January, and some people are already speculating about whether the GOP could take back the House, and maybe even the Senate, in November. The main reason for this, of course, is Scott Brown’s stunning victory in Massachusetts running on a conservative platform. Writing for RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende has estimated that “the GOP currently has about a one-in-three chance of getting the 40 seats they need to take back the House,” and even a plausible if still very unlikely shot at retaking the Senate. His suggestion that the Republicans have a very good chance of gaining 6-7 Senate seats this fall isn’t idiosyncratic, either—liberal political/sabermetric analyst Nate Silver is saying something very similar. On balance, it would seem likely that when the dust settles in November, the Democrats will still control both houses of Congress, but barring a significant shift in their favor, their majority will probably be quite slim.

Most Republicans and Republican-leaning voters will probably be hoping for more; but from a purely cynical political point of view, they shouldn’t be. The best possible political outcome for the Republican Party would be for the Democrats to hold ~52 Senate seats (counting Joe Lieberman) and ~220 House seats. After all, what would the difference be between that and a situation in which Republicans had the exact same majorities? Probably not much in terms of legislation—but a world of difference in terms of who gets blamed for the gridlock.

In the current political climate, assuming things remain enough the same that we end up with a major Republican recovery and a closely-divided Congress, is that sort of razor-thin majority going to be able to produce significant legislation which President Obama would sign? No. But if the Republicans are in the majority, they will nevertheless be blamed by the White House and the Democratic Party as the obstructionists who are single-handedly preventing progress (conveniently forgetting the two years of Democratic supermajority that, so far, haven’t done much either); I would have to think that the chance to spend two solid years campaigning against Congress (which is unpopular no matter how you slice it) would dramatically improve the President’s chances at re-election in 2012, and spread his coattails a lot wider as well. If it’s a Democratic majority, though, then an unpopular and ineffectual Congress will only hurt his prospects, and those of the Democratic Party.

Now, as I said, this is a purely cynical analysis. Is what’s best for future Republican prospects also what’s best for the country? I really don’t know. I had hoped that the GOP would really internalize the lessons of its defeats in 2006 and 2008, enough to be humbled and chastened, before regaining power, and I really don’t see that as having happened; rather, the misplays, miscues, and mismanagement by the White House that prompted Mortimer Zuckerman to declare that the President “has done everything wrong” have handed them a shot at a political recovery that they have by no means earned. This is very worrisome to me.

Larry Kudlow is right, I think, that the GOP elite doesn’t even understand why voters are turning away from the administration and its policies—which suggests to me that if they do wind up back in the majority, they’re likely to wind up right back to the behaviors that got them wiped out in the first place. I believe, to be blunt, that that’s exactly what the Beltway GOP is hoping for. If I’m right about this, then that’s why elites on the Right continue to fight so hard against the possibility of Sarah Palin winning the 2012 nomination: she has a history of opposing exactly those sorts of behaviors in her own party, and of doing so quite successfully. If they can put an establishment type like Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani in the White House, though, I think they think they can go right back to business as usual. That might not be the worst possible outcome, but it would have to be up there.