Category Archives: Sarah Palin

The culture of death and the death of culture

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In an excellent short essay in the latest issue of The City, Baylor’s Francis J. Beckwith responds to a Washington Post column by one T. R. Reid claiming that ObamaPelosiCare would reduce the number of abortions. His evidence? There are more abortions per thousand women in the U.S. than in countries like Denmark, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Of course, the birth rate’s also quite a bit higher in the U.S. than in those countries, so his choice of statistic is more than a little disingenuous. But then, as Dr. Beckwith points out, there’s also a much deeper and more profound problem with Reid’s argument:

The prolife position is not merely about “reducing the number of abortions,” though that is certainly a consequence that all prolifers should welcome. Rather, the prolife position is the moral and political belief that all members of the human community are intrinsically valuable and thus are entitled to the protection of the laws. “Reducing the number of abortions” may happen in a regime in which this belief is denied, and that is the regime that the liberal supporters of universal health coverage want to preserve and want prolifers to help subsidize. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of the postnatal. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts by trying to pacify and accommodate the needs of those who want to procure abortions—physicians, mothers, and fathers—only reinforces the idea that the unborn are objects whose value depends exclusively on our wanting them.

A culture that has fewer abortions because its citizens have, in the words of John Lennon, “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” is a sad, dying, empty culture. Mr. Reid seems to think being prolife is just about instituting policies that result in fewer abortions. But it’s not. It’s about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one’s heritage to one’s legacy.

As Dr. Beckwith points out, that cultural emptiness—we might say, the absence of a strong pro-life impulse—has profound negative consequences:

What is going on in these nations is a shared understanding among its citizenry about the nature of its culture and its progeny: our civilization’s future and the generations required to people it are not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for each nation believes that its traditions, customs, and what remains of its faith are not worthy of being preserved, developed, and shared outside of the populace that currently occupies its borders. In practical terms, this means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans older than 55 will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly.

So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, non-voluntary, and voluntary euthanasia will certainly become the great cost containers (or as they say more candidly in Alaska, “death panels”).

That’s about it. At its heart, the pro-abortion position is a bet on power; the abortion regime is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority, the powerful abusing the powerless because they can and it suits them. Even the weakest and most powerless women are still infinitely powerful by comparison to their unborn children; and of course, many children are aborted not because women desire the abortion but because they are coerced into it by someone else, usually by the father of the child. Though there are exceptions, almost all abortions are essentially matters of convenience for somebody, driven by the unwillingness to sacrifice pleasures in the present for the sake of the future, and the refusal to allow the self to diminish so that someone else may grow.

This is malignant individualism, a cancer of the ego; and it is not only destructive of human life insofar as it drives the abortion mills, it is also destructive of human flourishing on a broader scale, because it is absolutely inimical to any sort of healthy culture. True growth depends on the willingness to sacrifice, or at least invest, the present for the sake of the future; true culture, healthy culture, arises out of love of life and openness to life, even when that love and that openness carry with them a real cost. To choose abortion is to choose the opposite: rather than choosing life at the cost of one’s convenience, comfort and pleasures, it is to choose death for the sake of protecting one’s pleasures, convenience and comfort. That may be pleasing in the short term, but in the long term, no good can come of it.

Watching the storm roll in

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There has been a lot written trying to project the outcome of this fall’s elections—a task which, as the inestimable Jay Cost has noted, is a lot harder than some people seem to think; but even Cost, who has said his answer to that is “I really don’t know,” opens his latest post by quoting Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain.” Following a list of the troubles career politicians have been having this year, he writes,

This is the thunder on the mountain, the early warning that something bad is about to blow through the District of Columbia. I don’t think there’s anything anybody there can do about it. The people have a limited role in this government—but where the people do possess power, they are like a force of nature. They cannot be stopped.

His colleague at RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende, mapped out the November landscape as it looks from here and concluded,

I think those who suggest that the House is barely in play, or that we are a long way from a 1994-style scenario are missing the mark. A 1994-style scenario is probably the most likely outcome at this point. Moreover, it is well within the realm of possibility—not merely a far-fetched scenario—that Democratic losses could climb into the 80 or 90-seat range. The Democrats are sailing into a perfect storm of factors influencing a midterm election, and if the situation declines for them in the ensuing months, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Democratic losses eclipse 100 seats.

Though Cost is right about the difficulty of prediction in this environment, because we really don’t have anything like good comparables on which to base a meaningful prediction, Trende lays out a compelling argument for his position. Of particular interest is this, from the end of his piece:

The problem for the Democrats is that these voters are packed into a relatively few states and Congressional districts nationwide, diluting their vote share. This is why the median Congressional district is an R+2 district. Thus, the President could have a relatively healthy overall approval rating, but still be fairly unpopular in swing states and districts. The increased enthusiasm that Obama generated among minorities, the young and the liberal is useful, but only if it is realized in conjunction with Democratic approval in a few other categories.

President Obama’s policy choices to date are wreaking havoc on the brand that Democrats cultivated carefully over the past twenty years. Bill Clinton worked long and hard to make it so that voters could say “fiscal conservative” and “Democrat” in the same sentence, but voters are finding it difficult to say that again.

If brand damage is truly seeping over into Congressional races—and the polling suggests it is—then the Democrats are in very, very deep trouble this election. There is a very real risk that they could be left with nothing more than Obama’s base among young, liberal, and minority voters, which is packed into relatively few Congressional districts. It would be the Dukakis map transformed onto the Congressional level, minus the support in Appalachia. That would surely result in the Democratic caucus suffering huge losses, and in turn produce historic gains for the GOP this November.

Now, anyone who’s read much of anything I’ve written on politics has probably figured out that I’m a pretty conservative sort when it comes to politics; so you might think I’d be rubbing my hands with glee at this prospect. You’d be wrong. In fact, I have significant misgivings about it. To understand why, go back to Cost; after predicting a popular revolt at the voting booth this fall, he says,

That’s bad news for the establishment this year. They’re going to wake up on the morning of November 3rd and be reminded of who is actually in charge of this country.

Democrats will be hit much, much harder than Republicans. Even so, it would be a huge mistake to interpret the coming rebuke through a strictly ideological or partisan lens. Yet predictably, that’s what many will do. Republicans will see this as a historic rejection of Barack Obama’s liberalism, just as they saw the 1994 revolution as a censure of Bill Clinton, and just as Democrats saw 2006 and 2008 as admonishments of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. These interpretations are only half right. When the people are angry at the way the government is being managed, and they are casting about for change, their only option is the minority party. The partisans of the minority are quick to interpret this as their holy invitation to the promised land, but that’s not what it really is about. They were only given the promotion because the people had no other choice.

The entire political class needs to understand that the coming events transcend ideology and partisanship. The electoral wave of 2010 will have been preceded by the waves of 2006 and 2008. That will make three electoral waves in a row, affecting both parties and conservative and liberal politicians alike. The American people are sending the establishment a message: we’re angry at the way you are running our government; fix it or you’ll be next to go.

That’s right on, and I don’t think the GOP establishment (or at least most of them) get this. I don’t think they get it because I don’t think they want to. Let’s be blunt here: the Republican Party absolutely deserved the electoral repudiation it got in 2006 and 2008, and maybe even worse than it got. It deserved it because it had abandoned its principles, its philosophy, its ethics, and its commitments, in favor of enjoying power and the fruits that attend thereunto; the hard slap in the face from the voters was well-earned, and should have come as a real wakeup call. I’m not at all convinced it has. As I wrote a few months ago,

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. . . . 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.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on that. If 2010 does turn out to be another “wave” election, it will sweep back into (some) power a GOP establishment that’s likely to go right back to carrying on the way they were doing before the voters turned them out. What we need here is not change between the parties, but change within the parties; we’ll likely continue to see power bouncing back and forth between them until we get that, or until something else happens and the current system breaks down.

This in a nutshell is the biggest single reason I support Gov. Palin: she isn’t a part of the machine, and she has a solid history of opposing business as usual in our political system, in her own party no less than in the other one. I applaud her for working to build up and support candidates who similarly are not creatures of or beholden to the political machine, and I devoutly hope she’s correctly picking people who have the character, gumption and understanding to continue to stand against that machine and against business as usual. We need her; we need more people like her in politics—on the liberal side of the aisle no less than on the conservative. Indeed, it may well be that there is no greater need in American politics right now than a Democratic Party equivalent to Sarah Palin. Without more folks like that, the storm that’s coming may ultimately sweep away more than just several dozen political careers that will never be missed.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

The Golden State in the spotlight

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One of the most interesting stories in politics right now has to be the California Senate race. On the Republican side, Sarah Palin has once again shown her unpredictable streak by endorsing, not the favorite of movement conservatives, California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, but former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, who is tainted in the eyes of many conservatives by her association with John McCain. Gov. Palin’s endorsement surprised and irritated a number of folks on the Right, but she has good reasons for it:

I’d like to tell you about a Commonsense Conservative running for office in California this year. She grew up in a modest home with a school teacher dad, worked her way through several colleges, and then entered an arena where few women had tread. Through a combination of hard work, perseverance, and common sense, she proved the naysayers wrong to reach the top of her field, where she led with distinction—facing hard truths, making tough decisions, and showing real leadership through a rocky transition period. Where others had failed, her company had weathered the storm and settled on a stronger new foundation. . . .

Carly is the Commonsense Conservative that California needs and our country could sure use in these trying times. Most importantly, she’s running for the right reasons. She has an understanding that is sorely lacking in D.C. She’s not a career politician. She’s a businesswoman who has run a major corporation. She knows how to really incentivize job creation. Her fiscal conservatism is rooted in real life experience. She knows that when government grows, the private sector shrinks under the burden of debt and deficits. We can trust Carly to do the right thing for America’s economy and to make the principled decisions she has throughout her professional career.

Part of this is that, at least in Gov. Palin’s view, Fiorina is more conservative than conservatives are giving her credit for; and part of it is the calculation that Fiorina has the best shot against Barbara Boxer. But part of it as well is clearly that Gov. Palin values Fiorina’s business expertise and the fact that she’s not an insider to government (though, having been a high-level CEO, she certainly has some D.C. experience and connections), and on that I think she has a point which other Republicans would do well to consider. (But then, I’ve always thought Fiorina was the best candidate in that primary, even with the demon sheep ad.)

On the Democratic side, meanwhile, we have blogger Mickey Kaus mounting a primary challenge to Sen. Boxer (as a “common sense Democrat,” no less; the Left may bash Gov. Palin, but her language has resonance)—and one of his big issues is the unquestioned and unquestioning commitment of the Democratic Party to Big Labor. As he wrote in the Los Angeles Times,

Do you have to love labor unions to be a good Democrat? That was the question raised last year by the unpopular bailouts of unionized Detroit automakers. It’s been raised again this year by California’s budget crisis, created at least in part by generous pensions for unionized public employees. I think the answer is no. It’s time for Democrats, even liberal Democrats, to start looking at unions and unionism with deep skepticism. . . .

Keep in mind that Detroit’s union, the United Auto Workers, is one of our best. It’s democratic. It’s not corrupt. Its leadership has often been visionary. Yet working within our archaic union system, it still helped bring our greatest industry to its knees. And the taxpayers were stuck with the bill for bailing it out, while UAW members didn’t even take a cut of $1 an hour in their $28-an-hour basic pay. How many Californians would like $27-an-hour manufacturing jobs? Actually, there was a good auto factory in California, the NUMMI plant in Fremont. It got sucked under when GM went broke. Those 4,500 jobs are gone.

Yet the answer of most union leaders to the failure of 1950s unionism has been more 1950s unionism. This isn’t how we’re going to get prosperity back. But it’s the official Democratic Party dogma. No dissent allowed.

Government unions are even more problematic (and as private sector unions have failed in the marketplace, government unions are increasingly dominant). If there are limits on what private unions can demand—when they win too much, as we’ve seen, their employers tend to disappear—there is no such limit on what government unions can demand. They just have to get the politicians to raise your taxes to pay for it, and by funding the Democratic machine they acquire just the politicians they need. . . .

We need nonretired Democrats who tell the unions no. Or else, perhaps after more bankruptcies and bailouts, Republicans will do it for them.

It will be interesting to see if Kaus gets any traction, or if his message actually bears fruit. I tend to think the answer on both counts will be “no,” and that his warning will go unheeded—but you never know.

On a side note, Kaus follows Fred Barnes with an interesting and disturbing comment on the possible consequences of a Republican victory in November:

Fred Barnes raises the possibility of a “mad duck” Congress, in which Democrats lose their majorities and their soon-to-be-ex Congressmen reconvene in December to pass all the most controversial parts of the Democratic agenda, including an immigration bill and a VAT, before they lose power. … It seems implausible and paranoid, but how, exactly, could it be stopped? … The new laws would be hard to repeal while Obama is in office—if they could ever be repealed. (Once you legalize illegal immigrants, can you re-illegalize them again? I doubt it. The change seems irreversible.) … The only sure solution to Mad Duckism that I can see is for the Republicans to not win too big, leaving at least a substantial number of Dems with something left to lose.

That’s a precedent I hope we don’t see set.

Identity politics and the liberal fear of Sarah Palin

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Contempt and disdain for Sarah Palin, sometimes hysterical and violent, is practically a commonplace on the Left in this country right now. There are those on the Right who believe that contempt to be faked, a matter of political calculation, but I don’t think so; I tend to believe it’s truly felt, however unjustified I’m certain it is. I don’t see the evidence in the record to support it, but that’s because I don’t begin with the presupposition that conservative ideas are stupid; it’s also because I have no desire to believe her stupid, incompetent, malignant, a lightweight, etc., where many liberals clearly do.

The question is, though, if the Left honestly believes Gov. Palin is not to be taken seriously—which isn’t a unanimous opinion, but I do sense is held by the majority—why do they keep leveling every gun they can bring to bear on her? Part of that is probably contempt for the voting public, something akin to what we recently saw out of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; after all, from the liberal point of view, if a majority of American voters actually chose to elect George W. Bush, there’s no telling what hyperbolically moronic thing we might choose to do next. Even if she really is as bad as they’re trying to tell us, we might go and vote her in anyway.

I think there’s something else going on here, though, which sits a good deal more uneasily with liberal consciences, to say nothing of liberal political analysis. When Barack Obama won in November 2008, a good chunk of his appeal could be boiled down to identity politics: “Vote for me because I’m black.” It wasn’t simply an appeal to “racial”* minorities, though—this was also a good chunk of his appeal to white swing voters, breaking down into two related appeals. One was “Vote for me to help make history by electing America’s first black president.” The desire to see history happen, and to help make it happen, is powerful even in a vacuum; that’s why if you go to a baseball game and the visiting pitcher has a perfect game going through five, six, seven innings, you’ll find an awful lot of the home fans start cheering him on, hoping to see him pull it off. After all, there’s another chance for a win tomorrow, but to see a perfect game . . . who knows if you’ll ever have another shot? But of course, Sen. Obama’s win wasn’t in a vacuum, it was in the context of the long indignity of white-black relations in this country, and the history he made truly was profound.

The other element in play here, of course, was “Vote for me and prove you’re not a racist”; as many people observed, Sen. Obama offered himself in a very real sense as the answer to white guilt over slavery, Jim Crow, and “racial” inequality, and as the hope for a post-racial politics in this country. It hasn’t panned out that way, but that was part of his promise and part of his appeal; in voting for a black President, white folks could do something constructive about the ills that have been done to black folks in this country.

In 2012, however, that appeal is gone. The history is already made; it can’t be made again. America has already proven it will elect a black President. A great many swing voters have already proven to themselves that they are perfectly willing to vote for a black President; if they decide to vote for someone other than President Obama, no one can reasonably say it must be because they’re racists. That’s gone, and it can’t be brought back; it may be propped up a bit, but “re-elect” just isn’t as resonant as “elect”—and if you try to tell swing voters that once wasn’t good enough, they have to vote for him again to really prove they aren’t racists and their country isn’t racist, you risk making them very angry.

That said, even the echo of the appeal to history and identity politics may have some resonance, depending on whom the Republicans run against the President. If it’s another white guy—Pawlenty, Romney, Daniels, doesn’t much matter—then you can refashion it a bit as the Republicans wanting to turn back the clock, or something; sure, independents have already voted for a black President once, but isn’t that still more heroic than just another pasty GOP dude? Of course, Bobby Jindal could always decide to run, and he could win the nomination, and yeah, he’s a minority . . . but Indians and other South Asians just aren’t that big a presence in US identity politics, and their history in this country lacks moments like Selma and figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Jindal’s a minority, but not in a way that’s politically resonant (especially since he converted from Hinduism to a very American form of Christianity). His nomination would defang the “Republicans = racists” meme to some extent, but the Left could always claim that the GOP only nominated him because he’s not really black.

But if Sarah Palin (or, for that matter, Michele Bachmann or Liz Cheney) were to win the nomination . . . now that’s a kettle of fish of a different color. Now, all of a sudden, the appeal to history, identity politics, and guilt is powerfully back in play—but on the wrong side (from the Left’s perspective). All of a sudden, you have a candidate who can stand up and say, “Vote for me to help make history by electing America’s first female president”; you have a candidate who can go on TV and say, “Vote for me and prove you’re not a sexist.” The former would probably make some on the Right cringe a little, but far more would cheer her on; as for the latter, while I don’t see any conservative female candidate actually being so gauche as to say such a thing, she wouldn’t have to. Indeed, Gov. Palin could fire off volley after volley against the “old boys’ network” in Chicago and DC, and point out quite accurately that President Obama is a creature of those networks and has surrounded himself with their members; the principal point would be the true and important one that he’s just another machine politician doing politics as usual, but the undercurrent would have its effect.

Do I believe that Gov. Palin would consciously ask people to vote for her because she’s a woman? No, certainly not to the extent that Sen. Obama consciously used his skin color to political advantage; but her gender would be to significant political advantage nevertheless, just as his skin color was, and in ways that would really undermine the political foundations of his 2008 victory. This is particularly true given that, while there was no fair basis for calling John McCain a racist, one can make a pretty good argument that Barack Obama is a sexist, or at least that some of his closest advisors are. After all, just look at the way his campaign treated Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Look at the way they treated Sarah Palin during the general election. Look at the language they used, over and over again, and at the ways they depicted their female opponents. If President Obama ends up having to run against a woman for re-election, charges of sexism could get real traction with independents—and even some moderate liberals—and that could really hurt him.

In short, I believe the reason liberals have been hitting Gov. Palin with everything including the kitchen sink ever since her appearance on the national stage is that they think of things, and the current administration certainly thinks of things, in terms of identity politics—something conservatives are far less prone to do—and are used to using identity politics in their favor (as they’re trying to do again with the latest round of accusations of racism); but if the GOP nominates a strong conservative female candidate for the White House, those identity politics will rebound on them in a big way, and pose a definite political threat. That, I think, is the biggest reason for the Left’s anti-Palin hysteria: if she wins the GOP nomination, she’ll turn their ace in the hole into a low club.To which I say, good on her.

*The whole use of the word “race” to categorize people by skin color and continent of ancestral origin really galls me. IMHO, there’s only one “race,” and that’s the human race. Anything else is majoring in the minors.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin).

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 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.

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.

Mr. Brown Goes to Washington

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Not an original line, I know, but too perfect anyway. For the first time since 1972, Massachusetts has elected a Republican to the Senate—and pretty convincingly; the seat had had Edward M. Kennedy’s name engraved on it since the 1960s, but a formerly-little-known state senator named Scott Brown knocked off his designated Democratic successor, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, by a decisive margin (52.3%-46.7% with 92% of precincts reporting). Sarah Palin’s Facebook note nails it, I think:

Congratulations to the new Senator-elect from Massachusetts! Scott Brown’s victory proves that the desire for real solutions transcends notions of “blue state” and “red state”. Americans agree that we need to hold our politicians accountable and bring common sense to D.C.

Recent elections have taught us that when a party in power loses its way, the American people will hold them accountable at the ballot box. Today under the Democrats, government spending is up nearly 23 percent and unemployment is higher than it’s been in a quarter of a century. For the past year they’ve built a record of broken promises, fat cat bailouts, closed-door meetings with lobbyists, sweetheart deals for corporate cronies, and midnight votes on weekends for major legislation that wasn’t even read. The good citizens of Massachusetts reminded Democrats not to take them for granted.

Americans cheered for Scott Brown’s underdog campaign because they viewed his candidacy as a vote against the Democrats’ health care bill. You know that there’s something wrong with this legislation when opposition to it inspired a Republican victory in a state that currently has no Republicans in Congress and last sent a Republican to the Senate nearly 40 years ago.

Clearly this victory is a bellwether for the big election night ten months from now. In the spirit of bipartisanship, let me offer some advice to the Democrats on how to stem this populist tide. Scrap your current health care bill and start from scratch. We all want true reform, but government mandated insurance is not it. Scott Brown campaigned against this top-down bureaucratic mess. We need common sense solutions like reforming malpractice laws, allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines, giving individual purchasers the same tax benefits as those who get coverage through their employers, and letting small businesses pool together to provide insurance for their employees. Focus your efforts on jobs, not on job-killing legislation. Such a change in approach would show Americans that you’re listening.

My best wishes to Senator-Elect Brown. When you go to Washington, may you never forget the ordinary citizens you met while driving that truck through the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

—Sarah Palin

Does this mean that Massachusetts has suddenly gone conservative? Not likely, though Brown ran a pretty conservative campaign, running against big government and ObamaPelosiCare; as Jay Cost has said, voter revolts of this sort are less about the agenda of the opposition party and more about voters looking for an alternative to the party in power. To quote Cost,

When the country is angry about the state of the union, and it feels that it’s time for a change, it will vote for the opposition party as a “protest vehicle.” Why? Because in our two-party system there is no place else for the people to go. They might not like the opposition, but it is a choice between them and the status quo. . . .

If it’s a choice between the status quo and an opposition party that has disappointed in the past, sometimes circumstances demand the opposition. Historically speaking, that’s simply a true statement. There have been multiple periods in our country’s history when the people have swung back and forth between the parties, casting about for somebody—anybody—who could manage public affairs competently. The most violent swings came in the 1880s-1890s as the country struggled through the latter phases of the industrial revolution, but we saw a more recent one in 1974-1982. In both periods, neither side had given the people much reason for confidence, but that did not stop them from using both as “protest vehicles.”

What this election says about Sen.-elect Brown’s ability to hold the seat when the term expires in 2012 is, honestly, not all that much; if 2010 and 2012 play out for the GOP like 2006 and 2008 did for the Democrats, he’ll probably win re-election, but under normal circumstances, there’s no way he wins election from Massachusetts. For now, though, Scott Brown is playing Paul Revere, heralding a backlash against the Democratic Party and the way they’ve been governing since returning to power.

The interesting thing will be to see if the White House and the party establishment take that seriously and make substantive changes in the way they’ve been doing business. So far, it doesn’t look like it; from their public comments, they seem determined to blame the defeat all on Coakley, and to refuse to consider the possibility that the President has lost his mojo. If their public face accurately reflects their private perceptions, November could indeed be a bloodbath for the Democrats, because their top leadership won’t take the threat seriously until it’s too late.

The risk for them is especially great given that Barack Obama went up to campaign for Coakley—the White House had initially decided that he wouldn’t unless she was likely to win, in order to protect the President’s political prestige; when he went up and gave a speech for her, lackluster though it may have been, he upped the ante. With her defeat, his image and credibility have taken a hit. If he and his advisors don’t accept that fact, it’s going to skew their perceptions of what they can accomplish politically, and how. That will only worsen the odds for Democratic candidates this fall.

All of which is to say, Scott Brown has proven himself a very impressive politician, and may well have a bright future despite being a Republican from Massachusetts; but he’s less interesting for himself than for what he represents, and what his election may portend.