Two Wasted Years

This election has been, as expected, a dramatic public rebuke to the president, his party, and the way they have spent most of their time since the 2008 election. Their two chief legislative accomplishments, the economic stimulus package in February 2009 and the ObamaCare earlier this year, were supposed to have saved the nation both economically and morally, but instead they have infuriated the nation. The $787 billion stimulus produced the Tea Party movement and ObamaCare gave Democrats a record to flee and a topic to avoid. More than half the country wants it repealed.


It's a strange way to campaign. "Vote for me. I have nothing to say."

In January, President Obama said, "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president."




If he sticks to what he thinks is good, but which a majority of the people he serves clearly doesn’t want, then, in 2012, president and people may well arrive at a mutually agreeable arrangement.

Of course, this should be an occasion for humble self-examination on the president's part. But I don't think he has it in him. He is very much like his predecessor in that regard. No self-doubt, not even where it is obviously merited.

As this dark day of doom approached, starting in January with the election of Republican Scott Brown in liberal Massachusetts to the seat ted Kennedy vacated, Obama explained this political unhappiness by his failure to explain his policies and accomplishments well enough. (That is, the voters are thick headed.) He later said that the people are just scared, and so they are not thinking rationally. (The voters frightened animals.) Those are not words of political prudence.

In January 1985, after Ronald Reagan won re-election over Walter Mondale, Joshua Muravchik wrote in Commentary, “Why the Democrats Lost.” In 1989, he followed up with “Why the Democrats Lost Again,” after George Bush beat Michael Dukakis. Then in 1993, Bill Clinton’s first big year, he completed the trilogy with “Why the Democrats Finally Won.” There is usually a good reason why the electorate, on balance, chooses one party or one candidate over another. As long as politicians and parties explain their defeats by faulting the voters, the consign themselves to political Palookaville. For Barack Obama, that may be the next stop after Washington.
For my full reflection on Obama's disasterous and obnoxious record that has put him in this position, read "Midterm Smackdown" at Worldmag.com.

Tea Party 101

This is my "Understanding the Tea Party Movement" column over at WORLDmag.com, but with some extra information thrown into the middle.

*********************

You cannot understand American politics today without understanding the Tea Party movement. Especially after Tuesday's Republican primaries, everyone from The President and the House Speaker down to the voting citizen should get a handle on it. Get it wrong, and you get everything wrong. It is a truly American movement. It is popular in origin, protective of property, rooted in the Founding, and morally serious.

The movement began as a protest against exponentially-more-than-usual runaway government spending. The Washington Post's David Montgomery traces it back to Mary Rakovich, an unemployed middle-aged automotive engineer, standing outside a Fort Myers stadium in Florida on February 10, 2009, protesting the president's $787 billion stimulus bill that he was promoting at a "town hall meeting." It was just Mary and her husband, a handful of co-belligerents, and a cooler full of water. The sun was cruel, but providence was smiling. Fox News called to invite her to be interviewed on Neil Cavuto. Similar protests began budding in other cities.

About a week later, CNBC's Rick Santelli accidentally provided the movement with a name in a rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. This got an enthusiastic response from the traders around him.

"I have an idea. The new administration's big on computers and technology. How about this, president and new administration? Why don't you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages or would we like to, at least, buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have the chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people than could carry the water instead of drink the water."

At the end of this clip, notice that Santelli refers to our nation's founders. "If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves." He claims that what the government is doing in its attempt to solve the current economic crisis is not only economically foolish, but also politically a betrayal of our founding principles.

In the middle of all this, Santelli mentions offhandedly, "We're thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July." From all that he says, it is clear that he has in mind a protest against not only the high levels of government spending by the new Obama administration, but also the counterproductivity, political infidelity, and moral injustice of it.

Michael Barone emphasizes the moral aspect of Santelli's founding document of rant in "The Transformative Power of Rick Santelli's Rant" (June 9, 2010).

A recent statement by Phillip Dennis, a Texas Tea Party leader and advisor to the National Tea Party Coalition ("Tea Party Leader: What We Want," CNN, April 16, 2010), gives some insight into what has developed in the following year.

"The federal government is addicted to spending, and the consequences are now staring us in the face." He cites two politically neutral and authoritative sources to underscore the dimensions of the crisis that has provoked the national Tea Party uprising. In July 2009, Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf described our current budgetary course as "unsustainable." On his Director's Blog, he wrote:

Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario for current law. Unless revenues increase just as rapidly, the rise in spending will produce growing budget deficits. Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to more borrowing from abroad and less domestic investment, which in turn would depress economic growth in the United States. Over time, accumulating debt would cause substantial harm to the economy.

 In April 2010, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also using the word "unsustainable."

To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.

He sees the protest as a response to “decades of irresponsible government fiscal behavior.” He does not say how many decades back he is thinking, but he echoes Ronald Reagan’s concerns when he says, “We have gone from a nation of self-sufficient producers to a nation divided between overburdened taxpaying producers and some nonproducers who exist on welfare from cradle to grave.”

But again, Dennis's focus is not simply economic. He makes reference to the Founding Fathers and constitutional principles. “America has moved away from the vision of our Founding Fathers who advocated for a nuanced balance between federal and state power. As America has drifted from constitutional values, federal power has grown.” He speaks not only as a fiscal conservative, but more importantly as a constitutional conservative.

When he moves from complaints to concrete proposals for renewal, he strikes a revolutionary (counter-revolutionary?) stance.

Federal spending must immediately be drastically slashed across the board: Abolish the useless departments of Education and Agriculture, among others; get rid of the EPA; and repeal the stimulus bill and other pork spending. These are millstones around the neck of the American taxpayer and our economy.

Send all responsibilities of these agencies back to the states where they can be better and more efficiently managed. Foreign aid and Pentagon spending must be equally constrained and reduced.

Second, the number of government jobs must be substantially cut, and those employees must return to the private sector. Overpaid bureaucrats with fat benefits and pensions not found in the real world are simply not needed. Or wanted.

Third, fraud and welfare waste must be eliminated. Welfare and unemployment benefits must be drastically cut.

Welfare, health and education services for illegal immigrants must be eliminated.

The Center for Immigration Studies recently reported that 33 percent of immigrant households use some kind of "welfare." Again, who pays? The American taxpayer!

Government must get completely out of the private sector. Market freedoms must prevail for America to be successful. Government control over our financial and insurance industries, major manufacturing, health care and energy is a sure recipe for disaster.

It would be interesting to know how much agreement each of these ideas registers among the 27% of the country that supports the Tea Party movement, according to an May Washington Post/ABC poll.

Anyone like Paul Krugman who dismisses Tea Party activists as "crazy" and an "AstroTurf" movement, i.e., a fake grass roots movement ("Tea Parties Forever," New York Times, April 12, 2009) is arguing away an incoming electoral missile and will likely soon be doing the same with his demise in the political hereafter.

The Window Is Closing for Obamaworld

In this WORLDmag.com column, I survey the major indications of growing public anger which will gush forth with electoral expression in November. I cite the Pew polls and now the New Jersey school budget elections as indications of a coming earthquake the size of which has not been seen since Atlantis went down.

**********************

"Signs of the Political End Times"

2008 was an extraordinary election campaign that culminated in the election of an extraordinary candidate. But extraordinary is a difficult beast to manage. Candidate Barack Obama was much better at achieving his historic election victory than President Barack Obama has been at managing his historic governing opportunity.

After only fifteen months in office, the popular rebellions against the president and his governing party have been multiplying. A year after Obama's election, Republican Bob McDonnell won back the previously Democratic held Governor's mansion in Virginia with 59% of the vote. One might say that Virginia goes back and forth. But at the same time, Republican Chris Christie defeated sitting Democratic Governor Jon Corzine in liberal New Jersey by four percentage points, or 100,000 votes. Then in January, the vote heard round the American political world was the election of Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's Senate seat which was assumed to be safer than safe for any Democratic candidate.

In the meantime, something called the Tea Party movement has been growing in numbers and visible activity. The original Boston Tea Party was a protest against an illegitimate tax by a far away, power usurping British Parliament. The parallel isn't neat, but it's relevant. These people are protesting not just high taxes and even higher taxes to come, but the level of power grabbing, intrusive government activity that requires those taxes. The political significance of this raging grass fire can be measured by the growing number and intensity of attacks on the movement (they're said to be racists and potential terrorists) by panicking Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media.

But popular anger goes far beyond self-identified Tea Partiers. The Pew Research Center has just released the results of polling done in March that indicates a much broader disapproval of this overwhelming Democratic government activism. "Just 22% say they can trust the government in Washington almost always or most of the time, among the lowest measures in half a century." As The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger put it, "This report isn't bad news for the Democrats. It's Armageddon" ("Democrats at the Edge of a Cliff," April 22, 2010). He calls it "the Pew blowout data."

In 1994 when the Democrats lost over 50 House seats at mid-term, the party's favorable rating was 62%, and for the Congress they controlled it was 53%. They still got killed. Now the party's favorable is 38% and Congress's approval is 25%. The Republicans' numbers are low, too, but they're not in charge. 

This week, we have further rumblings that suggest the earth is about to open up and swallow one of our two major parties in November. On Tuesday, New Jersey voters came out in large numbers to defeat 59% of proposed local school budgets. Turnout was 24% of registered voters. Last year it was only 13.4%. It hasn't exceeded 18.6% in a quarter century. Wow. Ordinarily, 70% of school budgets are approved. That's another wow. These are suburban, liberal New Jerseyites, many of whom work in New York City.

This does not mean the end of the world is coming. It's just the end of Obamaworld as we've known it since January 2009. That's why our current president and his sympathetic Congress are working so hard to remake the world as much as they can before January 2011. It may be a very different world for all of us.