Barack Obama, Manichaeus, and the Pharisees

President Obama’s Rolling Stone interview is deeply troubling to me, for reasons that Commentary’s Peter Wehner captures quite well. As Wehner says, Rolling Stone

paints a portrait of a president under siege and lashing out.

For example, the Tea Party is, according to Obama, the tool of “very powerful, special-interest lobbies”—except for those in the Tea Party whose motivations are “a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president.”

Fox News, the president informs us, “is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

Then there are the Republicans, who don’t oppose Obama on philosophical grounds but decided they were “better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve problems.” Now there are exceptions—those two or three GOPers who Obama has been able to “pick off” and, by virtue of supporting Obama, “wanted to do the right thing”—meaning that the rest of the GOP wants to do the wrong thing.

What really bothers me here isn’t the irony (which Wehner notes) of this kind of calumny coming from a man who promised our country, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.” What bothers me is the blind, unshakeable conviction that anyone who disagrees with him must be doing so for nefarious motives. It simply isn’t possible, in his worldview as he presents it, that anyone could disagree with him for reasons which are as honorable and as sincerely concerned with the good of our nation as his own; no, anyone who opposes him must be by virtue of that fact evil, incompetent, a deluded tool of dark forces, or some combination thereof.

Wehner goes on from this point to argue that “President Obama is a man of unusual vanity and self-regard,” and that people close to him need to stage an intervention before things get out of hand. That may be true or it may not be—I’m a preacher, not a telepathic shrink, so I won’t claim to know. But as a preacher, I am at least somewhat trained as a diagnostician of human sin, and I will say that one thing I think I see here is an awful lot of self-righteousness, to a degree that looks a lot like Jesus’ enemies among the Pharisees. It’s a degree of arrogant certainty about one’s own rightness and rectitude that leaves no room for the concept of honest differences of opinion; any disagreement or opposition has to be malignant, is perceived as personal, and thus must be destroyed.

Now, I hasten to add, this is by no means unique to the President, or to liberals; rather, to my way of thinking, this kind of Manichaean self-righteousness is the great blight in American political discourse these days, at every point on the spectrum of beliefs. Among the prominent voices, I think it’s more prevalent on the left, but that’s not much more than comparing pot and kettle either way, and certainly I’ve heard some ugly comments of this nature from conservative friends, relatives, and acquaintances. But still, to have this kind of language coming from our nation’s chief executive is an order of magnitude worse than to hear it even from prominent figures in the media and culture. When Candidate Obama said we needed to get beyond the ugly partisan spirit in our politics, this was the root of the problem at which he was pointing; to have President Obama exacerbating it instead of seeking to make it better is deeply dispiriting.

Update: Jay Cost has a great piece on this on the Weekly Standard website this morning; he makes the argument, I think correctly, that this is really the first time Barack Obama has actually had to deal in any meaningful way with actual conservatives. On that analysis, what we’re seeing is a reaction driven by disappointment (and fury?) that conservatives are not in fact proto-liberals who just need the right presentation to convince them. It’s rather like Martin Luther’s reaction when he realized that the Jews were Jews because they believed in Judaism, not because the Roman church had done such a bad job in presenting Christianity.

"What did the President know and when did he know it?"

That was the question posed by Fred Dalton Thompson, minority counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, and asked by his boss Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking minority member of that committee, that some say ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It may be a question that now needs to be asked, in earnest, of President Barack Obama with regard to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. According to columnist Kevin McCullough,

It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.

In fact, according to documents in the administration's possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February.

Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig's fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, "They damn near blew up the rig."

It's also now being reported that BP was asking for the administration's help on this matter long before the deadly accident and the now gushing well of tar.

If this is true, then the administration's inaction—because they were unwilling to take their focus off getting ObamaPelosiCare passed?—was reprehensible. What did the President know, and when did he know it? It's easy to see why he's taking the "I was as surprised as you were" tack, telling us he accepted the assurances of others that nothing would go wrong; but if he truly, honestly didn't know about this—why not, and what does that say about his administration?

Can he yodel?

I've been thinking about the President's Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:

That wasn't surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was:

Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he's less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his "Top of the Ticket" blog:

What President Obama should have done about the BP spill

It's probably too late now, but this administration that's so fond of appointing "czars" for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:

Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

Umm . . . about those “death panels” . . .

The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare's shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,

an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).

“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”

Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.

Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .

With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.

To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”

And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?

Is a Clinton-Obama war brewing?

This from Politico makes me wonder:

Former President Bill Clinton returned to his home state Friday to help a beleaguered ally and delivered a broadside against some of the most powerful interests in the Democratic Party.

Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.

He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.

“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here.

Clinton didn’t mention Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s name—the lieutenant governor worked in the former president’s administration—or single out any specific liberal groups. But he didn’t need to.

Halter, who held the incumbent to under 50 percent in the May 18 primary election, has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in advertising from liberal groups and unions angry with Lincoln over her hesitance to support labor organizing legislation and ties to the business community.

It’s a clash that pits the ascendant forces of the progressive left against a centrist Southern Democrat cut from Clinton’s own Democratic Leadership Council mold, a proxy fight that the former president and longtime Arkansas governor sought to underscore by noting that Lincoln’s “opponent is not her opponent.”

This is especially true given the way the whole Sestak story has played out, with the White House trying to focus everyone’s attention on President Clinton (as opposed to, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, whom they admit asked President Clinton to talk to Rep. Sestak on the administration’s behalf). I can’t imagine he appreciates the “when in doubt, blame a Clinton” approach (as Tabitha Hale put it) that the Obama administration is using here.

There’s more to the story than that, though, as Susannah of The Minority Report points out in a piece at RedState; specifically, there’s the relationship between President Clinton and Rep. Sestak. Susannah makes the case—circumstantial but compelling—that President Clinton submarined President Obama here, and that he did so deliberately. If so, this is something neither man wants to come out officially, for differing reasons, but if there’s a better explanation of President Clinton’s conduct during the PA Senate primary, I can’t think of it. And certainly, President Clinton has plenty of reason to want to bring President Obama down—not just for the way the Obama campaign treated the Clintons during the presidential primaries, but for the way the President has treated Secretary Clinton since taking office.

I do have a couple disagreements with Susannah; for one thing, I don’t think she goes far enough—if matters indeed played out as she speculates, I’m sure that President Clinton not only encouraged Rep. Sestak to stay in the primary, but that he actively encouraged Rep. Sestak to campaign on the fact that the White House had tried to buy him off. For the other, yes, James Carville has always worked for the Clintons, but I don’t think we can see their encouragement in Carville’s recent verbal defenestration of the White House, because I don’t think we need to. Carville’s a Democrat, yes, he’s a Clintonite, yes, but before either of those things, he’s a Cajun. He wasn’t speaking as a political operative there, he was speaking as a man of Louisiana, and good for him.

Now, she could be wrong, and I could be wrong, and everything could be just fine between Barack Obama and the Clintons; but given that there’s never been any evidence of that, but plenty of evidence to the contrary, given that it makes the best sense of l’affaire Sestak, and given that President Clinton seems to have come out and declared war on Barack Obama’s base—well, given all those things, at the end of the day, I don’t think we are. I will be shocked if Peter Ferrara’s recent prediction that President Obama will resign before November 2012 comes true, but as for his earlier prediction that the President won’t stand for re-election—that, I suspect, is the Clintons’ goal. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and who ends up being the last one standing. For my part, I wouldn’t bet on Barack Obama.

Identity politics and the liberal fear of Sarah Palin

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).

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

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

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.

What do you mean, "no"?

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.

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

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

A good call from the President

I'd meant to post on this yesterday, but didn't get the chance. The devil is in the details, as always, but the core idea here is right and important:

With former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker at his side, Mr. Obama said he wanted to toughen existing limits on the size of financial firms and force them to choose between the protection of the government's safety net and the often-lucrative business of trading for their own accounts or owning hedge funds or private-equity funds. . . .

"The key issue is that institutions that are getting a backstop from the taxpayer shouldn't be able to make a profit off their own investing," said Austan Goolsbee, a White House economist who staffs the presidential advisory board Mr. Volcker chairs. . . .

Under the Obama proposal, banks that take federally insured deposits or have the right to borrow from the Fed would be prohibited from owning, investing in or sponsoring hedge funds or private-equity firms. "You can choose to engage in proprietary trading, or you can own a bank, but you can't do both," an administration official said.

The reason for taking this step was articulated well by National Review's Jim Manzi:

Finance professionals, like members of all occupational categories, attempt to build barriers that maintain their own income. One of the techniques used is to shroud what are often pretty basic ideas in pseudo-technical jargon. 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.

If you want to have a safe, secure banking system for small depositors, but don’t want to make risky investing illegal (which would be very damaging to the economy), the obvious solution is to not allow any one company to both take guaranteed deposits and also make speculative investments. This was the solution developed and implemented in the New Deal. We need a modernized version of this basic construct, and as far as I can see, this is what President Obama has proposed. . . .

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.

Now, as Megan McArdle points out, there's a lot that we don't know that will bear very heavily on whether this policy ultimately benefits our country—and even assuming it's the right thing to do, there will be distinct and significant downsides to it. Nevertheless, the government has to reduce its exposure somehow, and this seems to be the most reasonable way to do it.

The government is recognizing that banks "paying back" the funds they were given is essentially meaningless, because they've still got a very, very valuable implied government guarantee. One could argue that they've had it since 1991 when the Federal Reserve got the power to loan money to investment banks in extremis. But since last fall, it's the next best thing to explicit. That means the government needs to take steps to mitigate its own risk.

The way you do that is to decouple the key operation the government insures—the funneling of credit from those with money to those who want to borrow it—from making bets on market outcomes that can go badly wrong. And to ensure that no institution has enough liabilities to take down the system if it fails.

It may not work, as she acknowledges, and it won't be without significant cost; but we can't unring the bailout bell, so what else are we going to do?

Mr. Brown Goes to Washington

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.

Diminishing returns on the Obama foreign policy

As a presidential candidate, Sen. Obama was firmly convinced (and convinced a lot of people) that the reason for America's unpopularity in some parts of the world was George W. Bush and his conservative policies. A vote for Obama, we were assured, would make the world like America again.

Roughly eleven months on from his inauguration, the bloom is well and truly off that rose, at least in the Arab/Muslim world.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again. . . .

In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

There are various reasons for this. One, which Fouad Ajami notes, is that anti-Americanism in that part of the world is useful—perhaps, indeed, psychologically necessary—as an alibi for the political and economic failures of those nations and a pressure release for the tensions and frustrations created by their autocratic, self-interested governments; having someone to blame for all that is far too valuable to be let go in return for a few pretty speeches.

As well, Ajami explains, the President's confidence that he could make everything better by apologizing for America to everyone in sight betrayed a fundamental failure to understand Arab culture.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

It also didn't help that in Iran, when the President was offered the choice between standing with the Iranian people protesting their oppression or standing with the anti-American religious tyrants who oppress them, he chose the tyrants. That, one suspects, will not be soon forgotten, and it's impossible to know what the long-term effects might be.

Some might be surprised that President Obama's approach to foreign policy is not yielding the promised results; but students of history shouldn't be. How many horror movies do you have to watch before you learn to expect that the pretty cheerleader going alone into the dark house on a stormy night is going to end up dead? I don't even watch horror movies, and I can see that one coming. This administration's foreign policy is just a remake of a movie we've seen before; it debuted roughly 33 years ago, it was called Carter, and as Bret Stephens pointed out a couple weeks ago, it didn't end well then, either.

An idealistic president takes office promising an era of American moral renewal at home and abroad. The effort includes a focus on diplomacy and peace-making, an aversion to the use of force, the selling out of old allies. The result is that within a couple of years the U.S. is more suspected, detested and enfeebled than ever.

No, we're not talking about Barack Obama. But since the current administration took office offering roughly the same prescriptions as Jimmy Carter did, it's worth recalling how that worked out.

Stephens explicates this through an examination of the 1979 battle over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, an incident remembered little (if at all) in this country, and its aftermath—an aftermath we're still dealing with today.

Among Muslims inclined to favor the U.S., the Carter administration's instincts for knee-jerk conciliation and panicky withdrawals only had the effect of alienating them from their ostensible protector. Coming as it did so soon after Khomeini's rise to power and the revolutionary fervors which it unleashed, the siege of Mecca carried the real risk of undermining pro-American regimes throughout the region. Yet American embassies were repeatedly instructed not to use their Marines to defend against intruders, as well as to pull their personnel from the country.

"The move didn't go unnoticed among Muslim radicals," notes Mr. Trofimov. "A chain of events unleashed by the takeover in Mecca had put America on the run from the lands of Islam. America's foes drew a conclusion that Osama bin Laden would often repeat: when hit hard, America flees, 'dragging its tail in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.'" It is no accident, too, that the Soviet Union chose to invade Afghanistan the following month, as it observed a vacillating president who would not defend what previously were thought to be inviolable U.S. strategic interests.

Here's hoping that if and when America faces another such incident in the Muslim world, that the administration has the courage, will and wit to react in defense of American interests and allies, rather than to follow the Carter path of trying to be as inoffensive as possible. I am not, however, optimistic.

Reflections on the revolution in Berlin

I’m still feeling awful, but a distinctly better shade of awful than I’ve been the last two days; my sincere thanks for all the good wishes, and I can at least say that I'm heading in the right direction. I still haven’t been up from the horizontal much today, but I had to stop and take note of the anniversary of the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my lifetime so far. From the celebration around the inaugural this past January, I get the feeling that many in this country would put Barack Obama’s election in that slot, but for me, nothing yet tops the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The Wall didn’t all physically come down on that day twenty years ago, of course, but psychologically, that was the day East Germans forced their way through. It was an amazing victory for the forces of democracy over the forces of tyranny, and a vindication of Ronald Reagan’s belief that the Eastern Bloc could in fact be beaten, and was not simply a fact of life which must be accommodated. It may have been the greatest triumph for human rights that the world has seen in the last half century; I can’t say for sure, but I'm not thinking of anything to top it at the moment.

It was of course a victory won by many; in the West, as John O’Sullivan pointed out, President Reagan was in fact the last of the three great leaders in the fight, joining Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. I think, though, that the psychological moment was President Reagan’s, coming in June of 1987 when he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and threw down a challenge to the leader of the Soviet world: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Later on in his speech, he declared, “Across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.” For his words, he was mocked by many, and ignored by many more; but in the end, the truth of his words was proved when the wall was torn down, not by Mr. Gorbachev, but by the combined weight of the East German people.

The one thing that amazes me is that our president is not going to Berlin to honor the fall of the Wall and those who brought it down. German Chancellor Angela Merkel invited him, and he said no. He didn’t hesitate to go to Berlin to celebrate himself when he was merely running for president; why would he not go when he is the president to celebrate this great victory for the cause of freedom and human rights? I'm not the only one wondering, either; here, for example, is Rich Lowry:

Wouldn’t Obama at least want to take the occasion to celebrate freedom and human rights—those most cherished liberal values? Not necessarily. He has mostly jettisoned them as foreign-policy goals in favor of a misbegotten realism that soft-pedals the crimes of nasty regimes around the world. During the Cold War, we undermined our enemies by shining a bright light on their repression. In Berlin, JFK called out the Communists on their “offense against humanity.” Obama would utter such a phrase only with the greatest trepidation, lest it undermine a future opportunity for dialogue.

Pres. Ronald Reagan realized we could meet with the Soviets without conceding the legitimacy of their system. He always spoke up for the dissidents—even when it irked his negotiating partner, Mikhail Gorbachev. Whatever the hardheaded imperatives of geopolitics, we’d remain a beacon of liberty in the world.

Obama has relegated this aspirational aspect of American power to the back seat. For him, we are less an exceptional power than one among many, seeking deals with our peers in Beijing and Moscow. Why would Obama want to celebrate the refuseniks of the Eastern Bloc, when he won’t even meet with the Dalai Lama in advance of his trip to China?

For what it’s worth, I think his refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama was far more significant, and far more worrisome, since that concerned an ongoing struggle against tyranny in this world; but this still bothers me, not least because it dishonors the many, many Americans whose service in the cause of freedom contributed to the fall of the Iron Curtain twenty years ago. As president, honestly, you just can’t do that to your people. This also concerns me because it suggests a significant historical tone-deafness on the part of President Obama—and ever since Santayana, we all know what happens to those who don't learn the lessons of history.

I do appreciate the fact, however, that Sarah Palin seems to understand the magnitude of this anniversary:

Twenty years ago, the ultimate symbol of the division between freedom and tyranny was torn down. The Berlin Wall was constructed for one purpose: to prevent the escape of East Germans to the freedom of the West. The Wall’s cold, gray façade was a stark reminder of the economic and political way of life across the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

Ronald Reagan never stopped regarding the Berlin Wall as an affront to human freedom. When so many other American leaders and opinion makers had come to accept its presence as inevitable and permanent, Reagan still hammered away at the Wall’s very premise in human tyranny, until finally the Wall itself was hammered down. Its downfall wasn’t the work of Reagan alone. Our president’s actions were joined with the brave acts of many individuals who stood firm and united in facing the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall came down because millions of people behind the Iron Curtain refused to accept the fate of enslavement and their supporters in the West refused to accept that the “captive nations” would remain captive forever.

Though that long, tragic episode in human history had come to a close finally with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it wasn’t the “end of history” or the end of conflict as some had hoped. New conflicts confront us today throughout the world which call for courage and resolve and dedication to freedom. The new democracies and market economies that have emerged in Central and Eastern Europe still require our friendship and alliances as they continue to seek security, prosperity, and self-determination. But as we reflect on present and future challenges, let’s take time to celebrate the anniversary of this awesome victory for freedom. The downfall of that cold, gray concrete Wall should be a lesson to us in hope. Nothing is inevitable. Tyranny is no match for the hope and resolve of those who work and fight for freedom.

—Sarah Palin

Remind me again why it was that he was supposed to be qualified to be president and she was woefully unqualified even to be VP?

The 2008 campaign as "reality TV"

Looking back through my archives for something else, I ran across this piece from Dr. Violet Socks that I'd intended to post some time ago. Apparently, I managed to forget about it, which even for me is a bit on the absent-minded side. It's a few months old now, but I think it's still worth posting as a feminist perspective on Sarah Palin. Dr. Socks is hard-left, strongly pro-abortion and strongly anti-Christian; she's also as fair-minded as you can reasonably expect anyone to be, and recognizes the horrible irony of those who call themselves feminists trying to destroy one of this country's leading female politicians. It's a great post, and I encourage you to go read it; Dr. Socks gets off some beautiful observations about Barack Obama and the media caricatures of the last campaign:

[Gov. Palin's] speech also delivered some welcome punctures to the national gasbag known as Obama. And that’s another thing: it has not escaped my attention that many of the things Palin is accused of, falsely, are actually true of Obama. This is a guy who, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, didn’t even know which Senate committees he was on or which states bordered his own. (And don’t even get me started on Joe “The Talking Donkey” Biden, who thinks FDR was president during the stock market crash and that people watched TV in those days.) I’m not saying Obama’s a moron, but he’s sure as hell no genius. People say Sarah Palin rambles; excuse me, but have you actually heard Obama speak extemporaneously? As for being a diva, surely we all remember the Possomus sign and the special embroidered pillow on the Obama campaign plane. The fact is, Obama is an intellectually mediocre narcissist with a thin resume who’s lost without a teleprompter and whose entire campaign had all the substance and gravity of a Pepsi commercial. Yet people say Sarah Palin is a fluffy bunny diva.

So: are we back to Obama after all? Is this a transference thing? Are people subconsciously frustrated by the fact that Obama is an empty suit, and are they transferring that rage to Palin? . . .

One other observation, and then I’ll quit: it is striking to me how much of the political discourse in 2008 revolved around people who don’t exist. The main players last year, if you recall, were Obama, the genius messiah whose perfection and purity would save the planet; Hillary, the evil racist lesbian who killed Vince Foster with her bare hands before plotting the Iraqi invasion and then attempting to have Obama assassinated; and Sarah Palin, a crazed dominionist who hates polar bears and personally arranges for Christian girls to be raped by their fathers just so she can charge them for their rape kits.

None of these characters are real, of course. Yet, weirdly, people were much more interested in these fictional beings than they were in the real individuals who were vying for political office last year. There were times in 2008 where I felt that the entire national discourse had become one of those scripted faux-reality shows, where nothing is real and the producers edit everybody into barking stereotypes. And the people at home just watch and point and snicker. We’re actually having an election here, I kept wanting to say. These are the people who want to run the country. Don’t you want to know who they really are?

On the downside of the permanent campaign

One other thing in that Peggy Noonan column, "There Is No New Frontier," that struck me was this paragraph:

I'm not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between "us versus them" and "us." People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public's enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don't want whatever it is they're about to get, and they're about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.

I hadn't really thought about the difference between campaigning and governing in that way, but I think she's right. Given that governing has become increasingly partisan, increasingly "us versus them," in recent years, it's no wonder that popular fatigue and disgust with politics has been increasing.

That of course is why the Obama campaign was so powerful, because it found a way to overcome that fatigue and disgust and generate new enthusiasm and energy for Barack Obama; but while they seem to think they can keep that up forever, this would tend to suggest that in fact, if they keep up the campaign approach, they'll ultimately get a nasty case of elastic recoil back in their collective face. He can only keep it up so long before his admirers decide he's just another politician after all . . . and at that point, he's off the pedestal for good.

"A nation fully settled by government"

Peggy Noonan wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago called "There Is No New Frontier" that I've been mulling for a while now; the core of her argument is an analysis of the differing contexts of FDR's expansion of government in the 1930s and Barack Obama's efforts to do the same. It's more of an analogical analysis than a logical one, but I think it holds pretty well:

A big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they're living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we're in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn't claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It's not virgin territory anymore, it's crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren't all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it's a world America has been to. It isn't new to us. And we don't have too many illusions about it.

Her argument rests less on propositions than on metaphor, on the image she invokes; but it's a powerful image, and if it's a valid one—which I believe it is—then I think her argument holds. The President and his administration think they have an opportunity to bring about another major expansion of government, and are determined not to let the crisis go to waste (to use Rahm Emanuel's language)—but the context isn't what they think it is, and the parallels they think they see with President Roosevelt don't actually apply, because the popular attitude toward government isn't the same now as it was then. They're failing to factor in the reality that those past interventions have had their own effects, and have changed the board in some important ways.

Americans of FDR's time could be persuaded that government could do a better job and fix all their problems, because it hadn't really been tried much before. Americans of our time know better. The New Deal has already been tried, and the Great Frontier, and pushed to the point that another president could stand up and declare, "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem"; that bell cannot be unrung. While President Obama may well in the end get his government-bloating agenda through, for the powers of the Executive Branch are great, one thing he cannot be is another President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; that opportunity has passed, and ours is a different world.

The anti-transparency administration

Despite the President's bold initial words, that's what his administration is turning out to be. It shouldn't be a surprise, given the assault on the First Amendment conducted by his campaign in an effort to silence uncomfortable questions before the candidate had to face them; it shouldn't startle us at all that his response to being challenged by a media organization would be to try to shut that organization down. As Charles Krauthammer writes,

there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand "the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties." They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other—and an otherwise imperious government.

The problem is, we have an amazingly thin-skinned administration, one that can't seem to take criticism, or even significant differences of opinion, with any sort of grace; which is all of a piece, I think, with the fact that they also can't seem to take a joke. As such, they don't roll with the tough questions, they don't rise to the challenge of being argued with, and they don't laugh at themselves—or even just let it pass when someone else does. Instead, whenever anyone messes with them, their collective instinct is to get out the biggest hammer they can find and try to smash them.

(Well, whenever any of their American opponents messes with them, anyway . . . if it's a foreign country like Iran or China or Russia, their instinct is rather different, to say the least.)