Freedom Line Blog

As CFIF recently noted, the Democrats in Congress are committed to passing more controversial legislation before their chokehold on the legislative process eases in January.  Reporting from the San Antonio Express-News confirms that members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are personally lobbying President Barack Obama to put the weight of his slight frame behind a vote on the DREAM Act during the lame duck session.

As noted in the Express-News article, there are 800,000 reasons to do so:

The DREAM Act, or Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, would require the affected youths to enter the armed forces or attend college for two years, clear a background check and have no criminal records to be eligible for citizenship.

Roughly 800,000 teens and young adults would be eligible, according to immigration rights groups.

With one of those immigration rights groups estimating an annual addition of 65,000 potential beneficiaries under the DREAM Act, the only thing standing in the way of a multi-generational Latino dependency on the Democratic Party is a GOP-led filibuster in the Senate.

Every so often, someone captures the proverbial lightning in a bottle.  Today, it was Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens and his commentary entitled “Obama’s Air Guitar.” Stephens’s weekly commentaries are always a must-read, but today’s perfectly portrays the growing sense among the American electorate, more sober observers and now world leaders that Barack Obama is simply in over his head:

His administration has now been chastised or belittled by everyone from the Supreme Leader of Iran to the finance minister of Germany to the president of France to the dictator of Syria.  What does it mean for global order when the world figures out that the U.S. president is someone who’s willing to take no for an answer?  The answer is that the United States becomes Europe.  Except on a handful of topics, like trade and foreign aid, the foreign policy of the European Union, and that of most of its constituent states, amounts to a kind of diplomatic air guitar: furious motion, considerable imagination, but neither sound nor effect.  When a European leader issues a stern demarche toward, say, Burma or Russia, nobody notices. And nobody cares.”

Since he first began flirting with a White House campaign, Obama has long created the impression that he considers the presidency a video game, or a pickup game of hoops with himself at point guard taking a three-pointer on every possession.  But now we have a description that perhaps captures the Age of Obama better than any other to date:  Obama as air guitarist.

Traditionally, presidents facing opposition at home go abroad to find policy and political success.  Basically, if you can’t beat them, play with someone else.  It’s an especially useful move in the latter part of a president’s second term, when lame duck status settles in and speculation about a successor mounts.

Perhaps we’re seeing that now with one-term President Barack Obama.  One thing is missing, however, from the script: a foreign policy success.

So far, the president’s 10 day Asian trip has been a disaster.  It started with a badly handled mis-impression that 34 warships costing $200 million a day were escorting the president to India.  (They weren’t.)  Then his staff was embarrassed by press handlers working for the Indian government.  Now, he’s failing to secure a crucial free trade deal with South Korea while being ostracized at the G-20 meeting for his fiscal and monetary policies.

All this may make him more likely to be defeated in his reelection campaign, but it is a terrible projection of powerlessness to the rest of the world.

The House GOP isn’t wasting any time putting President Barack Obama on notice that they are ready to test his new commitment to bipartisanship on education issues.  Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the incoming-Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, is promising to recreate the D.C. school voucher program Obama and the Democrats killed two years ago.

Vouchers are despised by teachers’ unions because the device introduces competition into the K-12 education market.  If parents don’t like the curriculum, culture or administration at a public school a voucher lets them send their children to a private school that meets their needs.  For all the canards about separation of church and state, the real reason teachers’ unions hate vouchers is because less students means less of a need for public school (i.e. unionized) teachers.

Supporting a bill that recreates the D.C. school voucher program would be good politics and good policy.  Good politics because President Obama could legitimately claim a bipartisan victory with Republicans on an issue that moves the president to the political center.  It would be good policy because it would allow low-income students the probability of the single biggest attraction of a better education: a better life.

All this for only recreating what already existed.  If the president can’t muster the courage to support this kind of feel-good, localized issue he’ll have no one to blame for the gridlock but himself.

H/T: Washington Times

It’s been clear ever since President Obama’s irritable East Room press conference the day after the midterm elections that the White House is in deep denial over its refutation by the American electorate.

What’s shocking, however, is just how much the bunker mentality is getting noticed even in Democratic circles. A new Politico story by Mike Allen & Jim VandeHei entitled “President Obama Isolated Ahead of 2012” brings an administration dead set on standing athwart reality into sharp relief. The piece, well worth reading in its entirety, is filled to the brim with damning testimonials about the Obama White House’s incompetence on basic politics. One of the more glaring quotes:

For a guy who won a 21-month-long campaign, you’d think Senator-Elect Marco Rubio (R-FL) would get the weekend off.

Hardly.

He’s already been asked to deliver the GOP’s response to President Barack Obama’s weekly address.  Welcome to primetime, all the time, Mr. Rubio.

Whether or not you think he’s a viable presidential candidate in 2012, there can be little doubt that — on his best days — former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is one of the most intelligent, articulate defenders of conservative thought around (full disclosure: I used to write radio spots for the Speaker). Last night Newt delivered a tour de force performance on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, analyzing the midterm elections and their effects on President Obama. Some video highlights can be seen below. Newt’s best line of the night, however, didn’t make it into the highlights reel. Scroll down beyond the video for the line that had the Fox camera crews cracking up on air:

VAN SUSTEREN: But I just don’t get it, I mean, because he did run on change. And he delivered change. And now the American people — and they told him almost from day one they didn’t like his change, and he didn’t even notice it, and he’s still (INAUDIBLE) and so now he comes (INAUDIBLE) today — I don’t get it!

GINGRICH: Greta, Greta, Greta, Greta, if somebody offers you a chance to go to Disney World and you get all excited, and they promise to take you to Disney World, and then they didn’t quite tell you that, by the way, the way they’re going to get there is they’re going to crash the plane into the park…(LAUGHTER)

GINGRICH: The fact that they were going to take you to Disney World may not have been quite as attractive as you thought. Nobody in America thought we were going to elect a president who would be this far to the left, pass this much spending, build up this big a deficit, try to impose Washington on every doctor’s office, every hospital, every medical decision in America. And the American people now said, Got it. If that’s the change you meant, we’re going to send you a signal that that’s the wrong change.It’s all right to be for change, but you ought to be for the right change, and he didn’t get. Now, what worries me is with two more years, I wonder what it’s going to take for him to begin to realize it’s not about us, the American people, it’s about him.

If ever anyone deserved the title “the speaker” … 

One of the selling points for “universal” health care is the notion it carries of making treatment available to everyone.  That’s (somewhat) true, but when government-run health care displaces private companies, something else gets tossed out too: privacy.

According to a notice published in the Federal Register last month, President Barack Obama’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will be launching a new health-related database that adds to new data sets to one representing federal workers: private citizens who report pre-existing health conditions or use one of the newly created regional exchanges for pooled health insurance.  That information will be made available to any government agency, law enforcement group, or third party researcher that shows a need for it.

What gives OPM the right to collect and disseminate such sensitive health records?  The passage and implementation of ObamaCare.

Charles Krauthammer’s recent column heralding the demise Obama’s legislative agenda contained a paragraph that deserves mention:

Over the next two years, the real action will be not in Congress but in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Democrats will advance their agenda on Obamacare, financial reform and energy by means of administrative regulation, such as carbon-emission limits imposed unilaterally by the Environmental Protection Agency.

No doubt, there will be many battles to fight in Congress against enactment of more freedom-killing policies, but voters, activists, and politicians should remember that the threat to liberty only accelerates once the federal bureaucracy gets involved.  OPM is just the most recent example.

So says John Steele Gordon in a characteristically insightful post on Commentary’s Contentions Blog. Per the G-man:

Wilson was, at heart, an academic, the author of several books, (including Congressional Government, still in print after 125 years). He thought and acted like a professor even after he entered politics. Wilson always took it for granted, for instance, that he was the smartest guy in the room and acted accordingly. Does that sound familiar? Wilson was a remarkably powerful orator. (It was he who revived the custom of delivering the State of the Union message in person, a custom that had been dropped by Thomas Jefferson, a poor and most reluctant public speaker.)

… Both Wilson and Obama were the subjects of remarkable public adulation, and both won the Nobel Peace Prize for their aspirations rather than their accomplishments. In Wilson’s case, at least, it only increased his sense of being God’s instrument on earth. Although the Republicans had won majorities just before Armistice Day in November 1918, in both houses of Congress — and the Senate’s consent by a two-thirds majority would be necessary to ratify any treaty — Wilson shut them out of any say in the treaty he went to Paris to negotiate with the other victorious powers. Obama, of course, shut the Republicans out of any say in both the stimulus bill and ObamaCare.

Lest conservatives get too excited, we should remember that Wilson was a two-term president. Lest liberals get too cocky, his name has also been something of a political epithet ever since.

After publishing today’s denunciation of President Barack Obama as the reincarnation of Richard Nixon, self-professed liberal Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen don’t need to guess if they’ll be getting a White House Christmas card this year.  The duo doesn’t break new ground with their criticisms of the president, but they do enlarge the chorus of commentators disturbed by Obama’s style.  From the section recounting Obama’s sins against campaign decorum:

Indeed, Obama is conducting himself in a way alarmingly reminiscent of Nixon’s role in the disastrous 1970 midterm campaign. No president has been so persistently personal in his attacks as Obama throughout the fall. He has regularly attacked his predecessor, the House minority leader and – directly from the stump – candidates running for offices below his own. He has criticized the American people suggesting that they are “reacting just to fear” and faulted his own base for “sitting on their hands complaining.”

Is it possible that the man who ran the longest presidential campaign in history is already looking to extend the record?  If so, 2012 can’t arrive soon enough.

Power abhors a vacuum.  So too do the people seeking it.  From Rhode Island comes another example of the chit-building Bill Clinton is possibly doing while President Barack Obama dithers.

You may recall the now-infamous “shove-it” line to President Obama came from the Democratic nominee for Rhode Island’s governorship.  It was presaged by the president’s refusal to endorse Democrat Frank Caprio in deference to Obama’s friendship with former Republican, current independent candidate Lincoln Chafee.  In his rebuke of the president, Caprio did more than reject Obama’s aura; he embraced Bill Clinton’s.

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:

Despite the furor his crude suggestion caused, Mr. Caprio not only is sticking by his “shove it” comment. His campaign has just announced a weekend event with Mr. Clinton, whom it says is much more popular in the state than Mr. Obama. The campaign told Politico.com that Mr. Caprio “aims to be a governor in the mold of President Clinton.” Zing, zing. It also noted a Gallup survey showing that voters of every affiliation would be more likely to vote for a candidate backed by Mr. Clinton than one backed by Mr. Obama.

A new poll by the local NBC affiliate suggests that “shove it” may have unsettled the race, with Mr. Chafee now running at 35% and Mr. Caprio, with 25%, running third behind Republican John Robitaille, who has 28%. How much confidence to put in such polling amid a fluid three-man contest is debatable. In any case, Democrats will be watching closely. An eleventh-hour victory by Mr. Caprio would be fodder for those dreaming of a Clinton-Obama rematch in 2012.

If Caprio wins, don’t expect a make-up session between him and the president.  If he loses, don’t be surprised if he emerges 18 months from now as a top hand in Hillary’s bid to challenge for the 2012 nomination.

Which of these sounds like the person currently serving as the leader of his party and nation’s chief executive?  On one side is a man crisscrossing the nation in a mad-dash to raise his members’ hopes, and squeeze out a few more votes and volunteers by Election Day.  He is upbeat, full of self-effacing humor, and mindful of long-term perspective.

The other man is in a television studio in Washington, D.C. defending the results of a campaign that ended almost two years ago.  To a comedian.  And failing.

The first man is former president Bill Clinton.  The latter is his current successor Barack Obama.  While Clinton is preaching a “we’re-all-in-this-together” sermon in battleground states, Obama seems lost in self-absorption, unable to feel anyone’s pain – including the crushing news that one’s political career is over because of votes the president asked you to take.

Sure, politics is a big-boy business with harsh outcomes.  But it is jolting to watch President #44 missing so many lessons from #42 about the importance of running through the finish line instead of stopping several yards out.  Just like winning, sometimes people need to feel like they’re losing for something; in this case the president’s uber-liberal agenda.

The failure to lead and inspire in the face of certain defeat will not be forgotten by those Democrats who survive to fight in 2012.  Chance are, the memories of Clinton helping and Obama not will do much to make Hillary Clinton’s dark horse candidacy all the more appealing.

For reasons surpassing understanding, the White House seems to have decided that the immediate run-up to a catastrophic mid-term election is the time for a series of insider press portraits of an asphyxiating presidency. The latest such installment comes in a profile of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in the new issue of GQ. Buried among many gems in the piece is this new nugget about President Obama’s initial reaction to the Gulf Oil Spill:

Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard makes a compelling case that one of the reasons a Republican victory next Tuesday may seem ho-hum is that its arrival has been trumpeted for so long.  After months of voter resentment over ObamaCare, the Recovery Act, and spiraling unemployment the notion that the GOP might surpass 1994’s gains can seem pedestrian.

Cost reminds us it isn’t.  In fact, the intensity and location of voter resentment towards the liberal status quo could portend a possible realignment in states President Barack Obama won in 2008 to the GOP column.

The circumstantial evidence in favor of this? As Jim Geraghty’s Obi Wan noted yesterday, it’s all around us.  We simply have gotten used to it. Ohio is all but gone for the Democrats, including the swingiest of swing districts in Columbus.  Michigan is a lost cause. So is liberal icon Russ Feingold in Wisconsin.  Pennsylvania looks like it will go maybe +4-6 for Toomey and Corbett. All of these places voted for Obama, and all of them are basically gone. Weak Republican candidates in Colorado and Nevada keep those races tight, but otherwise the toss-ups are: California, Illinois, West Virginia, and Washington. The last Republican presidential candidate to win all four of these? Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Whoever earns the GOP presidential nomination for 2012 will have the wind at their back and a groundswell of proven precinct walkers at the ready.  We’ll see if the candidate can figure out how to use them.

Pundit and board certified psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer identifies a new strain of derangement infecting the body politic:

Here Obama has spent two years bestowing upon the peasantry the “New Foundation” of a more regulated and socially engineered, and therefore more humane, society, and they repay him with recalcitrance and outright opposition. Here he gave them Obamacare, the stimulus, financial regulation, and a shot at cap-and-trade — and the electorate remains not just unmoved but ungrateful.

Faced with this truly puzzling conundrum, Dr. Obama diagnoses a heretofore undiscovered psychological derangement: anxiety-induced Obama Underappreciation Syndrome, wherein an entire population is so addled by its economic anxieties as to be neurologically incapable of appreciating the “facts and science” undergirding Obamacare and the other blessings their president has bestowed upon them from on high.

But don’t just take Dr. Krauthammer’s word for it.  Check out this clip of President Barack Obama blaming his downward spiral in popularity on a lack of effective advertising.

Feel better now?

The news just keeps getting worse for the primary resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  With his party facing historic defeat in the congressional midterms, President Barack Obama should also be worried about the coming crack-up among two vital parts of his base: teachers unions and wealthy liberal donors.  The first wants job protection; the latter better student outcomes.

Their collision course is expertly analyzed by Alvin Felzenberg.  A sample:

We have seen hints of rising tensions between these two elements of the president’s base for over a year. First, there came David Callahan’s “Traitors to their Class: The New Super Rich,” in the New Yorker, an account of how the information-based elites that rallied to Barack Obama break with their fellow Democrats on such matters as free trade, “card check,” and, yes, public sector monopolies over the delivery of education. There was the now infamous District of Columbia mayoral primary, which pit the reformist mayor Adrian Fenty against challenger Vincent Gray. No issue sparked greater controversy than the record of school superintendent Michelle Rhee, who Obama publicly hailed along with Fenty in a televised presidential debate. And no public official prior to Rhee has spent more time thinking of what D.C. children should be taught and evaluated since Thomas Jefferson. While Rhee proved Fenty’s greatest asset in his re-election campaign, the unions clearly did a better job in getting out the vote than did parents whose children benefitted from Rhee’s efforts.

Read the entire article here.

H/T: U.S. News & World Report

How is the most powerful man in the world spending the week prior to the midterm elections, while the economy is in turmoil and the public is revolting over expansive government programs that his administration initiated? According to CNN, he’ll be chatting with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

It’s bad enough that Obama is a feckless president. But he’s an awful pedestrian one too.

A parallel alliance between the world’s governing thugs continues to follow a James Bond movie scenario: buffoonish villains pursuing absurdly dramatic evil.  Other than a shared penchant for casual clothing and over-the-top rhetoric, however, there’s nothing funny about the increasingly close alliance between Venezuela, Iran and Russia.

This week, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is traveling to Russia and Iran to secure cooperation agreements on nuclear enrichment, oil production and other stick-in-the-eye measures to America and its allies.

At some point, Americans will wake up to a clutch of hostile nations that have nuclear weapons in volatile regions.  Hopefully, the Obama Administration is doing much more strategic planning than waiting for a Felix Leiter-type CIA operative to save the day.

You may remember Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s reaction to President Barack Obama’s scolding of he and other conservatives on national television last January.  According to Alito, he’s finished with the farce of sitting stone-faced while being harangued.

The 60-year-old justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush, acknowledged with a smile that his colleagues “who are more disciplined refrain from manifesting any emotion or opinion whatsoever.”

Alito, answering questions following a speech Wednesday at the conservative Manhattan Institute in New York, also said, “Presidents will fake you out.” The institute provided an online video link to Alito’s talk and question-and-answer session.

The president will begin a sentence with an invocation of the country’s greatness, Alito said. If justices don’t jump up and applaud, “you look very unpatriotic,” he said.

But, Alito continued, then the president may finish the thought by adding “because we’re conducting a surge in Iraq or because we’re enacting health care reform.” Justices aren’t supposed to react to statements about policy or politics.

The better course, Alito said, is to follow the example of more experienced justices like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and the recently retired John Paul Stevens. None has attended in several years.

“So I doubt that I will be there in January,” Alito said.

H/T: The Associated Press

Further proof that the Beltway Keynesians have taken us down the economic rabbit hole: it’s now falling to Europeans to warn us that inflation and stimulus are tanking the dollar. Consider the following from the Financial Times:

Increasing expectations the Federal Reserve will pump more money into the US economy next month under a policy known as quantitative easing sent the dollar to new lows against the Chinese renminbi, Swiss franc and Australian dollar. It dropped to a 15-year low against the yen and an eight-month low against the euro …

A senior European policy-maker, who asked not to be named, said a further aggressive round of monetary easing by the US Federal Reserve would be “irresponsible” as it made US exports more competitive at the expense of its rivals…

Russia’s finance minister Alexei Kudrin, in a meeting with European Union officials, blamed the US – and others – for global currency instability.

He said one reason for exchange rate turmoil “is the stimulating monetary policy of some developed countries, above all the United States, which are trying to solve their structural problems in this way”.

The entire justification for the creation of the Federal Reserve was to ensure that monetary policy would be insulated from political pressure. If Ben Bernanke chooses to act as a handmaiden for the profligacy of the Obama Administration, then he deserves to be cleaning out his desk just as much as the president.