Freedom Line Blog

A nice jab from the folks over at Politizoid:

As we profiled in last week’s Freedom Minute video, they’re currently doing a bit of housekeeping in the Obama White House, with key departures coming throughout the ranks of the senior staff. Thus far, the biggest change has been on the economic team, with the departures of Peter Orszag, Chrisina Romer, and Larry Summers. Last week’s announcement that General Jim Jones would step down as National Security Adviser, however, shows that the bloodletting is now spreading to the president’s foreign policy team.

Unfortunately, the upshot of this transitional period seems to be replacing plaques rather than policies. The new economic advisers promise more of the same. And on national security, we may actually be trading down.

While General Jones was known for keeping banker’s hours and not being a particularly influential member of Obama’s inner circle, his military credentials insulated him from being viewed as too dovish on foreign policy. Not so his replacement, Thomas Donilon, whose past successes include being in-house counsel at Fannie Mae (you can’t make this stuff up).

Writing in today’s New York Post, AEI’s Arthur Herman lays out the case for pessimism at Obama’s choice for the nation’s most powerful national security position:

Pity Peter Beinart. The former New Republic editor was once a voice of intellectual independence on the left — even going so far as to write a 2006 book arguing that it was incumbent upon liberals to aggressively prosecute the War on Terror.

A prophet is despised in his own country, however, and in the world of Washington punditry it’s more common for the prophet to change than the country. Thus, Beinart — after years of being labeled a Zionist warmonger by his colleagues on the left — has turned tail and run into the arms of his left-wing brethren. The source of his rebirth? A scathing rebuke to what he calls “the American Jewish Establishment” in the New York Review of Books and a decided retreat from his previous muscularity on foreign policy.

Having claimed sanctuary with the left, Beinart is now drifting into the realm of liberal self-parody. As his party stands on the precipice of what could be one of the largest midterm election refutations in history, he takes to the virtual pages of the Daily Beast today to confidently proclaim that Barack Obama is “a lock” for reelection in 2012. The only problem is that the self-styled intellectual’s data has been tortured until it confesses his preferred outcome. Consider:

Of course Barack Obama is likely to be reelected. For starters, American presidents usually get reelected. In the last 75 years, incumbents have lost a grand total of three times: in 1976, 1980, and 1992. And what did Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush all have in common? They had serious primary challenges within their own party (from Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy, and Pat Buchanan, respectively). The last president who lost reelection without a major primary challenge was Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Beinart’s historical invocation is deeply flawed. He seems to have chosen a period of 75 years only because it yields the most favorable outcome for his thesis. But should the 1936 election really be taken with equal weight as 1992 in understanding modern American politics? Look at it this way: the same data could be used to say that three of the last six presidents have failed to be elected to a second term — that 50 % failure rate provides no room for the confidence that Beinart is peddling.

As for primary challenges, this a more subtle, but still flawed, analysis. In all likelihood, Beinart has the causation wrong. Presidents don’t lose because they have primary challenges. They have primary challenges because of the weakness that ends up leading to their loss. Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 simply did a better job of managing their coalitions than Ford, Carter, or Bush 41. But had the latter three not been challenged for their party’s nomination, it’s still not safe to say they would have been on sure footing for reelection.

Were Beinart not imbibing Organizing for America soma, he could have produced a more thoughtful piece. The landscape for Obama in 2012 probably looks closer to that facing George W. Bush in 2004 than any of the earlier models he cites. Like Bush, Obama’s tenure has led to some (still relatively stifled) disquiet in his own party and has polarized public opinion at large — making a majority in the electoral college very tough sledding. But like Bush, he also has the benefits of incumbency and a known brand of leadership to take into an election where the opposition’s bullpen is  thus far a mile wide and an inch deep.

This is no time for triumphalism on the left. Obama certainly retains the prospects of being reelected in 2012. But if he does, it will be a street fight, not a coronation.

Not a good sign … but a nice moment of levity with the President:

If America continues to be a sober nation, there will be a time a few decades from now when Paul Krugman’s economic hypochondria will be viewed with the same sneering contempt as Paul Ehrlich’s crazed claims that hundreds of millions would die from famine in the 1970s and 1980s or the fears of the rise of Japan that dominated public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the old empire’s economic lost decade intervened).

On his blog at the New York Times today, Krugman frets aloud (his muscle memory prevents him from doing otherwise) that Americans may tank the economy by attempting to pay down their unsustainable levels of debt (further proof that Keynesianism is the economist’s version of a drunken weekend in Vegas). But the big story here is buried in the complaint that undergirds his thesis:

So what will happen? In the end, I’d argue, what must happen is an effective default on a significant part of debt, one way or another. The default could be implicit, via a period of moderate inflation that reduces the real burden of debt; that’s how World War II cured the depression. Or, if not, we could see a gradual, painful process of individual defaults and bankruptcies, which ends up reducing overall debt.

Hang on a tick. World War II? Hasn’t Krugman spent the past two years using every inch of column space available to him to advocate that President Obama embrace aggressive neo-Rooseveltism? But now it’s the war — not the New Deal — that ended the Depression? We know that Krugman is a specialist in non-falsifiable theories (if only the stimulus had been bigger …), but if the eight years that FDR had set aside for “bold, persistent experimentation” prior to Pearl Harbor weren’t sufficient to heal the nation’s markets, maybe that was a sign that the problem was strategic and not tactical. Maybe the Sage of Hyde Park should have taken some pointers from the benighted Warren Harding.

This is all a bit shocking coming from a Nobel Laureate. After all, if Paul Krugman doesn’t speak with authority on economics … then maybe Barack Obama doesn’t speak with authority about peace.

Pulling out a scribble of notes from his tickler file, columnist E.J. Dionne thinks the Tea Party is “one of the most successful scams in American political history”.  Why?  Because the “so-called” liberal media is giving an obscure, ideologically-driven set of voices a microphone big enough to capture the nation’s attention.  To Dionne’s dismay, few of his fellow gatekeepers “recognize that the tea party (note the intentional lower case lettering) constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its members.”

I don’t think Hillary Clinton could give a better summary of the media’s unyielding adulation for Barack Obama.  Like Clinton, Obama was a one-term senator with nary a public achievement to his credit, but somehow his lack of a record was billed as “fresh” and “exciting.”

News flash to Dionne: the media likes a good story, and the TEA PARTY is the most compelling political drama this year.  Hate it if you must, but don’t call it a scam.  That’s a project for bloated institutions and the candidates who support them; not sporadically organizing coalitions of free people.

Conservatives can be forgiven for thinking that every member of the liberal establishment has read and memorized Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  The subject of Hillary Clinton’s college senior thesis and the inspiration for a young Barack Obama’s zeal for community organizing, the Rules stand alongside Chairman Mao’s little red book in the Leftist’s canon.  But time and again, the liberals running the Democratic Party into the ground seem to be as clueless about the rules as they are about the laws of economic gravity.

Consider Rule #12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.  On some level, liberals knew this when they spent the better part of a year castigating Republicans as ‘The Party of No’.  They knew that the public wouldn’t accept the GOP as a credible governing party until it produced a constructive alternative.  (Though worthy of support, Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America’s Future has yet to gain widespread acceptance in the GOP caucus.)  With this week’s ‘Pledge to America’ the GOP is now a party with a constructive alternative.

The field is open, liberals.  And time is dwindling.

Where’s the party unity?  Florida’s Charlie Crist morphed into an Independent when it became clear Marco Rubio would be the Republican Senate nominee.  To date, Delaware’s Mike Castle hasn’t called to pledge his support to GOP nominee Christine O’Donnell.  (Though he did find time to take phone calls from both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.)

And today, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski announced she would reject the judgment of her fellow Republicans and run as a write-in candidate after losing her reelection primary to Joe Miller.

Here we go again.  While the conservatives always fall in line, it’s the Republican Party’s moderates that are refusing to put their own political interests at the service of party unity.

Wake me up when it’s November…

But that doesn’t mean it’s changed its position.  Escalating the war on words that began by replacing ‘Global War on Terror’ with ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’ and ‘acts of terror’ with ‘man-made disasters,’ President Barack Obama’s advisors are once again going Orwellian.  Now, instead of ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’ the president’s top climate czar John Holdren wants Americans to start saying ‘Global Climate Disruption.’

Not everyone is convinced the re-branding scheme will work:

“They’re trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff,” said Republican pollster Adam Geller, noting that Democrats also rolled out a new logo and now refer to the Bush tax cuts as “middle-class tax cuts.”

He said the climate change change-up likely derives from flagging public support for their bill to regulate emissions. He said the term “global warming” makes the cause easy to ridicule whenever there’s a snowstorm.

“Every time we’re digging our cars out — what global warming?” he said. “(Global climate disruption is) more of a sort of generic blanket term, I guess, that can apply in all weather conditions.”

Ostensibly, the name change is designed to make people take climate change more seriously.  More likely, it’ll have the opposite effect.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg makes a good case that the real analogue to President Barack Obama’s increasingly inept tenure in office is Herbert Hoover.  As political scientist Gordon Lloyd makes clear in his anthology, The Two Faces of Liberalism, Hoover was not the ‘market fundamentalist’ FDR and other liberals like to claim.  He, like Obama, meddled relentlessly in the market causing it to stagnate.  When FDR’s frenetic policymaking was mistaken for good economics, Hoover got the blame while his successor got the credit.

Goldberg sees a similarity in the offing:

For reasons fair and unfair, the Great Depression discredited laissez-faire economics for a generation or more. Hoover, who was hardly the “market fundamentalist” FDR made him out to be, suffered largely from the (bad) luck of the draw, giving Democrats a chance to argue for a new deal of the cards. For reasons fair and unfair, Obama, who inherited a bad recession and made it worse, every day looks more like a modern-day Hoover, whining about his problems, rather than an FDR cheerily getting things done. Inadequate to the task, Obama is discrediting the statism he was elected to restore.

The punch line? When the economy finally rebounds, it might be just in time for Obama’s replacement to get all the credit.

Remember how two years ago, Barack Obama was the most exciting, intellectually inventive president since John F. Kennedy? Maybe it’s time for 44 to compare his tax policies to 35:

Best-selling author Dinesh D’Souza has an eye-popping theory that tries to explain President Barack Obama’s approaches to domestic and foreign policy.  In short, Obama appropriated a dream from his father that America – and the business leaders that make it prosperous – are to blame for the world’s problems.  And thus, they should be brought down a peg (or ten) to equalize the global ledger.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Click here to read the entire article.

As CFIF Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs Tim Lee explained in this week’s Freedom Minute, the largest American labor unions are promising to spend a combined $150 million of their members’ dues money to preserve Democratic control of Congress.

To put that into perspective, here’s a partial list of what President Obama did for unions after receiving $60.7 million from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the 2008 cycle:

»  Only 10 days after taking the oath of office, Obama signed three executive orders that, respectively, limited what federal contractors can say to employees during union organizing drives, made it harder to fire incompetent employees of government contractors, and directed federal contractors to insure that employees are aware of their organizing rights.

»  One week later, Obama signed another executive order that requires federal agencies to use union-favored Project Labor Agreements on large federally funded construction projects. Not only does that mean many state government construction projects must use a PLA, but so must many economic stimulus-funded projects.

»  Hilda Solis, Obama’s secretary of labor, has nullified disclosure rules issued during the Bush administration that were designed to increase union financial transparency on forms required to be filed with the government under the Landrum-Griffin Labor Management Reporting Disclosure Act of 1959. The disclosure requirements, which were not enforced before Bush, made it possible for union members to see what their officers were doing with their dues.

If Democrats do somehow hang on to power after this year’s midterms, expect at least double the payback for the unions’ doubled investment.

H/T: Washington Examiner

In one of the most telling departures from the previous Administration, Obama officials decided to eliminate the White House’s fact-checking team soon after taking office.  After President George W. Bush received heavy criticism for 16 words he said in his 2003 State of the Union Address, The Decider decided to hire a team of fact checkers to confirm the validity of every word the president spoke to the public.

The result was a process that killed any portion of presidential remarks that couldn’t be 100% verified.  The moral of the story: facts matter.  At least they did to the last occupant of the White House.

Now it seems like facts are inconveniences that can be swept under the rug.  That is, unless their absence appears on top of the new Oval Office rug in the form of a misattributed quote.  On President Obama’s redesigned floor emblem appears the quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Though it’s attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., it actually belongs to antebellum abolitionist Theodore Parker.

Unlike Vice President Joe Biden, King didn’t forget to give credit for a line he made his own.  Next time, Mr. President, get the facts straight before you commit taxpayer money to honor something that isn’t true.

Conventional wisdom says that when the job market dries up, it’s time to head back to school for more education.  With today’s announcement that unemployment is above 9% nationally for the 16^th month in a row, many out-of-work Americans will consider going back to school.

In two to three years, those who pay for more certificates or degrees may find that their employment – and financial – situation hasn’t improved.  The reason is the rising cost of higher education coupled with the loss in value of college degrees.  Per Reason Magazine:

Student borrowing has more than doubled since the end of the 20th century, according to the College Board, with $85 billion in loans in 2008, up from $41 billion in 1998. And as the rising rate of defaults indicates, borrowers in aggregate are not making the kind of money—i.e. twice as much as a decade ago—they would need to pay those loans back.

The government’s response to this bubble has been to get itself more deeply involved in the inflation. The administration has kicked in various types of assistance, such as a $100 million college prep program. And in March, President Barack Obama signed a bill eliminating the 45-year-old Federal Family Education Loan Program (which guaranteed student loans made by private lenders) and replacing it with a system of direct Treasury Department loans to students. The first part of these efforts is a straightforward waste of money. The second has the potential to be a marginal improvement on a system that shouldn’t exist.

So we have too much money going into an asset, not enough value coming out, a massive increase in leverage, and a large taxpayer liability for the difference.

Get ready for another bailout…

Fresh off home state protests against Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) who, as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), continues to back losing candidates against Tea Party opposition comes a similar bit of news from Florida.  The minority leader of the Sunshine State’s state senate, Al Lawson, just endorsed Governor Charlie Crist (I-FL) for U.S. Senator.  As an African-American and Democratic leader in the Florida Senate, Lawson’s support is a blow to Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-FL), the Democrats’ African-American Senate candidates.

But Lawson’s endorsement of Crist is apparently motivated by the Democratic establishment’s successful moves to defeat his recent primary challenge to Rep. Alan Boyd (D-FL).  That includes strong-arm tactics by President Barack Obama’s Organizing for America campaign operation.

Unlike Tea Party insurgents Joe Miller in Alaska, Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada, Lawson couldn’t overcome his party’s establishment.  Cornyn’s saving grace is that he still has time to make up with the grassroots voters before November.  Unless Obama & Co. can find a way to unify their base in the next two months, chances are people like Al Lawson will stay home on Election Day; making GOP control of both houses of Congress that much more likely.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post pens a searing description of Christina Romer’s farewell luncheon at the National Press Club.  According to Milbank, Romer, until recently chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, established four points during her speech to reporters:

(1)   She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be.

(2)   She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad.

(3)   The response to the collapse was inadequate.

(4)   And she doesn’t have much of an idea how to fix things.

So, where does Christina Romer go from here?  Back to her teaching post at UC Berkeley where she’ll presumably try to make reality fit into her mathematical models; only this time she won’t have to worry about being held publicly accountable for her conclusions.  (Such as the one where she argued that passing the first stimulus bill would keep unemployment below 8%…)

You can tell a lot about a man from his pastimes.  According to the Associated Press (with associated photos), the former Russian president shot a gray whale with a crossbow from a rubber speed boat in choppy arctic waters.

This isn’t Putin’s first brush with staged danger.

He has been photographed fishing bare-chested in Russia’s Altai region, and was shown on television diving into an icy river and swimming the butterfly stroke.

In April he attached a satellite-tracking collar on a tranquilized polar bear. He also has shot a Siberian tiger with a tranquilizer gun and released leopards into a wildlife sanctuary.

While there’s no need for President Obama to wrestle an alligator or box with a grizzly bear, it would be nice if our dear leader could compensate by showing a bit more backbone in the foreign policy arena; especially towards Iran and the country that built its new nuclear facility.  (I.e. Russia)

With all the craziness coming out of Washington, D.C. these days it’s a joy to find political commentary that uses humor – and politicians’ own words – to make devastatingly accurate points.  Such is the case with Politizoid.com, an online creator of digital cartoons that use actual sound bites of elected officials.

Check out this episode called “Obamafeld,” a segment introduced with the caption: “The endless banter, the self-absorbed complaining it sounds like Seinfeld but with our liberal leaders it’s just another day of the politics of meaninglessness.”

View more videos here.

The New Republic’s John Judis is out today with a feature-length article titled, “The Unnecessary Fall,” a blow-by-blow recounting of how Barack Obama missed his opportunity to define his presidency in populist terms.  To Judis, the greatest betrayal of liberal America’s would-be Messiah is the latter’s failure to engage in confrontational politics.

Why has the White House failed to convince the public that it is fighting effectively on its behalf? The principal culprit is clearly Barack Obama. He has a strange aversion to confrontational politics. His aversion is strange because he was schooled in it, working as a community organizer in the 1980s, under the tutelage of activists who subscribed to teachings of the radical Saul Alinsky. But, when Obama departed for Harvard Law School in 1988, he left Alinsky and adversarial tactics behind.

The young lawyer who returned to Chicago and won a seat in the Illinois state Senate in 1996 practiced a very different style of politics. Obama’s principal accomplishments in Springfield were bills restricting lobbying and requiring videotaping of confessions in potential death penalty cases. He was not a typical blue-collar, bread-and-butter Chicago Democrat, but the kind of good government liberal that represents the upscale districts of the city, seeing in politics a higher calling and ill at ease with (although not in open opposition to) the city’s Democratic machine. He was also a post-racial politician who eschewed the hard-edged, angry rhetoric of Jesse Jackson. (That, too, is oddly reminiscent of Carter, who partly campaigned in 1976 as the white Southern antidote to George Wallace’s angry racial populism.)

Obama carried this outlook into the U.S. Senate, into his campaign for the presidency, and then, into the presidency itself. He is a cerebral, dispassionate, post-partisan; he wants to “end the political strategy that has been based on division,” to “turn the page” on the culture wars of the 1960s and the partisan battles of the 1990s. During the campaign, his aides jokingly referred to him as the “black Jesus.” While he can tolerate and even brush aside conflict, he is reluctant to actively foment it. “In a time of crisis, we can’t afford to govern out of anger,” he declared in February 2009. During his campaign and his first year in office, he held to a blind faith in bipartisanship, even as the Republicans voted as a bloc against his legislation. He is, perhaps, ill-suited in these respects for an era of bruising political warfare.

Ignoring Judis’ laughable attempt to paint Obama as a disappointed bipartisan, there’s nothing special about this era that makes politics any more or less “bruising.”  Leading is always tough.  As Judis indicates, maybe Obama isn’t.