No Strategy to Govern

Via-NRO

Ivory-tower Obama can’t abide views he doesn’t share.

By Michael Barone

To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference on Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.

His point-blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make House Republicans look bad.

But Obama knows very well that negotiations usually accompany legislation to increase the government’s debt limit. As Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Network points out, most of the 17 increases in the debt ceiling over the last 20 years have been part of broader measures.

Working out what will be in those measures is a matter for negotiation between the legislative and executive branches. That’s because the Constitution gives Congress the power to incur debt and the president the power to veto.
Obama supporters like to portray Republican attempts to negotiate as hostage-taking or extortion. But those are violent crimes. Negotiations — discussions attempting to reach agreement among those who differ — are peaceful acts.

What we do know, from Bob Woodward’s book The Price of Politics, is that Obama is not very good at negotiating. He apparently can’t stomach listening to views he does not share.

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Obama's State Capitalism: A Failure of Modesty

Via-RCP

By Michael Barone

"The pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated." Those were the carefully chosen words of the Federal Reserve Board after its meeting Tuesday. Translation into English: We wuz wrong.

So were a lot of people, including departing White House economics adviser Christina Romer, who wrote that the Obama Democrats' February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent.

It wasn't just administration spokesmen who expected a solid recovery. California economist Bill Watkins in newgeography.com recalls a conference last fall in which all the other economists presented rosy scenarios and only he forecast extended malaise. He was relieved that his colleagues didn't pelt him with tomatoes.

It's easy for Republicans to make partisan hay of all this. They can point out, as Bush administration economist Larry Lindsey does in the Weekly Standard, that the congressional Democrats' stimulus package was not the timely, targeted and temporary measure recommended by national economic director Larry Summers.

They can add that the threat of pending regulations interpreting the health care and financial regulation bills and of pending tax increases as the Bush cuts expire have created a climate of uncertainty in which consumers don't consume, banks don't lend and businesses don't create jobs.

All true. But in this summer of unrecovery, it's still important to understand how so many smart people got so much so wrong.

One answer comes from economist Arnold Kling writing for american.com. Kling argues that the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis disrupted what had been "a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade" and that we need to let the market economy develop a new one.

Instead, the policies of the Obama Democrats have been aimed at propping up the old order -- holding up housing prices and the mortgage market, keeping the Detroit auto companies in place, maintaining the lush standard of living of public employee union members (the purpose of the $26 billion the House was summoned back to Washington to approve Tuesday).

Maintaining unsustainable patterns of production, Kling writes, prevents the trial-and-error process of private investment that creates new jobs and patterns of production that will be sustainable.

Across the Atlantic, Marc De Vos, director of the Itinera Institute, a Brussels think tank, advances similar arguments in his book "After the Meltdown." The financial crisis, he argues, has brought a revival of "state capitalism," in which governments "have an increased and distorting role in economics."

"The state should be the partner of the market, not the owner or manipulator of the market," he writes. "Governments should not pick economic winners and losers. The state may be back, but the politicians should be modest."

Modesty, unfortunately, is not the dominant character trait of a president who predicted that his election would be seen as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

But facts are stubborn things. The fact that the private sector economy has not responded as administration economists expected and confidently predicted should be a wake-up call.

It shows the limits of expert knowledge and the ability of political actors to make optimal economic choices.

The intellectual firepower of this administration may be high. But so was the intellectual firepower of the postwar British Labour governments that nationalized steel, auto companies and the railroads.

That didn't turn out so well, and for decades, the British economy lagged behind those of America and its European neighbors. State capitalism has been tried before. It didn't work.

Market capitalism works better because it doesn't depend on one set of actors to make all the choices. Entrepreneurs with a vision for the future can take their chances, and most may fail. But some will turn out to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, who change our world in ways that 99 percent of economic experts were unable to predict.

In the meantime, American voters seem prepared to return a negative verdict on the Obama Democrats' version of state capitalism. Bailout favoritism and crony capitalism, it turns out, are not vote-winners.

The open question is whether Republicans will present and advance public policies that leave the way open for market capitalism to find its way to a new sustainable pattern of production, as it has done before. Let's hope for that kind of change.

House Democrats head for a thumping at the polls

Via-Washington Examiner

By: Michael Barone

Democratic spin doctors have set out how their side is going to hold onto a majority in the House. They'll capture four at-risk Republican seats, hold half of the next 30 or so Democratic at-risk seats, and avoid significant losses on target seats lower on the list.

That's one plausible scenario. The shift of opinion away from Democrats so evident in the polls could turn out to be illusory. The widely held assumption that Republicans will turn out in greater numbers than Democrats could prove wrong.

Democratic candidates do indeed have a money advantage in many close races, and their campaign committee has more cash than its Republican counterpart.

All that said, this Democratic spin sounds a lot like the Republican spin back in the 2006 cycle. If the numbers don't change too much from 2004, Republicans said then, we can hold on. If the numbers don't change too much from 2008, Democrats think now, they can hold on.

But the Republicans, as George W. Bush said, took "a thumping" in 2006. And most signs suggest Democrats will take a thumping this year too.

To see why, take a look at the generic ballot question -- which party's candidate will you vote for in elections to the House? The current realclearpolitics.com average shows Republicans ahead by 45 to 41 percent. Ten of this month's 15 opinion polls asking the question had Republicans ahead; Democrats led in four (twice by 1 percent), and one poll showed a tie.

Keep in mind that the generic ballot question historically has tended to underpredict Republican performance in off-year elections. Gallup has been asking the question since 1950 and has shown Republicans leading only in two cycles, 1994 and 2002, and then by less than the 7 and 5 points by which they won the popular vote for the House in those years.

So the Republicans' current lead in the generic ballot question suggests they may be on the brink of doing better than in any election since 1946, when they won a 245-188 margin in the House -- larger than any they've held ever since.

Another metric is daunting for Democrats. Polls in House races almost always show incumbents ahead of challengers, because incumbent members of Congress are usually much better known than their opponents. An incumbent running below 50 percent is considered potentially in trouble; an incumbent running behind a challenger is considered in deep doo-doo.

Another metric is daunting for Democrats. Polls in House races almost always show incumbents ahead of challengers, because incumbent members of Congress are usually much better known than their opponents. An incumbent running below 50 percent is considered potentially in trouble; an incumbent running behind a challenger is considered in deep doo-doo.

In 1994, I wrote an article in U.S. News & World Report arguing that there was a serious chance that Republicans could capture the 40 seats that they needed then, as now, for a majority in the House. It was the first mainstream media piece suggesting that, and it appeared on newsstands on July 11.

I cited as evidence five polls showing incumbent Democratic congressmen trailing Republican challengers. None of those Democrats had scandal problems; all five lost in November.

Today a lot more Democratic incumbents seem to be trailing Republican challengers in polls. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online has compiled a list of 13 Democratic incumbents trailing in polls released over the past seven weeks.

Some of these poll numbers are mind-boggling. Tom Perriello, a 727-vote winner in Virginia 5 in 2008, has been running two weeks of humorous ads showing what a hard worker he is. A poll shows him trailing Republican state Sen. Robert Hurt 58 to 35 percent.

In industrial Ohio 13, which Barack Obama carried 57 to 42, a poll shows incumbent Betty Sutton trailing free-spending Republican Tom Ganley 44 to 31 percent.

As Geraghty notes, we haven't seen polls released by many other Democrats on Republican target lists. Most are conducting polls; many have reason to release favorable results if they're available. This looks like a case where the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Two years ago, Obama was elected president with a historic 53 percent of the vote -- more than any other Democrat in history except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

These metrics -- the generic ballot results and polls in individual districts -- suggest that House Democrats are headed toward historic losses. Quite a swing in 18 months

On guns and climate, the elites are out of touch

Via-Washingon Examiner


Many years ago political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues they clearly do. But on some issues they don’t. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row. One is global warming.

The other is gun control. On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has been moving in the other direction.

Over the last decade, the Gallup organization has been asking Americans whether the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated or generally correct. From 1998 to 2007, except for the runup to the 2004 election, they said it was generally serious by roughly a 2-1 margin — 66 to 30 percent in 2006, for example. But in March 2009, that margin slipped to only 57 to 41 percent, with two-thirds of Republicans and nearly half of independents saying concern is exaggerated.

Similarly, last month pollster Scott Rasmussen found that only 34 percent believe that global warming is caused by human activity, while 48 percent said it was caused by long-term planetary trends. That’s almost exactly the opposite of what he found 12 months before — 47 to 34 percent the other way around. However, 48 percent of the group Rasmussen calls the Political Class — in other words, the elite — continues to believe global warming is man-made.

On guns, Gallup has been testing opinion for many years on one extreme proposal that is the goal, usually unstated, of many gun control advocates: banning the possession of handguns. Support was 60 percent in 1960 and 49 percent in 1965. It was as high as 43 percent in the early 1990s, before the Clinton Congress passed the so-called assault weapon ban. In March 2007 it had fallen to 29 percent — a minority, almost a fringe position. In the early 1990s Gallup found that Americans by a 2-1 margin favored stricter gun sale laws over less strict ones or keeping them the same. By fall 2008 they were evenly split.

Some of these shifts in opinion may be responses to events that liberal elites have not deigned to notice. Forty of the 50 states now have concealed weapons laws that allow law-abiding citizens to get permits to carry guns. Gun controllers predicted these would result in traffic shootouts and general mayhem. They haven’t. It turns out that criminals are deterred from attacks less by gun control laws than by the possibility that their intended victims may be armed. As for global warming, many Americans may have noticed that temperatures actually haven’t been rising over the last decade as global warming alarmists predicted. The elites are able to hire armed security guards and jet off on private jets, so they are less likely to notice these things.

I think there’s something else at work here. For liberal elites, belief in gun control and global warming has taken on the character of religious faith. We have sinned (by hoarding guns or driving sport utility vehicles), we must atone (by turning in our guns or recycling), we must repent (by supporting gun control or cap-and-trade schemes). You may notice that the “we” in question is usually the great mass of ordinary American citizens.

The liberal elite is less interested in giving up its luxuries (Al Gore purchases carbon offsets to compensate for his huge mansion and private jet travel) than in changing the lifestyles of the masses who selfishly insist on living in suburbs and keeping guns for recreation or protection. Ordinary Americans are seen not as responsible fellow citizens building stable communities but as greedy masses who must be disciplined to live according to the elite’s religious dogmas.

It should not be completely surprising that, over time, these views have become less congenial to the masses who are the object of such condescension. Democratic officeholders who must live by the discipline of the ballot have noticed. Party leaders did not press to re-enact the assault weapons ban when it expired and are currently flummoxed by their backbenchers who are resisting a cap-and-trade bill that will impose huge costs on those who use electricity. Elites may lead, but Americans do not always follow.

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