Is Obama Losing Party Support?
By Donald Lambro

President Obama was back on his bus this week, promoting yet another job bill in the diminishing hope that it might help him hang on to his own.

Just days after the Democratic-controlled Senate failed to muster enough support just to make his bill the pending business, he was venting in North Carolina, threatening Republicans and blaming Wall Street again for America’s unending recession for which he accepts no responsibility.

Conveniently ignoring that two Senate Democrats voted against his tax and spend bill last week, while others held their nose and voted aye, Obama said Republicans would pay a very heavy price for voting to kill his proposal.

“If they vote against these proposals again, if they vote against taking steps now to put Americans back to work right now, then they’re not going to have to answer to me, they’re going to have to answer to you,” the president said at a campaign rally Monday.

But Obama’s third or fourth jobs bill may be a hard, if not downright impossible sell in North Carolina, a state he barely carried by the skin of his teeth in 2008 by less than 1 percentage point and where unemployment has surged to a hope-crushing 10.4 percent under his presidency.

Obama wasn’t here, though, to win over new voters to his banner but to appeal anew to a wavering political base, especially dispirited black voters

In the Tar Heel state, where Democrats will converge next year to dutifully renominate him for a second term, “Obama’s most ardent supporters in Durham’s black community worry that waning enthusiasm among African-Americans may prevent him from repeating his razor-thin North Carolina victory of 20008,” writes Boston Globe reporter Tracy Jan.

Jan quotes an unemployed, 52-year-old black woman standing in line at the employment office, saying she “can’t muster the will to support Obama for a second term.”

“I don’t see what he’s done. I’m not even going to waste my time and vote,” this Democrat said.

In Durham County, where the president spoke, nearly 20 percent of its black voters are jobless and Obama’s job approval rating has dropped, even among this most loyal constituency who have suffered under his rule more than any other segment of the state’s electorate.

Nationally, black unemployment has surged to 16.7 percent, the highest since 1984, and a front page story in Tuesday’s Washington Post is ominously titled, “Can Obama hold on to black voters in 2012?”

Many hardpressed North Carolina Democrats must be asking if his first $800 billion-plus jobs bill failed to ignite the U.S. economy, why will this latest tax and spend bill, at roughly half the price, be any different? Or is this bill just another taped-together, repainted campaign prop for the 2012 election to give the president some cover?

Obama headed into the weekend before his three-day bus tour began, dogged by a lengthening list of Gallup polls that painfully illustrated why surveys show that 75 percent of Americans say the economy is “getting worse.”

Among Gallup’s findings:

– 19 percent of Americans say they are struggling just to afford food and, overall, “fewer Americans had access to basic life necessities in September.”

– Thirty percent of 18-29-year-olds are unemployed or underemployed, forced to to take temp or part-time jobs. Thousands of college graduates say they cannot find any jobs at all.

– If the plethora of “Where Are The Jobs?” signs among the Occupy Wall Street protesters accurately reflect their anger, these young people are also among the victims of Obama’s failed economic policies and his empty promises that unemployment would be below 8 percent by now.

– The Washington Post reported Monday that recently returning military veterans “have an unemployment rate of 11.7 percent,” well above the national 9.1 percent jobless rate.

These and other survey numbers are more than tragic human statistics, they are the sad story of a great nation in a decline, led by an incompetent administration whose ill-fated policies have worsened an economy that should be on a sharp upward trajectory by now.

The network news shows keep downplaying Obama’s troubles by reporting his job approval numbers are in “the low to mid-40s.” In fact, Gallup’s daily polls showed his approval numbers dropping to a low of 38 percent for the first time Friday and again on Saturday, with a high of 54 percent disapproving his presidency.

Throughout the first half of this year as the mediocre Obama economy grew weaker and unemployment rose, much of the news media took comfort in reporting that, while the president’s polls were falling, the Republicans’ were worse in generic surveys.

But at the end of last month, Gallup asked voters this simple and apropo economic question: “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous?”

The response: 48 percent answered “the Republicans,” 39 percent said “the Democrats,” and 13 percent had “no opinion.”

Notably, Gallup asked the same question about which party would do a better job of “protecting the country from international terrorism and military threats?” The GOP led that one by an 11 point margin.

Obama’s taxpayer-paid bus trip took him into Virginia on Tuesday, a state he won in 2008 but now appears to be the underdog. In a further sign of his weakness, Obama’s former Democratic National Committee chairman Tim Kaine, who is running for the Senate, was expected to be noticeably absent on the tour, according to the Associated Press.

A further embarrassment for the president: prominent Democrats in the state urged the White House to readjust his scheduled campaign stops so that Obama would not be visiting battleground districts where local Democrats face tough elections.

Forget for the moment the coming political battle with Republicans, Obama is now struggling just to win back the support of his own party.

Obama’s Dilemma — and Ours
By Pat Buchanan

Seventy-one years ago this spring, after the German army had broken through the French lines, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to France to consult his embattled allies on how to stop the advance.

“Where is the strategic reserve?” Churchill urgently asked the French commander in chief, Gen. Maurice Gamelin, and then he repeated himself in French: “Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?”

“Aucune,” came Gamelin’s reply. “There is none.”

The French had no reserves to stop the Germans from overrunning their country. The Battle of France was lost.

The Obama administration, in its grand strategy to generate a rapid and strong recovery from the Great Recession, is at a similar pass. It has drawn and played all its cards: the $800 billion stimulus bill, three straight deficits averaging $1.4 trillion, the Federal Reserve’s mass purchases of bad paper from the world’s banks, and QE2, the monthly purchase of $100 billion in Treasury bills that ends June 30.

Yet, from the numbers that came in from May, Obama looks to be holding a losing hand. The anemic growth of the first quarter of 2011 seems to have stalled, and the prospect of a double-dip recession looms.

Though the administration anticipated perhaps a quarter-million new jobs in May, as April produced, May generated only 55,000. The unemployment rate ticked back up to 9.1 percent.

The rise in manufacturing employment went into reverse. Five thousand manufacturing jobs were lost. Consumer confidence sank.

Today 2 million homes remain vacant in the USA, putting immense downward pressure on housing prices. A fourth of U.S. homes are not worth the mortgages being paid upon them.

Says Federal Reserve Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, “Looking forward, I unfortunately can envision no quick or easy solutions for the problems still afflicting the housing market.” Recovery is going to be a “long, drawn-out process.”

A further decline in housing prices of 10 to 25 percent over the next five years, says Robert Shiller, the economist who invented the S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values, “wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

The economic malaise has now begun to affect the mood of the nation and its attitude toward the president.

Almost 90 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is terrible or poor. Sixty percent think the nation is headed in the wrong direction. Forty-eight percent expect a second Great Depression next year. Fewer than 40 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the U.S. economy.

In one new poll, Mitt Romney leads the president 49-46 in a matchup in 2012.

The question Obama faces and, indeed, Congress and the nation face is: What do we do now?

Chairman Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve has signaled that there will be no QE3, no more Fed purchases of $100 billion a month in U.S. government paper. Buyers for that $1.2 trillion a year of U.S. debt will have to be found elsewhere.

And with the economy stagnant or sinking, the Democrats on Capitol Hill are starting to back away from any deep budget cuts, even as Republicans are now even less likely to sign on to any tax increases to reduce the $1.5 billion deficit.

Indeed, if the economy is stalled or sinking into recession, what economic theory is it that argues for austerity and tax hikes?

And the perceived economic stagnation not only diminishes the chance of a bipartisan budget deal but also points to deadlock on the debt ceiling.

Republicans are already holding out for $1 in spending cuts for every dollar increase in the debt ceiling. And the country seems to be behind the GOP position: If the Senate and White House don’t agree to $2 trillion in spending cuts, we don’t raise the debt ceiling by $2 trillion.

The U.S. government does not run out of money to pay its bills until August. But markets probably will be making judgments upon the likelihood of a U.S. default well before then.

How did we get here? How did the richest and strongest country in history, triumphant in World War II and the Cold War, approach so soon the condition of the late Spanish and British empires as they began their precipitous declines?

Answer: We overextended ourselves. We bankrupted ourselves.

We undertook the defense of nations all over the world having little to do with our vital national interests. We fought unnecessary wars. We doled out trillions in foreign aid to ingrates, incompetents, opportunists and thieves.

We promised all our seniors Social Security and subsidized medical care for the rest of their lives and failed to put the money away to pay for it. We dropped half of U.S. wage earners off the tax rolls while creating a mammoth welfare state to dwarf anything Norman Thomas and his Socialists dreamed of in the 1930s.

Not only for the United States but also for the West, the days of wine and roses are over.

Liberals Give ‘Til It Hurts (You)
By Ann Coulter

Liberals never tire of discussing their own generosity, particularly when demanding that the government take your money by force to fund shiftless government employees overseeing counterproductive government programs.

They seem to have replaced “God” with “Government” in scriptural phrases such as “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37)

This week, we’ll take a peek at the charitable giving of these champions of the poor.

In 2009, the Obamas gave 5.9 percent of their income to charity, about the same as they gave in 2006 and 2007. In the eight years before he became president, Obama gave an average of 3.5 percent of his income to charity, upping that to 6.5 percent in 2008.

The Obamas’ charitable giving is equally divided between “hope” and “change.”

George W. Bush gave away more than 10 percent of his income each year he was president, as he did before becoming president.

Thus, in 2005, Obama gave about the same dollar amount to charity as President George Bush did, on an income of $1.7 million — more than twice as much as President Bush’s $735,180. Again in 2006, Bush gave more to charity than Obama on an income one-third smaller than Obama’s.

In the decade before Joe Biden became vice president, the Bidens gave a total — all 10 years combined — of $3,690 to charity, or 0.2 percent of their income. They gave in a decade what most Americans in their tax bracket give in an average year, or about one row of hair plugs.

Of course, even in Biden’s stingiest years, he gave more to charity than Sen. John Kerry did in 1995, which was a big fat goose egg. Kerry did, however, spend half a million dollars on a 17th-century Dutch seascape painting that year, as Peter Schweizer reports in his 2008 book, “Makers and Takers.”

To be fair, 1995 was an off-year for Kerry’s charitable giving. The year before, he gave $2,039 to charity, and the year before that a staggering $175.

He also dropped a $5 bill in the Salvation Army pail and almost didn’t ask for change.

In 1998, Al Gore gave $353 to charity — about a day’s take for a lemonade stand in his neighborhood. That was 10 percent of the national average for charitable giving by people in the $100,000-$200,000 income bracket. Gore was at the very top of that bracket, with an income of $197,729.

When Sen. Ted Kennedy released his tax returns to run for president in the ’70s, they showed that Kennedy gave a bare 1 percent of his income to charity — or, as Schweizer says, “about as much as Kennedy claimed as a write-off on his 50-foot sailing sloop Curragh.” (Cash tips to bartenders and cocktail waitresses are not considered charitable donations.)

The Democratic base gives to charity as their betters do. At the same income, a single mother on welfare is seven times less likely to give to charity than a working poor family that attends religious services.

In 2006 and 2007, John McCain, who files separately from his rich wife, gave 27.3 percent and 28.6 percent of his income to charity.

In 2005, Vice President Cheney gave 77 percent of his income to charity. He also shot a lawyer in the face, which I think should count for something.

In a single year, Schweizer reports, Rush Limbaugh “gave $109,716 to ‘various individuals in need of assistance mainly due to family illnesses,’ $52,898 to ‘children’s case management organizations,’ including ‘various programs to benefit families in need,’ $35,100 for ‘Alzheimer’s community care — day care for families in need,’ and $40,951 for air conditioning units and heaters delivered to troops in Iraq.”

(Rush also once gave $50 to Maxine Waters after mistaking her for a homeless person.)

The only way to pry a liberal from his money is to hold tickertape parades for him, allowing him to boast about his charity in magazines and on TV.

Isn’t that what Jesus instructed in the Sermon on the Mount?

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do … But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6:2-4)

In my Bible, that passage is illustrated with a photo of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

At least the hypocrites in the Bible, Redmond, Wash., and Omaha, Neb., who incessantly brag about their charity actually do pony up the money.

Elected Democrats crow about how much they love the poor by demanding overburdened taxpayers fund government redistribution schemes, but can never seem to open their own wallets.

The only evidence we have that Democrats love the poor is that they consistently back policies that will create more of them.

Liberals’ 50 Years of Dreadful Domestic Policy
by Larry Elder

For the past 50 years, the Democrats — and many Republicans who should know better — have been wrong about virtually every major domestic policy issue. Let’s review some of them:

Taxes.

The bipartisan extension of the Bush tax cuts represents the latest triumph over the “soak the rich because trickledown doesn’t work” leftists.

President Ronald Reagan sharply reduced the top marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent, doubling the Treasury’s tax revenue. President George H.W. Bush raised the income tax rate, as did his successor. But President George W. Bush lowered them to the current 35 percent.

President Barack Obama repeatedly called the current rate unfair, harmful to the country and a reward to those who “didn’t need” the cuts and “didn’t ask for” them. If true, he and his party ditched their moral obligation to oppose the extension. But they didn’t, because none of it is true. Democratic icon John F. Kennedy, who reduced the top marginal rate from more than 90 percent to 70 percent, said, “A rising tide lifts all the boats.” He was right — and most of the Democratic Party knows it.

Welfare for the “underclass.”

When President Lyndon Johnson launched his “War on Poverty,” the poverty rate was trending down. When he offered money and benefits to unmarried women, the rate started flat-lining. Women married the government, allowing men to abandon their moral and financial responsibilities.

The percentage of children born outside of marriage — to young, disproportionately uneducated and disproportionately brown and black women — exploded. In 1996, over the objections of many on the left, welfare was reformed. Time limits were imposed, and women no longer received additional benefits if they had more children. The welfare rolls declined. Ten years later, The New York Times wrote: “When the 1996 law was passed … liberal advocacy groups … predicted that it would increase child poverty, hunger and homelessness. The predictions were not fulfilled.”

Education.

The federal government’s increasing involvement with education — what is properly a state and local function — has been costly and ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. Title I, a program begun 45 years ago to close the performance gap between urban and suburban schools, burns through more than $15 billion a year, and the performance gap has widened. The feds spend $80 billion a year on K-12 education, as if money is the answer. States like Utah and Iowa spend much less money per student compared with districts like those in New York City and Washington, D.C., with much better results.

Where parents have choices — where the money follows the student rather than the other way around — the students perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. But the teachers’ unions and the Democratic Party continue to resist true competition among public, private and parochial schools.

Gun control.

Violent crime occurs disproportionately in urban areas — where Democrats in charge impose the most draconian gun control laws.

Over the objection of those who warn of a “return to the Wild West,” 34 states passed laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Not one state has repealed its law. Professor John Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” says: “There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate: As more people obtain permits, there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect, the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent and robberies by over 2 percent.”

“Affirmative action.”

Race-based preferences have been a disaster for college admissions. Students admitted with lesser credentials are more likely to drop out. Had their credentials matched their schools, they would have been far more likely to graduate and thus enter the job market at a more productive level.

Preferences in government hiring and contracting have led to widespread, costly and morale-draining “reverse discrimination” lawsuits. Where preferences have been put to the ballot, voters — even in liberal states like California — have voted against them.

Minimum wage hikes.

Almost all economists agree that minimum wage laws contribute to unemployment among the low-skilled — the very group the “compassionate party” claims to care about.

Economist Walter Williams, 74, in his new autobiography, “Up from the Projects,” describes the many low-skilled jobs he took as a teenager. “By today’s standards,” he wrote, “my youthful employment opportunities might be seen as extraordinary. That was not the case in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, as I’ve reported in some of my research, teenage unemployment among blacks was slightly lower than among whites, and black teens were more active in the labor force as well. All of my classmates, friends, and acquaintances who wanted to work found jobs of one sort or another.”

ObamaCare.

This ghastly government-directed scheme will inevitably lead to rationing and lower-quality care — all without “bending the cost curve” down as Obama promised.

Any party can have a bad half-century. Merry Christmas.

Pelosi Could Guarantee Destruction of Democrats in 2012
by Matt Towery

It was the dumbest thing the Democratic members of the U.S. House could have done. And it is already jeopardizing the chances of President Obama to reverse the fortunes of himself and his party. “It” was making Nancy Pelosi the minority leader of the House, and thus the head of what is now an even more liberal delegation of lawmakers.

I find it interesting when a veteran news/talk celebrity like Barbara Walters asks President Obama to respond to Sarah Palin’s comment that if she runs for president in 2012, she believes she could win. Obama at first gracefully dodges the question, only to have Walters laugh and condescending suggest that surely he believes he could defeat Palin. So we’re to assume automatically that Palin is a lightweight, but that someone like Pelosi is a political pro and an asset to her party.

If Pelosi is such a pro, she should realize that her hard stand of opposing an extension of tax cuts for so-called “wealthy Americans” as part of an extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts is placing what few moderates she has from her own party in Congress in political hot water. Moreover, this puts her at odds with the president. That’s not to say he wants to extend these cuts for those who earn over $250,000 as a family. Rather, it’s to say that, at least for the short term, he desperately needs to do so.

The problem is that Pelosi, who at one point was known vaguely by the public, is now becoming the left-wing spokesperson and a potential obstructionist to compromise. This will only hurt her own party and the president as she rises in name identification. It was Pelosi who was unapologetic for the beating her colleagues took in the elections. Now even major national newspapers are reporting that she is becoming a huge thorn in the side of a president who desperately needs to appear more moderate in order to have a prayer of re-election in 2012.

I have drawn the comparison between the Obama administration and that of Jimmy Carter’s more than once. Now history truly is repeating itself. In the 1970s, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill was a powerful Democratic speaker of the House. At first, he and Carter worked together. But when Carter began challenging pet projects of O’Neill’s, and also failed to push for universal heath care, O’Neill turned into the Nancy Pelosi of his era.

Many forget that while the Democrats held onto the House in 1980, O’Neill was used as a major weapon by the GOP in that year’s presidential election. They argued that the Democrats were too liberal and that Carter had to go. And so Jimmy Carter went. Doubtless he was painfully aware of the large target O’Neill had placed on his back.

It seems likely that the more soon-to-be Minority Leader Pelosi opens her mouth, the more she will appear out of touch with political reality. For example, she never flinched over the use of government planes to fly her across the country, to and from her district. Did it ever dawn on her that the Republican speaker that Democrats most loved to hate, Newt Gingrich, generally flew commercial airliners to and from his district, most often in coach, unless he had earned a legitimate “frequent flier” upgrade?

This was before Pelosi’s party got spanked on Election Day, of course. Her refusal to acknowledge the consequences of the elections, and her desire to soldier on with a pure leftist agenda, create not just problems for Obama with the public, but potentially within his own party, as well.

While Hillary Clinton has emphatically denied that she will seek the presidency, a recent PollPosition national survey showed her basically tied among likely voters in a Clinton-Obama contest in 2012. And recent surveys have shown Clinton’s favorable polling percentages are higher than Obama’s, while the president’s unfavorable percentages among voters are higher than Clinton’s.

Could this explain why, throughout the early days of the recent North Korea-South Korea crisis, Secretary of State Clinton has been nowhere to be found? Can you say “Bobby Kennedy in 1968″?

With President Obama having to deal with an inflexibly leftist Democratic House caucus, and at the same time needing to recapture the support of moderate voters who abandoned the Democrats in the recent election, the last thing he needs is a louder, shriller and more stubborn Nancy Pelosi. It could spell doom for him in the next presidential contest. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

Charlie Rangel Is a Symptom of a Bigger Problem
by Star Parker

Charlie Rangel, convicted of eleven ethics violations – the most ever found against any member of Congress – was resoundingly re-elected, getting 80% of his district’s vote.

After 40 years representing these folks, you can’t conclude he was an unknown commodity. Granted, the conviction occurred after the election, but the charges were well publicized.

Has Charlie Rangel’s leadership produced life so grand in Harlem that flagrant and persistent unethical behavior by their Congressman means nothing to its residents?

The national poverty rate is around 14%. In the 15th district of New York, Charlie Rangel’s district, it’s 24.3%. The child poverty rate is 30.9%.

Whatever it is that Harlem voters find so attractive about Mr. Rangel, it’s hard to conclude that quality of life is something they feel they owe to him.

But let’s think about this in a broader context.

Charlie Rangel is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

There are now 41 House members who belong to the Caucus. In the most recent elections, 37 of them ran as incumbents and all regained their seats handily. The four seats that were vacated were easily captured by new black Democrats.

That’s a 100% return rate. These Black Caucus Democrats recaptured their seats getting an average 75% of their district’s vote.

In a year when 62 Democrats were defeated – a 25% reduction in the bloc of 252 Democrats in the current Congress – the reduction of the bloc of 41 black Democrats was zero.

The average poverty rate in the districts of Congressional Black Caucus members is 20.3% – six points higher than the national average. The average child poverty rate in these districts is 28.8%.

So, as in Charlie Rangel’s case, it’s hard to conclude that these Black Caucus Democrats are being sent back to Washington by large voting margins, year after year, because they are delivering such fine lives to their constituents.

A problem here is that elections in Black Caucus districts are not exactly what might be described as free and open.

About three quarters of these districts are Majority Minority districts, hard wired to guarantee election of blacks. The remaining districts are also gerrymandered through various schemes flowing from collusion of political parties and state legislatures.

The initial provision of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, to deal with voting problems was structured to counter schemes going on in the South – literacy tests, etc – rigged to keep blacks from registering and voting.

But by the 1970’s, this provision morphed into district gerrymandering. What was initially meant to protect the voting rights of blacks evolved into provisions to guarantee the election of blacks.

The result of this overall process is a bloc of politically manipulated districts which, coupled with other institutional biases protecting incumbents, virtually guarantees the election of black Democrats.

You might say that rigged elections might be justified if it meant better lives for black constituents.

But given that these districts are largely characterized by persistent poverty and some of the worst public schools in the country, this is a conclusion that’s hard to reach.

Earlier this year, the New York Times profiled the prodigious money raising prowess and dubious ethics of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The Times editorialized, “Of all the money machines shaving ethical corners, few rival the Congressional Black Caucus…..the caucus spends far more on gala entertainments and golf outings than on the scholarships that billboard its charity drives.”

Political markets are like commercial markets. The absence of competition results in shoddy products.

When we send American soldiers into harm’s way abroad to fight for free elections, perhaps we should spend more time considering the quality of our own democracy at home.

The Final Nail in the Democrats’ Coffin
by Larry Kudlow

On the eve of the midterm elections, a third-quarter GDP report showing a meager 2 percent growth rate is the final nail in the Obama Democrats’ political coffin.

The economic nails slowly have been hammered into that coffin all summer and fall. A spate of subpar economic statistics has shown the failure of the fiscal-stimulus spending program. And myriad tax and regulatory threats produced by new government policies have created a massive uncertainty overhang and a dismal jobs outlook. American businesses have gone on an investment-capital and hiring strike.

For a White House that bet the ranch on a massive government pump-priming plan, it has all turned out to be a complete failure. The scheduled economic recovery has simply not occurred.

And that’s why a Republican Tea Party tsunami lies just over the horizon. That tidal wave could be even greater than current polling suggests.

It should have been recovery summer, according to the president and his followers. But it is now officially a recovery slump. The entire command-and-control economic philosophy of the Obama Democrats has proven to be a big bust. And they’ll pay a very big price for this.

In fact, the last two GDP reports have averaged less than 2 percent growth, something that qualifies as a growth recession, not a recovery.

Even worse, the GDP deflator — the broadest inflation measure — came in at 2.2 percent in the third quarter, following a 2 percent reading in the second quarter. That means inflation is rising faster than real output. Stagflation.

The Bernanke Fed should take notice of this on the eve of its quantitative-easing pump-priming exercise, expected to be announced the day after the election. We are actually experiencing a mini version of stagflationary growth recession.

The spending, taxing, and regulating policies of the Democratic Congress and administration have blocked growth, putting the Fed in a position to provide even more money to chase fewer goods. But in classic Milton Friedman terms, even though the economy is mired in stagnation, that’s still an inflationary prescription.

On top of all that, the depreciating-dollar policies of the Fed have led to a boom in commodity prices, including food and energy — things ordinary Americans pay for in the course of their typical week.

When the economy came in at 5 percent in the last quarter of 2009, and at 3.7 percent in early 2001, it looked like a recovery scenario. This, of course, followed the Fed’s massive $2 trillion stimulus plan and the more than $1 trillion fiscal stimulus. But those sugar highs quickly evaporated as growth slowed to 2.7 percent in the spring and 2 percent in the summer.

Meanwhile, a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 9.6 percent was supposed to have dropped to 8 percent last year and 7 percent by the end of this year, according to the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. But it didn’t. The so-called stimulus failed to stimulate.

Actually, unemployment is much worse for regular workaday folks. Counting marginal part-time workers and discouraged workers, unemployment is 17.3 percent. And this year, while the president promised 1.5 million new jobs, nonfarm payrolls have grown by only 613,000, and actually have fallen over the past four months.

The trouble with the whole Obama mindset is the notion that government can run the economy. That idea has failed. It is business that runs the economy, including entrepreneurs and risk-takers. Yet the animal spirits have been stifled, while the producers have been laughed at, mocked, and insulted.

The Obama class-warfare campaign against business and investment has created a wall of worry and a refusal to invest in the future. The incentive model of growth, where it must pay more after tax and regulatory costs to work, produce, and invest, has been discarded by Obama’s extreme left-liberal Keynesianism. Predictably, higher costs — including the cost of Obamacare, probably the single-greatest barrier to growth and jobs — have forced the most productive factors in the economy to hole up and virtually shut down.

But the whole Tea Party movement of free-market populism represents an attempt to re-oxygenate the economy by unclogging the blood vessels of entrepreneurship with a major rollback of spending, taxing, and regulating. This Tea Party philosophy is derided daily by the Democrats, but it represents a bull’s-eye in terms of creating future economic growth.

Fortunately, the Republican party has returned to this Reaganesque message. This is the single most-important theme in the GOP comeback.

This Is a Referendum, Not an Election
by Dennis Prager

Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010 is not Election Day. It is Referendum Day.

It may be commonplace for commentators to announce that every election is “the most important election in our lifetime” or something analogous. But having never said that of a presidential election, let alone an off-year election, this commentator cannot be accused of crying wolf when I say that this off-year election is not simply the most important of my lifetime. It is the most important since the Civil War.

The reason is that unlike all previous elections, this one is actually a referendum on the direction of the United States of America.

If the Democrats win:

– The American people have announced, consciously or not, that they support the Democratic Party’s “fundamental transformation” — those were President Obama’s words when he campaigned, and he has lived up to them — of America from a liberty-based state of limited government into an equality-based welfare state with an ever-expanding government.

– America will change from a country that emphasizes producing wealth to a country that emphasizes redistribution of wealth.

The left has never been primarily interested in creating wealth. Its primary goal always and everywhere has been to redistribute it. That so many businessmen and much of Wall Street are only now awakening to this fact is only a testament to the staggering lack of wisdom in big business.

– America will produce increasingly narcissistic citizens.

For proof, just look at the virtual shutdown of much of France and the ubiquitous rioting of vast numbers of its citizens over a tiny change in its welfare state — raising the age of retirement from 60 to 62. The idea that one will work two more years before receiving benefits until death so offends vast numbers of French — including young people who have every reason to believe they will live until the age of 100 — that they are fighting it as if their very lives were in jeopardy. That is the self-centeredness that all welfare states engender in their citizens.

– America will further reinforce the conviction that minorities are victims — who must be protected from their fellow Americans by the state.

Latinos, blacks, Muslims, gays and vast numbers of women have been told by the left and its political party that they are all persecuted by a country that is SIXHIRB — Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist and Bigoted. That America is the least SIXHIRB country in the world is a fact that has been all but drowned out by the left-wing domination of television and print news media, all the entertainment media, and the high schools and universities.

– America will continue to undermine its unique ability to Americanize people of all ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds.

With a Democratic victory the country’s very motto — E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many One” — will continue to erode as ethnic and racial identities rather one American identity are increasingly celebrated. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has just announced that Germany’s experiment with multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” but the left and its political party, the Democrats, have redoubled their efforts to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.

– America will continue its economic slide.

With a Democratic victory, unsustainable debts will mount, wealth-producing companies will continue to flee from higher taxes and more regulations, energy use will be taxed in the name of environmentalist utopianism, and the government will continue to print dollars.

– America will become increasingly secular.

With a Democratic victory, the left’s goal of rendering America’s other motto, “In God We Trust,” an anachronism will come closer to fruition. Leftism is a jealous god. As in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian roots of this country are ceasing to play the indispensible moral role they have played since before 1776.

And what would constitute a Democrat victory next Tuesday? Anything other than a Republican landslide. Any other result will be interpreted by the media and by the Democrats as solely a result of the economic recession and as the normal losses of the dominant party in off-year elections.

In other words, the only way to ensure that the electoral results are seen as a repudiation of the growth of the state and the other Democrat and leftist goals is through an enormous Republican victory.

Only then will America understand that this election was not first about jobs. It was above all about America.

Four Causes that Will Lead to a Democratic Election Nightmare
by Fred Barnes

The four causes of what’s likely to be a landslide defeat for Democrats in the midterm election are now locked in place. All that’s left for Democrats in the final three weeks of the campaign is to trash Republicans, stir their base to vote, and pray.

The last cause of the Democratic downslide to be cooked in the election cake was the economy. The Labor Department last week reported the jobs picture for September: 95,000 jobs lost and the unemployment rate mired at 9.6 percent.

These gloomy numbers are important because there won’t be another jobs report until after November 2. So any hope by Democrats for a dramatic uptick in employment – or even a small increase – before Election Day is gone. They’re stuck with the ultimate albatross in politics – a bad economy.

Two of the other causes – liberal overreach and disappointment with President Obama – began to surface last year. By early 2010, they had become overriding issues in the campaign. Now they’re such a drag that Democratic candidates would rather not talk about them.

Liberal overreach is an old problem for Democrats when they take control of both the White House and Capitol Hill, as they did in 2008. Their no-holds-barred pursuit of a liberal agenda tends to turn off the electorate, a majority of whom fit into the center-right category. A midterm backlash occurred in 1966 and 1994, and to a lesser extent in 1978.

This year, the $862 billion stimulus, the cap-and-trade climate bill (passed by the House), health care, a thicket of new regulations, and unchecked spending constitute the overreach. The trillion dollar deficits and a projected tripling of the national debt have made matters still worse for Democrats.

And the bursting of the Obama balloon has created a critical mass of voters who swooned over Obama when he was a candidate but have been deeply disappointed by his performance as president. Many are independents who have flipped and become likely Republican voters this year.

Obama’s promise to end polarization in Washington, pursue bipartisanship, and change the way business is done in the nation’s capital had appealed to these voters. His failure to deliver on any of the three has added fuel to their migration to Republicans.

The fourth cause is one Democrats couldn’t do anything about – or not much anyway. That’s the historical tendency of the party that doesn’t hold the White House to gain in the first midterm election after a new president is inaugurated. There have only been two exceptions, 1934 and 2002.

At one point, Democrats thought they might escape the midterm curse or at least mitigate its impact. When the economic recovery proved to be painfully weak and both Obama and his policies lost favor, that dream died. What’s ahead now for Democrats is a nightmare.

Republicans Should Prepare for “October Surprises”
by Carol Platt Liebau

It’s an old lawyers’ cliché: If you don’t have the law on your side, use the facts. If you don’t have the facts, pound the table. Apparently, the Obama/Pelosi Democrats have decided they need to pound the table – at least figuratively. That’s why Republicans had better be ready for a series of big, ugly Democrat “October surprises.”

Last week’s New York Times piece about Democrats resorting to negative, personal attacks on their political opponents was an amazingly open admission of desperation. And there’s no doubt the desperation is warranted.

After all, Democrats don’t have “the law(s)” on their side. Their two biggest legislative initiatives – the stimulus and the federal healthcare takeover – are massively unpopular. A recent Gallup poll found that 52% of the public disapproves of the former (with 43% approving) while 56% of Americans disapproves of the latter (with 39% approving).

Nor are “the facts” in the Democrats’ favor. The $819 billion stimulus spending pushed the U.S. deficit 23% higher to a record $13.2 trillion. Since it was passed, America has lost $2.5 million jobs. Contrary to the President’s promise that the spending would keep unemployment below 8%, the national unemployment rate is 9.6% (and a whopping 16.7% including those who want, but cannot find, full-time work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Examples of waste and abuse are legion – including the $111 million in stimulus funds sent to Los Angeles to create only 55 jobs, and the payment of $250 stimulus checks to incarcerated felons.

Likewise, it’s already clear that ObamaCare keeps none of the promises the President made while advocating its passage. Contrary to Obama’s pledge that Americans satisfied with their care could keep their current plans, up to 69% of employees and 80% of small businesses could be forced to change health care plans under the law’s new regulation. And rather than slowing the acceleration of health care costs, ObamaCare means that U.S. health care spending is projected to rise 9.2% by 2014, rather than the 6.6% projected before the law took effect, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Given the spectacular failure of their legislative centerpieces – and the ongoing economic crisis fueled, in significant part, by the undisguised hostility of their leaders to private business – “table thumping,” in the form of negative campaigning, is all the Democrats have left. And they’ve taken to it like pigs to mud.

Just last week, Democrat Congressman Alan Grayson called his opponent, Daniel Webster, a member of the “Taliban” after distorting Webster’s advocacy of traditional Christian values. Democrat Congressman Ron Klein sent out the social security number of his opponent, Alan West, at the top of a mass mailing. In California – using a technique eerily similar to one she employed against Arnold Schwarzenegger in the closing days of the 2003 campaign – Democrat attorney/publicity-seeker Gloria Allred trotted out an alleged “victim” to accuse the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nominee, Meg Whitman, of possible illegality.

Allred’s gambit may well have been just the first of many controversial allegations Democrats will launch in the hopes of repulsing just enough independent and Republican to enable incumbents to squeak through to re-election. Ironically, the party advocating government as the answer to all America’s problems seems willing to maintain its hold on power at the cost of convincing Americans that politicians themselves can’t be trusted.

But even in their desperation, perhaps Democrats have once again misjudged the mood of the country. This year, it’s not about the personalities or histories or proclivities of the people on the ballot. It’s about their policies – and the Democrats’. It’s about restoring prosperity, stopping the out-of-control spending, and firing the politicians who have demonstrated such obvious contempt for values and wishes of the mainstream American electorate.

Yes, Republicans should be prepared for the possibility of an October surprise. And Democrats, in turn, should be prepared for the possibility that it will backfire. They can “pound the table” all they want. The problem for them is that the voters may have already stopped listening to them.

The Dems’ Disastrous Model
Calling voters stupid is a losing strategy.
by Victor Davis Hanson

The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn’t be enough to get elected in America because “I need a majority.”

For some reason, Democrats have chosen to follow the disastrous model of Stevenson and not that of the feisty, man-of-the-people Missourian Harry Truman — though the former nearly wrecked the party and the latter got elected.

Former president Jimmy Carter likewise seems to feel that he’s still too smart for us. Carter, who turns 86 on Friday, is hitting the news shows to explain why he remains America’s “superior” ex-president — and why more than 30 years ago he was so successful yet so underappreciated as our chief executive.

Most Americans instead remember a very different President Carter, who finished his single term with 18 percent inflation, 18 percent interest rates, 11 percent unemployment, long gas lines, and a world in chaos, from hostage-taking in Teheran to Soviet Communist aggression in Afghanistan and Central America.

Now, John Kerry — who failed to win the presidency in 2004 and recently tried to avoid state sales taxes on his new $7 million yacht — is voicing similar frustrations about Americans’ inability to fathom what their betters are trying to do for them. He is furious that an unsophisticated electorate might not return congressional Democratic majorities in 2010. Kerry laments that “we have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on.” Instead, it falls for “a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.”

In 2006, Kerry warned students that if they did poorly in school, they could “get stuck in Iraq.” He apparently had forgotten that soldiers volunteer for military service and are overwhelmingly high-school graduates.

In the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama at one point said of her husband’s burden, “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.”

That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: “And it’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

During the recent Ground Zero mosque controversy, Obama returned to that Carter-Kerry sort of condescension. When asked about the overwhelming opposition to the mosque, the president felt again that the unthinking hoi polloi had given into their unfounded fears: “I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society.”

The president often clears his throat with “Let me be perfectly clear” and “Make no mistake about it” — as if we, his schoolchildren, have to be warned to pay attention to the all-knowing teacher at the front of the class.

Disappointed progressive pundits also feel this angst over having to deal with childlike Americans. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently psychoanalyzed the falling support for the president by claiming that “the American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.”

Thomas Frank’s best-selling 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? lamented that uninformed voters were easily tricked into voting against their “real” economic interests.

When America votes for a liberal candidate, it is praised by the Left as intelligent — and derided as dense when it does not. We were told not to worry that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not pay all his income taxes, since we were lucky to have someone so well educated and experienced in high finance.

Note that few Democratic candidates are running on the health-care bill they passed, promising at the time that it would be appreciated by a suspicious American public. More federal borrowing and amnesty are still pushed under the euphemisms “stimulus” and “comprehensive immigration reform.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the Tea Party was merely a synthetic, Astroturf movement. Professors and preachers may like such sermonizing. But for politicians, it’s a lousy way to get elected. Again, compare the relative fates of the patronizing Adlai Stevenson and the plain-speaking Harry Truman.

For many of today’s liberals, the fact that the president hasto deal with so many Neanderthal know-nothings explains why he can’t, as promised, close Guantanamo, end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” or do away with Bush-era renditions, tribunals, and wiretaps, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But current polls suggest that these clueless and unappreciative Americans apparently believe that an elite education does not ensure their officials can balance a budget, pay their own taxes, or speak candidly.

What an outrageous “How-dare-they!” thought.

Liberals Confuse Me
by Walter E. Williams

Christine O’Donnell, U.S. Senate candidate from Delaware, has faced considerable criticism and news media attention about her youthful association with witchcraft. Have we seen similar news media attention given to other politicians who have made bizarre remarks that border on gross stupidity — possibly lunacy?

During a congressional Armed Services hearing in March, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., expressed concern that stationing 8,000 Marines and their equipment on Guam, our Pacific territory, could cause the island “to become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.” Such a remark is grossly stupid but the liberal press didn’t give it anywhere near the amount of attention and derision that they gave Christine O’Donnell.

On the campaign trail in March 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama told his Beaverton, Ore., audience, “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.” Whether Obama misspoke or not, that’s a grossly stupid remark, but white liberals among the intellectual elite and the liberal news media all but ignored it. Of course, when former Vice President Dan Quayle misspelled “potatoe,” they pounced upon it and had a field day.

So what might explain the liberals giving Hank Johnson and Obama a pass whilst playing up the perceived shortcomings of Christine O’Donnell and Dan Quayle? The answer might be as simple as just looking at the colors involved. O’Donnell and Quayle are white and Johnson and Obama are black. That means the white liberal vision comes into play where to openly oppose, criticize and ridicule blacks is racist. The key term is openly. I bet that when alone, in trusted company, white liberals crack up over the things that some black people say and do. The white liberal vision holds one set of standards to which white people are obliged and another that’s lower for blacks. I don’t believe that white liberals are racists in the sense that Klansmen and neo-Nazis are; however, their paternalistic and demeaning attitudes toward blacks are far more debilitating.

There needs to be a bit of elaboration of the statement that to openly oppose, criticize and ridicule a black is racist. If the black in question is a conservative, possibly Republican, then any sort of criticism and treatment is acceptable. This was seen in the criticism and ridicule of Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” cartoon featured President Bush referring to Secretary Rice as “brown sugar.” Pat Oliphant showed her as a parrot with big lips and Ted Rall’s cartoon had Miss Rice proclaiming herself Bush’s “House nigga.” Don Wright’s cartoon depicted Justice Thomas as Justice Scalia’s lawn jockey. These cartoons were carried in major newspapers nationwide. Ask yourself what would happen to a nationally syndicated cartoonist, and the newspaper that carried it, depicting President Obama as a wide-eyed, fat-lipped monkey.

Racial double standards are nothing new. It has been the currency on jobs and college campuses where there is an acceptance of behavior by blacks that would be condemned if done by whites. Often misguided white liberal professors, in the name of making up for injustices of the past, give black students grades they didn’t earn. Being 74 years old, I have frequently told people that I’m glad that I received just about all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. That means I was obliged to live up to higher standards.

More blacks need to be bold and challenge the demeaning attitudes of white liberals. During the early years of the Reagan administration, I had a number of press conferences in response to a book or article that I had written. At several of them, I invited the reporters to treat me like a white person — just ask hard questions.

Liberal Crackup
by Walter E. Williams

Charles Krauthammer, in his Washington Post column (8/27/10), said, “Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed,” pointing out that overwhelming majorities of Americans have repudiated liberal agenda items such as: Obamacare, Obama’s stimulus, building an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, redefinition of marriage to include same-sex marriage, lax immigration law enforcement and vast expansion of federal power that includes unprecedented debt and deficits.

The nation’s elite and the news media see being against the Obama-led agenda as being racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, mean-spirited and insensitive. Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, has a different twist expressed in “It’s Witch-Hunt Season” (8/29/10). Krugman says that the last time a Democrat sat in the White House, Bill Clinton, he faced a witch-hunt by his political opponents. “Now,” Krugman says, “it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse,” asking, “So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?”

Professor Krugman and others among America’s elite blame some of the rage on talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. They are only partially correct. What talk shows have accomplished is they’ve ended the isolation of many ordinary Americans. When the liberal mainstream media dominated the airwaves, Americans who were against race and sex quotas were made to feel as though they were racists and sexists. Americans who were against big government were portrayed as mean-spirited and uncaring. What talk radio and the massive expansion in non-traditional media have done is not only end the isolation, but more important, the silence amongst ordinary Americans.

Krugman says that what we’re witnessing is “political craziness.” Therefore, the overwhelming majority of Americans who think our borders ought to be secure and think we should have the right to determine who enters our country are politically crazy. Americans who can find nothing in the U.S. Constitution granting Congress the power to take over our health care system are politically crazy. Americans who think a mosque should not be built in the shadows of the Muslim-destroyed World Trade Center are simply religious bigots. By the way, those who oppose the building are not saying there’s no legal or constitutional right to do so any more than they would say a person has no legal or constitutional right to curse his parents, but neither is a good idea. In Thomas Sowell’s column on the topic (8/31/10), he reminds us that “If we all did everything that we have a legal right to do, we could not even survive as individuals, much less as a society.”

Krugman predicts that political craziness, and by inference crazy Americans, will result in a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and play chicken with the federal budget. Chicken with the budget is precisely what Defundit.org has called for. Already they’ve obtained the pledges of 165 congressional candidates not to fund any part of Obamacare.

While America’s liberal elite have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision and, as such, differ only in degree but not kind. Both denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are for control and coercion by the state. They believe they have superior wisdom to the masses and they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. They, like any other tyrant, have what they see as good reasons for restricting the freedom of others.

Their agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Free markets imply voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning control and regulation.

Why liberalism has become an ugly sight, as Krauthammer claims, is because more and more Americans have wised up to their agenda.

An Epic Dem Disaster
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The magnitude of the catastrophe facing the Democratic Party in the fall elections is only gradually becoming clear to the leaders of both parties. The Democrats will lose both the Senate and the House. They will lose more House seats in 2010 than the 54 they lost in 1994, and they will lose the Senate, possibly with some seats to spare.

In state after state, the races that were once marginal are now solidly Republican, those that were possible takeaways are now likely GOP wins, and the impossible seats are now fully in play.

Colorado offers a good example. Betsey Markey was supposed to be a marginal new Democratic member. But Cory Gardner, her Republican opponent, is now more than 20 points ahead. John Salazar, the brother of the interior secretary and a well-established Democratic incumbent in a largely Republican district, is now almost 10 points behind his GOP challenger Scott Tipton. And Ed Perlmutter, a solidly entrenched Democrat in a supposedly nearly safe district, is running 1 point behind his GOP opponent, the unusually articulate Ryan Frazier (a black Republican with Obama-esque charisma). The Republicans will probably win all three seats.

Or take Arkansas. Blanche Lincoln is clinically dead, trailing John Boozman 65-27 in the latest Rasmussen poll. In the race that was supposed to be close for the open seat in AR-2, Republican Tim Griffin is massacring Democrat Joyce Elliott by 52-35. In the race that was thought to be a likely Democratic win — AR-1, the East Arkansas district — Republican Rick Crawford is running seven points ahead of Democrat Chad Causey. And, in the district that was considered a safe Democratic seat, the home of Blue Dog leader Mike Ross, Republican Beth Anne Rankin is showing surprising strength and may topple her opponent.

In the Senate, Republicans are solidly ahead in Delaware, North Dakota, Indiana and Arkansas. They have good leads in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington. The Democratic incumbents are perpetually below 50 and basically tied with their Republican challengers in Nevada, California and Wisconsin. Illinois is tied. Connecticut and New York (after the primary) are in play. That’s a gain of up to 13 seats!

And, then consider West Virginia, where the hugely popular Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin — who boasts of a 70 percent job approval rating — looked like the certain successor to Robert Byrd. But, in the latest Rasmussen poll, he leads Republican challenger John Raese by only 48 to 41. When 22 percent of the state likes the job you are doing as governor but doesn’t want to vote for you for senator, you are in deep, deep trouble. That’s 14!

Why the disaster? Obama’s poll numbers alone don’t account for it. With a job approval in the low 40s, he is not as radioactive as Bush was. He still has a ways to fall to reach those depths. So why the unbelievable wipeout in the congressional races?

Obama has a lot to do with it. But so does Congress itself. With congressional approval at 23 percent in the realclearpolitics.com average, the Democrats in the House and Senate have contributed mightily to their own demise. The Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters investigations and the impending decision to let each keep his and her seat does a lot to undermine Congress’ image. So did the deals surrounding health care reform, as the public watched sausage being made in Washington. The spectacle of Congress voting on bills the members have not read adds to public discontent.

In most off-year cycles, it is the president’s party that is judged in the voting. But, this year, Congress has been in the forefront of most of the legislation — up to actually writing the stimulus and health care bills — that the body itself is attracting its own negatives. Republican insurgents’ success in derailing incumbent senators in Alaska and Utah attest to the bipartisan nature of the disaffection.

But, for whatever reason, the only mistake either party can make as 2010 approaches is to aim too low. It is not the marginal seats that are in play, it is the safe ones!

It’s the Economy, Dems
by Donald Lambro

The economy is tanking. Economists say it has slowed to a near comatose 1.5 percent growth rate, unemployment claims were at a nine-month high and jobs are scarce, yet President Obama is focusing on corporate campaign donations.

While the economy is the clear overriding issue in the midterm elections, threatening to topple Democrats from power in Congress, Obama was devoting his weekly radio address last Saturday to an issue far from the real concerns of workers, families and employers struggling to survive.

If anyone is looking for signs Obama is completely disconnected from the failing economy, his radio address blaming Republicans for blocking his legislation to place restrictions on corporate campaign donations delivered that in spades.

With polls showing Obama’s job approval rating slipping to 43 percent last week because of the economy, Democratic strategists grumble privately that the White House has a “tin ear.” Republicans said Obama’s focus on campaign politics instead of policies to get the economy growing again showed how much he wanted to change the subject in this year’s elections.

“Americans want us to focus on jobs, but by focusing on an election bill, Democrats are sending a clear message to the American people that their jobs aren’t as important as the jobs of embattled Democrat politicians,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in response to Obama’s remarks.

But the Obama administration remained in deep denial about the declining health of the U.S. economy, insisting that it was “moving in the right direction,” dubbing it the “Recovery Summer” and declaring that economic growth was “growing at a good clip.”

A few weeks ago, Vice President Joe Biden predicted the creation of between 250,000 to 500,000 jobs was just around the corner.

But as the summer draws to a close, and with the elections a little more than two months away, those jobs are nowhere to be seen. If anything, the economy’s health was worsening, and this administration didn’t seem to have a viable plan to pull the country out of its economic decline.

Among recent developments:

– Last week the government reported that more American workers had filed for jobless benefits than at anytime since last November. Unemployment-benefit claims rose by 12,000 to 500,000 for the third straight weekly increase — the first time claims had hit the half-million mark in nine months.

– While the official unemployment rate stood at 9.5 percent in July, the real jobless rate is much higher than that. Factor in the 1.2 million unemployed who have given up looking for work and have dropped out of the labor force, plus those who want full-time work but can only find part-time jobs, and the national unemployment rate is 16.5 percent.

– The housing industry has sunk into a deeper slump, with nearly half of homeowners who enrolled in Obama’s mortgage relief plan dropping out — raising fears that foreclosures may increase in the second half of the year.

– Other troubling signs point to growing economic desperation in the workforce. Longterm unemployed Americans are forced to apply earlier than they planned for Social Security benefits in an attempt to make ends meet. And a record number of workers are withdrawing funds from their 401(k) retirement accounts to pay their household bills and put food on the table.

Meantime, the Obama administration is planning to slam the U.S. economy with the largest tax increase in American history by letting President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 top income tax rate cuts expire at the end of this year.

Beleagured businesses, both large and small, have been saying all year that this will deeply hurt the economy, risk-taking investors and job creation, but the White House and Democratic leaders are stubbornly determined to go ahead with their big-spending tax-hike plan.

It isn’t just the business community saying higher taxes will weaken the economy: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is saing it, too.

A CBO analysis released last week said permanently extending the Bush tax cuts would give the country a “considerable” economic boost over the next few years.

“Under that… scenario, economic growth would be stronger next year; unemployment would be lower next year,” said CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, who was appointed to his post by Democratic leaders in Congress.

Moreover, “under current law, both the waning of (Obama’s) fiscal stimulus and the scheduled increases in taxes will temporarily subtract from growth, especially in 2011,” CBO added.

Notably, a growing number of Democratic candidates are also urging Obama and their party to keep the lower tax rates in place, saying it would be the height of economic folly to raise income taxes on the people who create jobs at a time when the economy is in a steep decline.

Some of the don’t-raise-taxes Democrats are Senate candidates in critical battleground contests, including Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, Rep. Brad Ellsworth of Indiana and Rep. Charlie Melancon of Louisiana.

When Ronald Reagan cut tax rates across the board in the 1981-82 recession, the economy surged into a spectacular recovery, with quarterly rate increases of between 4 percent and 9.3 percent over the next several years.

There’s a message there somewhere for the stubborn Obama Democrats to consider.

Down in the Polls, Dems at War With Themselves
by Michael Barone

Intraparty civil war. It’s a story line journalists often employ, though usually about only one party, the Republicans.

Thus when three-term Sen. Bob Bennett failed to get enough votes at the Utah Republican convention, we were told that he was the victim of a purge by right-wing activists, despite his largely conservative record.

That was a legitimate story, and I tend to agree that Bennett was a constructive member of Congress who will be missed. And there will be more of these stories as the years go on, as Tea Party activists challenge politicians they regard as establishment Republicans.

But the real civil war this year is going on in the Democratic Party — and it is going largely unreported.

One reason is that it is not a clear-cut battle between two easily identifiable forces, like Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac. Rather, it resembles the guerrilla conflicts of the Civil War in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, with local self-starters scurrying about in all directions.

So in this month’s primaries, we saw a skirmish between Arkansas Senate incumbent Blanche Lincoln and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who suggested but did not quite promise he’d support the card check bill that would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections — and whose campaign received something like $1 million from unions. That race will be decided in the June 8 runoff.

Another incumbent challenged on the left was Utah Rep. Jim Matheson, who got only 55 percent in the Democrats’ state convention and could lose the June 22 primary to a supporter of the health care bill.

Pennsylvania Democrats rejected party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter, supported by the Obama White House, in favor of Rep. Joseph Sestak, who has a longer record of supporting Obama policies — but who after the primary declined to identify himself as an “Obama Democrat.”

The Democrats’ one big victory, in the Pennsylvania 12 special election, was won by a pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-health care bill, anti-cap-and-trade candidate. That platform sounds more Republican than Democratic.

Their big defeat came in the Hawaii 1 special election, when the Democratic vote was split between supporters and opponents of the machine headed by Sen. Daniel Inouye, now in his 51st year as a member of Congress. Democratic factionalism may help Charles Djou hold onto the seat in the fall, in the one state that has never denied re-election to an incumbent member of Congress.

Intraparty civil war takes many forms. In Illinois, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. reportedly is ready to endorse Republican Senate nominee Mark Kirk over Democrat Alexi Giannoulias, whose family bank gave loans to mob-related individuals and then failed last month. In New York, Andrew Cuomo launched his gubernatorial bid with a platform that puts him on a collision course with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and differs notably from the record of his father, Mario Cuomo, in his three terms as governor.

What we’re seeing here are attempts to scramble out of trouble by members of a party whose big-government policies have proved, to their surprise, to be highly unpopular. Some move left, some move right, some just run around.

As Pennsylvania Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper says, “You have to be independent, no matter what.” This from one of the “Stupak five,” who delivered to Speaker Nancy Pelosi the critical votes to pass the Democrats’ health care bill despite their previous promises to oppose a bill that funded abortions.

Democrats showed impressive party discipline in jamming cap-and-trade through the House in June and the health care bills in the House and Senate last winter. But that was then. Now the House Democrats are throwing up their hands on passing a budget resolution. Party stalwarts like Rep. Gerry Connolly of Northern Virginia aren’t willing to cast a vote for the kind of deficits the Obama administration supports.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. In 2006, House Republicans, staring at negative poll numbers, weren’t able to pass a budget resolution, either. A once disciplined party was transformed into an incoherent rabble.

The Democratic Party at its best is a group of disparate constituencies united in support of a common program able to win large majorities around the country, as it did in November 2008. The Democratic Party at its worst is a collection of panicked politicians engaged in civil war. Which one does it look like now?

The Left Loses Its Way by Abandoning ‘Third Way’
by Michael Barone

Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labor Party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday.

All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way” center-left movement that once seemed to sweep all before it?

Only a dozen years ago, in 1998, President Bill Clinton enjoyed 70 percent job approval. Prime Minister Tony Blair was basking in adulation in his first full year in office.

Clinton “third way” New Democrats and Blair’s “New Labor” party seemed to have a bright and long future ahead. Clinton’s designated successor, Al Gore, despite some ham-handed campaigning, came out ahead in the popular vote in 2000 and lost the presidency by only some hundreds of votes in Florida. With Blair at its head, Labor won unprecedented re-election victories in 2001 and 2005.

Now, less than a generation later, both New Democrats and New Labour seem defunct.

Both parties have moved well to the left. Barack Obama and Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, head governments that are running budget deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product. Both are promoting higher taxes and expansion of government programs.

The financial crisis is one reason for the large deficits. But it is undeniable that to varying extents both Obama and Brown have pursued more statist policies than their predecessors did a dozen years ago.

And it is undeniable, too, that both are in trouble with the voters.

In these circumstances, it is surprising that the pundit class is not chiding Obama and Brown for abandoning the politically successful policies of Clinton and Blair. The same pundit class is always ready to chide American Republicans and British Conservatives for not pursuing the courses that Rockefeller Republicans and pre-Thatcher “wet” Conservatives pursued with some political success a much longer time ago.

Rocky and the wets supported a continuing expansion of government and maintaining the power of labor unions. But a British party last won an election on that platform in 1974, 36 years ago, and no American president has been elected on such a platform between 1964 and 2008. And with Democrats plunging in the polls, Obama’s election is beginning to look like an exception that proves the rule.

Americans may have voted for “hope and change,” but not in the form of the 2009 stimulus package and the 2010 health care bill.

Looking back in history, the Rockefeller Republicans chose their course because they believed their party could not beat New Deal Democrats except by moving some distance toward their philosophy. And in particular, they believed they could not beat Democrats in New York, which in the first half of the 20th century was both the nation’s largest state and one of the politically most marginal.

But by the early 1960s, New York was no longer the nation’s largest state and was safely Democratic. And by the early 1970s, Americans were no longer voting for big government. The Rockefeller strategy was rendered obsolete.

It’s not clear that the Clinton New Democratic strategy is similarly obsolete. Clinton calculated that Democrats could not win except by making inroads in the South and by making big gains in the suburbs. That’s how he won twice, and Obama improved on his leads in the suburbs and carried three Southern states with Northern-accented suburbs (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida).

But Obama ran well behind in eight Southern-accented and Mountain states that Clinton carried in 1992. And polling now shows Democrats weaker than Obama was in 2008 virtually everywhere except in university towns and the affluent precincts of metro New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Similarly, in Britain polling has shown Brown’s Labor party holding its traditional redoubts in declining industrial towns but getting shellacked in the affluent suburbs where Tony Blair’s New Labor thrived.

The left parties have reacted to their unpopularity by playing the race card. Democrats have tried to portray tea partiers as racist, and Brown called a lifelong Labor voter who questioned his policies a “bigoted woman.”

Blaming the voters is the last resort of a party in trouble. Old Labor and the Obama Democrats may not yet be finished. But they’re not doing as well as their “third way” predecessors.

Ungovernable? Nonsense.
by Charles Krauthammer

In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board — and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

It’s 2010 and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama’s two signature initiatives — cap-and-trade and health care reform — lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: “America the Ungovernable.” So declared Newsweek. “Is America Ungovernable?” coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model, while America flails about under its “two parties … with their duel-to-the-death paralysis.” The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.

Yet, what’s new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic — and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

And then, of course, there’s the filibuster, the newest liberal bete noire. “Don’t blame Mr. Obama,” writes Paul Krugman of the president’s failures. “Blame our political culture instead. … And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable.”

Ungovernable, once again. Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about “extremists” trying “to eliminate the filibuster” when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: “Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama’s (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. … But in this case there’s a simpler explanation: Barack Obama’s job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed.”

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise — expanded coverage at lower cost — led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections — Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That’s not a structural defect. That’s a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself — despite the special interests — through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

Obama’s Populist Impersonation of Truman Can’t Possibly Work
by Michael Medved

Barack Obama’s embarrassing new attempt to channel Harry Truman with his angry populist appeals is doomed to failure for three reasons: wrong guy, wrong Congress and wrong country.

Wrong Guy. Everything about the real Harry Truman made him a perfect representative of the little guy: his slight stature, humble boyhood on a Missouri farm, lack of formal education (he was the last president with no college degree), checkered business career, small-time and small-town associates and well-known habit of plain speaking. When he became the accidental president after FDR’s sudden death in 1945, establishment journalists compared him unfavorably against Roosevelt’s worldly sophistication and aristocratic style. Truman made his rough-hewn Missouri-stubbornness into a virtue when he faced the electorate in his underdog campaign in 1948, connecting far more effectively with ordinary, middle class Americans than his opponents – the mustachioed New York governor, Thomas E. Dewey and the suave, handsome third-party leftist, former Vice President Henry Wallace.

Obama has virtually nothing in common with Truman – other than their comparable experience of failure in promoting a sweeping new government health care program. The current president is an athletic 6’2”, with two prestigious Ivy League degrees, cosmopolitan tastes and vast personal wealth (earned largely from his bestselling books). He never attended American public schools, receiving his education either in Indonesia or, since fifth grade, at a posh, top-rated prep school (Punahou) in Hawaii. Where Truman’s father John Anderson Peanuts Truman (who measured all of 5’4” and 140 pounds) was a poor farmer and livestock salesman, both Obama’s parents held graduate degrees (his mother a PhD in anthropology and his father an economics MA from Harvard) and he was raised by his banker grandmother, for thirty years a Vice President of Bank of Hawaii. His wife Michelle, of course, holds blue-chip degrees from both Harvard and Princeton and earned close to a half-million a year in her career as a corporate attorney.

While most Americans remain ignorant of the details of Obama’s privileged background, they know that his attempts to portray himself as just plain folks ring phony and fraudulent. When he first assumed the presidency, his admirers tried to liken him to John F. Kennedy – an analogy that actually made some sense. Both men were tall, slender, preternaturally cool, expensively groomed, deeply narcissistic Ivy Leaguers who made up in glamour what they lacked in the common touch. It’s an idiotic strategy, however, to try to morph the suave, teleprompter-addicted No-Drama Obama into the fiery Give ‘Em Hell Harry. It makes about as much sense as trying to transform George W. Bush into the wry, philosopher king egg-head, Adlai Stevenson.

Wrong Congress. In November of 1946, after just nineteen months as president, Harry Truman received a devastating political blow that made Obama’s recent message from Massachusetts look like a love-tap. Under Truman, the resurgent Republicans captured 13 new Senate seats and 56 fresh places in the House, giving them control of Congress for the first time in 16 years. As it happened, Truman turned this huge political defeat into a major electoral advantage when he campaigned for president two years later: he ran a feisty, indignant race blaming all the nation’s problems on The Do-Nothing Republican Congress and accusing his opponents of trying to dismantle FDR’s popular New Deal.

It’s obviously tempting for Barack Obama to similarly blame the struggling economy and his foreign policy reverses on the pompous insiders on Capitol Hill; after all, public opinion polls show that Congress is even less popular than he is. The problem, of course, is that the president’s own Democratic Party enjoys big majorities in both houses, and even with Scott Brown’s upset in Massachusetts, the Republicans still control nothing at all in the legislative branch. He may feel frustrated about his own Do Nothing Congress but attacking fellow-Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (as either incompetent or malfeasant) wont help make the case for electing still more Democrats in November. Angry populist rhetoric could work for President Truman in 1948 because the people had just gone through two years of the novel (and, as it turned out, short-lived) experience of GOP control of Congress. If Barack Obama, on the other hand, tries to exploit widespread anger at the current direction of government, it’s hard to see how the rage wouldn’t finally focus on the president and his allies.

THE WRONG COUNTRY. Impassioned efforts to bash business and demonize corporate power have rarely paid off in the past (just ask three-time presidential loser William Jennings Bryan or more recent flailing, failing demagogues like George McGovern, Walter Mondale, or John Edwards) and they certainly wont work today. It’s true that Truman eked out his 1948 upset victory (49% to 45%) by claiming to represent common people against the Washington and Wall Street establishments, but with two prominent fringe party candidates he still fell short of a majority. What’s more, the nation has changed dramatically in the last sixty years, making the electorate far less susceptible to us-vs.-them, working class-vs.-ruling class appeals. For one thing, labor unions played a vastly greater role in elections at every level: in 1948, 28% of the civilian labor force affiliated with unions while today the number is less than 12%. Far more Americans own their own businesses in 2010 than hold union cards. What’s more, the old denunciations of Wall Street carry less political force when a clear majority of Americans (an estimated 55%) own shares in the stock market compared with just 4% in 1950! In the Truman era, denunciations of greedy financiers (like FDR’s economic royalists) threatened mostly them, but in today’s America any damage to the Dow Jones definitely impacts us, causing pain and loss for most (if not all) American families. Even many citizens with no stock portfolios understand that if big business suffers and declines, then their own jobs are on the line. Could any observers of today’s economic dilemma believe that we will achieve a durable recovery if leading corporations and major banks don’t play a prominent role in it?

The recent foray into faux populism by the President of the United States reflects an administration in the midst of unraveling, its magical mantras of hope and change irretrievably tarnished, and its gauzy promises of a new golden age of bi-partisan cooperation looking more and more like a sour joke. President Obama understands that he needs to project a fresh start on health care, terrorism, spending, deficits, the economy, energy policy and more, but he prefers to experiment with an ill-fitting image adjustment, based on the success of one of his embattled predecessors. He may make vain attempts to impersonate Harry Truman, but the combination of mindless big government policies and feckless, self-righteous leadership increasingly bring to mind his deeper resemblance to Jimmy Carter.

Off-The-Cliff, But Catching On
by George Will

You know the foreboding you feel while watching the steamier Greek tragedies, when dynasties are falling and sons are marrying their mothers and everyone is behaving badly and you are thinking: Really, things cannot continue like this.

Washington feels that way on the rare and fleeting occasions when it really thinks about the nation’s looming crisis of public finance. The crisis, which is obvious and inevitable, combines unfulfillable entitlement promises and unsustainable budget deficits. So Washington is succumbing, yet again, to an idee fixe, which is usually, and in this case, scary.

The awful idea is for Congress to divest itself of the core competence that the Constitution vests in it — the power to make the taxing and spending choices that shape the nation. This power would be given to an 18-member panel assigned to solve the budgetary crisis.

Under legislation drafted by Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and endorsed by 33 other senators, the Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action would be composed of 16 members of Congress (four each selected by the House speaker and minority leader, and the Senate majority and minority leaders) plus the Treasury secretary and someone the president selects. The panel would propose spending cuts and tax increases to put the government on a glide path to solvency. The menu of proposals would be guaranteed an up-or-down vote — no amendments permitted — in both houses of Congress.

This is patterned on the commissions that were charged with deciding which military bases — more of 300 of them, it turned out — would be closed after the Cold War, a problem deemed too threatening to local sensibilities for Congress to cope with it. The Conrad-Gregg task force is the latest iteration of the “let’s-all-hold-hands-and-jump-off-the-cliff-together” school of government, with this difference: Closing bases is small beer compared to the task force’s sweeping mandate.

There are two objections — each is sufficient — to the task force. One is procedural, the other is substantive.

Regarding procedure, consider a sentence in a Fiscal Times story in The Washington Post on the task force idea, a sentence that seems bland only because of this city’s advanced state of constitutional decadence: “The White House has been talking to Congress to try to craft a proposal that would not wholly relinquish congressional control over major decisions on taxes and spending.” Wholly? The oath of office for representatives and senators does not commit them to partially or occasionally or when convenient “support and defend,” and bear “true faith and allegiance” to, the Constitution and “faithfully discharge the duties” of their offices.

Substantively, the task force would be a means of conscripting Republican participation in huge tax increases. There are precedents. The 1983 Greenspan Commission that “fixed” Social Security permanently (permanence is not what it used to be) involved large and immediate tax increases and small and delayed trims to benefits. The year after the 1990 budget summit, which resulted in President George H.W. Bush’s renunciation of his “no new taxes” pledge, the budget deficit almost doubled.

Were the Conrad-Gregg task force to come to a consensus, it almost certainly would be that Congress must make the supposedly “difficult choice” of spending more of other people’s money. Fortunately, the task force probably would be paralyzed by the requirement that its proposals must be endorsed by at least 14 — 78 percent — of its members. Given the difficulty of getting 60 percent of the Senate to agree on anything important, a 78 percent consensus on raising taxes and cutting entitlements will be extremely elusive.

Year one of the Obama administration was devoted to deliberately exacerbating the fiscal crisis. The gusher of spending, combined with the new multi-trillion-dollar health care entitlement, is half of liberalism’s plan to radically and permanently increase government’s grasp on the nation’s wealth. As a response to the crisis, the task force would produce the other half.

Armies on the march are supposedly no match for an idea, especially a bad one, whose time has come. But what armies cannot defeat, monetary incentives might. So, the Gregg-Conrad legislation should be amended to include this language:

“During the life of this task force, which will perform Congress’ fundamental duties, all senators and representatives will be considered on vacation and will not be paid. If the task force’s recommendations are accepted by Congress, there will be no congressional pay until 2050.”

This would be a Madisonian measure, altering incentives in order to encourage responsibility. Let’s vote.