The Republican Senate
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Republicans gnashed their teeth in frustration as the national tide of GOP resurgence washed up against the massive Democratic fortresses in Nevada, Washington state, Colorado and California. When they neither toppled nor faltered, most conservatives resigned themselves to a divided Congress with the Republican House and the Democratic Senate forever at war.

Not so. The vote on the extension of the Bush tax cuts reveals that the Republican Party has, in fact, gained effective control of the U.S. Senate. We are facing the same situation Ronald Reagan confronted in 1980 when his revolution brought him control of the Senate, but left the House under the nominal reign of Tip O’Neill and the Democrats. But, in fact, as the new president soon discovered, the House Democratic majority was subservient to the tide that had swept the Senate. Terrified by the Republican sweep, the Democrats were unable to muster a coherent opposition in the chamber they controlled. So it will be in 2011.

The Democrats will keep the corner offices in the Russell, Dirksen and Hart Senate office buildings and retain their committee chairmanships, but their ability to summon a majority to sustain their president on crucial votes is gone. The defection of Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut indicates that the 53-47 Democratic tilt of the Senate is more apparent than real.

Webb, Nelson, Manchin and Lieberman are all up for re-election in 2012. Each is very good at reading the handwriting on the wall left by Sens. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Bob _Bennett, R-Utah, and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., on their way out the door. It reads, “The conservatives are coming!”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., could well afford to lose four votes while he controlled the Senate 58-42, but he can ill afford four defections when his margin is only three. And Sens. Nelson, Jon Tester, D-Mont., Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. — all from red states and all facing close re-election battles — cannot be far behind these four in considering periodic abandonment of the ship on key votes. Only the likelihood of retirement saves Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., from a similar fate. Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Herb Kohl, D-Wis., Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., also vulnerable in 2012, probably think they can ride out the tide in their more Democratic states. (And in any event, Brown, Stabenow and Menendez are too liberal to notice what has just happened.)

So, on key votes, the endangered Democratic senators are likely to dodge the bullets coming from the House and defect from Reid’s majority. Why should they take the rap for blocking conservative legislation when they have a presidential veto backing them up at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? “Let the president take the rap; why should I have to?” they will ask as they lend their assent to House-passed bills. The inability of President Obama to re-elect those who supported him hardly encourages others to risk their careers doing so.

Indeed, Reid can only regain his functioning majority if more Democrats choose to retire rather than face the music in 2012. If Kohl, Bingaman, Webb and Ben Nelson decide to retire after this term, the Democrats could have enough lame ducks to keep control of the Senate floor for one more cycle — hardly a pleasing prospect for their party.

The result of the functional _Republican control of the Senate is that the forum for decision-making in a divided Washington will not be the conference committee, but rather White House negotiations between the two political parties.

It remains to be seen whether the endangered Democrats can save their Senate seats from the likely GOP tide of 2012 by switching in time to pretend to be moderates. What is clear is that they are not going to block the Republican bills coming over from the House.

The Democrats will still control the committees in the Senate, but the Republicans will own the floor.

DeMint, Coburn Upbeat On GOP Earmarks Moratorium
by Guy Benson

Senators Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) discussed Senate Republicans’ scheduled vote on a two-year earmarks moratorium during a Heritage Foundation press call this afternoon. The call took place just minutes before Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell announced his support for the measure — a significant about-face. The conservative Senators had expressed hopeful optimism that the secret ballot decision, which will take place on Tuesday, will adopt Sen. DeMint’s controversial proposal. They cited recent polling data that they argue clearly demonstrates voters’ opposition to a practice deemed to be “wrong and wasteful.”

McConnell, citing the will of voters, agreed: “I am announcing that I will join the Republican Leadership in the House in support of a moratorium on earmarks in the 112th Congress,” he said in a prepared statement. “Banning earmarks is another small but important symbolic step we can take to show that we’re serious, another step on the way to serious and sustained cuts in spending and to the debt. Republican Leaders in the House and Senate are now united on this issue, united in hearing what the voters have been telling us for two years — and acting on it.”

Senate Republican leadership’s reversal all but guarantees easy passage of the DeMint proposal, which has already been embraced by the House GOP. It also marks an early triumph of Tea Party activists and fiscal conservatives, who had demanded that Republicans take this large, albeit mostly symbolic, step to curb federal spending. DeMint has since applauded McConnell’s move, calling it an example of “bold leadership.”

During the conference call, DeMint explained why the ban is important. “There are Congressmen and Senators who believe it’s their job to bring home federal bacon,” he said, warning that if Republicans continue to endorse the process, voters would be justified in doubting whether the party truly “believes in limited government.” In a remark that would prove prescient, DeMint hinted, “I don’t think there’s nearly the division in our conference that some have suggested.”

The conservative duo dismissed arguments advanced in recent days by some fellow Republicans that earmarking is a relatively insignificant issue, and that the GOP shouldn’t cede all the ground on specific directing of appropriations to Democrats and the White House. “Earmarks are the cause of bigger problems,” DeMint explained. “They keep members’ eyes off the ball of major reforms. [Rejecting] earmarks is a way for us to show that we’ve gotten the message, and that we’re committed to stop focusing on parochial and special interests. It’s not our job to be directing money back to local projects that don’t have national significance,” he said. It now appears that GOP brass has adopted a similar stance.

“Our country is facing the greatest difficulty of my lifetime,” Coburn said. “For us to defend a process that takes the focus off the important issues is an untenable position. It violates our oath, which says we must do what’s in the best interests of the nation, not what’s in the best interest of individual members’ political careers.” He added that maintaining the status quo on earmarks would engender “greater cynicism” among the American people “at a time when they need encouragement.” A source in McConnell’s office agreed, saying that the GOP leader’s announcement would “help bring folks on our side together.”

Prior to the McConnell development, DeMint predicted that his proposal would narrowly pass. Based on his own informal whip count, DeMint said he believed his faction would have the votes to adopt the moratorium. “I think we have the edge by a vote or two,” he said. After McConnell’s chess move, those calculations are now moot, as the conference’s adoption of the moratorium is a fait accompli.

McConnell’s decision also sidestepped a number of potentially thorny issues brewing within his caucus. Senator-elect Mike Lee of Utah was pushing a public vote on the matter, and the DeMint/Coburn duo was preparing to force an open, Senate-wide vote on earmarks by attaching it to a food safety bill on Wednesday. The Party’s official change of heart effectively neutralizes both possibilities. United Senate Republicans now plan to pressure Democratic colleagues to endorse their position; a choice that could prove complicated for a handful of Senators widely viewed to be vulnerable in 2012.

A New Generation GOP Is Good News for Conservative Future
by Michael Medved

It’s true that the November elections brought prominent winners in both parties, but the contrast between Democratic and Republican victors is highly revealing.

The biggest Democratic success stories involved re-elected Sens. Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid, and new California governor Jerry Brown – all age 70 or above! The GOP, meanwhile, hailed breakthrough victories for 39-year-old Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, 43-year old Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, 38-year old Governor Nikki Haley in South Carolina, 42-year- old Sen. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, 47-year-old Sen. Rand Paul in Kentucky, and many other youthful candidates bringing fresh, conservative perspectives to high office. Moreover, with Hillary Clinton ruling out a future presidential race, Joe Biden reaching age 74 by 2016, and John Edwards utterly unthinkable, what younger generation Democratic star could plausibly succeed Obama?

The Democrats, in other words, have become a party of shop-worn retreads while the GOP bench is full of next-generation leaders of potential national stature, including Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rick Perry of Texas, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Senators John Thune of South Dakota, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and many more.

Looking toward the future, the rising stars of the GOP not only look more vibrant and dynamic than the Pelosi/Reid Democrats, they also count as increasingly diverse.

After the recent elections, skeptics can no longer deride the GOP as an all-white party of grumpy old men. Marco Rubio, 39, became the new Senator from Florida while fellow Latino Republicans Bryan Sandoval in Nevada and Susana Martinez in New Mexico became the nation’s only two Hispanic Governors. Jaime Herrera, age 31, captured a Democratic Congressional seat in Washington State, while Raul Labrador did the same in Idaho. Two more Hispanic Republicans– Bill Flores and Quico Canseco—knocked out incumbent Democrats in Texas. In South Carolina, Indian-American Nikki Haley won for Governor while black conservative Tim Scott beat Strom Thurmond’s son (among others) for a Congressional seat. Alan West, an African-American Iraq War hero, trounced an incumbent white Florida Democrat.

In the new Republican House of Representatives, eight members of the GOP majority will proudly qualify for a potential “Republican Hispanic Caucus.” Geraldo Rivera may dismiss such victories as “window dressing,” (as he did recently on Fox News) but they have changed both image and substance of the GOP.

What the GOP Landslide Means for America
by Terry Paulson

P. J. O’Rourke said it best, “This is not just about an election – It’s going to be a RESTRAINING ORDER!” Just what does the Republican landslide mean to America, to Washington politics, and to you?

Elections have consequences. Voters make choices. But a campaign is like dating—it’s the sales phase of the relationship. Once an election is over, citizens are watching to see how candidates live up to the promises they’ve made. Will the “love” and “trust” be earned and re-earned month after month?

This vote was more a rejection of President Obama’s changes and failure to right the economy than it was an endorsement of the Republican Party. The last time Republicans were in control of Congress, they spent more than the Democrats in the previous administration. America will be watching to see if Republicans have learned their lesson and have the backbone to live the principles they so frequently espouse.

The media will harp on the importance of “getting along” and working together to find “non-partisan” solutions. President Obama will call for compromise, but you’ve promised those who voted for you smaller government, lower taxes and a return to the Constitutional principles. Compromise on these promises is not what America needs or voters expect.

The solutions that President Obama brought to Washington involved more government stimulus spending, more expensive entitlements, more intrusive regulations and an exploding deficit. Conservative solutions come from decreasing the size and cost of government so that citizens have the capital and the incentives necessary to unleash the innovation and entrepreneurial strength of this great country.

Conservatives want government to stop punishing producers who have played by the rules and succeeded. America won’t have economic private sector growth and the jobs that creates until investors know that such investment and hard work will pay off. Instead of punishing success by raising their taxes; the investors, entrepreneurs and workers need to be honored, supported, championed and encouraged. Other countries are bouncing back from the recession because they’re cutting entitlements and incentivizing business growth. We must do the same. That involves change, not compromise.

Republicans don’t need the Senate or President Obama to make an impact now. The House, alone, is given the Constitutional power of the purse. Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution clearly reads: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives . . .” And Section 9 states, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Republicans should use the power they’ve earned.

There’ll be costs. You can’t cut government spending without cutting some government agencies, some government jobs, and some government benefits. That involves real people losing jobs at a time jobs are hard to find. You can’t cut or reduce benefits to people who have learned to be dependent on government and expect everybody to applaud. Conservatives will be called “mean-spirited” by every government addict cut off.

Call on Americans to help their neighbors. Tough times are part of the cure on the way to much better times. With the right incentives, there’s private sector money waiting to be unleashed, but jobs will remain scarce until new companies find their markets. It’s a hand up over a handout.

Republicans must lead. That means facing difficult early choices like refusing to extend the debt ceiling and fighting the Fed’s efforts to monetize our debt which devalues the dollar and triggers inflation. Will they take spending back to 2008 levels and initiate zero-based budgeting for the next budget cycle? Will they actually lower the bar on what constitutes poverty so that only the truly poor receive government funds? They must call on communities and charities to once again be the first line of support instead of creating further government dependency. They must become the party of NO to excessive big-government spending and the party of YES to free market solutions and individual responsibility.

While talking about landslides, California voters gave total control to the Democrats. With no viable Republican opposition, California will put liberal solutions to the test while remaining disconnected from the center-right country in which they reside. But if they look to Washington for their “too big to fail” bailout, expect no blank checks with Republicans now holding the purse strings in the House.

Take heart; solutions can be found. The fast-rising GOP star, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, has shown that fiscal responsibility and true budget-cutting can be popular. He recently warned his own party, “If Republicans win the Congress we’ve got to put up or shut up.” Voters are watching. Give us a party with a backbone that we can be proud to support for years to come.

Impressions from a Historic Election
by Mona Charen

It’s an occupational hazard of pundits to see what they want to see in election returns. After the Democrats’ 2008 sweep, any number of liberal commentators (and even some conservatives) consigned the Republican Party to Whig status (the Whigs ended with a whimper in 1856). Some were unwise enough to enshrine their predictions in book titles. In 2009, James Carville published “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation,” and Sam Tanenhaus authored “The Death of Conservatism.” Some conservatives despaired that Republicans had lost women, young people, the cities, New England!

And even now, after Republicans won more House seats than any party has won since 1948, some liberals are suggesting that the really pressing issue for the majority is how they will handle internal tensions between tea party activists and establishment Republicans.

This is not to suggest that worries over Republicans’ standing with the voters were totally misplaced. Obviously, any party that loses touch with the electorate is in trouble, as President Obama and the Democrats are learning now. But we are clearly in a new political age. Critical independent voters really are independent. In light of recent swings in voter sentiment — and the quite stunning new velocity of political change — grand predictions of realignments seem utterly outdated and silly. Viewed in the light of 2010, the 2008 election looks like a provisional grant. The same may be true of 2010’s results when viewed from the perspective of 2012.

With that caveat noted, let’s examine some of the interesting features of the 2010 results.

Hispanics. Hispanics are the nation’s largest minority, and their share of the population is increasing. They went hard for Obama and Democrats in 2008 (67 percent) and accounted for 9 percent of votes cast. In 2010, they gave almost the same share of their votes to congressional Democrats (65 percent). But the election of three prominent Republican Hispanics — Marco Rubio as a Florida senator, Susana Martinez as New Mexico governor, and Brian Sandoval as Nevada governor — could open the door to greater Republican success with this voter group.

Beyond simple ethnic pride, Hispanic voters may reconsider their suspicion that Republican opposition to illegal immigration is thinly masked hostility to Hispanics. The same Republicans who passionately want the federal government to enforce the borders also tear up with pride when Rubio invokes an immigrant who came to this country to ensure that “doors closed to him” would be open for his children — Rubio’s father. The success of Hispanic politicians who patriotically extol the American dream for immigrants yet hold the line on illegal immigration will not erase the Democratic advantage with this group, but it cannot help but improve the chances of Republicans. If Republicans can learn to talk about immigration with Rubio’s combination of pride in our immigrant heritage along with impatience with lawbreaking — it will alienate far fewer members of this constituency.

States. As significant as the Republican sweep at the federal level, gains for Republicans in governorships and state legislatures could position the party for further success. Nineteen state legislative chambers flipped from Democrat to Republican control Tuesday. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans now control 55 chambers, Democrats have 38, and one is tied. Maine, for the first time since 1964, has elected a Republican governor and two Republican legislative chambers.

Additionally, as National Review’s John Hood notes, a number of key battleground states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Wisconsin now have Republican governors and Republican majority legislatures. Not only will they preside over redistricting in advance of the 2012 elections, they will provide conspicuous models of Republican governance. That is key. For as President Obama acknowledged, somewhat ruefully, during his morning-after press conference, what the voters want is “results.”

America Just Checked Into Rehab
by Victor Davis Hanson

On Tuesday voters rejected President Obama’s attempt to remake America in the image of an imploding Europe — not just by overwhelmingly electing Republican candidates in the House, but by preferring dozens of maverick conservatives who ran against establishment Washington.

Why the near-historic rebuke? Out-of-control spending, unchecked borrowing, vast new entitlements and unsustainable debt — all at a time of economic stagnation.

So what is next? Like the recovering addict who checks himself into rehab, a debt-addicted America just snapped out of its borrowing binge, is waking up with the shakes, and hopes there is still a chance at recovery.

It won’t be easy. Obama and his Democratic Congress ran up nearly $3 trillion in new debt in just 21 months — after running a disingenuous 2008 campaign that falsely promised to rein in the fiscal irresponsibility that had been rampant during the spendthrift Bush administration.

So the voters intervened and sent America in for rehab treatment. In our three-step road to recovery, we, the sick patient, must first end the denial, then accept the tough medicine, and finally change the entrenched habits that caused the addiction.

First, voters did not reject Obama’s agenda because he was too centrist, borrowed and spent too little money, or did not more vigorously pursue unpopular agenda items like cap-and-trade and blanket amnesty. Nor was the Democratic meltdown because of Obama’s inability to articulate his agenda. The vision itself — not the talking points — was the problem.

Obama failed miserably to keep the nation’s trust. After just 21 months, the country concluded that he was an extremist, and that his attempts to manage the economy through massive borrowing, rapid growth in government size and spending, assumption of private enterprise, and serial harangues against business and the rich had turned a recession into a crisis of confidence and a near-depression. For some strange reason, Obama thought the cure for Republican big-spending was European-style socialism, when in fact, voters wanted an end to Bush-era borrowing and waste — not far more of it.

Second, not being Obama will no longer be enough for the ascendant Republicans, many of them political novices or Tea Party mavericks skeptical of both parties. These outsiders told outraged voters that America will have to step up and start controlling spending in a manner Republicans never did as a majority in Congress from 2001 to 2006. Perhaps a good symbolic start would be to cut back on popular pet programs — agricultural subsidies, for example — whose end the republic will survive. This would be iconic proof of congressional willingness to alienate powerful special interests. Social Security, Medicare and some Defense programs all have to be on the table.

If conservatives plan to cut taxes, they will no longer be able to convince the public that the resulting supply-side growth in the economy will eventually bring in more money and balance the budget. Instead, right from the start, the new House majority will have to demand that we pay as we go — every dollar lost in revenue will require a commensurate dollar cut in federal spending.

Republicans should be willing to be demagogued by a weakened Obama as heartless and cruel budget cutters — even if the president may well be the ultimate beneficiary by running on the new theme of fiscal responsibility and a recovering economy in 2012.

Third, voters want their Congress and president to end the pathological value system that got us into this mess. Instead of the president barnstorming the country handing out borrowed cash to favored constituencies and playing one identity group against another, he had better stay in Washington, keep off Comedy Central and “The View,” and only come out to brag when he has cut unsustainable spending for all of us.

It should also be an embarrassment, not an honor, for congressional members of either party to put their names on the latest pork-barrel projects. And instead of weekly newsletters from Washington that boast of bringing home the bacon, voters prefer hard proof that their government only spent what it took in. Any politician can promise a new project, an expanded entitlement or a special-interest tax break with someone else’s money, but only a statesman can explain exactly how it is all to be paid for.

So for now, voters have said that they are sick of profligate Democrats. But if Republicans do not get that message regarding fiscal restraint, in two years it will be their turn — again.

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.

Voters Fed up With Obama’s Big, Bossy Government
by Michael Barone

Out on the campaign trail, Barack Obama has given us his analysis of why his party is headed for significant losses in the election nine days hence.

“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now,” said the president for whom politics did not seem so tough in 2008, “and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.”

In other words, the voters can’t see straight.

But maybe it’s the Obama Democrats who are so scared they can’t see straight. John Maynard Keynes famously said that practical men of business are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. In this case, it seems that practical men of politics may be the slaves of some defunct political scientists and historians.

Those political scientists and historians, inspired by the Progressive movement and New Deal of the last century, taught that history inevitably and properly moves left. It is a story of progress from little or no government to big and bigger government.

Bigger government, in this view, helps the ordinary citizen who is otherwise at the mercy of the masters of the marketplace. And those citizens will be grateful, especially in times of economic distress, to the politicians who expand government ever further.

This theory has been getting some empirical testing over the past two years. And it doesn’t seem to be working any better than Keynes thought the theories of defunct economists were working in the 1930s.

The Obama Democrats have been giving Americans more government, with a vengeance. But the voters seem about to wreak vengeance in their turn.

That’s apparent in the much-watched races for the Senate. Democrats may be pulling even in Pennsylvania and Colorado, but Republicans are even or pulling ahead in California and Illinois. Overall, forecasters consider five Democratic seats lost and believe that Republicans could gain up to six others, though they’ll probably fall short of the 10 they need for a majority.

Similarly, in governorships Democrat Jerry Brown has a small lead in California, and Florida is a dead heat. But Republicans seem likely to replace Democrats in the industrial heartland from Pennsylvania west to the Mississippi River. And they’re likely to gain legislative seats, which will enable them to draw congressional district boundaries for 2012 and beyond.

The big battle is for the House, in which the majority party can pretty well run things. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting Democrats will hold their majority. But that is what any party leader has to say.

Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg, who do seat-by-seat analysis, expect Republicans to capture the 39 seats they need for a majority and more. Both list 100 seats as up for grabs, of which 91 are held by Democrats and only nine by Republicans.

In wave election years, the wave party usually wins half or a little more of the seats it targets, while the losing party usually wins only about one-tenth of its target seats. You do the math. Looks to me like Republicans gain more than the 52 they captured in 1994.

Why has the Democrats’ theory of history moving left worked out so badly? One reason is that it is factually untrue. We’ve moved from regulation to deregulation in the last century, for example.

Another reason is that when government is small and deft, as it was in the 1930s, a little more of it may help folks. But when it is big and plodding, as it seems to be now, a lot more of it may just be a dead weight on the private sector economy, which most Americans seem to realize, is the only generator of real economic growth.

A third reason is that big government can be overly bossy. Voters who have learned to navigate their way through life may not believe that they need Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to set the terms and conditions of their health insurance policies, as Obamacare authorizes her to do.

“Don’t tread on me,” read the flags at tea party rallies. That’s not a contradiction of “facts and science.” It’s an insistence that the Obama Democrats’ policies would strangle freedoms and choke off growth. You may disagree. But if so, it looks like you’re in the minority this year.

Call Me Madam Joe from RightChange on Vimeo.

Republican Trend Continues
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The mainstream media is peddling the line that the Democrats are staging a comeback, slicing Republican leads. It is absolute nonsense. A close review of polling in every close House race in the nation indicates that Republicans now lead in 53 seats currently held by Democrats and are within five points in 20 more.

And the trend is Republican, not Democrat. Of the races where comparative data over the past few weeks is available, Republicans have gained in 33 while Democrats have gained in only 10.

On the Senate level, Republicans now lead in all ten states that are necessary for GOP control of the Senate, the smallest margin coming in Nevada where the Rasmussen Poll has the Republican, Sharron Angle, four points ahead. In West Virginia, Wisconsin, Washington State, and Illinois, the Republican has surged ahead dramatically in recent days and only in Colorado and California has there been slippage. The ten states which are now represented by Democrats where Republicans have the lead are:

North Dakota = +45

Indiana = +18

Arkansas = +18

Wisconsin = +12

Pennsylvania = + 7

West Virginia = + 6

Colorado = + 5

Washington State = + 5

Illinois = + 4

Nevada = + 4

Republican gains should be even greater than this polling indicates. The trend lines are decidedly in the GOP’s favor and Gallup Poll indicates that Republicans are twice as likely to be enthusiastic about voting as Democrats are.

The only note of caution for Republicans is that their leads in Democratic House seats are not substantial. In only 14 seats does the Republican candidate lead by more than ten points and most of those are open Democratic seats. But the Republican turnout machine – animated by Tea Party activists — will likely outperform its Democratic rivals.

And the Democratic Party has no message. Its campaigns are a hodgepodge of personal negatives and fabricated issues. No Democratic candidate is even trying to defend Obama’s health care legislation or argue that his stimulus program is working. Cap and trade is never mentioned by Democrats on the campaign trail. We have the spectacle of the most substantive legislative program in generations having been passed by Congress and now finding that it has no defenders in the election campaign, only Democrats scurrying to prove their independence.

All signs point to a growing Republican landslide.

The gigantic Republican gains of the past week indicate that party trend is now beginning to kick in big time. The Republican leads until this past week are largely due to the voting decisions of people who closely follow the process. The surge in Republican support in the past seven to ten days indicates that the less educated voters who do not follow politics as closely are breaking for the Republicans. Normally, these downscale voters are Democrats, but the economy and the alienating values of the Obama Administration (e.g. Ground Zero Mosque) seem to be driving them to the GOP.

Also boosting Republican prospects is the absence of social issues in the national debate. These elections are turning on unemployment, deficits, the economy, health care, and the national debt, not on gay rights or abortion. So, social liberals and libertarians see no reason not to vote Republican. Only in California are these traditional issues working in driving voters to the Democrats.

A landslide without precedent appears to be in the making.

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.

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!

The Dangerous Dog Days of Summer
by Victor Davis Hanson

Historian Barbara Tuchman characterized the events leading up to World War I as the “Guns of August.”While there is no statistical evidence that wars break out any more often in late summer than in other seasons, the world was torn apart twice during the 20th century: in early August 1914, and then again on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Maybe it is the effects of the heat, or the sense of urgency to do something before the cold of winter; but nonetheless, we’ve also seen a lot of late-summer violence the last few decades.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, leading to an American-led air campaign and ground war in early 1991 that demolished the Iraqi army. On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 radical Islamic terrorists took down the World Trade Center complex and hit the Pentagon — the worst foreign attacks on the continental United States since the British burned much of Washington, D.C., in 1814.

What can we learn from these dog-day cataclysms?

First, for all the rising prewar tensions, the general slaughter to follow was mostly unforeseen. Experts thought August 1914 would lead only to a war “over by Christmas” — not 500 miles of trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland, and 8 million combat dead by 1918. Even after Hitler invaded Poland in a lightning strike, no one dreamed that more than 50 million deaths would follow.

Second, these late-summer bloodbaths usually followed from the initial impression of aggressors that they would face few consequences. After the Munich Agreement, Hitler had no reason to believe that gobbling up Poland would lead to a world war rather than more of the same appeasement. Saddam Hussein had no idea that the United States would react to a far-away border dispute by mobilizing a global coalition against him, and by bombing large swaths of Baghdad. Likewise, few imagined that nine years after 9/11, American troops would still be fighting in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban — the former hosts of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda — from returning to power.

In short, grand professions of peaceful intent in the face of global tensions, or even noble indifference to dictatorial aggression, instead ensure that war follows.

Finally, in the ensuing wars the United States lost thousands of soldiers when it was not well prepared — and far fewer when it was. There was almost no American military in 1914 and little more when we declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungry in 1917.

America was once again woefully unarmed in 1939, when Germany started the European war, and not in much better shape when attacked by the Japanese in December 1941. As a result, in both of its victorious world wars the United States lost tens of thousands of troops.

A fully armed and mobilized volunteer American military forced Iraqi forces out of Kuwait with relatively few losses. And even in the long current slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan — for all the heartbreak of their terrible human costs — fewer American soldiers have died than in single past battles like the Meuse-Argonne or Iwo-Jima. In short, America never went to war regretting that it was overarmed and overprepared.

We should keep such bothersome late-summer history in mind this August. The world is once again heating up with the weather. Iran boasts of its new nuclear reactor — with more to come. A nuclear North Korean keeps threatening South Korea. Hezbollah and Syria are arming to teeth with new missiles. And an assurgent Turkey is seeking an updated version of its Ottoman imperial past. Meanwhile, the United States has unsuccessfully reached out to firebrand leaders such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Syria’s Bashar Assad, while drifting away from its Indian, Israeli and European allies.

More worrisome, in times of 1939-like recession and staggering deficits, the United States is understandably talking of massive cutbacks in its military. Nations never reduce defense expenditures because they want smaller militaries, but because in tough times the public shortsightedly thinks that money is better spent on social programs at home.

The combination of provocative rivals abroad, our president’s constant assurances that the United States has been at fault in the past and wants to reach out to enemies in the future, and probable defense reductions should remind us to tread carefully this late summer.

Unfortunately, the past Guns of August teach us that war may be looking for those who are not looking for war.

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.

November Congressional Elections Could Be Replay of 1966 Midterms
by Michael Barone

Everybody, even White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, agrees that Republicans are going to pick up seats in the House and Senate elections this year. The disagreement is about how many.

Some compare 2010 to 1994, when Republicans picked up 52 House seats and won majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. That was a reaction to the big government programs of the first two years of the Clinton administration.

Others compare this year to 1982, when Democrats picked up 26 House seats and recaptured effective control of the House two years after Ronald Reagan was elected president. That was a recession year, with unemployment even higher than now.

Let me put another off-year election on the table for comparison: 1966. Like 1994, this wasn’t a year of hard economic times. But it was a year when a Democratic president’s war in Asia was starting to cause unease and some opposition within his own party, as is happening now.

And it was a year of recoil against the big government programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The 89th Congress with two-to-one Democratic majorities had passed Medicare, federal aid to education, antipoverty and other landmark legislation.

Democrats only failed, as they have in this Congress, to pass organized labor’s No. 1 priority: then repealing section 14(b), which allowed state right-to-work laws, now the card check bill to effectively eliminate the secret ballot in unionization elections.

In 1966, Republicans gained a net 47 seats in the House. That left Democrats with a 246-187 majority but without effective control. That’s because 95 of those Democrats were from the South (defined as the 11 Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma), and almost all voted conservative on most issues.

Republicans actually won the popular vote for the House in the North (defined as the other 36 states) by a 51 percent to 48 percent majority. They have only done so since in three elections — in 1968 (a virtual carbon copy of 1966 in House races), in their breakthrough year of 1994 and in the post-9/11 year of 2002.

Current polling data suggests that Republicans have a chance of doing so once again in 2010. The realclearpolitics.com’s average of recent generic ballot polls — which party’s candidate for the House would you vote for? — shows Republicans ahead by a historically unprecedented margin of 46 percent to 40 percent.

If those numbers hold, and if they turn out to underpredict Republican performance in the popular vote, as they have in the past, that could mean that Republicans would win a popular vote plurality or majority in the North. Those are two significant ifs, but they’re possible.

There is not much doubt about which party will lead in the South. Back in 1966, the South elected only 29 Republican House members (including future President George H.W. Bush) to 95 Democrats. Democrats led in the popular vote there by a 63 percent to 36 percent margin.

In 1992, as Bush was getting thumped in the presidential election, Republicans won a higher percentage of the House popular vote in the South than the North for the first time since Reconstruction. In 1994, they carried the popular vote in the South by 55 percent to 43 percent. They have carried it ever since, even in 2008, when Barack Obama brought out unprecedented numbers of black voters in the South.

Republicans currently hold an 82-to-63 edge in Southern House seats, with eight Democratic-held seats rated likely or leaning Republican by realclearpolitics.com and another 11 Democratic-held Southern seats rated as toss-ups. And 15 more are in play, rated as likely or leaning Democratic.

So Republicans could easily gain 20 seats in the South. But they could gain even more in the North if current numbers hold up.

In 2008, Democrats won the popular vote in the North by 57 percent to 40 percent — roughly comparable to their lead way back in 1964, the year of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide.

If the popular vote in the North should turn out to go narrowly Republican, as it did in 1966, it could be disaster for Democrats. They lost a net 38 seats in the North that year, when they held just about as many seats Northern seats as now. Not a happy scenario for Democrats. But not out of the realm of possibility.

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 Great Peasant Revolt of 2010
by Charles Krauthammer

“I am not an ideologue,” protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society — health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people’s anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted (BEG ITAL)dissent(END ITAL). And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It re-centers. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.