Obama’s Problem? His Record
By Jonah Goldberg

“The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we are on, where a fewer and fewer number of people do very well and everybody else is running faster and faster just to keep pace.”

That’s Obama advisor David Axelrod on “Fox News Sunday,” explaining why people should vote for … Barack Obama.

Odds are this was simply poor phrasing. But it might not have been, given how desperately the Obama campaign wants to turn back the clock to 2008, when the choice was between hope and change or continuing “down the road we are on.”

Regardless of the spin, the simple fact is that Obama is the stay-the-course candidate stuck with a team, a record and an economy ill-suited for a stay-the-course strategy.

That’s what gives poignancy to Obama’s recently renewed love affair with Ronald Reagan, whom Obama invokes these days as a model of reasonableness and bipartisanship. He even wants to rename the “Buffett rule” the “Reagan rule.”

Even before he got the nomination in 2008, Obama said he wanted to be a “transformative” president like Reagan had been.

And last year, Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Obama [Hearts] Reagan,” which in Time’s words gave the true story behind “Obama’s Reagan Bromance.”

There were two key elements to Obama’s man-crush. The first was the simple hope that history — or at least the business cycle — would repeat itself.

The White House’s plan was to run for re-election in 2012 with a soaring economy at its back. After an absolutely bruising recession (that was in some ways worse than the one Obama inherited), Reagan got to ride a surging economy to re-election. America enjoyed 6 percent annual growth in 1984: In three of the four quarters before Election Day, GDP quarterly growth was more than 7 percent, while inflation and unemployment plummeted.

At Obama’s back is a dismayingly anemic recovery, constantly threatening to get worse. He wants credit for “creating” 3 million jobs but insists he be held blameless for millions more workers who’ve left the job market entirely.

The other reason the White House admired the Reagan White House? According to Time: “Both relied heavily on the power of oratory.” Then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs added, “Our hope is the story ends the same way.”

And there’s the problem for Obama. He’s sticking to his rhetorical guns on the assumption that he’s the great orator his fans have always claimed. It’s admirably Gipperesque, I suppose, but the problem is that Obama has never once significantly moved public opinion on domestic issues with his arguments. If he had that power, not only would “Obamacare” be popular today, it would have been popular when he gave more than 50 addresses and speeches on it during his first year.

Obama’s out on the stump, embracing Obamacare, doubling down on green energy, on the need for “investments” in government programs, and for the whole hodgepodge of rationalizations for hiking taxes and “spreading the wealth around.”

Asking whether Obama is as good a communicator as Reagan is like comparing boxers from different generations; there’s plenty of evidence to form opinions but no way to settle the matter.

But what must be very troubling for Obama is the mounting evidence that presidential persuasion is vastly overrated. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan has noted that Reagan’s rhetoric had little effect on the polls or his media coverage. Liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, surveying the academic literature in a recent issue of the New Yorker, found that there’s little evidence that any president has really moved the country with his rhetoric.

My hunch is that such findings are overdone and leave out some aspects of presidential persuasion.

Still, what’s undoubtedly true is that results matter far more than words. And despite Axelrod’s assertions, the fact is that Obama has been leading us down the road we are on for more than three years, and that’s what voters will have in mind come Election Day.

Obama: Man on a Mission
By Jonah Goldberg

In 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama insisted that the coming presidential primary and general election campaigns “shouldn’t be about making each other look bad, they should be about figuring out how we can all do some good for this precious country of ours. That’s our mission.”

“And in this mission,” he continued, “our rivals won’t be one another, and I would assert it won’t even be the other party. It’s going to be cynicism that we’re fighting against.”

I guess I missed the moment when Obama hung his “Mission Accomplished” banner. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks more like the president not only lost his battle against cynicism, he defected to the other side.

In his remarks this week in Osawatomie, Kan. — the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1910 “new nationalism” speech — Obama laid out the themes for his re-election campaign.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denies it was an “election speech,” but Obama’s own campaign manager, Jim Messina, touted it as one in a fundraising email.

But such is the way of this White House. Facts are dependent variables, history the president’s Pool of Narcissus, reflecting his own glory. Hence, Obama cherry-picks TR’s “new nationalism” as a justification for his own agenda and proof that today’s Republicans are extreme.

After all, was not TR a “Republican son of a wealthy family,” as Obama put it?

Well, yes, he was. And then, he wasn’t. TR left the Republican Party to promote his new nationalism philosophy and run as a Progressive – a “super socialist,” in the words of The New York Times in 1913.

As a Republican president, Roosevelt had been a “trust buster.” As Progressive gadfly, Roosevelt believed in making the trusts bigger, stronger and more entwined with the federal government, orchestrated by an all-powerful “Federal Bureau of Corporations.”

“Concentration, co-operation and control,” he explained in his acceptance speech at the 1912 Progressive convention, “are the key words for a scientific solution of the mighty industrial problem which now confronts this nation.”

It’s no surprise Obama would find the progressive Teddy so reasonable. Nor is it shocking that Obama would fail to explain to today’s generation the true intentions of that “Republican son of a wealthy family.”

And no wonder Obama thinks that low tax rates in the 1920s were a significant cause of the Great Depression. Or that he sees income inequality as the chief problem during the 1930s — and today.

“Now, this kind of inequality — a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression — hurts us all,” he declared. “When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, when people are slipping out of the middle class, it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom.”

Except inequality isn’t the cause of these problems, stagnating wages and unemployment are. But Obama wants to talk about inequality because it puts him on the convenient side of populist anger.

Sounding as if he’s still running against George W. Bush, Obama laid the blame for our problems on the “most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history.” Of course, he leaves out that those tax cuts also went to the middle class.

He also forgets his own favorite metric of jobs “created or saved.” It’s a bogus, unprovable gimmick, used to defend his failed stimulus, but who is he to say Bush’s tax cuts didn’t save millions of jobs after 9/11?

Obama describes the Bush years as a libertarian dystopia of “‘you’re on your own’ economics,” when we ignored vital spending on things like education and poverty programs. This is Obama’s favorite straw man, and he’s a kung fu master when it comes to defeating it.

He leaves out that Europe already has his preferred policies and is about to go under.

More significantly, Obama leaves out that under “compassionate conservatism,” Bush was the first president to spend more than 3 percent of GDP on anti-poverty programs. Under Bush, federal spending on education grew 58 percent faster than inflation. Obama forgets that Bush fought for the biggest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society (Medicare Part D). He airbrushes away Sarbanes-Oxley, a new Cabinet agency, faith-based initiatives, etc.

“Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent,” Obama barked. “That is the height of unfairness.” Except, when the Washington Post asked the White House for evidence to support the claim, an official confessed they “had no actual data to back up the president’s assertion.”

That’s OK. Who cares about the facts when you’re fighting to make America safe for cynicism again?

GOP Presidential Race: What’s the Rush?
By Jonah Goldberg

In 2008, the Democrats were blessed with two candidates the party’s rank-and-file admired almost as much as the press corps did. Ultimately Barack Obama, the hope-and-change guy, was more popular than Hillary Clinton if for no other reason than that the former first lady came with so much baggage — mostly in the form of her husband, but also some scandals of her own — while Obama was a fresh start. But everyone let that contest play out. There was little urgency over the need to pick a candidate as soon as possible.

This time, the GOP field is not getting the same courtesy. There’s an almost manic rush to pick a winner, or at least a GOP front-runner. And while it would be tempting to put the blame squarely on the liberal media or some other convenient villain, the truth is that it’s the right that is largely to blame.

Though to say so is essentially blaming the victim. In 2008, the prevailing Democratic attitude toward the Obama-Clinton race was, “If only we could vote for both of them!” Right now, a significant number of conservatives feel about the Gingrich-Romney contest the same way Henry Kissinger famously felt about the Iran-Iraq war: It’s a pity only one of them can lose.

While one can find passionate fans of every candidate — even, according to rumors, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman– the fact is that none of the contenders wows the base, and the base desperately wants to be wowed.

This is an important distinction. There’s a lot of talk about how the base doesn’t like the candidates. I don’t think that’s true. The sense I get from talking to large numbers of conservatives is that the base doesn’t like their choices, but they don’t actually hate the candidates. In other words, they want to be swept off their feet. That’s why for most of the past year, the voters have been listening to the official contenders but somewhat rudely refusing to make eye contact as they look over their shoulders hoping someone more exciting — Chris Christie! Paul Ryan! Marco Rubio! — just might enter the room.

It’s not that they don’t like any of these candidates so much they’d rather President Obama win. It’s that people don’t want to fall in like; they want to fall in love.

This is undoubtedly the reason why Newt Gingrich is enjoying a fantastic surge these days, one that could well carry him to the nomination. Despite all of his shortcomings and his troubling history, he at least romances the GOP electorate. With his endless string of grandiose adverbs — fundamentally, radically, profoundly, etc.-ly — and his promises to dazzle us in his debates with Obama, Gingrich is the bad-boy suitor of the race. I know he’s no good for me, many of the voters are in effect saying, but he’s just so much fun.

Romney, meanwhile, is the kind of guy you bring home to mother. Everyone knows that he’s sober and responsible. According to his wife, his biggest vice is that he drinks low-fat chocolate milk. His problem is that he doesn’t know how to woo the voters. He can say the words, but he can’t sell them. He’s a bit like Bob Dole, who in 1995 told GOP leaders, “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan if that’s what you want me to be.”

Herman Cain — who after a bizarrely choreographic marital summit, announced over the weekend he was suspending his campaign — was the one candidate who understood how to romance voters wholesale. Ironic, then, that his political career ended thanks to allegations he didn’t understand how to romance women retail.

I and my fellow conservative pundits haven’t helped anything. We’re constantly insisting that so-and-so’s campaign is done or that he or she now has no chance. We’ve been about as right as anybody would be if he simply guessed randomly. Certainly, no one predicted Gingrich as the front-runner after his self-immolation in the spring. One reason for the pundit drumbeat is that we’re probably just as eager to see Obama lose as the average caucus-goer. But another reason is that the pundits are working from the old calendar. Since 1980, the winner of the South Carolina primary has won the nomination. A winner of either Iowa or New Hampshire (but never both) always wins in South Carolina. And so on.

But the rules this year are different. Many states won’t be winner-take-all. Finishing in second place doesn’t earn you a set of steak knives; it wins you delegates. That means there’s still plenty of time for Romney to grow on people or for Gingrich to stumble again or for some other candidate to rise. This could go on for a while.

That’s what happened in 2008 with the Democrats. Hillary Clinton didn’t endorse Obama until a couple months before the Democratic convention. And, after a bruising primary battle, Obama inherited an energized base eager to retake the White House. I am positive the GOP nominee will enjoy a similar inheritance, whoever that might be.

Biden Sticks to the Playbook
By Jonah Goldberg

“I wish [critics of the administration's jobs bill] had some notion of what it was like to be on the other side of a gun, or [to have] a 200-pound man standing over you, telling you to submit [to rape].” — Vice President Joe Biden, Oct. 18, University of Pennsylvania

“… at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” — Barack Obama, Jan. 12, 2011, Tucson, Ariz.

Joe Biden is not a big effing deal, as he might say.

In fairness, few vice presidents matter, and Biden suffers by comparison to his immediate predecessor, who mattered more than most.

As you know, the current vice president says dumb things, funny things, weird things. He talks like the sort of guy who sits right next to you on the bus even though there are plenty of empty seats — just so he can explain how squirrels aren’t mammals.

Indeed, in many respects, he’s as close as American politics gets to a wacky sitcom character who’s a couple fries short of a Happy Meal.

Remember when he told us how President Roosevelt went on TV to reassure America after the 1929 stock market crash? It wasn’t until later that someone reminded him that no one had TVs in 1929, and that FDR wasn’t president. Remember when he insisted that in Delaware, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. … I’m not joking”?

He wasn’t joking then, and he’s not joking now when he says that if you oppose the president’s jobs bill — which currently enjoys bipartisan opposition in the Senate — you’re OK with more rapes and murders.

No wonder he thinks many Republicans acted like “terrorists” during the budget negotiations last summer.

And speaking of terrorists, my complaint about Biden has always been that he gets to behave like the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat. By that I mean Arafat got a free pass from many in the West because he would only say horrible things in Arabic while he would talk peace in English.

Biden’s double standard allows him to enjoy a kind of political immunity that only encourages asinine impunity.

When he says outrageous, idiotic and reprehensible things, the mainstream press and the Democratic Party shrug, even smile, and say, “Oh, that’s just Joe.” And if he says something nobody can ignore, he’s always allowed to take it back because everyone knows he has as much control over his mouth as Pakistan does over its tribal regions.

Biden may not matter much, but his boss does. And that’s why it’s worth pointing out that Biden isn’t simply freelancing out there.

Like all vice presidents, part of his job is to carry water for his boss, and he carries more water than Gunga Din. “In my wildest dreams,” he proclaimed of the stimulus, “I never thought it would work this well.”

Biden has repeated his insinuation that if you’re opposed to yet another stimulus to pay for municipal workers, you’re OK with the fact that “Murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crimes will continue to rise.”

When his boss doesn’t want him to repeat his crazy talk, Biden dutifully zips his yapper. Not this time. Why? Because this is part of the White House’s overall strategy to demonize the opposition. It’s from the same playbook that has Obama insisting that Republicans are for “dirtier air, dirtier water,” and are woefully deficient in decency and honesty. It is also the same playbook that makes an absolute mockery of the new politics Obama routinely calls for.

Joe Biden is Barack Obama’s loyal pet, and like even the most loyal dog, he sometimes has an accident on the carpet. But he still does his master’s bidding when asked.

And that is the one way Biden matters. He is a reflection of his boss, and an accurate one at that.

Obama, Abroad, Is Adrift
By Jonah Goldberg

Since President Obama has been having a rough time lately, let me belatedly congratulate him on his apparently successful policy of regime change in Libya.

Initially, I favored a more robust and decisive intervention when Obama seemed to dither, and then I criticized how he ultimately committed the United States to a so-called leading-from-behind strategy. But fair is fair; whatever happens next — a big question — Obama has succeeded in toppling one of the most loathsome creatures on the international stage.

Obviously, he didn’t do it alone. Our NATO allies and, of course, the rebels deserve the lion’s share of the credit. And there are quibbles and critiques one can offer. We may even grow nostalgic for the devil we knew, though I doubt it.

Still, if Obama were a Republican, he would be getting considerably more praise from the right for pursuing a relatively low-cost and low-risk NATO-led strategy that resulted in long-desired regime change in Libya. (Of course, had he been a Republican, many on the left would have denounced yet another neocon war for oil).

Obama also deserves kudos for taking out Osama bin Laden and for his mounting successes in killing other members of al-Qaeda.

And yet, there’s something peculiar about Obama’s foreign policy: There doesn’t seem to be one. Talking about Libya, Ben Rhodes, the director for strategic communications at the National Security Council, told the New York Times: “We’ve resisted the notion of a doctrine, because we don’t think you can impose one model on very different countries; that gets you into trouble and can lead you to intervene in places that you shouldn’t.”

This strikes me as wildly overstated, even bizarre. A doctrine, in and of itself, doesn’t compel anyone to do anything. Moreover, some doctrines — isolationism, for instance — can lead you to not intervene in places you should.

Rhodes’ anti-doctrine stance reflects an irony about the Obama presidency. Shortly after Obama’s swearing-in, and his initial executive order to end coercive interrogation techniques and his (failed) vow to shutter the Guantanamo Bay prison, the conventional wisdom in Washington quickly jelled around the view that Obama didn’t much care about foreign policy, or at least he preferred to keep it out of the headlines while he concentrated on his “transformative” agenda at home.

His administration committed itself to downplaying the war on terror. Remember the effort to rebrand 9/11-style terrorist attacks as “man-caused disasters”?

The surge in Afghanistan barely appeased hawks, while his rhetoric about withdrawal barely pleased doves. Former CIA super-lawyer John Rizzo tells PBS in an upcoming episode of “Frontline” that with the exception of ending the interrogation program, Obama “changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations.”

In fact, to the chagrin of many on the left, Obama has strengthened these programs by making them bipartisan and uncontroversial.

Even Obama’s momentous decision not only to continue but massively expand the policy of targeted killings has an oddly cautious flavor to it. If you obliterate terrorists with a drone, you don’t have the messy political question of how to arrest, jail, interrogate or prosecute them.

Obama’s Libya policy may not amount to a doctrine, but it did establish two principles. In March, Obama explained that we must intervene when there’s a risk of massacres or genocide, but we can never do so alone unless Americans are directly at risk.

At face value, I find this borderline repugnant. America shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, but neither should we make it a matter of principle to say we won’t stop genocide when and where we can simply because no one will join our posse.

One has to marvel at the audacity of Obama’s cautiousness. It buys bravery on the cheap by saying we must do something, and then exempts us from having to do anything if we’re alone in our principles. Cross your fingers and Belgium will save us from acting by ourselves!

This principle means that we can do diplomatically or politically easy things (like Libya), but if it’s hard to get support for something — like Syria — we’re off the hook.

More broadly, it’s remarkable how Obama’s reactive and risk-averse foreign policy has racked up political successes, while by concentrating all of his talents on domestic affairs, he’s made a colossal political mess for himself at home by concentrating his energies and talents on a bold agenda. Maybe his domestic policy shop could take some lessons.

The Ideologue in the Oval Office
By Jonah Goldberg

“I think increasingly the American people are going to say to themselves, ‘You know what? If a party or a politician is constantly taking the position my-way-or-the-highway, constantly being locked into ideologically rigid positions, that we’re going to remember at the polls,’” President Obama said at his Friday news conference.

I know everyone is sick of hearing about the debt-limit negotiations. Lord knows I am. When I turn on the news these days, I feel like one of the passengers seated next to Robert Hays in the movie “Airplane!” By the time we get to the phrase “in the out years,” I’m ready to pour a can of gasoline over my head.

Still, regardless of how things turn out with the negotiations, what we are witnessing is the rollout of the Obama re-election campaign’s theme: Obama is the pragmatic voice of reason holding the ideologues at bay.

So it’s worth asking, before this branding campaign gels into the conventional wisdom: Who is the real ideologue here?

The president, we are told, is a pragmatist for wanting a “fair and balanced” budget deal. What that means is tax increases must accompany spending cuts. Any significant spending cuts would be way in the future. The tax increases would begin right after Obama is re-elected.

Now keep in mind that tax hikes (or what the administration calls “revenue increases”) are Obama’s idee fixe. He campaigned on raising taxes for millionaires and billionaires (defined in the small print as people making more than $200,000 a year or couples making $250,000).

During a primary debate, he was asked by ABC’s Charles Gibson if he would raise the capital gains tax even if he knew that cutting it would generate more revenue for the government. The non-ideologue responded that raising the tax, even if doing so would lower revenue, might be warranted out of “fairness.” As he said to Joe the Plumber, things are better when you “spread the wealth around.”

Earlier last week, referring to the fact that he is rich, the president said: “I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing. In fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need.”

Leaving aside the fact that the man lives in public housing and has a government jet at his disposal — so his definition of “need” might be a bit out of whack — what is pragmatic about this position?

Obama says that Republicans are rigid ideologues because they won’t put “everything on the table.” Specifically, they won’t consider tax hikes, even though polls suggest Americans wouldn’t mind soaking “the rich,” “big oil” and “corporate jet owners.”

But Obama hasn’t put everything on the table either. He’s walled off “ObamaCare” and the rest of his “winning the future” agenda.

If Obama believes the American people are the voice of reason when it comes to tax hikes, why does their opinion count for nothing when it comes to ObamaCare, which has never been popular? (According to a RealClearPolitics average of polls, only 38.6 percent of voters favor the plan.) Why not look for some savings there?

Consider the frustration of the supposedly ideologically locked-in GOP Congress. In 2008, the national debt was 40 percent of GDP. Now it’s more than 60 percent, and it is projected to reach 75 percent next year, all thanks to a sour economy the GOP feels Obama made worse with incontinent spending.

Republicans won a historic election last November campaigning against the spending, borrowing, tax hikes and ObamaCare. Yet Obama’s position is that the Republicans are deranged dogmatists because they don’t want to raise taxes or borrow more money to pay for spending they opposed. And Obama is flexible because he refuses to revisit a program that has never been popular.

Meanwhile, the sole example of Obama’s pragmatism — that he has publicly acknowledged — is his openness to means-testing Medicare, which may not be a bad idea. But Obama’s support for it rests entirely on the fact that it would continue to tax upper-income people for benefits they will no longer receive. So, in addition to taxing the “rich” more, he also wants to give them less.

I know why liberals would support that, but for the life of me I can’t see how it’s non-ideological.

Obama and the Shifting Ground of Race
By Jonah Goldberg

Princeton’s Cornel West, one of the most famous black intellectuals in America, says that President Obama is afraid of “free black men.” Because of Obama’s atypical upbringing, West says, “when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a de-racination.”

With whom does the rootless cosmopolitan-in-chief find himself most comfortable? Jews and rich white men, says West. No surprise given the professor’s view that Obama is a “black mascot” and a “black puppet” for Wall Street and corporate America.

Meanwhile, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, offers a far more familiar if no more persuasive take: “The president’s problems are in large measure because of his skin color.”

If forced to choose, I’d say West has the slightly more plausible position, only insofar as there’s an argument to be made that Obama has been a puppet of Wall Street. What that has to do with his skin color is beyond me (a community organizer with a phobia about “black folk,” married to a black woman, strikes me as the recipe for a hilarious Tyler Perry sitcom).

Still, I find the whole thing fascinating. Here are West and Clyburn, two of the most influential black people in America, bitterly clinging, as Obama might say, to ideologically racial views — He’s not black enough! He’s too black for racist Americans! — that have less and less relevance. This is not to say that there is no racial animus against Obama. Of course there is. But is it significant, as Clyburn suggests? Well, certainly not enough to keep him from being elected president of the United States (!) or being the establishment favorite to be re-elected.

Clyburn’s take strikes me as the left-wing version of the right-wing theory — popularized by Dinesh D’Souza — that everything Obama does can be explained by his allegedly “post-colonial” worldview. Simpler explanations are available. Obama’s a liberal Democrat. He does things a white liberal Democrat would do, and he receives mostly the same opposition a white liberal Democrat would receive. If a President John Edwards (shudder) had rammed through the economic stimulus or “EdwardsCare” the same way Obama did, Republicans wouldn’t say, “Well, since he’s white, it’s OK.”

Take the “tea parties,” which have been accused of racism by the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, mainstream media outlets and entertainer-activists such as Janeane Garofalo, who proclaimed they are “about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.” So, after nearly two years of “experts” telling us that the typical tea party member is two holes in a white sheet shy of being a Klansman, guess who is arguably the most popular tea party candidate for president? Herman Cain, a black businessman.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the changing racial landscape comes with voting patterns, though not at the ballot box. Blacks — particularly among the young and educated — are voting with their feet by leaving cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit in huge numbers and moving to places like Atlanta, Charlotte and Dallas. Clement Price, a Rutgers history professor, told the New York Times, “The black urban experience has essentially lost its appeal with blacks in America.”

(One reason that might be the case: Black entrepreneurialism skyrocketed from 2002-07, according to the census. Perhaps the rise in black-owned small businesses breeds disenchantment with big-city bureaucracy?)

For years, liberals have glibly smeared the GOP as racist because it is disproportionately Southern. Obviously there are historical reasons behind the charge, but in 2011? If the region is so racist, why are blacks so eager to flee to the less “progressive” South?

Blacks are still largely lockstep Democratic voters and will probably remain so for a while. But when you listen to the likes of West and Clyburn, never mind silly white liberals like Garofalo, one cannot help but be reassured that the ground is shifting under their feet as inexorably as it shifted under the feet of racists more than a generation ago.

A Sharper GOP Field
By Jonah Goldberg

The Republican presidential logjam has finally broken.

Donald Trump, who believes not only that he would make the best president but that he could win, declined to run because making money is his true “passion.” It’s as if Cincinnatus loved his plow too much.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also bowed out, with class and dignity even his friend Trump could not buy.

Ron Paul, the libertarian Harold Stassen, is in for another go, presumably on the mistaken assumption that America has turned into Tea Party Nation. (If only!)

And then there’s Newt Gingrich.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the former House speaker — a man who has spent much of the last decade declaring the need for radical transformation of this, that and the other thing — denounced Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals as too “radical” and nothing less than “right-wing social engineering.” He also came out in favor of an individual mandate for health insurance.

This last bit of news was no doubt greeted with jubilation in the Mitt Romney camp, given that Romney had only days earlier given a speech defending his own landmark achievement — a state-based individual mandate that helped inspire “Obamacare.” By my count, Romney’s speech bombed with 9 out of 10 conservatives (the 10th being influential conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt).

To have Gingrich out there defending the mandate — and by extension Romney — had to have the former Massachusetts governor jumping for joy so high his hair might actually have moved.

By midday Monday, however, Gingrich was reversing himself in response to a deluge of criticism. But the damage was done. The simple fact is that despite Gingrich’s immense talents and achievements, Ryan — who’s not even in the race — is more popular than Gingrich among conservatives. It’s hard to throw someone under the bus when it’s not your bus. More to the point, Gingrich reinforced the impression that his mouth deserves a patent as a perpetual motion machine.

Still, the real significance of the last week or so is not the breaking up of the political logjam of candidates but of the policy logjam.

Not only did Romney and Gingrich blur the lines between the GOP and Barack Obama, they also sharpened the distinctions between themselves and the rest of the GOP field.

In this, they were playing catch-up with Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s extremely effective governor and putative front-runner among conservative policy wonks, the Bush family and insomniacs. Daniels yanked away collective-bargaining rights for public workers years ago, without the Sturm und Drang that accompanied Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s more tepid reforms. Just this month, Daniels successfully withdrew all state funding of Planned Parenthood, a holy grail for social conservatives.

Daniels, however, also steadfastly refuses to sign anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes. He famously called for a “truce” on social issues, which social conservatives translate as “surrender” to the left since they rightly believe that the left is the aggressor in the culture war. And last week he playfully suggested he might tap former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his running mate. Floating a pro-choice veep is not the way to reassure social conservatives.

For those paying attention, these should be fascinating developments given the perennial claims that the GOP base is too right wing, extremist and closed-minded to tolerate such philosophical diversity. (And with the exception of Gingrich and Paul, there are no Southerner candidates in a party allegedly captured by the South.)

Does all this mean that the GOP has re-embraced its Nelson Rockefeller roots? Of course not.

But it does hint that this year’s primary season won’t involve a replay of the dreadful 2008 debates in which the candidates auditioned to play the part of Ronald Reagan in the school play.

It also suggests that the front-runners — a group that includes former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — might be ahead of the rank and file of the GOP.

Come November, it is very unlikely that conservative voters will stay home. So, barring a truly fringe GOP nominee, they will vote against Obama no matter what. Already, the conversation on the right is moving toward the all-important question of “electability” — i.e., which candidate can peel off the handful of moderates and independents needed to win in an election that will be a referendum on Obama and his record.

The Unhappy President
By Jonah Goldberg

“The Oval Office, I always thought I was going to have really cool phones and stuff. … I’m like, ‘C’mon guys, I’m the president of the United States. Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up?’ It doesn’t happen.”

–President Barack H. Obama

The list of people I feel sorry for is long. It includes not just all of the people I know personally who are suffering from one misfortune or another, but the billions around the world who’re having a rougher time than they ought: Japanese earthquake victims, targets of ethnic cleansing, etc. Then there’s the supplemental list, which includes everyone from fans of “Lost” who were ripped off by the series finale to the guy in the middle seat on a long flight.

But one guy who doesn’t make the list is Barack Obama.

And yet the president seems eager for people to know he feels aggrieved. All of sudden, he’s had a few “hot mic” incidents in which he “accidentally” vented his displeasure about various alleged insults. His staff let it be known that the president feels the head of China’s one-party authoritarian regime has it better than him, because no one second-guesses Hu Jintao.

“I just miss — I miss being anonymous,” he told some magazine executives recently. “I miss Saturday morning, rolling out of bed, not shaving, getting into my car with my girls … taking walks. I can’t take a walk.” He says the reason he plays so much golf is that it’s the only way he can get away from the “bubble” he’s in.

None of this is entirely new. The president has always had a gift for self-pity. And blame-shifting. “It’s Bush’s fault” could be the subtitle of his presidency.

And from the outset, the president has had little patience with critics. Serious critiques are always illegitimate “talking points.” In the summer of ‘09 he started insisting that he didn’t want to hear “a lot of talking” from Republicans. The time for debate always seems to over when it’s clear to everyone he’s losing the argument. When abroad, he loves to whine about the impertinence of the press.

I can’t prove it, but I’m also hardly alone (on the right or the left) in thinking the president really just doesn’t like the job anymore. He’s testier. His response to the Republican budget plan was not merely dishonest, hypocritical and partisan, it was bitterly personal.

One can understand his frustration. The guy who once said to a reporter during the 2008 campaign, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls—” about fundamentally transforming America is now forced to run as a reactionary, defending “Medicare as we know it” from “radicals” who — gasp! — want to change America. The overrated and inexperienced politician, accustomed to nothing but adulation, who was swept into office thanks to discontent with the incumbent, is now himself the incumbent desperately trying to explain how he’s done nothing wrong.

He demonized George W. Bush as an evil fool, but Obama has been forced to adopt many of the very policies he derided as evil and foolish. The “change” candidate is now the “more of the same” guy.

That’d put anybody in a funk.

But I don’t care. The presidency is not like his Nobel Prize — an award for just being you. If you hate the job, don’t run.

Moreover, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Many of his seemingly self-pitying jokes and asides just don’t seem that innocent to me, never mind endearing.

He may sincerely have wished his awesome job came with a cooler phone (or a Bat Signal perhaps?), and he may honestly feel trapped in a bubble. But he’s also determined to pretend that he is running “against Washington” in 2012. And that is outrageous nonsense, for a president who effectively owned the government for two years.

Already his campaign’s messaging is all about recapturing the feeling of insurgency from the first time around. Finish the mission. Complete the work. Remember the feeling. That’s why he’s running his re-election campaign out of Chicago, as if people won’t notice he’s the incumbent.

Obama has never run on a record. He’s always run almost literally on a hope and a prayer. Now he must defend what he has done — and what he has failed to do.

If that makes him cranky, that’s just too bad.

A Solution at Obama’s Fingertips
by Jonah Goldberg

On Tuesday, the president will deliver his State of the Union message.

The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama will continue his “move to the center.” The quotation marks are necessary because some people think he really is moving to the center, while others think he just wants to appear like he is.

Either way, this undoubtedly means Obama will try to seem as if he’s meeting Republicans halfway on their “reasonable” demands (quotation marks for the same reason as before) while drawing a stark line against their “unreasonable” ones.

As much as I may enjoy it, this sort of strategizing leaves most Americans cold. As far as I can tell, these days they are less concerned with “triangulation” than they are with the creation of good jobs that aren’t bogus make-work, or paid for with money borrowed from China or our grandkids.

If that’s the case, the solution is right in front of the president’s face. To echo a chant from the 2008 Republican convention, “Drill, baby, drill!”

The objective case for developing our oil and gas wealth is pretty straightforward. With the exception of climate change, pretty much everything the Obama administration considers a major problem would be improved by opening the floodgates to new exploration.

The deficit? The oil industry already pays the U.S. treasury more than $95 million a day in taxes, rent, royalties and the like. If you expand exploration, you expand revenues. According to estimates, if America unlocked its oil and gas reserves, the government could take in somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in additional revenue over the coming years. And that’s not counting the increased revenues from the stimulus of lower fuel and energy costs.

Trade imbalances? Domestic oil and gas is, by definition, not imported. The more we produce here, the less we import, or the more we can sell overseas. Either way, the trade deficit goes down and GDP goes up.

Jobs? You can’t drill for American oil or natural gas in China, Saudi Arabia or anyplace other than America. Oil and gas exploration jobs pay more than twice the national average.

Just take a gander at North Dakota, where oil production is up 138 percent since 2008. The boom “has helped make its economy almost recession-proof,” writes American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry. North Dakota’s “jobless rate never exceeded 4.4 percent even during the Great Recession when the U.S. rate hit 10.1 percent.” North Dakota, with a $1 billion surplus, and the lowest unemployment rate in the country, has more jobs today than it did when the recession started in 2007. Perversely, as AEI’s Steve Hayward notes, if trends continue, North Dakota may well outproduce California and Alaska (it’s already zoomed passed Oklahoma), not because California and Alaska are running out of oil, but because the feds keep it under lock and key.

All in all, the American Petroleum Institute believes we may have 100 billion barrels of untapped oil — that’s 10 million barrels a day for 30 years, or the equivalent of our total imports of foreign oil.

Meanwhile, it’s quite possible that the United States could be the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, with an estimated 100-year supply of the stuff, and more being discovered every day.

But what about global warming? Well, even if you agree that climate change is a real problem, the simple fact is that we’re stuck with fossil fuels for at least a generation longer, in part because “green energy” isn’t ready for prime time. Moreover, the developing world will not significantly curb its emissions until they’re developed.

President Obama is fond of saying that we need to look to China’s example. They’re allegedly leading the way on solar and wind power. Maybe that’s true, though I think there’s a lot of hype there. But, OK. What people leave out is that China is hardly curbing its fossil-fuel development.

Why can’t America have a similar do-it-all strategy?

As part of a grand bargain, the president could, in his State of the Union address, propose quintupling the amount of money we spend doing basic research on alternative fuels, the revocation of subsidies for the oil and gas industry, and a hike in the gas tax to pay for that infrastructure bank he wants. Throw in a ban on mountaintop-removal coal mining while he’s at it. All of this in exchange for creating good jobs here at home, lowering energy costs, reducing our reliance on foreign oil and cutting the deficit.

Sure, the base of the Democratic Party and the editorial board of the New York Times would scream bloody murder. But for a guy trying to get re-elected, that’s a bonus.

Obama’s Outsized Ego
by Jonah Goldberg

“That’s all right, all of you know who I am,” President Obama joked last week when the presidential seal fell off his podium during a speech in Pittsburgh.

Even though the incident made headlines for no discernible journalistic reason, it was noteworthy as a succinct example of Obama’s arrogance problem. Rather than make a self-deprecating joke, he opted instead to make a self-inflating one, as if to say that the title mattered less than the man.

The good news is that it’s apparently not racist to call Obama arrogant anymore. Not long ago, Keith Olbermann and other gargoyles on the parapets of establishment liberalism insisted that if you were to call attention to the fact that Obama ostentatiously holds himself in very high regard, you were really calling him “uppity,” if you know what I mean.

Now, what was once taboo has become undeniable. Even the New Yorker’s David Remnick, author of a loving biography of Obama, tells Der Spiegel, “Obama has a considerable ego.”

And here’s Time’s Mark Halperin: “With the exception of core Obama administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusion: The White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.”

Halperin’s diagnosis was inevitable, given Obama’s conviction that he represented a movement that was larger than politics or even the presidency. After all, this was the man who, as a candidate, descended on Berlin as the leader of a worldwide cause that transcended national borders. And when asked in a debate what his greatest weakness was, he plumbed his soul and answered that he was disorganized. “My desk and my office doesn’t look good,” he said. When a man runs as a national redeemer and says his biggest failing is a messy desk, that should be a warning sign that he likes himself a bit too much.

Of course, all presidents have healthy egos. You cannot become president, or even think you’re qualified to run, if you don’t think highly of yourself. Obama’s arrogance problem isn’t a matter of psychology but of strategy.

When Arkansas Democratic Rep. Marion Berry complained that health-care reform felt like a replay of the Hillarycare debacle, Obama explained that the big difference between then and now was “me.” In other words, the White House’s plan for making everything work out was an unyielding confidence in the power of Obama’s own cult of personality. That’s why that cult’s high priest, David Axelrod, pursued a strategy of greeting every problem as if it were an excuse for Obama to give another big speech.

Now that the strategy has proved catastrophic, the self-pity is pouring out. Joe Biden, in a rare interregnum of lucidity, assailed his own base as whiners. Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago’s backrooms, said, “I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing — not to mention 9/11 — might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own “transformational” vanity projects.

There’s an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they’re bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they’re smaller than the honor they’ve been temporarily bestowed, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink.

Last week, the president of the United States attacked Karl Rove by name — twice! — in a speech. He recently begged a crowd of black supporters not to “make me look bad” by staying home from the polls. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he scolded young voters that if they don’t vote, it will be proof they “weren’t serious in the first place.”

It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.

“You know, I actually believe my own bull—-,” Obama told the author of “Renegade: The Making of a President.” Richard Wolffe.

Exactly. And that’s why he’s gotten into this mess.

To Obama’s Chagrin, Young Voters Get Serious
by Jonah Goldberg

“Repeatedly stabbing the air with his finger,” a visibly frustrated Barack Obama complained to Rolling Stone: “It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election.” The very “idea that we’ve got a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible. … If people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

Well, it took him long enough. Some of us could have told him these people weren’t serious two years ago. Back then, enthusiasm for Obama jumped the rails of sanity. A San Francisco Chronicle columnist insisted that Obama was a semi-mystical “lightworker.” George Lucas insisted he was a Jedi Knight. Author/spiritualist Deepak Chopra said Obama represented a “quantum leap in American consciousness.” Oprah merely insisted he was “The One.”

Obama publicly encouraged all of this bizarre-messianic stuff, with rhetoric about “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and invocations of “hope” and “change” — as if these were serious campaign platforms, ostensibly in the hope of wooing young idealistic voters who needed to be wooed like that to drop their Game Boy consoles. That’s why volunteers trained at “camp Obama” were instructed to proselytize, not campaign. They were told, according to The New York Times, that they should avoid discussing the issues but rather should “testify” about how they “came to Obama,” as if he was some sort of religious figure.

Immediately after the election, a collection of Hollywood stars not seen since “Cannonball Run” was in the theaters got together to make a YouTube video in which they pledged to do all sorts of nice and worthy things. But also some silly things. For instance, Anthony Kiedis of the band Red Hot Chili Peppers pledged “allegiance to the funk, to the United Funk of Funkadelica.” Then, later, while kissing his biceps for emphasis, he pledged to “be of service (bicep smooch) to Barack Obama (bicep smooch).”Others joined in. Demi Moore, too, pledged to be Obama’s “servant.”

Now, Obama seems to think these same voters are less serious because they don’t believe that nonsense anymore. Obama whines that he wishes he didn’t have a weak economy. Vice President Biden actually calls Democrats whiners for complaining about the weak economy. But, as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote on National Review Online, it is “precisely the weak economy and weakly engaged voters that resulted in his big margin and padded congressional majority in the 2008 elections. Take either out of the picture, and Obama still wins but lacks the votes to screw up American health care. Take the good and bad together, Mr. President.”

It’s almost as if Obama is stunned and disappointed to discover that people who can be won over by a Pepsi-style ad campaign might be lost by 20 months of economic decrepitude, nearly 10 percent unemployment and the worst summer unemployment rate for young people since 1948. Or, perhaps they lost their ardor because Candidate Obama and President Obama are very, very different people. Candidate Obama was a passionate bipartisan. He was hopeful; he promised change. President Obama has been the most partisan president since World War II. He’s not hopeful anymore, he’s literally a finger-wagger who spends a shocking amount of time complaining about how unfair his critics are, how bad his press is and how hard he’s working despite countless vacations and golf outings.

As for the change he promised. Well. “The way Washington works” hasn’t been transformed, unless by that you mean “made worse,” and the president’s signature accomplishment, health care reform, remains as unpopular as it was when he shoved it through Congress on a partisan basis.

Many leading liberals insist that today’s “millennial” generation — the “next New Dealers,” according to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne — is the most liberal in memory, and polls support that. But it should be no surprise. “In America,” Oscar Wilde observed, “the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” A Pew poll released last week showed that a third of young voters didn’t even know the Democrats controlled Congress. But such surveys are a snapshot. As events change so do our views. Whatever motivated so many young voters in 2008, far fewer of them are similarly motivated today to vote to let Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi keep their jobs.

A recent “Rock the Vote” survey found that the Democratic Party’s advantage among young people has been cut in half. Obama sees it as proof that his most ardent supporters are less serious today than when they thought he could walk on water. But for those of us outside the White House bunker, it’s proof that at least some of them are finally getting serious at all.

The GOP’s Ante
by Jonah Goldberg

On the political gimmickry scale, the GOP’s new “Pledge to America” is worse than some, better than others. Let’s say it falls somewhere between the Federalist Papers and a Harry Reid press release — which, admittedly, pins it down as much as saying you lost a cufflink somewhere between Burkina Faso and Cleveland.

First and foremost it promises to focus on job creation, vowing to stop all scheduled tax hikes (i.e., the expiration of the Bush tax cuts). It offers a steep tax deduction for small businesses and a renewed commitment to curbing business-stifling regulations.

The Pledge also stands athwart the Obama agenda, promising to “repeal and replace the government takeover of health care,” cancel the unspent portion of the stimulus, and drive a stake through the heart of TARP. The Republicans also promise to “roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels” and disentangle the government from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That’s hardly all of the substance, but the politics are more interesting. Naturally, Democrats attacked the Pledge before they read it as a mean-spirited, irresponsible return to the boneheaded and miserly policies of the Bush years. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn insisted it would “visit a plague on Americans.”

Compared to what many Democrats said about the Contract With America, this is a ringing endorsement. Rep. Charlie Rangel said of the 1994 Republican platform: “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.” And though that is technically true — Hitler wasn’t talking about term limits for committee chairs or demanding an independent audit of Congress’s budget — the insinuation was a good deal more sinister. Indeed, Rep. Major Owens said that the ‘94 Republicans were hell-bent on “genocide.” Meanwhile, Clyburn’s biblical-sounding Republican “plague” might invite worries about locusts or, at worst, the killing of the first-born male child in every household.

On the right, reactions were mostly positive, with a healthy mix of skepticism. “I love it,” wrote blogger Michelle Malkin, “provided the words jump off the paper and into reality at some point soon.” Erick Erickson of the conservative website Red State stood out for his rage against the whole thing, calling it a “series of compromises and milquetoast rhetorical flourishes in search of unanimity among House Republicans because (they do) not have the fortitude to lead boldly in opposition to Barack Obama.”

Meanwhile, others, like Charles Krauthammer, argued that the substance was fine, but it was politically dumb to offer any substance at all. The Democrats are self-destructing like a tape-recording in “Mission: Impossible,” why get in the way?

My take: They’re all right.

Malkin is absolutely correct that the GOP must prove it is born again on fiscal responsibility. If the Republicans don’t prove it, then the Tea Party will swoop in like the Shadow Host of Dunharrow in “The Lord of the Rings” and mow down the Republicans like so many dimwitted orcs.

Krauthammer, I think, is uncharacteristically shortsighted. Politicians not only need mandates, they need to understand what their mandates are. Otherwise they tend to think they were elected for their sheer personal awesomeness. President Obama, somewhat understandably, thought he had a messianic mandate to push a hard partisan agenda from the left. In reality, voters thought his mandate was to be “not Bush” and to then govern from the center. He fulfilled the first part and ignored the second entirely.

It’s true that running on something rather than nothing might cost the GOP some campaign victories, but running on nothing would deny them even more policy victories. Sending Republicans back into power without a clear mission is like sending teenagers to Vegas for a school trip without a chaperone. Sure, they’ll check out the museums.

As for the argument that the Pledge doesn’t go far enough, that’s obviously true. But it’s also true that the Pledge is far, far more ambitious than the Contract With America was.

Moreover, the fact that it garners support from across the GOP caucus is a good sign, not a bad one, not least because it shows that the GOP can reach out to both the tea parties and to independents. Obama and Pelosi’s alienation of independents is destroying the Democratic Party right now. Why should the GOP emulate that strategy?

Conservatives shouldn’t look at the Pledge as the sum total of the Republican agenda. They should see it as the opening bid.

Race-Card Payment Coming Due
by Jonah Goldberg

“The race card is maxed out.”

That was the punch line for a recent hilarious exchange on “The Daily Show” in which Larry Wilmore, the faux news program’s “senior black correspondent,” reported that the race card is not only over its credit limit but is in fact “void during a black presidency.” This discovery came in the wake of Maxine Waters’ allegation that her political problems stem from a racially biased congressional ethics investigation.

Wilmore said he should have seen this coming, given that “the Congressional Black Caucus has been overusing the race card for years.” Like when it circled the wagons around Rep. William Jefferson. The CBC in effect argued it’d be no big deal if a white congressman had been videotaped receiving a $100,000 bribe and if the FBI then found most of it in his freezer. Singling out a black congressman for this sort of thing, Wilmore jokes, amounts to punishing Jefferson for “Legislating While Black.”

Of course, Wilmore (a great comic talent) is joking, but not everyone is laughing. Waters, the representative for South Central Los Angeles since 1991, is one of America’s premier racial hucksters. A notoriously nasty piece of work, she sided with the murderous rioters in what she called the post-Rodney King verdict “rebellion” and danced the electric slide with the Crips and the Bloods. (Who says she’s not bipartisan?) So it’s hardly surprising that she’d lump all of her problems on Whitey.

In Aesop’s Fables, the scorpion must sting the frog because that is what scorpions do. In real life, Waters must blame her problems on, well, you know who.

Waters is alleged to have offered special help for OneUnited, a minority-owned bank where her husband served on the board until April 2008. Her husband owned roughly $350,000 worth of OneUnited stock. If it didn’t get bailed out by the Treasury Department, the bank would have gone under. Waters told Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, about the potential conflict of interest, and Frank — not everyone’s idea of a scrupulous ethicist to begin with — told her she should stay clear of it. She ignored his advice and allegedly helped secure OneUnited $12 million in TARP money, saving the value of her husband’s bank shares. Waters says it’s all a misunderstanding since she was barely involved. She merely outsourced most of the work to her chief of staff, aka her grandson.

She insists she won’t be anyone’s “sacrificial lamb” and points to the fact that eight members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been subject to ethics investigations — which she and many in the CBC suggest is no coincidence.

And they’re right.

But the culprit here isn’t racism, it’s the corruption that is almost inevitable when any politician — black or white — is given a job for life. Charlie Rangel, the 80-year-old deposed chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is also in ethical hot water for a list of reasons too lengthy to recount here (but they include failure to pay taxes on unreported income — awkward, given that he was, until recently, in charge of writing the tax laws). Rangel, one of Washington’s most charming characters, ran his office like a pasha — because he could.

Indeed, that’s long been the problem with the CBC: its scandalous lack of accountability. Because of racial gerrymandering (cynically abetted by the GOP in the 1980s), black representatives have been insulated even more than other incumbents from democratic competition. Worse, the older generation of CBCers in particular actually believe this claptrap about being the “conscience of the Congress” (the Caucus motto). This has put the CBC to the left not just of the average voter but the average black voter. Less than 10 percent of the CBC voted to ban partial-birth abortion in 2003, even though a majority of blacks support the ban. A majority of blacks oppose racial quotas and support school choice, but the CBC claims to speak for them when taking the opposite positions.

Caucus members pulled this off by invoking racial solidarity and Tammany Hall tactics in their districts, while maxing out the race card with the media and their non-black colleagues in Congress. And that’s what Waters and Rangel are doing now, the former explicitly, the latter implicitly. Both are demanding an immediate trial, before the November elections, which would hammer even more nails into the Democratic coffin. In effect, they’re saying, “Let us off the hook or we’ll take you all down with us in a racial spectacle.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are laughing. Even the ones who don’t watch “The Daily Show.”

Obama’s Crisis is GOP’s Opportunity
by Jonah Goldberg

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The Obama administration came into power with the political winds at its back, the media at its feet and Americans open to major change. The White House even had a slogan: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

The logic behind the axiom is unassailable. As Robert Higgs documented in his libertarian classic, “Crisis and Leviathan,” it’s crisis — not merely war — that is the health of the state. Crises melt frozen politics. They create opportunities. They give the government room to maneuver and grow.

And for a while, it worked that way. Democrats steamrolled the most ambitiously liberal agenda in at least a generation. Yet liberals are miserable. Their lamentations over what they see as President Obama’s lack of audacity punctuate the din, like ululating matrons at an Arab politician’s funeral.

This misplaced griping stems not from Obama’s failure to “think big” but from a misreading of the political climate: Liberals thought they’d be popular.

The American people supported the New Deal and pro-FDR politicians for years. This time around, Americans aren’t turning to government. Rather, they’ve grown only more disgusted with the public sector. Trust in government is near its historic low. Obama’s support among self-identified independents is at an all-time low and doesn’t appear to have hit bottom yet, while the “intensity” among Republican voters continues to surge.

Indeed, conservatives outnumber liberals by more than 2 to 1 (42 percent to 20 percent), according to Gallup. If that trend continues just a bit more, an absolute majority of Americans may soon call themselves conservatives.

All those liberal pundits who prophesized an Obama-led “new New Deal” must feel foolish as they don their life preservers and head to higher ground in anticipation of the electoral tsunami heading their way in November.

In a futile effort to build the morale of the sandbag brigades preparing for the tide, the White House and Democrats have interrupted their “recovery summer” cheerleading and started making the case that the coming election is a “choice,” not a “referendum.” It’s “a choice between the policies that led us into this mess or the policies that are leading us out of this mess,” Obama thundered in Missouri last week.

Obviously, such arguments hinge on the hope that the people will agree. That seems doubtful. Indeed, if that reasoning were persuasive, ObamaCare would be popular — or at least it would have become popular since its passage, as the White House predicted.

Perhaps voters don’t remember the Bush years as a time of “market fundamentalism” so much as a time when “big government” conservatism in the White House and cronyism in Congress set the kindling for the bonfire ignited by Obama.

However much blame they deserve for the economic crisis, Obama and congressional Democrats deserve the political crisis they’ve created for themselves. And the GOP should exploit it.

For a year or so, Republicans have been the so-called party of no. Contrary to the expectations of its critics, that tactic has been good for the GOP. It seems that the “tea parties,” America’s natural antibodies to Obamaism, have provided some vital stem cell therapy, helping to regrow the Republican spine.

But that spine is only valuable if you use it for something. Much of the GOP leadership has been content saying “no” for two reasons — one good, one bad. When Obama was tall in the saddle and determined to exploit the economic crisis on his terms, there was no point in offering real alternatives. And it’s just a lot easier to criticize than it is to lead.

Now is the time for the GOP to call Obama’s bluff and offer a real choice. My personal preference would be for the leadership to embrace Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s “road map,” a sweeping, bold and humane assault on the welfare state and our debt crisis. Doing so might come at the cost of trimming the GOP’s victory margins in November, but it would provide Republicans with a real mandate to be something more than “not-Obama.”

Don’t let Obama’s crisis go to waste.

The Democrats’ Vision Problem
by Jonah Goldberg

Head to the local big-box electronics store and buy yourself: a Panasonic home theater system ($500), an Insignia 50-inch plasma HDTV ($700), an Apple 8GB iPod Touch ($175), a Sony 3-D Blu-ray disc player ($219), a Sony 300-CD changer ($209), a Garmin portable GPS ($139), a Sony 14.1-megapixel digital camera ($200), a Dell Inspiron laptop computer ($450) and a TiVo high-definition digital video recorder ($300).

This is not an endorsement of any of these products. I don’t own any of them (though if the manufacturers are keen to find out my opinion, they can send me some non-returnable demos). But you can fill your shopping cart with these items for less than $3,000. The average American worker needs to work 152 hours to earn that much money.

In 1964, however, the average American worker could buy one pricey stereo from Radio Shack after working 152 hours. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry, a University of Michigan economist, crunched the numbers.

What’s the point? Well, there’s a big one. We are constantly told that the American working man is so much worse off than he used to be. And if you measure income one way, you can make that case.

Indeed, the Democratic Party in recent years has become obsessed in looking at the economy only in that one negative way to justify its avocation: giving more stuff to the poor and middle class because they are “falling behind.”

The wealth of nations, according to Adam Smith, the founding father of the market economy, is not measured in GDP or cash reserves. Rather, it “consists in the cheapness of provision and all other necessaries and conveniences of life.”

By that standard, American wealth in general, and the wealth of poor Americans, has skyrocketed in the last half-century, and the government had relatively little — though certainly not nothing — to do with it. And it’s not just that consumer items are cheaper than ever, they’re also better than ever. An iPhone today isn’t just better than yesterday’s phones, it’s better than yesterday’s cameras, calculators, portable stereos and computers. Many of the standard features on a 2010 Honda Accord were considered luxury items 10 years ago and almost unimaginable 20 years ago.

Now, you might argue that while, say, TiVo might be a great convenience, it’s not a necessity. Given the divergent TV tastes in the Goldberg household, I might disagree. But fair enough: The real necessities are food, clothing, shelter and medical care, according to most people.

Well, food has gotten steadily cheaper — for everybody — over the last century. For instance, Perry calculates that eggs cost about one-tenth as much as they did at the beginning of the century. Moreover, Americans, with their allegedly stingy government, pay about half as much for food as Europeans do.

So, what has gotten more expensive? According to St. Lawrence University economist Steven Horwitz, there are only four areas that have become more expensive over the last century as measured in their “labor price”: housing, cars, higher education and medical care. With the arguable exception of a college degree, all are marked with wildly improved quality. And the main reason for rising medical and college costs (and to a lesser degree housing costs) is that the government has distorted the market by “helping.”

For example, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., underwent Lasik eye surgery in 2000. He paid cash, and it cost $2,000 an eye. “Since then,” he told the Washington Post, “it’s been revolutionized three times and now costs $800 an eye. This sector isn’t immune from free-market principles.”

No, but it is protected from them.

Even so, the costs of housing, food and clothing combined have dropped over the last century from about 75 percent of the average family’s expenditures to around 35 percent, largely thanks to the ability of the market to democratize innovation and decrease the cost of necessities and conveniences.

None of this is to say that the middle class and the poor aren’t facing tough times, or that our government policies are perfectly suited to their needs.

But ever since the dawn of the Obama presidency millennia ago, the air has been thick with claims that government needs to get much more deeply involved in the private sector. According to Obama and Co., only government can provide what the working people in America need, and “doing nothing” is the only unacceptable suggestion. “The one thing I don’t want to hear,” as Obama likes to say, is that more government isn’t the answer.

Maybe he should get his hearing checked by the same guy who did Ryan’s eyes.

What the GOP Can Learn From a Pizza Chain
by Jonah Goldberg

This is one of those rare moments when the conventional wisdom in Washington is right. The Democrats are poised to have a bad year; the only argument is over how bad it will be. And that question rests on whether or not the Republican Party crafts an agenda voters will support.

So far the GOP has shrewdly been the “party of no.” Since I disagree with so much of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda, I happen to think that “no” is the correct position on the merits. But that’s not the point. Saying “no” has worked because that’s what most Americans say, too.

The trick for the GOP is to figure out what it will say yes to. Republicans are a bit like the Democrats in 2006 and 2008. Americans were sick of Bush and the Republicans back then, so they threw their support behind the Democrats by default. The Democrats over-read this support as a sweeping mandate for their agenda.

This has given the GOP an opportunity many Republicans feared just a year ago might not come for a generation.

Now comes the hard part: seizing the opportunity. Fortunately, I’m not a political consultant. But if I were giving my two cents — and whaddya know? I am! — I’d tell the GOP to look not to Reagan in 1980 or Gingrich in 1994, as so many pundits suggest.

I’d look to Domino’s in 2010.

You may have seen the commercials or the four-minute YouTube video touting the iconic pizza-delivery chain’s reinvention. But if you haven’t, Domino’s new campaign can be summed up easily enough: “We blew it.”

Focus groups and consumer surveys revealed something pretty much everyone outside of Domino’s has known for years: Their pizza stinks. It tastes as if aliens tried to copy real pizza but just couldn’t capture its essence.

In their four-minute video (search YouTube for “the Pizza Turnaround”) executives, employees and chefs at the company confront their harshest reviews head-on. They talk about how much it hurts to hear that their product “tastes like cardboard” and is worse than microwave pizza. But they admit the truth and commit themselves to starting over with more flavor, better crusts, and cheese that doesn’t taste like discount weather caulking. Domino’s says that the American palate has improved, and they want to update their recipe to take account of that fact.

The appeal of the campaign should be obvious: honesty. Domino’s admits they lost their way, and they want a second chance. They’re confronting the criticism head-on rather than denying it.

Obviously, the analogy to the GOP isn’t perfect. For example, last I checked, Domino’s didn’t get bogged down in an unpopular war.

But the GOP’s troubles over the last decade have a lot to do with the fact that Americans didn’t stop liking what the Republican Party is supposed to deliver. They stopped liking what the GOP actually delivered.

As a conservative who cares more about policies than partisan success, I would hate to see the GOP abandon conservative policies in order to be more popular. That would be like Domino’s listening to critics and then deciding to get into the Chinese food business. Indeed, by my lights, that’s what George W. Bush tried to do with his “compassionate conservatism.” He surrendered to liberal arguments about the role, size and scope of government on too many fronts. In effect, he said you can have your pizza and Kung Pao chicken all in the same dish. That’s not a good meal, it’s a bad mess.

Moreover, abandoning conservatism would be silly. According to Gallup, Americans identify themselves as conservative over liberal by a margin of 2-1, the same proportion as just after 9/11.

So what would a GOP-turnaround recipe look like? That’s a subject for any number of other columns. But for starters, I’d look to young political chefs like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). He’s been the leader in attacking “crony capitalism” — the corrupt merger of big business and big government, a hallmark of the Obama administration. For too long Republicans confused supporting big business with supporting free markets, when big business is often the biggest impediment to fair competition. Other fresh new ingredients would almost surely include pro-family tax policies and the de-linking of legal and illegal immigration as interchangeable terms.

But first, the GOP needs to admit it screwed up. That’s what Democrats did with Bill Clinton, and it gave the “New Democratic Party” a new lease on life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t have been more wrong when he said there are “no second acts in American lives.” More than any nation on earth, America is about second acts. We love contrition and redemption. We love it in pizza companies and politicians alike.

Endless Love
by Jonah Goldberg

Huzzah! Thanks to a few pointed questions from the press corps at a White House news conference, the long Obama captivity of the media is at an end. The Hotline, an inside-the-Beltway tip sheet, proclaimed June 23 “The Day the Love Ended.”

The New York Daily News’ Michael Goodwin celebrates the press corps’ ability to channel the mood of the country: “By peppering the President with forceful questions … and by challenging some of his slippery answers, reporters captured the changing tone in the country. Like the end of a real honeymoon, blind infatuation is giving way to a more accurate view of reality.”

“The press corps gets it,” Goodwin writes. “For Obama, the hard part begins now.”

Swamis and carnival contortionists who can fit their bodies into a Happy Meal box could learn something from the press about flexibility, given its ability to effortlessly pat its own back.

Silly me, I thought the main job of the press was to challenge slippery answers and ask tough questions, not to do that only when it helps “capture a tone.”

But what truly confuses is how a few tough questions make up for months of forehead-scraping obeisance to The One. Suddenly these half-dozen reporters are media redeemers? “They Asked Tough Questions for Our Sins.”

Indeed, shouldn’t this be a moment for reflection on how bad the press has been until now? Instead of “The Honeymoon Is Over,” why isn’t the headline, “Handful of Reporters Make Colleagues Look Like Chumps”?

A week ago, CNN, the Washington Post and other major news outlets covered Obama’s killing of a fly as if it was a major news event. (At least when the Russian press similarly gushes over Vladimir Putin, he’s karate-chopping cinderblocks in half.)

The good news: More photo-ops are coming, because the White House apparently has a major fly problem. I know that because I read the New York Times’ flood-the-zone coverage.

As Kool Aid-allergic columnist Robert Samuelson has noted, such sycophancy is a serious public-policy problem because the president is proposing a radical overhaul of pretty much everything, and for the most part the press hasn’t cared that his explanations are iffier than gas-station sushi, his assurances more dubious than a North Korean press release. Obama’s ongoing promise that he’s “creating or saving” jobs is as plausible as the chess team captain’s claim that his supermodel girlfriend can’t fly down from Canada for the prom.

Maybe the fly infestation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has something to do with the fact that the White House is a central hub of bovine manure distribution?

I can’t remember: Was it Shirley Temple or Keyser Soze who said the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist? It doesn’t matter. But I do think of that line whenever I hear liberals claim the press isn’t biased.

For instance, Dan Rather famously insisted media bias was a “myth,” even after he paid blind Bulgarian orthodontists to officially verify those blockbuster National Guard memos written in fingerpaint. OK, that’s not exactly how it went down. But as Dan might say, my version is fake but accurate.

Of course, the deniers never convinced anyone. Poll after poll reveals that four out of five dentists agree the press tilts to the left, if by “four out of five dentists” you mean the majority of Americans, and by “tilts” you mean leans leftward like a one-legged ensign on the U.S.S. Enterprise after the port nacelle has been blown to bits by Klingons.

But denial still has its advantages. It allows concubines to say they’re merely highly compensated conversationalists. For the press, it allows them to act on their own prejudices and call it “news judgment.” Alas, were it not for the fact that Oprah already has a magazine called “O,” this same news judgment would have resulted in Newsweek changing its name to better reflect its status as the official tribute album of the Obama years (long may He reign). Subscribe now and get your free plate from the Franklin Mint.

Denial doesn’t need much to sustain itself. A little convenient corroboration goes a long way. A dieter drops a few pounds and then feels justified in eating a dumpster load of Cheetos. The press has a nice moment, suddenly all is forgiven and forgotten and they go back on their merry way.

If the honeymoon ended Tuesday, the vows were renewed Wednesday when ABC News staged an infomerical on socialized medicine from the White House. ABC was tough, though. It opted not to hand out commemorative plates.

Empathy v. Impartiality
by Jonah Goldberg

Why make this complicated?

President Obama prefers Supreme Court justices who will violate their oath of office. And he hopes Sonia Sotomayor is the right Hispanic woman for the job. Here’s the oath Supreme Court justices must take:

“I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as (title) under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”

Contrast that with Obama’s insistence that the “quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles” is the key qualification for a Supreme Court justice. According to White House talking points, Judge Sotomayor’s “American story” of humble origins — she was raised in the South Bronx — best prepares her for the high court because it shows “she understands that upholding the rule of law means going beyond legal theory to ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts.”

Obama says law and precedent should determine rulings in “95 percent of the cases.” But in the really hard and important cases, justices should go with their heart. “In those cases, adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

Now, keep in mind that 5 percent of Supreme Court cases isn’t everything, but it’s nearly 100 percent of what we argue about as a country. For the hard cases Americans care most about, Obama says empathy should rule.

So, what’s wrong with empathy?

Well, nothing. Empathy is a fine thing, and all decent people should employ it, including Supreme Court justices.

But Obama has something specific in mind when he talks about empathy. He wants the justice’s oath to in effect be rewritten. Judges must administer justice with respect to persons, they must be partial to the poor, and so on.

I don’t think this is open to much debate. When Obama voted against Chief Justice John Roberts’ confirmation, he said that Roberts didn’t have the “heart” to vote the right way in those 5 percent of cases. Rather than Roberts the Cruel, Obama explained, “we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” Cue Sotomayor the Empathic.

The reasoning here is a riot of dubious assumptions. Obama and Sotomayor both assume that a firsthand understanding of the plight of the poor or the African-American or the gay or the old will automatically result in justices voting a certain (liberal) way. “I would hope,” Sotomayor said in 2001, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” This is not only deeply offensive, it is also nonsense on stilts. Clarence Thomas understands what it is like to be poor and black better than any justice who has ever sat on the bench. How’s that working out for liberals?

Of course, liberals say that if you don’t agree with their policy prescriptions on, say, racial quotas or abortion, it’s because you don’t care as much as they do about minorities or women. Which is why they’ve demonized Thomas as a villainous race-traitor. This, too, is aggressively stupid. But even if it were true, why are we talking about policy preferences and the courts? Judges aren’t supposed to have policy preferences, despite Ms. Sotomayor’s insistence that the courts are “where policy is made.”

More important, who says conservatives are against judicial empathy? I, for one, am all for it. I’m for empathy for the party most deserving of justice before the Supreme Court, within the bounds of the law and Constitution. If that means siding with a poor black man, great. If that means siding with a rich white one, that’s great too. The same holds for gays and gun owners, single mothers and media conglomerates. We should all rejoice when justices fulfill their oaths and give everyone a fair hearing, even if that’s now out of fashion in the age of Obama.

Obama’s Word Play
by Jonah Goldberg

President Obama had a grand time in Europe. He wowed the press, met the queen, gave some wonderful news conferences and got virtually none of the major policy concessions he wanted. But he did do a lot of talking, for what that’s worth.

And for Obama, that’s worth a lot. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought words meant a great deal. “Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” Obama proclaimed. ” ‘I have a dream’ — just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words? Just speeches?”

Give the man points for consistency. He has put rhetorical innovation on an equal footing with policy innovation. Exhibit A: “Overseas contingency operations.” That’s the Obama administration’s term of choice to replace “the long war” or “the global war on terror.” No doubt they were inspired by the famous Leo Tolstoy novel, “Overseas Contingency Operations and Cessation of Overseas Contingency Operations,” later dumbed-down by the publisher to “War and Peace.”

Janet Napolitano, head of Obama’s Department of Homeland Security — primarily created to deal with terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11 — has decided “terrorist attack” is too hard-edged. It’s “man-caused disasters” now. “That is perhaps only a nuance,” Napolitano explained to a German newsmagazine, “but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.”

Meanwhile, the White House has announced that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will no longer be called “enemy combatants.” No word yet on what the new term will be. No doubt the poetic euphony of “man-caused disasters” and “overseas contingency operations” sets a very high bar for Obama’s Office of Euphemism Generation. But surely “Men Prone to Disaster Causation” or “Overseas Counter-Contingency Operators” are the most obvious choices. My friend Mark Steyn, however, suggests going another way: “Future Facebook Friends.”

And that points to just one of the problems with the Obama administration’s effort to use words to shape reality. It’s morally tone-deaf. Maybe Napolitano is right about the need to bleed fear from our politics (a directive Obama didn’t seem to have in mind when he suggested that failure to pass his budget would lead to catastrophe, er, man-caused disaster). But these phrases are morally meaningless. Public safety is an important government function, but, regardless of whether “war on terror” was the right term, it’s surely wrong to use language better suited for a salmonella outbreak to describe a conflict with evil men who have American blood on their hands.

We’ve seen this before. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, famously declared that countries such as North Korea would no longer be called “rogue nations” but instead “states of concern,” which sounded an awful lot like various poses from a photo shoot with Dr. Phil. One can hope that the problems that came with the Clinton administration’s lawyerly approach to terrorism won’t be replayed by this administration. President Clinton was very good at vowing to hunt down our enemies after terrorist attacks, but when he left the podium, he was more interested in how his comments played in polls and focus groups than what we were doing to catch the bad guys.

So far it’s hard to say definitively how Clintonite Obama’s approach really is. His approach toward Iraq and Afghanistan is better than his critics on the right expected and worse than his fans on the left hoped. Indeed, despite the change in jargon, in the war formerly known as “the war on terror,” Obama’s policies are shockingly in sync with Bush’s.

However his policies turn out, it’s clear that Obama still puts a great amount of stock in the power of words — his words. In particular he continues to have a candidate’s relish for denigrating George W. Bush and a left-wing academic fondness for finding fault with America. In Europe last week, he pledged more “humility” and apologized for America’s “arrogance.”

Similarly, as befits a very symbolic president, his administration enjoys symbolic gestures. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked on the Russians before the Group of 20 summit by giving them a giant red button with the word “reset” on it (or that was the plan; they used the wrong word in Russian). In a meeting with the Russian president, Obama followed up by lamenting the “drift” in Russian-American relations. Putting aside the oddness of giving a big red button to an antagonistic country with a boatload of nuclear weapons, it’s still an odd tack to take with the Russians. After all, whatever mistakes the Bush administration may have made, Russia was hardly the aggrieved party. America didn’t make Russia invade Georgia, aid Iran or crush democracy. President Bush famously, and naively, saw Vladimir Putin’s soul in the Russian leader’s eyes. Obama’s naiveté may rest in his own belief that his words amount to some kind of Jedi mind trick.

Indeed, Obama spent the week telling Europeans everything they wanted to hear, but got little for it. The French and the Germans still belittled America’s “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism and refused to follow our lead.

This might lead to a painful realization for Obama. While he may think words are everything, for our enemies and even our friends, words are — still — just words.