Box-checking Obama in a Liberal Cocoon
By Michael Barone

It’s unusual when a reporter sympathetic to a politician writes a story that makes his subject look bad. But Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker has now done this twice.

The first time was in an article last April on Obama’s foreign policy in which he quoted a “top aide” (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon? It sounds like him) saying that the president was “leading from behind” on Libya. Not what most Americans expect their presidents to do.

Now, in an article based on leaked White House memos marked up by Obama, Lizza has done it again.

Contrarian liberal blogger Mickey Kaus sums it up: “The president’s decision-making method — at least as described in this piece — seems to consist of mainly checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him.”

A $60 billion cut in the stimulus package? “OK.” Use the reconciliation process to pass the health care bill? A checkmark in the box labeled “yes.”

Include medical malpractice reform in the health care bill? The man who as an Illinois legislator often voted “present” writes, “We should explore it.”

According to Lizza, Obama prefers getting information and making decisions by staying up late and reading memos rather than meeting with people — a temperament that’s a liability because face time with the president is one of his major sources of political capital.

Lizza’s reporting undercuts the stated thesis of his article: that Obama sought to bring bipartisan governance to Washington, but was foiled by Republicans’ partisan intransigence.

Evidence that Obama ever seriously considered Republican approaches is minimal in the New Yorker article. The alternatives Lizza describes Obama as considering are for even more spending and government control, such as a much bigger stimulus package.

He mentions just in passing that Obama “had decided to pursue health care reform” as well as the stimulus package — a choice that inevitably made bipartisanship harder to achieve.

At one point Lizza does quote Obama writing on a memo, “Have we looked at any of the other GOP recommendations (e.g., Paul Ryan’s) to see if they make any sense?” Another president might have looked at Ryan’s proposals himself or might even have called him on the phone.

George W. Bush, in contrast, worked with Democrats — and sometimes even talked with them — on his education plan, his tax cuts and the Iraq War resolution. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate with them on Social Security.

And on Obama’s failure to reach a “go big” budget agreement with House Speaker John Boehner last summer, Lizza presents only the White House talking point: “conservative colleagues rebelled, and Boehner withdrew.” He doesn’t mention Republican claims that Obama upped the ante, demanding more tax increases.

Lizza’s White House sources apparently didn’t leak any memos about some of Obama’s more recent actions, but his article provides a jumping off place for understanding them.

As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to.

His personal interactions are limited to his liberal Democratic staff — and to the rich liberals he meets at his frequent fundraising events. He has held more of these than George W. Bush, who in turn held more than Bill Clinton.

Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements.

Obama says he wants more jobs and to reduce American dependence on oil from unfriendly foreign sources. The pipeline would do both, and is endorsed by labor unions. But Robert Redford doesn’t like Canadian tar sands oil. Case closed.

The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities’ health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths.

Catholic bishops responded predictably by requiring priests to read letters opposing the policy. Who’s on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else.

Obama fundraising seems to be lagging behind its $1 billion goal, and Democrats fear Republicans are closing the fundraising gap. So Obama seems to be concentrating on meeting the demands of rich liberals he spends so much time with.

A Few Words in Defense of Negative Campaigning
By Michael Barone

Those who take a certain pleasure in denouncing the evils negative political advertising should have spent the last week in South Carolina. They could have plunked down in front of TV sets, especially during morning, early evening and late evening news programs, and by adroit use of the remote control seen one negative spot after another.

They could have watched again and again the Ron Paul campaign’s stinging denunciation of Newt Gingrich for, among other things, taking $1.6 million from Freddie Mac.

They could have seen a similar assault on Gingrich from the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC (by the way, how do you restore something which by definition doesn’t yet exist?).

They could have taken delight in the Rick Santorum campaign’s ad highlighting similarities between Mitt Romney’s record on issues and that of Barack Obama, or in Paul’s stinging ad denouncing Santorum as a “big government conservative.”

All of these ads, you may notice, targeted the three candidates who, coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire, were considered by themselves and others as having some chance of winning the nomination: Romney, Gingrich and Santorum. Left largely unattacked were Paul, who confesses he has no chance to win, and Rick Perry, who withdrew Thursday morning.

There is a near-unanimous sentiment among the high-minded that negative advertising is a bad thing. It pollutes the air even more than carbon dioxide. It breeds cynicism about politics and government. It is somehow unfair.

In response, let me say a few words in praise of negative ads.

First, elections are an adversary business, zero-sum games in which only one candidate can win and all the others must lose. Sometimes it’s smart for competitors to concede points to their opponents. But it’s irrational to expect one side to sing consistent praises of the other.

In second-grade elections, it may be considered bragging to vote for yourself. But it is silly to expect adults to behave this way.

It is especially foolish to expect that candidates who seem headed to win elections should escape criticism on television. Every candidate has weak points and makes mistakes. It’s not dirty pool for opponents to point them out.

Second, it is said that negative ads can be inaccurate and unfair. Well, yes — but so can positive ads. An inaccurate or unfair ad invites refutation and rebuttal, by opponents or in the media, and can boomerang against the attacker. So candidates have an incentive to make attacks that can be sustained.

Sometimes voters respond negatively even to fair attacks. That’s why in multicandidate races, an attack by candidate A on candidate B can hurt A as well as B, and end up helping candidate C or D.

That’s why many campaigns hesitate before attacking. And it also gives them a motive to make attacks that can be sustained because they are accurate and fair.

Third, advertising is not always decisive. Other things can matter more. The barrage of negative ads against Gingrich hurt him in Iowa and New Hampshire, but in South Carolina (which has not yet voted as I write) it did not prevent him from overtaking first Santorum and drawing even with Romney in the polls. Debate performances trumped attack spots.

Behind the disdain of the high-minded for negative campaign spots is a fear that they will erode Americans’ faith in politics and government. These folks like to cite polls showing Americans once had great confidence in institutions and that now they lack it.

But polls have been showing lack of faith in institutions going back to the late 1960s. The only time when pollsters found high levels of confidence was when the questions were first asked in the 1950s. That was during the two decades when American institutions — big government, big business, big labor — enjoyed enormous prestige after they led the nation to victory in World War II and presided over the unexpected growth and prosperity of the postwar era.

I strongly suspect that if you could go farther back in history and ask those same questions, you would find that during much of our history, most Americans were grousing about politicians and complaining about government. Mark Twain and Will Rogers made good livings doing so.

In any case, negative campaigning will persist. Those who enjoy wallowing in negative ads should fly to Florida, find a TV and keep clicking the remote control.

Obama, Romney Change Tacks in Week of Political Risks
By Michael Barone

It was a week of risk-taking in the 2012 presidential race.

Barack Obama, his job approval languishing in the low 40s, delivered a much heralded speech in Osawatomie, Kan., framing the choice between the parties in class-warfare terms.

That’s a risky strategy. Democrats haven’t won a presidential election on class warfare since 1948, when Obama’s mother and Newt Gingrich were 5 years old.

Al Gore, in a year when political scientists’ formulas pegged him as an easy winner, ran on a “people versus the powerful” theme and managed to win only 48 percent of the popular vote and lost in the electoral college in 2000.

John Edwards, as the candidate of the 99 percent against the 1 percent, finished a poor third to Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Undaunted, and perhaps feeling he has no better option, Obama made it plain he’s staking his chances on class warfare.

He did so even though the policies he trotted out amounted to little more than the Democrats’ 2009 stimulus package (road building, high-speed rail), education spending (a payoff to the teacher unions) and higher tax rates on high earners.

It’s hard to see how this thin gruel is going to strike independent voters as (to use Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election theme) a bridge to the 21st century. And it’s notable that Obama scarcely made reference to the Democrats’ signal legislative accomplishment, Obamacare.

He has thrown away his image, established in his 2004 convention speech and maintained through the 2008 campaign, of a compromise-minded conciliator.

On the Republican side, the oft-proclaimed and oft-dislodged frontrunner Mitt Romney moved from running a risk-averse campaign to a tactic that is highly risky — launching negative attacks on one opponent in a multi-candidate race.

Romney did not see fit to do this when Rick Perry zoomed to a lead in national polls in August or when Herman Cain did so in October. In effect, he bet that in the numerous candidate debates Perry would reveal himself as a parochial Texan and Cain would reveal himself as over his head on foreign policy. Both bets paid off.

But Gingrich clearly has posed a greater threat since he took the lead in national polls in Thanksgiving week. Whatever else he is, Gingrich is not parochial or uninformed.

Moreover, Gingrich currently holds sizable leads over Romney in three of the four January contests. And he is closing in on Romney’s long-held lead in the smallest of those states, New Hampshire.

Romney’s Granite State firewall is looking dangerously weak. “If Romney loses New Hampshire,” writes longtime election analyst (and George W. Bush cousin) John Ellis, “the Romney campaign collapses in a heap.”

So on Thursday the Romney campaign arranged a conference call in which former New Hampshire Governor and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu and former Missouri Sen. Jim Talent excoriated Gingrich. He “is not a reliable and trusted leader,” Talent said.

And the Romney campaign has put out a 60-second spot labeled “With Friends like Newt,” attacking Gingrich for referring to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan as “right-wing social engineering.”

“It’s a character problem,” the spot shows Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer saying of Gingrich. “He doesn’t have the discipline you need in a president.”

For the moment, at least none of the other candidates seems to be piling on Romney for going negative. On the contrary. Ron Paul, tied for second with Romney in Iowa polls, has a tough anti-Gingrich spot himself. Michele Bachmann, who once was leading Iowa polls, has been charging that Gingrich is not a real conservative.

The Romney campaign is presumably betting that Paul and Bachmann will pummel Gingrich in the hope of winning Iowa. They undoubtedly calculate that there is a ceiling on their support and would prefer having either of them rather than Gingrich coming out of Iowa with momentum as Romney’s most visible opponent.

The obvious dynamic in the Republican race this year is that many voters, particularly those who identify with the tea party movement, are casting about for an alternative to Romney. At the moment they’re delighted at the prospect of Gingrich debating Obama.

Romney’s negative attacks are an attempt to get them to focus on the qualms many former Gingrich colleagues have about him. It’s a risky move, but probably not as risky as Obama’s.

Newt Keeps Pitching the America of His Imagination
By Michael Barone

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about Newt Gingrich, as he leads in polls for the Republican presidential nomination nationally and in Iowa and South Carolina, and may be threatening Mitt Romney’s lead in New Hampshire.

One is that he is an autodidact. A second is that he has incredible perseverance.

Autodidact is a fancy word for someone who is self-taught. Gingrich calls himself a historian and says his worldview was shaped at age 15 by viewing the bones at the ossuary at Verdun, site of the World War I battle. And he did earn a Ph.D. in history in 1971, with a dissertation on “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.”

But he hasn’t pursued that or any other subject with scholarly rigor. Instead, in his voluminous writings and unusually lengthy speeches, you will find references to the futurist Alvin Tofler, to Olympic beach volleyball, to zoos and space exploration. You’ll find management book lingo, salesmanship tips, offbeat and sometimes revealing facts and anecdotes.

Gingrich started running for Congress as a teacher at West Georgia College, in a traditionally Democratic area where he had no local connections, in 1973. That was when Richard Nixon was president. Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York, and Ronald Reagan governor of California. Both had supported tax increases and signed bills legalizing abortion. Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal were not yet in kindergarten.

The sophisticates of the time said that Vietnam proved that America was overextended and impotent, Watergate proved that it was morally unworthy and corrupt, and stagflation proved that its days of economic growth were over. Gingrich disagreed on all three counts.

With autodidact intensity, he argued then and has argued ever since, that America is not in decline but at the brink of technological and economic breakthroughs; it is not a waning power in the world, but one that can inspire revolutionary transformation; the wave of the future is not the liberal welfare state but (in a 1983 phrase that never quite caught on) the conservative opportunity society.

Politically he persevered through adversity. He ran a strong race against a longtime Democratic incumbent but lost in the Watergate year of 1974. He set out to run again, but after Jimmy Carter clinched the Democratic nomination he knew he could not win in rural Georgia. It was only when he ran a third time in 1978 that he finally won.

I remember Gingrich predicting that in the 1984 cycle Republicans would win a majority in the House of Representatives. Every political insider thought that was ridiculous, and it illustrates Gingrich’s tendency toward overoptimism. But while he was wrong on the timing, he was right on the reasons why the Republicans could and would end the Democrats’ decades of control. He saw that the South was moving Republican as elderly incumbents retired and that smart young Democrats elected in Vietnam and Watergate years would be replaced by Republicans. That finally happened in 1994, and Gingrich became speaker of the House.

His record there was mixed. As I wrote in the 1998 Almanac of American Politics, “He had more success as an inside-the-House legislative leader than as an outside-the-House shaper of public opinion.” Congress passed welfare reform and held spending level for a year, which led to a balanced budget. Gingrich and Bill Clinton were negotiating Medicare and Social Security reforms until distracted in different ways by impeachment.

But many Republicans felt that Gingrich was continually outnegotiated by Clinton, who as Gingrich told me at the time, “never stops learning.” Other Republican leaders nearly ousted him in an unprecedented coup in 1997, and few colleagues are supporting him for president now.

As for the public, Gingrich became widely unpopular due, as I wrote then, to “a cocksureness, a professorial abstractness about policy, a more than occasional petulance and high self regard.”

He also showed a tin ear for proprieties, divorcing two wives to marry other women and signing a seven-figure book contract as speaker (later dropped), just as he signed up for seven figures from Freddie Mac after leaving office.

Asked a year ago whether he was running, Gingrich said, “Why wouldn’t I?” When his campaign staff resigned en masse, he persevered. Now we’ll see if voters entrust this autodidact with a position for which few of his colleagues think he is fitted.

Entitlement, Not Tax Cuts, Widen the Wealth Gap
By Michael Barone

What should be done about income inequality? That basic question underlies the arguments hashed out in the supercommittee and promises to be a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Supercommittee Democrats argue that income inequality has been increasing and can be at least partially reversed by higher tax rates on high earners. They refused to agree on any deal that didn’t include such tax increases.

Supercommittee Republicans offered a plan to eliminate tax preferences and reduce tax rates, as in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform. They argued that high tax rates would squelch economic growth.

They didn’t make the case that their proposals would also address income inequality. But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has done so.

Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.

Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That’s despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.

Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That’s because, in Ryan’s words, “the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.”

In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don’t pay income but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.

The Democrats, perhaps following the polls and focus groups, have been protecting these entitlement programs that have done more to increase income inequality than the Reagan and Bush tax cuts put together.

Ryan makes three more points that may strike many as counterintuitive.

First, reductions in some transfer payments haven’t hurt the living standards of most low-earners. The prime example is the welfare reform act of 1996, which reduced transfers to single mothers but induced many of them to find jobs that left them better off economically and, probably, psychologically.

Second, Americans aren’t trapped in one segment of the income distribution. A Tax Journal analysis of individual income tax returns found that 58 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher income segment by 2005. This comports with common experience. We move up and down the income scale in the course of a lifetime.

Finally, the inflation adjustment used in the CBO analysis was the Consumer Price Index. But that tends to overstate inflation (as any indexes tends to do, since it measures the cost of a static market basket of goods and services). A study by Chicago economist Christian Broda found that prices for goods purchased by low-earners have been rapidly decreasing, while prices for goods of high-earners have increased. Kids’ school clothes may be cheaper at Walmart than they were years ago, while prices at Neiman Marcus keep increasing.

So if the question is how to compensate for increasing income inequality, higher tax rates on high-earners won’t do much — and could be counterproductive if they diminish economic growth.

A better way is suggested by the supercommittee Republicans: Limit future increases in transfer payments to affluent households, and cap deductions for home mortgage interest and state and local taxes, which are hugely lucrative for high-earners and worthless for low-earners who don’t pay income tax.

These proposals won’t reduce income inequality altogether. Much of the increased inequality comes from the huge increases for those in the top 1 percent of earners. But we wouldn’t be better off if Steve Jobs had never existed.

Keeping entitlements as they are and raising tax rates on high-earners is a recipe for Europe-style stagnation. Ryan and the supercommittee Republicans point toward a better way.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Obama Has a Knack for Ticking off America’s Friends
By Michael Barone

The election of Barack Obama, we were told, would bring new respect and friendship for America in the world.

No longer would we be led by a Texas cowboy ignorant of and indifferent to world opinion. Instead, we would have a visionary leader sympathetic to the governments and peoples of the world.

But Obama’s best moments in foreign policy have been when he follows the leads of predecessors. In his twice-postponed trip to Australia this week, he will reportedly announce that a U.S. Navy base will be opened there.

That cements ties already strengthened by George W. Bush and previous presidents to the one nation in the world that has fought alongside the United States in every war in the last century.

But domestic politics can trump foreign policy for Obama. He cancelled previous Australian trips to lobby the House to pass Obamacare and to respond to the Gulf oil spill.

Closer to home, crassly political ploys have angered the governments and peoples of our two geographical neighbors, Mexico and Canada.

Only domestic politics can explain two of the Obama administration’s most controversial moves: exporting illegal guns to Mexico and balking at building an oil pipeline from Canada.

The export of guns to Mexico was the whole point of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms’ Operation Fast and Furious.

Why ever would our government do such a thing? Conservative commentators have argued that the administration wanted to use evidence of deaths caused by guns illegally exported from the U.S. to spur demands for gun control laws here.

Democratic leaders have done that before. In 2009, Obama claimed that “more than 90 percent of guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States.” That claim was echoed by Hillary Clinton and Sens. Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein.

But the statistic was bogus, as factcheck.org concluded. The 90 percent refers only to guns Mexican authorities submitted to the U.S. for tracing. The actual percentage of U.S. guns used in Mexican drug wars is unknown but is clearly far lower.

We don’t know for sure why the ATF and Justice Department embarked on Fast and Furious. Officials are keeping mum. But no one has come up with a more plausible explanation than the charge that it was intended to make a case for gun control at home.

In any case, Mexican citizens and government officials are understandably incensed. But maybe not as incensed as Canadians citizens and government officials are over the Obama administration’s decision to punt until after the 2012 election the decision on whether to allow the Canadian firm TransCanada to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta to Oklahoma and Texas.

This was a crass political decision if there ever was one. The policy arguments for blocking the pipeline, first proposed in September 2008, are pathetically weak.

Environmentalists claim that Canadian oil sands production will release too much carbon dioxide. But if we block the pipeline, Canada will keep producing the oil and sell it to China.

Concern is also expressed that the pipeline will somehow pollute the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska. But pipelines are the safest way to transport oil, and we’ve been building them for decades without polluting aquifers.

What is undisputed is that the KeystoneXL pipeline would create a lot of jobs in the United States — 20,000 directly and more indirectly, the Canadian firm says — and will provide us with about 7 percent of our imported oil.

That would be a big plus for energy independence. It would mean that we’d get more oil from a friendly neighbor and depend less on the Middle East and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.

On this one, Obama even stiffed his usual allies, labor unions that are eager for pipeline jobs, and sided with the environmentalists who staged Occupy-type demonstrations outside the White House earlier this month.

To make points with them, he was quite willing to snub Canada, with whom we have shared the longest unfortified border in the world for more than a century.

A president who showed respect and friendship for the governments and peoples of other nations would not have connived in the smuggling of guns into Mexico and would not have blocked the import of oil from Canada.

But, on these and other foreign policy issues, we don’t have such a president right now. We have a presidential candidate with a negative job rating desperate for re-election.

GOP Has Momentum, Needs Clear Direction
By Michael Barone

This has been quite a week or 10 days for Republicans. As this is written, down in South Carolina Rick Perry has just announced he’s running for president, while here in Ames most of the votes have been cast but none has yet been counted in the Iowa Republican straw poll.

Yesterday Sarah Palin walked slowly through crowds at the Iowa State Fair and addressed voters there on the set of Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program.

Pundits will parse the Iowa results and the Perry polling to determine which candidate is up and which down or out. The Iowa straw poll may prove to be the last stop for some Republican candidates, as it was in 1999 and 2007.

More important than the fate of individual candidates has been the rush of events going the Republicans’ way.

Barack Obama’s job rating has slid to record lows in the Gallup poll, and his job approval fell under 50 percent even in New York. His Aug. 8 speech had a deer-in-the-headlights quality even as he turned mechanically from one teleprompter to another.

Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the government’s credit rating for the first time in history. The stock market went through a week of horrifying gyrations. Then on Friday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down as unconstitutional Obamacare’s individual mandate to buy health insurance.

The president’s policies are in shambles. Things are not working out the way he and his advisers expected. His journalist cheering section has been voicing doubts and dismay.

But it’s not entirely clear where Republicans want to go, either, or whether they have candidates with the potential to take them there.

Yes, they have some quick answers. Repeal Obamacare? By all means. Approve a tax increase in return for genuine large spending cuts? All eight candidates at the Washington Examiner-Fox News debate Aug. 11 dutifully raised their hands to say no.

Beyond that, not so much clear direction.

Some candidates did mention intelligent policy initiatives in the debate. Mitt Romney called for more high-skill immigration, a policy backed by a bipartisan Brookings panel. Michele Bachmann calls for buying health insurance with tax-free money, a homey way to advocate elimination of the tax preference for employer-provided health insurance.

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., whose candidacy has attracted little attention, called for tough stress tests and recapitalizing the big banks by debt-for-equity swaps. These are all solid ideas, and they even have the potential for bipartisan support.

Unfortunately, some candidates put great emphasis on constitutional amendments, to require a balanced budget and to ban same-sex marriage, that will never pass. Nor is it clear these are presidential issues. Article 5 of the Constitution says it can be amended by supermajorities in Congress and among the state legislatures. The president has no more say than any other voter.

So it’s possible that the Republican nominee, if he or she avoids stumbles and conditions remain as they are, can win just by running against the failed policies of the Obama Democrats. But that’s not necessarily enough to govern successfully.

Republicans can argue successfully that Democratic promises of absolute security cannot be kept. Federal entitlements are, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, running out of other people’s money.

The problem for Republicans is that it’s impossible to foresee exactly how free market policies will improve people’s lives. Back when Ronald Reagan was running during a similar Democratic breakdown in 1980, no one foresaw the wonders of the Internet.

The best attempt to suggest the possibilities I’ve heard here in Iowa came from McCotter, speaking at the Des Moines Register’s soapbox on the fair’s midway. “The answer,” he said, “is not to put your dreams in centralized bureaucratic Washington. The future is self-government, empowerment of the individual, a citizen-driven and more horizontal government.” We need policies that enable us to choose our own future, just as we choose our own iPod playlists and design our own Facebook pages.

That could have special appeal to young people, who voted 66 to 32 percent for Barack Obama in 2008. The hope and change he promised has turned sour, and Democrats’ welfare state policies have proved to be more a straitjacket than they have a safety net.

Republicans are winning the argument over the Obama policies. But they aren’t yet making the strongest case for their own.

Free Market, Not Government Policy, Drives Energy Boom
By Michael Barone

There’s an awful lot that’s stale in the debate on government energy policy.

Some stale arguments are nevertheless valid: It’s dangerous to depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil. Others have increasingly been seen as dubious: that global warming caused by human activity will result in catastrophe.

There’s stale talk about federal and state laws that promised great change but have produced very little. Electric cars, even with subsidies, are no larger a part of the auto fleet than they were 100 years ago.

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar still produce only a tiny percentage of electricity. That offshore wind farm hasn’t gone up in Nantucket Sound, and the Mojave Desert is never going to be covered with solar panels.

Ethanol subsidies have jacked up the price of corn, raising the price of meat here and tortillas in Mexico. But the subsidies haven’t done much for gas mileage, and presidential candidates heading to Iowa now call for abolishing them.

In contrast to the marginal effects of these much ballyhooed public policies, there has been a huge breakthrough in energy production in the past couple of years.

Petroleum engineers working for private companies have used a technique called “hydraulic fracking,” injecting vast amounts of water into rock, to release commercially viable amounts of natural gas and oil.

Hydraulic fracking has resulted in a boom in the Bakken oil shale formation under North Dakota and Montana. North Dakota is now the No. 4 state in oil production.

And hydraulic fracking has made commercially viable huge volumes of natural gas previously imprisoned in shale rock in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that there is at least six times as much natural gas available now as a decade ago, as well as a big increase in commercially recoverable oil.

All thanks to hydraulic fracking, a phrase I bet you didn’t hear in the energy debate in the 2008 presidential campaign or in the debate over the cap-and-trade bill passed by House Democrats in June 2009. My (perhaps defective) search for the phrase in the New York Times and Washington Post websites didn’t yield any mentions earlier than 2010.

While government’s ethanol subsidies and renewable requirements have made little difference, the private sector’s hydraulic fracking has increased our energy supply and reduced our dependence on dicey Middle Eastern oil.

This kicks back against the efforts of government under the Obama administration to restrict energy supply. The administration has shut down much offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (even though President Obama cheered Petrobras’ drilling off the shore of Brazil) and has been denying permits for oil drilling in Alaska that are needed to keep the pipeline pumping. This on top of environmental groups’ successful attempts to prevent drilling on the desolate tundra of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The State Department has even been stalling on approving the Keystone pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Environmental groups object to drilling techniques Canada allows.

It’s unclear why we should feel called on to second-guess the internal regulations of a competent and environmentally conscious nation like Canada. And it’s incomprehensible why we should want to keep out a plentiful supply of oil from a dependable and friendly neighbor.

There is a lesson here for public policy generally, including health care. No centralized government expert predicted the vast expansion in energy supply from hydraulic fracking. It was produced by decentralized specialists in firms subject to market competition.

Just as Friedrich Hayek taught, no central planner can know or foresee enough to produce the beneficial results regularly produced by competition in free markets regulated in accordance with the rule of law. And no central planner can accurately predict the course of innovation that can be achieved in decentralized markets.

That’s something you might want to keep in mind when someone tells you that Medicare costs can be controlled by 15 members of an unelected board created by Obamacare. Better results and lower costs can be expected with the kind of market competition set up by the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law.

No one can tell you just how that will happen, just as no one was telling you three years ago just how hydraulic fracking would expand our energy supply. But it did. That’s what market competition can do — and government control can’t.

Obama’s Hypocritical Rhetoric on Immigration Reform
By Michael Barone

Barack Obama’s immigration speech in El Paso May 10 was an exercise in electioneering and hypocrisy. Hypocrisy because while Obama complained about “politicians” blocking comprehensive immigration bills, he was one of them himself.

In 2007, when such a bill was backed by a lame duck Republican president and had bipartisan backing from Senate heavyweights Edward Kennedy and Jon Kyl, Sen. Obama voted for union-backed amendments that Kennedy and Kyl opposed as bill-killers.

In 2009 and 2010, President Obama acquiesced in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to pass cap-and-trade and bypass immigration and in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision not to bring an immigration bill to the floor.

Both times the votes were probably there to pass a bill. Obama did not lift a finger to help.

But that did not stop the president who is constantly calling for civility to heap scorn on those who seek stronger enforcement. “They’ll want a higher fence. Maybe they’ll need a moat,” he said to laughter from the largely Latino audience. “Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied.”

Was that on the teleprompter, or was it ad-libbed? In either case, Obama was showing his contempt for those who bitterly cling to the idea that the law should be enforced.

That’s no way to assemble the bipartisan coalition necessary to pass an immigration bill.

It’s obvious that nothing like the legalization (opponents say “amnesty”) provisions considered in 2007 can pass in this Congress. They can never pass the Republican House, where Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith is a longstanding opponent and Speaker John Boehner will not schedule a bill not approved in committee.

Nor will this Congress pass the most attractive proposal Obama mentioned, the Dream Act, providing a path to legalization for those brought in illegally as children who enroll in college or serve in the military. That failed last December in a more Democratic Senate and won’t pass now.

Some new approach is needed, and Obama did little to point the way. One idea, advanced by a bipartisan Brookings Institution panel, is a bill that would strengthen enforcement and would shift the U.S. away from low-skill and toward high-skill immigration.

Canada and Australia have done this to their great benefit. And with a sluggish economy it makes little sense, as current law does, to give preference to low-skill siblings of minimum wage workers rather than to engineering and science Ph.D.s. We need more job creators, not more job seekers.

The problem here is that the lobbying forces backing comprehensive legislation don’t favor such an approach. Latino groups and lobbies representing employers of low-skill workers are interested in legalizing the low-skill Latinos who make up the majority of the 11 million illegal immigrants.

High-tech firms seek more H-1B visas for high-skill graduates, but these tie immigrants to particular employers. They don’t have an interest in provisions allowing these people to work for anyone they don’t like or to start their own businesses, as they can in Canada and Australia.

In the absence of significant lobbying support, the only way to provide support for Brookings-style legislation is a bold presidential initiative advertising it as a clean break from past proposals.

Obama didn’t come close to doing that in El Paso. He included a few words about letting in more high-skill folks, but didn’t suggest any reduction in low-skill immigration.

And he said only a few words about workplace enforcement on which his administration has developed a valuable new tool.

That’s a refinement of the E-Verify electronic system now available in which employers can verify the Social Security numbers of new employees.

The Department of Homeland Security has been ironing out glitches in E-Verify and, as former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker reports, DHS now allows job-seekers in some states to use E-Verify before applying for a job not only to check their status but also to protect against identity theft.

The administration has been attacking state laws requiring employers to use E-Verify. If Obama were serious about enforcement, he would be calling for mandatory E-Verify. That would be a more effective tool against illegal immigration than even the strongest border enforcement.

But as Obama’s record makes clear, he’s not really interested in passing a law. He knows his support has been slipping among Latino voters, and he wants to goose it back up. El Paso was all about election 2012, not serious immigration reform.

What the GOP Can Learn From Canada’s Conservatives
By Michael Barone

Some years ago, the columnist and editor Michael Kinsley sponsored a contest to come up with the most boring headline. The winner was, “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.”

Well, Canada held an election last Monday, and the result was anything but boring. It amounts to something like a revolution in Canadian politics and has lessons, I think, for those of us south of the border.

The headline story is that the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has headed minority governments since 2006, won an absolute majority of seats, 167 of 308, in the House of Commons. It was a result practically no Canadian pundit or psephologist predicted.

Going into this election, center-right parties in the four major Anglosphere democracies were at the brink of but not quite fully in power. The British Conservatives formed a government with the leftish Liberal Democrats in May 2010, the Australian Liberals are in opposition by virtue of the votes of a couple of Outback independents, and American Republicans won the House of Representatives in November 2010 and are now forcing significant cuts in public spending.

In Canada, Harper’s Conservatives have already cut taxes and modified spending programs, but always with the tacit consent of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, or the left-wing New Democrats, or the long-dominant Liberal Party. Now they’re on their own, and we’ll see the results.

But the installation of a majority government by itself is not a political revolution. The biggest changes in Canada were indicated by the devastating defeats of two of the opposition parties.

The Bloc Quebecois was reduced from 50 seats to only four. Formerly it represented most of Canada’s second largest province. Now it represents a tiny rump.

French Canadian separatism has been a major force in Canada since Charles de Gaulle came to Montreal in 1967 and spoke the deliberately provocative words, “Vive le Quebec libre!” There have been two referenda in which the voters of Quebec rejected separatism by only narrow majorities.

Now it looks like separatism is as dead as de Gaulle. The vast majority of Quebec’s ridings (the Canadian word for districts) elected New Democrats, some of whom didn’t campaign and don’t speak much French.

Quebec’s Francophone voters seem to have decided to vote for a party that favors a European-style welfare state rather than one that favors a separate Quebec. The New Democrats won 58 seats in Quebec, enough to give them 102 seats in Parliament, enough to make them the official opposition party.

The third huge development is the humiliating third-place finish of the Liberal Party, the pre-eminent party in Canada since its first election in 1867. Liberals headed governments for 70 years in the 20th century and have provided most of Canada’s well known prime ministers — Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

They have been more of a nationalist, opportunistic party than a left-wing one. Public spending ballooned during Trudeau’s nearly 20 years in power, but the Liberals cut back spending sharply in the 1990s, when Canada faced a fiscal crisis very much like the one the United States faces today.

Liberals long boasted that they were the only party with backing in both English- and French-speaking Canada. Now they have little backing in either one.

They elected only 34 members of Parliament, and their leader, Michael Ignatieff, lost his own seat. Liberals hold sway now only in central Toronto, where Canadian media are concentrated, in Anglophone Montreal and in the economically lagging Atlantic provinces.

The Conservatives’ triumph offers a couple of lessons that may be relevant to U.S. Republicans. One is that smaller government policies, far from being political poison, are actually vote-winners.

The second is that a center-right party can win immigrant votes. Conservatives won 35 of 54 seats in metro Toronto, many heavy with immigrants. One tactic that seems to have worked was to circulate videos of Indian- and Chinese-Canadian Conservative candidates appealing for votes in their native tongues.

The simple message is that this is a party that likes and respects you. Republicans could do something similar, with Sen. Marco Rubio, Govs. Susana Martinez and Brian Sandoval, and Reps. Allen West, Tim Scott and Quico Canseco, all elected in 2010.

So Canada has moved from a four-party politics rooted in its own special history to a two-party politics more similar to ours. Nothing boring about that.

On Foreign Policy, Obama Leads From Behind
By Michael Barone

Sometimes a sympathetic and perceptive journalist paints a more devastating portrait of a public figure than even his most vitriolic detractors could. A prime example is Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article titled “The Consequentialist” and subtitled, “How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy.”

Lizza’s article, characteristically well reported and well written, reads less like the story of an adult politician’s evolving view of foreign issues and more like the story of the wildly oscillating opinions of a college student now in his junior year.

As Lizza points out, Obama didn’t think much about foreign policy during his years as a community organizer and Illinois state senator — no more than the typical good pupil does in the years between kindergarten and eighth grade.

As it became clear that he was going to be elected to the U.S. Senate, he started reading and seeking out foreign policy experts of varying views — Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria, Anthony Lake and Susan Rice and Samantha Power — much as a curious high-schooler starts reading interesting books he finds on the shelves.

Arriving in the Senate in 2005, when it was clear that things were going sour in Iraq, Obama took the side of “realists” who always advised caution about military involvement abroad rather than the “idealists” who had backed such involvements in the Bill Clinton years and after.

This served his own interests as he moved toward running for president against Hillary Clinton, who had taken the “idealist” view and voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002. This looks a lot like the freshman and sophomore brown-noser seeking to upstage a rival by embracing a cause widely popular with both the faculty and student body.

As Lizza records, this hugely impressed “realists” like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who saw Obama as a trustworthy acolyte. And Obama’s scornful dismissal of George W. Bush’s “idealist” calls for advancing democracy around the world had something in common with the adolescent discovery that “Dad is wrong about everything!”

Of course, when Obama got to college, er, the White House, he found that Dad was right about some things. The surge in Iraq was allowed to continue succeeding, and something like a surge was ordered in Afghanistan. Guanatanamo remains open, and CIA interrogators are not going to be prosecuted. Robert Gates was kept in the Pentagon, and Hillary Clinton installed at State.

But Obama clung to his “realist” policy on Iran, treating the mullahs’ regime respectfully and showing cool detachment if not cold indifference when the Green Movement rose against the mullahs’ election fraud in June 2009.

But by sophomore year, the unreality of the “realist” strategy had become apparent. Lizza quotes a five-page memorandum on the Middle East Obama sent to his top foreign policy advisers in August 2010 noting “evidence of growing citizen discontent with the region’s regimes” and instructing them to come up with “country by country” strategies on political reform.

A three-member task force “was just finishing its work” in December when the Tunisian vegetable vendor set himself on fire. In responding to the uprisings there and in Egypt, Lizza reports, “Obama’s instinct was to try to have it both ways. … Obama’s ultimate position, it seemed, was to talk like an idealist while acting like a realist.”

It’s not uncommon for college students to have wildly oscillating views on issues as the months go by. It’s more consequential for a president to do so. As foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead notes: “President Obama likes to hedge. If he puts four chips on black, he almost immediately wants to put three chips on red.”

Lizza gives a detailed account of how Obama and his advisers have been putting chips on black and red in Egypt and Libya over the past two months. And he provides a revealing summing up. “One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as ‘leading from behind,’” he writes.

“It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”

“That’s not,” Lizza, who often writes on domestic politics, interjects, “a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.” No, it’s not. But it’s one you may hear about from Republicans.

President Whatever Finds Things Not Going His Way
by Michael Barone

Barack Obama is a politician who likes to follow through on long-term strategies and avoid making course corrections. That’s how he believes he won in 2008, and since then he’s shown that he’s not much into details.

So he was happy to let congressional appropriators fill in the blanks in the 2009 stimulus package, and to let congressional leaders know he would be happy whether there was or wasn’t a public option in the 2010 health insurance legislation. Whatever. In the long run, the big things would work out his way.

Except right now they aren’t. And his partisan and petulant speech last Wednesday is unlikely to move things in the direction he wants.

Even as he was speaking, Congress was moving toward passing the fiscal year 2011 appropriations agreed to by congressional negotiators with only occasional input from the White House. The deal will substantially reduce spending below levels what he and leading Democrats used to call unacceptable.

Speaker John Boehner was criticized by some on the right for not pressing for deeper and more permanent cuts in spending than the $38 billion he claimed. But the deal nonetheless passed both houses by wide margins, and it contains some details that threaten to undermine the policies of the Obama Democrats in the future.

Most important, it requires the General Accounting Office to conduct an audit of the waivers from the Democrats’ health care bill that are being issued in large numbers by the secretary of health and human services.

This will raise an uncomfortable question. If Obamacare is so great, why are so many trying to get out from under it? And, more specifically, why are so many Democratic groups trying to get out from under it?

The fact is that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has granted more than 1,000 waivers from Obamacare. Many have been granted to labor unions. Some have been granted to giant corporations like McDonald’s. One was granted to the entire state of Maine.

By what criteria is this relief being granted? That’s unclear, and the GAO audit should produce some answers. But what it looks like to an outsider is that waivers are being granted to constituencies that have coughed up money (or, in the case of Maine, four electoral votes) to the Democrats.

If so, what we’re looking at is another example of gangster government in this administration. The law in its majesty applies to everyone except those who get special favors.

The GAO has also been ordered to produce audits on the effect of Obamacare on health insurance premiums. This is likely to reveal that the president did not keep his promise that you could keep your current health insurance if you want to.

And there will be an audit of the comparative effectiveness bureaucracy established in the 2009 stimulus package. Comparative effectiveness is supposedly an objective study of which medical techniques are most effective. But anyone who looks closely finds that the experts are constantly changing their minds, which suggests that this is more alchemy than science — and maybe political favoritism, as well.

All of which tends to undercut the thrust of Obama’s obviously-aimed-at-the-2012-campaign message: We can continue to fund Medicare and Medicaid indefinitely if we just tax rich people a little more.

Serious budget experts of all stripes know this is fantasy. Obama’s fiscal commission, which issued its report last December, recognized this clearly, and recommended a package of spending cuts, program changes and tax increases to address the long-term fiscal dilemma.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in his budget resolution that passed the House Friday, put forward a package of changes that included giving the states block grants for Medicaid and replacing the current Medicare fee-for-service with the kind of premium support recommended by the bipartisan Medicare commission more than a decade ago — all without tax increases.

The voters, in current polls as well as in the elections last November, sent the policymakers down these paths. Obama on the one hand allows congressional Democrats to negotiate packages like the 2011 budget deal that go in that direction — and at the same time says, incoherently and without detail, that we don’t need to go there at all.

In all this he is acting on the assumptions that Americans will accept a permanently enlarged and more expensive government and that the details don’t much matter.

The 2010 elections refuted the first assumption. Now we’ll see about the second.

The Damning Contradictions of Obama’s Attack on Libya
by Michael Barone

Let’s imagine that all goes well in Libya. The rebels, protected by air strikes, recapture lost territory and sweep into Tripoli. Moammar Gadhafi and his sons one way or the other disappear.

Leaders propose a democratic and secular constitution that voters overwhelmingly approve. The first act of the duly elected government is to issue a proclamation of thanks and friendship to the United States, Britain, France and others who prevented Gadhafi’s mass slaughter.

Well, we can all dream, can’t we?

But in the cold light of day, none of these happy eventualities seems very likely. As one who hopes for success in this enterprise, I am dismayed by the contradictions in the course we are following.

Some three weeks ago, Barack Obama said Gadhafi “must go.” But the United Nations Security Council resolution under which we are acting stops well short of this goal.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen confirmed that Gadhafi may remain in power indefinitely. National Security Council staffer Ben Rhodes said, “It’s not about regime change.”

If not, then the purported purpose of the operation, to “protect civilians,” could be of unlimited duration. Libya might well be divided between a Gadhafi regime in the west around Tripoli and a rebel regime in the east around Benghazi.

Maintaining the existence of the latter will likely require military force. Obama has conceded that the United States is currently in command of operations, but says that command will be handed off to others in “days, not weeks.”

But news reports make it clear that the overwhelming majority of military forces in action are American. Putting a British or French officer in command will not change that. And putting U.S. forces under foreign command might weaken support for the enterprise here at home.

Obama’s policy is reminiscent of the old saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee. The policy satisfies advocates of humanitarian intervention, like the National Security Council’s Samantha Power, who remember Bill Clinton’s regret that he didn’t intervene to stop the slaughter in Rwanda.

Unfortunately, in order to satisfy those who oppose anything smacking of unilateralism, it took time to get the U.N. Security Council to act, so that we missed the moment when it seemed possible that recognition of a rebel government or imposition of a no-fly zone would topple Gadhafi.

That delay gave him time to launch a counterattack that made him strong enough to withstand the limited military action that could get multilateral approval.

By accepting limits on U.S. involvement, Obama aims to satisfy skeptics of military action, like Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who publicly pointed out the difficulties of maintaining a no-fly zone. We have seen this before, when Obama announced his surge in Afghanistan together with a deadline for the beginning of troop withdrawals.

The result in Libya is a policy whose means seem unlikely to produce the desired ends.

In the process, this Democratic president has jettisoned some of the basic tenets of his party’s foreign policy.

“It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action,” candidate Obama said in December 2007. But Congress was not informed or, it seems, consulted in any serious way about this decision to take military action in Libya.

Instead, members of Congress, like the general public, heard the president make the announcement in Rio de Janeiro. That’s quite a contrast with George W. Bush, who sought and obtained congressional approval of military action in Afghanistan in September 2001 and Iraq in October 2002.

Since then, many Democrats have denounced Bush’s “rush to war” in Iraq. But military action there began a full five months after Congress approved. Obama didn’t wait five days after the Security Council resolution.

Bush argued that intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq was in the national interest. Obama, who has made the same argument about Afghanistan, doesn’t seem to be making it about Libya. For some supporters of his policy, the absence of any great national interest makes it all the more attractive.

It’s not likely to remain attractive to American voters if it fails to result in the overthrow of Gadhafi and leads to an open-ended military commitment in a nation where our vital interests are not at stake.

But a better outcome is at least possible. After all, history shows that dreams sometimes do come true.

Politics By the Numbers – Good Omens For the GOP in 2012
by Michael Barone

Numbers can tell a story. Looking back on Barack Obama’s second State of the Union message, and looking forward to the congressional session and the 2012 elections, they tell a story that should leave Democrats uneasy.

Start off with the audience in the House chamber. Not all members of Congress attended; Obama briefly and Paul Ryan at greater length in his otherwise brief rebuttal both appropriately noted the absence of Gabrielle Giffords.

But the contrast between the audience at Obama’s first State of the Union last year and the audience this year is remarkable. Then there were 316 Democrats and 218 Republicans in Congress. This year there are 289 Republicans and 246 Democrats. No president has seen such a large change in the partisan composition of his State of the Union audience since Harry Truman.

That obviously will have legislative consequences. Obama told Republicans to give up on all but the most minor changes to Obamacare. They’re not going to follow this advice.

As for spending, Obama reiterated his call for a limited freeze on domestic discretionary spending and cuts in defense. Again, as Ryan made clear, this Congress has different ideas.

The political incentive for Obama is to sound consensual, not confrontational. The current uptick in his job approval, putting him just over 50 percent, began when he agreed with Republicans to continue current income tax rates rather than raise taxes on high earners.

But on Tuesday night, he continued to call for higher taxes on the greedy rich in a time of sluggish economic recovery. Not as consensual as one might expect.

House Democrats, almost all elected from safe districts, won’t mind that. But they’re not going to have much to say about legislative outcomes. House Republicans will take it as a poke in the eye and perhaps as an attempt to renege on a deal. Not helpful in reaching other agreements.

In the Senate, where Democrats have a 53-47 majority, but not iron control, the situation is different. In the 2012 cycle, 23 Democrats come up for re-election and only 10 Republicans. You can get a good idea of their political incentives by looking at the 2010 popular vote for the House in their states. Since the mid-1990s, when partisan percentages in presidential and House elections converged, the popular vote for the House has been a pretty good gauge of partisan balance.

Of the 10 Republican senators up for re-election, only two represent states where Democrats won the House vote — Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. They’re both well ahead in local polls.

For the 23 Democrats up for re-election, the picture is different. Eight represent states where the House vote was 53 percent to 65 percent Democratic and where Barack Obama got more than 60 percent in 2008. Count them all as safe.

But 12 represent states where Republicans got a majority of the House vote in 2010. These include big states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Virginia, and states like Montana and Nebraska, where Republican House candidates topped 60 percent. Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin round out the list.

In another three states — New Mexico, Washington, Minnesota — Republicans won between 46 percent and 48 percent of the House popular vote. These were solid Obama states in 2008. They don’t look like solid Democratic states now.

The point is that Democratic senators from all or most of these 15 states have a political incentive to reach agreements with Republicans that go a lot further than Obama did at the State of the Union.

Finally, what about the portents for the 2012 presidential race? Well, start off with the fact that Democrats won the House popular vote in only two of the 17 states that do not have Senate elections next cycle. The other 15 went Republican.

Overall, Democrats carried the popular vote for the House in 15 states with 182 electoral votes in 2012; add three more for the District of Columbia. Democrats were within 5 percent of Republicans in House elections in five more states with 52 electoral votes.

That gets Democrats up to 237 electoral votes, 33 votes shy of the 270-vote majority and 128 short of the 365 electoral votes Obama won in 2008.

Opinion can change, as it did in 2009 and 2010. But these are not favorable numbers for Obama or his party.

Reid and Pelosi Finally Get Mugged by Public Opinion
by Michael Barone

Elections have consequences. The consequences of the November 2010 elections — and one might add the November 2009 elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the January 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts — became clear as lights shined over the snow at both ends of the Capitol on Thursday night.

At the north end of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid abruptly withdrew the 1,924-page omnibus spending bill he had submitted two days before. Reid had hoped that the $8 billion worth of earmarks, including some for Republicans, would provide the Republican votes to pass a bill that financed Obamacare and otherwise furthered Democratic policy goals well into the next calendar year.

But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was able to persuade Republican appropriators not to swallow the bait. Democrats might have gotten their pet provisions through if they had submitted and passed appropriations bills earlier in the year.

But having failed to follow regular legislative order, they were caught defying the will of the voters so clearly expressed in November. Reid’s ploy collapsed.

At the south end of the Capitol, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to watch gloomily as her Democrats failed to rally majorities to alter — and probably sidetrack — the deal reached between Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders extending the Bush tax cuts for two years.

Instead, the House voted 277-148 for a measure that the Senate had passed 81-19 earlier in the week. “If someone had told me, the day after Election Day 2008, that the tax rates on income and capital would not increase for the next four years,” wrote Bush White House staffer Keith Hennessey in his blog, “I would have laughed.”

Plenty of time for laughter now, for Hennessey and for the couple of million people who in some way, shape or form took part in the protests symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement.

It is a source of continuing fascination for me to watch the interaction between public opinion, as measured in polls and election results, and the actions of members of Congress, elected in one political environment and looking in most cases to be re-elected in one that may be quite different.

Eleven months ago, after the Massachusetts Senate election, I was convinced that Democrats could not jam their health care bill through because voters had so clearly demanded they not do so. But Pelosi proved more determined and resourceful than I had imagined, and found enough House Democrats who were willing to risk electoral defeat to achieve what Democrats proclaimed was a historic accomplishment.

Pelosi and Barack Obama predicted that Obamacare would become more popular as voters learned more about it. Those predictions were based on the theory that in times of economic distress, Americans would be more supportive of or amenable to big government policies.

That theory has been disproved about as conclusively as any theory can be in the real world, and most of the Democrats who provided the key votes for Obamacare were defeated on Election Day.

Democratic congressional leaders did take note of the unpopularity of their policies when they chose not to pass budget resolutions last spring. Presumably they did so because they would have had a hard time rounding up the votes for the high spending and large deficits that would have ensued.

But had the House and Senate passed a budget resolution, Democrats might have been able to pass their preferred tax policy, raising taxes on high earners, under the budget reconciliation process. So the House vote Thursday night was a delayed consequence of the public’s long-apparent rejection of their policies.

Obama told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.” November’s vote, presaged by more than a year of polls, was, as political scientist James Ceasar has written, “the Great Repudiation” of that policy.

Republicans, having succeeded in holding down tax rates, clearly have a mandate to hack away at spending, and to defund and derail Obamacare, which is at or near new lows in the ABC/Washington Post and Rasmussen polls. And there does seem an opening, as Clinton White House staffer William Galston argues, for a 1986-style tax reform that eliminates tax preferences and cuts tax rates.

How effectively the 112th Congress will respond is unclear. But the outgoing 111th Congress, despite its big Democratic majorities, responded pretty clearly Thursday night.

Obama Riles Dems by Spurning New Deal Complacency
by Michael Barone

“The single most important jobs program we can put in place is a growing economy.” So said Barack Obama at his surly press conference last week defending the tax deal he made with Republicans.

“The single most important anti-poverty program we can put in place is making sure folks have jobs and the economy is growing. We can do a whole bunch of other stuff, but if the economy is not growing, if the private sector is not hiring faster than it’s currently hiring, then we are going to continue to have problems no matter how many programs we put in place.”

It’s hard to disagree. Robust economic growth solves a lot of fiscal and other problems.

But Obama’s fellow Democrats, to whom he explicitly directed these comments, can be forgiven for being puzzled. The whole thrust of his first two years — the stimulus package, the health care legislation, the vast increases in government spending — has been to put programs in place that have done little or nothing to stimulate economic growth.

That’s not accidental. The template for the Obama Democrats’ policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place a tolerable but not dynamic status quo.

The New Deal’s father, Franklin Roosevelt, believed that the era of economic growth was over, just as many contemporaries believed that technological progress was at an end (how far could you go beyond the radio and the refrigerator?). FDR, like his cousin Theodore, was an affluent heir who had contempt for men who built businesses and made money. They were “economic royalists” and “malefactors of great wealth” — sentiments echoed by Barack Obama last week.

The initial New Deal program, the National Recovery Act, set up 700-plus industry codes to hold up wages and prices. That made some sense in a time of deflationary downward spiral, but proved unsustainable over a longer term.

Later New Deal programs strengthened labor unions, in an attempt to protect current workers and freeze work rules in place — which tended to block the flexible management practices that eventually gave a competitive edge to later foreign-based auto companies. New Deal transportation policy protected existing trucking firms from competition — a policy overturned by the likes of Ralph Nader and Edward Kennedy in the 1970s.

High tax rates on high earners and continued uncertainty over increased regulation and unionization led to what economists called a capital strike. Job creation was dismal as the 1930s went on, and unemployment hovered over 10 percent until wartime mobilization began in the 1940s.

All that sounds more than a little familiar.

Many of the Obama Democrats’ policies are an attempt to freeze the status quo in place. Example: the mortgage forbearance policies intended to allow strapped-out homeowners to refinance at lower rates. These inspired the February 2009 Rick Santelli rant that sparked the tea party movement — why should prudent taxpayers bail out those who have overindulged?

In any case, forbearance has failed: Few have taken advantage, and about half who have ended up in foreclosure anyway. The Obama Democrats’ attempts to prop up housing prices at near-bubble levels seem to be faltering as prices continue to sag.

Similarly, the one-third of the stimulus package money sent to state and local governments allowed them to maintain public payrolls for a while — and to keep public employee union members paying union dues. Most union members today are public employees, and unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 election cycle.

But this payoff is coming to an end, and state and local governments, especially those where public employee unions are strongest, are facing fiscal crises. The Obama Democrats’ attempt to freeze their political benefactors in place is proving unsustainable.

In 2008, candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber that he wanted high taxes on high earners in order “to spread the wealth around.” He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson that he wanted higher capital gains taxes even if they produced less revenue in the interest of “fairness.”

Now after his party’s 2010 shellacking, incumbent Obama seems to have discovered the virtues of a “growing economy.” The New York Times reports that he has asked his administration to develop proposals to eliminate tax preferences and lower tax rates, as the 1986 bipartisan tax reform did.

Perhaps the president is learning that you can’t plunder the private sector endlessly, Chicago-style, without ill effects.

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.

Dems Find Careers Threatened by Obamacare Votes
by Michael Barone

Seven months ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi spent a busy week rounding up votes to pass the Senate version of the Democrats’ health care legislation.

It wasn’t easy. She had to get Democrats who had voted no in November to switch to yes in March. And she had to get Democrats who had refused to vote for the bill in November without an anti-abortion amendment to vote for a bill in March that lacked that language.

She took the unusual step of scheduling the roll call for Saturday — so members wouldn’t go back to their districts and be besieged by Obamacare opponents.

Those opponents, according to polls at that time, included most American voters. But Pelosi, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton predicted the bill would become more popular after it was passed (and, Pelosi said, after people had a chance to read it).

National polls indicate that hasn’t happened yet. But what about the districts of the House Democrats who cast the key votes that made Obamacare law? Those Democrats have an interest in persuading constituents of the law’s merits. So how are they doing?

In general, not very well.

Take Betsy Markey of Colorado 4, who in 2008 beat a Republican who seemed fixated on the same-sex marriage issue. Markey cast a late-in-the-roll-call no in November, then publicly switched to yes in the week before the March 21 roll call. She’s currently trailing Republican Cory Gardiner by an average of 44 to 39 percent in three polls. Her website links to a video she cut the week after the vote saying she had “the honor” to vote for the bill. But otherwise it seems to be silent on the issue.

Or consider John Boccieri of Ohio 16, who switched from no to yes in a TV press conference in which he said the bill would do great things for his constituents. Boccieri’s district was represented by Republicans for 58 years until he was elected in 2008.

It looks like it will be again next year. In three polls, Republican Jim Renacci leads Boccieri by an average of 46 percent to 36 percent. Boccieri’s website links to a recent interview in which he defends Obamacare and challenges opponents to say which provisions they’d give up.

Then there is Suzanne Kosmas, a longtime real estate agent who beat a Republican with an ethics issue in 2008. She announced her switch from no to yes late in the week before the roll call. She’s now running behind Republican Sandy Adams by an average of 47 percent to 40 percent in three recent polls.

To put these numbers in perspective, it’s highly unusual for an incumbent House member to trail a challenger in any poll or to run significantly below 50 percent. But these three Democrats are running 5 to 10 points behind Republican challengers, and none tops 40 percent.

At least they’re running, which is more than can be said for Bart Stupak of Michigan 1, the chief sponsor of the anti-abortion amendment that he forced onto the House bill in November. Just hours before the March roll call, he was persuaded that an executive order, which he was assured Barack Obama would sign, would have the same effect.

Legal experts and strong abortion opponents disagreed. But Stupak cast a critical vote for the bill, as did five other Democrats widely referred to as “the Stupak five,” who flanked him at his press conference. If these six votes had gone the other way, Obama would have been defeated.

Stupak promptly announced he was retiring after 18 years. Republican Dan Benishek is currently leading there by an average of 44 percent to 27 percent in five polls.

Two of the Stupak five, freshmen Steve Driehaus of Ohio 1 and Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania 3, are in dreadful shape. Driehaus trails by an average 51 percent to 41 percent in his Cincinnati-area district; Dahlkemper trails by an average of 45 percent to 37 percent in her Erie-area seat.

Another two are from West Virginia. Alan Mollohan, first elected in 1982, lost in the May primary; Nick Joe Rahall, first elected in 1976, won his primary and seems well ahead for November.

Doing best is Marcy Kaptur of Ohio 9, first elected in 1982. Her Republican opponent reportedly wears Nazi uniforms in World War II re-enactments.

But that’s an exception. The rule seems to be that casting a decisive vote for Obamacare tends to be a career-ender.

Stimulus and Health Care Have Democrats on Defensive
by Michael Barone

Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person.

In his campaign in 2008 and as president in 2009 and 2010, he has hoped that those he characterized to a rich San Francisco Bay area audience as bitterly clinging to guns and God would be won over by programs to stimulate the economy and provide guaranteed health insurance.

At least so far, it hasn’t worked, as witnessed by recent statements by some of the Democrats’ smartest thinkers.

The 2009 stimulus package is so unpopular that Democrats have banned the word from their campaign vocabulary. “I’m not supposed to call it stimulus,” Rep. Barney Frank told the “Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart. “The message experts in Washington have told us that we’re supposed to call it the recovery plan.”

“I’m puzzled by that,” Frank went on. “Most people would rather be stimulated than recover.” The problem is, the economy has neither been stimulated nor has it recovered.

As for the health care bill, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who has been pondering Democrats’ standing with working-class voters since his perceptive 1980s studies of Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Mich., has pretty much thrown in the towel.

In a leaked report for Democratic insiders, Greenberg and fellow pollster Celinda Lake concede that “straightforward ‘policy’ defenses fail to be moving voters’ opinions about the law” and “many don’t believe health reform will help the economy.”

“Women in particular,” they add, “are concerned that (the) health law will mean less provider availability — scarcity an issue.” In other words, people have figured out that government rationing may mean less supply for a product for which there is great demand.

Greenberg and Lake recommend using personal stories to highlight the law’s benefits. But “don’t overpromise or ’spin’ what the law delivers” and don’t “say the law will reduce costs and deficit.”

Do say: “The law is not perfect, but it does good things and helps many people. Now we’ll work to improve it.” (emphasis theirs)

This amounts to an abandonment of the claims that the Obama Democrats have been making about the health care bill they jammed through five months ago. It’s an admission that they messed up when they had supermajorities and will do better when they have fewer votes. It’s a retreat from framing the issue as support versus oppose to revise versus repeal.

So much for the economic issues that were going to provide the underpinnings of what Greenberg’s associate James Carville predicted would be 40 years of Democratic Party dominance.

As for cultural clashes, Democrats can claim to have quieted down debates over abortion and other issues that, as Obama said in his 2004 convention speech, unduly divided Blue America and Red America. But others have taken their place, to the Democrats’ discomfort this legislative season. The Obama Justice Department stepped in and got an injunction against Arizona’s law authorizing law enforcement to ask people stopped for other reasons about their immigration status.

Never mind that other states do this routinely without getting sued. The real problem is that about two-thirds of Americans support the Arizona law. Why couldn’t the administration let it go into effect and see if it assisted the efforts they assure us they are making on border and employer enforcement?

Then there was Obama’s iftar celebration comments on the mosque proposed for a site two blocks from the World Trade Center ruins — comments that were taken as an endorsement, until the president proclaimed himself a day later as agnostic on whether it should be built there.

A large majority of Americans, according to a Fox News poll, believe the advocates have a right to place a mosque there, but even more believe they should not do so. Now we have been watching as Democrats from Harry Reid and Howard Dean on down scamper to say they agree with both these views, while Obama endorses only the first.

The Arizona law and the ground zero mosque issues are not likely to be dispositive issues in most congressional races this year. But they are additional baggage for the Obama Democrats who find themselves, as the economy languishes, on the defensive on the issues they thought would win over the bitter clingers.

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.