Is Obama Losing Party Support?
By Donald Lambro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among Gallup’s findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President What’s-His-Name
by John Ransom

There’s a millstone hanging around the neck of the US economy.

And his name is Barack Obama.

Blame Bush if you want, but post-9/11, Bush’s policies got the country moving in the right direction after a hard right hook.

Blame Bush if you must, but the “blame Bush” mantra isn’t going down well with voters across the country. A new survey released by Fox News and conducted jointly by Democrat and Republican firms says that a large majority of voters think that the time for blaming Bush is over, including a majority of swing voters.

“Meanwhile, a 58-percent majority thinks it is unfair for President Obama to continue to blame former President George W. Bush for the country’s economic problems,” says Fox News. “Thirty-six percent think it is still fair — including 6 percent of Republicans. A majority of independents (61 percent) and 28 percent of Democrats think it is unfair for Obama to keep blaming Bush.”

You know why? Because the buck stops on the president’s desk.

Every time someone blames Bush, they just reinforce how irrelevant President Scholarship has been.

President Invest-in-Clean-Energy has pretty much had it his own way since he was coronated. He spent the money he asked for. If he wanted more, he had two years to ask for it, and Congress would have given it to him.

And despite brave talk from President High-Speed-Rail, he was better at writing books than he has been at being president. At least in reading the books, I could fall asleep.

Ah, yes, just another thing Sarah Palin was right about that the mainstream media couldn’t sniff out for themselves. I guess going to all those colleges worked out better for Palin than having say, one journalism degree and working at one job- journalism- your whole life.

Betcha five bucks that one year under a Palin presidency- or a Bachmann, a Perry, a Romney, or a Huntsman presidency, or a (Bill) Clinton regency- that the unemployment arrow will be pointing the right way.

Only an ideologue, tied to academic leftist-dogma, could be proud of such a disastrous record as President-Eat-My-Peas-and-Like-it. And apparently he’s pursued all these goals on purpose.

And here’s the most damning thing about President Class-Warrior: The only people making money so far are the stock traders. Every time I turn around, the stock market is threatening to make new two-year highs, companies are reporting record earnings and even evil banks are reporting profits. Things are going swimmingly on Wall Street.

Oh, and did I tell you President Fundraiser broke a presidential fundraising record?

Hmm. I wonder who donated? Wall Street maybe? Guys with names like Soros and Buffet are doing great. That’s what happens when the federal government announces a $600 billion bond purchase program in advance.

That’ll give the well-heeled billionaire or fund manager just a little extra for, ah, you know…donations. Well that’s what they call them in Chicago, ha ha. And it worked so well the first time, they did it again.

And why doesn’t it surprise me that President Balanced-Budget raised a record $49 million but spent a record $80 million?

Cuz, ya know, Main Street ain’t so hot right now.

The people who are left out in the cold are the vast middle-class, and it includes people who make more than $250,000 a year. People like that, under the right president, can create jobs for the rest of us better than President Tax-the-Rich can with the entire power of the federal government at his disposal. We know that for sure now. Got it?

Because whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican or a swing voter- I’m talking about voters here- President I-Killed-Osama-bin-Laden-Personally, either created this economy on purpose or created it by accident.

It’s time to pick one.

And let the buck stop where it may.

Dismantling America
by Thomas Sowell

“We the people” are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States– the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow.

At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocratic governments of the 18th century. Since it was something so new and different, the reasons for the Constitution’s provisions were spelled out in “The Federalist,” a book written by three of the writers of the Constitution, as a sort of instruction guide to a new product.

The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, it has been a continuing challenge– to this day– to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.

While the kings of old have faded into the mists of history, the principle of the divine rights of kings to impose whatever they wish on the masses lives on today in the rampaging presumptions of those who consider themselves anointed to impose their notions on others.

The Constitution of the United States is the biggest single obstacle to the carrying out of such rampaging presumptions, so it is not surprising that those with such presumptions have led the way in denigrating, undermining and evading the Constitution.

While various political leaders have, over the centuries, done things that violated either the spirit or the letter of the Constitution, few dared to openly say that the Constitution was wrong and that what they wanted was right.

It was the Progressives of a hundred years ago who began saying that the Constitution needed to be subordinated to whatever they chose to call “the needs of the times.” Nor were they content to say that the Constitution needed more Amendments, for that would have meant that the much disdained masses would have something to say about whether, or what kind, of Amendments were needed.

The agenda then, as now, has been for our betters to decide among themselves which Constitutional safeguards against arbitrary government power should be disregarded, in the name of meeting “the needs of the times”– as they choose to define those needs.

The first open attack on the Constitution by a President of the United States was made by our only president with a Ph.D., Woodrow Wilson. Virtually all the arguments as to why judges should not take the Constitution as meaning what its words plainly say, but “interpret” it to mean whatever it ought to mean, in order to meet “the needs of the times,” were made by Woodrow Wilson.

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be in the forefront of those who seek to erode Constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?

To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of “czars” wielding greater power than Cabinet members, without having to be exposed to pubic scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members.

Now there is leaked news of plans to change the immigration laws by administrative fiat, rather than Congressional legislation, presumably because Congress might be unduly influenced by those pesky voters– with their Constitutional rights– who have shown clearly that they do not want amnesty and open borders, despite however much our betters do. If the Obama administration gets away with this, and can add a few million illegals to the voting rolls in time for the 2012 elections, that can mean reelection, and with it a continuing and accelerating dismantling of America.

Tolerance and the Ground Zero Mosque
by Joseph C. Phillips

I am fascinated that the same people who have been able to find a Constitutional right to government control of education, healthcare, and the energy industry are unable to divine from that same document any rational basis for the government to prevent a mosque from being built on Ground Zero.

Of course, the issue is not whether the American Society for Muslim Advancement has a constitutional right to build a 13-story, mosque, and community center within 600 feet of Ground Zero. There are a number of things citizens have a right to do—things that the constitutional protection of speech protects—that people of good conscience choose not to do and that others might view as offensive or insulting.

It is important to point out that there have been no pronouncements from opponents of the mosque that the American Society for Muslim Advancement does not have a right to build the mosque wherever they wish. Opponents have simply asked that the building not be built in that location. What remains unclear and unanswered is why the supporters of this mosque are choosing to move forward in spite of its offense and emotional injury to others.

Spokesman and chief fundraiser for the mosque, imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, maintains that the project is about “promoting integration, tolerance of difference and community cohesion through arts and culture.” The complex “will provide a place where individuals, regardless of their backgrounds, will find a center of learning, art, and culture; and most importantly, a center guided by Islamic values in their truest form—compassion, generosity, and respect for all.”

Tolerance, compassion, and a respect for the feelings of others might lead the builders of the mosque to issue a statement, saying something along the lines of: “While we strongly disagree with the sentiments of those opposed to the location of this center, we understand and are sympathetic to the deep emotions fueling those sentiments. Moreover, we are respectful of those feelings and, so, in the name of love, we are going to move our mosque a few blocks up the street. It is our sincere hope that this gesture will be the beginning of a healing process that will put us all on the path to a victory of our common humanity over the ideals that fueled the horrible events of 9/11/01. We are dedicated to making this center a beacon of hope, learning, and compassion not only for the city of New York, but for the entire nation.”

Alas, there have been no statements approaching that kind of generous tone. Instead, what opponents have heard are accusations of bigotry and ignorance, lectures on American values, and a conviction that the medicine of this insult is good for America no matter how bitter it tastes.

So much for tolerance, compassion, and community cohesion.

What could possibly account for the disconnect between the elites and the seventy percent of Americans who oppose the building of the mosque at Ground Zero?

There is a small segment of the left that simply hates America. There is no other way to describe it. These hard-core leftists do not respect America’s traditions or institutions, so they are comrades-in-arms with any force that seeks to undermine or insult those institutions and they rush to stand in opposition to anything that smacks of patriotism or national pride.

A much larger segment of the political left has chosen to wrap its patriotism in the brown-paper wrap of multi-culturalism. For these soft leftists, America’s great strength is its diversity, (as opposed to the founding belief in certain objective truths to which all men must be bound). For them, American values must be malleable enough to fit into the larger context of world citizenry. Thus, everything is American! And yet, in truth, nothing is American because America is so many different things and all of them of equal value, none more sacred than any of the others!

The over-riding motivator, however, is guilt. Leftist—both hard and soft—are still seeking to atone for the sins of our nation’s past. They are hesitant to stand in defense of Western civilization and American ideals and culture lest they be seen as defending whiteness, and by extension, to be standing in opposition to non-whiteness. It is only through national humility and apologetic, cultural indulgence that we can absolve ourselves of the nation’s original sin and win the hearts of our enemies.

Most Americans, however, seem to understand that we are engaged in a battle for the soul of America. No amount of genuflection toward our enemies will make us safer. And each accommodation we make in the name of political correctness brings us one step closer to ruin. It is both fascinating and infuriating that the mosque’s supporters do not understand this simple truth. Or perhaps they do understand it, but simply choose to ignore it.

911 words about Obama’s Mosque
by Kevin McCollough

It was something he certainly didn’t have to do. But he did it anyway. President Obama stepped into the fray of the single most divisive issue pertaining to terrorism, healing of hurt, religious disagreement, civil liberties, political fracturing, racism, and national security all in one step.

How’s that for bringing us all together?

Why a sitting President feels compelled to sit down to a formal Muslim dinner in the first place begs the issue of necessity. After all, why not send them a nice little video-taped greeting like you did the Boy Scouts of America? I mean it’s not like it was the 100th Anniversary of Iftar.

No, instead President Obama felt compelled, not just attend, but to host the little soiree and then make formal comments addressing the gathering.

Something along the lines of:

“But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.”

Question, Mr. President, “Do you feel that all Muslims have a right to exercise their religion?”

How about the nearly 2 million of them world-wide that buy into the exact same brand of Islam that the killers of 9/11 practiced? Do you feel that they have the right to practice that brand of Islam in the United States? How about on the sacred ground of Ground Zero?

Even the “moderate” practitioners of that faith seem to be having some real trouble coming to clarity on not encouraging their fellow Islamists to be so very insensitive.

To date all of two prominent moderate Muslims have had the courage, and endured the death threats, to suggest the Mosque be built somewhere else.

But you Mr. President, we expected better of you, and Mr. Bloomberg, and Mr. Paterson for that matter. We expected those of you who work for “We The People” to have some sort of understanding of propriety, decency, and honor. At the very least we did, and still do expect you to at least demonstrate some modicum of competence: like pushing the pause button until we know who is funding the Mosque, and where the money originates from.

Also checking into the known links between the front man for the effort and terrorist groups wouldn’t hurt either.

What we especially don’t need and wish you wouldn’t waste our time on is empty, meaningless, public statements. Are you genuinely so bored in office that you’ve run out of things to comment on? “How ’bout I give you a topic?”

“Extension of the Bush tax cuts for small businesses so that we can finally start doing something about the unemployment in the nation… discuss…”

The truth is the Obama Mosque in New York City is in large measure being favored and given preferential treatment to other communities of faith. How else can you explain why a small Greek Orthodox church congregation in the same neighborhood–which existed prior to 9.11–still doesn’t have clearance or permission to reestablish it’s presence in lower Manhattan?

Americans aren’t unreasonable Mr. President. If we could be really sure, because some investigative body did its job thoroughly, that the kind of Islam being taught in this particular Mosque wouldn’t be the same kind of Islam that is taught in radical Mosques all over the world, then we’d find it somewhat easier to be soothed by your forked tongue.

The problem here is, no one’s even claiming to have a desire to look into it.

In Islam there is a long standing practice of building a Mosque, a temple, a shrine to Allah’s glory upon conquered lands. I know that you and the rest of the “professional left” find it inconceivable that Muslims would dare to think that about America. But you’ve given them no reason to think otherwise.

You let your Attorney General spit in the face of 9.11 families by attempting to bring the animals currently housed in Gitmo back to my precious city to make some grand gesture. But the Jihadists didn’t see it that way. They laughed at you for your foolishness.

In fact since you’ve been in office you’ve repeatedly apologized to the Islamic world for America’s action of liberation to fifty million muslims, you wholly redirected our space program to the unique purpose of making them feel good about how smart Muslims used to be, and on issue after issue you’ve sided with the views of the terrorists, even appointing several of the former defenders of the Gitmo detainees to your Department of Justice.

But this last week, even though no one was asking you to, you stepped into the most painful issue related to the hallowed grounds of 9.11 to date.

You chose sides, even when nobody cared if you did.

But now it’s in your file. We will discuss during your performance review in November and over the next two years.

And now you own it!

The Obama Mosque of Lower Manhattan… Hmm…

It does have a ring to it.

(Even a Few) Words Matter
by Victor Davis Hanson

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was ecstatic after the Munich Conference of 1938. He bragged that he had coaxed Adolf Hitler into stopping further aggression after the Nazis gobbled up much of Czechoslovakia.

Arriving home, Chamberlain proudly displayed Hitler’s signature on the Munich Agreement, exclaiming to adoring crowds, “I believe it is peace for our time. … And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”

But after listening to Chamberlain’s nice nonsense, Hitler remarked to his generals about a week later, “Our enemies are little worms, I saw them at Munich.” War followed in about a year.

Sometimes deterrence against aggression is lost with just a few unfortunate words or a relatively minor gesture.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a comprehensive address to the National Press Club in early 1950. Either intentionally or by accident, he mentioned that South Korea was beyond the American defense perimeter. Communist North Korea, and later China, agreed. War broke out six months later.

Well before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and sent aid to communist rebels in Central America, President Jimmy Carter announced that America had lost its “inordinate fear of communism.”

In 1981, Britain, as a goodwill gesture in the growing Falkland Islands dispute, promised to withdraw a tiny warship from the islands. But to the Argentine dictatorship, that reset-button diplomacy was seen as appeasement. It convinced them that the United Kingdom was no longer the nation of Admiral Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Winston Churchill. So Argentina invaded the Falklands.

Why, after a horrendous war with Iran, would Saddam Hussein have risked another one with Kuwait? Perhaps because he believed that the United States would not stop him. That was a logical inference when American ambassador April Glaspie told him, “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait … the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”

Saddam invaded a little over a week later.

These examples could be expanded and serve as warnings. In the last 18 months, the Obama administration has made a number of seemingly insignificant remarks and gestures — many well-intended and reasoned — that might be interpreted as a new U.S. indifference to aggression.

Consider the number of apologies Obama has issued to various states that suggest we, not others, are the problem.

To Turkey, Obama said we had often been at fault, and added remorse for slavery and our treatment of Native Americans.

To Russia, he emphasized a need for an American diplomatic reset button.

To the Japanese, he touched on the brutal way America ended World War II.

To the world at large, Obama apologized for Guantanamo Bay, the war on terror, and some activities of the CIA.

To Latin America, he rued our past insensitive diplomacy.

To the G-20, he lamented America’s prior rude behavior.

To the Muslim world, he confessed to wrong policies and past mistakes.

To Europe, he apologized for our occasionally strained relations.

To the United Nations, he said he felt bad about America’s unilateral behavior.

In addition, Obama has bowed to Saudi autocrats and Chinese dictators. In morally equivalent fashion, an Obama subordinate brought up to human-rights violator China the new Arizona immigration law. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that we would be neutral in a new and growing Falklands Island dispute. And America has put Israel on notice that the old close relationship is changing.

Turkey is growing increasingly anti-American. A newly aggressive Russia is beaming that we have caved on a number of contentious issues.

The Japanese are distancing themselves from America. British, French and German leaders are increasingly wary of the United States. The Mexican president criticizes Arizona from the White House lawn.

War is now more, not less, likely in the Middle East. In Latin America, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela are as hostile to the U.S. as ever. Brazil is now seeking to assert new authority contrary to U.S. policies.

The lesson?

Even little words and gestures still matter in high-stakes international relations. Bad actors look hard for even the smallest sign that they might get away with aggression without consequences.

A deferential and apologetic President Obama may think he is making those abroad like us –and he may be right in some cases. But if history is any guide, aggressive powers are paying close attention to these seemingly insignificant signs Soon, they may turn their wild ideas into concrete aggression — once they convince themselves that America neither wants to nor is able to stop them.

‘Bush Did It’ Is Not a Foreign Policy
What exactly does Barack Obama wish to accomplish abroad?
by Victor Davis Hanson

Not being George W. Bush while apologizing for America’s purported sins is not a foreign policy.

Ronald Reagan came into office with the idea of rolling back the Soviet Union. Reagan hoped that such an evil empire might collapse from its inability to match a newly confident United States.

George H. W. Bush sought to oversee a peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire, the reunification of Germany, and a new Western-led world order that thugs such as Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein could not disrupt.

Bill Clinton pushed Western-inspired liberal globalization to lift the Third World out of poverty.

After 9/11, George W. Bush sought to keep America safe from another round of Islamic terrorism while promoting Middle East constitutional government as a way of weakening Islamic terrorism.

But what exactly does Barack Obama wish to accomplish abroad?

In interviews and speeches, Obama emphasizes his nontraditional background and his father’s Islamic heritage. Apparently, he hopes that by reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush, America will be better liked.

But without a strategic vision, “Bush did it” leads nowhere — given that most of the world’s problems predated and transcend Bush. Obama doesn’t seem to understand than wanting people to like America is only a means to an end, not a policy in itself — and an especially dubious means, given the character of many nations in the world today.

Nor does Obama comprehend that global tensions often reflect fundamentally different views of the human condition, rather than simple miscommunication or clumsy diplomacy — and so can’t be solved by serial apologies.

Last I heard, the Chinese Communist government has not said a word about the killing of millions of its own, or about past fighting with many of its neighbors. Russia does not apologize for its bloodletting in Chechnya — or for any of the other countries it has invaded and crushed.

Only Obama’s America offers atonement, as if apologies will singularly achieve our new goal of being liked. Yet when there is no upside for a country’s being democratic or pro-American, and not much downside for its being dictatorial and anti-American, global confusion follows over the proper path that civilization should follow.

So, after 16 months of the Obama presidency, we are starting to see the sort of chaos that results from America’s lack of strategic vision or advocacy of its own values.

Suddenly, democratic allies such as Colombia, Israel, and India cannot count on our support in their rivalries with aggressive neighbors, while overt enemies such as Iran, Hamas, and North Korea wonder whether a brief window has opened for aggrandizement without repercussions.

In the Middle East, Israel is being tested as never before by Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and now Turkey — under the cloud of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Apparently, they all think that suddenly the U.S. is no longer Israel’s protector, and the opportunity for upping the ante should not be missed.

North Korea warns that Seoul might be “a sea of flame,” while jittery Japan cannot seem to stabilize its government. Turkey is starting to sound more like the old Ottoman sultanate, eager for a showdown with the West, than a NATO ally.

Along with Brazil and Russia, Turkey is seeking to water down American efforts to stop Iranian nuclear proliferation. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez now insults an obsequious Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as much as he once did a tough-talking George W. Bush. In fact, the more we reached out in 2009 to Iran, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Venezuela, the more they all now seem hostile — suggesting magnanimity is often seen by such governments as appeasement that in turn encourages aggression.

A cash-flush China wonders why it should finance record U.S. borrowing for entitlements it cannot afford for its own people. We seem to gratuitously offend our oldest and best ally, the British, in novel ways each week. The European Union is in a meltdown, and many of its key members suspect that America no longer sees itself as a leader of shared Western interests. Or that if it does, it is now too broke to do much anyway.

In all these crises, trashing George W. Bush, reaching out to enemies and taking friends for granted is not proving to be a coherent foreign policy. Instead, it is a prescription for a disaster not seen since 1979, when another messianic American president thought he could charm the world by making our enemies like us.

And we all know how that ended.

No (Political) Experience Required
by George Will

Stiffening their sinews and summoning up their blood, pugnacious liberals and conservatives who relish contemporary Washington’s recurring Armageddons are eager for a summer-long struggle over Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. They should pause and ponder how recently and radically the confirmation process has changed.

By 1939, the Supreme Court had been embroiled in political controversy for half a decade. It had declared unconstitutional some important New Deal policies, and FDR had reciprocated by attempting to “pack” the court by enlarging it, which had earned him a rebuke in the 1938 elections. Yet when on Jan. 5, 1939, he nominated Felix Frankfurter to fill a court vacancy, the Harvard law professor sailed through Senate hearings and the confirmation vote in 12 days. It was a voice vote, with no audible dissent.

On March 20, FDR nominated William O. Douglas to fill another vacancy. Although the 40-year-old Douglas had no judicial experience — he was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission — and would be the youngest justice in more than a century, he was confirmed 15 days later. No witness testified against him.

Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times notes that when Stevens was nominated in 1975 to fill the first vacancy since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, he was asked no question about abortion during his confirmation hearing. He was confirmed 98-0, as was Antonin Scalia in 1986. Things changed the next year, when Ted Kennedy used a demagogic Senate speech to launch a successful liberal crusade against Robert Bork.

As Stevens departs, the eight remaining justices are all products of the Harvard, Yale or Columbia law schools; all are former federal judges. Professor Terri L. Peretti, a Santa Clara University political scientist, notes (in Judicature, Nov.-Dec. 2007) that the court has often included judges with political experience.

The greatest justice, John Marshall, who made the court a nation-shaping force, had been a state legislator and congressman. Between 1789 and 1952, most justices had some legislative or executive political experience. Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former president, was followed by Charles Evans Hughes, a former New York governor. Hugo Black had been a senator from Alabama. Earl Warren had been California’s governor, which became a problem: Because President Eisenhower, like many others, believed that political thinking sometimes supplanted jurisprudential reasoning in Warren’s decision-making, he sought judicial experience in his remaining four nominees.

In 1971, Richard Nixon nominated the last two justices without such experience, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell. The last justice with experience in elective politics was Sandra Day O’Connor, who had been an Arizona state legislator before becoming a judge. Bill Clinton seriously considered four prominent politicians for Supreme Court nominations — New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, Secretary of Education and former South Carolina Gov. Richard Riley, Secretary of the Interior and former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.

Peretti believes that when, with the 1954 Brown decision, the court began the dismantling of segregation, Warren’s political skills were apparent in the unanimity of the decision as well as the fact that it was “short and non-legalistic” and was “a public appeal” accessible to a broad public rather than “a cogent legal argument whose reasoning lawyers and academics would admire.” But although the court played a crucial role in overturning the South’s social structure, the need for such a dramatic judicial role is rare and there is no visible occasion for it today, so there is slight need to select politically experienced justices.

Conservatives spoiling for a fight should watch their language. The recent decision most dismaying to them was Kelo (2005), wherein the court upheld the constitutionality of a city government using its eminent domain power to seize property for the spurious “public use” of transferring it to wealthier interests who will pay higher taxes to the seizing government. Conservatives wish the court had been less deferential to elected local governments. (Stevens later expressed regret for his part in the Kelo ruling.)

The recent decision most pleasing to conservatives was this year’s Citizens United, wherein the court overturned part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The four liberal justices deplored the conservatives’ refusal to defer to Congress’ expertise in regulating political speech.

So conservatives should rethink their rhetoric about “judicial activism.” The proper question is: Will the nominee be actively enough engaged in protecting liberty from depredations perpetrated by popular sovereignty?

The Competing Narratives of Barry and Sarah
By Jack Cashil

In the spring of 1964, Sarah Heath, then just three months old, flew into backwater Skagway, Alaska (population 650) aboard a 1930s-era Grumman Goose to start a new life with her parents, brother, and sister.

At that same time, in America’s other new outlier state, Hawaii, two-year-old Barry Obama was just getting used to a fatherless existence in the otherwise-comfortable world his white grandparents and occasionally his mother would make for him.

At the time, not even Nostradamus could have foretold that the paths of Barry and Sarah would intersect in the “historic” 2008 election, Barry as the first major party presidential nominee of African descent and Sarah as the first woman with a real shot at the vice-presidency.

Each would change names before reaching the national stage. Barry Obama would become Barry Soetero, and then Barack Obama. Sarah Heath would become Sarah Palin after eloping with the formidable Todd Palin. Obama would chronicle his journey in the 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father and the 2006 sequel, The Audacity of Hope. Palin would chronicle hers in the 2009 memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life.

How the literary/media establishment would respond to the respective memoirs of these two political figures would reveal far less about the authenticity, honesty, and literary quality of the tales the authors told than it would about the collective mindset of that establishment.

From a classical perspective, Palin’s is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.

Palin takes a semester or two off to pay for college. She works at a diner over the summer. She enters the Miss Alaska contest to help pay tuition and is awarded second runner-up and “Miss Congeniality.” She interns during other summers to become a sports reporter.

After college, Palin joins fiancé Todd on his Bristol Bay salmon boat. During slow salmon runs, she works “messy, obscure seafood jobs” until she can find a job as sports reporter, and even then she keeps returning to Bristol Bay when the salmon are in season.

Throughout this period, despite the hard work and harsh environment, Palin never loses her sense of wonder about the spectacular natural theater in which she is so very much at home. When asked about the state’s best attributes during a Miss Alaska pageant, Palin responds, “its beauty and everything that the great Alaska outdoors has to offer.” Prophetically, she also plugs the state’s “potential in drilling for oil,” which, even then, “Outsiders don’t understand.”

Back in Hawaii, either through his grandparents’ connections or by dint of affirmative action, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii’s poshest prep school. Like Palin, he plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked. The only scores Obama shares are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled, a working out of his “pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against [his] mother’s race.”

In his recent book Barack and Michelle, Christopher Andersen quotes a black friend who rejected Obama’s claimed reason for being benched in a particular game.

No, Barry, it’s not because you’re black. It’s because you missed two shots in a row.

Obama admits to “marginal report cards” in prep school, but his underperformance does not diminish his dreams. He hits the mainland in the late 1970s with the “diversity” movement in full flower. Diversity’s rationale is that people of varied cultures enrich the educational experience. Obama’s upbringing, however, has been thoroughly white and elitist. The diversity bean-counters couldn’t care less. His skin color improves their “metrics.” Obama will ride this pony far.

After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League — Columbia, to be precise. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise, he is silent on how his tuition might have been paid for. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea’s nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong-Il.

After several years as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago, Obama decides to return to law school. Despite a lack of resources and a mediocre performance at Columbia — he does not graduate with honors — Obama limits his choices to “Harvard, Yale, Stanford.” He had absorbed the diversity zeitgeist deeply enough to see success as an entitlement.

In the spring of 1989, during Obama’s first year at Harvard Law, Palin’s “life truly began” with the birth of her oldest son, Track. That summer, with Todd working a blue-collar job on the North Slope oil fields, Palin, her father, and their Eskimo partner work Todd’s commercial fishing boat in Bristol Bay. Palin’s mother, meanwhile, baby-sits the ten-week-old Track.

In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago has given him to write Dreams, half of his $150,000 advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door-to-door seeking votes in her run for Wasilla city council.

Not yet thirty, Palin settles upon the philosophy that will guide her political career: reducing taxes “and redefining government’s proper role.” Like few Republicans this side of Ronald Reagan, Palin will adhere to these principles throughout her political ascent.

Not surprisingly, Palin’s tenacity makes enemies among those who have cashed in their Republican heritage for the perks and power of office. Palin’s perseverance in the face of this resistance makes for compelling political drama. That she is a woman challenging the good old boys of backroom Alaska heightens that drama.

Yet despite pushing the boundaries of female accomplishment throughout her career — as sports reporter, as commercial fisherman, as councilwoman, as mayor, as oil and gas commissioner, as governor, as vice-presidential candidate — Palin never loses her sense of the feminine. Having five children surely helps. So does living in an environment where manly virtues still matter.

An exchange with the larger-than-life Todd helps clarify Alaskan reality. Todd is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog competition, a 2,200 mile snowmobiling marathon. One night, Sarah expresses interest in competing. Says Todd:

Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?

When Sarah answers “Nope,” Todd replies, “Then go back to sleep, Sarah.” Todd lives his Eskimo heritage. He does not just dream about it, let alone exploit it.

While Palin is slugging through Alaska’s political morass like a determined Iditarod musher, Obama is cruising through Illinois politics on skids greased by his Chicago cronies. In his 2004 run for U.S. Senate, both his chief primary opponent and his expected general election opponent are undone by damaging personal information leaked to the media. Obama wins both elections easily.

The combination of his black genes and white upbringing makes the famously “articulate and bright and clean” Obama an irresistible choice to keynote the race-conscious 2004 Democratic convention. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man,” alleges the inimitable Joe Biden.

The story told in Dreams will become a huge bestseller in the wake of the 2004 convention. The lofty, lyrical style of the book will seal the Ivy-educated Obama’s reputation as a genius, and its much-celebrated narrative would serve as a foundational myth for Obama’s ascent to the White House.

Said NEA chairman Rocco Landesman just last month, reiterating the accepted wisdom of the chattering classes, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”

The establishment will not be so kind to Palin. In the week of Going Rogue’s release, the New York Times house conservative David Brooks will call her “a joke.” Dick Cavett, the Norma Desmond of TV talk, will dismiss her as a “know-nothing.” Ex-con Dem fundraiser Martha Stewart will brand Palin “a dangerous person.” And literally thousands of lesser liberal lights will deride her as “stupid,” an “idiot,” or a “moron” (8.5 million Google hits and counting for “Palin” “moron”).

In that same week, Chris Matthews was worrying out loud that Obama was “too darned intellectual,” and author Michael Eric Dyson was celebrating Obama’s “sexy brilliance.” But while the Associated Press was sending a platoon of reporters to fact-check Palin’s book, neither the AP nor any other media outlet dared check either Dreams or Audacity of Hope.

They likely feared what they would find — namely that Obama’s genius depends solely on his willingness to lie about it. “I’ve written two books,” Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia last year. “I actually wrote them myself.” He did no such thing. He had massive help with both books.

Although the prose of Dreams is often lyrical, it is not Obama’s. As I have argued in these pages, and as Christopher Andersen has confirmed, Obama’s gifted friend Bill Ayers gussied up the rough outlines of Obama’s life and imposed upon them the mythic dimensions of Homer’s Odyssey. To accomplish this, the authors invented any number of incidents, many of which are easily disproved. For a serious seeker of facts, Dreams is Sutter Creek in 1848.

In Going Rogue, by contrast, Palin does not shy from crediting Lynn Vincent for “her indispensable help in getting the words on paper.” And yet the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin’s voice. There is no artifice, no postmodern mumbo-jumbo, and not a sentence in the book that Palin could not have written herself. My personal favorite, “I love meat.” I suspect that, unaided, journalism major and former reporter Palin is a better writer than Obama.

Left to their own devices, Palin is clearly the better speaker. In Going Rogue’s climactic moment, the unknown Palin serves up the most dazzling convention speech in modern political history, and she does so in spite of a malfunctioning teleprompter. “I knew the speech well enough that I didn’t need it,” writes Palin.

Had Obama’s teleprompter malfunctioned at the 2004 convention, he would not be president. He has always depended on the eloquence of others. So thoroughly hooked on the teleprompter is Obama that the irrepressible Biden jokes about it. “What am I going to tell the president?” Biden asked the crowd at the Air Force Academy after a teleprompter blew over. “Tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?”

In the final analysis, Going Rogue is a better book than Dreams. No Republican has ever held Palin up as a genius, literary or otherwise, but her narrative is as shrewd, sensitive, and straightforward as its author.

Dreams, on the other hand, is merely a well-crafted fraud.l

Expectations of Hope and Change
by Michael Barone

A new generation is coming to the White House. Barack Obama, born in 1961, is technically a baby boomer. But his early years were straight out of Generation X — abandoned by his father and, for a time, his mother; experimentation with drugs; a sense of drifting.

His two predecessors, both born in 1946, generally considered the first year of the baby boom, personified the two halves — liberal and conservative — of their generation, and both had characteristics that those on the other side of the cultural divide absolutely loathed. Obama, in Boston in 2004 and in Grant Park on victory night, promised to take us above and beyond these divisions.

The constituency Obama assembled during his campaign has a decided new-generational tilt. The Edison-Mitofsky exit poll tells us that Obama carried voters under age 30 by a margin of 66 percent to 32 percent. On the flip side, by my calculation, he won voters 30 and over by just 50 percent to 49 percent. That means that he won by a larger percentage among young voters than any president, and that among voters older than that, he may or may not have carried states with a majority of electoral votes. In retrospect, the only winning Republican strategy would have been to pass a constitutional amendment raising the voting age to 35.

This is the third time in a century that we have seen such a generational change in the White House. From 1933 to 1961, we had presidents born between 1882 and 1890. From 1961 to 1993, we had presidents born between 1908 and 1924. John Kennedy’s inauguration marked the departure of the World War II commanders who occupied the White House for 28 years; Bill Clinton’s the moving on of the G.I. generation after 32 years. Obama’s will mark the passing of the boomers after only 16.

The advantage of a new generation is that it brings fresh ideas and perspectives, a greater sense of possibility and none of the weariness of fighting the same old battles over and over. The disadvantage is that it lacks experience and doesn’t know the lessons of the past.

Obama does make reference to history, especially to distant figures like Abraham Lincoln and FDR. But like Tony Blair, he is given to rhetoric that suggests history begins anew with his installation in office. “This was the moment,” Obama said on June 3, after the last primaries, “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” He is promising more than King Canute.

Message From Georgia: This Too Shall Pass
by Michael Barone

The world doesn’t stand still. Case in point: the Georgia runoff election last week made necessary because Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss failed, barely, to win an absolute majority on Nov. 4. In that contest, Chambliss led Democratic challenger Jim Martin by 3 percent. In the runoff, he won by 14.8 percent. Same candidates, very different result.

Does this mean there has been a major shift toward the Republican Party? By no means. But it does tell us something about the balance of enthusiasm in the days after Barack Obama’s historic victory. In Georgia, the Obama campaign did a brilliant job of getting black and young voters to cast early ballots and came within 5 percent of carrying a state that had voted for George W. Bush twice by double-digit margins.

Some 3.9 million Georgians voted — a 19 percent increase over November 2004. Undoubtedly many of these new voters were eager to cast their votes for the man who will now become America’s first black president.

But that level of enthusiasm was not sustained in the more routine circumstance of choosing one of two white men to serve a six-year term in the Senate. Turnout on Dec. 2 was about 2.1 million votes (with 3 percent of precincts not reporting as this is written).

For the November contest, about one-third of early voters were black; for the December contest, it was about one-quarter. Examination of the county returns suggests that black turnout lagged far behind November except in the inner Atlanta metro area, where black political organizations have been active for several decades. Young voter turnout was, I suspect, down markedly, as well. All of which suggests that the enthusiasm that played such a large part in Obama’s November victory may not be there for Democrats in elections when Obama is not on the ballot.

Other factors were in play, as well. With 58 Democrats elected to the Senate and the race in Minnesota in the recount stage, a Martin victory might have meant that Obama’s party would have the 60 votes it needs to break any Republican filibuster. Many voters interviewed at the polls said they didn’t want to give the Democrats all that power. Americans tend to like checks and balances, particularly if, as is the case in Georgia, most of them don’t tend to favor the party that threatens to win all-out control.

In any case, the widespread and growing approval of Obama’s performance as president-elect did not motivate a high Democratic turnout. It may even have dampened it. Obama’s choices for high positions — keeping Robert Gates as secretary of defense, installing Gen. James Jones as national security adviser, appointing New York Fed Chairman Timothy Geithner as secretary of the treasury — have won widespread approval from the public and drawn cheers from many conservative Republican pundits. But for voters motivated by root and branch hatred of George W. Bush and all his works — from the Democratic base, in other words — they may not have been the change they believed they were voting for in November. If Obama continues to govern in this vein, he may Eisenhower-like drive his own approval ratings up but generate little enthusiasm for his party.

This could be the case especially among affluent voters. In November, Obama assembled a top-and-bottom majority coalition, winning among voters with incomes under $50,000 and over $200,000, and running (narrowly) behind among those in between. But in the Georgia runoff, voters in the ring of affluent suburban counties around Atlanta voted between 64 percent and 85 percent Republican.

To be sure, this is more Republican turf than the rings of similarly affluent counties in the big metropolitan areas of the North. But it does raise the question of whether Democrats can sustain Obama levels of support in affluent America if voters there do not see the recent dizzying drops in their home values and investment portfolios reversed over the next few years.

There’s a danger of extrapolating too much from a single election held in unusual circumstances that are not likely to be precisely replicated elsewhere. But one lesson of political year 2008 is that voters’ preferences are subject to sharp shifts in a period of what I have been calling open-field politics. An Associated Press-Yahoo series of 10 polls over 12 months showed that 14 percent of voters switched candidates, and John McCain had a clear lead in most polls when the financial crisis hit in mid-September.

The world isn’t likely to stand still in the months and years ahead, and the Georgia runoff result is one more piece of evidence that many political outcomes are possible.

Same Old New Deal?
by George Will

Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. “Yes,” he replied, “it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.” It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.

The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America’s biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending — President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt — unemployment was 17.2 percent.

“I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started,” lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.

In “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve’s tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers’ spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits — prerequisites for job-creating investments — were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.

In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that “much of the depth of the Depression” is explained by Hoover’s policy — a precursor of the New Deal mentality — of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.

Furthermore, Hoover’s 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR’s hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.

Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:

“By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s.”

Obama Hires More Clinton White House Veterans

President-elect Barack Obama continued to fill out staff positions for his incoming administration during the weekend, with many of the new appointees having Clinton White House pedigrees.

Gregory B. Craig, a former State Department official who also served as former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer, will be named White House counsel, serving as Mr. Obama’s chief lawyer, Democratic officials said.

Mr. Craig advised Mr. Obama on foreign policy during the presidential campaign and was one of the first prominent aides to Sen. Hillary Clinton to defect from her campaign during the primaries.

The Obama transition team also said Mr. Obama’s former Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse, will serve as a senior White House adviser. Mr. Rouse had previously been Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s chief of staff before the South Dakotan’s election defeat in 2002, and with Mr. Daschle’s aid, he helped build Mr. Obama’s Senate office.

Mona Sutphen, a former special assistant to Mr. Clinton’s national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, was named deputy chief of staff. Ms. Sutphen had been a managing director of Stonebridge International LLC, an international consulting firm that advises multinational corporations. Another Stonebridge managing director, Michael Warren, is leading the transition’s auditing team at the Treasury Department.

Jim Messina, a veteran Senate aide and Mr. Obama’s campaign chief of staff, will also serve as White House deputy chief of staff. Phil Schiliro, a veteran House aide, will be the president’s liaison to Congress.

The new names join a list that includes senior Clinton White House veterans, such as Rahm Emanuel, now Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff, and Ron Klain, a top aide to Vice President Al Gore who will be Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s chief of staff.