Bush fatigue

I noted yesterday in a post on my blog entitled "The Morning After" that I believe Obama's victory on Tuesday was as much a product of the public's "Bush fatigue"as it was any ringing affirmation of the liberal policies that Obama will pursue as president. I argue this because Obama ran primarily as a centrist, coopting the Republican tax-cut mantra by promising his tax reduction for "95% of working Americans" and talking up his desire in general for middle class tax relief. It was a great strategy and proved extremely effective -- particularly given McCain's ineptness in arguing that the Obama plan amounts to another entitlement program. In the end, of course, we all know that with the Democratic robber barons in Congress leading the way, tax increases are coming for everyone -- and not just the "rich" folks making in excess of $250k per year. In my view there is no fundamental "realignment" in this election -- the country remains a center-right nation that wants small government and low taxes. In today's Wall Street Journal, Pat Toomey makes a very compelling argument to this effect:

"A poll commissioned by the Club for Growth in 12 swing congressional districts over the past weekend shows that the voters who made the difference in this election still prefer less government -- lower taxes, less spending and less regulation -- to Sen. Obama's economic liberalism. Turns out, Americans didn't vote for Mr. Obama and Democratic congressional candidates because they support their redistributionist agenda, but because they are fed up with the Republican politicians in office. This was a classic "throw the bums out" election, rather than an embrace of the policy views of those who will replace them."

This is exactly the point I've been making: the 2008 election -- like in 2006 -- was a referendum on George W. Bush and the Republican "bums" that the public associates with failure. It was not a ringing endorsement of "spreading the wealth around" and doesn't amount to an affirmation that wanting to keep more of your hard earned money is "selfish". This was not a realignment toward socialism. It was a rejection of Bush, pure and simple.

The poll results cited by Toomey clearly back up this position:

"Consider the most salient aspects of Mr. Obama's economic agenda: the redistribution of wealth through higher taxes on America's top earners; the revival of the death tax; raising the tax on capital gains and dividend income; increased government spending; increased government involvement in the housing crisis; a restriction on offshore drilling and oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR); and "card check" legislation stripping workers of their right to a secret ballot in union elections.

On each of these issues, swing voters stand starkly against Mr. Obama. According to the Club's poll, 73% of voters prefer the federal government to focus on "creating economic conditions that give all people opportunities to create wealth through their own efforts" over "spreading wealth from higher income people to middle and lower income people." Two-thirds of respondents prefer to see the permanent elimination of the death tax, and 65% prefer to keep capital gains and dividend tax rates at their current lows."

These results read like a Conservatives dream: a focus on individual effort to create wealth, elimination of the death tax and low tax rates. Unfortunately, the voters -- in rejecting McCain as another vestige of the Bush Administration -- elected someone who stands in opposition to all of these positions. Obama is on record as supporting increases in the death tax, capital gains and dividend taxes, income taxes on the highest tax bracket, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and many other tax increases. One of the poll results that shocked me from Tuesday was that Obama won among tax payers in the $200,000 and above income category -- the very category that he was openly targeting for a tax increase. Voters seem to be against tax increases -- but they didn't vote that way on Tuesday.

This seeming contradiction is tough to explain. It is a given, of course, that many voters don't pay attention to the details, and vote on the basis of emotion and personality. On that score Obama won hands down. Many of the voters in swing states ended up voting against their stated interests and desires, by electing Obama and increasing Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. The emotional wave of "change" -- coupled by an incoherent Republican opposition and a total failure of leadership -- created a Democratic wave. Caveat emptor: they just bought something that was both defective and dangerous.

How long will it take before massive "buyer's remorse" sets in? That depends on how well Obama is able to manage the massive liberal forces that will now be pushing him hard to the left. Whether it be the far-left interest groups that poured massive money into his campaign, or the Democratic leadership in Congress that wants socialism on a grand scale, Obama faces some powerful groups that want precisely what most Americans do not. Whether he can (or will) resist this and govern more to the center is unclear. Nothing in Obama's past indicates a courage of conviction or a willingness to buck his party's power brokers. If Obama is unable (or unwilling) to control these forces, he will quickly find himself with a groundswell of opposition among those who decided (against logic) to vote for him. It won't be pretty.

In the end, this election amounted to a clear signal to conservatives that the issues that fueled the Reagan Revolution -- smaller government, less regulation and low taxes -- still resonate broadly with the American people. George W. Bush was never a leader of this movement, and his prolifigate spending and lack of fiscal discipline helped to ruin the Republican brand. Now, Conservatives need new leadership and new ideas that will take the Reagan-era philosophies and update them for a new generation of Americans. Barack Obama won the presidency but he hasn't changed America.

America needs civility, not uniformity

Barack Obama has pulled off one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of Presidential elections. Starting from a stirring rhetorical triumph at the Democratic National Convention four years ago, this relatively young U.S. Senator has reversed eight years of Republican control of the White House and led a Democratic sweep of all three elective branches. Naturally, his victory has generated immense joy among millions of people, won over by a combination of political savvy, boyish charm and a reassuring manner. Millions of others are not at all pleased at this result.

I am not concerned that Republicans will not accept it. I am more concerned about the Democrats, who have behaved as if they were entitled to this victory and have shown disquieting signs that they will take full advantage of it, not only by ramming through new laws to increase taxes and spending, micro manage the economy and privilege labor unions, but by demonizing their opposition as fascists and worse, bringing back the misnamed "Fairness Doctrine" in radio broadcasting (the "Hush Rush" campaign) and bringing criminal charges against Bush Administration officials for carrying out policies Democrats disapproved of.

This odious Democrat specter threatens not only to make life miserable for Republicans but to generate a hateful and vindictive spirit across the land. For now comes the hard part, the troublesome question of what to do after victory had been achieved.

Over the last two years the nation has seen two Obamas, Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside. The first is full of platitudes, trite phrases, endless repetition of focus group themes and what Obama’s running mate, Joseph Biden, referred to earlier this year when he was competing for the same office,  as his "clean" image.

This exterior image has won the day. Given the massive public rejection of both President Bush and his party, it was just what the doctor ordered, in what by all indications was going to be a Democratic year. Obama knew what role he had to play and he played it as well as any man could have.

If Bill Clinton gave us the "permanent campaign," that is, a governing style that makes no distinction between running for office and executing the office of President, he could not avoid the constitutional requirement that he set forth his goals for the country in an Inaugural Address, his more specific objectives in a State of the Union Address, and his priorities and their price tag in the proposed budget for 2010.

These tasks now face President-elect Obama. He cannot perpetually play the role of the nonthreatening alternative to the dread Mr. Bush. Mr. Inside will have to emerge. He will have to risk the unity he has emphasized by spelling out what the "transformation" of America is about. Those who paid attention to Mr. Inside will more likely to be helpful on this score.

Unless Obama was living in a fog for all of his adult life, his common cause with black nationalist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, terrorist William Ayers and crooked Chicago pol Tony Rezko were indications of his character and his views. While he may not have exhibited the disreputable dispositions and predilections of those men, he evidently did not feel uncomfortable spending many hours and days with them.

It is possible that Obama voted merely "present" in the Illinois legislature and U.S. Senate many times because he is man of weak convictions, but more likely it was because his reputation was more important to him than his voting record. Even so, nonpartisan journals report that his was the most liberal.

Liberals today prefer to be called "progressive," ever since Ronald Reagan won by a landslide over Walter Mondale in 1984. But this is merely old wine in much older bottles, for progressivism was founded more than a century ago by academics and politicians who rejected the U.S. Constitution as outmoded and the Declaration of Independence as a "salad of illusions." The "progress" they seek is toward more government control of commerce and trade, and worse, a loosening the family bonds by removing all restrictions on abortion and gay marriage.

Those who object to such socialistic policies as universal health care, redistribution of income and subsidizing "soft" energy will be vilified as selfish, unpatriotic and mean spirited. This will come as a surprise only to those who somehow failed to notice that that is precisely how conservatives have been vilified for years with those epithets.

The Constitution that established our form of government has survived many shocks, and there is reason to believe that it will survive Democratic party governance. But no Constitution is self enforcing. Good men must uphold the law, outside the government as well as in it.

Fairness? Just the opposite

Obama admits that raising taxes decreases revenue. He does not hide that his goal in increasing taxes on individuals and small business owners who qualify for his tax hike is emphatically not to increase tax revenue. Because a "single mom" gets taxed at a higher rate than "her boss's investments," Obama is willing to sacrifice necessary revenue in the service of what he defines as "fairness." But how is it "fair" to tax the boss's money at the same rate as the "single mom's" (or more likely, a higher rate) when the money is first earned, and then not only tax it again, but raise the second tax on it - merely because it is invested? Don't we want to encourage investment in American companies?

How is it "fair" to deprive the country of essential tax revenue needed to decrease the deficit and run all our bloated government programs (programs that only McCain is willing to reform)? Don't we want the deficit to shrink instead of grow?

And how is it "fair" to the "single mom" who relies on her job to care for her family's needs to jeopardize her employment by increasing the tax burden on her boss (who very well may be a "single mom," too)?

According to Obama, wanting to keep the money you earn (and invest it and even decide for yourself which non-profit gets your donations) is what he calls, "selfish," and the most recent figure for who will get taxed under his plan has changed to people making more than $120,000.

Obama even believes that a good way to "spread the wealth around" is to take your money and give checks to people who don't pay taxes - more than 40% of the people getting Obama's "tax relief" money pay no federal taxes at all. That's not "fair," that's "welfare" and it traps people in poverty.

This isn't "restoring fairness to the tax code." This is creating the appearance of fairness in the tax code. But it isn't honest and it isn't fair. It's class warfare - divisive and polarizing. What happened to the Obama of, "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America" fame?

I guess he's the same Obama that followed, "people don't expect government to solve all their problems" with "But..."

Dr. Pamela Zuker received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Psychology from the University of Chicago where she performed research at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). She also holds degrees in Anthropology and Clinical Psychology, and practiced marriage, child, and family therapy before focusing on positive psychology. Her current research is on the role of meaning in adult life. She lives in the Roaring Fork Valley with her husband and two children.

America at the tipping point

Today, Daniel Henninger has a brilliant piece in the Wall Street Journal that lays bare the true significance of an Obama victory. Rather than being representative of a repudiation of "the last eight years", a victory for Obama will usher in a new and philosophically revolutionary change in the basic tenets of both the American economy and society. An Obama administration -- aided with huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate -- will not be a "one-off" example of an over-reaction to the financial crisis that demands an immediate (but temporary) change in direction to right the ship.Rather, as Henninger so eloquently puts it, with this election the U.S. is at a "philosophical tipping point". This is spot on, and echoes the theme of many of my posts for the past several months. America is about to take a sharp 90 degree left turn, away from our history of free-market capitalism based on a risk/reward calculus, and toward a model of state-controlled system based on a no-risk/high security formula. It's a fundamental shift, as Henninger states:

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

This move toward "welfare capitalism" is exactly where Obama will take us over the next four years. And it is a tipping point because it is largely irreversible; the Great Society has now been with us for over 40 years, and its core elements -- Medicare and Medicaid -- are programs that make up a huge percentage of our entitlement spending. It is easy to giveth -- but it is much harder politically to "taketh away".  This is the issue we will face with Obama -- who plans an historic expansion of public-funded healthcare, energy development and welfare programs. As I've written previously, this will result not just in new taxes, but in the growth of a huge and growing dependent class that lives off government but does nothing to help fund it.The impact of this will be to move America back in the pack, to the economic alsorans of France, and Germany. As Henninger again writes:

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, "Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be for-profit cowboys. It's time to spread the wealth around."What this implies, undeniably, is that the United States would move away from running with the high GDP, high-growth nations rising today as economic and political powers and move over to retire with the low-growth economies we displaced -- old Europe.As noted in a 2006 World Bank report, spending in Europe on social-protection programs averages 19% of GDP (85% of it on social insurance programs), compared to 9% of GDP in the U.S. The Obama proposals send the U.S. inexorably and permanently toward European levels of social protection. This isn't an "agenda." It's a final temptation.

A temptation to remake America in the model of the "progressives left" -- which sees capitalism as a model that fundamentally offends them. It offends the notion that America should be about equality of outcome, not opportunity. At the heart of this is a super-charged version of those who believe that "self-esteem" matters more than keeping score, and the idea that some will win while others lose is not acceptable. Never mind that in our economy, those who win do so not because of some hereditary right that is baked in as a birthright, but rather because of their drive to succeed. The left wants to discount the winners so as not to offend those who are less able (or willing) to succeed. This is at the core of the progressive movement: don't brag, walk softly, don't make anyone else feel badly and -- most importantly -- spread your wealth around so as not to make anyone feel inferior.

What this ignores, of course, is that human nature desires independence and self-sufficiency, not dependence on others. Those who actively support this kind of system are the progressive intellectuals who live in a world of theory, rich liberals who feel guilty about their success, and students whose brains have been scrambled by the left-wing politics of the universities. But the vast middle -- who will vote for Obama on November 4 because they have been hoodwinked into thinking that he is more Bill Clinton than Jacques Chirac -- don't want a handout. They want opportunity. And opportunity is not granted by a statist model of economics, but rather by life-giving tax cuts and a light regulatory burden that will ignite the economy and create new jobs. That's the right tonic for America and those who have too little -- not a government handout in the form of a cash payment that serves only to affirm their lower lot in life.

But this is not Obama's view of the world. And if he wins on Tuesday, we will see America make a choice that will fundamentally alter the philosophical underpinnings of our great capitalist democracy.

It will be a choice we will long remember-- and long regret.

His moral relativism discredits Obama

Democrats like Obama the Intellectual like to denigrate "folksy" and "unintellectual" Republicans as "clinging to guns or religion," but what they really abhor about their "lowbrow" Republican counterparts is the willingness to stand in moral judgment. I am not in any way arguing that every time a Republican uses a moral argument it is a correct application. However if we are not willing to even engage in moral discourse, we will travel a very dangerous path. Only a moral realist holds that there are right and true moral universals that exist across all cultures, nations, languages and time, regardless of human comprehension or behavioral conformity to these moral truths. Only a moral realist can believe, for example, that slavery or murder is objectively wrong and was never right despite cultural norms that once permitted it.

A moral relativist, on the other hand can assert, as does Dr. Richard Shweder, respected professor at the University of Chicago where Obama taught, “…even the presumption that infanticide is immoral is too presumptive and provincial to count as a moral universal.”

Only a moral realist truly affirms human rights. Yet the conviction that we all occupy one moral universe is not "high-minded" enough for elite universities, and unless one manages to escape higher education with one's moral compass unadjusted, what was abhorrent before exposure to postmodern deconstructionist thought will afterward be considered benign or even commendable.

Lest we forget, imprisonment of innocents, human experimentation, slavery, murder, and even genocide were legal in Germany during WWII, and it was the educated who formed the Einsatzgruppen “intervention groups” tasked with carrying out systematic mass murders of Jews, gypsies, and others. If there existed no moral realists during that time, there would have been no one willing to risk their own lives to protect society's outcasts. Meanwhile, many "good" German people chose to do nothing. Moral relativism instantiates what Martin Luther King referred to as "the appalling silence of the good people" and produces indifference - or at best diffidence - in the face of evil.

"We must face this challenge. We can face this challenge. We must totally defeat it, and we're in a long struggle." says McCain.

Says Obama the Intellectual, without a hint of irony, "Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, because a lot of evil's been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil."

As Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing." Yet Obama the Intellectual represents a perspective that is not merely morally diffident, but posits moral equivalences between actions that should be easily recognized as morally unequal. He additionally manages to associate with people who would be (correctly) unambiguously identified as racist (Wright and Farrakhan), felonious (Rezko) and terrorist (Ayers and wife, Dohrn) if they were evangelical, white, and “unintellectual.”

Cries of “we gotta be careful of guilt by association” and “these are attempts to connect Obama with events that happened when he was eight years old” obfuscate the real issue: how can we trust the judgment of someone who found none of his “controversial associates” beyond the pale? Even in condemning Ayers, Obama follows with “But…” and describes unrepentant Ayers as simply “a professor of education at the University of Illinois.”

Have we become so numb to the word "terrorist" that it has no effect when used to accurately describe FBI Most Wanted former fugitives, Ayers and Dohrn who helped blow up over 20 buildings (including one in which Ayers' former girlfriend accidentally blew herself up with a nail bomb)? Dohrn reportedly commended Charles Manson's followers while exhorting her compatriots to be “less wimpy” and was allegedly involved in the 1981 Brinks armed robbery in which two men were injured and three were murdered, leaving nine children fatherless.

Dohrn spent seven months in jail for refusing to cooperate with authorities. When two of their dear friends were sent to prison for murder and armed robbery, Ayers and Dohrn became guardians of the convicts' baby son whom they raised to be an intellectual - like themselves. When interviewed by Slate regarding his Rhodes scholarship in 2002, Yale graduate Chesa Boudin claimed he was dedicated to the same principles as "all" his parents.

It was in their living room that Obama the Intellectual’s breathtaking political ascent had its genesis in 1995, and seven years later, Ayers sat on a panel with Obama entitled, “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis.”

Intellectualism guarantees neither good judgment nor sound moral principles. One need only look at Colorado’s own Ward Churchill. But Churchill merely raved about terrorism. Ayers and Dohrn actually delivered. Churchill has at least one thing in common with the dynamite duo, though: Both Ayers and Dohrn are also university professors.

Come to think of it, “folksy and unintellectual” doesn’t sound so bad.

Dr. Pamela Zuker received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Psychology from the University of Chicago where she performed research at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). She also holds degrees in Anthropology and Clinical Psychology, and practiced marriage, child, and family therapy before focusing on positive psychology. Her current research is on the role of meaning in adult life. She lives in the Roaring Fork Valley with her husband and two children.