Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin has advice for the VP pick.

There is good reason for Mitt Romney to wait until close to the convention to pick his running mate, and not simply to keep the TV ratings from plummeting. Campaigns take on a life of their own, exposing weaknesses and creating opportunities. What Romney might have looked for in a VP earlier in the race (e.g. reassurance for the base) doesn’t look so important now. Other considerations have moved up (e.g., a worldwide economic slowdown).

There are a couple of months to go, but here are eight considerations for Romney in making his VP pick:

1. Can articulate a free-market message. Romney is making a convincing case that the president is in over his head, at a loss to understand what ails the economy and how to fix it. The more help Romney can get in this department and the more vigorously a VP can spell out the flaws in the Obama economic policy, the better. …

Michael Barone thinks he knows why Romney will out fund raise the president. 

There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth as, in the spring, it appeared that forces supporting Mitt Romney would be able to raise about as much money as those supporting Barack Obama. There’s even more now that it seems likely that the pro-Romney side will raise and spend more money than the pro-Obama side.

Four years ago, the Obama forces heavily outspent those supporting John McCain. The Obama campaign had enough money to target — and carry — heretofore Republican states like North Carolina and Indiana.

That experience made the Democrats spoiled. The prospect that the other side would have as much money as they do struck them as a cosmic injustice. The prospect that it would have more — heaven forfend!

They like to blame this situation on the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allows corporations and unions to spend money on political speech. They did so even after their defeat in the June 5 Wisconsin recall election, in which Citizens United had no effect because fundraising was governed by state campaign finance laws.

What’s really interesting is that, if current projections are right, this will be the third election in a row in which the party holding the White House will be outspent by the opposition. …

Barone also posted on the need for Romney to get support from the Reagan democrats.

What’s up with the white working class vote? For years the horny-handed blue collar worker was the star of the New Deal Democratic coalition. It was for him, and his wife and family, that Democrats taxed the rich, invented Social Security and supported militant labor unions.

Well, that was then and this is now. White working class voters — or white non-college voters, the exit poll group most closely approximating them — are now a mainstay of the Republican coalition.

Ronald Brownstein, a clear-sighted and diligent analyst of demographic voting data, provided some useful perspective in his most recent National Journal column. His bottom line is that in order to win this year, Mitt Romney must capture two-thirds of white non-college voters — about the same percentage that voted for Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide re-election.

The reason Romney must do so well is that white non-college voters are a smaller part of the electorate now than they were then. In 1984 they comprised 61 percent of all voters. In 2008 they comprised 39 percent. …

Despite all the good news for Romney, Toby Harden sees problems in the way he answered the immigration move.

… The problem with Romney’s non-response on the immigration question is that it looks just as political as Obama’s announcement of a new executive policy five months before an election in which Hispanic votes in Florida, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico could decide whether he’s re-elected.

While the election is will turn principally on the economy and be much more about Obama than Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee can’t duck difficult questions or talk about only what he wants to talk about. And Hispanics in those swing states matter, as do the views of swing voters (likely to be moderate on immigration) across the country.

Democrats are right to be panicking and, as Al Hunt suggests here, the Obama campaign might well be in need of an intervention. But Obama used the power of his office on Friday to knock Romney off balance. And Romney’s failure to respond coherently shows that he can be unsteady on his feet – something that should concern Republicans.

Telegraph, UK has background for one of Churchill’s most famous speeches.

The address he made to the British nation as it stood alone against the Nazi war machine is one of the most celebrated speeches in history.

Full of passion and Shakespearesque language, his appeal for fortitude and courage was credited with re-galvanising the country in its darkest hour.

But a new examination of his papers shows how he agonised over every famous phrase – even adding one at the last minute – and how his private secretary was secretly unimpressed by his efforts.

The “finest hour” speech was made on June 18, 1940, during one of the lowest and most uncertain moments of the Second World War.

The Battle of France was lost, the Battle of Britain was about to begin and the country stood alone against the might of a German offensive that had swept much of Europe before it.

The speech he delivered, first to parliament and then over the radio to the nation, was to become one of the most celebrated of the war – and his career. …

Daily Mail, UK reports we have escaped our solar system.

With absolutely no attempt at hyperbole at all, it is fair to say that this is one of – if not the – biggest achievement of the human race.

For, as we speak, an object conceived in the human mind, and built by our tools, and launched from our planet, is sailing out of the further depths of our solar system – and will be the first object made by man to sail out into interstellar space.

The Voyager 1, built by Nasa and launched in 1977 has spent the last 35 years steadily increasing its distance from Earth, and is now 17,970,000,000km – or 11,100,000,000miles – away, travelling at 10km a second.

Indications over the last week implies that Voyager 1 is now leaving the heliosphere – the last vestige of this solar system. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

“Telling lies on Capitol Hill is like ’carrying coals to Newcastle,’” is what the Roger Clemens jury decided. Well, maybe we’re editorializing. David Harsanyi has the story.

Not guilty on all counts. That’s the return on millions of tax dollars, dozens of witnesses, ludicrous Congressional hearings and nine hours of deliberation. Today, a jury acquitted pitching great Roger Clemens on all counts of lying to Congress about steroids and human growth hormone. …

James Pethokoukis says the Greek election has everyone under whelmed.

The Greek election was for schnooks. That’s not where the real story is happening.

Sure, a win by the loony leftist Syriza party would have put Greece on the fast-track to the euro exits. But Hellas, even with a New Democracy-Pasok coalition government, is still on the moving walkway that is likely taking it to the very same place. So instead of sooner rather than later, it’s probably [a bit] later rather than sooner.

Here’s what Citigroup is saying today:

“Initial reactions from European officials welcome the outcome of the election, but made very clear that the there is little room for the new government to change the existing bailout programme. With this in mind, our probabilities for Grexit [Greek Exit] remain unchanged in the range between 50% and 75% over the next 12 to 18 months.”

And Morgan Stanley in a new research note:

“Not much is resolved from a medium-term perspective. … ”

John Fund thinks Holder may be out of stone walls.

The Washington Post just bestowed its “Worst Week in Washington” award on Attorney General Eric Holder, and it’s not hard to see why.

Over the weekend, Senator Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats, clearly expressed his lack of confidence in Holder by calling for a special counsel who is independent of the Justice Department to investigate serious leaks of national-security documents. Someone near the president is leaking classified information, and both Democrats and Republicans seem determined to find out who.

But the real blow came last week, when Holder’s carefully constructed stone walls against House investigators started to crumble.

Representative Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced he would initiate contempt-of-Congress proceedings against Holder for not turning over documents related to the committee’s probe of the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal at Justice. Issa says that more 200 Mexicans and a U.S. Border Patrol agent were murdered with weapons that the U.S. government allowed to be sold to Mexican drug cartels as part of a probe into gun smuggling. …

Ed Morrissey enjoys the irony of the Politico’s reporting on the NY Times saying the press of governance may take Obama away from the campaign. The next story reported on Obama’s 100th round of golf since the inauguration.

I’ve subscribed to Politico’s Morning Score for quite a long time.  It’s a handy roundup of political stories from around the country, and while much of it never makes it into posts here at Hot Air, I find the background data very useful for context.  I almost never quote directly from the e-mail itself, since it mainly consists of excerpts from the stories it links, but today will have to be an exception.  Someone at Politico either has a wicked sense of humor or perhaps didn’t notice the irony of putting these two stories sequentially in today’s output.  Here it is, verbatim: …

WSJ reports on the attempts to introduce E-Readers to rural Africa.

It is time for a vocabulary lesson in Bernard Opio’s sixth-form class at the Humble Primary School in Mukono, Uganda. One new word the students have already learned this year is “Kindle.”

Mr. Opio instructs them to pull out their Amazon.com Kindle e-reading devices. Within seconds, most of the teenagers have a digital Oxford English Dictionary open on their screens. “It took the kids just a few days to learn how to use them,” says Mr. Opio.

The Humble School, which serves needy children in a part of Africa ravaged by poverty and HIV, is on the front lines of an effort to reinvent developing world literacy programs with technology. The premise is that the new economics of digital publishing might make more and better books available in classrooms like Mr. Opio’s.

“Instead of just having 1,000 books, they have 10 times or 100 times that,” says David Risher, co-founder of a San Francisco-based nonprofit called Worldreader that is leading the experiment in Uganda and two other African countries.

A vision of “one Kindle per child” for developing countries faces considerable challenges, including the cost of e-readers and making sure that kids actually learn better on the devices than with old-fashioned books. Africa is littered with well-intentioned technology programs that fail because devices don’t get used, fall into the wrong hands or just can’t find enough power to run. …

NY Times reports on the moose lottery in New Hampshire.

CONCORD, N.H. — “Oh my God,” cried Alice Jenness, fanning her overheated face with both hands. She had just won the lottery.

The lottery for a permit to hunt a moose, that is.

Ms. Jenness, 51, has been entering her name in New Hampshire’s moose-hunting lottery since it began in 1988. She had never won, and this year, she, like the other hopefuls, faced ever-greater odds at the drawing on Friday.

More than 13,400 people entered the lottery this year for a permit to each hunt just one moose; 275 would be chosen. The number of permits is down, in part because the size of the herd is about where state officials want it and because excessive numbers of ticks, spawned by warmer winters, appear to be killing more moose.

So Ms. Jenness, who was packed with about 150 people into a room here at the State Fish and Game Department for the drawing, was astonished when she heard her name called after a computer selected the lottery winners. Thousands were listening on live radio or watching as the event streamed on the Web.

Ms. Jenness, who works at a supermarket deli, said that she grew up hunting deer with her father, who died in 1983. The moose hunt, which will take place in late October, will be a tribute to him. “I’m going to use my dad’s .308,” she said proudly. “It means a lot to me.” …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor. 

Leno: Sen. Rand Paul endorses Mitt Romney. Makes for an awkward Father’s Day with dad Ron Paul. What would you like, Dad? Little help would be nice.

Fallon: J. Crew announces it’s getting ready to open its first store in Asia. Which explains why the tags on the clothes say, “Made By You.”

Conan: Illinois State Rep. Derrick Smith has been accused of accepting a $7,000 bribe. If convicted, he could serve up to four years as the state’s governor.

Conan: Kanye West is preparing to propose to Kim Kardashian. Today he said, “I can’t wait to marry Kim and get started making the worst family on Earth.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn on the Cleveland speech. 

Round about this time in the election cycle, a presidential challenger finds himself on the stump and posing a simple test to voters: “Ask yourself – are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

But, in fact, you don’t need to ask yourself, because the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances has done it for you. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans’ median net worth fell 38.8 percent – or from $126,400 per family to $77,300 per family. Oh, dear. As I mentioned a few months ago, when readers asked me to recommend countries they could flee to, most of the countries worth fleeing to Americans can no longer afford to live in.

Which means we’ll just have to fix things here. How likely is Barack Obama to do this? A few days ago he came to Cleveland, a city that is a byword for economic dynamism, fiscal prudence, and sound government. He gave a 54-minute address that tried the patience even of the most doting court eunuchs. “One of the worst speeches I’ve ever heard Barack Obama make,” pronounced MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter, as loyal Democrat attendees fled the arena to volunteer for the Obamacare death-panel pilot program. In fairness to the president, I wouldn’t say it was that much worse, or duller, or more listless and inert than previous Obama speeches. In fact, much of it was exactly the same guff he was peddling when Jonathan Alter’s pals were still hailing him as the world’s greatest orator. The problem is the ever-widening gulf between the speech and the slough of despond all about. …

Which brings us to Peter Wehner’s five reasons why Romney is the favorite.

Why is Barack Obama’s road to re-election so steep and uncertain at this stage?

There are five important reasons.

1. An indefensible record. Every election which features an incumbent is, at least in good measure, a referendum on the record of the incumbent. The problem facing Obama is that he can’t offer a convincing case that his policies have succeeded. Recall that at the outset of his presidency, Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer, “I will be held accountable. I’ve got four years… If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.” Yet last October, Obama had to concede to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “I don’t think [people are] better off than they were four years ago.”

In addition, the main achievements of the Obama presidency – including the Affordable Care Act and the stimulus package – are deeply unpopular. By virtually any measure, then, the president has presided over a failed first term. He cannot reinvent, and therefore he cannot successfully defend, his record.

2. A weakening economy. …

James Pethokoukis on the nostalgia economics of Barack.

… Get ready for some Baby Boomer nostalgia from our 21st century, ultramodern president: “In the decades after World War II there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own. …This consensus, this shared vision led to the strongest economic growth and the largest middle class that the world has ever known. It led to a shared prosperity. “

The 1950s and 1960s — taxes were high, unions were strong, incomes more equal. And the U.S. economy grew by 3.7% a year. So, Obama seems to suggest, let’s just dial up the economic Way Back Machine — raise taxes on the rich, reregulate industry, boost union power – and we can go back to the future.

In a recent piece on the presidential campaign in New York magazine, an Obama aide described Mitt Romney this way: “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward.” Yet Obama is the one touting his economic vision as a bridge to the 1950s.

But there’s no going back, Mr. President. The post-World War II decades were affected by a host of unique factors, not the least of which was that they came right after a devastating global war that left America’s competitors in ruins. A National Bureau of Economic Research study described the situation this way: “At the end of World War II, the United States was the dominant industrial producer in the world. … This was obviously a transitory situation.”

And as former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard notes in his new book, Unintended Consequences, the size of the U.S. labor force was constrained during those decades by both the 1930s baby bust and casualties from the war. …

It was surprising to learn the Commerce Department has a secretary and typical of this dysfunctional government that we never heard of him until he started playing demolition derby. Heritage Blog wonders why we bother.

… President Obama certainly has an estranged relationship with his cabinet, preferring to govern mostly out of the White House. But according to White House Visitor Logs, John Bryson actually visited more often than many of his colleagues–a total of 31 times (barring multiple John Brysons). Energy Secretary Steven Chu had visited 17 times and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has only swung by 13 times. To put that in context, Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen has visited the White House 33 times and union boss Richard Trumka has visited 69 times.

The White House has more questions to answer. These questions do not require them to divulge any private or health-related information if Bryson and his family choose to not share that information. But White House officials should explain why the president was left in the dark, why the president is still not in touch with his cabinet secretary and why they had such a hard time gathering facts over two days.

If the position of the Commerce Secretary does not merit that type of attention, than shouldn’t the focus be placed on the necessity of the position in the first place? …

And then there was another strange fact. Foreign Policy wonders why the man charged with improving the commerce of the United States was driving a Lexus.

U. S. Secretary of Commerce John Bryson had a bad weekend. After what appears to have been two hit and run accidents he was eventually found asleep or unconscious over the steering wheel of his car. He has now taken a “medical leave of absence.”

That was obviously bad for Bryson, bad for the people he hit, and embarrassing, at least politically, for the Obama administration. But the incident didn’t seem to have any real far reaching significance. There was, however, a further detail. The car the secretary was driving was a Lexus.

“So what,” you say. A lot of people drive Lexuses. What’s the big deal about that? Well, the thing is that Lexuses in the United States are totally imported from Japan. The Secretary of Commerce — the official most responsible for carrying out President Obama’s export doubling campaign — is driving an import. Top Japanese officials don’t drive imports. Top German officials don’t drive imports. Top South Korean officials don’t drive imports. All of their countries have trade surpluses.

How is the United States supposed to double exports, reduce its trade deficit and thereby create jobs domestically when its top official in charge of the export-doubling doesn’t even drive a U.S.-made car? Couldn’t he at least drive a Honda or a Toyota Camry or a Mercedes or BMW? All of these are foreign brands, but at least they are also made in America. He doesn’t have to be xenophobic, just conscious of creating American jobs. …

British papers have noticed the Elizabeth Warren controversy and the media double standard it displays.

Imagine if a Republican candidate claimed, confidently, that she was part Native American. Imagine if she had actually used that identity to have herself listed as a minority at Harvard, qualifying her for special treatment and celebration as proof of how diverse and progressive her department is. Imagine if, many years later, it turned out that her claims to Native heritage were dubious and, when pressed for proof, she offered her “high cheekbones.” Oh, and she once contributed a recipe to a Native American cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow” (that may even have been plagiarised).

Chances are, that Republican candidate would be hounded night and day by the press, branded a racist and probably be winding down her political career. Right now, she’d be sitting by the phone, praying for a call from the producers of Celebrity Apprentice (gotta pay the mortgage on that wigwam somehow). …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer sums up the race.

… The race remains 50-50. Republican demoralization after a primary campaign that blew the political equivalent of a seven-run lead has now given way to Democratic demoralization at the squandering of their subsequent ­post-primary advantage.

What remains is a solid, stolid, gaffe-prone challenger for whom conservatism is a second language vs. an incumbent with a record he cannot run on and signature policies — Obamacare, the stimulus, cap-and-trade — he hardly dare mention.

A quite dispiriting spectacle. And more than a bit confusing. Why, just this week the estimable Jeb Bush averred that the Republican Party had become so rigidly right-wing that today it couldn’t even nominate Ronald Reagan.

Huh? It’s about to nominate Mitt Romney, who lives a good 14 nautical miles to the left of Ronald Reagan.

Goodness. Four more months of this campaign and we will all be unhinged.

Matthew Continetti gets to the core of Obama’s failures.

I can’t be the only person in America who, at about minute 35 in President Obama’s almost hour-long “framing” speech in Cleveland Thursday, wanted to tell the president, as the Dude famously screams at Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, “You’re living in the past!”

Obama’s overly long, repetitive, and by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory address was so soaked through with nostalgia that MSNBC should have broadcast it in sepia tones. The speech—which even the liberal Obama biographer Jonathan Alter called one of the president’s “least successful” political communications—revealed an incumbent desperately trying to replay the 2008 election. But no oratory will make up for a flawed record and a vague, fissiparous, and unappealing agenda.

The president himself forced this abrupt re-launch of his reelection campaign. After a bad week that began with terrible job numbers, proceeded to Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall, and culminated in awful fundraising news, Obama tried to recover last Friday by addressing the press on the state of the economy. Except things went horribly wrong. The president uttered six words—“the private sector is doing fine”—that not only will plague him for the rest of the campaign, but also perfectly captured his complacent attitude toward all things outside the realm of government.

The moment prompted a burst of panic throughout the Democratic hive mind, with media types clucking their tongues at the president’s campaign and party strategists questioning the salience of his message. Yesterday’s event in Ohio was thus intended to serve as a sort of domestic analogue to President Obama’s “reset” with Russia. By the looks of things, it will prove to be just as unsuccessful.

The very idea that Obama has the ability to shape his political fortunes through rhetoric is a backwards-looking myth. It is part of the pop narrative of Obama’s 2008 candidacy, in which the young freshman senator was able to rescue his moribund campaign from the evil Clinton machine by giving a single speech at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in November 2007. More likely it was Obama’s antiwar stance in an antiwar party that gave him the edge in the Iowa caucuses the following January, but that has not stopped the president or his supporters from having an almost theological attachment to his oratorical prowess. …

Politicker treats us to tweets from the White House press corps during the president’s Cleveland snore.

… All of these points have already been featured in the president’s other recent speeches. Between the pre-speech hype from the campaign, the lack of new material and the overall length of the speech reporters were clearly dissatisfied with end result. Read on for a sampling of Tweets from the political press slamming the president’s speech.

Before the speech was over, MSNBC’s Mike O’Brien begged the president to stop.

“In terms of politics, this speech could have ended about 20 minutes ago. Drive your message, take your ball, go home.” …

More on the speech from Jennifer Rubin.

In the wake of President Obama’s Ohio speech on Thursday the mainstream media figured out, or at least were willing to express, what conservatives have long known: President Obama is a bore, and his second-term agenda is his first term agenda. The Mitt Romney campaign gleefully circulated clips of reviews by liberal pundits savaging the speech. If the New York Times’ Andrew Rosenthal panned the speech, you know it bombed. (“[W]ill someone edit the president’s speeches? They’re nearly Castro-length.”)

One reason why Obama’s speech was so poorly received by all but the Kool Aid-intoxicated set was that the man who once thrilled and wowed the liberal elites is no longer electrifying. Heck, he’s not even interesting. …

Using the results of the 2010 congressional election, Michael Barone shows why prospects are so good for Romney.

It seems to be a standard rule in assessing the prospects of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in particular states to use the November 2008 numbers as a benchmark. However, as I have pointed out, in the last three presidential elections, the winning candidate has won a percentage of the popular vote identical to or within 1% of the percentage of the popular vote for the House of Representatives in the election held two years before. In this case, the November 2010 results are very different from 2008. In 2008 Obama won 53% of the popular vote. In 2010 House Democrats won 45% of the popular vote.

To gauge where the race is now in the various states I have prepared the following table. It lists the 16 states where Obama’s 2008 percentage was between 49% and 57%, ranked by Obama percentage. I have added Arizona, which the Obama campaign has reportedly been considering targeting; Obama got a higher percentage in Georgia and almost identical percentages to Arizona’s in South Carolina and South Dakota, but no one considers any of them to be in play. …

In Pickings May 30th, Robert Samuelson appeared with the first part of his column on scrapping the idea of college for all. Here is the second part.

Let’s resume the debate over who should go to college. Some weeks ago, I wrote a column arguing that the “college for all” philosophy is a major blunder of educational policy.

Its defects, as I outlined them, include:

? The lowering of college entrance requirements, except at elite schools (in 2008, about 20 percent of four-year schools had “open admissions” policies, meaning that virtually anyone with a high-school diploma could get in).

? The dumbing down of college standards (one study I cited found that about a third of college seniors hadn’t improved their analytical skills).

? Much human and financial waste — the dropout rate at four-year schools is roughly 40 percent, and many of these students leave with large debts.

? A monolithic focus on the college track in high school that ignores the real-life needs of millions of students who either won’t start or won’t finish college and would benefit more from vocational programs.

Naturally, this critique didn’t please the barons of higher education. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund reports Der Spiegel has given up on the One.

In July 2008, the leading German newsmagazine Der Spiegel couldn’t contain itself in its reporting on Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin. The coverage was rapturous.

“The people of Berlin experienced the full range of Barack Obama’s charisma on Thursday evening,” it enthused. “At times he was reserved, at others engaging. Sometimes combative, and also demanding.” Der Spiegel called him “the trans-Atlantic bridge builder” who wowed 200,000 Germans as he proved himself a “save the world orator” who would expunge the evils of the unpopular Bush administration. 

My, how times have changed. This week — almost exactly four years later — Der Spiegel is back with a cover story featuring a glum and dejected Obama: “Sad,” the headline reads. “Obama’s Unlucky Presidency.” …

Andrew Malcolm reports on the campaign. 

President Obama today is — what else? – fundraising again.

But while he’s out, Gallup released a seriously ominous poll for the Democrat’s chances of keeping his extended family in the White House for four more years.

Gallup finds a deep crack in Obama support emerging among whites, still statistically by far the largest group of voters. His support among several white subgroups is down 5% now among registered voters from what it was just before the 2008 election, when he easily defeated John McCain.

These sub-sets of non-Hispanic whites include young registered voters between 18 and 29, which provided him a huge margin four years ago, well-educated women and non-religious whites, among others. Other research has shown huge percentages of Obama’s money donors from 2008 withholding their money this time.

Obama’s support among registered voters today is 46%, five points below what it was nearly four years ago. Whites’ support is down slightly more, six points, from 44% to 38%.

Obama’s support among blacks, while still overwhelming, has also dipped four points from 91% to 87%.

This unwelcome news for the Chicago political operation comes after a horrendous two weeks of gaffes, bad jobs news and unforced errors by the politician once known here as the Real Good Talker. …

Andrew Ferguson reviews two of the new Obama books and ends up reviewing Obama’s first book too.

… the only way to keep a book like The Amateur chugging along is with gallons of high-octane contempt. Yet because Klein provides so little to provoke fresh outrage?—?or to support the theme that Obama is “something new in American politics,” a historically unprecedented threat to the Republic?—?readers will have to come to the book well-stocked with outrage of their own. They will be satisfied with sentences that begin with an appeal to phony-baloney authority (“According to those who know him best”) and continue with assertions that no Obama intimate would make to Edward Klein, on or off the record: “inept in the arts of management .??.??. make[s] our economy less robust and our nation less safe .??.??.” and so on. And they’ll admire his ability to fit his theme of Obama’s villainy to any set of facts. After his election, for example, Obama didn’t take a wise man’s advice to disregard his old Chicago friends?—?a sign of Obama’s weakness and amateurism, Klein says. A few pages later Obama and Valerie Jarrett are accused of ignoring their old Chicago friends?—?a sign of coldness and amateurism. Klein gets him  coming and going.

If Klein makes Obama something he’s not by hating him more than he should, David Maraniss, a reporter for the Washington Post and a biographer of Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi, takes the opposite approach. Klein is an Obama despiser, Maraniss is a big fan?—?big fan. Klein assumes the worst of his subject at every turn, Maraniss gives Obama every benefit of the doubt, sometimes with heroic effort. Klein writes hastily and crudely, Maraniss writes with great care, veering now and then into those pastures of purple prose that Obama frequently trod in his own memoir. Klein’s book aims for a limited but sizable audience of readers who already despise Obama as much as he does, and therefore don’t require footnotes or any other apparatus of verification; Maraniss, with 30 pages of notes, has grander ambitions to satisfy anyone curious about Obama’s upbringing and family life. Klein’s book is a squalid little thing, Maraniss’s is not.

It is not, however, the book that Obama lovers will hope for?—?maybe not the book that Maraniss thinks it is. Prepublication, his splashiest piece of news has been the extent of the future president’s love for, and consumption of, marijuana. Through high school?—?he apparently lost the taste for pot sometime in college?—?Obama’s ardor reached Cheech and Chong levels. His circle of dopers called themselves the “Choom Gang,” after a Hawaiian word for inhaling pot, and the phrase is already threatening to enter the common language, ironically or otherwise. (I Googled it today and got 560,000 hits, pardon the expression.)

Obama politically indemnified himself against charges of youthful drug use by admitting them in his memoir, though he was smart enough to avoid the words “Choom Gang.” Even at 33, when he wrote his book, he had his eye on a political landscape that would require acknowledgment if not full disclosure of youthful “experimentation,” as the charming euphemism went. In Dreams, he treats the drug use as another symptom of his singular youthful confusion. Maraniss’s explanation is less complicated: Obama really, really liked to get high. Maraniss offers similarly unblinkered portraits of Obama’s appalling father, a vain, wife-beating bigamist and drunk, and of Obama’s maternal grandfather, who comes off in Dreams as a latter-day Micawber, innocent and luckless. Maraniss hints at a darker, even slightly menacing figure. And he discovers some sharp edges beneath the flowing muumuu of Obama’s mother, more often depicted as an idealistic flower-child-turned-scholar (or, in the Klein-reading camp, a Communist agitator).

Maraniss’s book is most interesting for the light it casts on Obama’s self-invention, which is of course the theme of Dreams from My Father: a sensitive and self-aware young man’s zig-zagging search for a personal identity in a world barely held together by fraying family ties, without a cultural inheritance, confused and tormented by the subject of race. Dreams is a cascade of epiphanies, touched off one by one in high school, at Oxy, in New York and Chicago, and, at book’s end, before his father’s grave in Africa. Years before Obama haters could inflate him into an America-destroying devil or Obama worshippers spied those rolling swells of greatness that have yet to surface, Barack Obama was carefully fashioning from his own life something grander than what was there. He was the first Obama fabulist. 

Obama himself drops hints of this in Dreams. He writes in his introduction that the dialogue in the book is only an “approximation” of real conversations. Some of the characters, “for the sake of compression,” are “composites”; the names of others have been changed. All of this is offered to the reader as acceptable literary license, and it is, certainly by the standards of the early 1990s, back in the day when publishers flooded bookstores with memoirs of angst-ridden youth and there were still bookstores to flood. Yet the epiphany-per-page ratio in Obama’s memoir is very high. The book derives its power from the reader’s understanding that the events described were factual at least in the essentials. Maraniss demonstrates something else: The writer who would later use the power of his life story to become a plausible public man was making it up, to an alarming extent. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm. 

Leno: At a news conference Obama says the economy is doing just fine. In fact, 14 million people were able to watch the news conference at home because they’re unemployed.

Leno: A new book says Barack Obama smoked huge amounts of marijuana in high school. New unemployment numbers are higher than Obama was in high school.

Fallon: Joe Biden’s daughter was married in a ceremony that incorporated Jewish traditions. But Biden wouldn’t wear the yarmulke til they put a propeller on top.

Fallon: Obama spent Friday night at his Chicago home. But there was an awkward moment the next day. When he left for D.C., the housekeeper said, ‘So, see you after the election?’

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Roger Simon says be happy you’re not Binyamin Netanyahu.

Who would want to be Benjamin Netanyahu? As the prime minister of Israel he has a dreadful calculus to make: Is Barack Obama sufficiently serious about preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? …

… He is staring at an American election that must give him fits. Were Barack Obama – the man who said those “flattering” things about him to ex-French President Sarkozy – to be reelected in November, the Israeli PM’s hands might be tied in a myriad of ways with a myriad of threats.

His window to act is now. One can only wish him luck.

David Harsanyi says create wealth, not jobs.

… the context of President Obama’s remark is simple: He believes that public-sector jobs are a vital measure of economic growth. This is the prevalent view from the left these days. “Everybody knows that government creates jobs,” lied Sen. Sherrod Brown recently. Liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne quipped that when conservatives say “government doesn’t create jobs,” “the riposte should be quick and emphatic: ‘Yes it has, and yes, it does!‘” (And really, how can anyone argue with that kind of ironclad logic?)

It’s ironic that the same people pushing unsustainable job growth find the process of wealth creation so unsightly. Not long ago, Obama and others on the left were busy attacking private equity, claiming that some people are good at “maximizing profits” but that that’s not always “good for businesses or communities or workers.” (Actually, it almost always is.)

But pumping money into public-sector unions is always good for businesses, communities and workers? Obama is peddling a “jobs” bill right now that features one pinch of protectionism, one pinch of feel-good veteran help and a few hundred cups’ worth of wealth-sucking, union-growing debt inducement. Can anyone name a single policy proposal by his administration that even pretends to clear the way for private-sector wealth creation?

In context, the entire focus of the president is warped — not simply because he underestimated the health of the private sector but because he believes that any other sector matters when talking about the economy. It doesn’t.

Michael Barone says the president makes a mistake listening to rich liberals. Pickerhead says, “Keep it up. Barry, suits us fine.” 

Who does Barack Obama listen to?

Not Republican politicians. Evidently weeks go by between his conversations with House Speaker John Boehner, who determines what legislation comes to the House floor.

Not Democratic politicians. We have it on good authority that he seldom talks to Democratic members of Congress. Lyndon Johnson used to be on the phone constantly, cajoling and inveigling but also on the alert for shifts in opinion.

Speaker Tip O’Neill walked around the Capitol, asking member after member, “What do you hear?” In contrast, Obama, a former adviser told Vanity Fair‘s Todd Purdum, “is a total introvert. He doesn’t need people.”

But there is one group of people Obama has to listen to: the people who give him large sums of money. He recently attended his 150th fundraiser. That’s more than the number attended by the last four presidents put together.

Obama has seen enough Architectural Digest-type interiors in Park Avenue triplexes and Beverly Hills mansions, and on the block in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where every house is owned by a billionaire, to develop an expertise in Louis XV walnut commodes and Brunschwig & Fils fabrics.

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents. And the evidence that he has taken some of that advice is his initiatives on three controversial issues, each of which involves serious political risk. …

Matthew Continetti reviews Road to Freedom by Arthur Brooks.

Will Smith was about to be surprised. 

It was mid-May, and the actor was appearing on French television to promote his latest blockbuster. The host wanted to hear the Fresh Prince’s thoughts not only on Men in Black III but also on American tax rates. “I have no issue with paying taxes and whatever needs to be done for my country to grow,” Smith said. “So I will pay anything that I need to pay to keep my country growing.”

Even the 75 percent top rate proposed by the newly elected French president François Hollande, the host asked? Smith’s movie-star grin contorted in disgust: “Seventy-five?” he said. “Yeah, that’s different.” He looked from side to side, perhaps wondering if President Obama was lurking off-camera to punish him for such apostasy. “That’s different. Yeah, 75. Well, you know, God bless America.”

Will Smith reacted viscerally because a top tax rate of 75 percent offended his sense of justice. It might be right, in his view, for the government to take 30 or 40 percent of a rich person’s earnings, but taking 75 percent would not be right at all. It would be wrong. Unjust.

One of the virtues of Arthur Brooks’s new book on the morality of free enterprise is that it supplies empirical support for Smith’s intuitive reaction. The Road to Freedom is personal and idiosyncratic, filled with autobiographical asides, references to the author’s wife and children, corny jokes, and the occasional pop culture allusion. But it also has a serious intent. Brooks attempts to prove, scientifically, the “moral legitimacy of free enterprise” by testing whether the system “enables people to flourish,” whether it is fair, and how it “treats the least fortunate in society.” He argues that free enterprise passes all three tests, and he makes a good case.

Consider human flourishing. Ex–panding on arguments he made in The Battle (2010), Brooks says that high tax rates are wrong not only because they damage the economy, but also because they violate the principle of earned success. You are more likely to be happy, he observes, when you create “value with your life or in the lives of others,” and the happiness of the people ought to be the goal of any society that aspires to morality. …

… Work is what takes us from learned helplessness or dependence to earned success and independence. Through public policy, governments and societies affect how much we work, and for what reason, and for whose benefit. Government can pay us not to work, or it can tax our labor and incomes and investments to such an extent that we do not work harder on the margin. Not only do we make less money; we lose some of our sense of self-worth. We lose our right to labor, and to the benefits of our labor. Jefferson, Lincoln, and Reagan understood: Governments that assert a claim to a citizen’s property will have no trouble asserting a claim to his conscience as well. It cannot be a coincidence that the Obama administration, which wants to “spread the wealth around,” also coerces religious institutions to provide contraceptives and abortifacients to employees. In both cases, Barack Obama believes his vision of the good trumps the equal rights of others.

Read The Road to Freedom for its explication of earned success, its definition of meritocratic fairness, and its moral commitment to using free exchange to improve the lives of the destitute. But don’t forget that the moral truths that animate this admirable book, and others, cannot be found in economics or statistics or social science. They are found in the individual dignity of every human being, and in the natural equality of man. Will Smith’s ability to pursue happiness does not depend on our 35 percent top tax rate. It depends on the depth of our commitment to the vision of the Founders.

Jeff Jacoby says the end is near for public sector unions. 

In retrospect, there were two conspicuous giveaways that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was headed for victory in last week’s recall election.

One was that the Democrats’ campaign against him wound up focusing on just about everything but Walker’s law limiting collective bargaining rights for government workers. Sixteen months ago, the Capitol building in Madison was besieged by rioting protesters hell-bent on blocking the changes by any means necessary. Union members and their supporters, incandescent with rage, likened Walker to Adolph Hitler and cheered as Democratic lawmakers fled the state in a bid to force the legislature to a standstill. Once the bill passed, unions and Democrats vowed revenge, and amassed a million signatures on recall petitions.

But the more voters saw of the law’s effects, the more they liked it. Dozens of school districts reported millions in savings, most without resorting to layoffs. Property taxes fell. A $3.6 billion state budget deficit turned into a $154 million projected surplus. Walker’s measures proved a tonic for the economy, and support for restoring the status quo ante faded — even among Wisconsin Democrats. Long before Election Day, Democratic challenger Tom Barrett had all but dropped the issue of public-sector collective bargaining from his campaign to replace Walker.

The second harbinger was the plunge in public-employee union membership. The most important of Walker’s reforms, the change Big Labor had fought most bitterly, was ending the automatic withholding of union dues. That made union membership a matter of choice, not compulsion — and tens of thousands of government workers chose to toss their union cards. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin has words for a president who has a love affair with government.

The president’s news conference belly-flop Friday was a killer on two levels. Obviously, the private sector is not doing fine, as Obama admitted later in the day when he tried to walk back the remark. (But if it’s not doing fine is he to blame? No! That’s 2E and 2F.) But the rest of his message — that it’s good to keep growing the public sector — won’t be walked back. That is what he believes and why his comments, coupled with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in last week’s recall election, spell big trouble for him. …

… President Obama seems unaware that we need the private sector to generate wealth (you know, make things, sell things, etc.) or that we face in the near future a fiscal crisis when we can no longer off-load our debt. Where does he think the money to pay for an ever-expanding public employee workforce comes from? (“The fair if depressing takeaway from Mr. Obama’s press conference is that he continues to believe, despite three and a half years of failure, that more government spending is the key to faster growth and that government really doesn’t need to reform. This is how you get a jobless rate above 8% for 40 months and the weakest economic recovery in 60 years.”) …

Andrew Malcolm says the White House has a new economic advisor – Wile E. Coyote.

One of the immutable rules of politics is that if you have to explain something you’ve said publicly, the argument is already lost. “What I was trying to say was….”

Loser!

In that sense President Obama was strategically wise Friday afternoon not to try to somehow explain his morning jaw-dropper about the private U.S. economic sector doing just fine with the real unemployment rate above 14%. Instead, the Democrat simply contradicted himself. Create a new quotable reality. The Chicago way.

Morning: “The private sector is doing just fine.”

Afternoon: “It is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine.”

Dissembling doesn’t faze him. Pretending just might work. Which Obama do you believe? Increasingly, neither. The president’s latest gaffe is, as another high-ranking Democrat would put it, a big #$%&*+@ deal because:

1) It came as Obama gives the consistent week-after-week impression that he’s much more interested in raising millions at campaign fundraisers (13 in just 3 “work” days) than lowering the unemployed ranks by millions,

2) It adds to the impression that a lost Obama, distracted by Mitt Romney’s surprising early strengths, is kinda panicked, will say almost anything to make it true and easily slips off-script with silly, immediately refutable statements. …

John Hinderaker thinks it is “Obama’s most clueless moment yet. ”

President Obama’s seemingly-bizarre claim that “the private sector is doing fine” is echoing across the country. When I first saw the quote, I thought it must be a momentary gaffe, or perhaps taken out of context. But no: Obama really did say, at some length, that the private sector is prospering and we need to spend more money on government:

“The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

And so, you know, if Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is how do we help state and local governments and how do we help the construction industry? …”

George Will gets on to the student debt crisis.

… Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, believes that college has become, for many, merely a “status marker,” signaling membership in the educated caste, and a place to meet spouses of similar status — “associative mating.” Since 1961, the time students spend reading, writing and otherwise studying has fallen from 24 hours a week to about 15 — enough for a degree often desired only as an expensive signifier of rudimentary qualities (e.g., the ability to follow instructions). Employers value this signifier as an alternative to aptitude tests when evaluating potential employees because such tests can provoke lawsuits by having a “disparate impact” on this or that racial or ethnic group.

In his “The Higher Education Bubble,” Reynolds writes that this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust. Tuitions and fees have risen more than 440 percent in 30 years as schools happily raised prices — and lowered standards — to siphon up federal money. A recent Wall Street Journal headline: “Student Debt Rises by 8% as College Tuitions Climb.”

Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that as many people — perhaps more — have student loan debts as have college degrees. Have you seen those T-shirts that proclaim “College: The Best Seven Years of My Life”? Twenty-nine percent of borrowers never graduate, and many who do graduate take decades to repay their loans. …

Joe Nocera, of the NY Times, points to another area where college administrators have failed.

The lead article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week is about a University of Memphis football player named Dasmine Cathey. He lives not on campus but in his aunt’s home nearby, where he helps raise his siblings, who were essentially abandoned by their mother. He has two children of his own (with different mothers). He uses his Pell grant money to help pay the household bills and often skips class because he has to drive a family member somewhere. It’s a lot for a college student to shoulder, but he doesn’t shirk it.

College itself, however, is a different story. As an incoming freshman, Cathey could barely read, and academics remain a chore. His papers — a handful of which are posted on the Chronicle’s Web site — seem more like the work of a seventh grader than a college student. Among the courses he has failed are Family Communication and Yoga. His major is called “interdisciplinary studies.” As the article ends, the athletic department’s academic advisers are desperately trying to get him to go to class so he can graduate.

So while the article, written by Brad Wolverton, causes one to root for Cathey, who is a largely sympathetic figure, it also, inevitably, raises the question: How in the world did he get into college? But, of course, we know the answer to that. He is in college because, as one of his former coaches puts it, “He had all the tools you could ask for.” Football tools, that is. …

UC Santa Cruz prof on the trap of minority studies.

When Naomi Schaefer Riley was fired by the Chronicle of Higher Education for her trenchant remarks on Black Studies programs, most of those who criticized the firing saw in it a display of the campus left’s intolerance. Fair enough, but this episode also has a much broader meaning.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large populations of poor immigrants arrived in the U.S.–Irish, Italians, and Jews from Russia and Poland. Their extreme poverty placed them at the bottom of the social ladder, and they were often treated with contempt. Yet just a few generations later they were assimilated, and their rapid upward social mobility had produced mayors, senators, judges, and even Presidents from among their ranks. None of this could have happened without first-rate public education.

To be sure, they worked hard to get ahead, but they were not obstructed by something that afflicts the have-nots of today: as they walked through the school gates they were not met by people intent on luring them into Irish or Italian Studies programs whose purpose was to keep them in a state of permanent resentment over past wrongs at the hands of either Europeans or establishment America. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn writes on the president whose name soon will be the punch line for a thousand jokes. 

Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee a few days ago – that’s 60 years on the throne. Just to put it in perspective, she’s been queen since Harry S. Truman was president. At any rate, her jubilee has been a huge success, save for a few churlish republicans in various corners of Her Majesty’s realms from London to Toronto to Sydney pointing out how absurd it is for grown citizens to be fawning over a distant head of state who lives in a fabulous, glittering cocoon entirely disconnected from ordinary life.

Which brings us to President Obama.

Last week, the republic’s citizen-president passed among his fellow Americans. Where? Cleveland? Dubuque? Presque Isle, Maine? No, Beverly Hills. These days, it’s pretty much always Beverly Hills or Manhattan, because that’s where the money is. That’s the Green Zone, and you losers are outside it. Appearing at an Obama fundraiser at the home of “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy and his fiancé David Miller, the president, reasonably enough, had difficulty distinguishing one A-list Hollywood summit from another. “I just came from a wonderful event over at the Wilshire or the Hilton – I’m not sure which,” said Obama, “because you go through the kitchens of all these places, and so you never are quite sure where you are.”

Ah, the burdens of stardom. …

Neal Boortz analyzes Clinton’s apology.

For the past 18 hours or so I’ve been watching various pundits try to analyze Bill Clinton’s so-called “apology” to Barack Obama?  Apology for what?  Apology for suggesting that now, while we’re in a recession and trying to find the key to growing our economy, might not be a good time to raise taxes on the rich.  So naturally the Obama people contacted the Clinton people to ask them just what in the hell they’re trying to do?  Obama’s one constant theme since he was sworn in is that the rich – the people who pay the bulk of the income taxes in this country – need to pay more because, after all, they have money they don’t “need.”  Obama even went so far at one point as to say that he didn’t want to live in a country that would “allow him” to keep this money that he has earned that he didn’t really need.  And then along comes Clinton to say that now would be a bad time to raise taxes on these people? 

So yesterday, Clinton apologizes. …

Ed Morrissey posts on Lanny Davis’ remarks about the “vicious people” working for the president.

Via BuzzFeed and Matt Lewis, here’s the latest in blue-on-blue political warfare from Lanny Davis, literally one of Bill Clinton’s most ardent defenders.  Davis presented the defense during Clinton’s impeachment trial and has been loyal to both Clinton and the Democrats for decades.  At some point this week, those loyalties ceased to be redundant as the Obama team humiliated the former President and even had Clinton’s own team insinuating that he might be a little too old to be taken seriously any longer — at age 65.  An Obama administration official told the New York Post that Newark Mayor Cory Booker was “dead to us” despite humbling himself in what was widely panned as a “hostage video” after contradicting the Obama campaign’s Bain Capital-”vampire capitalist” strategy.

Speaking yesterday on “America’s Radio News Network,” Davis blasted Obama’s teams in the administration and the campaign, and wondered where they’d find any friends after this week:

“You have vicious people who are working for the president …”

Thomas Sowell on the real war against women.

Among the people who are disappointed with President Obama, none has more reason to be disappointed than those who thought he was going to be “a uniter, rather than a divider” and that he would “bring us all together.”

It was a noble hope, but one with no factual foundation. Barack Obama had been a divider all his adult life, especially as a community organizer, and he had repeatedly sought out and allied himself with other dividers, the most blatant of whom was the man whose church he attend for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

Now, with his presidency on the line and the polls looking dicey, President Obama’s re-election campaign has become more openly divisive than ever.

He has embraced the strident “Occupy Wall Street” movement, with its ridiculous claim of representing the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Obama’s Department of Justice has been spreading the hysteria that states requiring photo identification for voting are trying to keep minorities from voting, and using the prevention of voter fraud as a pretext.

But anyone who doubts the existence of voter fraud should read John Fund’s book “Stealing Elections” or J. Christian Adams’s book, “Injustice,” which deals specifically with the Obama Justice Department’s overlooking voter fraud when those involved are black Democrats. …

Investors.com on what caused the slow recovery.

Whenever the subject of the weak economic recovery under President Obama comes up, his defenders tend to respond along the lines of: “What do you expect, since the recession was the worst since the Great Depression?”

It’s an argument the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers made last week, after the U.S. created just 69,000 jobs in May, and unemployment remained stuck above 8% for the 40th month in a row.

“There is much more work that remains to be done to repair the damage caused by the financial crisis and deep recession,” wrote Alan Krueger.

Obama himself has used this excuse. “From the moment we first took action to prevent another Great Depression, we knew the road to recovery would not be easy; we knew it would take time,” he said last week.

But the history of economic cycles suggests that the exact opposite should have happened.

“Typically following a recession, the economy rebounds strongly,” Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker noted in the bank’s quarterly journal.

What’s more, deeper recessions tend to produce strong recoveries.

“You can’t find a single deep recession that has been followed by a moderate recovery,” Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital, said back in August 2009.

David Harsanyi makes a point about the headlines claiming Walker “survived” the recall election.

The Wisconsin “survival” election:

Scott Walker – 53 percent

Tom Barrett – 46 percent

The 2008 audacious Barack Obama presidential election – AKA: “historic blowout victory,”  ”a national catharsis,” “landslide,” etc…

Barack Obama – 53 percent

John McCain – 46 percent

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer knows the real reason the unions fought so hard against Walker’s reforms.

… The real threat behind all this, however, was that the new law ended automatic government collection of union dues. That was the unexpressed and politically inexpressible issue. That was the reason the unions finally decided to gamble on a high-risk recall.

Without the thumb of the state tilting the scale by coerced collection, union membership became truly voluntary. Result? Newly freed members rushed for the exits. In less than one year, ­AFSCME, the second-largest public-sector union in Wisconsin, has lost more than 50 percent of its membership.

It was predictable. In Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) instituted by executive order a similar reform seven years ago, government-worker unions have since lost 91 percent of their dues-paying membership. In Wisconsin, Democratic and union bosses (a redundancy) understood what was at stake if Walker prevailed: not benefits, not “rights,” but the very existence of the unions.

So they fought and they lost. Repeatedly. Tuesday was their third and last shot at reversing Walker’s reforms. In April 2011, they ran a candidate for chief justice of the state Supreme Court who was widely expected to strike down the law. She lost.

In July and August 2011, they ran recall elections of state senators, needing three to reclaim Democratic — i.e., union — control. They failed. (The likely flipping of one Senate seat to the Democrats on June 5 is insignificant. The Senate is not in session and won’t be until after yet another round of elections in November.)

And then, Tuesday, their Waterloo. Walker defeated their gubernatorial candidate by a wider margin than he had — pre-reform — two years ago.

The unions’ defeat marks a historical inflection point. They set out to make an example of Walker. He succeeded in making an example of them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism. …

And Peggy Noonan has a stunningly good column on the meaning of Wisconsin.

What happened in Wisconsin signals a shift in political mood and assumption. Public employee unions were beaten back and defeated in a state with a long progressive tradition. The unions and their allies put everything they had into “one of their most aggressive grass-roots campaigns ever,” as the Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey and Dan Balz reported in a day-after piece. Fifty thousand volunteers made phone calls and knocked on 1.4 million doors to get out the vote against Gov. Scott Walker. Mr. Walker’s supporters, less deeply organized on the ground, had a considerable advantage in money. …

… Mr. Walker was not crushed. He was buoyed, winning by a solid seven points in a high-turnout race. …

… President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is.

There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration. …

… And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour’s house. He’s busy. He’s running for president.

But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be. …

Michael Barone drills into the Wisconsin numbers.

Here are some observations from the election results in the Wisconsin recall race. For the results I’ve used the convenient interactive maps provided by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Huffington Post. When you look at the map, you notice that Democrat Tom Barrett won only in a relatively few counties, 12 of 72. He was reduced to the Democratic base: Madison and a few surrounding counties, the central city of Milwaukee but definitely not the suburbs, a few old factory towns like LaCrosse and Stevens Point, three counties up on Lake Superior near Duluth, Minnesota, and the Menominee Indian Reservation. Everything else went for Scott Walker.

Turnout in this election was really high: 2,507,269, compared to 2,160,832 in November 2010 and closer to the 2,984,417 in November 2008. Much has been made of the exit poll finding that union members were one-third of the total, up from 2010, but we see evidence of this in county returns as well. Turnout was up 16% statewide, but it was up 20% in Kenosha County and in Douglas County (Superior) which have had lots of blue collar voters. Walker’s percentage as compared to 2010 declined 6.2% in Douglas County, more than in any other county in the state, and Kenosha County was one of the few counties Walker carried in 2010 but lost in 2012. Turnout was up 16% in Milwaukee County, suggesting that black turnout was fairly robust, and up 15% in Dane County (Madison), the epicenter of anti-Walker forces and up 22% and 25% in adjacent Columbia and Dodge Counties, which were two of the 16 counties where Walker’s percentage fell from 2010 to 2012. One has visions of Madison Occupy-types heading out to canvass in rural areas nearby.  Conclusion: the union and leftish Democrats did a good job of turning out their voters. It was like the 2004 presidential race in Ohio, where the Kerry forces did a great job turning out voters in central cities, but were still beaten because there was also heavy turnout in small and medium-sized counties of strongly motivated Republican voters. Such was the case in Wisconsin.

Walker’s percentage rose most in small counties in the northwestern quadrant of the state and near Green Bay. These were mostly Barack Obama territory in 2008; the rise in Walker percentage suggests that confrontational tactics hurt Democrats there (as I speculated in a blogpost last night) and they might hurt Obama there as well.

In Friday’s presser, the president said the private sector was “doing fine.” James Pethokoukis begs to differ.

… But is it really? Is the private sector “doing fine?”

1. Private-sector jobs have increased by an average of just 105,000 over the past three months and by just 89,000 a month during the entire Obama Recovery.

In 1983 and 1984, during the supply-side Reagan Boom, private sector jobs increased by an average of 292,000 a month. Adjusted for population, that number is more like 375,000 private-sector jobs a month

2. If the labor force participation rate for May had just stayed where it was in April, the unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%. As it is, the U.S. economy is suffering is longest sustained bout of 8% unemployment or higher since the Great Depression. …

Pethokoukis again posts on the remark later in the day.

… The remark reveals the government-centered nature of Obama’s thinking. He just doesn’t give private enterprise very much thought, particularly when it comes to all the ways government can muck up the free enterprise system. To Obama, the private sector is always “doing fine,” so it really doesn’t matter if the public sector overloads it with too many taxes and too much regulation. The private sector? Oh, you means guys like Bain Capital who like to fire people.

No wonder there’s been so little sense of urgency by the Obama White House to cut the sky-high corporate tax rate or so little consideration given to the impact on small business of letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The private sector is “doing fine,” after all.  Unintended consequences? What are those?

Approve the Keystone pipeline? Why? The environment comes first, especially at a time when the private sector is “doing fine.”

The private sector isn’t just millionaire CEOs of America’s largest companies. It’s also workers (who bear most of the burden of high corporate taxes) and investors and entrepreneurs. …

David Harsanyi tells us why we love Miss USA.

The cartoonists have fun with Wisconsin.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The optimism of the Wisconsin vote needs to make way for a warning from Peter Schiff.

… In recent months as turmoil bubbled across the debt markets of Europe, the United States had beckoned as a safe haven. But in truth, the problems are as bad, if not worse, on this side of the Atlantic. Ironically, America has not had to deal with its day of reckoning because lesser problems surfaced first in Europe.  But when Europe comes to some modest resolution of its problems, or when bond investors realize they have jumped from the frying pan into the fire, there will be no hiding from the unresolved problems here. 

As the intoxicating effects of Fed stimulus wear off, the hangover is setting in. To delay the pain, I believe that there can be little doubt that the Fed will unleash its next round of stimulus, in the form of QE3. My guess is the Fed has always known more QE was needed but it has been waiting for the most politically palatable time to announce it. That “stunner” can’t be far off with the data so bad and the elections so near. 

Eventually more people will figure out just how precarious America’s fiscal position truly remains.  That’s when interest rates will finally rise in the U.S. There is no way to justify record low interest rates in this country given our atrocious fiscal position. I believe interest rates here should approach levels comparable to the more indebted European countries. Once it becomes obvious just how many dollars the Fed is prepared to print to stave off recession, people running into treasuries today will likely suffer buyer’s remorse. When they rethink their assumptions, as buyers of the Facebook IPO clearly have, the Fed will then become not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort. Then the Real Crash may finally be upon us.

Now back to the optimism; courtesy of Jennifer Rubin.

I distinctly recall in college reading Jean Francois Revel’s “The Totalitarian Temptation” and thinking, “Well that’s it. The Commies will win — too many dim people in the West.” Communism, however, crumbled in large part because very undim people, including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, were optimists and staunch defenders of freedom.

So when conservatives today argue that we haven’t the fortitude to defeat Islamic terrorists or to put our fiscal house in order, I am not despondent. Quite the contrary, there is great reason to be optimistic. In fact, there are lots of reasons to be. I’ve got my list:

1. With yesterday’s win, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) showed that self-governance, the ability and will to grasp the reins of power from the few and tame our institutions, is possible.

2. It is becoming conventional wisdom, from the center-left to the center-right, that President Obama blew it when he chose to reject the Simpson-Bowles committee’s recommendations. …

Andrew Malcolm asks why Walker won so big?

“Win” is too small a word for what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pulled off Tuesday. So, probably, is victory.

In a referendum on the first half of his first term, the Republican became the first governor in U.S. history to defeat an attempt to oust him from office. The other two recall efforts — against California’s Gray Davis in 2003 and North Dakota’s Lynn Frazier in 1921 –were successful.

Exit polls discovered a significant number of Wisconsin voters bothered by the union-led recall bid for something short of improper conduct. While others were impressed by Walker’s budget surplus and billion dollar in state savings already. And Walker’s national party reputation wasn’t hurt either.

With 99% of the votes counted, Walker received 53% (1,326,658) to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s 46% (1,150,233) and 1% for a third candidate.

But those numbers understate Walker’s success. He took 60 of the state’s 72 counties and beat Barrett by two more points than he did in 2010. Walker’s lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, also defeated a recall bid. …

Josh Kraushaar spots bad news for the prez in yesterday’s results.

President Obama wasn’t on the ballot in Wisconsin, but Gov. Scott Walker’s decisive victory in last night’s gubernatorial recall is a stinging blow to his prospects for a second term.  The re-election was a telltale sign that the conservative base is as energized as ever, that the Democratic GOTV efforts may not be as stellar as advertised, and that the Democratic-leaning “blue wall” Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will be very much in play this November.

Politico catches Clinton once again trashing Obama’s campaign message.

Last week, former President Bill Clinton disavowed a central theme of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Tuesday, he added that a key piece of the White House’s policy agenda doesn’t make much sense to him either.

With friends like this, Obama’s political enemies don’t need to do too much.

In an interview with CNBC that his office was scrambling to clarify Tuesday night, Clinton sided with congressional Republicans over Obama in calling for Congress to temporarily renew the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts — but he also heaped praise on private equity companies like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, pleaded ignorance for his past gaffes and asserted his independence from the Obama campaign message operation.

It was Clinton in full Mr. Hyde mode — in a flashback to the deep and lasting tensions between the Clinton family and the Obama team that still linger from the bitter 2008 primary fight.

The interview was part of a whirlwind television tour Tuesday afternoon, with Clinton spending also granting interviews to NBC, PBS and CBS that followed up on his turn last week on CNN, when he referred to Romney’s business background — which the Obama campaign had spent days tearing apart — as “sterling.” Once again, Clinton was sucking up all the media oxygen and generating dozens of headlines about an intra-party split between the two presidents.

It took Hillary Clinton’s campaign a good part of the 2008 primary season to realize the damage that the former president’s straight talking, can’t-be-muzzled ways could do — after he helped sink his own wife’s chances at the presidency in advance of the South Carolina primary by alienating black voters. It took the Obama campaign only one week to learn the same lesson, as Clinton swung wildly between effective surrogate and major headache.

Talking about the economic crisis in Europe and the persistent economic malaise in the United States, Clinton told CBNC that extending the Bush-era tax cuts across the board was “probably the best thing to do right now.”

Obama has made raising taxes on upper earners a signature part of his reelection pitch — and Republicans were quick to exploit the daylight between the two Democratic presidents. …

WSJ OpEd notes the administration’s hard time at the Court this year.

As the world awaits the Supreme Court’s ruling on ObamaCare, there’s a larger story that the pundits are missing: the court’s rejection of the Obama administration’s increasingly extreme claims on behalf of unlimited federal power.

This term alone, the high court has ruled unanimously against the government on religious liberty, criminal procedure and property rights. When the administration can’t get even a single one of the liberal justices to agree with it in these unrelated areas of the law, that’s a sign there’s something wrong with its constitutional vision.

Let’s take these cases in order:

First, in Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the government sued a church school that fired a teacher for violating one of the church’s religious tenets: threatening to sue over an employment dispute rather than resolving the disagreement internally. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claimed this violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the firing was related to the teacher’s health issues.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in January that punishing a church for failing to retain an unwanted teacher “interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.” Such interference, it concluded, violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. …

Roger Simon compares Elizabeth Warren to another Ms. Warren, the madam in one of Bernard Shaw’s plays; Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

… Warren can be an Indian if she wishes; she can exploit bank foreclosures if she wishes.  Eliot Spitzer can bust hookers while employing them and end up with a television show.  Who knows — Elizabeth may end up with her own reality show now, her own version of “Flip This House” called “Flip This Tepee”?

It’s their profession — modern liberalism. They can be capitalists while the rest of us rot under taxes and government regulation.  Socialism for thee but not for me.

And it pays better than the original Mrs. Warren’s. You can even get tenure at Harvard, no questions asked.  Just check the right identity square.  No one will know.  And if they suspect, they can’t prove anything.  After all, ancestors.com only goes so far.

USA Today OpEd in high dungeon over fake Indian claims.

… For several years, Warren falsely identified herself as a Native American — a designation that raises serious questions about how such a misrepresentation might have advantaged her in obtaining a professorship at the Harvard Law School at a time when it was being attacked for its lack of diversity.

But when Brown attacked her claim, Democrats rallied their defense and Warren responded with a lot of feisty talk.

“If that’s all you’ve got, Scott Brown, I’m ready. And let me be clear. I am not backing down. I didn’t get in this race to fold up the first time I got punched,” Warren said of her GOP opponent’s non-stop efforts to keep this issue before voters.

Brown is a go-along-to-get-along Eastern Republican who kowtows to the GOP’s right wing. His voting record ought to offend most Massachusetts voters, who are liberal. But his right-wing ideological rigidity could prove to be less of an issue for a decisive bloc of voters in the Bay State than Warren’s identity crisis. Her assertion that family tales and the high cheekbones of some relatives led her to believe she had Native American blood coursing through her veins is laughable. That many Democrats, obsessed with unseating Brown, treat what she did as meaningless is lamentable. …