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Karl Rove looks forward to 2010.

… In a sign Mr. Obama’s victory may have been more personal than partisan or philosophical, Democrats picked up just 10 state senate seats (out of 1,971) and 94 state house seats (out of 5,411). By comparison, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, Republicans picked up 112 state senate seats (out of 1,981) and 190 state house seats (out of 5,501).

In the states this year, five chambers shifted from Republican to Democrats, while four shifted from either tied or Democratic control to Republican control. In the South, Mr. Obama had “reverse coattails.” Republicans gained legislative seats across the region. In Tennessee both the house and senate now have GOP majorities for the first time since the Civil War.

This matters because the 2010 Census could allocate as many as four additional congressional districts to Texas, two each to Arizona and Florida, and one district to each of a number of (mostly) red-leaning states, while subtracting seats from (mostly) blue-leaning states like Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and, for the first time, California. Redistricting and reapportionment could help tilt the playing field back to the GOP in Congress and the race for the White House by moving seven House seats (and electoral votes) from mostly blue to mostly red states. …

David Harsanyi on coming out of the GOP coma.

The Republican National Committee recently launched a website to give “users the opportunity to discuss their reasons for being a member of the Grand Old Party and what being a Republican means to them.”

It means having their butts kicked — big time. The rest, I assure you, is a profound mystery.

So the battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party is on. Then again, many Democrats probably contest the notion that Republicans own a heart or a soul. On the latter, they may have a point.

The prominent conservative columnist David Brooks recently declared the coming Republican war would pit traditionalists (conservatives who believe Republicans have strayed too far from Reaganism) against reformers, who, he argues, want to modernize, moderate and expand the party.

Traditionalists vs. reformers. If only it were that clinical.

For the past eight years, we have had a Republican Party that was neither excessively conservative nor too moderate, but a party that employed no principles to speak of — unless securing power for power’s sake is now a creed. …

Ann Coulter notes the NY Times had a bigger decline than the GOP.

For the first time in 32 years, Democrats got more than 50 percent of the country to vote for their candidate in a national election, and now they want to lecture the Republican Party on how to win elections. Liberal Republicans have joined them, both groups hoping no one will notice that we just lost this election by running the candidate they chose for us.

For years, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing mash notes to John McCain. In November 2007, he quoted an allegedly “smart-alecky” political consultant who exclaimed, in private, “You know, there’s really only one great man running for president this year, and that’s McCain.”

“My friend’s remark,” Brooks somberly intoned, “had the added weight of truth.”

Brooks gushed, “I can tell you there is nobody in politics remotely like him,” and even threw down the gauntlet, saying: “You will never persuade me that he is not among the finest of men.”

That took guts at the Times, where McCain is constantly praised by the op-ed columnists and was endorsed by the paper in the Republican primary. Even Frank Rich has hailed McCain as the “most experienced and principled” of the Republicans and said no one in either party “has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator” — the biggest rave issued by Rich since “Rent” opened on Broadway.

They adored McCain at the Times! Does anyone here not see a cluster of bright red flags?

In January this year, Brooks boasted of McCain’s ability to attract “independents.”

And then Election Day arrived, and all the liberals who had spent years praising McCain all voted for Obama. Independents voted for Palin or voted against Obama. No one outside of McCain’s immediate family was specifically voting for McCain.

But now Brooks presumes to lecture Republicans about what to do next time. How about: “Don’t take David Brooks’ advice”? …

Speaking of the NY Times, they report on the Palin/Africa hoax that fooled FOX and MSNBC.

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say? ..

Walter Williams on the Obama win.

Despite the fact that President-elect Barack Obama’s vision for our nation leaves a lot to be desired, the fact that he was elected represents a remarkable national achievement. When the War of 1861 ended, neither a former slave nor slave owner would have believed it possible for a black to be elected president in a mere century and a half, if ever. I’m sure that my grandparents, born in the 1880s, or my parents, born in the 1910s, would not have believed it possible for a black to be president and neither did I for most of my 72 years.

That’s not the only progress. If one totaled black earnings, and consider blacks a separate nation, he would have found that in 2005 black Americans earned $644 billion, making them the world’s 16th richest nation. That’s just behind Australia but ahead of Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Black Americans have been chief executives of some of the world’s largest and richest cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Gen. Colin Powell, appointed Joint Chief of Staff in October 1989, headed the world’s mightiest military and later became U.S. Secretary of State, and was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, another black. A few black Americans are among the world’s richest people and many are some of the world’s most famous personalities. These gains, over many difficult hurdles, speak well not only of the intestinal fortitude of a people but of a nation in which these gains were possible. They could not have been achieved anywhere else. …

As if we don’t have enough to worry about, Robert Samuelson raises the spector of deflation.

Until recently, the idea that deflation — the decline of most prices — was possible, let alone a potential economic danger, seemed outlandish. If anything, inflation was the threat. Led by rising oil and food prices, it was increasing in most countries. But in the past two months, deflation has suddenly become conceivable, and, though still a long shot, it’s much more menacing than most people realize. The most urgent economic task for Barack Obama and other world leaders is to prevent the long shot from happening.

A mild deflation — like a mild inflation — would be barely noticeable, and even pleasurable. Who doesn’t like lower prices? But beyond a few percentage points, deflation can create economic havoc by forcing debtors to repay loans in more expensive money and causing consumers to postpone purchases. In the Great Depression, deflation reigned. Consumer prices fell about a quarter from 1929 to 1933. Spending collapsed. Supply swamped demand, driving prices down. By 1933, manufacturing output had dropped 39 percent and joblessness had reached 25 percent.

It’s this history that makes deflation terrifying. Obama and his fellow leaders should worry. Since mid-September, economic conditions have deteriorated badly. …

However, Carpe Diem has a point about the media’s unemployment hyperbole.

… So before we make exaggerated comparisons to the 1930s when the unemployment rate peaked at 25.6%, maybe we should more realistically be making comparisons to the more recent double-digit jobless rates of the 1980s and the 7.8% rate in 1992. And we’re not even close to those rates yet. …

John Tierney posts on Michael Crichton’s question.

In memory of Michael Crichton, who died Tuesday, let us consider a question that preocuppied him: How do we separate science from religion in environmentalism? As a spinner of sci-fi horror stories himself, he had a finely honed skepticism for the apocalyptic scenarios presented by environmentalists. In a speech in 2003, he argued that environmentalism was a modern remapping of Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. …

Q and O has details on the cash collapse at the New York Times.

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Camille Paglia is out with her monthly column.

… Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan — nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.

Holman Jenkins on the auto bail-out.

… The media have been terrible in explaining how the homegrown car companies landed in their present fix, when other U.S. manufacturers (Boeing, GE, Caterpillar) manage to survive and thrive in global competition. Critics beat up Detroit for building SUVs and pickups (which earn profits) and scrimping on fuel-sippers (which don’t). They call for management’s head (fine — but irrelevant).

These pre-mortems miss the point. Critics might more justifiably flay the Big Three for failing long ago to seek a showdown with the UAW to break its labor monopoly. In truth, though, politicians have repeatedly intervened to prevent the crisis that would finally settle matters.

The Carter administration rushed in with loan guarantees to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy. The Reagan administration imposed quotas on Japanese imports to prop up GM. Both parties colluded in the fuel-economy loophole that allowed the passenger “truck” boom that kept Detroit’s head above water during the ’90s.

Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi now want to bail out Detroit once more, while mandating that the Big Three build “green” cars. If consumers really wanted green cars, no mandate would be necessary. Washington here is just marching Detroit deeper into an unsustainable business model, requiring ever more interventions in the future.

The Detroit Three will not bounce back until they’re free to buy labor in a competitive marketplace as their rivals do. In the meantime, private money, even in bankruptcy, almost certainly will not be available to refloat GM and colleagues. Nationalization, with or without a Chapter 11 filing, is probably inevitable — but still won’t make them competitive. …

There is much that is silly in Megan McArdle’s panning of a possible auto bail-out, but here and there, a gem.

Why bail out Wall Street and not GM, demand many people.  Why do we care about bankers and not ordinary folks?

I think this misses the point of the financial bailout.  Whether or not it works–and I sure hope it will–I don’t think very many people wanted to bail out the financial industry because we were so moved by the plight of those plucky traders on the mortgage desk.  We bailed them out not because they deserved it–they didn’t–but because if we didn’t, there was a very big risk that they would take us down with them.

This is not generalizeable to other industries.  Money is weird.  Finance is weird.  There is no other industry that is, first, so tightly coupled, and second, severely affects every other industry in the country.  Moreover, there are few other industries that are so vulnerable to panic.  Strategic injections of capital can actually salvage operations that are otherwise sound.

GM’s operations are not otherwise sound.  They have been headed for this moment since 1973.  Conservatives blame legacy costs, and liberals blame management.  They’re both right.  GM’s legacy costs are crazy.  So is the UAW leadership, which, goaded by the retirees, is knowingly driving the company into bankruptcy rather than negotiate sustainable deals. …

John Stossel reminds us of the Road to Serfdom.

It’s exciting that the world is so excited about Barack Obama. I’m excited, too. That he achieved the presidency says something good about America.

But the excitement also frightens me. It reinforces the worst impulse of the media and political class: the assumption that all progress comes from Washington. In a free society, with constitutionally limited government, the president would be a mere executive who sees to it that predictable and understandable laws are enforced. But sadly, the prestige and power of the presidency have grown, and liberty has contracted. That is not something to celebrate.

The infatuated chattering classes now demand “action” on the economy. They use positive words like “bold steps.” The insufferable New York Times suggests the choice is “between a big-bang strategy of pressing aggressively on multiple fronts versus a more pragmatic, step-by-step approach …. ” There is endless talk about how FDR ended the Great Depression and how Obama will apply similar “stimulus.”

Please. FDR’s “bold” moves didn’t end the Depression. They prolonged it by discouraging capital investment. Hoover and Roosevelt turned what might have been a brief downturn into 10 years of double-digit unemployment.

Now Obama says, “we don’t have a moment to lose,” and he and the Democrats insist that government must unionize most of America by passing “card check” and taxpayers must throw even more money at American automakers.

This is the conceit of what Thomas Sowell calls “the anointed”. The politicians know best how our money should be spent. The “road to serfdom” is paved with such good intentions. …

Famous hunter announces open of RINO season. Ted Nugent in Human Events.

Like any entity that abandons basic quality control, political parties rot from within. It happened to the Democrats long ago, and now has become the case with the Republican Party, which has strayed from its conservative underpinnings.

There are really only four things I have a strong aversion to: unloaded guns, dull knives, banjos, and Republicans in Name Only (RINOs).

The Nugent family simply doesn’t allow any of those things in our lives.

RINOs are Fedzilla punks who feign support for conservative principles only when it serves their political interest. RINOs are also known for their moderate positions such as supporting tax increases, federal “bailouts”, “comprehensive immigration reform”, advocating more counterproductive gun control that guarantee more innocent victims, opposing the death penalty, and growing and sustaining Fedzilla and all its toxic mongrels by going along with the liberals. RINOs have forgotten President Ronald Maximus Regan’s admonition that government is the problem, not the solution. …

Michael Crichton’s legacy from the Weekly Standard.

Bestselling author and TV producer Michael Crichton, who died of cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, had an ambivalent view of science but an unfailingly benevolent attitude toward humanity. His writings are particularly important for having brought an intelligent, nuanced view on science to a popular culture much more inclined toward ignorance and political shibboleths in its treatment of scientific issues.

Known for his hugely popular thriller novels dealing with scientific subjects and for his TV series ER, Crichton, an M.D., infused his works with a powerful sense of scientific investigation as an adventure and the world as a place of real wonders.

In Crichton’s world, knowledge is always a good thing, but what people do with it is often foolish and enormously destructive, perhaps most famously in Jurassic Park, where a scheme to recreate dinosaurs for entertainment goes horribly awry. …

Short history of the bagel from Slate.

When my family first moved to Larchmont, N.Y., in 1946, my father had a feeling that the neighbors living behind us were Jewish. In those days, you didn’t broadcast your religion, so he devised a plan that would reveal their cultural background. We would go to the Bronx and bring back some bagels. If our neighbors knew what the rolls were, they were Jewish. If they stared at them in bewilderment, we would know they were not. To my father’s delight, as soon as our neighbors saw the bagels, they recognized them. Nowadays, dad’s devious plan to determine a neighbor’s religion wouldn’t work. After all, who doesn’t know what a bagel is? But what are the origins of this once-mysterious bread, and what happened between 1946 and today that turned the bagel into a trans-cultural and all-American breakfast bun? …

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Cafe Hayek divides our country into two groups.

And Independent.Org says one of the groups knows the truth of Twain’s dictum; “ It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Driving yesterday past the gasoline station where I usually buy fuel, I noticed that the price of the lowest grade of unleaded–the one I buy–was down to $2.09 per gallon. Registering this perception as a little piece of good news in an unhappy world, I drove on.

Later, however, I began to mull over the altogether unsurprising fact that, to my knowledge, Congress has held no televised hearings to look into the tremendous fall in fuel prices since last summer, when I paid more than $4.00 per gallon for a while. Oil company executives have not been summoned to Washington so that they can be applauded for sloughing off the greed that (allegedly) impelled them to charge so much for their products in June and July. No member of Congress has apologized for calling the businessmen there last spring to berate and threaten them while angrily mouthing sentiments that can only be described as idiotic.

These congressional show trials, which are held whenever gasoline prices rise substantially, always adhere to a tight protocol and a traditional script for each of the actors. …

Particularly timely WSJ Op-Ed from the Abby and Steve Thernstrom on the need for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act.

… In fact, racially gerrymandered districts are an impediment to political integration at all levels of government. Herding African-Americans into “max-black” districts forces black candidates to run in heavily gerrymandered districts. The candidates who emerge from those districts are, unsurprisingly, typically not the most well-positioned to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.

Black candidates can win in multi-ethnic and even majority-white districts with color-blind voting. Mr. Obama should make it a priority to give more aspiring black politicians the opportunity to stand before white (and Latino and Asian and other ethnic) voters. He won, so can they.

American voters have turned a racial corner. The law should follow in their footsteps.

Froma Harrop says “card check” is one campaign promise Obama should break.

The first campaign promise Barack Obama should break is to push through the Employee Free Choice Act. That harmless sounding piece of legislation would let union organizers do an end run around secret-ballot elections: Companies would have to recognize a union if most workers signed cards in support of it.

We’re not children here. We know how those majorities can be reached. There’s repeated harassment, bullying and more inventive tactics, such as getting workers drunk, then sliding sign-up cards under their noses. Meanwhile, any strong-armed tactics by employers can be dealt with.

Unclear is why unions even want to go there. Their decline is one reason for the falling fortunes of American workers, particularly those without college educations. Unions have an interesting product to sell. Surely, they can persuade workers to support them in the privacy of a voting booth. That’s how Obama and the enhanced Democratic majority in Congress got where they are.

Former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, a pro-labor liberal, has come out against the so-called card-check provision. He calls it “disturbing and undemocratic.” …

Peter Hitchens on waving goodbye to the “our last best hope on earth.”

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find. …

WSJ editors ask if Barack and the Dems are going to pay off Michigan unions bailing out Detroit.

… Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid met last week with company and union officials, and they later sent a letter urging Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to bestow cash from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp) on the companies. Barack Obama implied at his Friday press conference that he too favors some kind of taxpayer rescue of Detroit, though no doubt he’d like to have President Bush’s signature on the check so he won’t have to take full political responsibility.

We hope Messrs. Bush and Paulson just say no. The Tarp was intended to save the financial system from collapse, not to be a honey pot for any industry running short of cash. The financial panic has hit Detroit hard, but its problems go back decades and are far deeper than reduced access to credit among car buyers. As a political matter, the Bush Administration is also long past the point where it might get any credit for helping Detroit. But it will earn the scorn of taxpayers if it refuses to set some limits on access to the Tarp. If Democrats want to change the rules next year, let them do it on their own political dime. …

And they note Henry Waxman is leading the Dems “night of the long knives” as they purge their ranks.

The champagne is barely off the ice and Democrats are already celebrating their new majorities by punishing a few heretical colleagues. In almost every sense, John Dingell and Joe Lieberman are loyal Democrats. But Mr. Dingell is holding down the party’s right flank on energy, and Mr. Lieberman in foreign affairs. Now they’re targets, and the retribution speaks volumes about the direction of liberal politics.

California Democrat Henry Waxman kicked things off the morning after Barack Obama’s victory, with an announcement that he will seek the chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. The post is currently held by Mr. Dingell, the bulldog Michigander who next year will become the longest-serving Member in U.S. history. In Congressional physics, seniority is gravity, which alone makes Mr. Waxman’s challenge extraordinary. …

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals.

… During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model— all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear— that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine— about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust. …

Environmental Graffiti posts on Russia’s 1908 Tunguska event.

… Dubbed the Tunguska Event, or Tunguska Explosion, because of the location of the blast in the Tunguska Valley of Russia, the event would have registered a devastating 5.0 on the Richter Scale, had it been invented at the time. And had it occurred about five hours later in the day, the Earth’s rotation would have guaranteed that instead of killing 1,000 reindeer, the blazing object would have completely wiped out St Petersburg. …

Dilbert finds the recession’s bright side.

… As painful as this recession is likely to become, everyone agrees that sometimes you have to shake the rug to get all the crap out of it. Economies don’t grow in straight lines.

It’s expensive to travel anywhere, but on the other hand, the new season of 24 is almost here. I don’t need to go to faraway places and meet people when I can sit on my couch and watch Jack Bauer shoot those people.

I remember driving home in 1989 and thinking I had a flat tire because the car went all wobbly. I pulled over and discovered that my tires were fine; the earth was moving. It was the Loma Prieta Earthquake, and I soon discovered my apartment in shambles. But a funny thing happened. All of my neighbors were outside, stunned. We talked. We shared stories. We bonded. It was a strangely good time. And I felt connected to people at a deeper level than ever before. Shared disaster does that. …

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According to Scott Rasmussen, a noted pollster, Reaganism is not dead.

Barack Obama won the White House by campaigning against an unpopular incumbent in a time of economic anxiety and lingering foreign policy concerns. He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the presidential debates.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan. His victory confirmed that voters still embrace the guiding beliefs of the Reagan era.

During Reagan’s campaign, the nation suffered from high unemployment and high inflation. This time around, data from the Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll showed that Mr. Obama took command of the race during the 10 days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers — when the Wall Street meltdown hit Main Street. Before that event John McCain was leading nationally by three percentage points. Ten days later Mr. Obama was up by five and never relinquished his lead. …

David Warren says soon Obama’s mettle will be tested.

America elected her demagogue Tuesday, after a fine rhetorical show before massed crowds, in which the candidate showed great discipline in avoiding substantial commitments, and simply painted the air with exhilarating, meaningless phrases. After successive chameleon changes in political colouration, and the successful moulting of his various radical associations, “O-ba-ma!” ended the campaign posing as a centrist — with a thick wad of reassuringly conventional Democrat policies, and one of the oldest of the old-style politicians as his running mate.

The election was no blow-out, and the result showed the same alignments across the U.S. electoral map as in the last several elections, with just a couple points seasonal swing to the left; but still sufficient balance to allow a swing back at the next electoral juncture.

Nor did it vindicate the international media declaration that, “America has moved beyond race.” If you look at the exit polls, the people who said they had voted on the basis of race, or that race was a major factor in their decision, were overwhelmingly voting for Obama. And if you add them up, they correspond approximately to his victory margins, not only nationally but in each swing state. In that sense, one could plausibly argue it was the most racist election in U.S. history. Moreover, it was an election in which 97 per cent of black voters voted for the visibly black candidate. Puh-lease don’t tell me America has moved beyond race. …

Speaking of Obama, John Derbyshire posts at the Corner.

… The sputtering-Left component of my email bag took particular exception to my calling Obama “shallow, ignorant, and self-obsessed.” How dare I? Well, let’s unpack it.

Shallow: Have you ever heard Obama say anything interesting? Me neither. I saw him on the telly the other day fielding a question about illegal immigrants. He said something like: “We can’t deport ten million people. We need to find a way to bring them out of the shadows. Thet should have to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for citizenship.” Now, here is an issue that’s of major concern to millions of Americans, who feel they are losing the nation they grew up in. It’s been argued for years at high levels of discourse, with many fine books written. (Most recently, one by our own Mark Krikorian.) Yet Obama can address it only with the tiredest, most threadbare clichés of the open-borders Left. It’s plain he has never given a moment’s real thought to the issue. Shallow.

Ignorant: Obama strikes me as a very intelligent person, but with that intelligence narrowly focused. He has spent his adult life among the tiny sub-class of black Americans who have grown wealthy, or hope to, via the affirmative-action rackets. He has never ventured outside that milieu, and I seriously doubt he knows much about life outside it. I doubt, for example, that he knows anything much at all about business, the military, science, work (other than paper-shuffling), or high culture. I’ll be glad to be proved wrong, but nothing I’ve heard him say, nor my (admittedly incomplete) acquaintance with what he’s written, refutes that.

Self-obsessed: A guy who publishes a 464-page autobiography at age 34 is self-obsessed, what can I tell ya? If he publishes a second autobiography at age 45, you can print “self-obsessed” in capital letters. (Yeah, I know, it’s a “campaign book.” The content is mainly autobiographical, though.) …

In a Sun-Times column dated five years ago, Mark Steyn tells us what it was really like the last time the media worshipped a president. And, he reminds us of the courage of George Bush.

… History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November 1963:

8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men. They’re tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for inspection by the army’s commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and chief adviser.

Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned. When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had gone wrong. I use “gone wrong” in the debased sense in which a drug deal that turns into a double murder is said to have “gone wrong.”

Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about his part in the murder of an ally, he didn’t feel bad for long: Within three weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events leading to the slaying of another head of state. The noble ideals of Camelot did not extend to the State Department or the CIA. …

Noemie Emery says we should watch and wait.

Refusing to take Ronald Reagan’s famous advice–don’t just do something, stand there–conservative machers are all in a swivet, reading the leaves of the 2008 verdict, plotting to pick off this or that set of voters, opining on what it all means. Actually, just standing there seems like a pretty good option, at least for the moment, and perhaps for the next few weeks and months. Plans made right now may turn out to be useless. There are too many things we don’t know.

We don’t know yet what happened on Tuesday, and what kind of win it will be: a pivotal one, like 1932 and 1980; or a transient success–1964, 1976, 1988, 2004–that at the moment appeared monumental, but four years later had turned out not to be. How much of the glow now surrounding the Democrats is due to themselves, and how much to the nature of Barack Obama, who has a personality that comes along twice in a century, and how long will this last? Which Obama will turn up to govern, the man of moderate temperament, or the functional liberal, whose record is way left of center? …

Michael Barone thinks Obama’s win was not a win for a left turn.

… Do Obama and the Democrats have a mandate? Obama got a larger percentage than any other Democrat since 1964, and Democrats have congressional majorities comparable to those in Bill Clinton’s first two years. But their policies of protectionism and greater taxes on high earners seem ill-suited to a country facing a recession (see Hoover, Herbert). The public fisc does not appear to be overflowing enough to finance refundable tax credits, government health insurance or universal pre-kindergarten.

The half of the electorate that doesn’t remember the 1970s may be more open to big government than those of us who do. But “open to” does not equal “demand.” The decisive shift of public opinion came when the financial crisis hit. McCain approached it like a fighter pilot, denouncing Wall Street, suspending his campaign, threatening to skip the first debate. Obama approached it like a law professor, cool and detached. Voters preferred law professor to fighter pilot. This was a triumph of temperament, not policy. …

Couple of shorts from John Fund. First on the strategery of Alaska voters. Second, the accuracy of pollsters this year.

… But the real reason for his (Ted Stevens) survival appears to be tactical voting on the part of the state’s voters. GOP sources tell me word was spread that the only way to keep the seat in the Republican column and prevent a possible 60-seat filibuster-proof Democratic majority was for voters to hold their noses and re-elect Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens himself implied as much in the race’s only debate, held after his conviction. …

Writing in Human Events, Ted Nugent wishes Happy Birthday to the Marines.

From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, all across America and in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever America is being defended,  the world’s most exclusive gun club is the celebrating its 233 birthday today.

Born in a roughneck Philadelphia bar in 1775 on a dare to surpass standard warrior excellence, the United States Marines Corps has distinguished itself over its history as the finest military force the world has ever seen. Do not point the US Marines Corps at anything you do not wish conquer. They are the pointy end of America’s spear. …

Al Dente Blog, (where serious gastronomy meets culinary calamity), posts on a race in CO where Bacon was way ahead of Fries. Which prompted this comment;

Obviously bacon is better. It is naturally bad for you, whereas fries, which are just potatoes, have to be fried to be bad for you.

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Mark Steyn is not convinced we’re a “center-right” country.

… “The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”

Now who does that remind you of?

Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it’s John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It’s hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party’s nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That’s why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: He briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again. …

… Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla., to vote for Obama because “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” …

Michael Gerson on the decency of George Bush.

… I have seen President Bush show more loyalty than he has been given, more generosity than he has received. I have seen his buoyancy under the weight of malice and his forgiveness of faithless friends. Again and again, I have seen the natural tug of his pride swiftly overcome by a deeper decency — a decency that is privately engaging and publicly consequential.

Before the Group of Eight summit in 2005, the White House senior staff overwhelmingly opposed a new initiative to fight malaria in Africa for reasons of cost and ideology — a measure designed to save hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly of children under 5. In the crucial policy meeting, one person supported it: the president of the United States, shutting off debate with a moral certitude that others have criticized. I saw how this moral framework led him to an immediate identification with the dying African child, the Chinese dissident, the Sudanese former slave, the Burmese women’s advocate. It is one reason I will never be cynical about government — or about President Bush.

For some, this image of Bush is so detached from their own conception that it must be rejected. That is, perhaps, understandable. But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W. Bush.

David Harsanyi has expectations.

… Anyway, Obama has promised five million new, high-wage jobs in renewable energy and to stop global warming so we won’t need oil for long. Obama promises more nuclear power, as well — after some polling data assured him we like the sound of it. Obama also has promised that the “central” focus of his new nuclear policy will be “eliminating all nuclear weapons.”

It’s a little unclear if he means our nuclear weapons or the arsenal of (soon enough) Iran, Pakistan and Russia. No worries; Obama has promised to have a face-to-face and give these folks a what-for should anyone misbehave.

So, you see, we’re all here for you, man. Americans and the world. We can’t let you forget your promises. Waiting won’t be easy. It’s difficult to be patient when you sit on the cusp of Utopia.

Please don’t mess with expectations; just bring it on home.

John Fund sees off Michael Crichton.

Michael Crichton, writer of such best-sellers as “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park,” was far more than a great storyteller. His books tackled meaty issues such as medical malpractice, airline safety, biotechnology, sexual discrimination, and global warming.

That last topic produced perhaps his most controversial book, “State of Fear,” a novel that imagined a conspiracy to exaggerate natural disasters in order to keep the developed world on edge and unsettled. A radical environmental charity stands to benefit most from this “state of fear,” and the plot’s protagonist is an idealistic young lawyer named Peter Evans who learns that the cause he has devoted his life to is rotten to the core. …

Crichton tells us how aliens caused global warming.

Townhall column on the election lessons of Michael Crichton.

Celebrated author and veritable Renaissance man Michael Crichton died this week, and upon reflection his passing brings up some interesting thoughts on Barack Obama’s historical election. Allow me to pontificate, if you will.

Crichton and Obama actually have much in common. Crichton was born in Chicago, and also attended Harvard, both for his undergraduate work and for medical school. Crichton was incredibly well-learned, with a vast knowledge base and an exceptional intellectual pedigree, and viewed American universities as important places of cultural exchange. And he too was somewhat politically controversial.

But the similarities end there. Michael Crichton was a noted libertarian. He spoke often and eloquently about the dangers of a speculative and undisciplined media, the pseudo-religious overtones of the left’s environmental fanaticism, and a perceived rejection of scientific evidence by global-warming alarmists.

Interesting post in Volokh by Todd Zywicki on the 2012 Palin prospects.

This is pure speculation, but if I had to guess, I’d predict Sarah Palin will not run for President in 2012. For personal reasons. Let’s face it–a person with 5 kids, including a special-needs child, can take off two months of her life and run for Vice-President. And let’s further face it–Vice-President is not that hard of a job. But taking off two years away from home to trudge around Iowa and New Hampshire? Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would want to do that–I read that Chris Dodd actually enrolled his kids in Iowa schools when he was running for President. That’s pretty weird, if you ask me. You have to be relatively unusual person (ok, “sick” is the word I’m really thinking of) to undertake the project of running for President. …

Zywicki also posts on the CA reactions to the gay marriage referendum. A Mormon temple in Westwood was targeted by hundreds of gays. Some carrying signs saying, “No More Mr. Nice Gay.” How cool was that?

So let me get this right–those who are upset about the passage of Proposition 8 in California have decided that the thing to do is to pick on the Mormons? So one marginalized group decides that the way to go is to vent their outrage against another marginalized group in society? Unbelievable.

Relying on Exit Polls are dicey, of course. But according to the Exit Polls, the decisive difference in Proposition 8′s passage was two reasons. First, 70% of black voters supported it. There were 10,357,002 votes case on Prop 8. The winning margin was 492,830 votes. And they were 10% of the electorate. So that means there were 1,035,700 votes cast by black voters. That right there provided a difference of 414,280 votes. If I’m doing my math right, that is 84% of the winning margin. There was an article in the Washington Post on this today. A majority of Hispanic voters also supported Proposition 8. …

Which brings us to Thomas Sowell on affirmative action and gay marriage.

… Marriage has existed for centuries and, until recent times, it has always meant a union between a man and a woman. Over those centuries, a vast array of laws has grown up, all based on circumstances that arise in unions between a man and a woman.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that law has not been based on logic but on experience. To apply a mountain of laws based specifically on experience with relations between a man and a woman to a different relationship where sex differences are not involved would be like applying the rules of baseball to football.

The argument that current marriage laws “discriminate” against homosexuals confuses discrimination against people with making distinctions among different kinds of behavior.

All laws distinguish among different kinds of behavior. What other purpose does law have?

While people may be treated the same, all their behaviors are not. Laws that forbid bicycles from being ridden on freeways obviously have a different effect on people who have bicycles but no cars.

But this is not discrimination against a person. The cyclist who gets into a car is just as free to drive on the freeway as anybody else. …

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Proud Pickerhead Papa picks #6 child for the lead. Liza, who writes a bimonthly column, is a junior at Virginia Tech. Click on the About section at the site to find her in pic from 1997 Alaska cruise.

Yes, they can. And they did. We Republicans lost big in this presidential election, and now we should respectfully hand over the bragging rights to Democrats, with hopes of snagging them back again in four years. Despite the significant loss McCain and the Republican Party experienced Tuesday, we can argue that under the circumstances it could’ve been a lot worse. And for that reason, we can’t be completely devastated.

From the beginning of this race, the media favored Democratic candidates. Actually, from what seems as the beginning of time, the media has favored Democratic candidates. During the primary season, there were 500 more stories printed in the mainstream press about the three leading Democratic candidates than there were for their Republican counterparts. …

George Bush is defended in a WSJ Op-Ed by a former member of Kerry’s 2004 legal team.

… Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman’s presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years — and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

National Review symposium on where people who love freedom go from here.

Well that wasn’t good news for the Right, last night! National Review Online asked some regulars to address: “What happened to the Republican party Tuesday? Who’s to blame?” …

Jonah Goldberg
When asked if he’d run for office again, Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, responded: “No! The people of New York threw me out of office, and now they must be punished.” The American voters threw out the Republican party, and they were largely right to. At least in the sense that the GOP deserves to be punished. The problem is that the Democrats do not deserve to win. More on that at NRO later — and by later, I mean the next 2 to 8 years.

I think McCain did better than pretty much any other Republican candidate could have. But I think the McCain campaign didn’t do as well as they could have. I think McCain could have won. They blew an amazing number of opportunities. They mishandled Sarah Palin horribly. They were obsessed with unfair media coverage while doing very little to take advantage of it or even do anything serious about it. They inherited an enormous number of problems not of their own making, but they made even more problems for themselves than they needed to.

There will be much more said about this, but in short I think John McCain biggest problem was that the GOP had lost any sense of intellectual or ideological definition and John McCain didn’t bother to offer any definition of his own until helped by Joe the Plumber. And by then it was too little too late. …

Ann Coulter has a point of view.

… This was such an enormous Democratic year that even John Murtha won his congressional seat in Pennsylvania after calling his constituents racists. It turns out they’re not racists — they’re retards. Question: What exactly would one have to say to alienate Pennsylvanians? That Joe Paterno should retire?

Apparently Florida voters didn’t mind Obama’s palling around with Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, either. There must be a whole bunch of retired Pennsylvania Jews down there.

Have you ever noticed that whenever Democrats lose presidential elections, they always blame it on the personal qualities of their candidate? Kerry was a dork, Gore was a stiff, Dukakis was a bloodless android, Mondale was a sad sack.

This blame-the-messenger thesis allows Democrats to conclude that their message was fine — nothing should be changed! The American people are clamoring for higher taxes, big government, a defeatist foreign policy, gay marriage, the whole magilla. It was just this particular candidate’s personality.

Republicans lost this presidential election, and I don’t blame the messenger; I blame the message. How could Republicans go after B. Hussein Obama (as he is now known) on planning to bankrupt the coal companies when McCain supports the exact same cap and trade policies and earnestly believes in global warming?

How could we go after Obama for his illegal alien aunt and for supporting driver’s licenses for illegal aliens when McCain fanatically pushed amnesty along with his good friend Teddy Kennedy? …

Walter Williams discusses the credsis and capitalism.

… First, let’s establish what laissez-faire capitalism is. Broadly defined, it is an economic system based on private ownership and control over of the means of production. Under laissez-faire capitalism, government activity is restricted to the protection of the individual’s rights against fraud, theft and the initiation of physical force.

Professor George Reisman has written a very insightful article on his blog titled “The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Financial Crisis.” You can decide whether we have in an unregulated laissez-faire economy. There are 15 cabinet departments, nine of which control various aspects of the U.S. economy. They are the Departments of: Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Education, Energy, Labor, Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior. In addition, there is the alphabet soup cluster of federal agencies such as: the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA.

Here’s my question to you: Can one be sane and at the same time hold that ours is an unregulated laissez-faire economy? Better yet, tell me what a businessman, or for that matter you, can do that does not involve some kind of government regulation. A businessman must seek government approval for the minutest detail of his operation or face the wrath of some government agency, whether it’s at the federal, state or local level. Just about everything we buy or use has some kind of government dictate involved whether it’s package labeling, how many gallons of water to flush toilets or what pharmaceuticals can be prescribed. You say, “Williams, there’s a reason for this government control.” Yes, there’s a reason for everything but that does not change the fact that there is massive government control over our economy. …

Daily Express, UK on Brit naturalist banned from BBC since he refused to go along with global warming ideas.

FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV. A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm. Yet for more than 10 years he has been out ot the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists. His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change. …

IBD editors say it’s been a bad year for global warming alarmists.

… As the British House of Commons debated a climate-change bill that pledged the United Kingdom to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, London was hit by its first October snow since 1922.

Apparently Mother Nature wasn’t paying attention. The British people, however, are paying attention to reality. A poll found that 60% of them doubt the claims that global warming is both man-made and urgent.

Elsewhere, the Swiss lowlands last month received the most snow for any October since records began. Zurich got 20 centimeters, breaking the record of 14 centimeters set in 1939. Ocala, Fla., experienced its second-lowest October temperature since 1850.

October temperatures fell to record lows in Oregon as well. On Oct. 10, Boise, Idaho, got the earliest snow in its history 1.7 inches. That beat the old record by seven-tenths of an inch and one day on the calendar. …

The Economist reports on promising cancer treatments using nanoparticles.

JOURNALISTS sometimes joke that the ideal headline for a science story would be something like “Black holes cure cancer”. Sadly, it will never happen. “Nanotechnology cures cancer”, though, is a pretty good runner-up, and that might just turn out to be true.

In fact, nanoparticles (ie, objects whose dimensions are measured in nanometres, or billionths of a metre) have been used to treat cancer for some time. But these treatments are mainly clever ways of packaging existing drugs, rather than truly novel therapies. For instance, Doxil, a medicine used to treat ovarian cancer, is wrapped up in naturally occurring fatty bubbles called liposomes. Taxol, a common breast-cancer drug, is similarly packaged with naturally occurring blood proteins in a product called Abraxane. In both, the packaging aids the delivery of the drug and reduces its toxic side-effects.

Now, however, a second generation of nanoparticles has entered clinical trials. Some are so good at hiding their contents away until they are needed that the treatments do not merely reduce side-effects; they actually allow what would otherwise be lethal poisons to be supplied to the tumour and the tumour only. Others do not depend on drugs at all. Instead, they act as beacons for the delivery of doses of energy that destroy cancer cells physically, rather than chemically. …

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Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. It is a testament to the open-minded tolerance of the American people; at least the majority of them.

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the American people had already moved on.

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.

And, this is second time the Dems have given us a president who throws a baseball like a girl. What’s with that?

Many of our favorite blogs have election posts. Jonah Goldberg starts us off with a Corner post.

Look, I expect to be one of the most severe critics of the Obama administration and the Democrats generally in the years ahead (though I sincerely hope I won’t find that necessary). But Obama ran a brilliant race and he should be congratulated for it. Moreover, during the debate over the financial crisis, Obama said that a president should be able to do more than one thing at a time. Well, I think we members of the loyal opposition should be able to make distinctions simultaneously. It is a wonderful thing to have the first African-American president. It is a wonderful thing that in a country where feelings are so intense that power can be transferred so peacefully. …

Lots more from the Corner, Contentions, and the Weekly Standard Blog.

Thomas Sowell reminds us we actually do have a sound economy.

… Official data show that the output of the economy in the most recent quarter is down– by less than one-half of one percent– but at last the media have one of those two quarters required to qualify as a recession.

Whether they will get the other quarter that they need, in order to start using the word “recession” legitimately, is another story. In fact, the data-gathering process is by no means so precise that we can expect the one-half of one percent decline to hold up, since such statistics often get revised later.

It is not just a question of being able to put scare headlines on newspapers or alarmist rhetoric on television. Such things are just the prelude to massive political “change” in fundamentally sound institutions that have for more than two centuries made the American economy the envy of most of the world.

If the left succeeds, it will be like amputating your arm because of a stomach ache. …

John Stossel, using a quote from Walter Williams builds a column around who will “run the country.”

… “Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good,” Williams says.

The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems.

“Most of life is outside the government sector,” says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. “Most change in America doesn’t come from politicians. It comes from people inventing things and creating. The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn’t come from government. Our world is going to get better and better, as long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up.”

It’s easy to find examples of government screwing up what it should have left alone. …

David Harsanyi says we need a principled opposition.

… Barack Obama is now my president. Though I wonder if irascible Democrats who rode around with those snazzy bumper stickers reading “He’s not my president” for the past eight years realize the irony of their call for national harmony.

Let’s hope there’s none.

Winning elections is one thing; governing is quite another. It is impossible to deny that Obama ran one of sharpest, most diligent and exhilarating campaigns in modern American history or, for that matter, that the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has won a resounding mandate to run the country.

That only means we need a robust and principled opposition.

My children are continually lectured by well-meaning adults about the mystifying power culled from our differences, the strength we derive from our disparate upbringing and the power of diversity.

So why, one wonders, does this belief not extend to our politics and ideology? Why do we strive to shed individuality and become herds of devotees and shills? …

Robert Samuelson says good luck on the “tax the rich gig.”

… But the redistributionist argument is at best a half-truth. The larger truth is that much of the income of the rich and well-to-do comes from what they do. If they stop doing it, then the income and wealth vanish. No one gets it. It can’t be redistributed because it doesn’t exist. Everyone’s poorer.

This isn’t just theory. Last week, New York Gov. David Paterson pleaded with Congress to provide emergency aid to states. Heavily dependent on Wall Street for taxes, he testified, New York faces a $12.5 billion budget deficit next year and expects joblessness to rise by 160,000. Wall Street bonuses will drop by 43 percent and capital gains income by 35 percent, he estimated. People in New York would be better off if the securities industry were still booming, even if there were more economic inequality.

Americans legitimately resent Wall Street types who profited from dubious investment strategies that aggravated today’s crisis. And government properly redistributes income to reduce hardship and poverty. But that’s different from attempting to deduce and engineer some optimal distribution of income. Government can’t do that and shouldn’t try. Scapegoating and punishing all of the rich won’t do us any good if the resulting taxes dull investment and risk-taking, discouraging economic growth that benefits everyone.

Politico’s Roger Simon takes a dim view of McCain’s campaign.

As his campaign rattles to an end, John McCain has never been better on the stump. Not a natural orator, McCain finally has found his voice.

“Stand up! Stand up! Stand up and fight!” McCain thundered Monday in Blountville, Tenn. “We never give up! We never quit! We never hide from history; we make history!”

And he will make history Tuesday night. He will enter the history books either as having pulled off one of the greatest upsets in modern political history or for having run one of its worst campaigns.

As of now, he appears to be heading for the latter. Let’s take a look just at some recent examples.

How about that Dick Cheney endorsement Saturday? Wasn’t that a brilliant move with just three days to go in the race? …

The Onion says a black man has been put into the world’s worst job.

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More from Pickings four years ago. This time we have Alexis de Tocqueville reporting on a presidential election 180 years ago

Good advice from The Corner.

Gerard Baker with his take.

Two years. A billion dollars. Sixty million votes cast in the primary alone. An election that started out in a country scorched by the fierce heat of the Iraq war ending in the frigid reality of a once-in-a-generation economic slump. A contest that opened with the promise of the first woman president ending in the apparently inevitable elevation of the first black man to the White House.

There’s a paradoxically anticlimactic feeling about election days. All that effort, all that money expended around the clock for years in an effort to influence what happens on this day ends in a period of almost eerie silence.

The heavy guns of campaign speeches and television advertising are muffled. The news turns briefly to other stories as campaign reporters who have checked in and out of hotels in the early hours every morning for weeks finally get to sleep in. The candidates can do no more than anyone else – simply show up and vote quietly in their designated polling station.

It’s a sacred, almost sacramental rite in a democracy. The citizens line up to exercise their terrifying power while the men who might rule them can only sit and wait. This contrast between the heat of the campaign and the light of election day is always most powerful in America, where the stakes are highest, the contests longest and the expenses greatest.

But there haven’t been many days preceded by more energy and freighted with much greater historic significance than this one. …

Las Vegas Libertarian decides, for the first time ever, to vote GOP.

… I have only one marginally effective way to tell those who have spent the past three months libeling and trashing Sarah Palin — and with her, every “regular American” who owns a gun or goes to church and lives outside their oh-so-correct urban enclaves of Washington, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles — where to shove it. And that’s to vote against the communist sympathizer who would make legally owned self-defense weapons as rare as whooping cranes, and for a true American hero — to vote a Republican presidential ticket for the first time in my life.

By the way, and finally, Barack Obama’s campaign Web site promises he’ll do more to “protect women from violence.”

By championing the cause of allowing any woman to carry a concealed handgun without jumping through a bunch of unconstitutional hoops to get a “permit,” that being the only way to “protect women from violence” that doesn’t involve drawing chalk outlines on the sidewalk?

No?

I didn’t think so.

Charles Krauthammer with part 2 of his McCain pick.

… The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.

Whatever happens, we are all going to learn a lot about the state of the polling art. London Times Commentary.

An old newspaper photograph haunts the dreams of every US pollster. A grinning Harry Truman, having won the 1948 presidential election despite every prediction, is holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune. It reads: “Dewey defeats Truman”.

Could it happen again? Every pollster is predicting a victory for Barack Obama. Might a grinning John McCain be pictured on Wednesday triumphantly holding a pile of incorrect polling data?

There are two things that say that he might.

The first is that American pollsters have not yet experienced what happened here in 1992 – when the polls pointed to a Labour victory but John Major won. The conventional wisdom is that 1992 was great for the Tories but terrible for the pollsters. In the long run, the opposite turned out to be true. Victory in 1992 turned to ashes for the Conservatives, whereas the pollsters used the debacle to get themselves sorted out.

Now British polls are properly and carefully weighted, taking account of what is known as the spiral of silence – the tendency of voters for the less fashionable party to keep their intentions to themselves. British pollsters weight their results to allow for these shy voters. US pollsters do not. …

Anne Applebaum says these people, the detestable political class, will never leave us alone.

Tuesday is Election Day, and, as always, Election Day is fraught with peril. Beware the seductiveness of opinion polls, which can badly mislead. Beware the even greater attraction of exit polls, which have so often been wrong in the past. Beware the too-early commentary, the too-swift rush to judgment. And above all, beware that the hopeful, reassuring clichés that will be passed around in the next couple of days will give false succor to winners and losers alike. …

John Tierney writes on the academic researchers who struggle to explain why conservatives are more humorous than uptight liberals

… “Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.”

Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture. …

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We start with a replay of the lead in November 1, 2004 Pickings.

Pickerhead’s Iron Law of Voting

Pickerhead wants to say if you don’t feel like voting – good for you. The more people who don’t vote, then the freer the country. I know that is counterintuitive, but think about it. If a citizen is not concerned who wins, it means the government is not much of a factor in that voter’s life.

So, the lower the voting percentage, the more freedom in the country. That is Pickerhead’s Iron Law of Voting. The law was, of course, proved by the astronomically high voting percentage in the late communist countries.

And, as Prof. Robert Anderson once said, “Don’t vote. It only encourages the bastards!”

The balance of Pickings today comes from foreign sources. Before current political events, we have a treat; Spengler’s obit for Ronald Reagan from the June 8, 2004 Asia Times. Seems like today we might need some proof that sometimes it goes our way. And reminders that good things happen when we have leaders with the courage to go against the bien pensants of the world.

For his lonely stand against the forces of barbarism, I rate Winston Churchill the greatest statesman of the 20th century. Ronald Reagan, though, arguably was the greater commander in chief. Decisiveness (translating Clausewitz’s term Entschlossenheit) depends in turn upon strategic vision. But a commander requires not only vision, but also the intestinal fortitude to endure uncertainty, and the will to force the burden of uncertainty onto his opponent. Borrowing from the language of economics, one might call this a predilection for creative destruction.

Whatever his other faults, Reagan possessed the great attributes of command. Bush’s war cabinet is of a lesser ilk. Consider their CIA chiefs: the oily George Tenet and the gruff William Casey, who personally planted a listening device in office of a Middle Eastern leader during a courtesy call. Tenet is a flatterer and politician; Casey was a warrior and adventurer.

To a generation that has come of age after the fall of the Soviet Empire, it is hard to imagine that the smart money in Europe wagered on Russian dominance when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. I can attest that the closest advisors of French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt thought NATO would lose the Cold War. So humiliating was the later collapse of the communist regimes that the pundits could argue credibly that it had fallen of its own weight. No such thing happened. Reagan took office at a dark hour for the West, and did things that the elite of Europe had deemed impossible. …

… When Reagan made clear his intention to bury the “evil empire” (as he characterized it before the Commons in 1982), a wave of shock and indignation spread among the Atlantic elite unimaginable to those who where not there at the time. Europe’s disgust at George W Bush is a gentle June shower compared to the tempests of 1982. Whereas Europe thinks that the younger Bush is crude and ideological, it thought Reagan barking mad. …

David Warren cautions against seeking heaven on earth.

… In the religious view, which is sometimes indistinguishable from what we now call the “conservative” view (though with a very small “c”) politics are merely of this world. We must live in this world, and make the best of it, and we may take considerable latitude in arguing about the best that is achievable.

But for the irreligious — the people for whom this world is all there is — politics can easily become everything. The very human instincts that turn towards prayer, towards heaven, towards God, turn easily instead towards human idols, towards the contemplation of a heaven on earth, towards utopian hopes and aspirations — and finally, towards demonizing all those who appear to be getting in the way of “progress.” As they inevitably must: for the definition of the “good” which progress seeks comes into dispute, between those whose futurity is here, or elsewhere.

Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian gives his take on our election.

The politics of the world’s greatest democracy has taken something weird in its Kool-Aid.

How can I say this when both candidates are so attractive and so articulate?

There is your first clue. The quality of a politician is frequently in inverse proportion to their good looks. Give me John Howard’s baldness, Paul Keating’s hatchet face, Kevin Rudd’s Harry Potter tonsure. The greatest US president of all, Abraham Lincoln, proves the point. He once remarked that he could not possibly be two-faced: “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”

This election marks the triumph of celebrity as the essential organising principle of US politics. There were presentiments of this in John F. Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was the critical transitional figure who morphed from a traditional politician into a pure soap opera celebrity, with all the baroque plot twists and personal dysfunction.

George W. Bush was a kind of anti-celebrity and a very flawed politician. But he was an example of the evil twin of celebrity, namely dynasty. US politics is now dominated by celebrities and dynasties. This represents a fantastic regression. There are other countries where celebrities and dynasties dominate: The Philippines, Argentina, much of Latin America. Their politics is authentic in the postmodern sense; they connect with people’s emotions. Movie stars and presidents’ wives and offspring regularly attain the highest office. They are also some of the worst governed nations in the world, certainly compared with the traditional mean in the US. …

Adam Smith.org says Tom Wolfe warned us about community organizers.

… The best description was published by Tom Wolfe in his once famous book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Wolfe depicted inner city community organizers as radical agitators who managed to blackmail city magistrates into expanding social programmes, the proceeds of which often didn’t reach the intended recipients. This later became the blueprint for third world development aid. …

Melanie Phillips, from her Spectator, UK blog.

So, what if The One should actually lose next week? The brainwashed hysteria whipped up on his behalf is, to put it mildly, dangerous. The media proclaims daily that Obama has already won. He cannot lose. He is the Saviour of the Planet. McCain is a mumbling senile idiot. Palin is evil incarnate. The polls show an Obama landslide. So if the world should revolve backwards on its axis next Tuesday and people wake up and find he has lost, then either the election will have been stolen in the way we all know evil Republicans always steal elections – or the American public will be proved to be, as we all know they are, irredeemably racist. Accordingly, we are warned that there would then be riots on the streets.

Those who see a racist in every non-Obama voter are themselves the people for whom Obama’s race is his defining characteristic. They say in terms that his race is the reason we must vote for him. They are the people who, by smearing every conceivable criticism of Obama or revelation of his unsavoury associations as ‘racist’, have emptied the term of its meaning. They are the people who, posing as ‘progressive’, display daily their utter contempt for their fellow human beings who are apparently incapable of voting against Obama on the rational grounds of the disturbing information they have learned about him, because by definition such information is just a load of racist smears. It cannot be true because there cannot be any dissent.

The same media which is whipping up this hysteria has failed to tell people that some polls are telling a different story – that the gap between the candidates is closing. The same media have either failed to tell the American public about Obama’s deeply questionable record, influences, sayings or associations, or the fact that it is the Obama campaign which has tried to steal the vote by delivering more than a million fraudulent voter registrations, or its systematic lies about all of the above, the equivalent of any one of which affronts would have instantly sunk a Republican candidate — or else have trivialised and dismissed them. …

In the Guardian, UK, former editor of the London Times describes how the American media went in the tank for Obama.

… But the press bias towards Obama doesn’t represent a simple revulsion for the Republican party. It was on display in the Democratic primaries with the persecution of Hillary Clinton. Worst of all, in the primaries, the press let the Obama campaign get away with continuous insinuations below the radar that the Clintons were race-baiters. Instead of exposing that absurd defamation for what it was – a nasty smear – the media sedulously propagated it.

Clinton made the historically correct and uncontroversial remark that civil rights legislation came about from a fusion of the dreams of Dr Martin Luther King and the legislative follow-through by President Lyndon Johnson. The New York Times misrepresented that as a disparagement of King, twisting her remarks to imply that “a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change”. This was one of a number of manipulations on race by the Obama campaign, amply documented by the leading Democratic historian, Princeton’s Sean Wilentz. Clinton came close to tears in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which many thought helped her to win an upset victory there. MSNBC television gave a platform to the Chicago congressmen, Jesse Jackson Jr, where he questioned her tears and claimed that she’d not shed any tears for the black victims of Katrina, and that she’d pay for that in the South Carolina primary, where 45% of the electorate would be African-Americans.

In fact, MSNBC ran a non-stop campaign for Obama propelled by the misogyny of its anchors, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and David Shuster. Chelsea Clinton joining Clinton’s campaign prompted Shuster to report she was “pimping” for her mother. …

Samizdata has the story of Barclay’s Bank spurning funds offered by the government.

… If its refusal to eat from the state table annoys BBC journalists – who of course are paid out of a tax – then the bank must have done something very right. One cannot exactly say that of a lot of banks these days.

Samizdata also notes London’s October snowfall.

Which brings us our second David Warren column today as he asks for us to be saved from those who are going to save the earth.

Our last item is a Philippine report on a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe. This is here as a reminder of what it was like when last we had a wise fool for president. Without Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young’s intervention, Mugabe might never have come to power. We are about to elect someone as ignorant as Jimmy.

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Before we get into the frightful political news, how about some pieces of very good news. Gas Buddy.com provides a graph of retail gas prices for the last six months.

We learn from a Bentonville paper about an effort to apply Wal-Mart’s strengths to reducing health care costs.

Pharmacy benefit managers could soon find themselves contending with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to broker prescription drug prices.

The Bentonville-based retailer is already looking to expand a two-month-old pilot with Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar to negotiate drug prices for its 70,000 U.S. employees, retirees, and their spouses and children.

“We are already in discussions with other companies to implement a direct-to-employer initiative,” Christi Gallagher, Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said Wednesday.

It’s an innovative application of the retailer’s core competency of cutting costs in the supply chain while simultaneously expanding its low-cost prescription drug program.

Wal-Mart’s legendary penny-pinching made the retailer an attractive candidate when Caterpillar went looking to weed out inefficiencies in its health care plan, said Todd Bisping, Caterpillar’s pharmacy manager. …

And The LA Times shows us the competitive effect Wal-Mart has had on CVS Pharmacies.

One of the nation’s largest drugstore chains ratcheted up a price war Thursday, offering deep discounts on generic prescriptions amid national concern about the spiraling cost of healthcare.

Drugstore giant CVS Caremark Corp. announced it would sell 90-day supplies of more than 400 medications for $9.99 and offer discounts for cash-paying patients at its in-store medical clinics.

The price war was unleashed by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the country’s largest retailer, a few years ago. Since then, many grocery stores have followed suit.

The price competition makes generic drugs just about the only healthcare bill that isn’t escalating. The lower prices provide a measure of relief to consumers who are struggling with rising health insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses or have lost coverage altogether. …

Mark Steyn says occasionally we get a look at the real Obama.

… The senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed nonrelevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice”. Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around – hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf ‘n’ turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.

The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama’s writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston. …

Some good news. Michael Barone says the Dems won’t get a filibuster proof senate.

If, as seems likely but not quite certain, Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, a key question for public policymaking will be how many Democrats are elected to the Senate. Currently, there are 51 Democrats there, including Joe Lieberman, but Democrats are seriously contesting 11 Republican-held seats, and there is a by-no-means-trivial chance that they could win each one. Meanwhile, Republicans are seriously contesting either zero Democratic-held seats, or only one, that of Mary Landrieu in Louisiana. The only public polls there since July are from Rasmussen, and the latest shows Landrieu ahead of Democrat-turned-Republican John Kennedy by 53 percent to 43 percent. So, Landrieu, a narrow winner in 1996 and 2002, seems headed to a third term.

Two and probably three Republican seats seem certain to be gained by Democrats: Virginia, where Mark Warner is way ahead of his predecessor as governor, Jim Gilmore; New Mexico, where Tom Udall, a reluctant candidate at first, is way ahead of his House colleague Steve Pearce; and Colorado, where Bob Schaffer has not been able to overcome the lead of Mark Udall. I have a lot of respect for Schaffer’s campaign manager (and state Republican chairman) Dick Wadhams, but I don’t see how he pulls this one off. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline gave Schaffer a good issue over the summer, but it has clearly waned in importance. And Colorado, like New Mexico and Virginia, is a Bush ’04 state where Barack Obama has had consistent and often statistical leads in the polls since the financial crisis hit on September 15. …

David Harsanyi on the “redistributionist.”

… You know, once upon a time, the stated purpose of taxation was to fund public needs like schools and roads, assist those who could not help themselves, defend our security and freedom, and, yes, occasionally offer a bailout to sleazy fat cats.

Obama is the first major presidential candidate in memory to assert that taxation’s principal purpose should be redistribution.

The proposition that government should take one group’s lawfully earned profits and hand them to another group — not a collection of destitute or impaired Americans, mind you, but a still-vibrant middle class — is the foundational premise of Obama’s fiscal policy.

It was Joe Biden, not long ago, who said (when he was still permitted to speak in public) that, “We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people.” The only entity that “takes” money from the middle class or any class for that matter, is the Internal Revenue Service. Other than that, there is nothing to give back. …

Thomas Sowell on “ego and mouth.”

After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise– whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team– is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama’s trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges– very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world. …

So, if Obama wins, Stuart Taylor wonders which Obama we’ll get.

… The first Obama has sometimes seemed eager to engineer what he called “redistribution of wealth” in a 2001 radio interview, along with the more conventional protectionism, job preferences, and other liberal Democratic dogmas featured in his campaign. I worry that he might go beyond judiciously regulating our free enterprise system’s all-too-apparent excesses and stifle it under the dead hand of government bureaucracy and lawsuits.

This redistributionist Obama has stayed in the background since he set his sights on the presidency years ago, except when he told Joe the Plumber that his tax plan would help “spread the wealth.” This Obama seems largely invisible to many supporters. But he may retain some attachment to the radical-leftist sensibility in which — as his impressive 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, explains with reflective detachment — he was marinated as a youth and young man. …

… The pragmatic, consensus-building, inspirational Obama who has been on display during the general election campaign is a prodigious listener and learner. He can see all sides of every question. He seems suffused with good judgment. His social conscience has been tempered by recognition that well-intentioned liberal prescriptions can have perverse unintended consequences. His tax and health care proposals are much less radical than Republican critics suggest.

This Obama has surrounded himself not only with liberal advisers but also with mainstream moderates such as Warren Buffett and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. He has won the support of moderate Republicans, including Colin Powell and Susan Eisenhower, and conservatives, including Kenneth Adelman and Charles Fried. …

John Podhoretz gives 10 reasons why McCain might win.