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Peter Wehner has kudos for Obama’s visit to Dover.
… Barack Obama did the right thing in the right way, and he deserves credit for it.
There are three big races in the elections next week. The polls, for all of them, took good turns in the last few days. What will this mean? Jennifer Rubin has ideas.
… If — BIG if — these margins hold, next Tuesday may be an eye-opening vote for the Washington crowd. They have gone blithely on their way, spending and spending and churning this and that plan to take over health care. Meanwhile, the country is fuming. Voters, especially independents, didn’t think that this was what hope-n-change was all about. If Republicans win big next week on messages of fiscal conservatism and opposition to big-government liberalism, maybe the inside-the-Beltway set will wake up. …
Michael Barone saw the first three races and raised one more.
Six days from now the voters of New Jersey and Virginia will elect governors. Voters in the 23rd district of New York and the 10th district of California will elect new members of the House of Representatives to replace incumbents, a Republican and a Democrat, who were appointed to positions in the Obama Defense and State departments.
All four of these constituencies voted for Barack Obama 51 weeks ago. Obama won 57 percent of the vote in New Jersey, 53 percent (his national average) in Virginia, 52 percent in New York 23 and 65 percent in California 10.
Yet all of this territory was once Republican. Suburb-dominated New Jersey voted 56 percent for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Southern-accented Virginia hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. The last time the territory covered by New York 23 elected a Democratic congressman was in 1870. And the incumbent who is being replaced in California 10 won her seat by beating a Republican in 1996.
In other words, the 2009 contests are a reasonably fair test of the strength and durability of the Democratic majority that Obama and his ticketmates assembled in 2008, a majority that was only made possible by gains in hitherto Republican territory. It is also a test of the capacity of Republicans to regain turf they have lost.
Yes, the character of the individual candidates and local issues can make a difference. But the basic issues in these four contests are reasonably congruent with the national issues now being debated in Congress and debated this summer in town halls across the nation. …
Karl Rove’s fourth race was for the PA’s Supreme Court.
… Finally, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, Judge Joan Orie Melvin, is mounting a strong effort against Democrat Jack Panella, despite a $1 million ad blitz targeting her that’s bankrolled by Philadelphia trial lawyers. A GOP victory would indicate trouble for Democrats in a state Mr. Obama carried by 10 points.
A year ago, Democrats crowed that Mr. Obama had reshaped the political landscape to their advantage. Voters have lived under Democratic rule for nine months, and many of them, especially independents, don’t like what they’re seeing.
Tuesday’s election will provide the most tangible evidence so far of how strong a backlash is building—and just how frightened centrist Democrats should be of 2010. For Republicans, it looks as if hope and change are on the way.
German magazine Der Spiegel interviewed Charles Krauthammer.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?
Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it’s not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.
SPIEGEL: Why does it?
Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today’s politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.
SPIEGEL: It hardly makes sense to blame him for losing the Olympic bid in one week, and then for winning the Nobel Prize the next.
Krauthammer: He should have simply said: “This is very nice, I appreciate the gesture, but I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve.” But he is not the kind of man that does that.
SPIEGEL: Should he have turned down the prize?
Krauthammer: He would never turn that down. The presidency is all about him. Just think about the speech he gave in Berlin. There is something so preposterous about a presidential candidate speaking in Berlin. And it was replete with all these universalist clichés, which is basically what he’s been giving us for nine months.
SPIEGEL: Why do Europeans react so positively to him?
Krauthammer: Because Europe, for very understandable reasons, has been chaffing for 60 years under the protection, but also the subtle or not so subtle domination of America. Europeans like to see the big guy cut down to size, it’s a natural reaction. You know, Europe ran the world for 400 or 500 years until the civilizational suicide of the two World Wars. And then America emerged as the world hegemon, with no competition and unchallenged. The irony is America is the only hegemonic power that never sought hegemony, unlike, for example, Napoleonic France. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. Of course Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.
John Stossel columns again on Elinor Ostrom’s Economic Nobel.
… Ostrom made her mark through field studies that show people solving one of the more vexing problems: efficient management of a common-pool resource (CPR), such as a pasture or fishery. With an unowned “commons,” each individual has an incentive to get the most out of it without putting anything back.
If I take fish from a common fishing area, I benefit completely from those fish. But if I make an investment to increase the future number of fish, others benefit, too. So why should I risk making the investment? I’ll wait for others to do it. But everyone else faces the same free-rider incentive. So we end up with a depleted resource and what Garrett Harden called “the tragedy of the commons”.
Except, says Ostrom, we often don’t. There is also an “opportunity of the commons.” While most politicians conclude that, depending on the resource, efficient management requires either privatization or government ownership, Ostrom finds examples of a third way: “self-organizing forms of collective action,” as she put it in an interview a few years ago. Her message is to be wary of government promises.
“Field studies in all parts of the world have found that local groups of resource users, sometimes by themselves and sometimes with the assistance of external actors, have created a wide diversity of institutional arrangements for cooperating with common-pool resources.” …
Ed Morrissey on the latest silliness from global warming freaks.
If people want a glimpse of what the world will be like with global-warming hysterics in charge, Lord Stern of Brentford lets the veil slip in an interview with the Times of London. Stern admits that the upcoming Copenhagen talks would produce a pact on energy usage that would send the cost of meat “soaring.” That suits Stern just fine, because he wants to push the world into vegetarianism anyway: …
… Seven hundred years ago, man farmed and raised cows and pigs on the entire island of Greenland. When they do that again, perhaps I’ll worry about bovine flatulence as a global threat. Until then, I consider creeping elitism from horse’s asses a much more elitist threat than methane from cow’s butts.
It’s hard to overstate how stupid governments are. Some perfect examples are the simple scams in the first time housing tax-credit. WSJ Editors have the story.
… As a “refundable” tax credit, it guarantees the claimants will get cash back even if they paid no taxes. A lack of documentation requirements also makes this program a slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone for scammers. The Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department are pursuing more than 100 criminal investigations related to the credit, and the IRS is reportedly trying to audit almost everyone who claims it this year.
Speaking of the IRS, apparently its own staff couldn’t help but notice this opportunity to snag an easy $8,000. One day after explaining to Congress how many “home-buyers” were climbing aboard this gravy train, Mr. George appeared on Neil Cavuto’s program on the Fox Business Network. Mr. George said his staff has found at least 53 cases of IRS employees filing “illegal or inappropriate” claims for the credit. “In all honesty this is an interim report. I expect that the number would be much larger than that number,” he said.
The program is set to expire at the end of November, so naturally given its record of abuse, Congress is preparing to extend it. Republican Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia is so pleased with the results that he wants to expand the program beyond first-time buyers and double the income limits. …