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Jennifer Rubin posts on the Energy Secretary’s defense of Solyndra loans.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s testimony yesterday wasn’t just bad news for him and the Obama administration. It is also an inconvenient reminder for Republican voters that some of the Tea Party-friendly candidates have rotten records when it comes to crony capitalism.
True, Chu’s testimony is most problematic for him and the president. He insisted the Solyndra endeavor was fully scrutinized. He had no idea others were playing politics. This exchange neatly summed up Chu’s cluelessness:
“I don’t see any chain of emails looking out for the taxpayer money,” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., said in a tense exchange with Chu. “I see a whole lot of emails in the administration that are concerned about the politics. That’s what stinks the most about this.”
Chu denied that he asked Solyndra to delay the layoff announcement, prompting committee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., to ask if Chu plans to look into who sent the email.
“You don’t know who in your department was involved with this and you have no idea in finding out?” Stearns asked.
Chu said the Energy Department’s general counsel “will look into who is doing these things.”
Chu is a walking advertisement for the perils of giving government bureaucrats duties for which they are not remotely competent to perform. When he says he acted with the taxpayers’ interests in mind, you get the idea that he might be serious. Apparently this crew thinks that the way to compete globally is to mimic failed command-and-control economies. …
Jennifer also says the Occupy group is getting inconvenient for the Dems.
The Occupy movement has officially become a liability for the Democrats. The New York Post reported: “Thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters clashed with cops [Thursday] across lower Manhattan, starting with a march on the New York Stock Exchange [in the] morning and ending with a crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge that snarled traffic.Cops responded in force, at one point [in the] afternoon sweeping into Zuccotti Park and arresting anyone inside. In total, at least 275 people were busted by cops; five of whom were charged with assault.”
And the New York Times opinion section is .?.?. well .?.?. entirely silent on the subject. Need we know any more about how the Occupy “movement” has become an unwanted bedfellow for the Democrats? …
And Jennifer posts on the $15 Trillion national debt.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is out with a new video explaining the implications of the $15 trillion debt we have now racked up:
Not surprisingly, the Republicans are having a field day with facts and figures to highlight their argument that President Obama has presided over a fiscal train wreck. Don Stewart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s communications director, sent out a handy guide to the debt history:
$8.67 trillion: Democrats take control of Congress, January 2007
$10.62 trillion: President Obama’s Inaugural, January 20, 2009
$10.789 trillion: Stimulus bill signed into law, February 17, 2009
$12.351 trillion: President’s weekly address on the merits of “pay as you go,” February 13, 2010
$14.305 trillion: President’s weekly address where he said “I believe we can live within our means,” April 16, 2011 …
One more from Ms. Rubin as she introduces the subject for the balance of Pickings today – Newt Gingrich. She says he has a lot to do to rehabilitate himself.
Newt Gingrich is experiencing his first real scrutiny of the 2012 presidential primary. Jonathan Martin and John Harris observe, “Even allies say there is simply no way Gingrich can defend all the controversies of his past — there are simply too many of them. His task is to transcend them by seeking to set his past against a context of personal growth.”
That would work better, or course, if in his years after his speakership he hadn’t gorged at the trough of special-interest groups. That is why the Freddie Mac controversy is so difficult for him. As the Politico duo note: “Faced with more Freddie Mac questions on a campaign trip to Iowa Wednesday, Gingrich wouldn’t say whether the report was accurate that he got paid at least $1.6 million and, despite his previous claims, did not warn the organization about the looming housing bubble.” If he doesn’t have his story down yet on the first issue to confront him, it’ll be tough sledding.
And we’ve only begun to see the extent of Gingrich’s self-enrichment. …
In regards to Newt Gingrich, Toby Harnden asks if Americans want another know-it-all president.
… The New York Times has reported that Obama baulked when Tim Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, told him: “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” Far from being overawed by the momentousness of his task, the new president shot back : “That’s not enough for me.”
In his book Confidence Men, Ron Suskind recounts that Mr Obama was frustrated by the mundanity of discussion about a trillion dollar economic stimulus. “There needs to be more inspiration here!” he said in one meeting. Later on, he raised the issue of smart grids. When he was told these were unfeasible as part of the stimulus, he responded: ‘We need more moon shot.”
Having remarked loftily during the campaign that Reagan had been a transformative president in a way that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had not, Obama came into office making clear his desire to be a Reagan of the Left – as well as a reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt with perhaps a dash of John F. Kennedy thrown in.
When he had hired his campaign political director Patrick Gaspard in 2007, he had told him: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
A similar self-regard was on display from Gingrich (who, like Obama in 2008, has no executive experience) last week when he was asked why his campaign had struggled to gain traction in its early days. “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate and what I’m trying to do,” he replied. …
Andrew Ferguson took one for the team. He read all of Newt Gingrich’s books. He reports to us from the NY Times Magazine.
Let’s consult the literature — all 21 books by the self-proclaimed ideas man of politics. (Gingrich cites 23 books on his Web site. We are not counting the Contract With America or the coffee-table book “Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny.”)
When his top campaign staff abandoned him not long ago, Newt Gingrich didn’t seem terribly surprised. “Philosophically, I am very different from normal politicians,” he said. “We have big ideas.”
The “we,” as Gingrich uses it here, is akin to the royal we — it’s what might be called the professorial we, employed when the intellectual and the ideas he generates merge to create an entity too large for a singular personal pronoun. “Over my years in public life,” he writes in his latest book about how to save America, “I have become known as an ‘ideas man.’ ” And we shouldn’t doubt it. As I write, a stack of books tilts Pisa-like on my desk, each volume written by Gingrich and various co-authors. I got out my tape measure the other day and discovered that the stack is precisely 15¼ inches high — a figure that does not include the various revised and expanded editions that I have had Whispernetted into my Kindle, along with the historical novels that Gingrich has published with a co-writer named William R. Forstchen: three fat books on the Civil War, three on World War II and a pair on the Revolutionary War. If I added these to my stack, it would be taller than the mayor of Munchkinland and much heavier.
The books taken together are evidence of mental exertions unimaginable in any other contemporary politician. Professorial affectations are not high on the list of tactics candidates like to use in this age of galloping populism. Within the politico-journalistic combine, Gingrich’s status as an intellectual is accepted as an article of faith — something that everybody just assumes to be true, like man-made climate change or Barack Obama’s stratospheric I.Q. Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, says Gingrich is “undoubtedly the smartest man I’ve ever met.” Cokie Roberts calls him “a big thinker.” Without irony the Democratic consultant Paul Begala praises his “intellectual heft” and Howard Dean his “intellectual leadership.” Ted Nugent says Gingrich is probably the “smartest guy out there.” So that settles that.
Or does it? I built my stack of Gingrich books because I intended to read every one of them, in chronological order, and I did read them, though my chronological scheme broke down eventually. Aside from the sheer number of words, what is most impressive about the Gingrich corpus is its range of literary form, from confessional to guidebook.
Gingrich’s first book, “Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future,” came out in 1984 and contained the seeds of much of what was to follow. Beneath its cover image — a flag-draped eagle inexplicably threatening the space shuttle — the backbencher Gingrich was identified as chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus, a position that inspired a series of “space cadet” jokes that took years to die. “Window of Opportunity” was co-written by Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, and a science-fiction writer called David Drake. Anyone who takes seriously the books that politicians claim to write must sooner or later confront the delicate matter of co-authors and ghostwriters, especially when the books serve, as in Gingrich’s case, as intellectual bona fides.
I have no inside knowledge of Gingrich’s work habits as a writer, or co-writer. In 1994, I was asked to help write one of his books, but the offer never went far enough to allow for close observation. There’s no reason to be prissy or censorious on the subject of politicians and their ghostwriters. George Washington had ghostwriters (pretty good ones, too: Hamilton and Madison). Lincoln had his secretaries write some letters for him, including, some historians say, the most famous Lincoln letter of them all, to the bereaved Mrs. Bixby. And despite a long parade of co-authors — historians, novelists, policy experts, journalists, even family members — Gingrich’s books show a remarkable consistency from one to the next. His contribution to the books that bear his name must be substantial — certainly greater than that of Charles Barkley, who once admitted he hadn’t read his autobiography. (No one else did, either.) Gingrich’s books are Gingrich’s books.
The ghosts for that first book served him unevenly. They got him in metaphor trouble from the first sentence. “We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures,” he wrote. This crossroads, it transpired, faced an open window. That would be the window of vulnerability, which is widening. Three paragraphs later, the crossroads, perhaps swiveling on a Lazy Susan, is suddenly facing another window, also open. The important point, Gingrich writes, is that this window of opportunity is about to slam shut. And if it does? “We stand on the brink of a world of violence almost beyond our imagination.”