Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Writing in Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel gives the back story to “you didn’t build that” in the form of a book review of Bourgeois Dignity.
The controversy surrounding President Barack Obama’s admonishment that “if you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” has defied the usual election-year pattern.
Normally a political faux pas lasts little more than a news cycle. People hear the story, decide what they think, and quickly move on to the next brouhaha, following what the journalist Mickey Kaus calls the Feiler Faster Thesis. A gaffe that might have ruined a candidate 20 years ago is now forgotten within days.
Three weeks later, Obama’s comment is still a big deal.
Although his supporters pooh-pooh the controversy, claiming the statement has been taken out of context and that he was referring only to public infrastructure, the full video isn’t reassuring. Whatever the meaning of “that” was, the president on the whole was clearly trying to take business owners down a peg. He was dissing their accomplishments. As my Bloomberg View colleague Josh Barro has written, “You don’t have to make over $250,000 a year to be annoyed when the president mocks people for taking credit for their achievements.”
Hectoring Entrepreneurs
The president’s sermon struck a nerve in part because it marked a sharp departure from the traditional Democratic criticism of financiers and big corporations, instead hectoring the people who own dry cleaners and nail salons, car repair shops and restaurants — Main Street, not Wall Street. (Obama did work in a swipe at Internet businesses.) The president didn’t simply argue for higher taxes as a measure of fiscal responsibility or egalitarian fairness. He went after bourgeois dignity.
“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 — and much higher in developed nations. (McCloskey’s touchstone is Norway’s $137 a day, second only to tiny Luxembourg’s.)
That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”
Peggy Noonan does a column of various election year snippets.
From a friend watching the Olympics: “How about that Michael Phelps? But let’s remember he didn’t win all those medals, someone else did. After all, he and I swam in public pools, built by state employees using tax dollars. He got training from the USOC, and ate food grown by the Department of Agriculture. He should play fair and share his medals with people like me, who can barely keep my head above water, let alone swim.”
The note was merry and ironic. And as the games progress, we’ll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing, because President Obama’s comment—”You didn’t build that”—is the political gift that keeps on giving.
They are now the most famous words he has said in his presidency. And oh, how he wishes they weren’t.
***
There was lots of chatter this week about the decision to have Bill Clinton speak in prime time on the penultimate night of the Democratic Convention. Is it a sign of panic? Would the president give Big Dawg such a prominent spot if he wasn’t nervous? Does it gall him to ask for help from the guy who said of his 2008 candidacy, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”?
But all this kind of misses the point.
The central fact of Bill Clinton is that he is really good at politics. And he has every reason to want to give a really good speech—to show he’s still got it like nobody else, to demonstrate he’s still the most beloved figure in the party, to do his wife proud. And of course to rub Mr. Obama’s nose in it.
David Harsanyi says Barack is no Bill.
Former President Bill Clinton is slated to deliver a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention. No doubt, he’s going to give one hell of a talk. The man is on his game, enjoying the highest favorable ratings he’s seen since 1993; a robust 66 percent of Americans think highly of the former president.
It’s a politically astute choice by Barack Obama, as “there isn’t anybody on the planet who has a greater perspective on not just the last four years, but the last two decades, than Bill Clinton,” David Axelrod explained to The New York Times. “He can really articulate the choice that is before people.”
He sure can. Or, rather, he sure could, if he felt like it. Problem is that if Clinton actually used his perspective, he’d be giving a rousing convention speech on the benefits of free trade and free markets at the Republican convention. After all, if the man from Hope has taught America one thing, it’s that even a power-abusing letch can be great for prosperity if he just leaves the economy alone.
Jeff Greenfield says things don’t look good for the president.
I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.
Boy, was I misled. It’s not just the torrent of polls that we have to deal with, but the numbers that supposedly forecast Presidential elections with uncanny accuracy. Depending on whom you turn to, the key lies in second quarter real GDP growth, the optimism or pessimism of the electorate, individual or family real income growth or a dizzying mix of these and other measurements.
They’re usually economic, although one prognosticator—Allan Lichtman, history professor at American University—uses broader measurements, asking whether the incumbent or challenger is charismatic or whether the incumbent party has presided over a major change in social policy. (This is considered a positive, although I don’t know if we’ve ever had a case like the Affordable Care Act, which—unlike every other major social change—passed without bipartisan backing and remains broadly unpopular.)
I’m a skeptic about the predictive power of these numbers for many reasons. For one thing, the “sample size,” which totals about twenty or so Presidential elections since most of these measurements were first made, is too small. For another, they work—unless they don’t. In 1968, strong economic figures were trumped by a divisive war and by social unrest. In 2000, every economic forecasting model predicted that Al Gore would win a comfortable or landslide plurality. They were “right” in the sense that he got half a million more votes than Bush; they were “wrong” in the fundamental outcome they offered.
So it’s with that skepticism in mind that I offer, not a prediction, but a flat pre-election assessment: If President Barack Obama is to win, he is going to have to overcome a set of numbers that no incumbent President, or incumbent party, has ever managed to surmount.
Charles Lane reviews “Failing Law Schools” for WaPo.
… “Many law professors at many law schools across the country are selling a degree to their students that they would not recommend to people close to them,” Tamanaha writes. He also accuses them of lying about it: Some schools have been caught luring students with inflated post-graduation employment statistics.
If you think those claims sting, consider Tamanaha’s argument that law school effectively transfers money from students to relatively well-to-do professors, via student-loan debt — much of which is ultimately guaranteed by federal taxpayers who are generally not as well-off as the typical law professor.
Law school faculties are also bastions of liberal politics, and this irony is not lost on Tamanaha, who accuses the professoriate of not only enriching itself but also erecting de facto barriers to upward social mobility and true public-service law practice, all in the name of “academic freedom” and other abstractions.
Tamanaha argues that most law schools should emphasize lower-cost practical training, perhaps in fewer than the three years of study that are standard now. The resulting lawyers would serve the mundane but vital needs of ordinary people, a surprisingly large number of whom cannot afford representation even though they are not indigent. It would be an honorable calling and a decent living.
Tamanaha’s message — that law schools fail to fulfill this social purpose and that their failure is due to their selfishness and myopia — may not go over well in faculty lounges. But it is an important one nonetheless.