October 27, 2014

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Scott Walker’s administration in Wisconsin has succeeded in bringing to heel the teacher’s unions, and that has created for him the undying enmity of the left. Where they have some residual power they have become gangsters.  George Will takes a look at the state’s upcoming election. 

The early-morning paramilitary-style raids on citizens’ homes were conducted by law enforcement officers, sometimes wearing bulletproof vests and lugging battering rams, pounding on doors and issuing threats. Spouses were separated as the police seized computers, including those of children still in pajamas. Clothes drawers, including the children’s, were ransacked, cellphones were confiscated and the citizens were told that it would be a crime to tell anyone of the raids.

Some raids were precursors of, others were parts of, the nastiest episode of this unlovely political season, an episode that has occurred in an unlikely place. This attempted criminalization of politics to silence people occupying just one portion of the political spectrum has happened in Wisconsin, which often has conducted robust political arguments with Midwestern civility.

From the progressivism of Robert La Follette to the conservatism of Gov. Scott Walker (R) today, Wisconsin has been fertile soil for conviction politics. Today, the state’s senators are the very conservative Ron Johnson (R) and the very liberal Tammy Baldwin (D). Now, however, Wisconsin, which to its chagrin produced Sen. Joe McCarthy (R), has been embarrassed by Milwaukee County’s Democratic district attorney, John Chisholm. He has used Wisconsin’s uniquely odious “John Doe” process to launch sweeping and virtually unsupervised investigations while imposing gag orders to prevent investigated people from defending themselves or rebutting politically motivated leaks. …

 

 

Pajamas Media has more from Wisconsin.

A document dump attempts to create an impression of scandal around Scott Walker, though none exists.

In order to understand the latest turn of events in embattled Wisconsin, it is necessary to review recent history.

Before running for the governorship in 2010, Scott Walker served two terms as MilwaukeeCounty executive. Milwaukee County is a Democratic Party stronghold, one of the three most resolutely Democratic of the state’s 72 counties (the other two: Dane, the seat of state capital Madison and main campus of the University of Wisconsin; and Menomonee, populated almost entirely by Menomonee Indians). In 2009, one of Walker’s staffers reported some apparent financial irregularities to him concerning a veterans’ charity which he ran, and Walker asked the county district attorney to look into them.

What is called a “John Doe” probe was launched, and indeed an aide was caught embezzling funds from the charity, prosecuted, and convicted. But in the course of the investigation, two other staffers (including, ironically, the one who had reported the irregularities in the first place) were also caught engaging in non-official tasks on government time using government computers. These are technical violations of state law concerning political activities whose enforcement is often controversial and widely believed to be highly partisan. In this case, there were again prosecutions. …

 

 

Fresh from gangster government in Wisconsin, we turn for a look at the gangster in DC. Seth Mandel writes on the presidency. 

It is rare that several seemingly unconnected stories on quite different topics can turn out, when read together, to make a cohesive and profound point on the nature the American presidency. But that is the case today. The first story is Jeff Shesol’s piece in the New Yorker on the newfound humility of the followers of President Obama, once the lightbringer and redeemer but now, astonishingly to them, human. And although there is a point hidden in this tale of political woe, it is a point Shesol misses.

The piece is headlined “Obama and the End of Greatness.” The story is a close relative of the “America the ungovernable” narrative, in which failed Democratic presidents inspire liberal commentators to decide that if someone like Obama can’t succeed, the job is too difficult for one man. That narrative is false, of course; Obama is simply not very good at his job and has personality traits that compel him to lash out and blame others instead of changing course. The Shesol conceit is similar: Obama turned out not to be a great president but perhaps we don’t need or can’t have or shouldn’t expect great presidents at all.

This, too, is wrong. But it’s wrong in an interesting way. Obama was the one who raised expectations, and his followers merely echoed his vainglorious messianic pronouncements. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine the country agreeing on a “great” modern president if only because the two major parties have moved so far apart that they now view governing in completely different ways. …

 

 

Peter Wehner says the Dems are trying to hide from the president, but the vain man will not let them. 

One of the more amusing things to observe as we get closer to the midterm elections is the great push-and-pull that’s going on between Democratic candidates and the president.

A nearly endless number of Democrats are distancing themselves from Mr. Obama, including those who have voted with him 99 percent of the time. Perhaps the most comical performance so far was by Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat in Kentucky who’s challenging Mitch McConnell. Ms. Grimes has repeatedly refused to say whether she voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and 2012, including invoking a high constitutional principle to keep her sacred little secret.

It’s now gotten to the point where even the chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, distanced herself from the president of her own party. And here’s what really wonderful about this: Mr. Obama won’t let Democrats run from him. He’s like their hound of heaven. …

 

 

Wehner also posts on the “madder than hell” president.

What we have here is a chief executive who obsessively blames others (through planned leaks or public statements, or both) for failures that occur on his watch. In the case of our intelligence agencies, they made it crystal clear after the 60 Minutes interview that the president had been warned about ISIS but simply ignored those warnings. So the fault was his, not theirs.

Beyond that, though, it doesn’t seem to have dawned on Mr. Obama that he’s the chief executive, that agencies and individuals answer to him and to his White House. And that when these failures occur, it’s actually his responsibility. It’s part of the job description of being president. But Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to get it. When things go wrong, he reverts to a most peculiar habit, in which he speaks almost as if he’s an outside observer of his own administration. He complains about things going wrong as if he has no capacity to correct them. He seems to defer to others rather than exercise control over them, and then he seethes when things aren’t done right. As a result, Mr. Obama has spent much of his presidency madder than hell. See for yourself. …

 

 

Power Line posts on the hapless help offered to the Dem senate candidate in Iowa.

… Michelle is an amateur politician. Before President Obama’s presidency sank, she was a natural at stirring up friendly crowds with rants on behalf of her husband. This skill doesn’t easily translate into boosting the candidacy of strangers. In short, her mistakes, though embarrassing, were excusable.

By contrast, Obama’s press operation is staffed by professionals. Yet it too can’t do right by Braley. Yesterday, it released via email a transcript of Michelle Obama’s appearance in Iowa on behalf Braley. Unfortunately for the beleaguered candidate, the subject line of the e-mail referred to him as the “Democratic candidate for governor.”

The White House’s subliminal message seems to be: Bruce Bailey, won’t you please come home.

Senate Democrats aren’t amused. One senior aide told the National Journal that “the ineptitude of the White House political operation has sunk from annoying to embarrassing.” Another Senate official told the Washington Post that Obama’s comments thrusting himself into the election were “not devised with any input from Senate leadership.” No kidding. …

 

 

Jennifer Rubin posts on Axelrod’s latest excuse for the president’s latest fail.

President Obama’s former adviser David Axelrod is quoted as explaining Obama’s chronic emergency-response failure thusly: “There’s no doubt that there’s a theatrical nature to the presidency that he resists. Sometimes he can be negligent in the symbolism.”  I don’t buy it.

The candidate who modeled his presidency on Abraham Lincoln, who accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver beside Greek columns and who ran on “Hope and Change” knows a thing or two about theatrics and symbolism. Axelrod would have us believe Obama is just too smart and too methodical for his own good. (“He responds in a very rational way, trying to gather facts, rely on the best expert advice, and mobilize the necessary resources.”) Oh, puleez.

Let’s look at three other explanations that correspond to reality.

First, Obama has surrounded himself with sycophants who won’t tell him he is wrong. As Ron Fournier pointed out, “What of the two advisers without a specific portfolio: Valerie Jarrett and Dan Pfeiffer? They’re blindly loyal to Obama, gatherers of power, shielded from blame, and accountable to nobody but the president. Their biggest admirers acknowledge privately that Obama won’t change course unless Jarrett and Pfeiffer change work addresses.” If you don’t know trouble is coming, your closest aides say reaction is just carping from Republicans and you have an exaggerated sense of your own skills, you tend not to expect trouble or take it seriously when it comes. …

 

 

And Rubin wonders if he is trying to sink fellow Dems.

It is a measure of President Obama’s unbridled ego that in an election in which he is dragging his party down to defeat, he insists on reminding voters that those struggling to swim against the tide and away from him are really his supporters. In an interview with Al Sharpton (apparently the MSNBC audience and a sycophantic host provide the president a safe venue — or so he thought), Obama proclaimed: “A lot of the states that are contested this time are states that I didn’t win. And so some of the candidates there — it is difficult for them to have me in the state because the Republicans will use that to try to fan Republican turnout. The bottom line though is, these are all folks who vote with me, they have supported my agenda in Congress. . .  . This isn’t about my feelings being hurt, these are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me.” He is absolutely correct; these are people who supported every major initiative and dutifully stuck with their majority leader. But why say it?

Not only does Obama thereby remind everyone in those red states that, as he said earlier, his policies are “on the ballot,” but he also impugns the candidates’ honesty, essentially telling voters that these candidates are running on a false claim of independence. Surely he must know all this, and yet he apparently can’t bear to see fellow Democrats disclaiming their association with him.

You can see a mile away the rationalization for a big loss: These Democrats shouldn’t have run from the president. …

 

 

Charles Cooke has more on Dem mishaps.

… Were an alien visitor to have descended from the heavens in order to survey this election season, he would likely have concluded that the American Left struggles to find proficient representatives. In Montana, the Democratic party lost its first candidate to a plagiarism scandal and, inexplicably, chose as his replacement an erratic Communist sympathizer whose idea of a fun afternoon is to record and post rambling black-and-white videos of herself to her YouTube page. In the course of her many “vlogs,” Amanda Curtis has mocked women who believe that they will be given a chance against sexual predators if they are armed; disdained “the family,” “natural law,” and “Christians”; and confessed how difficult she finds it not to “punch” fellow lawmakers in the face. She is currently losing by 19 points, and it is only by the grace of pronounced media bias that she has not been transformed into the public face of the entire party.

In Massachusetts, meanwhile, poor old Martha Coakley has doggedly continued to be . . . well, to be Martha Coakley, with all that that entails. Whatever it was that inspired the Democratic party in one of the bluest states in the country to give the woman who almost sank Obamacare a second shot, the powers-that-be will almost certainly now be bitterly regretting their choice. Republican Charlie Baker is winning by nine points.

Even in the closer races, it is Democrats, and not Republicans, who have injured themselves. Iowa’s Bruce Braley kicked off his campaign insulting the voters of his state by loftily informing a room full of trial lawyers that Senator Chuck Grassley was just “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” …