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Thomas Sowell looks over the GOP’s 2016 prospects. He thinks a governor should get the nod and gives a lift to our favorite. You know, the one without a college degree.
… We can certainly hope that the country has learned that lesson — and that Republican rookie Senators get eliminated early in the 2016 primaries, so that we can concentrate on people who have had some serious experience running things — and taking responsibility for the consequences — rather than people whose only accomplishments have been in rhetoric and posturing.
The more optimistic among us may hope that the Republicans will nominate somebody who stands for something, rather than the bland leading the bland — the kind of candidates the Republican establishment seems to prefer, even if the voters don’t.
If the Republicans do finally decide to nominate somebody who stands for something, and who has a track record of succeeding in achieving what he set out to do, then no one fits that bill better than Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who has put an end to government employee unions’ racket of draining the taxpayers dry with inflated salaries and extravagant pensions.
That Governor Walker succeeded in reining in the unions, in a state long known for its left-leaning and pro-union politics, shows that he knows how to get the job done. It also shows that he has the guts to fight for what he believes, and the smarts to articulate his case and win the public over to his side, rather than pandering to whatever the polls show current opinion to be. …
John Fund profiles our hero – Scott Walker.
National polls show Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and Chris Christie as the best-known Republicans preparing to run for president. Their high name ID puts them in front of other challengers for now. But the road to the GOP nomination runs through Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada — all states that vote early and can give an upstart candidate valuable momentum. Iowa will kick off campaigning for its caucuses this coming weekend, when Citizens United and Iowa congressman Steve King host the day-long Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines.
While Bush and Romney won’t be there, at least eight potential GOP candidates will show up, along with 150 journalists. Lots of attention will be paid to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who many observers say has a chance to break out of the pack in Iowa. He comes from a neighboring state and understands Midwestern sensibilities. His dramatic confrontation with public-sector unions in 2011 and his ability since then to survive both a recall and a reelection battle against those unions have earned him the equivalent of a Medal of Honor with many conservative activists. He has built up a national network of donors who can finance an intense grassroots operation in a state where organizing supporters is key.
But as he prepares to take his record to the nation, Walker is getting blowback from back home. Republicans won clear control of both houses of the state legislature last November, and many are eager to press an aggressive conservative agenda this year. Topping their priority list is a right-to-work bill under which private-sector workers can’t be forced to join a union or pay union dues. A total of 24 states — including Iowa — are right-to-work. The latest additions to the list were heavily unionized Michigan and Indiana.
Yet Governor Walker has made it clear that he views the push for right-to-work as a distraction from his buttoned-down agenda of business, tax, and education reforms. …
According to a report in The Hill, Scott Walker had a good debut in Iowa this past weekend.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) delivered a fiery speech in Iowa on Saturday, wowing the conservative crowd with a passionate argument for small government and his own lengthy resume.
The Wisconsin governor, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, paced the stage as he blasted big government and touted a long list of conservative reforms he’s pushed through in blue Wisconsin.
The governor also showed a rhetorical flourish that’s largely been absent from his previous campaigns, drawing the crowd to its feet multiple times.
“There’s a reason we take a day off to celebrate the 4th of July and not the 15th of April,” he said, almost yelling as his voice grew hoarse. “Because in America we value our independence from the government, not our dependence on it.” …
More on Walker from Jennifer Rubin.
… He also displayed his telltale pugnaciousness with a sense of humor previously not seen by many. He cheered his winning Packers while teasing New Jersey Gov. and Dallas fan Chris Christie. (“I had plenty of fun hugging owners in the stands at Lambeau.”) He knocked Common Core, perhaps a shot at Jeb Bush. (“My sons graduated from outstanding public schools in Wauwatosa and my nieces are in public schools as well, so I have a vested interest, like parents all across the state, in high standards. But those standards should be set by people from within Wisconsin—and preferably at the local level.”) He was upbeat and determined.
And most interesting, at the end of the speech he signaled how he looks at the world: “Last week, innocent people were targeted in France by terrorists. These cowards are not symbols of confidence. They are overwhelmed by fear. They are afraid of freedom. They are afraid of those who have the freedom of the press. They are afraid of freedom of speech. They are afraid of freedom of religion. Tonight, we must stand together—Democrat and Republican—and denounce those who wish to threaten freedom anywhere in this world. We need to proclaim that an attack against freedom-loving people anywhere is an attack against us all. And we will not allow it.” It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to confirm that he, unlike President Obama and isolationists on the right and left, understands the stakes in the war against global jihad and recognizes this is a fight for our way of life.
The irony here is that while most attention has focused on a potential Bush-Romney duel and a potential Christie run, Walker has been making steady progress in staffing up and preparing for a run (for one thing, making certain he would not face off against friend and Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan). What we learned yesterday is that Walker has a record, some personal style and a mature view of the world. He is someone who can be seen fighting against liberal interests in the age of Obama, but not someone burdened either by foreign policy miscues or past defeats. …
And Rubin turns her ire towards the Huckster.
… In his recent interview with Hugh Hewitt, Huckabee tried to argue:
“I may be lonely, I may be the only one, but I’m going to stand absolutely faithful to the issue of marriage not because it’s a politically expedient thing to do, because it isn’t. I’m going to do it because I believe it is the right position, it’s the Biblical position, it’s the historical position. I believe like Barack Obama said he believed back in 2008, that it’s an issue that has been settled by the Bible, and God is in the mix. Now one of three things – either Barack Obama was lying in 2008, he’s been lying now since he’s changed his view, or the Bible got rewritten, and he was the only one who got the new version. So I’m just going to have to say that I haven’t been given the role of editor. And I’m not angry about it. One thing I am angry about, though, Hugh, is this notion of judicial supremacy, where if the courts make a decision, I hear governors and even some aspirants to the presidency say well, that’s settled, and it’s the law of the land. No, it isn’t the law of the land. Constitutionally, the courts cannot make a law. They can interpret one. And then the legislature has to create enabling legislation, and the executive has to sign it, and has to enforce it.”
This is frankly nonsense. …
… Huckabee exemplifies the triumph of crank right-wing rationalizations over common sense and mainstream thinking. You think the average American would support a candidate who doesn’t abide by the courts’ rulings? He can disapprove of gay marriage. He can call for broad conscience exemptions. He can refuse to officiate or attend gay nuptials. But he cannot in good faith tell court clerks not to follow the law. Huckabee’s comments are a recipe for constitutional chaos and political oblivion. Enough already. Just stop it.
Yesterday in Pickings we spent lots of electrons with an overview of the president’s disastrous policies. You are left wondering why the administration continues with what is obvious failure. Part of the cause for that is the comfort they get from the fools in the left media. One of the most execrable of them is Paul Krugman who spins nonsense and lies from his column at the NY Times. Robert Samuelson decided to spend a few columns on Krugman calumny directed towards Ronald Reagan.
It’s important to get history right — and economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has gotten it maddeningly wrong.
Krugman recently wrote a column arguing that the decline of double-digit inflation in the 1980s was the decade’s big economic event, not the cuts in tax rates usually touted by conservatives. Actually, I agree with Krugman on this. But then he asserted that Ronald Reagan had almost nothing to do with it. That’s historically incorrect. Reagan was crucial.
In nearly four decades of column-writing, I can’t recall ever devoting an entire column to rebutting someone else’s. If there were instances, they’re long forgotten. But Krugman’s error is so glaring that it justifies an exception. …
… What Volcker and Reagan accomplished was an economic and political triumph. Economically, ending double-digit inflation set the stage for a quarter-century of near-automatic expansion (indeed, so automatic that it bred the complacency that led to the 2008-2009 financial crisis — but that’s another story). Politically, Reagan and Volcker showed that leaders can take actions that, though initially painful and unpopular, served the country’s long-term interests.
But their achievement was a joint venture: If either hadn’t been there, the outcome would have been much different.
There was no explicit bargain between them. They had what I’ve called a “compact of conviction.” Volcker later said of Reagan: “Unlike some of his predecessors, he had a strong visceral aversion to inflation.” So did Volcker. Both believed the country could not flourish with high inflation. Both acted on that faith.
Volcker needed presidential support, because the Fed’s formal “independence” is highly qualified by political realities. The Fed, Volcker has said, “has got to operate . . . within the range of understanding of the public and the political system.” Reagan widened that range.
To exclude him from this narrative is not history. It’s fiction.
You can always count on snarky replies from the crude Krugman. They led Samuelson to a second column.
Last week, I wrote a column taking issue with Paul Krugman’s contention that President Ronald Reagan had little to do with the decisive crushing of double-digit inflation of the early 1980s. In Krugman’s telling, all the credit belongs to Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In my telling, both Volcker and Reagan counted. Volcker imposed tight money; Reagan’s support enabled him to maintain the painful and unpopular policy (the monthly unemployment rate peaked at 10.8 percent) long enough to purge inflationary psychology.
The column predictably provoked a backlash; economist and New York Times columnist Krugman responded on his blog. So I return to the subject. My aim here, as with the original column, is to ground history in facts. In that spirit, let me address some common criticisms of the column. …
‘The 1980s were a triumph of Keynesian economics, because “events played out exactly the way Keynesian-leaning textbooks said they would.” ‘
The claim and the quote are Krugman’s. They distort history. As preached and practiced since the 1960s, Keynesian economics promised to stabilize the economy at levels of low inflation and high employment. By the early 1980s, this vision was in tatters, and many economists were fatalistic about controlling high inflation. Maybe it could be contained. It couldn’t be eliminated, because the social costs (high unemployment, lost output) would be too great. Inflation persists, wrote Yale economist James Tobin, because “major economic groups [claim] pieces of the pie that together exceed the whole pie.”
This was a clever rationale for tolerating high inflation, and the Volcker-Reagan monetary onslaught demolished it. High inflation was not an intrinsic condition of wealthy democracies. It was the product of bad economic policies. This was the 1980s’ true lesson, not the contrived triumph of Keynesianism.
As my original column said, I don’t dispute Krugman on the importance of the 1980s’ disinflation. Indeed, the premise of my book (“The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath”) is that inflation’s rise and fall are underrated events in post-World War II history. But it matters how high inflation was overcome. Krugman seems so determined to discredit Reagan that he makes a mockery of the history.