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Peter Wehner reviews possible explanations for Obama’s condescension.
…The president is also, consciously or not, creating a narrative to explain the defeat he and his party are about to be administered. The reasons are multiple — from the latent bigotry and racism of the Tea Party movement, to the lies of the GOP, to foreign-money corruption our politics, to the inability of the voting public to think clearly.
All this is nonsense, of course – and, for Obama, it is self-destructive. All of us, including political leaders, experience hardships and setbacks in life. In order to succeed, we need to respond to them in a way that is both honest and intelligent. And for that to happen, we need to see things as they are. We need to be grounded enough, and humble enough, to comprehend errors of our making. That is the sine qua non for adjusting to new facts and circumstances and to interpreting experiences in a way that will be beneficial.
President Obama seems almost incapable of such a thing. Rather, he is busily constructing an alternate reality. He is choosing to live in a world that begins with “Once upon a time.”
The president of the United States, it appears, can’t handle the truth. He and his party will suffer mightily because of is. So, alas, will our country.
Even Dems see that Obama does not learn from his mistakes. In Newsweek, Mickey Kaus worries that Obama will not be able to adjust.
Uh-oh. President Obama seems to have learned nothing from the disaster of the “cling-to-guns-and-God” talk that almost derailed his campaign in 2008. He’s back at it—blaming voters for failing to “think clearly” because they’re “scared” about the economy…
…JustOneMinute suggests, mockingly, that this is an improvement over Obama’s 2008 “cling” speech because
now Obama’s critics are scared rather than racist or stupid. There’s hope for us!
…Now I’m scared! What yesterday’s comments suggest isn’t just that Obama will get clobbered in the midterms. It suggests that after he gets clobbered he won’t be able to adjust and turn the setback into a longterm victory the way Bill Clinton did. Clinton reacted to his 1994 midterm loss by acknowledging his opponents’ strongest arguments and pursuing a balanced budget and welfare reform. Obama seems more inclined to just tough it out until the economy recovers and the scared, confused voters become unscared and see the light. Meanwhile, he’ll spend his time in a protective cocoon. …
John Steele Gordon has excellent commentary on Rich Lowry’s article about economic growth in Texas.
…It is often pointed out that the states make great laboratories for political-science experiments. And an experiment has been underway for quite a while testing the liberal model — high taxes, extensive regulation, many government-provided social services, union-friendly laws — against the conservative model — low taxes, limited regulation and social services, right-to-work laws. The results are increasingly in. As Rich Lowry reports in National Review Online, the differences between California and Texas are striking. Between August 2009 and August 2010, the nation created a net of 214,000 jobs. Texas created more than half of them, 119,000. California lost 112,000 jobs in that period. …
…And people have been voting with their feet: A thousand people a day are moving to Texas. It will likely gain four House seats next year, while California for the first time since it became a state in 1850 will gain none. …
And Jennifer Rubin points out that California and Texas have comparable illegal immigrant numbers.
John, your apt analysis got me thinking again about the impact of immigration, including illegal immigration, on California’s declining fortunes. As I wrote earlier this month, there is ample evidence that illegal immigration is not a significant factor in California’s woes. Your analysis sent me back to some data on the influx of illegal immigrants into two states — California and Texas — with radically different economic results.
It turns out that Texas has nearly as big an issue with illegal immigration as California. A September 2010 Pew study has these tidbits:
Unauthorized immigrants accounted for 3.7% of the nation’s population in 2009. Their shares of states’ total population were highest in California (6.9%), Nevada (6.8%) and Texas (6.5%). … California had the largest number (1.8 million) of unauthorized immigrants in the 2009 labor force, and they made up a larger share of the labor force there (9.3%) than in any other state except Nevada (9.4%). Texas had an estimated 1 million unauthorized immigrants in the labor force in 2009, which represented 8.7% of the labor force.
In other words, the sharply divergent economic policies and political environments of the two states have much to do with their radically different economic outputs; illegal immigration appears to be negligible factor.
In NRO, Rich Lowry reports on economic growth in Texas. The state government’s restraint has given the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” a new meaning.
…According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.
What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot…
…During the past 12 months, California nearly canceled out Texas’s job creation all by itself, losing 112,000 net jobs. …
Texas is a model of governmental restraint. In 2008, state and local expenditures were 25.5 percent of GDP in California, 22.8 in the U.S., and 17.3 in Texas. Back in 1987, levels of spending were roughly similar in these places. The recessions of 1991 and 2001 spiked spending everywhere, but each time Texas fought to bring it down to pre-recession levels. “Because of this policy decision,” the Texas Public Policy Foundation report notes, “Texas’ 2008 spending burden remained slightly below its 1987 levels — a major accomplishment.”
Less spending means lower taxes. Texas doesn’t have an income tax — in contrast to California’s highly progressive income tax — and it is among the 10 lowest-tax states in the country. Its regulatory burden is low across the board, and it’s a right-to-work state that enacted significant tort reform in the middle of the last decade. …
David Harsanyi asks what’s up with feminists.
…As you’ve heard, nepotism’s never-ending gift to California — the nation, really — Jerry Brown, is in a tight gubernatorial race against Republican Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO. In leaked audio tapes, a Brown campaign aide is heard mulling over the pros and cons of using the word “whore,” and no one challenges him.
It’s time to release that righteous feminist anger, right, sisters? No?
Perhaps these days the word “whore” is more accepted as a gender-neutral definition of politician. I leave these linguistic questions to you. The National Organization for Women wasn’t too offended and endorsed Brown only a day after we learned about the incident. And even if the entire Brown brouhaha is overblown politics — and, actually, I think it is — you can’t help but wonder if a Republican would ever survive a similar scandal.
…Admittedly, I comprehend precious little about women. Yet, it remains a mystery to me why more women aren’t offended that a small group defines what real “women’s issues” are, or dictates to everyone which words and ideas they should all find offensive. …
Rich Lowry posted an open letter to the Ohio Democrat Party Chairman in the Corner. The opening alone will make you want to read more.
Chris Redfern, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic party who famously called the tea partiers “f******,” has attacked one of our bloggers. My letter in response follows:
Dear Chairman Redfern,
I hesitate to take your time with a missive like this because I know you are busy losing a governorship, a Senate seat, and conceivably as many as six House seats in the great state of Ohio. Managing such a massive political failure can’t be easy, so I don’t want to do anything to distract you from it. …
Michael Barone wonders how the Dems who changed their votes on Obamacare are faring in their campaigns.
…To put these numbers in perspective, it’s highly unusual for an incumbent House member to trail a challenger in any poll or to run significantly below 50 percent. But these three Democrats are running 5 to 10 points behind Republican challengers and none tops 40 percent.
…Stupak promptly announced he was retiring after 18 years. Republican Dan Benishek is currently leading there by an average of 44 to 27 percent in five polls.
Two of the Stupak five, freshmen Steve Driehaus of Ohio 1 and Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania 3, are in dreadful shape. Driehaus trails by an average 51 to 41 percent in his Cincinnati area district; Dahlkemper trails by an average of 45 to 37 percent in her Erie area seat.
Another two are from West Virginia. Alan Mollohan, first elected in 1982, lost in the May primary; Nick Joe Rahall, first elected in 1976, won his primary and seems well ahead for November. …
In the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz is just as confused as the rest of the Liberals, but he does appear to understand that blaming the voters isn’t a viable strategy.
…On the merits, journalists are right that Obama’s accomplishments have been minimized. Health care reform, however it pans out, was a huge achievement; the overall package remains unpopular, the individual parts (such as not excluding kids for preexisting conditions) not so much. Tightening financial regulation was a heavy lift against the forces of Wall Street. Even the much-derided stimulus law saved plenty of jobs.
All that has been overshadowed because many voters believe the president bobbled the economy while setting his sights on social engineering. But here, too, the short attention span of today’s journalism played a role. The health care and banking battles were covered ad nauseum, but once they passed, the press lost interest and moved on to mosque mess and the Koran-burning preacher and whatever other diversions were available.
The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition, he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.
Who’s to blame for the coming electoral tsunami? We ought to be careful about dumping on the most convenient scapegoat, those moronic voters. In politics, it’s not that complicated: you either deliver or you pay the price.
Jillian Melchior writes that the political defeats in D.C. school reform may be an opening for a bigger reform movement, in Commentary.
School-reform champions Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee put the pressure on D.C.’s next mayor this weekend with a dead-on op-ed in the Washington Post. There’s a justified perception that teachers’ unions are a political force to be reckoned with. But despite their recent electoral loss, famed reformers like Rhee and Fenty have opened the opportunity for parents and their children to become an entity to be feared, too.
…interest in school reform appears on the rise, and a large percentage of the public supports holding teachers accountable and taking a stand against the unions that allow bad teachers to hold on to their jobs, raises, and benefits at the expense of American children.
Among the most interesting of these recent developments is the buzz surrounding the documentary Waiting for Superman, which has pointed a public finger at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. But interest in genuine reform extends beyond the film. Want statistical proof? The latest Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll reported that 72 percent of public-school parents wanted teachers to be paid “on the basis of his or her work.” A September Time poll also revealed a public that would favor Rhee and Fenty’s approach; 66 percent opposed tenure for public-school teachers; 71 percent wanted to establish merit pay; and a plurality thought teachers’ unions kept schools from improving. Also worth examination is the survey conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next, which shows a markedly pro-reform attitude.
Rhee and Fenty may no longer be in office, but here’s hoping they remain in the spotlight. Across the country, the political mood is surly and dissatisfied, but what reformers like the Tea Partiers have too often lacked is an articulate and experienced figurehead to organize behind. Fenty’s defeat and Rhee’s resignation may open up a bigger political opportunity. Whereas before, Rhee and Fenty were empowered to affect reform only in D.C., influencing the rest of the country by example, now they have the opportunity to become the voice of a national school-reform movement.