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Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor sees the bright side of Wisconsin.
… I am actually quite encouraged by the protests in Wisconsin. The protesters are so clueless. They fail to understand how their antics are just going to turn even more people against them, and intensify the opposition of those who are already unfavorably disposed. The more they whine about the benefits they are losing, and the “rights” that they are giving up, the more the hoi polloi who are footing the bill will recognize how generous those benefits and rights are. The suckers who pay will say: “I don’t get that good a deal. I am looking at a more straitened future. Why should these people get a better deal than I do? Especially since the performance doesn’t match the pay? I was a sucker before, but no more.”
In short, temper tantrums and hissy fits by the privileged only stoke anger against them. So go for it, boys and girls!
Obama, of course, couldn’t resist butting in. His operatives and union allies are coordinating and funding protests. He has come out and criticized Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for attacking unions.
This is all understandable, I guess. Buffeted by one failure after another, Obama sees an opportunity to rabble rouse–sorry, I meant to write “community organize”–and says: “Hey, THIS is something I can do!”
But again, this is good news. For being associated with the Insane Clown Posse will only damage Obama further. …
David Harsanyi thinks Wisconsin events are important.
… Certainly, how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker fares in this battle will be an important signal to the rest of the nation. Places like Colorado only recently allowed state workers to organize. Other states are facing pension nightmares. Who knows? States might begin privatizing and allowing competitive outsourcing of jobs. States must, because nationally, we’re headed in the other direction.
“Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions,” explained President Barack Obama, who, unlike governors, can (and does) borrow trillions. The numbers, though, tell us that public-sector unions are the ones assaulting taxpayers and brittle state economies. And the more we grow the state monopoly, the worse it will get.
David Warren explains the value of what he calls “formalized adversarial order.”
… It is just possible, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, to confront problems that would overwhelm a country, because organized oppositions exist.
Republicans are waiting when Democrats fail, and vice versa. It is because of the long history, not so much of “democracy” per se, but of a formalized adversarial order, that such a chance exists.
There are at most two countries in the Middle East of which this could be said: Israel, and maybe Turkey. In societies ruled by autocrats since time out of mind, no organized opposition waits to pick up the pieces. In each case, the autocrat who falls can only be replaced by another autocrat -unless by something like the Taliban.
Nasty as things will get in states like Wisconsin, the majority can rule. And if that majority can be persuaded to see sense, solutions are possible.
A similar thought and a note of optimism from Yuval Levin in The Corner at National Review.
… Too often, there is not much of a difference between the parties, and people inclined to care about policy are driven to call a pox on both their houses. But as this remarkable week has shown, this is not one of those times. The Democrats are shaming themselves on the premise that American voters can’t handle the truth and that there is political advantage in appealing to the country’s worst instincts. Republicans, whether by choice or by default, are taking up the challenge of telling voters the truth about our problems and persuading them that effective, responsible, and gradual solutions are possible — without taking benefits from current seniors and without abandoning our obligation to fellow citizens in need. There have not been many opportunities for conservatives to be proud of being Republicans in recent years, but this week has certainly been one.
Republicans and Democrats are both at fault for the mess we are in, and for ignoring and denying it for far too long. But so far only one party seems interested in changing that. Voters will notice. And then we will find out who is right about American voters: the party that thinks they are selfish children or the party that thinks they are responsible adults. I have a feeling Republicans will not regret their judgment that the time has come to get serious.
The foolish president’s budget is still here. Charles Krauthammer compares and contrasts Louis XV and Obama.
… Yet for all its gimmicks, this budget leaves the country at decade’s end saddled with publicly held debt triple what Obama inherited.
A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans – for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault – and sets Obama up perfectly for reelection in 2012.
Obama fancies his happy talk, debt-denial optimism to be Reaganesque. It’s more Louis XV. Reagan begat a quarter-century of prosperity; Louis, the deluge.
Moreover, unlike Obama, Louis had the decency to admit he was forfeiting the future. He never pretended to be winning it.
Want to know how well the juxtaposition of Dem waste and GOP frugality is looking? Here’s Eleanor Clift, a liberal’s liberal, writing on our hero Chris Christie in The Daily Beast.
… Christie sees a new zeitgeist of frugality. Soon after taking office in January 2010, he was told the state could not meet its payroll if he didn’t act immediately to close a deficit. He impounded money without the permission of the legislature. And when the Democratic legislature threatened a government shutdown, he vowed he would not do as his predecessor, Jon Corzine, had done, and sleep on a cot in his office until the crisis was resolved. “Look at me,” he exclaimed, drawing attention to his considerable girth, “I’m not sleeping on a cot.” He told the lawmakers that if they engaged in such mischief, he’d get a beer, order a pizza, and watch the Mets.
He likes to tell stories about himself taking on the teachers’ unions and the firefighters and the police officers. When he talked to a firefighters’ meeting in Wildwood one weekend, they booed him “lustily,” he said, and when he got to the podium, he said, “C’mon, you can do better than that—and they did.”
Christie’s tough-guy approach is working, making him a national figure after just 13 months in office. “He commands the bully pulpit more effectively than any other governor we have seen in modern history,” says Dworkin, who predicts Christie will deliver the keynote address at the GOP convention in 2012.
The action is in the state capitols says Peggy Noonan.
There were two big speeches this week, and I mean big as in “Modern political history will remember this.” Together they signal something significant and promising. Oh, that’s a stuffy way to put it. I mean: The governors are rising and are starting to lead. What a relief. It’s like seeing the posse come over the hill.
The first speech was from Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor who is the answer to the question, “What if Calvin Coolidge talked?” President Coolidge, a spare and serious man, was so famously silent, the story goes, that when a woman at a dinner told him she’d made a bet she could get him to string three words together, he smiled and said, “You lose.” But he was principled, effective and, in time, broadly popular.
The other speech was from a governor newer to the scene but more celebrated, in small part because he comes from a particular media market and in large part because he has spent the past year, his first in office, taking on his state’s most entrenched political establishments, and winning. His style—big, rumpled, garrulous, Jersey-blunt—has captured the imagination of the political class, and also normal people. They look at him and think, “I know that guy. I like that guy.”
Both Mr. Daniels, who spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spoke Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, were critical of both parties and put forward the same message: Wake up. We are in crisis. We must save our country, and we can. But if we don’t move now, we will lose it. This isn’t rhetoric, it’s real.
Here’s why response at both venues was near-rapturous: Everyone knew they meant it. Everyone knew they’d been living it. …