…I’d have to admit that he’s telling the truth here, and that it’s an admirable sentiment (although nice guys sometimes finish last):
I do believe in the institution of the presidency, and I didn’t think it was right then, I still don’t think it’s right to engage in name-calling if you’re the president of the United States.
And I’d have to observe that the current occupant of the White House disagrees with that policy—at least, as long as he’s the one who’s president and doing the name-calling.
Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker details how voting for Obama’s agenda did in the House Democrats this election cycle.
And then he concludes they should have done more of the same.
Yes, they should have pressed ahead and passed even more unpopular leftist programs, since they were going to be voted out anyway:
My takeaway from all this? If a President has big majorities in Congress and commits to a bold and controversial agenda, he should stick with it to the bitter end, pushing the system as far as it will go during the two-year interval he has between congressional elections. Obama took his foot off the pedal this year after the first sign of the conservative backlash appeared in the form of Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts. But it’s difficult to see how the results of the midterm election would have been much different had he pressed ahead with more stimulus and a comprehensive energy bill, the two most important items left unaddressed and which now have no prospect of passage.
This is exactly the sort of liberal “logic” that is so toxic and disturbing. We’ve got the power, let’s use it while we can, whatever the public might want. Power to us, not the people.
During the height of the HCR battle, I wrote about this phenomenon in my Weekly Standard piece entitled “Congress Becomes Madison’s ‘Overbearing Majority,'” in which I offered the following quote from Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10:
Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people”¦
Lizza and many others advocate doing just that, without apology and without shame. Of course, he professes to believe (and in fact may actually believe) that it’s in the people’s interests; they are just too stupid to know it.
On the other hand, in this WaPo piece by Obama supporter Ruth Marcus, she seems to get it [emphasis mine]:
The president’s self-diagnosis in his post-election news conference was dominated by the assessment that voters had simply failed to grasp – and that his failure lay chiefly in explaining clearly enough – why the administration took the steps it did…
If only the poor dears had a better grasp.
I write this from a perspective of sympathy with Obama’s aims and overall support for his performance over the past two years. But Obama’s dismissive analysis omits the non-emergency choices he made – primarily to press for and, in the end, muscle through the passage of health-care reform – and the ensuing discomfort of voters.
Discomfort that is entirely understandable, even to those of us who supported health-care reform.
She ends with the following cautionary words:
Democrats are making a big mistake if they think their problem was as simple as not enough talking.
Marcus has been carrying water for Obama for a long, long time. But somehow she has finally managed to do what seems so rare on the Obama side: to see those who disagree as reasonable and well-meaning, and motivated neither by hatred nor by ignorance—and even worthy of respect and legislative restraint.
One wouldn’t think this point of view would be so rare, but it has become so.
Fiscal austerity was promised. Fiscal austerity is needed. But fiscal austerity is hard, or it would have been done earlier.
Problem is, it may be good on the macro level, but it’s seen as bad on the micro level, because local communities and special interest groups benefit from government largesse. The benefit may be short-term, or at the expense of others or even the nation as a whole. But it’s perceived as a benefit by one particular community or group, and people can be loathe to give that up for what’s imagined or projected or explained to be the greater good. After all, a bird in the hand is worth—a lot.
This year is different, however. Or at least, it has appeared to be, so far. Rarely before has there been a public so alarmed and energized about the dangers of overspending, so seemingly willing to give up some perks in order to get the fiscal house in order.
Trouble is, which perks? And whose perks? How deep and wide will the cuts go? It is all very well to talk about generalities, but when specifics come and it’s you or I or the other guy who feels the pinch, it can hurt.
Although many of us here voted for Republicans and rejoiced in their victory, that doesn’t mean we place huge trust in their integrity or their judgment. Politicians are politicians, and betrayal and/or disappointment and/or ignorance and/or error is the name of the game.
Being an opposition party is often easier than having power, as the Democrats found out once again this election cycle. And all is not unified in the Republican camp. Party ranks include everything from a few lingering RINOS to social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, establishment types, Tea Partiers, old guard and new.
One early conflict shaping up appears to be whether Michael Steele has got to go as chairman of the RNC. Usually, of course, when a party achieves an astounding victory like the one the Republicans just chalked up, the party chairman would be lauded. Not now, because it is widely perceived as having been accomplished in spite of Steele’s pallid leadership, not because of it.
The brewing earmark fight is emblematic of the sort of battle we may see more of in the coming session. A red-on-red conflict is shaping up between TeaParty-friendly Jim DeMint and establishment-type McConnell:
DeMint won backing from 25 Senate Republicans, including McConnell, earlier this year to impose an earmark ban on Republicans and Democrats alike. Despite winning the support of a majority of Republicans, the proposal was easily defeated by Democrats and 14 pro-earmark Republicans. Thirty-three of 41 Senate Republicans then sought earmarks in this year’s unfinished roster of spending bills.
McConnell, however, isn’t enthusiastic about the idea of a ban now. And he finds himself caught in the middle of an unwelcome battle dividing his party and opening it to criticism from anti-pork tea party activists who helped Republicans take back the House and elect several anti-earmark senators.
And it’s not as though McConnell doesn’t have a point about what happens if earmarks are banned:
McConnell says giving up earmarks would provide a “blank check” to President Barack Obama because his administration would determine exclusively where money for popular programs would go. The proposed ban wouldn’t save any money, McConnell says.
“Every president, Republican or Democrat, would like to have a blank check from Congress to do whatever he chooses to do,” McConnell said in a speech to the Heritage Foundation last week. “You could eliminate every congressional earmark and you would save no money. It’s really an argument about discretion.”
“Earmarks” are one of those words, like “lobbyist,” that are flashed around as code for “evil, selfish.” But that’s way too simplistic, although it’s good for campaigning. Earmarks have become a symbol, and as a symbol they may need to go. But is the remedy worse than the disease?
[ADDENDUM: Ace muses on a similar topic.]
Mark Haub, professor of nutrition at Kansas State, gets my vote as intrepid truthteller of the month, maybe the year. Despite every fiber of his being protesting against some of the results of his experiment in junk food dieting, he has publicized them nevertheless.
For ten weeks, Haub subsisted mainly on a diet of Twinkies, other Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Doritos, sugary cereals and Oreos. He ate a few veggies as well, and a protein shake. But he curtailed his total calories and kept them in the range of 1800 a day, which for a man his size represented a weight-loss diet.
I will take a moment to digress and to observe that for me and many other women, 1800 calories a day would be a maintenance or even weight gain diet. So I confess to a bit of envy that Haub could eat so much and be expecting to lose. But as for the content of his meals, I don’t envy him a bit. I love sweets and snacks. But if I had to eat that way for even one day, I wouldn’t want to continue; I’d crave regular food. And even if I were eating primarily sweets and snacks, Twinkies and Little Debbie would be the last things on earth I’d choose. Absolutely can’t stand ’em.
But the intrepid Haub was trying to prove that calorie restrictions do count, no matter what sort of awful junk you eat. So he soldiered on. What he didn’t bargain for—and what completely surprised and flummoxed him—was that not only did his weight drop, indicating his hypothesis was correct, but his other health indicators (cholesterol, triglycerides, body fat percentage) changed for the better, too.
“That’s where the head scratching comes,” Haub said. “What does that mean? Does that mean I’m healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we’re missing something?”…
“I wish I could say the outcomes are unhealthy. I wish I could say it’s healthy. I’m not confident enough in doing that. That frustrates a lot of people. One side says it’s irresponsible. It is unhealthy, but the data doesn’t say that.”
We’ve learned a lot about health and nutrition over the years. But we still know so little.
[ADDENDUM: Speaking of knowing so little, I just did the math and something has me very perplexed. Haub reduced his caloric intake by 800 calories per day. That would be 5600 a week. Since losing a pound of fat is supposed to require a 3500-calorie reduction, one would expect him to have lost only about 16 pounds in the 10 weeks of the diet. So, how is it that he lost 27? Does this mean the Twinkie diet is an especially effective weight-loss tool? I shudder along with Haub to think so. Perhaps the monotony of the diet caused him to eat less than he thought he did?
Just to get some perspective: for me, as a woman of 5’4″ and not tremendously overweight, I have learned that about 1700 calories a day is maintenance. So in order to lose weight, I have to go way down to near-starvation rations. They say to keep it at 1100-1200 a day, which puts my fastest weight loss at about 12 pounds in that same 10 weeks. And empirical evidence has shown me my weight loss tends to be even slower than that as a rule, despite the fact that I exercise almost every day.
No wonder many women get discouraged dieting.]
President Obama may have wanted the Republicans to sit in the back of the car, but the voters have now plunked the Republicans right next to Obama, up in the front seat.
And the car they are driving is like the one my driver ed teacher used to have. You know, the one with the dual brake system—a set of brakes for the driver and another set for the guy to the right, as an extra check on the student driver’s judgment.
And I’m tempted to say, “fasten your seat belts, we’re in for a bumpy ride.”
There’s plenty of speculation on just what the Republicans have in store for Obama, and how they might accomplish blocking his agenda. And George Will points out that the Republican victory in Congress may put a curb not only on Obama’s legislative agenda, but to his attempt at an end run around Congress through the mechanism of czars and regulatory agencies.
And now, possessing House committee gavels and subpoena power, Republican chairmen will be able to limit Obama’s ability to use the “permanent government” – the bureaucracy – to accomplish through regulation what he cannot achieve through legislation.
Democrats retain their majority in the Senate. But it is hardly monolithic. Not only do the Democrats have the specter of many of their colleagues’ defeat last week to remind the twenty-three of them (if you include Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman) coming up for re-election in 2012 of their own vulnerability, but among the new Senate Democrats there are two—Joe Manchin and Chris Coons—who spoke out strongly against some aspects of Obama’s agenda in their successful election campaigns. Voters might just be paying attention if they betray their promises when Harry Reid twists their arms.
Stephen F. Hayes calls Marco Rubio “the most important freshman senator” in this Weekly Standard article.
Rubio not only won handily in Florida, he also gave a great and widely-admired acceptance speech. He’s one of the rising stars of the Republican Party, who along with Chris Christie of New Jersey has captured the attention of the public and whose bedrock fiscal conservatism is highly thought of by the Tea Party movement. And in this day and age, it doesn’t hurt that he’s young, smart, handsome, inspirational without being saccharine, and Hispanic.
But Rubio’s obvious talents went largely unappreciated by the conventional Republican leadership at the start of the race. Almost to a person, they endorsed his opponent Charlie Crist until their hands were forced when the latter ditched the party and become an Independent. There were a few surprising exceptions, however, and one of them was Jim DeMint, who showed remarkable prescience and was nearly alone in seeing Rubio as a very impressive candidate on first meeting him:
Rubio told DeMint and his staff that he was in the race for the duration, and he did so in a manner that left a strong impression. Rubio told DeMint that his parents had come from Cuba seeking a better life. His parents had worked in the hospitality industry. It wasn’t glamorous, but they understood that the harder they worked the more opportunities they could provide for their four children. It hadn’t been this way in Cuba, even before the revolution, and Rubio explained, with great passion, that he felt a moral obligation to do whatever he could to make sure his children had the same opportunities. “I remember my eyes welling up,” says DeMint. Others in the room remember the same thing. “You get pretty hardened in Washington. But I thought, this guy is for real. We don’t meet many people like him in Washington.”…
DeMint was angry that the NRSC had supported Crist. “If you listen to what the moderates have said””we need youth, we need minorities, we need women. And here we have this young Cuban American who had proved himself as speaker of the House in Florida. And the committee was dissing him and ignoring him.
And now that Rubio has proven the NRSC wrong and DeMint right, the senator from South Carolina has another prediction, a surprisingly selfless one:
“Marco Rubio is a natural leader and is likely to be a leader of our party,” says DeMint. “In five years, no one will remember Jim DeMint, and Marco will be president.”
Since last week’s election, we’ve been reading the good news that a great many state legislatures flipped to the Republican side. I even wrote a post about it last Saturday.
But still, I had no idea how dramatic the changes were until I looked at two maps (hat tip: Althouse) that show the actual numbers of Democrats and Republicans in each state legislature, before and after. It’s extraordinary.
Here’s the “before” map, and here’s “after.” Mouse over any state to see the actual figures, and compare.
States that almost always lean heavily to one party or another didn’t show the changes, for the most part. Massachusetts remains bluer than blue; Republican pickups were slight. The same was true in reverse in ruby-red Utah.
But oh, the magnitude of some of those switches! In New England, for example, we’ve got Maine, which started out on Tuesday morning with a hefty Democrat margin of 95 Democrats to 55 Republicans in its House and 20 to 15 in the Senate, and ended up on Wednesday morning with Republicans in charge 73/77 and 14/20 (in this and the following pairs of figures, I state Democrats first and Republicans second). Then there’s Wisconsin, which went from 52/46 in the House and 18/15 in the Senate to 38/60 and 14/19. Minnesota flipped from 87/47 and 46/21 margins to 62/72 and 30/37, while Michigan had similar gains.
But perhaps the most dramatic flip of all occurred in New Hampshire, a tiny state boasting a huge legislature. The previous figures were 216 Democrats to 173 Republicans in the House and 14/10 in the much-smaller Senate. Now New Hampshire has a legislature that rivals Utah in its one-sidedness: a whopping 102/298 and 5/19.
A number of pundits have mentioned that straight-ticket voting was one reason for these whiplash-inducing changes. And no doubt that’s at least partly true. But strangely enough, it doesn’t seem to have been the case for New Hampshire, one of the biggest flippers of all. After a resounding victory for Democrats in 2006, the state’s Democratic Party scrapped straight-ticket voting, fulfilling a long-term promise. This might have been thought to have restrained the Republican vote at the state level in New Hampshire this year, but with results like these, it’s hard to believe it had any effect at all.
[ADDENDUM: More.]
It seems that Obama isn’t quite as politically savvy—even within his own party—as he was once thought to be.
For those of you who read and enjoyed last Saturday’s post on tap dancing, and especially the clips of the Nicholas Brothers, here are some additional nuggets of interest:
(1) The brothers were the children of vaudevillians, and never had any formal dance training.
(2) Later in life they taught dance, and one of their students is reported to have been Michael Jackson.
(3) Fred Astaire called that Nicholas Brothers number from “Stormy Weather” (the one that appeared in my post in its YouTube version) “the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen.”
(4) Both brothers married three times. The first wife of the younger, Harold, was the beautiful actress Dorothy Dandridge—who, like the brothers, had spent her childhood as a performer on the black vaudeville circuit in a sibling act.
Now I’ll weigh in on the topic introduced by commenter John Schroeder in the comments section of that thread:
You have stepped into one of the great debates in the arts – What is tap all about – rhythm or style.- and it is buried in race.
The contention is that tap was “invented” by blacks and is a rhythmic exercise. It was only when it was “stolen” by the white man and combined with more acceptable forms of dance that it took on the appearance you seem to prefer. Some have even accused the Nicholas Brothers of “selling out” – and Bill Robinson was “forced” to dance that way to make a living.
I personally think there is room for both styles – they ask very different things of the audience. One is essentially visual and one aural.
Savion is not pretty, but close your eyes and listen – there are professional drummers that cannot do that with four extremities and a kit.
Very interesting indeed. But my response is that dance is a predominantly visual art, not an aural one. If Glover, and the tap dancers who resemble him—be they black, white, green, or polka-dotted—wish to call themselves “tap musicians,” or to refer to what they do as “playing the feet,” that’s perfectly all right with me. Just don’t call a predominantly auditory art “dance,” because it’s not.
As for the black art purists who say the Nicholas Brothers are a sell-out and Glover the real deal, I would maintain that, if they wish art to remain in the domain of anthropology, keeping it static and never allowing a culture to develop its own blended art forms, then the world of art will be sadly diminished.
One of the greatest strengths of this country is that we have managed to create new types of art: rock n’ roll, jazz, ragtime, Broadway musicals, modern dance, ballet with an American twist (one of the developments for which Russian emigre choreographer George Balanchine was known, as was American-born Jew Jerome Robbins)—and, yes, tap dancing. All of these wonderful contributions to the world exist only because they took art forms that began in other parts of the world and added to them, changing and blending them into something almost unrecognizable in the process.
This is the incredible strength of the American popular performing arts. To destroy it for some misguided PC idea of artistic ethnic purity is not only counterproductive, it’s offensive.
Pelosi is toxic for the Democrats. I don’t care how much money she raises; her retention as the Democrats’ House leader would send a strong message—and function as a constant reminder—that the Democrats don’t hear what the people are saying, and that they’ve learned nothing from this year’s election.
Hey, that’s okay with me. Because they haven’t heard what the people are saying, and appear to have learned nothing from this year’s election.
This puzzles me. I’ve spent a lot of time observing Democrats and thinking about them (not to mention decades passed as a Democrat myself), and I thought they were smarter and less stubborn than that. And of course some of them are; there are plenty of calls for Pelosi to step down.
Pelosi’s own motivation for wanting to stay isn’t so difficult to guess at. It’s hard to give up the reins of power, even reduced power. It’s understandable that, like a gambler losing a fortune at the roulette table, she thinks that if she just keeps playing she can get it all back.
But what’s the other Dems’ excuse? And why do they keep saying the sort of thing we see in this NY Times editorial?
It calls for Pelosi to step down, to be sure. But the reasons are the same tired old story—she just didn’t sell the program well enough:
What [Democrats] need is what Ms. Pelosi has been unable to provide: a clear and convincing voice to help Americans understand that Democratic policies are not bankrupting the country, advancing socialism or destroying freedom.
If Ms. Pelosi had been a more persuasive communicator, she could have batted away the ludicrous caricature of her painted by Republicans across the country as some kind of fur-hatted commissar jamming her diktats down the public’s throat.
I used to think this was just face-saving spin, and that liberals knew full well how much the American people hate the program itself as well as the corrupt process by which it was passed. But after last Tuesday, I’m starting to revise my assessment. It seems that many liberal Democrats are truly unable to understand that there’s anything wrong with their philosophy or their policies or their methods, or that people can have valid disagreements with the substance of what they’ve done.
It is so manifestly correct, so obviously right, that the only explanation left for its failure so far must lie squarely in the realm of advertising. It wasn’t branded properly. The spokespeople weren’t forceful enough. Maybe some perkier music would help. Anything but an admission that it’s the product, stupid, and that the dogs just don’t like the food.
