November 6, 2010
More than a rejection of big government or high spending, it is a revolution against moral decline.
I doubt that what happened in the United States on November 2 could have occurred in any European country. In fact, it was almost unprecedented in the United States.
No president in American history has ever been so thoroughly discredited after two years as Barack Obama. When Pres. Bill Clinton’s party lost 54 seats in 1994, that number was shockingly high. But in 2010, the Democrats have lost at least 60 seats in the House (the branch closest to the people) and six in the Senate. Counting as allies some conservative Democrats, the Senate Republicans, while slightly less numerous than Democrats, might emerge with a working majority, though not the two-thirds necessary to override a veto.
In his first two years, the president convinced many millions of Americans that he wants to make the U.S. more like European welfare states. The American people hate the very idea, and they simply rebelled.
What is most striking about this election is the rising up of a huge popular movement with virtually no visible national leader — a movement spontaneously arising out of the refusal to lose the country our Founding Fathers (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the others) built solidly on certain fixed, eternal principles: firm principles about the dignity and responsibility before God of every woman and man, about the freedom of the economy from State management (but not from necessary State regulation), and about the universal opportunity of every citizen to rise as far as their talents and hard work will take them.
President Obama pays obeisance to these principles, but his heart is not in it. He mainly trusts government, national government, one powerful central government. The record of his two years in office is repellent — and many, many Americans simply refuse to march in that direction. The Democrats have controlled everything for two years, and their leadership, with too much left-wing enthusiasm, allowed President Obama to take the bit into his mouth and run pell-mell toward the European model.
He could not get all that far, in this deeply whig country. “Whig” is a way of saying “the party of liberty,” the party of personal responsibility, the party of economic opportunity and personal creativity, the party fiercely committed to the defense of liberty (whence the eagle as our national symbol, the eagle with seven arrows in one claw and a large olive branch in the other). The whig tendency in America has always been suspicious of government (as the source of most abuses of human rights, as inefficient, as a breeding ground of corruption). The Whig party, transformed into the new Republican party after 1856, became the party that abolished slavery, and is alive and well today in the Tea Party movement. It is the party of the individual — not the atomized individual, the individual alone, but the civic individual in free cooperation with other individuals.
In recent years, I have wondered how much longer God would continue to bless America, that country so favored by Providence for so long. The mass-media culture of America, its movies, its glitzy magazines, and its public speech (even in churches) are becoming more and more decadent, less and less under the sway of personal moral responsibility, more relativist, less under the self-control of reason. That “superculture” of the media hangs over the nation like a miasma of moral smog. Below it, thank God, there are still tens of millions willing to resist it.
That is the hope of America today. It rises up from the people not yet incapacitated by the moral decline of our elites.
The election of 2010 signified a moral revolution, a cultural revolution, much more profoundly than a political revolution.
We will see how long it can endure and grow from strength to strength — or whether it will self-destruct, as so many movements do.
God, if You can no longer bless the whole nation, please bless the Tea Party movement.
--Michael Novak, National Review Online
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Today is Judgment Day!
Over the last twenty-two months, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have sown the wind. Today – if the polls are any indication – they will reap the whirlwind.
(My prediction is that the Republicans will win 64 House seats and 8 Senate seats -- tfc)
The portents have been there for a very long time. It all began on 19 February 2009 with a rant on CNBC on the part of Rick Santelli, which struck a nerve and occasioned the birth of the Tea-Party Movement. That the tide might be beginning to turn was made evident in mid-April of that year when the adherents of that movement successfully mounted demonstrations across the entire country, and the Democrats and their minions in the media began denouncing them as Astroturf, Nazis, racists, and tea-baggers. And to anyone who cared to notice, the seriousness of the opposition and the depth of their concern was made manifest that August when constituents confronted their Senators and Congressmen in town halls throughout the land and shouted them down. It was on 2 August 2009 that I first suggested that, if the Republicans embraced the Tea-Party Movement and articulated the grievances that had occasioned its emergence, a genuine political realignment might be in the offing.
As it happened – and it was by and large an accident – the Republicans were well-positioned to take advantage of this political opening. In January, 2009, many of the House Republicans and not a few of their colleagues in the Senate would have been willing to cooperate with the Democrats in promoting the agenda of the Obama administration. In 2008, they had received a drubbing at the polls, and they were appropriately cowed. But, campaign rhetoric aside, no one on the Democratic side was seriously interested in bipartisan accord. They had won the election; they persuaded themselves that they had a mandate; and though President Obama had presented himself to the voting public as a moderate, he and his fellow Democrats had not the slightest intention of seeking the middle ground. In the House, it would not have taken much to swing a sizable group of Republicans behind the Democrats’ program, but Nancy Pelosi was intent on revenge. So, when the so-called “stimulus” bill came up for a vote, she made sure that there were within it no earmarks for the Republicans, and out of pique nearly all of them voted against the measure.
The country owes Obama, Emanuel, Pelosi, and Reid a great deal. They put backbone into Republicans who never knew they had one; they ripped the masks off Democrats who had always posed as moderates, displaying the radicalism of the party’s agenda for one and all to see; and they pursued their ends by means ruthless, transparently corrupt, and tyrannical. Bills were put together in the middle of the night and jammed through the House unread. Corrupt bargains were negotiated in the Senate and awarded colorful and memorable names; and when the public in due course learned of Gator Aid (sometimes called the Florida Flim-Flam), of the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Connecticut Compromise, and the like, they erupted in fury.
Already in November, 2009, it was evident to anyone willing to pay attention that for this there would be hell to pay – for on the first Tuesday of that month, one year ago today, the citizens of Virginia and New Jersey, states that had voted for Barack Obama in 2008, elected Republicans Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie governors with comfortable margins. Then, two-and-a-half months later – after one version of Obamacare had passed the House and another, the Senate – came the Massachusetts miracle on 19 January 2010, when Scott Brown wrested Ted Kennedy’s seat from the Democrats in that left-liberal state by campaigning against Obamacare.
The Democrats had ample warning. On Christmas Eve in 2009, William Daley, brother of the Mayor of Chicago, former Secretary of Commerce, and mastermind of the Chicago machine, emerged from the shadows to tell his fellow Democrats that “the Democratic Party — my lifelong political home — has a critical decision to make: Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”
The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.
Witness the losses in New Jersey and Virginia in this year’s off-year elections. In those gubernatorial contests, the margin of victory was provided to Republicans by independents — many of whom had voted for Obama. Just one year later, they had crossed back to the Republicans by 2-to-1 margins.
Witness the drumbeat of ominous poll results. Obama’s approval rating has fallen below 49 percent overall and is even lower — 41 percent — among independents. On the question of which party is best suited to manage the economy, there has been a 30-point swing toward Republicans since November 2008, according to Ipsos. Gallup’s generic congressional ballot shows Republicans leading Democrats. There is not a hint of silver lining in these numbers. They are the quantitative expression of the swing bloc of American politics slipping away.
Alluding to Parker Griffith’s defection to the Republicans and to the Democrats who had decided to retire, Daley concluded, they are “the truest canaries in the coal mine.” But, of course, no one listened; and, after Scott Brown took his seat in the Senate, Pelosi and her associates jammed through the House the Senate version of Obamacare and thereby sealed their party’s fate.
No one knows just how big the Republican wave will be today, but there is excellent reason to think that it will dwarf every electoral shift that has taken place since the Second World War. Yesterday, the Gallup organization, which has an impeccable track record in this particular, released its final pre-election generic ballot poll results. They show the Republicans ahead among likely voters by 15% – a greater margin, with the sole exception of the post-Watergate Democratic wave in 1974, than either party has attained in the sixty years in which the Gallup organization has been collecting this sort of information.
What this suggests is that the guess I advanced on 2 September and later reasserted here and here – that the Republicans would pick up between 70 and 100 seats in the House and gain a majority in the Senate – was on the mark.
Today is Judgment Day – and it is easy to see why President Obama plans to leave tomorrow for an extended sojourn abroad. For before he departs he, his administration, and party will be judged by the American people and found wanting.
Column by Paul A. Rahe
(My prediction is that the Republicans will win 64 House seats and 8 Senate seats -- tfc)
The portents have been there for a very long time. It all began on 19 February 2009 with a rant on CNBC on the part of Rick Santelli, which struck a nerve and occasioned the birth of the Tea-Party Movement. That the tide might be beginning to turn was made evident in mid-April of that year when the adherents of that movement successfully mounted demonstrations across the entire country, and the Democrats and their minions in the media began denouncing them as Astroturf, Nazis, racists, and tea-baggers. And to anyone who cared to notice, the seriousness of the opposition and the depth of their concern was made manifest that August when constituents confronted their Senators and Congressmen in town halls throughout the land and shouted them down. It was on 2 August 2009 that I first suggested that, if the Republicans embraced the Tea-Party Movement and articulated the grievances that had occasioned its emergence, a genuine political realignment might be in the offing.
As it happened – and it was by and large an accident – the Republicans were well-positioned to take advantage of this political opening. In January, 2009, many of the House Republicans and not a few of their colleagues in the Senate would have been willing to cooperate with the Democrats in promoting the agenda of the Obama administration. In 2008, they had received a drubbing at the polls, and they were appropriately cowed. But, campaign rhetoric aside, no one on the Democratic side was seriously interested in bipartisan accord. They had won the election; they persuaded themselves that they had a mandate; and though President Obama had presented himself to the voting public as a moderate, he and his fellow Democrats had not the slightest intention of seeking the middle ground. In the House, it would not have taken much to swing a sizable group of Republicans behind the Democrats’ program, but Nancy Pelosi was intent on revenge. So, when the so-called “stimulus” bill came up for a vote, she made sure that there were within it no earmarks for the Republicans, and out of pique nearly all of them voted against the measure.
The country owes Obama, Emanuel, Pelosi, and Reid a great deal. They put backbone into Republicans who never knew they had one; they ripped the masks off Democrats who had always posed as moderates, displaying the radicalism of the party’s agenda for one and all to see; and they pursued their ends by means ruthless, transparently corrupt, and tyrannical. Bills were put together in the middle of the night and jammed through the House unread. Corrupt bargains were negotiated in the Senate and awarded colorful and memorable names; and when the public in due course learned of Gator Aid (sometimes called the Florida Flim-Flam), of the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Connecticut Compromise, and the like, they erupted in fury.
Already in November, 2009, it was evident to anyone willing to pay attention that for this there would be hell to pay – for on the first Tuesday of that month, one year ago today, the citizens of Virginia and New Jersey, states that had voted for Barack Obama in 2008, elected Republicans Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie governors with comfortable margins. Then, two-and-a-half months later – after one version of Obamacare had passed the House and another, the Senate – came the Massachusetts miracle on 19 January 2010, when Scott Brown wrested Ted Kennedy’s seat from the Democrats in that left-liberal state by campaigning against Obamacare.
The Democrats had ample warning. On Christmas Eve in 2009, William Daley, brother of the Mayor of Chicago, former Secretary of Commerce, and mastermind of the Chicago machine, emerged from the shadows to tell his fellow Democrats that “the Democratic Party — my lifelong political home — has a critical decision to make: Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.”
The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.
Witness the losses in New Jersey and Virginia in this year’s off-year elections. In those gubernatorial contests, the margin of victory was provided to Republicans by independents — many of whom had voted for Obama. Just one year later, they had crossed back to the Republicans by 2-to-1 margins.
Witness the drumbeat of ominous poll results. Obama’s approval rating has fallen below 49 percent overall and is even lower — 41 percent — among independents. On the question of which party is best suited to manage the economy, there has been a 30-point swing toward Republicans since November 2008, according to Ipsos. Gallup’s generic congressional ballot shows Republicans leading Democrats. There is not a hint of silver lining in these numbers. They are the quantitative expression of the swing bloc of American politics slipping away.
Alluding to Parker Griffith’s defection to the Republicans and to the Democrats who had decided to retire, Daley concluded, they are “the truest canaries in the coal mine.” But, of course, no one listened; and, after Scott Brown took his seat in the Senate, Pelosi and her associates jammed through the House the Senate version of Obamacare and thereby sealed their party’s fate.
No one knows just how big the Republican wave will be today, but there is excellent reason to think that it will dwarf every electoral shift that has taken place since the Second World War. Yesterday, the Gallup organization, which has an impeccable track record in this particular, released its final pre-election generic ballot poll results. They show the Republicans ahead among likely voters by 15% – a greater margin, with the sole exception of the post-Watergate Democratic wave in 1974, than either party has attained in the sixty years in which the Gallup organization has been collecting this sort of information.
What this suggests is that the guess I advanced on 2 September and later reasserted here and here – that the Republicans would pick up between 70 and 100 seats in the House and gain a majority in the Senate – was on the mark.
Today is Judgment Day – and it is easy to see why President Obama plans to leave tomorrow for an extended sojourn abroad. For before he departs he, his administration, and party will be judged by the American people and found wanting.
Column by Paul A. Rahe
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