In the famous story of the Tower of Babel, God is said to have uttered these words" Look, if they can accomplish this, just think what they will do later. Nothing will be impossible for them!"
Of course, the Tower failed, and the corrupt nature of man caused the people of Babel to loose their unity, disperse to all points of the compass and never work together again.
In the Bible story, the advent of new technology in brick-making gave humans the belief that they could build a tower to the sky. Given our ability to raise 200-storey skyscrapers all over the world, it's possible that the technology could have worked. But the cause of this failure was confusion caused by multiple languages. When men could not understand one another, they could not work together. Today, we are on course to witness another failure of another gigantic project caused by another failure of language. This time, the attempt is being made by a huge bureaucracy of men, perhaps as many as half-a-million, and the catastrophe that will ensue will dwarf the Tower of Babel in the histories of project management.
The project is the implementation of national health care in the United States, often called Obamacare. Although there is much political controversy surrounding Obamacare, it will not fail because of politics even though it appears to be quite unpopular. It will fail because of technology, in this case the language of large-scale computers.
Obamacare might survive multi-billion dollar cost over-runs, but it cannot weather a Trillion-dollar over-run. And the implementation of nation-wide Electronic Medical Record-keeping will result in numbers approaching that chasm within 10 years. Why? Because the technological reach of today's IT professionals is exceeded by the grasp of today's bureaucrats. A very large part of the economic benefits of a national health care system, as envisoned by the Progressive politicians who wrote the legal requirements for it, necessarily require global access to patient records, hospital records, pharmacy records, etc. Only when these records are organized and evaluated can individual health care decisions be made by national supervisors, which is essential for any cost savings to be realized. The Affordable Health Care Act mandates the implementation of such a global system, beginning right away.
But building a system like this is beyond anything ever contemplated in business or government. The closest we've come is the Air Traffic Control System, which helps manage 15-20,000 flights per day into and out of 450 airports in the United States alone. It's an amazing system, which has provided a very high level of safety for decades. In fact, much of the system was designed, programmed, implemented and currently runs on 1970's technology! Yet it is straining to maintain its effectiveness; new systems are desperately needed to manage the growth of air travel around the world. It's not broken, yet. But the complexity of an ATC system is nothing compared to a nation-wide health-care records system. No known database can begin to manage the amount of data that will be required for 330 million individuals, even if the record-keeping is distributed to end-points of major population centers.
On paper, such systems can be conceived. But none have ever been built that would meet the requirements for a country our size. Even the Europeans, where nation-wide systems correspond more closely to the size of our states, have only had limited success. Today, our ability to create fictional systems for science fiction movies and congressional staff presentations has fooled many otherwise well-educated people into believing that we actually know how to implement real-time high performance systems for gigantic populations.
Yet the financial objectives of Obamacare cannot be met without a dramatic new systems approach. Of course, this is obvious. Obamacare increases the population served by our healthcare system by 15-20% with no increase in medical personnel or hospitals. The core assumption in Obamacare is the belief that if all practicioners can have access to all patient information, there will be huge savings in diagnosis and testing. Insurance companies (if they continue to offer coverage at all) must price their offerings based on these assumptions. If the assumptions appear to be wrong, the companies will stop writing policies.
How will this unfold? For the next two years, the government will generate hundreds, even thousands of regulations to govern the implementation of Obamacare. Many of these new regulations will require new information collection, storage, distribution, and protection activities in hospitals, pharmacies, clinics, laboratories, and doctor's offices. There will be no compensation for these efforts, so the cost associated with them must be passed on to patients or insurers. The first squealing will be heard next summer as the government unleashes a torrent of specifications for the so-called insurace Exchanges, which will include state-run programs in many states, Federal programs in all others. By law, the Exchanges have to be up and running by 2014. Currently, no state or federal department or contractor is known to be building the IT system for any exchange, even though testing will have to commence within 12 months.
Large-scale systems of this type are comparable to the systems supporting the space program. It took 12 years to build the system used for the Apollo missions, and uncounted hundreds of millions of (1970) dollars were spent on it. The involvement of major contractors, such as IBM, McDonald Douglas and Martin-Marietta was critical. But today, those resources are no longer in place, and it's doubtful they could be brought to bear in a timely fashion, even if there were a single point of decision-making ready to spend the money.
In recent years, the federal government has commissioned several large-scale software implementations. Air Traffic Control is still in design phase. The IRS re-programming was a billion dollar bust. The players are literally going back to the drawing board. In fact, the feds have a long history of failed, expensive program implementations. Obamacare will join the parade.
But the implications are more serious, given the scope of Obamacare. As many as 400,000 employees in the Department of Health and Human Services are on their way to give us National Healthcare, whether we are ready for it or not. Enforcement of Obamacare is delegated to the Internal Revenue Service, where a division of 16,000 agents will be dedicated to the effort.
When the desire the control every aspect of individual health care in a nation of 330 million runs into the reality of unworkable IT systems, Obamacare will start to come apart at the seams. What we will wind up with is a gigantic, unwieldy Medicaid system for about 50 million, with long waits and high overhead, and a private healthcare system for the rest with catastrophic insurance coverage only. Everything else will be pay-as-you-go. In other words, it will look like the U.S. healthcare system of 1950. The bad news is that it will probably take 40-50 years for Obamacare to collapse of its own weight.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
What in hell is going on?
A TOTTERING TECHNOCRACY
by Victor Davis Hanson
We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.
The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.
The financial meltdown here and in Europe revealed symptoms of the technocracy’s waning. On this side of the Atlantic, Geithner, Orszag, Summers, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer apparently assumed that some academic cachet, an award bestowed by like kind, or a long-ago-granted degree should give them credibility to advocate what the tire-store owner, family dentist, or apple farmer knew from hard experience simply could not be done — borrow or print money on the theory that insular experts, without much experience in the world beyond the academy or the New York–Washington financial and government corridor, could best direct it to productive purposes.
But now they have either left government or are no longer much listened to — and some less-well-certified accountant will be left with the task of finding ways to pay back $16 trillion. Abroad, at some point, German clerks and mechanics are going to have to work a year or two past retirement age to pay for those in Greece or Italy who chose to stop working a decade before retirement age — despite all the sophisticated technocratic babble that such arithmetic is reductive and simplistic.
In the devolution from global warming to climate change to climate chaos — and who knows what comes next? — a small group of self-assured professors, politicians, and well-compensated lobbyists hawked unproven theories as fact — as if they were clerics from the Dark Ages who felt their robes exempted them from needing to read or think about their religious texts. Finally, even Ivy League and Oxbridge degrees and peer-reviewed journal articles could not mask the cooked research, the fraudulent grants, and the Elmer Gantry–like proselytizing about everything from tree rings and polar-bear populations to glaciers and the Sierra snowpack. A minor though iconic figure was the truther and community activist Van Jones, the president’s “green czar,” who lacked a record of academic excellence, scientific expertise, or sober and judicious study, assuming instead that a prestigious diploma and government title, a certain edgy and glib disdain for the masses, and media acclaim could permit him to gain lucre and influence by promoting as fact the still unproven.
Higher education is no longer affordable for many families, and does not guarantee well-rounded, well-educated graduates. A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club. An administrator is deemed successful largely for promoting “diversity” — rarely on the basis of whether costs stabilized, graduation rates increased, the need for remediation declined, or post-graduation jobs were assured on his watch. This warped system, which grew out of the bountiful 1960s, is now a vestigial organ, an odd-looking thing without an easily definable purpose. When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?
Kindred media elites in Europe and the United States lauded supposed technocratic expertise without much calibration of achievement. Indeed, to examine the elite media is to unravel the incestuous nature of power marriages and past loyal service to heads of state. Those who praised Obama as a god or attributed their own nervous tics to his omnipresence or reported on his brilliant policies often either had been speechwriters to past liberal presidents, enjoyed family connections, or were married to other New York or Washington journalists or powerbrokers. Their preferences about where to send a kid to school, where to vacation, and what to think were as similar to those they reported on as they were foreign to those who were supposed to listen to them. Like wealthy people in the Middle Ages who bought indulgences instead of truly repenting their sins, the more our elites preached about egalitarian politics for the fly-over upper middle classes, the less badly they felt about their own mannered conniving for privilege and status.
A generation ago, we were supposed to be grateful that a few gifted and disinterested minds were digesting our news for us each day on cash-rich ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, summarized periodically on weekend network discussion groups and in newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek. Now the market share of all these enterprises is shrinking. Some exist only because of government subsidy, rich parent companies, or like-minded wealthy benefactors.
The technocratic pronouncements from on high — that Barack Obama was “sort of GOD,” or at least “the smartest president in history”; that a Harvard-trained public-policy wonk alone knew how to save us from a roasting planet — are now seen by most as laughable. An education-age Reformation is brewing every bit as earth-shattering as its 16th-century religious counterpart.
There are also generic signs of the technocracy’s morbidity. It deeply distrusts democracy, most recently evidenced by John Kerry’s rant that the media should not even cover the Tea Party, and by the European Union’s terror of allowing the public to vote on its intricate financial bandaging. It is no accident that technocratic journalists love autocratic China — with its ability to promote mass transit or solar panels at the veritable barrel of a gun — while hating the Tea Party, which came to legislative power through the ballot box.
So the elites’ furor grows at those who seek and obtain power, exposure, and influence without the proper background, credentials, or attitude. How else to explain why a Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin earns outright hatred, whereas a Mitt Romney or John McCain received only partisan disdain?
There is an embarrassing lack of talent and imagination in the last generation of the technocrats. One banal memo about a “tea-party downgrade” or a “jihadist” takeover of the Republican party is mimicked by dozens of politicians and journalists who cannot think of any more creative phraseology. Calls for civility are the natural accompaniment to unimaginative slurring of those outside the accustomed circle. When Steven Chu exhorts us that gas prices should match European levels or assures us that California farms will blow away, should we laugh or cry? Do learned attorneys general call the nation “cowards,” refer to fellow minority members as “my people,” or really believe that they can try the self-confessed terrorist architect of 9/11 in a civilian court a few yards from the scene of his mass murder? Was Timothy Geithner really indispensable in 2009 because other technocrats swore he was?
We are living in one of the most unstable — and exciting — periods in recent memory, as much of the received wisdom of the last 30 years is being turned upside down. In large part the present reset age arises because our political and cultural leaders exercised influence that by any rational standard they had never earned.
by Victor Davis Hanson
We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.
The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.
The financial meltdown here and in Europe revealed symptoms of the technocracy’s waning. On this side of the Atlantic, Geithner, Orszag, Summers, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer apparently assumed that some academic cachet, an award bestowed by like kind, or a long-ago-granted degree should give them credibility to advocate what the tire-store owner, family dentist, or apple farmer knew from hard experience simply could not be done — borrow or print money on the theory that insular experts, without much experience in the world beyond the academy or the New York–Washington financial and government corridor, could best direct it to productive purposes.
But now they have either left government or are no longer much listened to — and some less-well-certified accountant will be left with the task of finding ways to pay back $16 trillion. Abroad, at some point, German clerks and mechanics are going to have to work a year or two past retirement age to pay for those in Greece or Italy who chose to stop working a decade before retirement age — despite all the sophisticated technocratic babble that such arithmetic is reductive and simplistic.
In the devolution from global warming to climate change to climate chaos — and who knows what comes next? — a small group of self-assured professors, politicians, and well-compensated lobbyists hawked unproven theories as fact — as if they were clerics from the Dark Ages who felt their robes exempted them from needing to read or think about their religious texts. Finally, even Ivy League and Oxbridge degrees and peer-reviewed journal articles could not mask the cooked research, the fraudulent grants, and the Elmer Gantry–like proselytizing about everything from tree rings and polar-bear populations to glaciers and the Sierra snowpack. A minor though iconic figure was the truther and community activist Van Jones, the president’s “green czar,” who lacked a record of academic excellence, scientific expertise, or sober and judicious study, assuming instead that a prestigious diploma and government title, a certain edgy and glib disdain for the masses, and media acclaim could permit him to gain lucre and influence by promoting as fact the still unproven.
Higher education is no longer affordable for many families, and does not guarantee well-rounded, well-educated graduates. A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club. An administrator is deemed successful largely for promoting “diversity” — rarely on the basis of whether costs stabilized, graduation rates increased, the need for remediation declined, or post-graduation jobs were assured on his watch. This warped system, which grew out of the bountiful 1960s, is now a vestigial organ, an odd-looking thing without an easily definable purpose. When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?
Kindred media elites in Europe and the United States lauded supposed technocratic expertise without much calibration of achievement. Indeed, to examine the elite media is to unravel the incestuous nature of power marriages and past loyal service to heads of state. Those who praised Obama as a god or attributed their own nervous tics to his omnipresence or reported on his brilliant policies often either had been speechwriters to past liberal presidents, enjoyed family connections, or were married to other New York or Washington journalists or powerbrokers. Their preferences about where to send a kid to school, where to vacation, and what to think were as similar to those they reported on as they were foreign to those who were supposed to listen to them. Like wealthy people in the Middle Ages who bought indulgences instead of truly repenting their sins, the more our elites preached about egalitarian politics for the fly-over upper middle classes, the less badly they felt about their own mannered conniving for privilege and status.
A generation ago, we were supposed to be grateful that a few gifted and disinterested minds were digesting our news for us each day on cash-rich ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, summarized periodically on weekend network discussion groups and in newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek. Now the market share of all these enterprises is shrinking. Some exist only because of government subsidy, rich parent companies, or like-minded wealthy benefactors.
The technocratic pronouncements from on high — that Barack Obama was “sort of GOD,” or at least “the smartest president in history”; that a Harvard-trained public-policy wonk alone knew how to save us from a roasting planet — are now seen by most as laughable. An education-age Reformation is brewing every bit as earth-shattering as its 16th-century religious counterpart.
There are also generic signs of the technocracy’s morbidity. It deeply distrusts democracy, most recently evidenced by John Kerry’s rant that the media should not even cover the Tea Party, and by the European Union’s terror of allowing the public to vote on its intricate financial bandaging. It is no accident that technocratic journalists love autocratic China — with its ability to promote mass transit or solar panels at the veritable barrel of a gun — while hating the Tea Party, which came to legislative power through the ballot box.
So the elites’ furor grows at those who seek and obtain power, exposure, and influence without the proper background, credentials, or attitude. How else to explain why a Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin earns outright hatred, whereas a Mitt Romney or John McCain received only partisan disdain?
There is an embarrassing lack of talent and imagination in the last generation of the technocrats. One banal memo about a “tea-party downgrade” or a “jihadist” takeover of the Republican party is mimicked by dozens of politicians and journalists who cannot think of any more creative phraseology. Calls for civility are the natural accompaniment to unimaginative slurring of those outside the accustomed circle. When Steven Chu exhorts us that gas prices should match European levels or assures us that California farms will blow away, should we laugh or cry? Do learned attorneys general call the nation “cowards,” refer to fellow minority members as “my people,” or really believe that they can try the self-confessed terrorist architect of 9/11 in a civilian court a few yards from the scene of his mass murder? Was Timothy Geithner really indispensable in 2009 because other technocrats swore he was?
We are living in one of the most unstable — and exciting — periods in recent memory, as much of the received wisdom of the last 30 years is being turned upside down. In large part the present reset age arises because our political and cultural leaders exercised influence that by any rational standard they had never earned.
Monday, August 08, 2011
PRESIDENTIAL FAILURE
Posted 07:08 PM ET from Investors Business Daily
Leadership: If the president meant to calm the markets on Monday, he failed utterly — and no wonder. All he did was make it clear he's completely out of ideas on how to get the economy moving again.
After his televised remarks, the Dow industrial average continued to fall, finishing 5.5% lower. The Nasdaq plummeted 6.9%.
Why should it have been any different? In his brief statement, the only thing President Obama demonstrated was a clueless-ness about the country's current mess — of which the debt downgrade is just the latest example — and an even weaker grasp on how to fix it.
Obama put forward just four "growth" ideas, not one of which will accelerate the snail-paced recovery.
• Raise taxes on the rich. We haven't polled every Keynesian economist alive today, but we're pretty sure few would agree with Obama that raising taxes on the most productive parts of the economy will turbocharge growth. Yet there was Obama once again insisting on it, this time dressed up as "tax reform."
• Spend more on roads. Last year, the White House boasted about the "Summer of Recovery" — saying job growth would accelerate because stimulus-sponsored road projects were kicking into high gear. Didn't happen. In fact, we lost 329,000 jobs between June and September 2010. Why does Obama think a repeat will do any better?
• Extend unemployment benefits. If this were an economy-boosting idea, we'd be in the pink right now, since we've had several extensions over the past two years. Plus, there's the fact that every credible economic study has shown that extending unemployment benefits mainly exacerbates joblessness, encouraging the unemployed to hold off taking that next job.
• Extend the temporary payroll tax cut. The results of this Obama chestnut are in: GDP growth in the first six months was almost flat, despite the alleged economic benefits of the existing temporary payroll tax cut.
It's not as if there aren't solid economy-boosting ideas out there. We've listed several in these pages, among them: cut corporate taxes, rein in the administration's out-of-control regulators, kill ObamaCare, sign the pending free-trade deals, enact tort reform.
The only thing lacking now is a president who is willing to admit that his policies aren't working and who is open to trying something different.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
God Bless the Tea Party
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
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 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
Monday, December 14, 2009
It's Good to be King (sometimes)
For the longest time I have been skeptical about the President's sliding popularity. But I believe we have passed the tipping point now, and we are watching a build-up in momentum that no realistic change in policy can affect. He is doomed, and he will be taking his party down with him in 2010. The numbers below reflect the abandonment of Obama by his own party!
Commentary Magazine reports on Obama's disastrous poll numbers:
Like a Stone
Posted By John Steele Gordon On December 13, 2009
Something interesting is going on. Jennifer this morning reported [1] that Obama had reached a new low in the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll yesterday, at -16. The latest results [2], released a couple of hours ago, show the president at -19 a mere 24 hours later.
Not surprisingly, Obama’s popularity began declining right after Inauguration Day, as the messy reality of actually governing replaced the warm glow of rhetoric. He was at +28 on January 21st but down to +10 a month later. He slipped into negative territory in June, when he was at -2 on June 21st. By November 21st, he was at -13.
But the last week was been brutal: -11 last Monday, -10 on Tuesday, -11 on Wednesday, -12 on Thursday and Friday, -16 on Saturday, -19 today.
Perhaps even worse for Obama has been the sharp decline in the number of those who strongly approve. That number dropped by 4 percentage points this week, from 27 percent to 23 percent, while the strongly disapproving increased an equal amount.
And the decline is across the board: Just 41% of Democrats Strongly Approve while 69% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 21% Strongly Approve and 49% Strongly Disapprove.
Polls, like markets, fluctuate on a daily basis. One day’s or even one week’s change doesn’t amount to much. But the chart below sure looks like a political bear market to me. And in politics, that translates into a loss of power to persuade other politicians to go along. With public approval of the Senate Health Care bill at an all-time low (-32 in the latest CNN poll [3]), it seems as though it will be increasingly difficult for the president to persuade all 60 Democrats and Independents in the Senate to walk that particular plank.
My guess is that if just one of the needed 60 senators were to announce that he or she would not vote for cloture this month, regardless of what Harry Reid comes up with in the next few days, (”I’m in favor of health-care reform, but we need to consider this more carefully” — translation: I like my job and want to keep it) others would quickly follow. That would push it into 2010 and, almost surely, into a richly deserved political oblivion.
Commentary Magazine reports on Obama's disastrous poll numbers:
Like a Stone
Posted By John Steele Gordon On December 13, 2009
Something interesting is going on. Jennifer this morning reported [1] that Obama had reached a new low in the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll yesterday, at -16. The latest results [2], released a couple of hours ago, show the president at -19 a mere 24 hours later.
Not surprisingly, Obama’s popularity began declining right after Inauguration Day, as the messy reality of actually governing replaced the warm glow of rhetoric. He was at +28 on January 21st but down to +10 a month later. He slipped into negative territory in June, when he was at -2 on June 21st. By November 21st, he was at -13.
But the last week was been brutal: -11 last Monday, -10 on Tuesday, -11 on Wednesday, -12 on Thursday and Friday, -16 on Saturday, -19 today.
Perhaps even worse for Obama has been the sharp decline in the number of those who strongly approve. That number dropped by 4 percentage points this week, from 27 percent to 23 percent, while the strongly disapproving increased an equal amount.
And the decline is across the board: Just 41% of Democrats Strongly Approve while 69% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 21% Strongly Approve and 49% Strongly Disapprove.
Polls, like markets, fluctuate on a daily basis. One day’s or even one week’s change doesn’t amount to much. But the chart below sure looks like a political bear market to me. And in politics, that translates into a loss of power to persuade other politicians to go along. With public approval of the Senate Health Care bill at an all-time low (-32 in the latest CNN poll [3]), it seems as though it will be increasingly difficult for the president to persuade all 60 Democrats and Independents in the Senate to walk that particular plank.
My guess is that if just one of the needed 60 senators were to announce that he or she would not vote for cloture this month, regardless of what Harry Reid comes up with in the next few days, (”I’m in favor of health-care reform, but we need to consider this more carefully” — translation: I like my job and want to keep it) others would quickly follow. That would push it into 2010 and, almost surely, into a richly deserved political oblivion.
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