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January 20, 2008
Campaign Season: this Week's Blog
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO The Corner
January 20
McCain Agonistes
Ever since I wrote a favorable column about John McCain, I have been swamped with furious email from outraged conservatives, alleging this and that, and going through in systematic fashion the usual litany — McCain-Feingold, illegal immigration, tax cuts, global warming, etc. McCain seems to anger many conservatives as much as, or more than, Hillary.
Collating this anger, and comparing it to the anti-McCain NRO Corner postings the last two weeks — all in the context of McCain winning a conservative state last night, and leading in many of the polls in Florida — reminds me of the train wreck facing the Republican party of whether they might want a 1964 washout or to maintain the White House. I think a growing consensus is that McCain, and perhaps Giuliani, alone have an outside shot of edging out Clinton and/or Obama.
Some observations:
1. McCain is starting to show a certain attraction to many bedrock conservatives that must be based on his war record and service, and this trumps their worries about his less than conservative fides — or at least allows them to accept McCain's won't-make-that-mistake-again changed views on closing the border, tax cuts, etc. Privately many conservative voters have looked at the polls and know McCain does best against the Democrats.
2. While those conservatives who support either McCain or Giuliani would probably vote for a Republican ticket headed by Romney or Thompson (not sure entirely about Huckabee), the inverse is not necessarily true at this point. In these angry emails I receive, there are the usual threats that if McCain is nominated, they will sit out. I doubt that, but right now that seems to be the braggadacio.
3. It seems that Romney, Thompson, and Huckabee supporters might at least consider that there is a chance that McCain will be nominated and these "I'll sit it out" conservatives should begin thinking of the consequences of Presidents Hillary and Bill. My guess is that McCain could still unify the party, if he (1) offers some informal assurances about illegal immigration and taxes, and does an "inoperative" on McCain-Feingold; (2) has frank discussions with the conservative media such as Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. and takes his medicine without losing his temper; (3) promises a hard conservative as VP. McCain's conservative ratings, after all, are in the 80s, he is rock solid on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he wants a balanced budget, and is now against blanket amnesty and "comprehensive" reform — and looks like he is the leader to gain the nomination and simultaneously infuriate base conservatives.
Otherwise, we are about 1/3 the way through a Greek tragedy, in which the fated catastrophic denouement is known, but can't be prevented.
Friday, January 18
California Blues
Our poor state is $14 billion plus now in the red, and the Governator has promised no new taxes, wise inasmuch as our sales and income taxes are already among the highest in the country. The University of California system is panicking and sending out emails to us alums, to march en masse on Sacramento for redress!
But lost in the furor is any self-reflection, such as why would UC Davis recently pay John Edwards, multimillionaire trial lawyer, $50,000 plus to give a brief lecture on poverty? Such questions are never answered, much less raised, since the problem is always framed as a matter of a shortage of income, never a surfeit of unnecessary expenditure.
We in California, given the past budget implosions, know the script to follow. We expect that police, fire, prisons, parks, etc. will be threatened with cut-backs and closure while the state-funded "Center for this" and the "Department of that" will remain untouched, since cutting the essential while protecting the politically-correct superfluous is the only way to scare the voter and achieve higher taxes.
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world's richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace — and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation's largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Friday, January 18
Clinton Entitlement
One of the strangest things of this strange campaign is how all the politically-correct chickens are coming home to roost atop Sen. Clinton, and in the process revealing much about the elite liberal mindset. Even the famed Clinton racial fides is now being questioned, as she resorts, albeit in convoluted similes to Martin Luther King, to playing the race competency card — only to get slapped back over the head with it by the identity politics of Sen. Obama.
For years the Clintons have pandered to the National Council of La Raza; now an ad — in Spanish no less! — is accusing her of all sorts of illiberal things in Nevada. It is almost as if an entirely new generation has tragically forgotten that angry, finger-pointing Bill was once our first "black" president, and won "access" for poorer voters through his "motor-voter" legislation, and helped keep our borders open by suggesting anyone who objected was less than liberal.
But as Bill pointed out, the real sin was that Obama did not, as Bill supposedly magnanimously had done in 1988, "wait" his turn.
Translated that means that the Clinton hierarchy was to get a total of 16 years, and then, and only then, could others in line have their day.
Such a sense of entitlement and maternalism was bound to turn nuclear when an unapproved minority candidate decided to run, especially an Obama with far greater wit, savvy, and rhetorical skills than Hillary. If it is a question of winning only by demonizing Obama as the minority candidate with pizzazz but not the acumen of a sober and judicious and experienced pro like Hillary, then we know what's coming — though done artfully through surrogates like successful black executives, and through properly tasteful off-the-record asides or lip-biting metaphors.
January 18
Reagan
My dear friend and colleague Peter Robinson did not quite read what I wrote; after explaining why Reagan was a great president, I qualified his pragmatism by using adverbs like "reluctantly" and qualifiers like "faced with congressional and popular opposition, he relented".
I don't think anything I wrote about immigration, tax increases, Supreme Court appointments, Lebanon, Iran-Contra, or advocacy for global nuclear disarmament" was either factually incorrect, or cited gratuitously to denigrate Reagan, but rather to show that a visionary once in office, and often in a minority in a tripartite system of government had to, well, govern and that meant a lot of both compromises and mistakes — which is exactly not what we’re hearing from the candidates who bash each with allegations of contemporary various sins with the club of Reagan purity.
I can and certainly would agree that none of the present cohort has either Reagan's conservative vision or his rhetorical skills, but unfortunately that distinction is not made, much less is the quite different landscape of 1980. Instead in ahistorical fashion, Reagan has become a sort of divine barometer that is unfair both to Reagan the man and the candidates themselves.
So there is a sort of Orwellian group-think going on where a candidate starts in on a ranting exaggerated indictment such as "[my opponent] has raised taxes, shown himself to be naive on foreign policy, appointed less than genuine conservative judges, and supported the biggest amnesty bill in history — and what we need to do is to go back and follow Ronald Reagan."
Contrast this with the relative silence about the remarkable, indeed historic ongoing turn-around in Iraq, and the brilliant Sherman-like role of David Petraeus, and the credit due George Bush for finding the right general and not bailing on Iraq when many in his party were suggesting just that.
January 14, 2008
Hillary and Race
It may or may not be Hillary's intent to deprecate in stereotype fashion the role of black rhetoric in galvanizing change by pointing out that LBJ, not Martin Luther King Jr., is to be given the greater credit for enacting civil-rights legislation. But it is a losing argument for her against Obama, and she makes things much worse every time she or Bill dredge it up for at least several reasons.
First LBJ, the legal reformer, would have never have become the born-again civil-rights advocate (cf. his earlier career as a supporter of the Texas status quo), without the pressure from the movement inspired by King. King's job was to move public opinion, LBJ's to reflect — and capitalize on — those new realities.
Two, it is always a bad idea to praise LBJ at the expense of MLK. Rightly or wrongly, most Americans look back in horror at the former, and fondly at the latter. She's riding the wrong horse, and doesn't seem to grasp that fact.
Third, Hillary's paradigm confirms the complaints of racial stereotyping — white pros like herself and LBJ do the "real" work of intricate legislative craftsmanship, while black "inspirational" leaders, such as Obama and MLK, with no aptitude for detail or complex law, give fiery speeches and protest about unfairness.
Fourth, it flies in the face of facts that Obama, the Harvard law graduate and senator from Illinois, can only inspire and not understand or promote law.
She and Bill obviously think that they've so cemented the issue of the Clintons as our first Black Presidents that their racial fides is above suspicion. It isn't; and the Obama the soul speaker vs. Hillary the brainy insider is a lose / lose / lose /lose proposition. I'm surprised that her handlers haven't muzzled altogether the Clintoni on this issue.
January 14
Re: "They Follow Everything That I Say."
Bill's narcissism must be rubbing off. Hillary predicted that if we would just elect her, then Middle-East oil prices would drop ("I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil").
Now she has another first-person claim about the surge — which she both opposed and then slandered its architect, Gen. Petraeus ("suspension of disbelief") — that Hillary herself, not the U.S. military, explains the success of the strategy:
And I believe in large measure because the Iraqi government, they watch us, they listen to us. I know very well that they follow everything that I say. And my commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009 is a big factor, as it is with Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, those of us on the Democratic side.
After single-handedly solving the oil crisis and winning the war, can we expect next similar cosmic claims that she invented the Internet?
January 14
Cutting Taxes Is Critical
The candidates haven’t had much discussion about why they should cut taxes as much as possible.
The Bush tax cuts created more, not less, revenue. They were slurred only because spending during the first term vastly outpaced the rate of inflation — in part due to the wars, the dislocations from 9/11, and new entitlements (e.g., prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, etc) that led to rising deficits. Tax cuts have to be coupled with either spending restraint or cuts, or the additional revenue gained is forgotten when sums far vaster are spent.
Here in California we are back to the mega-deficits of 2003, largely as a result of out-of-control spending. Rarely do the conservative candidates explain why we should all be against tax increases, which are tell-tale signs that something has gone vastly wrong in our civilization. Fixed sales or income rates that were fine in the 1950s or 1960s should provide enough revenue as population increases, the economy grows, and more taxpayers make more money and thus pay more taxes. But when the rates climb it is also an indication of either mismanagement or a radically redefined view of expansive government that is now asked to take on responsibilities never before envisioned — or usually both.
One small example: The CSU and UC systems of university education in California are constantly complaining that they are broke, even though tax rates of almost all sorts, or “fees” have climbed in the last 15 years, and the state has collected record amounts of revenue. It is easy to see why the appetite is never satiated, when an average campus now has “Centers” for almost anything under the sun — from reading remediation, to women’s health problems, to migrant education, to disability centers, to day-care, to psychiatric counseling, to minority affairs, and on and on.
In the old days, most of what these programs — usually each has a professor in charge with release time, secretaries, an office, and a non-professorial manager — now claim to address either fell under class-time instruction (learn how to read well in an English class), private conversation (a professor might advise a student during office hours), or were the purview of the individual (plan with your family for baby-sitting). But as the university absorbed these chores, it, of course, was chronically broke, and the consumer of its new services was not thankful, but constantly agitating for even more to meet an expanding appetite and sense of entitlement.
With budgets under stress, administrators usually understood two things: (1) The public could care less whether the center for migrant education was cut, but it did care far more when Russian languages or engineering classes were dropped. Thus the latter are more likely to be threatened with extinction to scare the taxpayer; (2) the constituency for these therapeutic centers and studies programs are highly political in a way a Russian professor or an engineer is not, and thus administrators don’t touch them, since it is a lose/lose situation.
All this is a long way of saying that once income or sales taxes are continually raised it is a referendum on society as a whole that goes way beyond the incentive-killing effect of higher taxes. We turn over our individualism and autonomy to a professional drone class of managers who are usually without audit and counterproductive in almost everything they touch.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson