Canadian Cincinnatus

Why the left is out to get Herman Cain

The first and foremost reason is that having a black opponent will upset Barack Obama’s reelection strategy, which is to promiscuously play the race card against the Republican nominee: every time the GOP contender criticizes Obama, it can only be because he is raciiist. They can’t do that if Cain were the nominee. Or rather, they can and they will, but every time a white MSM reporter/Obama water carrier calls Herman Cain an anti-black racist, he look like an idiot.

The second, and more revealing, reason is that the existence of Herman Cain offends them - offends them personally. To many liberals, they measure their own virtue by how much they care about various designated victim groups, groups such as blacks, women, homosexuals, etc. So every time a member of one of these groups plays the victim card, it affirms their own saintliness: “See, look how bad society treats [member of victim group]. Good thing there are people like me to show compassion to the less fortunate.” And since compassion doesn’t require any effort on their part, the whole racket is very convenient.

But what if a member of a designated victim group refuses to play ball? Even worse, what if a victim group member tells the white liberals to stick their condescending paternalism where the sun don’t shine because it actually damages the interests of individual members of those groups? Now, a monkey wrench is thrown into the whole works. Their – their own personal – goodness is called into question. How dare they! 

That’s what conservative like Herman Cain and Allen West do to white liberals. And for that matter, what Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin do to feminists. For our emotionally crippled elites, it's personal regarding people like Herman Cain.

 

Herman Cain’s competitors lose by exposing Cain’s past indiscretions

According to National Review’s Jim Geraghty, Herman Cain isn’t exactly suffering from the sexual harassment controversy he finds himself embroiled in. After allegations of harassment surfaced by Politico earlier this week, Cain now leads polls nationally, in Iowa and in South Carolina. In addition, his campaign is also benefiting from a money bomb.

Why is this happening? Specifically, why isn’t this scandal hurting him?

I think it is because conservatives really hate the mainstream media for the hit jobs they perpetrate on good conservatives. They saw what the MSM did to Clarence Thomas, George W Bush, Dick Cheney and especially Sarah Palin, and they really, really don’t like it. Their natural (and proper) instinct is to sympathise with the victim and rally to their defence, which is what they are doing in this case – with gusto. 

So will it hurt Cain in the long run? I think that depends on how serious Herman Cain’s improprieties were 15 years ago when these things allegedly happened. If it turns out that he merely acted obnoxiously around some female employees, I don’t think very much at all. As well, any moral outrage that the scandal has stirred up will subside by the time New Hampshire votes. As well, I think many people realize that anti-sexual harassment statutes are intrusive, left-wing laws that criminalize bad manners and victimize good people.

(Incidentally, this is why I believe the Republicans made a strategic error by going after Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinski affair. The public rallied to Clinton’s defence because the scandal illustrated the intrusive, big brother aspects to sexual harassment laws. If the Republican Congress had been smart, they would have demanded a repeal of these statutes, forcing Clinton to choose between hypocrisy and throwing his feminist allies under the bus.)

Of course, if it turns out Cain did have an affair - or worse, he had tried to leverage power for sexual favours - all bets are off. But fortunately, we will likely have a good idea of the truth by the time the Republican primaries begin.

Which is why I believe the source for the original Politico story was one of Cain’s fellow competitors and not the Democrats. The Obama campaign has nothing to gain by releasing such information now. How does stopping a damaged-goods contender from getting the GOP nomination help him? It is in Obama’s best interest to hope Cain gets nominated so that he can ambush him with the story two weeks before the general election, giving him no time to recover.   

In contrast, it is in the interest of Cain’s GOP adversaries to hit him with it now so as to halt his building momentum. This is why I think Romney, Perry or one of the others Republican candidates is responsible for this too-clever-by-a-half strategy. 

Which candidate leaked the story?

Here’s a hint: According to a follow-up Politico story, a GOP pollster from Texas, Chris Wilson, says he witnessed the harassment personally. Politico says this about Wilson:

“Wilson is a Rick Perry supporter and does polling for a Super PAC that supports the Texas governor's presidential bid.”

On the other hand, Free Republic says Wilson is closely connected to Karl Rove, who supports Romney.

If Romney and Perry were really smart, they would rally loudly and publicly to Cain’s defense. As a consequence they would look magnanimous and demonstrate that they stand against the mainstream media, because right now - among likely GOP primary voters - it is they who are under suspicion.

George Will: “Conservatives should rejoice” over Occupy Wall Street movement

In a perceptive article, George Will makes the following point about the ultimate consequences of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

“Conservatives should rejoice and wish for it long life, abundant publicity and sufficient organization to endorse congressional candidates deemed worthy.”

“From 1965 through 1968, the left found its voice and style in consciousness-raising demonstrations and disruptions. In November 1968, the nation, its consciousness raised, elected Richard Nixon President and gave 56.9 percent of the popular vote to Nixon or George Wallace. Republicans won four of the next five presidential elections.”

Will makes many interesting points in this article so please go and read the whole thing, but it seems to me that this is his most important point: the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is a gross political miscalculation by the left.

Many commentators on the left note that OWS is the left’s equivalent of the Tea Party, clearly assuming that, as the Tea Party propelled the GOP to midterm victory in November 2010, OWS may similarly propel the Democrats to victory next November. As George Will pointed out, this hope is completely misplaced.

They are wrong because the Tea Parties, contrary to the vicious MSM demonization campaign, are infused with middle class sensibilities. The Tea Partiers were orderly, polite and cleaned up after themselves. Their ranks are composed of working people, or the recently unemployed who only want honest work. In contrast, the OWS is composed of anarchists, communists and other extremists who revel in violent confrontation and clearly enjoy subverting public order with activities like illegally occupying public spaces for extended periods. Ordinary nonpolitical people can sympathize with Tea Partiers but recoil in horror at the ostentatious radicalism on display at the OWC ‘sit-ins’. I think the average nonpolitical American has the same sentiments about OWC that boxer Joe Louis had about the Third Reich when he publicly told Adolph Hitler, “there is nothing wrong with America that you can fix.”

If you don’t believe me - or George Will - or Joe Louis - then perhaps you should reread Saul Alinsky. He made the same point in Rules for Radicals. He thought the long hair, the flag burning and dirty clothes were about the worst things the left did to themselves. Right away they drove a wedge between themselves and The People. No wonder they lost, Alinsky concluded. 

That the Alinskyite, Barack Obama, does not see this and instead appears to welcome the coming of the OWC movement is a testament to the fact that he has completely lost whatever political touch that he once had in 2008. 

 

Obama might pull out

Yesterday, Bill Clinton’s strategist, Dick Morris wrote an article speculating that President Obama’s name might not even be on the ballot in 2012 because he might withdraw it.

“As bad news piles up for the Democrats, I asked a top Democratic strategist if it were possible that President Obama might ‘pull a Lyndon Johnson’ and soberly face the cameras, telling America that he has decided that the demands of partisan politics are interfering with his efforts to right our economy and that he has decided to withdraw to devote full time to our recovery. His answer: ‘Yes. It’s possible. If things continue as they are and have not turned around by January, it is certainly possible.’”

This echoes what I said in a Feb 2010 column on this blog:

“Interestingly enough, I think there is a fourth option that neither President Obama nor Charles Krauthammer have considered, that Obama might be a one-term president because his name will not be on the ballot again. It has struck me that besides his left-wing idealism, another core theme running through his personality is a delicate narcissism. When he ran for President, he was a blank slate and, as Chairman Mao once put it, “on a blank sheet of paper the most beautiful poems can be written.” And so it was. Everybody wrote their own beautiful poem on the bank slate called candidate Obama. In this way he became the Messiah, the One. If nothing else, the election campaign of 2008 was a great ego pump. But who will he be in 2012? Not a blank slate. No, instead of offering vague platitudes, he will have to defend the messy details of his record as President. Does Obama want that role? Or more to the point, is he any good at it? Bill Clinton could bob and weave and let the water run down his back like a duck, but can Obama do that? I don’t think so. He certainly hasn’t shown any skill at this. I think he might take the easy way out - declare victory as a good one-term President and ignominiously depart the scene.”

One of the things I based my assessment of was the possibility of a second recession coming up in 2012 caused by Obama’s anti-business policies and, even more importantly, by the stagflation induced by ‘Helicopter Ben’ Bernanke’s printing press.

Fortunately and unfortunately, respectively, I may be right on both counts.

 

The six requirements for a presidential candidate

Michael Ledeen lists his six requirements for a presidential candidate:

“Most of the time, we elect either state governors or generals who have won wars.  There are good and obvious reasons: We want leaders who have executive experience making difficult decisions, whether on the political or military battlefield, leaders who know how to manage a large and complex enterprise, leaders who have dealt with internal and external criticism, and who have kept together sometimes-fractious teams of advisers, colleagues and subordinates.”

“Second:  I don’t want someone from business who has no experience in politics or the military; the worlds are too different, and we don’t have time for the next president to learn the basic rules.

Third:  I don’t want a legislator whose career has been almost exclusively in politics. Congressmen and senators only give speeches. If the speech doesn’t work out too well, they give a different one next time, they rarely pay a meaningful price for getting it wrong. And they don’t have management experience, they’ve never been tested as leaders.”

“Fourth: I have a strong preference for someone who has failed, learned from failure, and overcome it. One of my heroes is Thomas Edison, whose search for a workable filament for the first electric light bulb produced thousands of failures. He delighted in them, learning from each one. We are fallible; our presidents are going to make mistakes. I want a president who knows that going in, and who is quick to spot his blunder and will look for a better way.”

“Fifth and closely related to #4:  I don’t want a ditherer, I want a decision-maker. Years ago I asked one of my favorite Americans — a great success in business — how he’d done it. ‘Well it certainly wasn’t brain power,’ he said (he’d had a mediocre college record at a middling school). ‘The most important thing was to keep making decisions. I knew most of them would be wrong, so I watched for them to fail, and then tried something else.’”

“Sixth:  I don’t want someone who is obsessed with doing the ‘right and proper and good thing.’ Sometimes there is no good option and the president will have to choose among various poor, and sometimes even evil, options. It’s a legitimate and urgent choice, and I want a president who will make the best choice available. The president has to make some tough decisions. Sometimes they are terrible decisions. But they have to be made.”

“In tough times like today’s, those who have had to make such decisions are more often than not military leaders, and  I am convinced that the best group of contemporary Americans are those who have been in war. I’m delighted to see veterans winning political office, and we may yet see a presidential candidate emerge from their ranks, either this time around or in the near future.”

I suspect conservatives would be enthusiastic about items 1, 3, 4 and 5, but especially 3. Pure legislators know nothing about leadership and they are often little more than influence peddlers and panderers.

With regard to item 1, I have always felt that one area where American political life is superior to Canada is the Americans preference for making governors presidents. Canadians have never chosen a provincial premier to lead our country. We tend to select leading MPs and – in the long run - are poorer for it.

I also suspect conservatives are less enthusiastic about points 2 and 6, but especially 2. In spite of being a conservative, I nevertheless agree with both points, but most especially #2.

Ledeen is right, business is too different from politics for the experience to translate. In a legal dispute between businessmen, the businessman’s instinct is, that beyond a certain point, it is better to split the difference so that everybody can go back to making money. After all, fighting is bad for business. This is the correct attitude in private life because wealth creation is a positive sum game. Politics is much more zero sum: if I am to win two seats, you must lose two. Not understanding this, businessmen-politicians routinely surrender when they think they are compromising (cf Mitt Romney).

Another thing businessmen don’t get is the central role played by emotions and symbols in politics. You see it all the time when some business type, commenting on politics, fails to see a symbolic victory as a real victory and a symbolic defeat as a real defeat. What the businessman-politician does not understand is what the prize of politics really is - the hearts and minds of the voters. If your voters are hopeful and your opponent’s are dejected, you are winning. If your voters are demoralized, you lose.

 

How Obama is short-changing the middle class and how the GOP could benefit from it, if they were smart

One mistake that free market proponents often make is that they conflate free markets with the capitalists who run the free markets. The two are not the same thing, especially with regard to business leaders at the high end. Plutocrats like Warren Buffet and GE’s Gerry Immelt are almost as political as they are business.

The dirty little secret of big business is that it doesn’t much like free enterprise. Why would they? When you are at the top, competition is bad for business. They can’t rise too much further but they sure have a long way to drop if a leaner, hungrier and smarter competitor comes along. As a result, from the perspective of their self-interest, it is much easier (and safer) for them to use their influence to pass laws that kneecap their competitors more than they kneecap them. If you are smart, you can also get showered with taxpayer money. This is why big business is often in bed with socialist politicians (cf GE and Obama). The baby they produce is called crony capitalism. 

GE doesn’t mind anti-free market legislation like cap and trade because they will get all kinds of perks such as windmill contracts, and a ban on cheap light bulbs (which forces the public to replace them with more expensive substitutes). For Goldman Sachs, things are even better. The Fed loans them money at almost 0% interest, and they turn around and loan it to Tim Geithner for a percent more. No effort, guaranteed results and - because the sums are so huge - so are the profits. And best of all, the government implicitly insures them against failure because they are ‘too big to fail’.

The problem is, as Joel Kotkin points out, that the middle class in the US is really hurting. That is because the anti-business climate Obama has fostered has hit hard the upstart competitors that provide most of the new jobs.

This should be a golden opportunity for Republicans because the interests of the middle class are almost perfectly aligned with the GOP’s free market principles. But only if GOP’s overall theme is insiders vs. outsiders, not government vs. private sector. Such a message would allow them to point out all the cushy connections between the big banks and the Obama administration. And when Obama talks about taxing “millionaires and billionaires” they should point out that this group of people includes not just Paris Hilton but almost every employer. Why is there persistent high unemployment? Answer: because the President is at war with the people who might otherwise be hiring them. When Obama talks about outsourcing jobs overseas, they should point out something Thomas Sowell said: 

President Obama's rhetoric deplores such "outsourcing," but his administration's policies make outsourcing an ever more attractive alternative to investing in the United States and creating American jobs.

In other words, every law and regulation Obama has added has helped push jobs away from America’s shores.

For a concrete example, take the aircraft plant Boeing built in South Carolina that might employ 2,000. Obama’s National Labor Relations Board is burning the midnight oil to make sure those people stay out of work.

The unemployment will continue as long as the populist anti-business bombast continues.

 

How to balance the US budget painlessly

When writing about pressing problems in current events, pundits have a tendency towards the apocalyptic. We see serious issues and assume they will end very badly or that the situation will be resolved by a paradigm-shifting Gotterdammerung that will change everything. 

Normally, what transpires is that a few things change - some for the better and some for the worse – and humanity just muddles on through to the next catastrophe.

The current US debt crisis is such a crisis. We think the US budget will blow up and change everything (just like we thought 9/11 would change everything) but I think people are overreacting. If you look at current budget situation: yes, it is serious; but no, it isn’t world changing. The reason is that the impediments to the solution are almost entirely artificial, i.e. political. In reality, balancing the US budget can be done with these changes, none of which are gut wrenching to the average American:

1. Reduce discretionary spending to 2008 levels. As 2008 was the last year of the George W Bush spending spree, 2008 was hardly a year of frugality. In reality, the budget could cut to 2004 levels with little pain felt on Main Street. But all that needs to be done is to reduce discretionary spending to 2008 levels and keep it there for a decade (i.e. discretionary spending increases kept to below GDP growth). This is not privation, political howls of dooma and gloom notwithstanding.

2. Implement pro-growth tax policies. Much of the current deficit is caused by a combination of a loss of income tax revenue corresponding with an increase in social spending due to the Great Recession. Medicare, AFDC, Section 8 vouchers, food stamps, unemployment insurance: all of these programs have grown by 50% or more in the past 3 years.

As Arthur Laffer once pointed out, you can’t balance the budget on the unemployed. To get the US out of the recession you must stimulate growth. You can do that by cutting income taxes for employers (i.e. the millionaires and billionaires who make more than $250K a year), slashing the corporate tax rate in half, slashing capital gains taxes in half and eliminating the estate tax.

The trick here is to not wimp out with populist anti-rich measures. When the liberals assert that the Bush tax cuts reduced federal revenue, they are half right. The Bush tax cuts to the middle class did indeed reduce revenue. In contrast, the Bush tax cuts to wealth creators was a spectacular revenue generator. Right now, the bottom 50% of Americans pays no income tax. They don’t need a tax cut (in fact, they need to start paying some income tax). It is the employers who need to be unshackled.

Do that and the unemployment rate will drop while tax revenues soar. As a bonus, mandated spending on the aforementioned welfare programs will plummet.

3. Deregulate as much as possible. There are so many counterproductive regulations on the books (Dodd-Frank, Community Reinvestment Act, etc.) that this is really fertile ground. Deregulation cuts government spending (enforcement costs) while simultaneously unshackling the economy. Another win-win.

4. Eliminate Obamacare.

5. To tame social security, take a page from the Paul Ryan plan and increase the retirement age by 1 month every year until the retirement age is 68. This change of 3 years will take 36 years to phase in but it will single-handedly make social security solvent again. How much will a 64 year old suffer if he as to wait an extra month for his first social security cheque. 

Answer: very little.

6. Introduce medical savings accounts, means tests and other market reforms to provide downwards pressure on the cost of medical services.

None of these steps, taken individually or together would cause much pain to the average American. In fact, they will relieve a lot of pain because the unemployment rate will drop. They will not fundamentally change the nature of American government or society, except to close a $1.5 trillion gap in the federal budget.

Not that implementing these things will be simple. It will be anything but simple and it will require an iron will among some of America’s leaders. It is just that the pain inflicted will be largely confined to those of America’s ruling class who rely on pork payoffs to stay in office.

Which is of course why none of these sensible reforms have been enacted yet.

To win the debt limit debate you must personalize it

The problem for Republicans is that the debt limit debate is too abstract for many American voters to really understand. What they see is unpleasant: noisy, squalid negotiations that seem to go on forever. So when President Obama says, just raise the debt ceiling so that government can continue to function until after, oh say, Nov 2012, many members of the public, particularly those for whom politics is not a central interest, are sympathetic: “a year and a half of peace and quiet, sounds good to me.”

Part of the reason for this sentiment is the numbers involved are incomprehensibly large. How big is a trillion anyway? - that is 1,000,000,000,000. To get to the disinterested ‘moderate’ voters, the deficit hawks must personalize the debate.

To do that, you have to make this argument: there are roughly 308 million people in the US; $1 trillion in debt translates into roughly $5,000 of debt for every man, woman and child; the $14.5 trillion federal debt translates into a debt of roughly $47,000 for every American; the federal government accumulates $1.5 trillion in debt every year; if the debt limit is raised as president Obama would like and the government continues to spend at its current rate, that means an additional $11K of debt for every person. That is money you - yes you, I’m talking to you – have to eventually pay. If you have a family with 2 kids, that means your family – your family – must pay an additional fourth-four thousand dollars over and above any debt that you have accumulated for yourselves and that the federal government has already accumulated for you. 

At some point, a compromise on the dent ceiling will be reached. Who wins in that compromise depends on who wins the hearts and minds of the public. Why isn’t anybody in Washington making arguments like this?

So what if 2012 turns out like 1996?

Many conservative commentators are worried that the 2012 election will turn out like 1996, which saw Bill Clinton recover from the 1994 Republican landslide.

Personally, I doubt it. In 1996, unemployment was low, and falling; economic growth was strong and accelerating; gas prices were low and going nowhere; and Ross Perot siphoned off 8.4% of the total vote from hapless Bob Dole, the most lacklustre Republican Presidential candidate since Gerald Ford. None of these conditions (except for maybe the last – if Mitt Romney wins the nomination) obtain today. But even with all of this going in his favour, President Clinton still had to clinch the deal by passing comprehensive welfare reform (at the urging of Dick Morris). Can you imagine Barack Obama doing something comparable? I can’t. It’s simply not in his gene pool. And who is his Dick Morris anyway?

But still, what if Obama pulls off an Arkansas comeback? Would that be so bad?

I don’t think so. Lets look at the aftermath of 1996 to see why: first and foremost, the federal budget got balanced; second, the Republicans retained control of Congress for another 10 years; third, the GOP remained dominant in the state houses and governors mansions; fourth, capital gains taxes were cut; fifth, deregulation continued; and sixth, no more radical left-wing agenda items were enacted. So exactly in what way was 1996 good for Democrats?

It was certainly good for one Democrat, who got to stay in the White House for another 4 years (though at the height of the Monica Lewinski scandal he might have thought otherwise). But other than Bill Clinton, the aftermath of 1996 was a nightmare for the Democrat Party, both politically and policy-wise.

While I believe the possibility of Obama becoming a born-again pragmatic conservative is slim, conservatives should not be afraid of a 1996-like outcome. Personally, I think 1996 – in all its manifestations – would be a pretty good result, all things considered.

Illegal immigration from Mexico declining rapidly: a lesson for Mark Steyn

This from esteemed commentator, Michael Barone:

“From 1980 to 2008, more than 5 million Mexicans legally entered the United States. And Mexicans account for about 60 percent of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today.

Immigration policymakers have assumed that the flow of Mexican immigrants would continue indefinitely at this high level. But now evidence is accumulating that this vast surge of migration is ending. 

The Pew Hispanic Center, analyzing Census statistics, has estimated that illegal Mexican entrants have been reduced from 525,000 annually in the 2000-04 years to 100,000 in 2010.

‘The flow has already stopped,’ Douglas Massey of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton recently told The New York Times. ‘The net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.’"

“The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the 2010 illegal population at 11.2 million, down from the 2007 peak of 12.0 million and just about the same level as in 2005. It's probably lower today.

Even more important, things have changed in Mexico. Its birth rate has fallen from 7 children per woman in 1971 to 3.2 in 1990 and 2 in 2010, barely enough to prevent population loss.”

“Mexico has finally become a majority middle-class country, former Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda argues in his recent book ‘Manana Forever?’ Mexico has more cars and television sets than households now, most Mexicans have credit cards, and there are almost as many cell phones as people.”

“The historic experience has been that countries cease generating large numbers of immigrants when they reach a certain economic level, as Germany did in the 1880s. Mass migration from Puerto Rico, whose residents are U.S. citizens, ended in the early 1960s, when income levels reached one-third of those on the mainland.”

I bring this up for two reasons:

First, this is a complete surprise to me. Everything else I have read led to believe that illegal aliens were overrunning the US from Mexico. Apparently those writers who are predicting that America will be run over by Mexicans are still stuck in 2007.

Second, and more importantly, this is a good cautionary tale for apocalyptic demographers like Mark Steyn, who take exponential trends (all demographic trends are exponential), extrapolate them into the future several decades and predict the end of the world as we know it.

As economist Thomas Sowell once noted, if you take a physical trend – any physical trend, no matter what it is – and extrapolate it linearly into the future, the result will be catastrophe. Sowell’s point, of course, is not that the world is bound to end but that linear extrapolation of physical trends beyond the very near future (i.e. nowcasting) is invalid. The world just doesn’t work like that. Sowell made this point to counter the predictions by environmentalists of widespread famine and oil shortages by the mid 1980’s.

It strikes me that when Mark Steyn predicted the Eupocalypse in America Alone, he made the same mistake that Paul Ehrlich did in his book, The Population Bomb, only in reverse. If extrapolating linearly into the future is an inaccurate technique, then extrapolating exponentially into the future is doubly bad.

I know these criticisms of Mark Steyn will get some pushback from Steyniacs in the comments section so I want to head some of this criticism off at the pass. Do not think I am a pro-immigration type. I am not. I would like to see illegal immigration eliminated and legal immigration significantly reduced (both here and in the US) in order for the melting pot to have a chance to integrate everybody into the body politic. Rather, what I am is anti-doom-mongering.  

I actually enjoyed America Alone and think it serves as a good cautionary tale. My only point is that it is not a forecast. I look at it like those Congressional Budget Office projections that predict that the US federal debt will exceed the world's GDP by 2050 (or whenever). These projections are good to demonstrate the absurdity and, oh what's the word for it - oh yes, sustainability of the current trends, but most assuredly they are not accurate forecasts, mostly because the very trends they highlight will create countervailing forces that will decisively change the course of the US.

To put it another way, consider a cohort of 100 people in one generation. If those 100 people produce 99 children, we are in a demographic death spiral, and if those 100 people produce 101 children, we are in a population explosion. If we follow the extrapolation logic of both Ehrlich and Steyn, our thinking must oscillate wildly between a Steynian apocalypse and a Club of Rome apocalypse. Only if those 100 people produce 100.0 children is there no cause for panic.