Victor Davis Hanson provides one perspective. It summarizes nicely everything I find somewhat repellent about the Obama administration. I love one passage:
Asking why would Obama & Co. be so self-destructive to push through an array of proposals that have no more than 45% of the public’s support is like asking whether the English Prof who teaches incomprehensible Foucauldian theory worries whether he has only 2 students, or whether the well-off union boss is all that upset that membership has sunk to 30% of the workforce, or multimillion-dollar-earning Sarah Palin-interviewing Katie Couric is worried about her sinking ratings, or whether the New York Times columnists are upset that their mother paper is broke with subscription and readership down, and laying off thousands of blue-collar employees.
He finishes on what might not seem so, but is a hopeful note:
Everything, as my dear late mother lectured me, happens for a reason, or at least presents a sort of logic—irony, paradox, karma, and nemesis being the best ways of interpreting our unfathomable existences. It took messianic narcissistic Barack Obama to expose the full extent of the mess that a once noble tradition of 19th-century liberalism had devolved into. Only he could have rammed it down the throats of the American people, and when he is done, we will suffer, but also sicken of it for quite a while.
Straw Men - the Typical Obama Administration Tactic
It has been pointed out by many that one of the 'features' of a typical Barack Obama administration speech is the erection of straw men (usually representing the previous administration) against whom to argue, making the argument much simpler by inventing the strawman position at the same time. Obama himself used this several times, to the point of making me laugh out loud, in his Cairo speech. Man, those poor American Muslim girls desperate to wear the hijab - I am so glad his administration is committed to slaying the dragons standing in their way! :-) (More so, in Canada, the real stories are about a Canadian Muslim girl, who did not want to wear the hijab, and get killed by her male relatives.) On FOX News Sunday the ever excellent Chris Wallace hosted a panel that included Austan Goolsbee making a comment at one point, slamming the Bush administration for the loans that kept GM and Chrysler alive, and I felt puzzled, as I was sure I recalled clear statements at the time that this strategy was to allow the Obama administration to handle the problem, which a) made sense, and b) was a classy behavior, in my view. Not now in Austan Goolsbee's:
We are only in this situation because somebody else kicked the can down the road, and that’s really an understatement. They shook up the can, they opened the can, and handed to us in our laps. Senator Shelby knows that to be true. When George Bush put money in to General Motors, almost explicitly with the purpose, how many dollars do they need to stay alive until January 20th, 2009? There was no commitment to restructuring, to making these viable enterprises of any kind.
Keith Hennessey not merely remembers the context, but also considers the strawman erected here as an utter offense against truth. And makes his case.
Even if Dr. Goolsbee was not privy to the quiet discussion we had with the senior Obama team last November, the public record refutes his claim:
1. The Obama team declined to respond to the Bush team’s offer to work together to create a joint process that would have resulted in a resolution by March 1st or April 1st, rather than by June 1st for Chrysler and maybe September 1st for GM. 2. We then worked with the Democratic majority to enact legislation that would have limited funds to be available only to firms that would become viable. 3. After Congress left town for the holidays without having addressed the issue, President Bush was faced with a choice between providing loans and allowing these firms to liquidate in early January, which would have further exacerbated the economic situation for the incoming President. President Bush chose to provide the loans. 4. We provided GM and Chrysler with sufficient funds to get to March 31st, not January 20th, and in those loans we gave the incoming Administration the ability to extend them for 30 more days. 5. The loans were conditioned on restructuring to become viable, with a precise definition of viability, specific restructuring goals, and quantitative targets. 6. The Obama Administration followed the restructuring process laid out in the Bush-era loans. They are now measuring that deal against the targets established in the Bush-era loans. The only changes the Obama team made were that they extended GM for 60 days rather than 30, and the Obama Administration directly inserted themselves into the negotiations as the pre-packager.
Dr. Goolsbee’s comments this morning were both inflammatory and incorrect.
I somehow doubt any Obama administration official would see fit to apologize for this. THey apologize mostly for what were sensible policies.
They’re kidding, right? It’s that hard to find financial experts who can pay their taxes correctly?
I think they are NOT kidding.
Geithner seems to have a lot in common with his boss. Neither of them have proven particularly adept at executive positions. Geithner’s failure to staff his office is his own fault, not anyone else’s, and completely within his power to correct. Pardon me if I’m not crying tears over Geithner’s loneliness.
I did not think much of Bill Clinton our modern-day Alcibiades. But all through his administration, and of course before and after it, I thought a great deal of the United States, especially in comparison to the alternative.
That word 'Alcibiades', too perfect in the wake/midst of Hillary's confirmation hearings, was so appropriate that any volume of fluid in my mouth would have hit the keyboard and screen. Victor Davis Hanson has more, and all the Obama reservations are solid, though I think he is too hopeful (though not very changey):
As Obama begins to govern and as the public sees that he simply borrowed Bush’s foreign policy rhetoric, jazzed it up with his cadences and pauses, and then took either Bushites or Democratic centrists and called them hope and change, and as he glued new rhetorical veneers on the Patriot Act and FISA, and as he alienates many by making decisions other than voting present, and as the gaffes begin (Biden and Michelle can’t be put under wraps forever), and the Chicago fumes linger (Blago ain’t through yet), the fawning media will begin to look embarrassed, then ridiculous, and finally completely bankrupt. They offered no audit of Obama, no tough treatment, no honest examination of his flips, no balance in their treatment of Bush, and they will soon pay a terrible price for that derelection and worse, as the public sees them as the state megaphones that they have so sadly become. The only suspense? Will they play Pravda to the end?
I am less optimistic than Llosa. I expect that the 3Ps will win out, and more bureaucrats with more hubris and more east-coast-elitist-interventionist training will pour into Washington; and they will negotiate (albeit in good faith, for the most part) with increasing numbers of rent-seekers to redistribute more wealth and power away from voters and taxpayers. Furthermore, the slower growth the US will experience 5 and 10 years from now will be attributed to these policies by only a minority of policy analysts. As Russ Roberts says, "Watch your liberty and your wallet. They are both at risk."|
I am REALLY hoping (pace Rondi) that we baby-boomers can prevail in the rent-seeking!
The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.
The Obama team enters the White House. Surely the well-oiled transition team had thought of this concern!
No one could quite explain the problem -- but they swore it would be fixed.
Now this is a real honor to Lincoln, not the pseudo-nonsense the media and Obama's handlers have been promoting. The notion here of the Founding Fathers' "promissory note" is sharp too. Sharp also is the notion of cashing a cheque - much of this amazing rhetoric I had forgotten in favor the "I have a dream" trope, also obviously magnificent. And the phrase "the Negro in New York feels that he has nothing for which to vote" rings magnificently this week, and I am not referring to Charles Rangel.
Hitch in Support of Post-Racialism without Opening his Mouth
... well, conjecturally, except perhaps to enjoy some party drinks, as I am sure I would want to. From Ta-Nehisi Coates:
I peep Christopher Hitchens, mid-groove, with some dime-piece on his hip. Philosopher of all things, William Jelani Cobb, who was dancing with his date a few paces away, offered the observation of the week, and the week had just begun...
The prospect of Christopher Hitchens getting down to Biz Markie, is only slightly less improbable than the prospect of a black president.
Brad DeLong has his silly moments, but this gives me great comfort.
What strikes me are a couple of key points.
The bench is very deep right now. Practically everyone competent and qualified for high executive office has come over to the Democratic Party over the fourteen years since the coming of Gingrich. Thus there are a huge number of superb choices available for every position.
This just seems obvious to me.
Everyone's knows that this is bigger than any of us, and that the right attitude is to ask for an oar, find a place on a bench, and start rowing. There is an awful lot to do.
Yup. I never believed for a second the Republicans could produce a team with these qualities. Obama has not yet but he has a shot at it. And I hope he does!
Democrats make fun of McCain for not using e-mail. He's a stone-ager, unlike The One!
Oops - not so simple. He uses the Internet and e-mail for years, but the wounds from his POW captivity mean he cannot type well, so others do the typing.
If this is the Obama campaign hitting hard, God save them. The tragedy is that the killer is in Forbes years ago.
In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate's savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. "She's a whiz on the keyboard, and I'm so laborious," McCain admits.
Besides the other things I refer previously to missing because of this vacation, I have certainly been sorry to be confined to BBC/ITV/Sky coverage of the two conventions. I do very much look forward to the campaign when I get home, and am even more excited that there will be a Canadian campaign, it seems, during that time, which will of course be relatively colourless. But the British coverage has been interesting. There was the knee-jerk BBC swoon after Obama's acceptance speech, though the parts I have seen did not strike me as some of his better speech-giving, but rather some of his toughest talk and major continuing migration to the centre. How must the reflex lefties who got him the nomination be feeling now? What has amazed me here was the BBC's, and every network's, response to Sarah Palin's acceptance speech. This was certainly partly driven by the low expectations, but, and I have watched the speech on YouTube now (what a great tool!), by how marvelously she delivered it, especially when the teleprompter appeared to fail and she began to deviate a little from prepared text. It is very easy to see how she became governor and why she has high approval ratings. And her role as a self-appointed pit bull with lipstick should create a lot of entertainment in the weeks to come. My favourite British comment on Palin came from SkyNews yesterday morning : "We don't have any women like that here", with a response from another commentator that maybe far in the North (Scotland?) they might. (Of course they likely do have all sorts of such women, but I do not think they have come along so far as to allow them to express their skills in the same way. The UK has changed a lot, but not as much as it needs to.) I do not get at all the many blog references I have seen describing her as shrill and negative. I thought all the criticisms of Obama were utterly fair, though I wish she would keep her index finger in the speech and stop waving it around and pointing it at me. Jackie Danicki has a post that captures a good bit of my overall view, and Megan McArdle's somewhat random reflections hit many points I agree utterly with. McCain knew he had to roll the dice, and did he ever! I found the mixed reviews for McCain's acceptance speech odd - he is a terrible orator, of course, but he moved me terribly when he described the ultimate effect of his torture in the hands of the North Vietnamese. And I thought he reached out brilliantly to the centre as well. Continuing disclosure : I would still vote Democrat had I a ballot, and again only because I cannot see how the Republicans can build a decent and competent team of advisers, especially on economic issues, and have full confidence that Obama will do that. And I am someone who has reached the stage of considering Obama a pompous windbag, who has a running mate who is even more so. When you read this I will have moved on to Germany, and am even more curious about what they make of Sarah Palin.
Don Boudreaux analogizes wonderfully, comparing Hillary Clinton's Democratic Convention speech to the perfect country song (which I mention in passing in this post):
WELL, I WAS DRUNK THE DAY MY MOM GOT OUT OF PRISON AND I WENT TO PICK HER UP IN THE RAIN BUT BEFORE I COULD GET TO THE STATION IN MY PICK-UP TRUCK SHE GOT RUNNED OVER BY A DAMNED OLD TRAIN
He likens this self-parody to passages like:
And I will always remember the young boy who told me his mom worked for the minimum wage, that her employer had cut her hours. He said he just didn't know what his family was going to do.
(Read his post for even better examples.) Having just watched Obama's acceptance speech, I have to wonder if there is any limit to the self-satire we will see in the course of this campaign. ("This election isn't about me. This election is about you", or the ridiculous like.)
Aside: No doubt Hillary Clinton was in favour of the increase in the minimum wage, one of whose effects would be expected to be just what happened to that single mom.
This is how I see Obama too - the 'change' is no wish to let things happen, but rather to return to previous states. Her closing sentences are excellent.
The theme running through Dreams from My Father is the search for order, for stability, for roots in an undisturbed pre-modern culture. How that yearning for stasis translates into presidential policy is not clear, but I worry. But then I have no nostalgia for the order into which my grandparents were born--even though the old factories have moved away and people no longer grow their own food.
Megan McArdle points to this funny article in the New York Times, surely an outfit generally oriented to getting Mr. Obama elected. Her reaction is dead right.
A politician? Painting himself in the most politically convenient light? My God, pass the sleeping pills--I've lost my faith in humanity, and with it, my will to live.
(Continuing disclosure. He has my virtual vote, which I cannot cast. My view is his foreign policy stuff is totally dumb, but could not possibly survive election. I have fear that after Bush's eight years of mismanagement of the economy, McCain's intention to continue such mismanagement is only too achievable. So Obama is still my guy, total liar or not!)
Like him, I regard all the changes so far as in the right direction, and had assumed these were changes in position that would come with his nomination. But the lefties?
Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.
Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.
I enjoy watching Barack Obama orate (he is not so entertaining in back and forth unscripted discussion), but often find myself disagreeing with what is he actually saying, or, even more often, unable to determine whether he is actually saying anything. At other times, in speeches responding to some campaign problem he tends to give a nice speech about some other subject.
Hat tip to P. Z. Myers, here is a fabulous speech whose content is clear, and excellent. I wonder if he can give it again during the coming campaign.
