Obama vs. Hillary vs. McCain, Part II
Like most outside observers who would not vote for either Obama or Clinton, I have mixed emotions about their current contested race. On the one hand, he has waged the more optimistic campaign, outsourcing the hit attacks to surrogates in the media and America hell-in-a-handbasket themes to his wife. Hillary is the tougher, more duplicitous candidate who understands politics far better—and the irony that the past divisive Clinton methods of identity politics and manipulation of the press by surrogates have come back to haunt her.
Surely, this was to be the year of the woman, with a bite-the-lip Bill talking about humanitarianism in teary-eyed encomia to his wife—not the upstaging by a charismatic African-American sensation, who pet-rocked them in a fad of popular hysteria.
He makes the case that he won the most delegates, leads in the recognized popular vote, and polls stronger against McCain. She replies that the big in-play states are hers, she is surging, and that his lead is based on caucuses that don’t reflect her grass-root delegates won by plebiscites in large swing states. Both are nearing the point of no-return in their stand-off. Either one caves by early April, or the acrimony will devolve into something we haven’t seen in Democratic politics since 1968.
Hillary’s message about foreign policy experience is dubious, but her charge that he has none is accurate and fair. So far, examine his advisors: academics like Ms. Power who chose to do a self-indulgent interview that nearly wrecked his campaign; Ms. Rice who just admitted that neither Obama or Clinton could be trusted to answer the call in the night; the anonymous free lancers who reassured the Canadians that the NAFTA trashing was just politics; and the ever ubiquitous Zbigniew Brezinski of Jimmy Carter fame, who spent most of the 2000s trashing his government, insisting that Iraq was lost, that we would be hit again, that we lost our liberties, that Israel was our problem, and that his stellar record gave him such insight (remember the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US boycott of the Olympics, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Cambodian holocaust, the Central American communist insurgencies, the arms sales of planes to the Saudis without bomb racks, the failed hostage rescue attempt, the dispatch of Ramsey Clark to Teheran, and on and on).
Otherwise, their joint message is about the same: radically jack up estate, income, and payroll taxes to fund new programs that shift responsibility from the individual to the government—as payback for those who make too much money that they haven’t earned. Note again, the populist message doesn’t really apply to the really rich who support both Obama and Hillary, and find ways of counting income as capital gains or use corporate or trust perks in lieu of spending taxable income on daily needs. I would be for the estate tax if one could convince me that Ted Kennedy and his clan ever paid the full rates when their fortunate was passed on to them, and they did not employ Byzantine trusts, sophisticated probate schemes, offshore holdings, and all the other mechanism the mega-rich use to avoid the inheritance laws. Until then, it is twice-taxed income that goes to a government that does its best to punish those who tried to pass something more to their children than what they received.
Instead, the ax falls on the American family who makes between $150,000 and 300,000 mostly through salaries—which sound like a lot of money until one remembers that many of those who make that good living reside in high-income tax states like Connecticut, New Jersey, New York or California where $500,000-$700,000 for a modest track home is not unusual, and a child at a private liberal arts college can easily cost $150,000 for a four year education, especially with ineligibility for financial aid.
Abroad, both would play reactive international politics, and of not getting ahead of the UN or the EU on much of anything. Both favor the European system of culture and government and are deeply at odds with the exceptional American variant of a gun-owning, Christianized, confident, low-taxed, small-government, and highly individualistic society.
Equality of result, not of opportunity, is their creed. It is not how you start, but how you end up that is their concern, government being the final arbiter that must continually level the playing field. The subtext of both campaigns is that the individual is rarely if ever culpable. Failure, set-back, poverty—all these lapses are attributable either to race/class/gender prejudices; or cruel chance; or the stacked-deck of American capitalism.
To suggest that some people indulge in drugs, drink, gamble, have mental problems, have out of wedlock children, experience multiple divorces, quit jobs, make unwise investments, spend unwisely what they don’t make, drop out of high school is to reveal one’s own biases and innate meanness. My 86-year-old grandfather (born in my farmhouse in 1890 and died here in 1976) warned me before he died that no matter how bad things had become, one could at least still get by—if you didn’t quit your job, didn’t move, and made sure you spent more money on what makes you money (e.g., in his case, a tractor or barn or irrigation pipe) than on what you don’t need (e.g., periodic new car, clothes, jewelry, etc.)
What Have We Done?
Sometime in September Democrats may ask themselves just that as candidate Obama sticks to his “Iraq has failed” message as it continues to get better, to ‘I’m above partisanship’ as he does negative hit ads, as yet another Power, Rice, Michelle (”cynics, sloths, etc.”) etc. says something inane, and the “hope and change” message runs out of steam and is replaced by a more taxes/more social programs 1960s boilerplate tired agenda. Michelle is not an albatross yet, but she will be by summer; she is the type that liberals fawn over but her rhetoric proves deeply offensive to the working classes, who can’t see why the bitterness?
Meanwhile McCain II
I like McCain for two reasons and am willing to give him a pass on other past bothersome positions on campaign financing, global warming, and Anwar (no need to go on). First, he understands that we can defeat the jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq, discredit radical Islam, and win the so-called war on terror, which is most definitely not a construct, a bogey-man, or an overreaction. Second, he has always railed about fiscal restraint. The government is over 30% larger than when Bush took office, and we are losing productive jobs while creating bureaucratic ones. More important, he realized that annual federal deficits, growing national debt, trade red-ink, and a weak dollar are more than economic indicators of a sick nation, but also terribly damaging to a nation’s sense of self and pride. When Greece has a far stronger currency than we do (I lived in the country for over two years and can assure readers that it does almost everything in a manner far less efficiently than do we), when Dubai must lend us capital, when a communist Chinese apparat holds over $1 trillion of our currency, and a corrupt Middle East rakes in billions of petrol dollars due to our lion’s bite of the daily global consumption of oil, then there is cause for collective doubt at home.
The Problem
In one sense, our current problem is that our youth learned from us (I speak as someone who was born in 1953), not our own parents (mine were born in 1921 and 1922) who to be candid were shaped by depression, war, and the threat of war, and who made terrible sacrifices to indulge us. I don’t wish to enter in the greatest generation quagmire, but note only that those who came of age in the 1960s are of a sort I hope the nation does not see again this century.
The Clintons are the best examples I know—self-referential, always victims of some unfair conspiracy, able to wing it by blaming someone other than themselves, full of self-righteous pride in their liberalism, critical of their betters of the past, indulgent to their own children, and always unembarrassed about the vast abyss from their utopian rhetoric and their own enormous tastes and appetites that are never quite muzzled. The Clinton way was to shake-down corporations for suitable lodging for Hillary, for Bill to garner obscene speaking, for Chelsea to be ensconced on Wall Street at a Hedge Fund—and then to stump on the John Edwards two-Americas theme. The signature of the generation was always the confidence that they could so well articulate, whine, or hedge a issue that they could avoid responsibility for failure while taking sole credit for success.
Stories Not Reported By the Media
The continual targeted killings of African-Americans by Latino gangs in Los Angeles
The culpability of a politicized CIA in dismissing Iran’s nuclear weapons procurement programs that have led to the near collapse of international efforts to stop them.
The Chinese war again separatist Uighurs in Xinjiang Province. (Why does the world ignore that Chinese, Indians, and Russians all wage war against radical Muslims with a savagery unimaginable by Israel?)
Liberal pressures on the federal government and lending agencies to relax standards to expand home ownership to first-time, non-traditional buyers through zero-down payments, interest only loans, and balloon mortgages—all of which are now blamed as illiberal catalysts for the current crisis.
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11 Comments
amr:Having raised 4 children utilizing the values of my parent’s depression era generation was an uphill battle. Born in 1945, I am lumped into my parent’s generation, it seems, and I have no problem with that. Our culture, and particularly the school system, seemed to challenge almost everything we tried to instill in our children. Fortunately their teachers were supportive; who generally were older and of a like mind, while many in the school administration had a mindset from the 60’s. Since the older teachers are retiring at an increasing rate, my grandchildren are suffering the increasingly PC ideals instilled at college in the younger teachers. We maintain contact with many of our children’s former teachers and most are retiring as soon as they can due to the changed professional atmosphere and lack of self-discipline exhibited by the students in our school system. And we are in a rural county in MD.
One of my sons was in an education program at college and during his student teaching time in the spring of his junior year he changed majors because of the PC BS he encountered. He had had this wild idea that he would return to his middle school and provide a male role model for the many students that he knew from his days in school had none. My wife was a teacher and substituted after the children were in school and I was tempted to teach after I retired last year from being a large project field engineer and later manager. Both of us are now of the opinion that if we had to have our children educated in today’s environment, they would be going to private school, even if my wife had to take a full time job to pay for it.
I don’t know what it is going to take to return this culture to a more individualistic and value conscience mode, but if we don’t find our way back to some rock solid values and personnel responsibility, we will collapse from with-in as has many cultures/nations/empires before us. Our Islamist enemies are pushing and testing our limits and so far we seemly keep bending over backwards to assist them. Obviously no lessons learned here!
The progressives/left liberals think they can make what previous failed work now; such utter stupidity. It is very interesting to me that once outside of the government, even the most liberal Mr. McGovern, former Democratic senator and presidential candidate who ran against Mr. Nixon, has realized, and last week wrote, that we are on the wrong path in America. There is hope if Mr. McGovern has seen the light.
Mar 10, 2008 - 5:00 am cfbleachers:The problem that Sen. McCain will have in the general election has nothing to do with the economy.
It will have to do almost entirely with the echo-nomy. The Greek suffix comes from the word “nomos” as I understand it…and relates to a system or body of knowledge in a particular field.
The MetaStasisMedia together with the full array of the other leftist information stream bandits, will shout down any inquiries into taxation, small government, fiscal restraint.
And we are likely to receive a much stronger dose of Chicago-style democratic politics than a Chicago School of Economics examination.
The “Echonomy” will instead do to Sen. McCain’s candidacy and his position on Iraq… what Walter Cronkite did to the Tet offensive. It will turn the facts on the ground into an irrelevancy. Iraqis will become the new Cambodians.
We will be “taught” by the leftist media that we should be more like Denmark, (or some other Euro-Socialist country) and enjoy the happiness that comes with higher taxes. (see, 60 minutes segment with Morley Safer, that does just that)
We will be told that voting for Sen. McCain will not assuage our deserved “guilt” over the take-out menu of “isms” that Unbidden Americans are saddled with blame about. (racism, sexism, jingoism, etc). We are being strapped in for a ride on a national guilt trip.
The system for the echo chamber political machine has been carefully crafted this time and Sen. McCain will be hard pressed to frame a single resonant issue, certainly none that is likely to gain any traction in the soundbite world of the bound and determined MetaStasisMedia.
In this election, it will not hinge on facts, it will not hinge on best practices, it will not hinge on sound fiscal policies, it will not hinge on sound national defense policies.
We are on course for an election about “deliverance”.
I just hope it has a better ending than the movie. I’m afraid for the Unbidden American, it won’t.
Mar 10, 2008 - 9:27 am Dave Begley -Omaha:From press accounts of the Obamas’ federal income tax returns, I learned the following:
1. Mrs. Obama received $100k in compensation from Treehouse Foods. Treehouse Foods is a specialty food maker that sells private label foods to stores. WalMart is a big customer. Pickles are in its food line.
I’m sure Director Obama is adding lots of value for shareholders with her service.
2. Charitable contributions of $1,100 on over $191k in income in 1998.
3. Mrs. Obama earns almost $300k from the University of Chicago Hospitals as vice-president of community and external affairs. She adds value to the health, research and teaching mission of the hospital by organizing meetings with neighborhood activists.
I wonder what first year residents get paid at the University of Chicago hospitals to work all night in the ER?
4. When did paying back a student loan become a news item? Why is that such a big deal to the Obamas? Does the consitution provide a right to a *free* college and professional school education?
5. If one says or writes anything raising any facts about the Obamas, then one is automatically a “hater.” That’s the left’s answer when you don’t buy into their views.
Mar 10, 2008 - 9:57 am Trudy B. Taylor:dr. hanson: i think that a certain kind of point of no return might have occurred today at around 12:22 central standard time during a speech given by mr. obama in mississippi. as we texans say, he drew a line in the sand (as did one mightier than himself awhile back–travis at the alamo) and told his acolytes that they cannot have both clinton and him. cant be done. unh-unh. no way. aint happening.
i will start looking for democrat party leaders outside the clinton machine to quicken the maneurving towards a shut down of her campaign in earnest. events are beginning to bear down, and we’ll see just how narcissistic and single minded mrs. clinton can be.
a surreal picture keeps running through my mind. envision howard dean as king solomon(!), the collective sanity of the democrat party as a teeny, tiny baby and obama and clinton as the 2 feuding mothers vying for the possession of the child. ( seeing the democrats en mass as a child is not a stretch of one’s imagination). which mom is the genuine mom is moot as both have extremely selfish personal motives and lack true statesmanship. how sad is this? it almost makes me feel sorry for my liberal, democrat friends. the operative word here being “almost”.
having said all that, i do think mccain needs to get on message, the sooner the better. mr. rove is probably right that mccain cannot waste time watching the dems, hoping for a train wreak. is it possible to pick a veep too soon?
Mar 10, 2008 - 12:07 pm John More:A closer look at Obama’s message shows it to be sharply negative. As a basis for his embodiment of hopeful change, he needs to paint America as a horrible place - unfair, poverty ridden, corrupt, racist, war-mongering and in decline. He has done this - subtly, but clearly. Only in contrast does his message seem positive.
As an aside, not all of us from the ’60s are like the Clintons. Some of us got over it. Some of us volunteered to fight in Vietnam, and many died there. Most of us lead ordinary lives, far from our contemporaries - elite narcissistic fools in the media , academia and politics.
Mar 10, 2008 - 6:05 pm jtheteach:Amen Mr. Hanson, It just continues to boggle my mind, the hypocrisy of the liberals and the MSM continues to eat it up. I believe what your grandfather said no matter how bad it gets we can get by. Americans are tough and it is not as bad as some people make it out to be.
Mar 10, 2008 - 9:30 pm Trudy B. Taylor:for amr: i think it’s rather worse than you outline. im a boomer and many of my college friends went into “education” as they so euphemistically call it. many of them are aching to take early retirement because the dogs of liberalism, which their generation of teachers loosed and coupled with the teacher’s unions, have wrought such destruction in the public schools. “if only we’d known where all this would lead to”, bemoans my best friend. now-a-days the only reason rational boomer teachers have for paying their union dues seems to be so that they will have lawyer representation when the inevitable lawsuit comes concerning the impugning of some slothful student’s right to act out in class.
and to theteach: dr johnathon turly, a constitutional law prof from george washington univ in d.c., once emailed me that out madisonian democracy can withstand all sorts of unheard of stresses and come thru intact because of the way our constitution is crafted. this email was sent in august of 2000.little did he know how right his observation would be less than 3 months later. i still reel it out and read it over, for reassurance, to this day. i find i have to read it more often, but i still believe in it’s accuracy.
Mar 11, 2008 - 6:30 am William Casey:Maybe a full blown depression is what this country needs to bring people back to reality and self reliance. Hopefully though, if that happens, the solution won’t be another FDR.
Mar 12, 2008 - 1:51 pm Anonymous:The divide between the left and right in this nation is too vast to bridge I’m afraid.
The left, as most of us see it, are delusional. They don’t want to fight out nation’s enemies, etc.
Hell, some of them actually cheer and support our enemies like Chavez.
I’m afraid that to get this country workin agains will require a civil war. Too bad.
Mar 12, 2008 - 3:28 pm wtk:What is sad is that multiculturalism only goes one way. Last month (if you remember was black awareness/black history month) my grandson came home from kindergarten and said he wished he were African American.
Mar 13, 2008 - 11:51 am Ken Banks:I greatly appreciate your insights into history and politics. I have enjoyed interviews I have heard on the radio, and on television.
Having said that it would benefit a great deal to read and edit the numerous errors that have no doubt been created by your software or by reading the post before it is sent.
Here is the kind of example I am referring to:
“The Chinese war again separatist Uighurs in Xinjiang Province.”
Given the quality of your writing this was quite surprising. I am not sure if you even read the posts Dr. Hanson, but I felt I should comment.
Mar 13, 2008 - 12:21 pm