americanideal.org Blog

Conservative pundits have been trying to comfort themselves and us with the claim that, despite the election results, America is still a conservative leaning country. The preferred adjective is “center-right.” Even Newsweek made the claim in a cover story before the Obama victory http://www.newsweek.com/id/164656, and Rush Limbaugh has opined that conservatism didn’t lose on November 4th, because “it wasn’t even on the ballot.”

Yet it is dangerously Pollyannaish for conservatives to think that the majority of voters did not know they were voting for a big-government nanny state when they cast their ballot for Obama.

Rush is right that McCain’s attempt to wear the mantle of conservatism never really worked, because his lifelong reputation as a “moderate” more intent on reaching compromise than on leading a movement aimed at advancing key principles could not ultimately be overcome. Along the same lines, Sean Hannity’s prescription is that the Republican Party has to identify strong candidates who will articulate strong conservative principles, and they will carry the day. Sean is right, but only half right.

Running articulate, conservative candidates is essential, but not adequate in and of itself. Conservatives have to face the fact that we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of a critical mass of the American people. And we have to rebuild the movement by re-emphasizing persuasion and education, concerning the fundamental principles that serve as the foundation of conservatism and the founding of the United States.

It is not enough to say, “we believe in limited government, personal liberty, private property, and the principles of the Founding Fathers, so vote for us.” I am convinced that most people don’t even understand these principles or know why they are important. For conservatives to succeed significantly in national elections, we are going to have to continually teach these principles, explain them thoroughly, and make it clear why straying from them can ultimately be so dangerous. This was the genius of Reagan, and no Republican president since him has had it. Reagan never stopped selling conservative principles. He understood them because he internalized them by reading widely, thinking deeply, and communicating (in speech and in writing) about these principles, and he never let up. In politics, just when you think you have won, that’s the time to push even harder.

Democrats have always seemed to understand this basic tenet of the effective acquisition of political power: Never stop campaigning. Bill Clinton’s entire presidency was a campaign; Barack Obama’s re-election campaign will begin on January 21, 2009 (maybe it has already started). Pick a major issue important to the waning Republican administration, however, and look at the horrible failures to teach, explain, and sell their position in a relentless way. Partial privatization of social security should have been a winning issue, but the administration caved at the first sign of a fight. And the Democrats successfully convinced a majority of Americans that Bush was trying to “take away” their social security.

The war in Iraq began with popular support, yet Bush failed to keep selling it, allowing the Democrats to make it into a liability for the GOP that brought the Dems back to power in 2006. If you step back and try to look at them with a little historical perspective, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been resounding successes overall, though not without serious but expected setbacks along the way. The American military, led by President Bush, overthrew two violent, bloody, terribly repressive regimes, liberated more than 50 million people, and killed tens of thousands of terrorists, all with breathtakingly low casualty rates. I am convinced that this administration’s historic unpopularity–before the economic crisis–had more to do with its inexplicable negligence in failing to keep selling the war (yes, a little propaganda–as long as it was true–would have been a good idea) and the Democrats relentless attacks than it had to do with Bush’s alleged incompetence.

My thesis here is not intended to give comfort to liberals or to depress conservatives. Nor am I lining up with so-called moderate conservatives–like David Brooks of the New York Times–who believe that conservatism needs to be reformed or modernized to become competitive again. That’s another way of saying Republicans need to create a new kind of conservatism, essentially liberalism lite, in order to be competitive. My argument could not be further from that. I am saying that the conservative movement needs to realize that we have to re-fight the old battles. No longer is it safe to assume that the principles of limited government, free markets, and individual liberty are widely embraced.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of us thought that would be the death knell of the planned economy. Sadly, we were premature. While Russia is looking more and more like the Soviet Union of old, and dictator Hugo Chavez, the darling of the “world community” and of the American left, is nationalizing significant aspects of the Venezuelan economy, the United States has just elected a leftist President and Congress, on the promise of government guaranteed health care, education, prosperity, etc. Then there’s the bail-out, supported by a Republican president and both his would-be successors, not to mention both parties in Congress. Thus we find ourselves in the United States with an “economy czar” who has near-dictatorial authority to spend upwards of a trillion dollars, in the person of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his eventual successor.

In future posts, I hope to examine some of the specific reasons for my conclusion in more detail. But if we do not admit that the conservative movement has a challenge before it more serious than the mere packaging of slicker and more attractive candidates, we will be doomed to more failure. And we could be witnessing the dawning of a new era of big-government liberalism that will change America as drastically, or more so, than the New Deal.

It’s a shame it took a blogger (God bless him or her) to dig up a seven-year old interview of Obama that the LEM (Liberal Establishment Media; there is nothing mainstream about them) didn’t know existed.  It’s a shame, also, that the questions Obama answered in that interview have NEVER BEEN ASKED OF HIM BY THE MEDIA, ANY OF THE DEBATE MODERATORS, NOR EVEN THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN. 

The questions are central to the role of government in the United States of America and to the function of the Presidency.  With all the promises both candidates have made, with all the things that Obama says he will do (most of which are unrealistic and outside the realm of the presidency), nobody has ever challenged him with the simple question, “Is that the role of the President as defined in the Constitution?”

The US Constitution is the job description for the President, yet there has been no, and I mean no, discussion of the Constitution by either campaign.  Whoever wins this thing will swear an oath, in fact, to “defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Isn’t it only fitting that the candidates be required to know and understand the Constitution as a pre-requisite to being elected, so that they know what it is that they will be swearing to defend and protect?

Barack Obama apparently thinks the Constitution is inadequate. Here is what he said on a Chicago Public Radio station in 2001:

OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.
MODERATOR: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.
KAREN: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point?
OBAMA: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.
You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.
The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts. 

To Obama, the Courts could come up with a way to justify positve rights (”what the federal or state government must do on your behalf”), but he doesn’t think they will.  So it has to be done at the grass-roots level of community organizing. Hello ACORN!

Obama believes that the government must provide “redistributive” justice. If it can’t be forced through the courts, it should be enacted through legislation.  This is a fundamentally radical view of human rights and of the American experiment in ordered liberty.  It is at odds with the vision of America’s founders and even with a great many Americans to this day.  Obama’s view would be consistent with the notion of a “right” to health care, which he advocated in the last debate; a “right” to housing; a “right” to education, etc.  This view of rights not only guarantees that a person cannot be obstructed in trying to obtain those goods, but also that the government must actively provide them to every citizen.

The President’s most fundamental duty is to uphold and defend the US Constitution.  Will the citizens of the United States elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in the very document he will swear to uphold? 

A telling piece by Jonathan Martin in the Politico explains why there will be no swift boat coming to Naval hero John McCain’s aid:

 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14811.html

No big money donors are willing to fund the independent groups that can run a massive ad campaign linking Obama to Jeremiah Wright, for example.  This is because they expect McCain to condemn them for doing it; they don’t believe that his campaign will know how to capitalize on it; and they are not sure it is worth the investment because, if McCain should win, will he govern that much more conservatively than Obama?

This campaign is fraught with ironies, delicious to Dems, nauseating to the GOP.

One is the irony of ideology:  Obama is steeped in extreme leftist ideology and is successfully running as a moderate.  McCain is steeped in pragmatic moderation and is attempting to run, unsuccessfully, as a conservative.

Obama has successfully packaged a Trojan Horse approach, with the LEM’s (Liberal Establisment Media. I refuse to call them mainstream; don’t cede the middle ground to them) help to be sure.  The radical left is thrilled with Obama, because they know he is one of them.  But they know he has to run more moderately in order to win, and they are willing to look the other way while he tacks to the center.  The mainstream Democrats and that amorphous group of left-leaning, generally non-ideological voters don’t know or refuse to believe that Obama is a radical leftist. Thus he has cobbled together a winning coalition:  keeping the left wing base in the fold and bringing the middle along.

On the other hand, McCain cannot keep the Republican base happy, because he has never been and is not now a movement conservative.  He is a patriotic and slightly right-of-center pragmatist.  Yet McCain can’t even get credit for that.  He used to be the darling of the “moderates” and independents, yet they are flocking to Obama, a radical leftist in his ideology.  In short, Obama is winning because he is perceived as middle of the road (when he is not), and McCain–the real moderate–is losing because he is perceived as being right wing (when he is not).

On the abortion issue, Obama comes from the most ideologically extreme pro-abortion camp.  This should not be a surprise, given that he has been steeped in far-left, radical, communist ideology from his earliest days. 

Watch this:

http://americaschoicenow.com/

If Obama wins and Democrats gain in the House and Senate, the way the pundits expect, be prepared for a leftward lurch to this country the likes we haven’t seen since the Great Society and maybe the New Deal. 

See the Wall Street Journal’s analysis:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122420205889842989.html

McCain’s best argument may be purely defensive.  Give me the White House as the last bulwark of defense against the coming storm of liberalism about to be unleashed on America through the Congress.  Remember good old gridlock?  We want you back, big time.

Not that McCain is the best defense we could have, with his penchant for caving to Democrat demands, but he is the only defense we have at this point. 

Vote McCain, shutter the windows, pray for the best, and head to the basement (don’t forget the duct tape).

Maybe when the storm is over, there will be enough of America left to be worth preserving . . .

Here’s the speech McCain should give about the economy and the stock market that you will never hear:

“My friends, Senator Obama and the other Democrats think that they can gain political traction with class warfare rhetoric that has worked for them all too often in the past.  I am not going to stand by quietly and let them get away with pitting Americans against each other, artificially, unjustly, and repeatedly.

“Democrats love to demonize Wall Street, and pit it against “Main St.”  To them, Wall Street is a small group of filthy rich robber barons that manipulate corporations to enrich themselves and punish the rest of us, we who live on “Main St.”

“To Senator Obama and the Democrats, corporations are bad, excessive, make too much money and should be punished for it.  If this is true, my friends, why aren’t they celebrating the dramatic decline in the stock market of recent weeks?

“If corporations are bad and should be punished, what is more punishing to them than a 20, 30, or 40% decrease in their value? 

“Democrats don’t even seem to understand what the stock market is.  Or more likely, they do understand but cynically misrepresent it in their lust for political power.  You see, my friends, the stock market is where ownership of America’s publicly traded corporations is bought and sold, by means of shares, every single day.

“When our corporations are believed to be profitable, productive, and headed in the right direction, their value to buyers increases. When this happens, their share prices will rise on the open market.  When their share prices rise, the stock market indices, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and NASDAQ, will rise. 

“My friends, who owns the corporations?  It’s not just the big shot executives. Do you know who owns the corporations?  You do!

” You see, my friends, when you have investments in the stock market, in the form of retirement funds, IRA’S, education accounts, pension plans, and the like, you have ownership shares in America’s corporations.  And when these corporations are profitable, your shares will increase in value. When your shares increase in value, the value of your retirement fund, pension plan, IRA, education account, nest egg, will also increase in value.

“This is why the decline in value of the stock market has been treated as bad news for most Americans.  Why then do Democrats demonize corporations?  Why do they want to punish them?  Senator Obama should be happy that the stock market has declined.

“I am not afraid to admit that I want to reduce taxes on corporations.  I am proud to admit that. When we reduces taxes on corporations, the corporations will be more valuable.  When corporations are more valuable, their owners will benefit.  Who are the owners?  YOU ARE!

“If you have as much as one mutual fund, you have shares in probably many many corporations.

“Senator Obama loves to demonize the oil companies.  Why?  Oil is the lifeblood of our economy.  Who is happy about high gasoline prices?  Not you. Not me.  What would putting extra taxes on the oil companies accomplish?  It would raise their cost of doing business and decrease their value.  All this would to is make the price of a gallon of gasoline even higher and make the value of oil company stocks lower.  And who loses when oil company stocks go lower?  The owners of the oil companies.  And who are the owners of the oil companies?  YOU ARE!

“Yes, I want America’s corporations to flourish, including oil companies.  When our corporations flourish, the owners benefit. Who are the owners?  Everyone that has even one mutual fund, or a retirement plan, pension fund, IRA, education fund, or a simple nest egg.  Who are the owners?  YOU ARE!”

Actions have consequences.  It’s axiomatic, self-evident, and true.  Yet it is widely denied by most of popular culture, the media, and the political class.  And the denial of this truth is at the very heart of contemporary liberalism.

We think that we can wish away the negative consequences of our actions.   Maybe we can hit the delete button on our keyboard and they will disappear!  Like a text message that disolves into cyberspace.

That’s why abortion is such a frustrating issue.  Everyone knows it kills a living human being, but it’s too much to ask, to expect a woman to bear and raise a child that she doesn’t want just because she and her boyfriend “made a mistake” when having a little frolic in the nude.  After all, nobody should be “punished with a baby” (in Mr. Obama’s words) because they forgot to use birth control.

Look at most of today’s parents, the ones with teenage children.  Drive by a high school parking lot during a school day and see all the expensive cars and SUVs parked there.  Those aren’t the teachers’ cars. Those are the students’ rides.  Their precious asses can’t be expected to sit on a school bus, heaven forbid.  And walking to school?  Unthinkable.

Cell phones in high school are a given.  Every high school student has one, and them’s the times we live in. But first and second graders with cell phones?  Common nowadays.

So what?  Kids today are by and large spoiled and pampered.  That’s not news.  No, but it goes hand in hand with the attempt to excise consequences from our lives.  Parents can choose to withhold punishment when their children do wrong, or they can limit their punishments to a toothless talking-to.  If my teenager drives drunk and kills somebody, though, that consequence–an innocent dead person–cannot be wished away, no matter how “understanding” I may try to be.

STD’s (AIDS etc.) are so troubling to us becuase they are by and large easily prevented.  But it just doesn’t seem fair that having sex can lead to terrible illness, and we need to erase the illness (the consequence) without expecting any change in people’s behavior that could prevent the illness in the first place.  We need vaccines, antibiotics, and condoms, but not more responsible behavior.

This brings us to the Wall Street bailout.  If companies make bad loans to unqualified recipients because of political correctness (increased minority home ownership goals, e.g.), the urging of bureaucrats, or short-sighted folly (absolute faith that real estate values will keep going up), they are taking on a risk that the loans will go bad, and they are hoping for a reward that the loans will be repaid on time.

If the loans succeed and retain their value, they can be sold for gain or retained for the income they will generate.  That’s fine.

If the loans can’t be repaid and the values of the homes supporting those mortgages also tank, they may become worth much less, and the lending institution takes a loss.

If we believe in the free market, the lending institution gets to enjoy the benefit of their investments and loans when they work out.  Why, then, should they not bear the burden when they don’t work out.  Why do we want to privatize the reward and socialize the risk? 

We want to wipe away, wish away, delete by magic the negative consequences of the risks taken by individuals and firms in the marketplace of mortgage lending.  After all, they didn’t mean for things to go bad.  They thought real estate values would continue to rise. They meant well by trying to expand home ownership. Why should they be punished for all these good intentions by taking a financial loss?  Let’s just abort the consequence of their actions, to the tune of $700 billion of somebody else’s money.

McCain has always bragged about his willingness to “reach across the aisle” for “the good of the country.”  He is proud of his collaborations with Russ Feingold, John Edwards, Ted Kenney, Ted Kennedy, Ted Kennedy. . .

The result of these collaborations: restrictions on the freedom of speech in so-called campaign finance reform; amnesty for illegal aliens in so-called “comprehensive immigration reform”; ridiculous restrictions on economic liberty under the guise of preventing global warming; and sundry big government solutions to this or that problem, real or imaginary.

With McCain and the Democrats, it’s not really about working together as compromise. It’s about giving the veneer of bi-partisanship to the most partisan, liberal, Democrat agenda. 

In what substantive ways did any of McCain’s efforts to “reach across the aisle” result in the Democrats’ moving even in the slightest toward the center? Where did they “compromise” what they wanted in order to garner McCain’s support?  Nowwhere.

Instead, McCain simply signs on to the Democrat agenda and claims the high ground as the great uniter and peace-maker. 

Principles?  Those are for ideologues.  We were sent here by the people to get things done.  No matter if the people are better off with most of those “things” Congress does not being done at all. 

This just shows that liberalism is the dominant mindset after all.  Most people believe without even thinking about it much that government’s job is to do something, anything.  In reality, we would be much better off if the government did less “things” and did only what it is supposed to do very well.

Yet McCain has so far secured more delegates than all his rivals combined in the Republican nominating process because he has proven that he can work with (i.e. cave to) liberal Democrats and “get things done” in Washington, things like eviscerating the first amendment, expanding big government, blocking the appointment of principled judges, you get the idea.

When President Bush gave up on his very modest attempt to privatize a small percentage of social security, on a voluntary basis, we should have know we were in deep trouble.  When the electorate apparently voted against this modest proposal in the recent Congressional elections, we know we have our work cut out for us.  How conservative is a country when the majority of voters seem to be saying that they don’t want the choice of controlling a small part of their retirement fund, a fund that came from their own money that they earned through their own labor?  It’s kind of scary when you think about it.  The same people that supposedly distrust big government (obviously this is debatable) have no problem with big government having sole power to determine how well–or poorly (more likely)–they will live after age 65.

Conservative talk show hosts typically say that America is mostly a conservative country, and they have even pointed to the 2006 Congressional elections as proof, saying that even though the Democrats took over, most of the Democrats who defeated incumbent Republicans ran and won as “conservatives.”  This theme was touted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others.  Yet as much as we would like to believe this, is it really true? By what measurement are the newly elected Democrats evaluated as “conservative.”  One liberal website (http://mediamatters.org/items/200611090003) went right to each of the winning Democratic candidate’s websites and other written records and found that almost to a man–and woman–they are not conservative on five major issues:  the war, Social Security privatization, abortion, raising the minimum wage, and embryonic stem cell research.  I hate to throw cold water on the conservative establishment’s attempt to find a “silver lining” in this election result, but we need to face reality, or we’re going to be in for more such “thumpings” in the future.