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August 2, 2011
Cantor's ode to Boehner draws a Corner post from Robert Costa.
... “We have been through a lot,” Cantor reportedly said. “The leadership team has had its
differences. You made us focus on the fact that we are all on one team dedicated to the cause we
came here to accomplish — to reset the size of government, to limit government.”
To House colleagues looking on, Cantor’s gift was about more than magazine spreads — it was
about reminding everyone, even us reporters, that Boehner and Cantor are a team. They may not
click on the little things, but on the big picture (and small frames), they are allies.
Peter Wehner says Maureen Dowd has become a neo-conservative. Here's Dowd;
' The Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the
president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should
have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to
Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.
As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish
professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching
him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.” '
Andrew Ferguson turns his gaze to some appointments in the arts.
Among the many surprises of Barack Obama’s presidency, perhaps the most unexpected have been
his appointments to the federal government’s egghead agencies—the National Endowment for the
Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even his ardent admirers might admit that the
current president’s selections were sub-Bushian.
It was an article of faith with Obama’s snootier acolytes that George W. Bush was a philistine and a
moron. (“Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot” was stripped across the bumper of many a
Prius puttering around the reality-based community back in the day.) In fact Bush’s appointments
showed he took the cultural agencies seriously. If not a man of high culture himself, he knew one
when he saw one. To the NEH he brought a world-class historian of Renaissance painting, Bruce
Cole. He selected Dana Gioia, one of the country’s most admired poets and literary critics, to lead the
NEA.
Although unusually accomplished, these men were in line with the appointments of previous
presidents, who generally picked their chairmen from the country’s large reserve of artists, scholars,
and arts administrators. Even Bill Clinton had the inspired idea to pick the celebrated actress Jane
Alexander to run his NEA. And he’s from Arkansas.
But Barack Obama? Memoirist, prose stylist of distinction, resident of Hyde Park, prowler of used
bookstores, professor of constitutional law? The man whom Michael Beschloss (Distinguished
Professor of History, Charlie Rose Tech) called “probably the smartest guy ever to become
president”? Surely he would use the opportunity to look beyond the things that divide us as
Americans and, drawing on our core common values that we all share as Americans, appoint
chairmen who could lift us up and speak to the heart of the American narrative about who we are as
Americans. Some artist or scholar—a well-known pottery maker, even. A macramé artist. Pete
Seeger. I don’t know.
No, though. Instead Obama has used the agency chairmanships as spoils of political hackery. ...
Ed Morrissey says guess what happened to the Obama recovery?
For the past two years, the Obama administration has tried to sell the American public on the notion
that its economic policies created a substantial recovery. Friday’s GDP numbers, especially the
revisions that impacted results for the past several years, has put an end to that illusion. Derek
Thompson at The Atlantic lowers the boom on the supposed Obama recovery (via Instapundit):
"Yesterday, analysts thought the economy was expanding by 2.5% a year. This morning, they learned
GDP grew by only 1.6% in the last four quarters. This is a remarkable discovery. It’s the difference
between thinking we’re expanding at a decent, if disappointing, pace, and knowing we’re growing
around half our historical norm.
Analysts also thought, as recently as twelve hours ago, that the economy declined 6.8% and 4.9% in
the quarters bisected by Obama’s inauguration. It turns out the actual declines were much steeper:
8.9% and 6.7%.
To adopt the president’s favorite metaphor of the ditch and the driver: The ditch was a 33% deeper
than we thought. And we’re driving 33% slower than we hoped."
Thompson includes a couple of eye-opening charts, although nothing that we haven’t seen before.
Check out his charts comparing the recession and post-recession periods of various downturns, but
this one from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve on employment really tells the story better: ...
According to the New Yorker, the president has not been liberal enough. Peter Wehner
has the story.
What happens to an ideologue when the president in whom he invested enormous hope is
increasingly seen as a failure? For one answer, see the lead “Talk of the Town” item in The New
Yorker, where Hendrik Hertzberg writes this:
"Invoking the Fourteenth Amendment has always been a long shot, a last refuge. But Obama’s
seeming refusal to hold it in reserve … is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating
negotiating strategy–indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most
disappointing aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has
allowed deficits and debt to supercede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He
has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household
that must ‘live within its means.’ (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means
can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done
too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is
achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when
the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now–a
lack of demand, not a shortage of capital–higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower
taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich."
Translation: Barack Obama, the most liberal president in generations, hasn’t been liberal enough. His
problem hasn’t been profligacy but frugality. During the last two-and-a-half years, as $3.7 trillion has
been added to our national debt, it turns out Obama has spent too little. ...
Nile Gardiner reacts to Biden's claim the tea party folks were "terrorists."
... There is something deeply sad and disconcerting when the vice president decides to compare
opposition legislators in Congress with terrorists simply because he disagrees with their views and
principles. This is the kind of ugly, threatening rhetoric that has no place at the heart of the US
presidency. About a third of the country are favourable towards the Tea Party, according to Gallup –
i.e. tens of millions of Biden’s fellow Americans. Does he label them terrorists too?
Working in Washington I’ve met numerous Tea Party supporters and have always found them to be
unfailingly patriotic people who love their country and feel passionately about the need to rein in Big
Government through the democratic process. To compare their elected representatives to terrorists
who seek to destroy the United States and everything it stands for is gravely insulting to hard working
Americans who have in many cases devoted their lives to serving their country. ...
The WSJ has more on the Canadian miracle of limited government.
While the U.S. remains mired in debt and slogs through a subpar economic recovery, Canada is
moving ahead steadily. Its unemployment rate peaked at a little over 8.5% and is now 7.4%, and
there were no bank bailouts. Real GDP growth is expected to be roughly 3% this year.
Now with the first majority government since 2004, and the first Conservative majority since 1993, the
country has an opportunity to vault forward. The Conservatives led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper
have a chance to build on the reforms begun under previous Liberal governments that Americans can
only look at with envy.
Canada's government, for example, has grown smaller over the last 15 years. ...
The Corner
Cantor’s Friendly Gesture
by Robert Costa
On slow days, in the press gallery above the House chamber, reporters chat about rivalries —
Redskins versus Eagles, Notre Dame versus Southern Cal, Boehner versus Cantor. The latter,
though, may be a bit exaggerated. Cantor is ambitious, to be sure, but the tales of his closed-door
clashes with the speaker are more the whispers of gossipy scribes than reported stories. In fact, from
what I heard today, the relationship between the pair may be better than most imagine. During this
afternoon’s conference meeting, Cantor’s friendly gesture made Boehner emotional — and drew a
standing ovation from House Republicans.
Cantor, sources say, presented Boehner with a framed copy of two TIME magazine covers — one
from late 2010, right after he became speaker, and another from 1929 featuring Nicholas Longworth,
the previous Buckeye State speaker. In presenting the gift, Cantor praised Boehner for his work in
brokering the debt-limit deal. “I know it has been a struggle,” he said. “As you said on last night’s
conference call, the deal is not perfect. But for all of us who have been here before, a deal like this
has never happened before.”
“We have been through a lot,” Cantor reportedly said. “The leadership team has had its differences.
You made us focus on the fact that we are all on one team dedicated to the cause we came here to
accomplish — to reset the size of government, to limit government.”
To House colleagues looking on, Cantor’s gift was about more than magazine spreads — it was
about reminding everyone, even us reporters, that Boehner and Cantor are a team. They may not
click on the little things, but on the big picture (and small frames), they are allies.
Contentions
Maureen Dowd, Neoconservative
by Peter Wehner
According to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times:
' The Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the
president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should
have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to
Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.
As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish
professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching
him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.” '
I, for one, was unaware Maureen Dowd had become a contributor to CONTENTIONS.
Her critiques are a bit familiar and a bit late; many of us, after all, have been making these
observations for many months now. No matter; I’m delighted to welcome Dowd to our (professional)
family.
Weekly Standard
Civility, Obama Style
The portentous pronouncements of the humanities czar
Or as Glenn Reynolds says: YOU ELECT AN APPARATCHIK, you get apparatchiks appointed.
And favors for the nomenklatura. No surprise.
by Andrew Ferguson
Among the many surprises of Barack Obama’s presidency, perhaps the most unexpected have been
his appointments to the federal government’s egghead agencies—the National Endowment for the
Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even his ardent admirers might admit that the
current president’s selections were sub-Bushian.
It was an article of faith with Obama’s snootier acolytes that George W. Bush was a philistine and a
moron. (“Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot” was stripped across the bumper of many a
Prius puttering around the reality-based community back in the day.) In fact Bush’s appointments
showed he took the cultural agencies seriously. If not a man of high culture himself, he knew one
when he saw one. To the NEH he brought a world-class historian of Renaissance painting, Bruce
Cole. He selected Dana Gioia, one of the country’s most admired poets and literary critics, to lead the
NEA.
Although unusually accomplished, these men were in line with the appointments of previous
presidents, who generally picked their chairmen from the country’s large reserve of artists, scholars,
and arts administrators. Even Bill Clinton had the inspired idea to pick the celebrated actress Jane
Alexander to run his NEA. And he’s from Arkansas.
But Barack Obama? Memoirist, prose stylist of distinction, resident of Hyde Park, prowler of used
bookstores, professor of constitutional law? The man whom Michael Beschloss (Distinguished
Professor of History, Charlie Rose Tech) called “probably the smartest guy ever to become
president”? Surely he would use the opportunity to look beyond the things that divide us as
Americans and, drawing on our core common values that we all share as Americans, appoint
chairmen who could lift us up and speak to the heart of the American narrative about who we are as
Americans. Some artist or scholar—a well-known pottery maker, even. A macramé artist. Pete
Seeger. I don’t know.
No, though. Instead Obama has used the agency chairmanships as spoils of political hackery. To run
the NEA, he appointed a Broadway producer (“Big River”) named Rocco Landesman, whose chief
qualification for the job was to share a business office with one of Obama’s most fertile fundraising
“bundlers,” another Broadway producer (“Hairspray”) called Margo Lion, whose generosity earned her
a place atop Obama’s “arts policy committee.”
Not a brainiac, Landesman first broke into public consciousness with a speech declaring that Obama
is “the most powerful writer since Caesar.” The claim wasn’t as ludicrous as it first sounds—
Landesman meant that the president was the most politically powerful person since Caesar who
could also be thought of as a writer—but it was still pretty ludicrous.
“This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt,” Landesman
said, “and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.” Good thing he inserted that
indispensable fudge word “arguably.” Obama is indeed the first president to have written his own
books since Teddy Roosevelt, but only if you don’t count Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert
Hoover, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and, arguably, Bill Clinton. And Obama couldn’t be the first
president to write his books really well since Lincoln because he, -Lincoln, didn’t write any.
Obama made an even odder choice to run the NEH. Jim Leach is a former Republican congressman
from Iowa whose only credential in the humanities seems to be his cofounding of the Congressional
Humanities Caucus in 2004, after he had been in Congress for 27 years. His other qualifications must
have struck the president as more decisive. Leach was perhaps the earliest prominent Republican to
endorse Obama for president, an endorsement he throatily reiterated in a full-dress speech at the
Democratic National Convention in 2008.
Leach’s Obamaphilia didn’t come as a complete surprise. In his 30 years in Congress, he earned a
reputation among the mainstream press as a “Reasonable Republican” who could be counted on to
rise above petty partisanship. In ordinary language, this meant he was a liberal Republican who voted
with Democrats on crucial issues like abortion rights, campaign finance, and environmental
regulation. His annual rating from Americans for Democratic Action was sometimes double his rating
from the American Conservative Union.
Unlike some other Reasonable Republicans I could name, Leach deserved much of the admiration
his admirers felt for him. He was earnest, soft-spoken, impeccably honest, accessible, and
hardworking, and he cleaved to his own kind of integrity, refusing, for instance, to accept campaign
contributions over $500. But some admirable qualities are not required to achieve the status of
Reasonable Republican in Washington: wide learning, deep intellect, or even managerial skill.
Unfortunately, these are the qualities you’d hope to find in a federal advocate for the humanities and
the arts.
Obama’s choice of a brassy Broadway financier and a retired professional politician to be his
intellectual ambassadors reveals in the president a sensibility that is neither lowbrow nor highbrow,
but no brow—a consuming political calculator working outside any consideration of the arts or the
humanities at all.
How far outside? Lucky for us, the NEH has assembled Leach’s speeches in a handy archive on the
agency’s website. Together they open a window into the intellectual life of the administration of the
smartest guy ever to become president.
For the theme of his tenure Leach has chosen “civility,” or, as I have come to think of it after thrashing
my way through his archive, the New Civility, to distinguish it from the old, easy-to-understand civility
that most of us are familiar with.
“Civilization requires civility,” Leach likes to say, and the chairman has ensured that civilization will
trickle down through his agency and, he hopes, into the country at large. Each year the NEH hands
out about $140 million in grants to roughly a thousand hat-in-hand humanists. Program directors who
receive an NEH grant are now expected to agree to the agency’s published “Principles of Civility,” an
Obama-era version of the old loyalty oaths. Under the agency’s auspices public seminars have been
held in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, teaching the locals the value of the New Civility and
its Principles. Most ambitious of all, Leach undertook his own “civility tour” across the country. He
began the tour in late 2009 and finished it in May of this year.
Even with the end of the tour, Chairman Leach is still talking about civility. After appearing in 80 cities
and towns in 50 states over the course of 19 months, he probably couldn’t stop if he wanted to. And
it’s not clear that anyone other than his wife would notice if he did. Leach’s civility tour was not a
public relations bonanza. It drew little comment in the national press. One notable exception is the
irreplaceable Scott Johnson of the blog Power-line, who tracked the tour with a pitiless, though civil,
eye. Another is the columnist E.J. Dionne. In a column to mark the launch of the tour, Dionne wished
Leach good luck and wrote, “My hunch is that this very civil man may have to put up with a lot of
incivility along the way.”
Dionne was, of course, wrong. In declaring his hunch the columnist was merely observing the first
rule of the New Civility: Whenever an admirer of the president issues a call for civility, which happens
often, we are to pretend that he’s doing something courageous, even outré, standing bravely against
the irresistible current of the culture at large, which in revenge will try to make him its victim. We all
like to puff ourselves up this way. But Republicans have been struck by an odd coincidence, that
civility in the public debate became a national concern right about the time they began resisting the
president and his policies.
“Evidence of growing social fissures is real,” Leach said near the beginning of the tour, in the spring
of 2010, when the premonitory rumblings of that fall’s Republican landslide were first being felt. Leach
mentioned the “comments several months back on the House floor” during the health care debate.
“Citizens are becoming less open minded and more disrespectful of their leaders, other faith systems,
and each other.”
He had one particular leader in mind. “Many citizens have over the course of the last year charged
our current President with advancing policies that were either ‘communist,’ or ‘fascist,’ or both. . . .
Several in public life have even toyed with history-blind radicalism—the notion of secession.”
Words like these, Leach went on, while “protected by free speech,” are “a vocabulary of hate,
jeopardizing social cohesion and even public safety.”
How so? “Hate groups, some armed,” he continued, “are on the rise.” He didn’t produce any evidence
for this claim—Leach is not a detail guy—but still: “Vastly more rancorous, socially divisive acts and
assertions are being made across the land.”
He told audiences about the recent murder of a young Ecuadorean immigrant in a small town in New
York, where a gang of thugs called the local Hispanics “beaners.” The uncivil name-calling escalated
into organized harassment—“beaner hopping”—until one day the thugs stabbed the Ecuadorean boy
to death.
“For those who might question what is so awful about a simple expression of personal bigotry,” Leach
said, “it must be understood that there are few greater threats to civilization than intolerance.”
And there’s more where that murder came from. In asking his audiences to practice the New Civility,
Leach looked back on the horrors of the last century and mentioned the First World War, the
Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, and the “prejudice driven murders of Emmett
Till” and Matthew Shepard. His conclusion: “Fear of the different is a weakness of the human
condition.”
Reading this I could imagine an audience searching for the appropriate response to the chairman’s
speech. His line of reasoning is not entirely clear. He seems to be saying that not only do
“intolerance” and a “fear of the different” lead to murder and genocide, they also lead to a sickening
lack of civility. Perhaps in a perfect world—in the “hate-free nation that must be our common goal”—
the gang of thugs stabbing the young man from Ecuador would suddenly stop themselves and hang
their heads in shame: “How could we be so impolite?”
As I read further into the archive, however, I saw that I might have been misunderstanding Leach’s
point. This is not my fault. As a prose stylist, Leach is no Obama. His sentences come in odd shapes
and sizes, and he tends to back into them, verb first, keeping his reader off balance. For example:
“Little is more important for the world’s leading democracy . . . ” And: “Seldom is there only one
proper path determinable by one individual, one country, or one political party.”
I don’t know where he got that “determinable.” With a little jiggering the sentence could easily have
lived without it. But it’s a good example of his method of choosing words—the bigger the better.
Earlier I said that civility was the chairman’s theme; Leach prefers to say his policies have a thematic.
You’ve already seen that religions are really faith systems. “Argumentation is a social good,” he
writes, tossing aside the commoner word argument as not fancy enough for a humanities guy.
Cultures don’t differ; they have cultural differentiations.
The helium often spreads throughout the entire sentence. On its way from brain to teleprompter to
voice box, a simple idea like “nobody’s perfect” expands into “Imperfect judgment characterizes the
human condition.” Sometimes sentences swell to proportions so large and bumpy you can scarcely
see from end to end:
Indifferent to the most unpardonable ramifications of human prejudice, many of the seemingly best
and brightest in civilization’s most advanced cultures manipulated with little compunction manifestly
oppressive circumstances in furtherance of self-interest.
Even the shorter effusions can be puzzling, thanks to the chairman’s preference for the abstract word
over the concrete. “Certain frameworks of thought define rival ideas,” he said often on the civility tour.
“Other frameworks describe enemies.” I think the phrase “framework of thought” is what stumped me.
Isn’t a “framework” a “thought” too? So thoughts about thoughts describe enemies? And ideas—
they’re thoughts too, right? So thoughts about thoughts define other thoughts? I am sure they do, but
after reading 27 speeches I’m not sure that this is what he means. My current guess is that he hoped
to say: You can choose to take disagreements personally or you can choose to judge them on the merits. If anyone has a better translation I’m open to suggestions.
Another recurring sentence, or one of its variants, often serves as the opening line of his civility
speeches. It is not what the speechwriting trade calls a “lapel-grabber.”
“Perspective is always difficult to apply to events and circumstances of the day.”
Now, in my reading, Leach floats off with that very first word, perspective. Does the sentence mean
it’s difficult to see current events in light of history or philosophy? Surely he couldn’t believe that.
Does he mean it’s hard to remain disinterested when thinking about today’s controversies? If so, he’s
got a point, though a trivial one. Does he mean that we should consider the long-term effects of our
current disputes? We should, we should!
But maybe that’s not what he means. He likes to say the NEH is in the “perspective dissemination
business,” which is no help at all.
Perhaps the context makes plain the meaning of such Leachian puzzles? Not in my experience, no.
But Leach seems to think so. Context is his favorite word; “in this context” and “in the context of” are
his favorite phrases. The context could be anything. “In the context of a newly challenged America,”
he will say. “In the context of Jefferson’s love for this university . . . ” “In the context of American
history . . . of growing demographic burdens . . . of the challenges in higher education today . . . of
philosophy . . . of jurisprudence . . . of life experience . . . ”
“In this context” and its siblings are among the most unnecessary phrases in the language—as a
general rule, any sentence would profit from its removal. As I read through the archive I began to
dread its next appearance, which was never far off. Just say “in a newly challenged America” and get
on with it. For crying out loud.
It was only later that I realized why the chairman likes to use this particular crutch to prop up his
sentences. Yes, “in this context” sounds vaguely academic, like something an egghead would say,
but, more important, it makes his theme—his thematic, I mean—appear much grander than it truly is,
once all the helium has been released and the abstract nouns shooed away. By putting events in the
context of his choosing, he can make connections that aren’t there. Thus a harsh debate over health
care, “in the context of history, philosophy, and life experiences,” can be understood as merely a
milder form of the murder of an Ecuadorean in small-town New York, which in turn is but a smallscale iteration of the Holocaust.
Context provides a rebuke to those who would consider the New Civility trivial or silly: You shouldn’t
roll your eyes at something that, properly understood, could stifle the urge to slaughter entire peoples.
Yet Leach never gets around to defining what, precisely, the New Civility is. He first tries the via
negativa, as the humanists used to call it, defining civility by explaining what it is not.
“Civility is not principally about manners,” he says. “The concept of civility implies politeness, but civil
discourse is more than good etiquette.” This is the point at which the New Civility detaches itself from
regular old civility, which is principally—indeed, solely—about manners. The old civility is social, a
matter of behaving the right way: speaking softly, listening quietly, keeping your temper in check. The
New Civility is psychological, a matter of thinking the right thoughts: thinking, as it happens, like Jim
Leach and his boss.
“What is required is a greater willingness to consider—respectfully—diverse views, recognizing that
we are all connected and rely on each other.” Listening quietly is no longer enough—that’s just run-ofthe-mill politeness. The New Civility requires us to “consider respectfully,” to “place other views in the
context of history, philosophy, and life experiences.” Under the old civility we could be satisfied if
people listened quietly because polite silence was all we could reasonably expect; whether you were
considering other views respectfully or recognizing that we are all connected was your own business.
Now it’s the chairman’s business and he has ways of finding out: Do your statements show that
you’ve found the proper context? Leach of course is happy to provide it. Our present situation, in his
view, is binary: Leaders can either “opt for unifying statesmanship or opportunistic partisanship.”
Voters can choose between “those who seek unity by respecting diversity, or those who press
debilitating cultural wars or extreme ideological agendas.”
We can be certain—it’s plain from the context—which side Jim Leach and President Obama are on.
The problem is, they can’t be certain about the rest of us. Their New Civility is premised on the idea
that the country’s heated debates are caused by the opportunistic partisanship and extreme agendas
of their adversaries. It assumes that the people on the other side are dealing in bad faith. It assumes,
in other words, the very worst of their political opponents.
That’s why Leach had to invent the New Civility: Under the old civility it would be considered uncivil—
and recognized as political hackery, prettied up.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Crazy U: One Dad’s
Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.
Hot Air
Guess what happened to that Obama recovery?
by Ed Morrissey
For the past two years, the Obama administration has tried to sell the American public on the notion
that its economic policies created a substantial recovery. Friday’s GDP numbers, especially the
revisions that impacted results for the past several years, has put an end to that illusion. Derek
Thompson at The Atlantic lowers the boom on the supposed Obama recovery (via Instapundit):
"Yesterday, analysts thought the economy was expanding by 2.5% a year. This morning, they learned
GDP grew by only 1.6% in the last four quarters. This is a remarkable discovery. It’s the difference
between thinking we’re expanding at a decent, if disappointing, pace, and knowing we’re growing
around half our historical norm.
Analysts also thought, as recently as twelve hours ago, that the economy declined 6.8% and 4.9% in
the quarters bisected by Obama’s inauguration. It turns out the actual declines were much steeper:
8.9% and 6.7%.
To adopt the president’s favorite metaphor of the ditch and the driver: The ditch was a 33% deeper
than we thought. And we’re driving 33% slower than we hoped."
Thompson includes a couple of eye-opening charts, although nothing that we haven’t seen before.
Check out his charts comparing the recession and post-recession periods of various downturns, but
this one from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve on employment really tells the story better:
Now we know why employment has skittered along the bottom end of the curve for so long. Our
economy hasn’t been expanding much at all during the two years of recovery, noted on the bottom
line by the black square. No wonder we’re barely above the employment level of the recession’s end
24 months later.
How about comparing actual output recovery cycles after recessions? Here was the chart on output
from the Minneapolis Fed before the revisions:
That trajectory will be lower, thanks to the restated numbers from the BEA. It’s the worst “recovery”
we’ve had in the post-WWII period. Even tracked from the recovery point, this post-recession period
(with revised GDP numbers) will end up worse than the double-dip recession of 1980-81 and the 9/11
recession in 2001 that destroyed a lot more than paper assets.
We have been saying for two years that the Obama “recovery” has been smoke and mirrors, and the
revisions in the GDP reporting make that pretty clear now. The other clear takeaway from this is that
the Keynesian stimulus bill utterly failed to produce anything more than a temporary, artificial spike in
economic indicators, and not a particularly impressive spike at that.
Salena Zito says that a lack of focus on jobs and real economic will cost Obama dearly in 2012:
When historians look back on this moment in American politics, they may wonder why the White
House failed to focus on the consuming issue of the time: the economy — and, in particular, jobs. …
In June, the nation’s unemployment rate rose for a third straight month, as employers added only
18,000 workers and corporate earnings languished.
Anyone buying basic groceries can feel the pinch of consumer prices rising to offset higher
commodity costs, so buying little beyond what you absolutely need has become the norm.
President Barack Obama’s support has eroded among the very independent voters who helped him
sweep into office. That drop-off is based on his inability to lead on numerous issues, but most
importantly on the economy.
They’re going to start asking why the jobs haven’t come back, too — and conclude that
Obamanomics has been a very expense fiscal catastrophe.
Contentions
The Comforting Life of Ideological Fanatics
by Peter Wehner
What happens to an ideologue when the president in whom he invested enormous hope is
increasingly seen as a failure? For one answer, see the lead “Talk of the Town” item in The New
Yorker, where Hendrik Hertzberg writes this:
"Invoking the Fourteenth Amendment has always been a long shot, a last refuge. But Obama’s
seeming refusal to hold it in reserve … is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating
negotiating strategy–indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most
disappointing aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has
allowed deficits and debt to supercede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He
has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household
that must ‘live within its means.’ (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means
can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done
too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is
achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when
the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now–a
lack of demand, not a shortage of capital–higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower
taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich."
Translation: Barack Obama, the most liberal president in generations, hasn’t been liberal enough. His
problem hasn’t been profligacy but frugality. During the last two-and-a-half years, as $3.7 trillion has
been added to our national debt, it turns out Obama has spent too little. Despite his efforts to slander
and misrepresent the proposals of his opponents, Obama turns out to be too civil, too
accommodating, too darn decent. And the man Democrats considered their Great Communicator just
three years ago is suffering from a “communications problem,” unable to educate the public to the
wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics.
This is sheer nonsense, of course. But Hertzberg’s comments are instructive. Rather than take into
account the economic (and empirical) failure of Obama’s Keynesian approach, those who take a
dogmatic, faith-based approach to American politics engage in intellectual contortions in order to try
to innoculate their ideology from damage. People like Hertzberg begin from what is, for them, an
unassailable proposition: liberalism is right because it is right and so it can never be wrong. And what
happens when, by any objective standard, liberal policies fail? The problem is, they weren’t
sufficiently liberal.
There are certain advantages to this approach. Those whose minds are obdurate and canonical –
regardless of the philosophy they hold — don’t need to grapple with inconvenient facts. They have a
reflexive response to every set of facts that challenges their worldview: ignore the facts. This doesn’t
help one ascertain the truth. But it does avoid the hard work of facing up to the false assumptions on
which their intellectual structure rests. Call it the comforting life of an ideological fanatic.
Telegraph Blogs, UK
Joe Biden compares the Tea Party to terrorists. Is this the most crass and nasty US
presidency in decades?
by Nile Gardiner
Joe is Biden his time before his next gaffe
Earlier today Politico broke the astonishing story of Joe Biden supporting the charge by Democrat
Congressman Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania that Tea Party Republicans had “acted like terrorists” over
the debt issue. According to Politico’s report, based on eyewitness accounts:
"Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday,
accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit. Biden
was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door
Democratic Caucus meeting.
“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This
small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”
Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have
acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room."
There is something deeply sad and disconcerting when the vice president decides to compare
opposition legislators in Congress with terrorists simply because he disagrees with their views and
principles. This is the kind of ugly, threatening rhetoric that has no place at the heart of the US
presidency. About a third of the country are favourable towards the Tea Party, according to Gallup –
i.e. tens of millions of Biden’s fellow Americans. Does he label them terrorists too?
Working in Washington I’ve met numerous Tea Party supporters and have always found them to be
unfailingly patriotic people who love their country and feel passionately about the need to rein in Big
Government through the democratic process. To compare their elected representatives to terrorists
who seek to destroy the United States and everything it stands for is gravely insulting to hard working
Americans who have in many cases devoted their lives to serving their country.
Power carries with it responsibility and the vice president has monumentally abused it with his
remarks today. His conduct is hugely embarrassing for the second most powerful figure at the helm of
the world’s only superpower. There is a fundamental difference between robust political debate and
labeling your opponents as enemies of the state and proponents of violence.
Joe Biden has clearly overstepped the line with his comments, and brought the office of the vice
president into disrepute. His actions today are symbolic of a White House that increasingly looks
bitter, crass and petty in its behaviour as public opinion moves firmly against it. Biden’s outburst is a
sign of the Left’s growing desperation 30 months into the Obama administration, and only further
reinforces the image of decline and decay sinking in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
WSJ
Why Canada Is Beating America
It shrank government, and now unemployment and debt are declining.
by Jason Clemens
While the U.S. remains mired in debt and slogs through a subpar economic recovery, Canada is
moving ahead steadily. Its unemployment rate peaked at a little over 8.5% and is now 7.4%, and
there were no bank bailouts. Real GDP growth is expected to be roughly 3% this year.
Now with the first majority government since 2004, and the first Conservative majority since 1993, the
country has an opportunity to vault forward. The Conservatives led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper
have a chance to build on the reforms begun under previous Liberal governments that Americans can
only look at with envy.
Canada's government, for example, has grown smaller over the last 15 years. Total government
spending as a share of the economy peaked at a little over 53% in 1993. Through a combination of
spending cuts in the 1990s and spending restraint during the 2000s, it declined to a little under 40%
of GDP by 2008. (It's currently about 44% due to the recession.)
Reductions in government spending allowed for balanced budgets and the retiring of debt. Federal
debt as a share of the Canadian economy was almost halved from nearly 80% to a little over 40%
over the same period.
On the federal level, capital gains taxes in Canada were reduced twice and currently stand at 14.5%.
A series of cuts to the corporate income tax beginning in 2001 have seen the rate slashed to 15%
from 28%. Many provinces followed suit by reducing both corporate and personal income tax rates.
But the Conservative government faces two challenges: health reform and taxes.
The unavoidable challenge is the country's health-care system. Negotiations to renew federal
transfers to the provinces in support of health care begin later this fall.
Canada devotes a relatively high share of its economy to health care without enjoying commensurate
outcomes. Of the 28 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) that have universal access, Canada has the sixth-highest rate of health spending as a share
of its economy.
Canadian health care is unique among the OECD countries with universal access in that Canadians
alone depend almost exclusively on government for medically-necessary health care. Simply put,
health care is dominated by the government in one form or another. Canada prohibits both
copayments and private funding for publicly-insured services. Hospitals are for practical purposes
owned and operated by government, and over 98% of physician income is from government.
But Canadians' access to care is poor, despite high spending. The country ranks 20th of 22 OECD
countries for access to physicians. Canada's national statistical agency recently reported that 6.6% of
Canadians (aged 12 or older) indicated being without a doctor and unable to find one. Canada also
ranks poorly on access to technology: 17th for CT scanners and MRIs.
Waiting times for treatment continue to worsen. A longstanding survey by the free-market Fraser
Institute recently found that the median wait time between general practitioner and treatment had
increased to 18.2 weeks (2010) from 9.3 weeks in 1993 when the survey started.
While the United States moves towards greater centralization of health-care regulation, Canada's
Conservatives have an opportunity to give the provincial governments more leeway in delivering and
financing health care. Allowing the provinces to become laboratories for different methods of healthcare delivery and financing while protecting universal access holds the greatest chance for improving
health care and controlling costs.
Uncompetitive tax rates, particularly compared to the U.S., are the country's other major challenge.
Canada's Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has consistently indicated that lowering
personal taxes is a priority. In a recent interview he stated that Canada "should be moving toward a
flatter personal income tax system."
Canada's personal income tax rates are relatively high and kick in at comparatively low levels of
income. For example, Canada's top federal marginal personal income tax rate (29%) applies to
income over $128,800 (in Canadian dollars, or U.S. $135,038 as of July 29). Provincial taxes, which
are generally higher than in U.S. states, are added on top of the federal rates. The top federal tax rate
in the U.S. is 35%—but it applies to income over U.S. $379,150.
The Conservatives have committed to tax relief once the budget is balanced, which is expected
toward the end of their current term. To implement meaningful income tax cuts, the Conservative
government will also need to be more proactive with spending reductions. As demonstrated in the
1990s by their Liberal Party predecessors, spending reductions now will result in a balanced budget
sooner and an opportunity for large-scale tax relief.
Winning a Conservative majority in Canada was no small feat. The question remains what the
Conservatives will do with that majority.
Mr. Clemens is the director of research at the Canadian Macdonald-Laurier Institute and co-author of
the "Canadian Century" (Key Porter, 2010).