Rick Perry's Texas

Now that Paul Ryan has chosen not to run for the presidency this time, the field seems to have come down to Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Maybe Michele Bachmann… but she is more likely as a vice-presidential candidate.

As Rick Perry advances toward the nomination, he has attracted a strange group of detractors. Naturally, trial lawyers and labor unions consider him an existential threat. They, along with the environmental lobby, will be throwing everything they have in the path of the Perry juggernaut.

And, more than a few Republicans are more than unusually upset over Perry’s statements about God and evolution and even global warming.

It’s fairly clear that conservative political operatives would be more comfortable with Mitt Romney, and believe that they would have better access.

In my view, most of that is static. Democrats will trot out the alien culture argument-- as in, Rick Perry represents a culture that is alien to the values that pertain on the Upper West Side-- to whip their voters into line.

But, the election will be probably decided, and should be decided, by comparing the records of the two major candidates.

Executive leadership counts. How does Perry’s Texas record of job growth stack up against Obama’s? That will be the question. Or, how does Texas stack up against major blue states like California, Illinois, and New York?

You know that this is going to be the major issue because Paul Krugman and his ilk have been trotting out facts and figures to debunk the idea that Texas has grown its economy over the last decade. And you can be assured that the mainstream media will start running stories about misery in Texas.

I suspect that Joel Kotkin is a Democrat, but his analysis is fact-based.

He opens his analysis of the Texas economy with the following sensible observation: “You don’t have to like Rick Perry or his sometimes scary neo-confederate politics to admire what has been happening in Texas over the past decade. Rather than trashing the state in order to demean its governor, perhaps the mainstream media should be thinking about what the Lone Star’s success story means for the rest of the country.

“Texas has done what most of other states — notably the blue coastal ones — have failed to do: create jobs. Over the past decade Texas has created 2.1 million jobs — while New York, California, Massachusetts and Illinois have all lost jobs.”

For the record, Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.

Kotkin continues that your salary goes farther in Texas.  Housing is more affordable in Texas. For those who live in blue states, that is not a trivial matter.

In the big blue states, with their high taxes and bloated government bureaucracies, life is vastly more expensive. The Texas record does not just involve job creation but an affordable lifestyle.

To those who believe that Texas has unfairly profited from its energy industry, Kotkin, who lives in California, has an excellent rejoinder: “Energy-rich California has all but declared war on its fossil fuel industry, once one of the nation’s most important. Instead, the state has placed lavish bets on renewable fuel and the much ballyhooed notion that ‘green jobs‘ could provide a massive base for new employment — something even the green-friendly New York Times has called ‘a pipe dream.’  In fact, employment in this field has actually started to tick down, and the prospect of ever higher energy prices associated with ‘clean‘ fuels could prove another nail in California’s economic coffin.”

After explaining that a pro-business Democrat might also have presided over similar economic growth, Kotkin concludes: “Yet despite the state’s shortcomings — and those of its current governor –  Texas’ success remains remarkable, particularly in comparison with that of the other major states. Rigid adherence to low taxes and light regulation may  not be the panacea for all economic problems but the opposite approach of ever higher taxes and debilitating regulation clearly has failed in terms of creating jobs and opportunities.

“Rather than demean the Lone Star state, perhaps progressives should begin demonstrating an alternative approach for American prosperity that might actually work someplace other than in the fevered imaginations of academics and pundits.”

I think it unlikely that progressives will take up the challenge. Their political heroes are far too beholden to the special interest groups that fund their campaigns. And these special interests have no real interest in economic growth and prosperity.

The Root Cause of the British Riots

England is not consumed in a public debate about the causes of the recent rioting.

It comes as something of a surprise, given that Tony Blair has written that he does not see them as a sign of moral collapse and that Christopher Hitchens has argued that rioting is a venerable British tradition.

Since Brits have always rioted, Hitchens assures us that we should not draw any lessons from them.

Of course, there are still a few leftists who interpret the violence as a rebellion against injustice. Some believe that they show that fiscal austerity is a bad thing.

Finally, other leftists have compared the looting and burning on the streets of England with the white collar looting that was perpetrated by mortgage lenders and rogue traders.

Writing in the Telegraph, Janet Daley has a better idea. To her, as to me, it is about the culture. Britain has been suffering through a cultural decline, one that resembles the fallout from the American counterculture.

In her words: “What real people know – and have known for quite a long time – is that the great tacit agreement which once held civic life together has been deliberately blown apart. There was a time within living memory when all reasonable grown-ups were considered to be on the same side. Parents, teachers, police, judges, politicians – decent citizens of every station and calling – formed an unspoken confederacy to uphold standards of behaviour within their own communities. But their shared values and expectations about human conduct were systematically undermined by a post-Sixties political ideology that preached wholesale disrespect for authority, and legitimised anti-social activity in the name of protest.”

Culture, in the sense of customs and mores, common habits and behaviors, common values and standards, is not written down anywhere.

Shared attitudes may lay the groundwork for legislation and for government policies, but they are not legislated.

Young Americans attacked the culture in the 1960s by rejecting adult authority. They began with a slogan: Don’t trust anyone over 30.

British politicians and jurists translated a distrust of authority into a criminal justice system that emphasized therapy more than punishment. Criminals were not violent offenders; they were misunderstood. We mustn’t subject them to the indignity of incarceration.

In her column Daley argues that this culture rot has arisen from the work of a French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau argued that people are born good and that they go bad because they are subjected to restrictions imposed by external authorities. Allow them to grow up unconstrained and they will become, by Rousseau’s lights, naturally good.

Daley expresses it well: “In fact, the politics of the Sixties were just a late incarnation of an 18th-century philosophy. We have Jean-Jacques Rousseau to thank for the basic principle that men are born good and will only behave badly if they are corrupted by authority and repressive institutions: that we need only liberate them from those false limitations and their natural moral instincts will come to the fore.”

The therapy culture has contributed to this cultural degeneration with its own mantra: don’t be judgmental.

But if no one is ever allowed to judge another human being’s behavior, and if no one is ever allowed to suffer for bad behavior, what incentive does anyone have to behave well.

Daley explains: “The indispensable tools of social stigma and moral judgment that communities used to have at their disposal for this purpose have been stripped away, and the result – the fearless defiance of helpless authority – is what we saw in its terrifying logical conclusion on the streets. That is what real people know: that they were right all along.”

Perhaps the riots were a wake-up call for Great Britain, a moment where the citizenry saw the folly of its ways and silently vowed to be done with the counterculture and the therapy culture. We can all hope.

Mitt Romney's Decline

You have gobs and gobs of money. You have succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. You are running for president of the United States on the ground that you can revive the nation’s flagging economy.

You know, because everyone knows, that the epicenter of the financial crisis exists in property values and the mortgage market. You know, because everyone knows, that millions of American homes are in foreclosure, about to be in foreclosure, or are worth less than their mortgages.

American families are feeling the pain. You want these families to come out and vote for you.

What do you do to show your sensitivity to the pain of everyday Americans?

If you’re Mitt Romney you file papers to raze your 3000 sq. ft. home in La Jolla, the better to replace it with a 11,000 sq. ft. home that is more befitting your circumstances. Link here. And you do it in California, of all places, because, you state, you want to hear the ocean.

To the average American, the symbolism could not be more jarring. The gesture tells the average American, that even in time of trouble, when everyone is struggling to make ends meet, that you are so rich that you can do as you please.

Not what I would call a winning message.

Maybe there’s something in the Massachusetts water. But this public relations blunder immediately invoked pictures of the hyper-rich former presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry kite boarding off the coast of Nantucket in 2004.

I don’t know who does Mitt Romney’s PR, but if he can afford his new digs, he can certainly afford some world class PR.

If his PR team signed off on the project, they should be fired.

But then, maybe it means that Mitt Romney knows, somewhere deep in his unconscious mind, that he is not going to be the Republican nominee for president.

In that, he would very likely be correct.

Should Obama Resign?

Yesterday, I suggested that Barack Obama might decide not to run for re-election in 2012.

Anticipating an ignominious defeat, liberal Democrats are wishing and hoping for Barack Obama to step aside.

It seems a bit farfetched, but there is no harm preparing for improbable events.

If Republicans do not have a plan for running against Hillary, they are derelict in their political duties.

This morning, two columnists have upped the ante.

Quin Hillyer recommended that Obama could help the economy by abdicating. We’ll give Hillier a pass on the fact that in normal English usage you can only abdicate a throne.

Hillyer offers a well-crafted opening paragraph: “This boringly ineffective would-be demagogue in the Oval Office keeps trotting out the same tired, petty, counterfactual lines in every one of his pompous, detached-from-reality speeches -- and he did so again in his Saturday radio address. So shopworn is his refrain, and so counterproductive are his policies (both enacted and proposed), that the markets tank just about every time he opens his mouth, and the economy suffers with each minute he continues to occupy the White House. His resignation from office, in abject embarrassment at his failures, would be a great first step toward economic recovery, not to mention a balm to the souls of tens of millions of Americans sick of his condescension, his prevarications, and his incompetence.”

Then, Michael Malone recommends that Obama resign, on the grounds of illness.

Addressing himself to Obama, Malone writes: “From the opinion polls to the depressed state of the stock markets to growing contempt of our enemies (and friends) around the world to the stunning lack of new ideas for getting out of our current economic predicament to the apparent impending failure of your signature universal healthcare initiative, it has become obvious even to members of your own party that you are in over your head.

“You know it too, Mr. President, if your endless golf games and vacations – not to mention your increasingly incoherent public appearances – are any indication of your state of mind.”

Malone suggests that resignation is the best thing that could happen to the progressive cause. He also sees resignation as the best way for Obama to save face.

By my analysis someone who fakes an illness in order to resign is not saving face. If Obama wants to walk away with his head held high, he would do better to declare himself a successful, albeit misunderstood one-term president, declare victory, and refuse to run for re-election.

If Obama is facing a choice between rejection by the voters and resigning from office, I recommend that he choose the middle ground and retire at the end of his first term.

Obama or Liberalism?

The Light Seers Brigade is expanding. More and more liberals are seeing the light about Barack Obama.

They are not happy. They are disappointed and disillusioned.

They see the champion of their cause leading it toward ignominious defeat. In the poet’s words, he is leading liberalism: “into the valley of Death.”

Maureen Dowd did not join the Light Seers Brigade yesterday. She has long since expressed despair over Barack Obama‘s failings.

Adept at debunking Obama’s pretense, she devotes part of her column this morning to refuting the arguments he was trying out on his pre-vacation bus tour.

In her words: “President Obama bashed Congress on his bus tour. But after delegating to Congress time and again with disastrous results, he continues to play the satellite to Congress.

“He shouldn’t be driven by the Washington schedule. He should be setting it.

“At long last, he promised a clear economic plan. Unfortunately, he had the fierce urgency of next month, when Congress gets back to town.

“Americans are rattled and want action. They don’t know or care what Congress’s schedule is. They just see the president not doing anything.

“Cruising white Midwestern hamlets in his black bus, Obama tried to justify not calling lawmakers back to D.C. by saying they’d just continue to bicker. But what does he think they’ll do in September? The truth is, he doesn’t want them back in the capital any more than they want to be back. It would have screwed up his vacation and upset Michelle, who already feels trapped in the Washington bubble.”

With friends like that, you don’t need conservative critics.

Another Times columnist, Charles Blow, echoes Dowd’s sentiments. Happily for my metaphor, he sees Obama leading the nation into a valley: “Yet here Obama is, down in the valley, struggling to connect with the American people and failing, increasingly coming across as dispassionate to some and outright revolting to others.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Like Dowd, Blow quickly dispatches another of Obama’s talking points, namely his effort to blame it on the Republicans: “Of course, Republicans haven’t helped. They’re absolutely committed to, and obsessed with, his failure. But that cannot be the excuse. Great leadership isn’t shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos.”

And yes, I see that Blow has jumbled his metaphors in his last sentence.

It’s more important to correct Blow’s assertion that great leaders appeal our “universal humanity.” First, because the phrase is empty of meaning. Second, because great American leaders appeal to our pride as Americans.

Whoever would have imagined that Barack Obama would not know how to appeal to our pride as Americans, and thus, would fail to be a galvanizing leader?

At the end of his column Blow describes Obama in terms that might have come from the keyboard of one of his detractors: “A robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity will not satisfy.”

Describing Obama as something other than human is downright harsh.

Let’s understand that Maureen Dowd, Charles Blow, and Jeffrey Sachs (see previous post) are people Barack Obama reads and respects. I suspect that they are addressing their remarks to Obama himself.

If so, what are they trying to tell him? Perhaps they are telling him to grow a pair, as the vernacular would have it, but they do not seem to have even that much hope.

I think that they are casting a vote of no confidence in  Barack Obama. Apparently, their president has lost their confidence. The elite intellectuals who put him where he is, the philosopher-kings who elevated him to a position that far exceeded his capacity or his competence are throwing him over the side.

Unless I miss my guess-- if so, it will not be the first time-- they are also telling him that it is time to step aside.

Clearly, he does not like the job. He would rather be hanging out with the liberal swells on Martha’s Vineyard. He has demonstrated no real competence and no real leadership, so it is time to take one for the team.

Liberals are in trouble. They are suffering their own intellectual crisis. Either they are going to abandon Barack Obama or they are going to abandon their ideas. Since their philosophy requires that they worship at the altar of Ideas, Obama will have to go.

But, they cannot challenge him in the primary. They do not want him to become another Jimmy Carter. So, they are trying to see him as another Lyndon Johnson, a man who had the good grace to step aside in 1968, to refuse to run for president again.

All things considered, it’s a touchy matter. No Democrat can win an election without a strong turnout by Obama’s base.

If his base sees Obama being forced out of the presidency by a bunch of liberal intellectuals, it might become alienated from the Democratic party.

Rest assured that liberal thinkers will give up on Obama before they will give up on their cherished beliefs. Even Jeffrey Sachs, clear-headed about his judgment of Obama’s leadership, still wants to apply liberal nostrums to the nation’s economic problems.

In his most recent Financial Times op-ed, Sachs offers his own policy prescriptions. He declares that the nation needs upgraded skills-- i. e., more spending on education--, more spending on infrastructure, higher taxes on the rich, low-carbon energy, and no more wars.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? It’s the liberal platform. It was the Obama campaign platform.

So now, liberal elites blame Obama for not implementing all of their agenda.

They are torn between thinking that Obama is an inept leader and recognizing that his programs did not work. In fact, his programs seem to have made things worse.

Having to choose between being wrong about Obama or being wrong about liberalism… they will happily throw Obama over the side.

Jeffrey Sachs Sees the Light

Today we can count economist Jeffrey Sachs among those who have see the light. By now there are so many that we might start calling them the Light Seers Brigade.

A liberal Columbia professor, Sachs had originally supported Barack Obama. He had great hopes for an Obama presidency.

No more.

The other morning on the Morning Joe show, Sachs said this: “We're almost three years into this administration, and there's never been a plan. And that's what everybody feels. And the president didn't lead. He waited. The quintessential image, sadly, of an administration that I supported and hoped for much better, is the president waiting by the phone to hear what Congress calls to tell him. It doesn't work in this country that way. It's not a matter that it's August. It's a matter that it's August 2011. So we've been drifting for a very long time. And we've been drifting down. And we had a short-term plan that failed. A short-term stimulus that was supposed to get the economy back on track, but it failed. And now we have nothing behind it. And we have no agreements, and we have no leadership. And, frankly, I do think it's pretty odd the president's on vacation right now. Normally I wouldn't care about such things, but the world markets are in deep crisis. It's no joke. This isn't just an up-and-down little blip. This is a very serious situation."

The opinion is not news. The source is. A quick read of Sachs’ Wikipedia entry will show how important and influential he is.

Admittedly, there are still a few holdouts. The few remaining diehard Obamaphile intellectuals have shifted into campaign mode and are parroting the party line by blaming the economic crisis on God and the Republicans.

So, let’s give credit to Jeffrey Sachs for his intellectual integrity. And let's heed the observation of this world class economist that the "world markets are in deep crisis." As he says: "It's no joke."

Rick Perry on Patriotism

Press accounts have it that Rick Perry really stepped over the line the other day. He seemed to be impugning Barack Obama’s patriotism.

Let’s see: Barack Obama declared himself a citizen of the world. He went around apologizing for America. He questions whether America is exceptional. His wife declared that she had only found it in her heart to feel proud of her country after it nominated her husband for the presidency.

And, of course, Obama openly impugns the patriotism of those who disagree with him.

No one blinks.

If a presidential candidate dares to question Obama’s patriotism, he will be called out by the press and the pundits for having committed something that is equivalent to a thought crime.

Early in the week Perry said this: “I think you want a president who is passionate about America — that’s in love with America.”

Thus, a reporter asked him whether he was suggesting that President Obama does not love America. Perry responded: “You need to ask him.”

I don’t want to split too many hairs here, but being passionate about America and loving America and not really the same thing. There is even a difference, as most people use these terms, between loving America and being in love with America.

You can certainly love your country without being passionate about it.

Perry was trying to highlight his own passion for America, by unsubtly comparing his passionate commitment with Obama’s more nuanced love for his country.

It is not, however, out of line to suggest that the reporter might ask the question of Obama himself. Rick Perry does not speak for Barack Obama; he does not know what is in Obama‘s heart.

Only Obama can answer for his own feelings.

Perry was also pointing to the fact that reporters have been loath to ask Barack Obama very many difficult questions. While Republican candidates are being vetted and tested by the press, Barack Obama largely gets a bye.

Everyone knows that the media double standard exists. Few know how to correct it.

Perhaps I am parsing Perry’s line a bit too finely, but the press that is all over his presumed impugning of Obama’s patriotism has nothing to say about the fact that Obama has been out on the hustings impugning the patriotism of most members of Congress.

Obama has been trying out his new election theme: country first. He has been saying that those who disagree with him have been putting party before country.

Yet, when he blames Congress for putting party before country by holding up free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, he must know, and he must know that we all know, that these agreements have been held up by Democrats, working at the behest of their union bosses.

Does Obama want to say that these Democrats and their union bosses are putting party before country?

Or does he know that no one is going to call him out on it.

Rick Perry’s inelegant insinuation might have stepped over a line, but the line he stepped over is only there for Republicans.

Double standards rankle. Unfair treatment by the press irritates and angers candidates. There is nothing very strange about this. Nor should there be.

In truth, Rick Perry was not impugning Obama’s patriotism as much as he was impugning the integrity of the Obamaphile journalistic community, and putting them on notice.