President Obama has just created a panel to figure out how to get our debt under control.  Even when he makes a decision, such as this one, it is to pass the buck to someone else to do the heavy lifting.  His attempt to overhaul health care turned into the Harry and Nancy Show.  Obama campaigned and gave speeches while Pelosi and Reid shut out the Republicans and created the bill that could not be passed.  Obama is now trying to put lipstick on that pig, by calling for a bipartisan meeting.  But instead of starting over and getting ideas from everyone, they are basically going to pick over the stinking corpse of the bill that the Democrats could not get passed.  It is obvious that the real objective is to either get some Republicans to sign on or to use the meeting as a club to beat the Republicans as the “party of No.”

Stop Me Before I Spend

This president can’t seem to control himself and he finds that he painted himself into a corner.  If he tries to raise taxes on those who make less than $250,000 per year he will be breaking a major campaign promise.  If he stops spending on his own, he will lose the left which is about the only support he has remaining.  So he calls in Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to co-chair a committee charged with making the president a tailor made fig leaf, to allow him to cut spending and raise taxes, while shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I can’t go a gainst the excellent advice of this august commission.”

If he wants to cut spending, he can just cut spending.  He doesn’t need a commission to do so.  How about an across the board spending freeze, except for national defense, until the the economy grows enough to balance the budget and not with gimmicks like increasing discretionary spending now 24% and then saying you will freeze that same spending for the next threee years?  How about freezing government hiring?  How about returning $500 billion in unspent stimulus money and $400 billion in repaid TARP money, plus interest, to the Treasury?  Don’t hold your breath.  That would require someone with executive experience who knows how to make a decision, rather than deliberating, like a legislator.  Sarah Palin comes to mind, as does George Bush (I & II), Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan.  These experienced executives knew how to put together a budget and make decisions.  Chris Christie in New Jersey was just sworn in last month as governor and he immediately identified the problem as too much spending and got to work cutting it back.  All that President Obama seems to know how to do is talk. 

If we start advertising now, we may get enough resumes to review to find a replacement by 2012.

The Joke is on You

Joe Biden just held a press event to reveal how he was going to help the middle class.  The man who has a hard time reaching into his own pocket for more than $1 a day in charity to give to his fellow man, has no problem reaching into your pocket and give the fruit of your labor to someone else.  It’s a win-win.  It doesn’t cost Joe Biden and it helps him keep getting elected and drawing a salary that you pay for.

Here is what he revealed:

1. Nearly Doubling the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit — in an economy that has over 10% unemployment this administration is focusing on helping those who already have a job and income.  I’m all for tax cuts, but not targeted cuts.  Cut income tax rates and jobs will be created.  I don’t believe this administration knows how to aim anything well enough to hit a target
2. Limiting a student’s federal loan payments to 10 percent of his/her income above a basic living allowance — the administration is concerned about how much debt students leave college with.  Does it have any concern about how much debt they are piling on everyone, not just college graduates?  Biden pointed to the average indebtedness of around $25,000 for college graduates.  The federal debt is about $35,000 for every man, woman and child in America, not just college graduates and this administration shows no signs of stopping it.
3. Creating a system of automatic workplace IRAs — government first got involved in retirement with Social Security.  That system is bankrupt and this administration has no interest in fixing it.  When Republicans floated the idea of taking a portion of the Social Security payroll tax and diverting it to higher return private savings, the Democrats savaged them.  So the Democrat solution is to ignore the bankrupt Social Security system and start telling business what to do.
4. Expanding tax credits to match retirement savings and enacting new safeguards to protect retirement savings — again with Social Security bankrupt, they want to put more tax dollars into retirement.  How different is this than the Republican plan to take what exists and allow it to get better returns than the paltry rate it currently gets within the Social Security system? The difference is that the Republican plan wouldn’t cost anything extra.  The Democrat plan will either increase payroll taxes or increase the deficit.  Surprise!!!
5. Expanding support for families balancing work with caring for elderly relatives –I thought the Democrats had fixed this with “end of life counseling” in their health care plan, coupled with bringing back the Death Tax next year.

Fumbling and Stumbling

The way to create jobs is to let the job creators keep their money to invest in their business and expand.  Small business owners are stuck waiting to learn how much all of Obama’s social re-engineering is going to cost them and until they know that, hiring is the last thing they will do.  The only thing this administration seems to know how to do is bash business and spend money and the more they spend the longer the recover will take.  They are now planning another stimulus plan to follow the last stimulus plan that didn’t work, and the deficit continues to grow and grow and grow.

President Obama wants to create a bipartisan panel to recommend how to reduce the deficit.  He gives the back of his hand to bipartisanship when it comes to workable solutions to real problems, but he loves bipartisanship when it gives him political cover to make unpopular decisions.  All of his supporters love to say that experience doesn’t matter and that President Obama is the smartest guy in the room.  If that is true, he should not be afraid to propose bold spending cuts and shrinking government and be smart enough to explain it to Congress on his own.  If he does so, I am sure many Republicans would support him and vote for it (and almost all Democrats vote against it).  But he wants it both ways, he wants Republicans to yield to tie spending cuts to tax increases and put the package to an up or down vote.  He will then take that on the campaign trail to tell the world how Republicans voted for tax increases.  If you don’t believe me, look to history.  George Herbert Walker Bush, of the “no new taxes” pledge, got Congress to agree with spending cuts in return for a tax increase.  Bill Clinton clubbed him to death, like a baby seal, with that pledge and then enjoyed Bush’s restraint upon Congress on the spending side to generate budget surpluses.  Let President Obama take the lead.  Wasn’t that why he was elected?  Because he was a different kind of leader?  So, lead away.

What is racial profiling?  I think most people would agree it is where an individual is observed and because of his or her race, some assumptions are made about their behavior.  Let’s examine the Louis Gates case

Sergeant Crowley

Sergeant Crowley responded to a call of a possible Breaking and Entering.  This was the result of a call to 911 reporting that a passerby and a neighbor saw two men, no race mentioned, attempting to force their way into a house.  Crowley, who is white, and two other officers, one black and one Hispanic, responded to the call.  Crowley began to investigate and Gates responded belligerently and called Crowley a racist.  The altercation moved outside where a crowd began to form.  Crowley warned Gates several times that he was becoming disorderly and even showed his handcuffs to make his point.  The 911 caller said there was only one person shouting and it was Gates. Crowley is a highly regarded officer who trains other officers regarding racial profiling.

Dr. Gates

Dr. Gates is a well respected professor at Harvard University and had just returned from a long trip and found he was locked out of his house.  To be fair, he was probably tired and irritated and having do deal with the issue of being locked out.  He and another individual tried to force their way into the house.  The witnesses, not knowing it was Gates and concerned about other reported burglaries in the neighborhood called 911.  The police arrived, Gates saw that Crowley was white and assumed that Crowley’s being there was racially motivated and proceeded to call him a racist, insult Crowley’s mother, and take the dispute outside the house.  So who exactly profiled whom?

Obama

Barack Obama, who was supposed to be the post-racial president really stepped in it, when he said the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly.”  Perhaps there is a silver lining.  By raising this local issue to national prominence, perhaps we can finally put to rest the battle of racial animosity.  Let’s face it, there will always be prejudice.  We are wired to be prejudiced.  Our survival depends on being able to size someone up quickly as friend or foe and take the appropriate action.  It is a natural instinct.  However, unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and control our instincts.

This self control has been driven into whites for 40 years.  You are guilty.  You are racist.  You must be re-educated.  You’ve got to control yourselves.  Has it worked?  Well in a country that is still predominantly white, we elected a black man president with 53% of the popular vote.  That’s more than Bill Clinton ever got by a long shot.  It’s more than either Bush got and for a Democrat you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to find better poll numbers.

On the other hand, minorities have been told for the same period of time, you can’t be a racist, no matter what you say, because you don’t have power (that’s over, with Obama in the White House).  It’s not your fault, you are a victim of society.  You didn’t get the job because of racism, so let’s throw out the test.  There is so much prejudice in this country you can’t get into college unless we put a box on the form to indicate your race and give you a helping hand.  It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.  With all that conditioning who could be blamed for throwing the race card whenever there is a bad outcome and the other guy is white?  It’s a conditioned reflex.

Playing the Race Card

I taught a graduate course in telecommunications.  There was a student, who was black, that I really enjoyed having in my class.  He actively participated and really enlivened the discussion.  There was one topic that he didn’t seem to grasp and as a result he did poorly on an exam.  He asked for a makeup exam, which I granted.  My policy was that my makeup exams were notoriously tough.  The reason was that the makeup focused on what you got wrong on the first test, and didn’t include a lot of what you got right.  If you were going to get another bite at the apple, and you had more time to study and you knew where to focus, I felt that was the only way to be fair to the other students.  He did worse on the make-up than on the original test but I took the higher grade of the two.  With his other work in the class, he still got a good grade for the course.  I later saw him on the elevator and he said to me, “I know why you failed me on those tests.  It’s because I’m black.”  Everyone took the same test, whites, blacks, Indians, Asians, immigrants, Hispanics, but I was accused of singling him out and failing him because he was black.  What I found most interesting was that his body language showed he wasn’t really comfortable using the race card.  He said it tentatively, rather than with the outrage some someone truly wronged.  It was if someone had coached him to use it.  Very sad.

A New Chapter

At the conclusion of today’s beer summit at the White House, they should symbolically take out a card that says RACE in bold letters on it and burn it.  This should signal that we are all Americans, and using the race card should be as scorned as racial profiling.  Whites have been learning this lesson for forty years, it’s time for everyone else to get the same education.  We all have our prejudices.  We must not assume that the motive behind every action is racial.  Maybe the reason you didn’t get the job is that you weren’t qualified.  Maybe the reason you didn’t get into the Ivy League school is that very few people do and your grades were not as good.  Maybe the reason you didn’t graduate high school is that you didn’t study.  With Barack Obama as President, it’s time to accept that anything is possible in this great country.  You have to accept responsibility and work hard.  I may not agree with much of what President Obama believes in, but he got to there by working very hard at what worked to get him there.  There is no Affirmative Action checkbox in the voting booth.

On President Obama’s 100th day in office, as part of his never ending election campaign he said, “Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit…. That wasn’t me.”  The “blame it all on Bush” mantra is getting old, but this one is becoming particularly grating.  I would like to direct President Obama’s attention to the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 9:

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law;”

Congress has the power of the purse, not the President.  That means that President Bush couldn’t spend a thin dime without the approval of Congress.  For the last two years of the Bush presidency, who controlled the United States Congress?  The Democrats.  And lest we forget, before he became President Obama, he was Senator Obama, a member in good standing of that same United States Congress.  Does anyone think for a minute that the Democratic Congress run by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi was a rubber stamp for Bush?  Anything they disagreed with Bush on they would have fought tooth and nail.

Remember during the campaign when the Democrats were putting together their rescue package how the Republicans were locked out of the room and John McCain “suspended” his campaign to return to Washington to make something happen?  Remember as well that Obama was too busy campaigning to similarly get involved even though he was still a sitting Senator.

Now with the shoe on the other foot, and President Obama pushing to triple the deficit, the only people fighting him in Congress are the Republicans.  So this impending debt disaster is a joint effort by Obama and the Congressional Democrats.

President Obama can’t claim, like Bill Clinton, “don’t blame me, I came from Arkansas.”  President Obama can’t claim, like Jimmy Carter, “don’t blame me, I came from Georgia.”  President Obama came to the presidency from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.  He was an insider, not an outsider.  He owns just as much of this mess as Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.

So, Mr. President, stop playing the blame game, take responsibility and do your job.

Did you ever watch a historical movie about how some fringe group ominously takes over the government and leaves everyone scratching their head wondering how it happened?  At the end of the movie you say, “Whew, I’m so glad that could never happen in the good ol’ USA.”  Then you watch the news and see things that are eerily familiar to the movie and you say, “Nah, that’s just my imagination running away with me.”  Until the next piece of news drips on your head.

A news story this morning gave me that uneasy, pit of the stomach feeling again.  It probably shouldn’t have since it was about Venezuela.  Hugo Chavez got the term limit restriction lifted in his country that will allow him to be president for life.  That measure had previously failed but now it passed by a wide margin.  So why am I feeling uneasy about our liberties and what is going on in this country?  Here are some of my concerns.

Bipartisanship

After all the talk of bipartisanship by candidate Obama and the need to change the tone in Washington, the reality was something completely different.  In a so called “stimulus package” that will triple the budget deficit and was rammed through the Congress with no one, and I repeat no one, reading it, one party was virtually shut out of the legislative process.  At the same time 44% of the American people, in a Rasmussen poll, said names picked at random out of the phone book could do a better job on the economy than this Congress.  This package is chock full of 40 years of liberal programs that could not pass muster on their own, but as Rahm Emmanuel says, “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.”  When  Republicans protested about being shut out of the process, the response from the other side was, “We won.”

Fairness Doctrine

In the movie there will come a scene when the incoming powers break into the newspaper offices and smash the printing press, overturn the typesetting table, dump papers on the floor and set them ablaze.  The message is clear, there will be no opposition press.  There is only one message and that is of the new dictator and the new news will be his indoctrination.

Today, there is more and more talk about reviving the Fairness Doctrine.  Here is what former President Bill Clinton said:

“Well, you either ought to have the Fairness Doctrine or we ought to have more balance on the other side,” Clinton said, “because essentially there’s always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows and let face it, you know, Rush Limbaugh is fairly entertaining even when he is saying things that I think are ridiculous….”

Liberals tried to bring balance to the discussion with Air America and it failed dismally.  Why?  People didn’t want to listen to left wing rants all day.  But face it, the main stream media overwhelmingly votes liberal.  So although no one will be smashing printing presses and torching newsrooms, the objective is to stifle the conservative point of view.  Once you do that the only voice that is heard is reinforcing the new ruler.

What the First Amendment says is:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for the redress of grievances.”

Congress shall make no law…so what are they doing? The line between news and opinion has long been crossed.  It used to be you couldn’t tell what Walter Cronkite’s politics were, because he kept his opinions, for the most part, out of the news.  But today there is little difference.  For a great example see this piece by Russ Roberts. (They Report. I Edit. You Decide). They will defend the Fairness Doctrine by saying it is not censorship, but here’s the dirty little secret.

Let’s say you are a radio program manager and you put on three hours of Rush Limbaugh.  Great show. Great ratings. You make lots of money.  Now along comes the Fairness Doctrine.  You don’t have to touch Rush’s show because that would be censorship.  What you have to do, however, is give three hours over to Air America to be “fair”.  Three hours of Air America hate <fill in the blank: Bush, religion, gun owners, pro life> rants.  Ratings for those three hours go in the tank.  No revenue. You’re making no money.  Listener’s start complaining.  So what is a station manager to do?  It’s what they used to do when the Fairness Doctrine was here before, tell Rush he has to close up shop, dump the Air America crowd and play Top 40s songs all day long.  The fact that it wasn’t censorship doesn’t matter, the effect is the same.

The Census

The census, conducted every ten years, is important in two regards.  One, it helps allocate how money from government programes is distributed, and it determines how the number of Congressional seats will be apportioned among the states.  Based on current estimates states like New York (Blue) will lose one or two seats and states like Texas (Red) will gain seats.  That could mean a shift in power from the Democrats to the Republicans.  Uh oh.

The scene in the movie shifts to a darkened office with a light over the conference table.  “We cannot allow the oppostion to gain any strength back, we have to consolidate our power.  What do we do?”

“Comrade, we can take control of the census.  Under our control we can count homeless people and illegal immigrants in Blue states and ignore them in Red states.”

“Brilliant!  You see that the census is directed out of your office rather than in some Department.”

You chuckle only for a minute, when you realize that Rahm Emmanuel will be overseeing the census, operating out of the White House, rather than handling it in the Commerce Department as it has been done for years.  Suddenly, the scene seems very real.

The Stimulus and ACORN

In the so called “stimulus bill” there appears to be about $4.1 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities.”  The money was initially limited to state and local governments but later changed to include non-profits, such as ACORN.  ACORN is surrounded by allegations of vote fraud.  It doesn’t take much of an imagination to understand how close races can be tipped by an organization that perpetuates voter fraud.  Now think about how your tax dollars are being funneled to them to do it.

We Need More Votes in The House.  So Let’s Add a Representative

In consolidating power, what better way than adding votes where you need them.  One way is to add a representative in the House for the District of Columbia.  It is a heavily Democratic district, so why not?  The Constitution? Ignore it.  Just go ahead pass a law.  If the Republicans object, just crank up the racist machine.

Handouts

Of all the tried and tested methods for turning around an economy in trouble, the Democrats seem to be picking all the ones proved not to work.  If you want to stimulate the economy through tax cuts, you cut marginal tax rates.  Instead the Democrats want to give rebates to people who pay no income taxes.  That’s welfare not tax cuts.  But the goal is not to turn around the economy.  The goal is to consolidate power.  What better way than to make sure more than 50% get something from the government and less than 50% are stuck with the bill.  Majority rules.  We won.  Once that threshold is crossed, the majority can start jacking up taxes on those evil rich, so that the “working and middle class” get checks from the government.  Comrade, it from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

Calling Dr. Mengele

In the movie a sinister doctor approaches the “patient” and plans how he is going to improve life for all of us.  For the “patient”, not so much.

Another provision in the stimulus bill is to establish a new bureaucracy that will “compare drugs, medical devices, surgery and other ways of treating specific conditions.”  This organization will take a role in your medical treatment that was formerly between you and your doctor. “Supporters of the research hope it will eventually save money by discouraging the use of costly, ineffective treatments.”  Isn’t that what medical journals are for?  Isn’t that why the AMA has conferences, to share such information?

“I’m sorry Mrs. Jones, we think you child has Down’s Syndrome, therefore you really must have the abortion, or your medical bills for your childbearing treatment won’t be covered by our national health care.  And you know the costs run into the hundreds of thousands.  What would you like to do?”

Do you really want some bureaucrat in Washington playing with a statistics program  telling your doctor what treatment he can and cannot perform to treat you?

Is This Real?

As you leave the theatre you laugh nervously that this couldn’t happen here.  But every time you pick up a newspaper, the similarity about how a dictator seizes control and then consolidates his power is just too eerie.  But as we have seen in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and now in Venezuela, it can happen and once it does it may be decades before it can be undone, if at all.  The Founding Fathers were very wary of a strong central government.  They believed that the only powers that the Federal goverment should have are limited and they went to the trouble to spell them out in the Tenth Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Where does it say in the Constitution that education is a federal function? I’m not against education by any stretch of the imagination, but how can the federal government do a better job than the local school board?  Why is the federal government putting cops on the street?  Shouldn’t each municipality handle this? The Federal Government has gotten too big and too powerful.  It is so vast no one can manage it.  We keep pushing so much up to the federal level we are almost begging for a dictatorship to form.  And with everything they take, and they will take all they can grab, your liberties go with it.

We better wake up, people, and start cutting this monster down to size.  Otherwise it will either consume all of us leaving nothing but a wasteland, or we will be reading our founding documents and see that they are telling to prepare for the Second American Revolution.

If you earn less than $75,000 per year, you are in line to get a tax break of about $8 a week.  Let me get out of your way as you grab the car keys to take your $8 and go on a spending binge that will have the economy humming in no time at all.

There are No Earmarks in this Bill

Do you long for the days of Bill Clinton when he waxed philosophical about the meaning of the word “is”?  President Obama said:

“We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert projects without review,” he told reporters on the Hill Tuesday as he tried to build support for the measure.

So, if no Congressional member specifically inserts language about a specific spending request in a particular district, it doesn’t meet the definition of an “earmark.”  So cut out some of the specifics and voila, an earmark is no longer an earmark!  A pet project of Nancy Pelosi, preserving the habitat of the salt marsh harvest mouse, has $30 million, earmarked, er, included in the stimulus bill.

Republican lawmakers said they learned of the marsh money when asking about how various agencies plan to spend stimulus money. The vitality of the mouse has been an issue for Mrs. Pelosi and other California Democrats since the early 1990s.

While the Republicans are raising questions about how American’s tax dollars are being squandered in the name of stimulus, Democrats are responding by calling Republicans unpatriotic, obstructionists, against the will of the American people.  When Speaker Pelosi’s office was asked about the $30 million a spokesman had this response:

“The speaker nor her staff have had any involvement in this initiative. This is yet another contrived partisan attack,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said. “Restoration is key to economic activity, including farming, fisheries, recreation and clean water.”

Does anyone with a room temperature IQ actually believe that statement?  The spending is in San Francisco which is where Nancy Pelosi’s district it located.  Are we supposed to believe she had nothing to do with $30 million of spending in her district?  Was it a Valentine’s Day gift from Steny Hoyer?  If she knows nothing about it, TAKE IT OUT! Those evil Republican partisans had the temerity to ask this question:

“This certainly doesn’t sound like it will create or save American jobs,” Mr. Steel said. “So can Speaker Pelosi explain exactly how we will improve the American economy by helping the adorable little” critter?

The American People Weigh In

Maybe Pelosi can explain it, but she’s not going to.  Perhaps that is why a recent Rasmussen poll had that 67% of Americans think that they could do a better job on the economy than Congress.  Do you think Nancy’s mouse is one of the reasons for that?  Even more embarrassing:

Forty-four percent (44%) voters also think a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress, but 37% disagree. Twenty percent (20%)are undecided.

Selected at random from the phone book! We pay these people $167,000 a year and we think names drawn at random from the phone book could do a better job!  Is it only me, or does someone else see a problem here?  These clowns are going to bankrupt us and our children and grandchildren, so they can push through this porka-palooza as fast as possible so no one gets a chance to look at it.  Spending didn’t fix the Great Depression.  Spending didn’t end the lost decade in Japan.  Why do we think it will work now?  Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

Tax cuts were proven by JFK, and Reagan, but let’s not try anything that has actually worked before.  The Democrats say that the reason spending didn’t work in Japan is that the spending wasn’t high enough or fast enough!  So, if this “stimulus” fails to work, as many are predicting, we can expect Congress to come back and say, well it’s those Republicans.  They didn’t let us spend as much as we wanted, so now we have to go back and spend $2 trillion.

So while you ponder that, enjoy your $8.  Don’t spend it all in one place.  But when you put your head on the pillow tonight, rest easy, the salt marsh harvest mouse got $30 mill.  But remember, the Democrats are looking out for you.  And don’t forget to start saving $2,500 for each member of your family, because that’s the size of the tax bill the Demcrates will be leaving you and your children.

Upon taking office, what the President does as his first action often sets the tone of his presidency, indicating what he thinks is important.  Bill Clinton chose to wade into the debate on gays in the military.  Of all the things of importance to the country that he could have chosen to work on first, that was his pick.

President Obama chose to close down Guantanamo Bay, saying we needed to restore our image in the world.  It seemed to matter little to him that under President Bush we had gone over seven years without an attack.  Shortly after that he quietly signed another order that struck down a Bush administration ban on giving money to international groups that performed or provided information on abortion.

So let’s look at these two together, since they were both done in Obama’s first week in office. To restore the United State’s moral leadership in the world, we need to go easy on terrorists and fund the killing innocent unborn babies.  Evil gets a pass, innocence gets snuffed out.  Are we feeling more proud yet?  Are we holding our heads higher?

There is a consistency there, in that these terrorists have no problem strapping bombs on themselves, wading into a crowd of innocent men, women, and children, blowing themselves up and taking as many innocents with them as they can.  So protecting these people, and not making them uncomfortable while interrogating them, even if it would spare innocent lives, is somehow against our principals?

The point could not have been driven home any more starkly than by Nancy Pelosi when talking about the economic stimulus package making its way through Congress said:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding to the new economic "stimulus" package, claiming "contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

So now we know, abortion stimulates the economy.  How long before we can hear Joe Biden tell us, “C’mon, do your patriotic duty, pay more taxes, have an abortion, we’re in an economic pinch here.”

When the founders wrote about “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” life is what they put first, liberty, which really means smaller government, they put second, and the Pursuit of Happiness third.  I don’t see how you can square that with Life for terrorists, death to babies, more government and more taxes.

“When the incoming Democratic president asked the outgoing GOP president to request the second $350 billion in rescue money, Mr. Bush graciously complied. At which point the Democratic majority informed the Democratic president that he’d see not a dime until they decided how to spend it.” — WSJ 01/16/2009

If Barack Obama wants to continue to be the “annointed one,”  and if he wants to achieve and maintain rock star status, just like his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, he should take another look at Clinton’s history.

If he wants to have a truly successful presidency, he better go get himself a Republican Congress.  If you look at a graph of the performance of the economy during Clinton’s term, you will see that the first two years were pretty lethargic.  But in 1994, the Republicans took over control for the first time in 40 years, and the economy took off, with Bill taking all the credit.  The last president to have a Democratic Congress during his entire tenure, was Jimmy Carter, and we all know how that turned out.

Here’s where we are four weeks after the election:

1. Appointments — With the Thanksgiving shortened week, it was mostly packaging of the previously announced appointments.  Monday was going to be the big day, with the formal announcement of Hillary and Holder.  They had to get Bill Clinton’s ducks in a row, and have him measured for a leash.
2. Dow Jones Industrial Average — Up 675 points. Team Obama finally got a win.  One of the reasons is that Obama has stopped talking about eliminating the Bush tax cuts early, but letting them expire in 2010.  Also, he seems to be assembling an experienced economic team, well known to Wall Street, which doesn’t hurt.
3. The New Leader – Obama has answered critics who say the team he is assembling looks a lot like the old Clinton White House, by saying that they are “Experienced, Yet Fresh.”  He is facing grumblings on his left, which brings into question how is he going to keep this team of wild horses under control?

The Challeng for Obama

Where is Obama’s base of support?  Where can he fall back on for strength?  He may well be pulling together a team of experienced hands for the various departments, but not all of them are cut from the same mold and there will be some tugging and pulling.  How does he keep them in check and how does he get them back in line?  In other words, where are his reinforcements.

In another post, I mention how past presidents, most of whom had executive experience as governors, brought some of their loyal people with them.  These were people who believed in their candidate and had been with him for a number of years.  That loyalty can be called in, like chits, when you need to win a battle.

It took Johnson a while, about two years, to get his people in the administration since he had inherited the Kennedy team when he ascended to the presidency, but he did have eleven years in the House and twelve years in the Senate, including six years as Senate Majority Leader.  So he had a lot of markers to call in if he needed them.

Kennedy was probably closest to Obama in lack of experience including no executive experience outside of the Navy, but he did have eight years in the Senate.  In addition, he had Papa Joe Kennedy, who had many strings of his own including being a former Ambassador to England; he had his own blood brother as Attorney General; and another brother Ted would be elected to the Senate two years later.  So while Jack Kennedy may not personally have had a lot of pull, his family had plenty.

Nixon was a former two term Vice President.  Ford had been House Minority Leader.  Carter had been governor and was able to bring some of his former team with him, as was  Reagan who had served two terms as governor of California, and Bill Clinton who was both Attorney General and Governor of Arkansas.  George Bush Senior was Vice President, and George W. was governor of Texas.  They all had many connections and a lot of political IOUs.

But what does Barack Obama do, after the glow of history is replaced by the hard work of governing?  It is more likely that Barack Obama wrote a lot of political IOUs rather than him holding them.  Many of his confidents uncovered during the campaign, turned out to be less than appealing to the nation as a whole.  When the going gets tough, who’s going to have Barack Obama’s back?  Who can he turn to and say, I need this one and because of thus and so, without having to say it, you owe me?  He has very little history with his team.  So when he needs a favor, he will have to deal almost from the get go.  Whose career has he made, such that he can ask for payback?

Experience Counts

Experience counts not just in knowing how to do a job, but it also counts in terms of who you know.  Rarely in our history has there been someone who has so little experience inside or outside the beltway.  This may well result in a very weak president.  For all of our sakes, I hope I am wrong.

Throughout the presidential campaign there was an undercurrent of racism.  It bubbled up every time it looked like an issue could be effectively used against Barack Obama.  Talk about William Ayers?  You’re a racist.  Talk about Revered Wright?  You’re a racist.  Talk about ACORN?  Your a racist. Say you are not going to vote for Obama, then that proves you’re a racist.

What’s interesting is that the only people who talked about race and racism were the Democrats.  It was as if knowing that racism was receding to the darkest corners of society and withering and dying as it went, they had to resuscitate it and keep it alive.  One of the most powerful tools in their arsenal was looking about as potent as Jack La Lanne, at 94.

The Election Results

Barack Obama won the election for President of the United States with 53% of the popular vote.  That is a higher percentage than Bill Clinton got in either of his elections, while he had the hubris to call himself the first black president.  It was a higher percentage than Jimmy Carter got in 1976, the last Democratic presidential winner to garner more than 50% of the popular vote, with 50.1%.  You have to go back 44 years to Lyndon Johnson to find a Democrat that got a higher percentage of the popular vote.

Barack Obama and John McCain didn’t submit job applications to a committee, where Barack Obama might get a few extra points for being a minority.  He won in the popular vote and even more decisively in the Electoral College.  He even won three states from the old Confederacy (Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida). I think it’s fair to say that race wasn’t a significant factor.  He could not have won the race on the black vote alone and regardless of how other categories broke down, the fact remains he had to get substantial support from all groups in order for him to be close enough for the black vote to put him over the top.

Progress Has Been Ongoing

If you look around it was not just this one man who has succeeded, there are also many others:  Colin Powell, Condalezza Rice, Oprah Winfrey, Charles Rangel, Clarence Thomas, Douglas Wilder, Lynn Swan, J.C. Watts, Michael Steele, Kenneth Chenault, Reginald Davis, Tiger Woods, and on, and on.  So perhaps we can put the deck of race cards in the drawer and leave them there.

The Next Chapter

How Barack Obama plans to lead would typically be revealed in his inaugural address.  I would like to offer some text that he might consider including to set the tone for bringing the nation together:

“As I look out on this crowd of great Americans I can see in the distance the Lincoln Memorial.  It was there some forty-five years ago, another great American, Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed a large crowd.  In that speech he said,

‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

As I stand here before you, I am humbled to think how momentous those words were then, and how great this country has become in the intervening forty-five years.  He also said:

‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’

I was a little child when he said those words and I consider myself as much one of his children as his own flesh and blood.  So I say to you on this day, that we are about to write a new chapter, the fulfillment of that dream.  I pledged to bring change, to bring you hope, and to end partisanship and unite this country.  Therefore, I proclaim that we should end all Affirmative Action programs, and we should end them with two words:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Including that message in his inaugural address would be on par with Kennedy’s “Ask Not….”  It would set him apart from the dull technocrats and bureaucrats and define his presidency.  Anyone want to wager if that will ever happen?