Ouch

A new poll indicates that Americans would prefer George W. Bush in the White House to Obama. Given that Bush left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in memory only two years ago, and that Obama has pretty much made a living off of blaming him for everything but halitosis since his election in 2008, that's not a good sign for the president. It's a certain sign that he's going to have to come up with something better than "at least I'm not Bush!" as a reason for people to vote for him in 2012. Given that he appears intent on taking on the GOP and fighting what Republicans feel will be losing battles for him after their presumptive takeover of the House on Tuesday, it's unlikely that he'll seek to position himself as an above-the-fray Clintonian triangulator either. I'm not sure that bashing the GOP for obstructionism is going to work, however, given that voters generally disapprove of his agenda and are poised to reward Republicans for trying to obstruct it over the past few years.

Why Won't The Stupid Voters Listen When We Tell Them What They Want?

Apparently mystified by persistent public opposition to his health care law, President Obama is blaming himself, not for signing a bill that started out unpopular and grew more so throughout the process of its passage, but for failing to sell it well enough. Obama continues to argue that the reason people don't like the law is because they aren't aware of all the benefits it will bring them. But as Reason's Peter Suderman points out, there's a simpler and empirically better supported explanation - that the public is aware of the law's benefits, which contrary to what the President thinks the Democrats have talked up to no end, but is also aware of its costs, which the Democrats have rather assiduously avoided discussing, and does not consider the former worth the price of the latter.

I haven't been polled, but I certainly fall into this category. I'm all for ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions can receive subsidized medical treatment for them if they can't afford it themselves, making health care plans more portable between places of employment, and the like. What I'm not for? The massive, cost-spiraling distortion in the health insurance market that forcing insurance companies to issue policies on which they are guaranteed to lose money will create. The higher taxes that will raise the price of new treatments and stunt medical innovation. The almost certain budget busting costs. The giant middle finger to personal freedom and constitutional rights that is the individual mandate. The unsavory backroom dealing that went into drafting the law. And most of all, the vast array of statistical gimmicks, euphemisms, blandishments, and outright lies via which the Democrats have tried to obscure all of this. I don't know how representative I am, but I know why I don't like the law, even though as a young person with a checkered travel history I stand to benefit from it in some ways, and it's not because I don't know what it's in. I'm not sure which is more offensive, the Democrats' arrogance in ramming this law through against the popular will, or their condescension in assuming that people oppose it because they're too stupid to know what's good for them.

It's widely expected that the Democrats will get hammered in the upcoming midterm elections, and very likely lose their governing majority in at least one house of Congress. I suspect that much of that is a result of the fact that the economy continues to sputter. But if health care does prove to be a salient issue in this campaign and hurts the Democrats as it almost certainly will if that's the case, they deserve it. Whatever the merits, or lack therof, of the particular laws they pass, parties that overinterpret their mandate and/or take the electorate for a pliable mass of idiots need to suffer for it.

Meet The New Boss

It's hardly surprising that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has been fired as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by President Obama - you can't badmouth your bosses on the record and expect it not to have consequences when it comes to light. But it does reveal a troublesome disconnect between civilian and military leadership on the question of Afghanistan, as well as once again expose one of the inherent strategic flaws of country's command structure.

About certain subjects, counterinsurgency strategy among them, military leaders are likely to be far more knowledgable than any President, no matter how intelligent or immersed in the issues he may be. Presidents generally acknowledge this by deferring to the stratetgic prerogatives of the military commanders they appoint, but when military leadership loses faith in the competence of its civilian overseers, as it did with Donald Rumsfeld and co. during Bush's Presidency, or apparently has with Obama over the past several months, things can get problematic. People like McChrystal, trained to think about problems like Afghanistan from a military perspective, are likely to have minimal awareness, concern, or patience for the political aspects of the issue, but a President (particularly one in his first term, with midterm elections that look to be rocky ones for his party looming) has little choice but to think about them. Hence they're unlikely to consider the limitations that political vulnerability places on a President's strategic choices legitimate, and when they feel that the President is sacrificing the opportunity for military success in order to improve his or his party's political prospects, they're likely to mouth off about it, at least privately. I happen to think Afghanistan is a hopeless, or at least very daunting, case as a nation-building project - but the difficulty of the task only makes McChrystal venting his frustration at feeling like he's undertaking it with one hand tied behind his back even more understandable, if inexcusable.

Here's hoping General David Petraeus can improve the situation. He's obviously got some political skills and has plenty of experience resolving conflict, and most observers agree he did an excellent job overseeing U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. If anyone's up to the challenge of making something positive out of the mess in Afghanistan it's him.

Obama And The Oil Spill, Bush And Katrina

Pundits on both sides of the aisle have been spilling a lot of ink debating the question of whether the gulf oil spill is "Obama's Katrina" - Karl Rove excoriating the slow response of federal bureaucracies to the disaster here, Maureen Dowd criticizing Obama's lack of visible distress over the matter there. So is it? The answer, I think, is yes, but only in the sense that both events A.)reveal the limits of government power, and B.)shed a similarly unflattering light on the political culture of today's America. We've come to two equally distressing points in our national discourse. Firstly, it's clear that a large number of us no longer believe in accidents or acts of God - many people seem convinced that the government should be able to prevent or solve any problem, no matter how severe or unforseeable it might be, and that if it is overwhelmed by events, it can only be due to malfeasance or incompetence. The President, as the personification of government, therefore takes all the blame, regardless of whether it is reasonable or not. Secondly, things have gotten to the point that any catastrophe that occurs on their opponents' watch is for rabid partisans an opportunity to score political points first and a national tragedy second - irrespective of the fact that culpability for these sorts of disasters, such as it exists, can be spread around in good measure.

People need to accept that there is a limited amount the government can do to prevent or respond to some crises. Bush could have appointed the world's foremost expert on hurricane relief efforts as head of FEMA before Katrina, and it wouldn't have prevented the storm from devastating New Orleans. When one of the most powerful hurricanes on record makes landfall directly on a city of half a million people that is situated mostly below sea level, severe destruction and loss of life is pretty much a certainty no matter what the President does. This is particularly the case when the levees designed to protect the city haven't been maintained properly due to the corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence of local officials, large numbers of people refuse to evacuate in advance of the storm, and relief efforts are hampered by the actions of opportunistic criminals in its aftermath. Bush could have and should have appointed a more competent and experienced person than the infamous Mike Brown to head FEMA, and he certainly could have handled the P.R. aspect of his response better, but even with the best relief plan imaginable in place the storm would have still killed hundreds of people and caused billions of dollars in damage.

Similarly, I don't see how Obama could have prevented the Deep Water Horizon explosion. Offshore drilling is already a heavily regulated activity, so it's not like there's a law he could have pushed for short of an outright ban on it that would have prevented the disaster. And while it's true that enforcing existing regulations is part of the executive branch's portfolio, and that the Minerals Management Service appears to have been rather lax in doing so in the case of BP's offshore drilling operations, it's hardly fair to hold Obama responsible for that. He's one man, and can't be expected to be aware of every decision made by every bureaucrat in every one of the dozens of Federal agencies under his purview, even if he is nominally the boss. The idea that he should be able to DO SOMETHING now that the spill has happened is similarly misguided. He's not a petroleum engineer and he knows next to nothing about deep water drilling. Other than emoting for T.V. cameras or raising his voice with the petroleum industry, there's not much he can do now, but that doesn't stop those who've bought into what Julian Sanchez dubbed "the Care Bear Stare model of American politics" from holding his inability to make things better against him.

Despite all this, Republicans are predictably taking every opportunity they can to beat Obama up over the oil spill, just as Democrats took every oppotunity they could to fault Bush for the Katrina disaster. Some of the criticisms in both cases are fair. Others are not. But while neglecting the question of what can be done in favor of who can be blamed may be a good strategy to win the next election - voters have a natural tendency to chuck out the party in charge when things go badly, regardless of whether they're actually responsible - it's not remotely good for the country. A disaster like this calls for a concerted, coordinated effort to mitigate its impact until the problem can be solved. There will be plenty of time for recriminations later.

The National Review had about the right take on the question of whether this is Obama's Katrina - it is, but that doesn't mean what people think it means. If we've really come to the point that we expect the President to protect us from heartbreak, every President is going to be a failure in the public's eyes.

You Can't Sell The Sizzle If They Don't Like The Steak

The Democrats have unveiled their 2010 midterm campaign slogan, and it is "The Results Party". This is fair enough - they have succeeded in passing the stimulus bill, TARP, healthcare reform, and a number of other items that were on their agenda, so there's no denying they've gotten results. There's just one teensy little problem - the public doesn't like those results. The bank bailouts were wildly unpopular. So is health care reform, despite Obama's pre-vote promises to Democrats that once it passed widespread opposition to it would subside. Dickerson acknowledges this in his piece, but then suggests that Obama may be able to overcome the massive unpopularity of Congress by returning to the broad, idealistic themes that got him elected in 2008. Count me extremely skeptical. Empty post-partisan rhetoric is a well that starts to run dry almost as the cleanup for the post-election victory party starts, because it's easy to campaign as a post-partisan politician, but impossible to govern as one - as soon as the rubber meets the road, you start having to make controversial decisions, and in doing so start alienating voters and antagonizing ideological opponents. If what you're doing rubs voters the wrong way, your opponents can and will oppose it. In this case, the Republicans very possibly are guilty of politically motivated obstructionism for maintaining near unanimous opposition to most of Obama's agenda, but that's irrelevant. It's unlikely to hurt their stock much given that said agenda is broadly unpopular, and its signature accomplishment, Obamacare, was rammed through on a narrow partisan vote to boot. Furthermore, while the voters may give Obama somewhat higher marks than they give Congress, with a sub-50% approval rating himself he's not exactly in a position to be an effective pitchman. Poll after poll shows that independents turning against Obama and the Democrats, and without those voters, it's pretty tough to maintain a governing majority. All the soaring oratory in the world won't change that.

Say Hello To The VAT

President Obama has stated that a European-style VAT tax is still an "option" for helping to close the budget deficit. That should be re-phrased. It's not an option - it's a necessity. There is simply no way to pay for a comprehensive personal-and-corporate welfare state of the sort this Administration has brought into being merely by taxing the hell out of people whose incomes are more than $250,000 a year. If Obama has realized that, bully for him, but it puts the lie to his campaign promise not to raise taxes on middle- and lower-income earners, who are more likely than the rich to feel the pinch when the prices of consumer goods begin to climb precipitously. The Senate is likely also correct in declaring that this tax, if enacted, will be a significant drag on consumer demand and hence on economic growth, but if they were concerned about that, they ought not to have voted for the stimulus bill, Obamacare, TARP, etc. The Democrats have enacted a lot of expensive legislation over the past two years - it's only fair that they be the ones forced to present the bill to the voters.

Welcome to Obamacare

Well, as everyone knows by now, it passed. For better or worse, the U.S. has now joined the rest of the industrialized world in voting to allow the national government more-or-less run the health care sector. Will it have all the wonderful benefits progressives are insisting it will? Count me highly skeptical.

1.)I don't think it will have the magical effect on American life expectancy statistics that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times anticipates. As Jonah Goldberg points out in this smart fisking, it appears that there are a number of factors that account for the (overstated) difference in life expectancy between the U.S. and other western democracies, and the presence of universal health coverage doesn't appear to be among the most important. If American life expectancies fail to leap upwards by five or more years as Kristof predicts, I expect him to acknowledge how wrong he was. On the other hand, maybe having health insurance will stop teenagers from dying in car crashes or gunfights and lowering the average American lifespan.

2.)I don't see any reason to expect it to control costs. It's economics 101 - you can't add a bunch of prohibitively expensive new beneficiaries to an insurance pool, and expect costs to go down for everyone. How anyone could be stupid enough to believe the Democrats when they claim this boggles my mind. Furthermore, given that accounting gimmicks can only produce savings on a balance sheet, not in the real world, I find the claim that this bill is going to be "deficit neutral" laughable on its face.

3.)I fully effect the bill to have deleterious effects on the rate of medical innovation and the willingness of doctors to continue practicing medicine. Since the bill actually taxes medical devices in addition to disincentivizing innovation, and does nothing to address the extraordinary cost of obtaining a medical license or the artificially restricted supply of practicing physicians, these effects will be even worse.

All this is leaves aside the, to be charitable shall we say, dubious, constitutionality of an act of Congress that will force private citizens to purchase a product from a private entity regardless of whether they want it or not. And the fact that the Democrats have just created a gigantic corporate-government nexus for waste, corruption and malfeasance that will give the military-industrial complex a run for its money on its worst day. While this legislation will have a few benefits - covering the uninsured and freeing individuals from healthcare-induced "job lock" - they are not remotely worth the astronomical costs we are going to pay, and could have been achieved with simpler, more market-friendly reforms. I hope to God I'm wrong, but I think that this legislation is going to be a colossally expensive failure.

I received an email from Barack Obama this morning thanking me for my support. I replied telling him to take me off his mailing list, because the candidate I voted for, the guy who seemed to understand how market economies and the Constitution and such actually work, and respect that those realities can't be changed by legislating them, is not the President I got, and I do not support the President I got. I will be voting for Republicans in the fall, for Senate and House. Hopefully Mr. Obama can be forced to lead from the center by the constraints of a divided government.

Orwell Was Right...

...War Is Peace.

With impeccable timing and an exquisite sense of irony, the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner has approved a modest increase in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. I'm not sure what would constitute a prudent policy in regards to that country - the place is a mess and if there is such a thing as a prudent policy, it's quite likely it would be impossible to pick it out from what look like at present a very bad set of options without the benefit of a functional crystal ball. But there's no doubt that escalating the American military presence in the country is going to result in a longer war and more people, Afghan and American, getting killed. If these are the actions of the man who's done the most for the cause of world peace in the last year, the cause of world peace is in serious trouble.

Am I Missing Something?

Not to be the turd in the punchbowl or anything, but what, exactly, has Barack Obama done to merit a Nobel Peace Prize, other than be beloved of the international demographic of cosmopolitan liberals that decides the award? The Prizes awarded to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore may have been (alright - were) dubious, but at least those two were devoting a good deal of their time to something that could be construed as conducive to world peace. Obama has not done so. He has not figured out how to pacify intransigent regimes in Iran or North Korea, nor made any headway in getting the Israelis and the Palestinians to stop blowing each other up, nor resolved the Mexican standoffs over Kashmir, Taiwan, etc., nor really accomplished much of anything on the peace front. That's not to fault him - these problems have persisted for decades or centuries despite the best efforts of lots of smart, dedicated people for the reason that they're incredibly difficult to solve - but I hardly see how one even begins to justify giving him a Nobel Peace Prize. The award is especially hard to fathom when one considers that with few substantive differences from George W. Bush, Obama has continued to prosecute the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in some cases more aggressively than his predecessor did. Bush was pilloried as a war criminal and the biggest threat to peace since Hitler by the very same liberal European elites who have now deemed Obama the person who has done the most for the cause of peace this year. What gives?

It all makes sense as soon as one acknowledges that in the court of international opinion the criminality of an action is determined not by whether it actually violates law or morality but by whether the party responsible has the right political allegiances. See also Polanski, Roman. I love the smell of rank liberal hypocrisy.

With Friends Like These...

Hot on the heels of Jimmy Carter blathering about motivation to the Obama Presidency being motivated largely by racism, Bill Clinton has decided to join the chorus of Democrats saying asinine things. Clinton has declared that his erstwhile bête noire, the fearsome "vast right wing conspiracy" that framed him for draft dodging, forged a bunch of fake documents implicating him in shady real estate dealings, bribed Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey to accuse him of sexual harassment, and programmed the Manchurian Bimbo, Monica Lewinsky, to seduce him before planting his semen on her dress, is now out to get Obama. Their sinister agenda? "Wanting him to fail". Horror of horrors! It's not as if we live in a democracy - you know, that quaint form of government in which, if someone whose policy goals you vigorously oppose is elected, you're allowed to declare your opposition to them and attempt to prevent them from being realized. Obviously conservatives who don't agree with Obama's agenda didn't get the memo that states that failure to approve of the Dear Leader's plans with sufficient enthusiasm has now been deemed Thoughtcrime. Perhaps a mix-up at the post office prevented timely delivery of their magical unity ponies. Whatever the problem, there's no need to worry - Bubba's on the case.

Obama's one of the few partisan politicians I genuinely like. I voted for him and haven't yet regretted that decision, despite the fact that I disagree with him on many issues and he has enacted policies of which I disapprove. Nevertheless, I want him to fail at many of the things he is keen on trying, not because I am part of a conspiracy, but because I think that they are bad ideas and I am opposed to them. This is the way democracy works. Only a malignantly narcissistic egomaniac like Bill Clinton would see members of an opposition party wanting a President to fail as some kind of sinister force. Well, unless the opposition party in question is the Democrats and the President is George W. Bush. In that case wanting the President to fail is a patriotic duty.

For once, it appears we don't have such a malignantly narcissistic egomaniac in the White House. Obama has at times responded to his opponents forcefully, but he has not imputed base motives to their opposition or implied that it is tantamount to disloyalty. Unfortunately for him, with high-profile loose cannons like Carter and Clinton rattling around the Democratic ship, he doesn't have to for the tone of political debate to continue to sink ever lower.