I'm Binah, and I approved this posting

It's a shame, but I have reached the point of no longer having the time to blog as I once did -- life has too many other demands at this point. So I'm quitting the blogging life, perhaps for good, perhaps just for a time.

I don't need to expand much on the depressing political developments probably coming our way -- a large step backwards to about 30 or 40 years ago -- in the form of Barack Obama, his movement, and the flunky journalist class that surrounds and protects him. Falsely sold as an agent of change, Obama in reality is the politics of Boomer nostalgia made flesh and dwelling among us, as well as a false messiah of the panicked establishment now filling his campaign coffers. It's older voters and older Boomers who are his core supporters. He's not the future, but very much the past, nicely scripted and teleprompted.

There will be no more seemingly limitless easy credit from our Asian lenders after the current financial crisis ends. Once discredited, nostalgia-filled "progressive" politics is likely to turn into nasty or even violent reaction. Constitutional and democratic government will be under exceptional stress, with suppression of dissent and free speech very likely. With its voter fraud schemes and bullying of local radio and television stations, the Obama campaign is a foretaste.

Somewhere between cult and hoax, an Obama presidency will probably be one term only. But don't get your hopes up too fast. An enfeebled GOP will take at least a decade to rebuilt an effective opposition, and we don't have a decade to respond to the crisis brought on by a vast credit bubble and a decade and a half of overborrowing. The coming breakdown of the welfare state will only add more woe. The problems created by too much debt cannot be solved by more borrowing. Politicians' new false promises can't undo the damage done by past false promises.

Political opposition is likely to take more bizarre forms. Backward steps in tax and other policies will undoubtedly make the US an even more hostile place than it already is for businesses that produce goods and services -- as opposed to financial institutions and politicians that encourage Americans to pile on more debt to buy from elsewhere. The dollar's long period as the world's main reserve currency enabled much of this excess. Expect the dollar to lose much or all of this status. The terms of borrowing from foreigners will become much tougher.

If we had a free press in America -- ah, but we don't. (See here and here, curiously, both by Democrats.) What we have instead is a class of would-be courtiers and lackeys, all primping themselves to serve as Obamamerica's unpaid Ministry of Popular Enlightenment. The conventional media is a junk-food banquet in which most of the dishes are poisoned. The best thing you can do is the simplest: turn it off. Conservatives, libertarians, and independents need to abandon the media-driven populist posturing that has displaced their older political wisdom in the last 15 years. The conservative movement so successful in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s was a movement of personal experience, thought, conversation, and books, not a movement of televised talking heads, Washington cocktail parties, and pandering.

This is Binah, signing off, till who knows when. To quote a journalist from a different era, when America actually had reporters, good night and good luck. Let's hope the night doesn't last longer than it needs to.



POSTSCRIPT: How could I forget "blogal warming"? :) Good news to report: more and more scientists are publicly rejecting the idea, as the negative evidence keeps piling up. Don't ignore your personal experience: the last two years really have been colder. The polar regions, especially the Antarctic, are cooling. The connection to the Sun's weakening magnetism can no longer be disputed, even if it is not yet understood.

It's refreshing to see scientists responding to evidence and ignoring mistaken computer models. If only Wall Street had taken this to heart earlier ....

Media's end

Is there any way to keep up with the jaw-dropping mix of bias, arrogance, adulterated junk food, and obtuse stupidity that the American news media has on display for us this election year? Bloggers, talk-show hosts, and others who are about to replace the American news industry struggle to come up with the words that will, in effect, form its epitaph.

The recent flap over Sarah Palin's ABC interview with Charles Gibson has even sympathetic media observers agog. Just pick a random blog in the blogroll to the right and look. Start with Mary Madigan comparing the raw and doctored interviews, and finish up with this classic Simpsons clip (requires WMP 11 or IE7). Like the indispensable Onion, only parody can now do justice to the schlock, "advocacy," and strutting, vicious pretense -- both cutthroat and petty -- that make up so much of our so-called "news."

The core problem here is that Palin, limited as her political experience is, is smart, as well as direct and plain-spoken. Her mere existence highlights the phoniness of liberal and "progressive" politics. Her limited but real accomplishments in Alaska underscore, every time those intolerable boobs on MSNBC open their mouths, the empty hype and puffery of the Obama campaign.

So media-land is in a tizzy. I don't take polls that seriously, but one poll and survey after another in the last decade has indicated that a large swath of the voting public knows what they're seeing and reading and are willing to say so. Some of these polls indicate that even a majority of self-described liberals now admit that the media is biased junk. And there's no mystery as to the nature of that bias.

In all likelihood, this election cycle will be the last in which the conventional news media has a dominant role in "reporting" and shaping the outcome. The media's credibility and prestige have been eroding for 25 or more years. But few foresaw the stunning speed of collapse we're now watching.

None of the above

It's been a significant trend that has frustrated Republican efforts to become the majority party: since the late 90s, a significant number of voters who used to vote Republican for fiscal and/or national security reasons have become turned off. Some of them (at least in 2004 and 2006) voted Democratic. But most are abstaining from voting for any major-party candidate in general elections. Discrepancies in vote tallies in 2000 and 2004 between congressional and presidential votes seem to reflect this, as did the Ron Paul candidacy. Whether McCain can overcome this trend in 2008 remains to be seen.

But this year, I'm detecting something similar happening to Democrats. (See here and here, for example.) Obama's failure to win a majority of the Democratic primary vote has set the Democrats up for trouble. Some of these voters will vote for McCain; others will just abstain. The 2008 general election will thus feature two growing blocs of the disaffected, adding a multidimensional wild card to the outcome.

Are you experienced?

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Oh, and how could I forget Juno? The movie's director talks here about life imitating art imitating life imitating art ....
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One of the most remarkable things about American society today is how long it takes the average middle or upper-middle class person to mature into adulthood.

I was comparing notes with a friend about Obama and Palin versus JFK at the same point in his life, and several large facts struck both of us. When JFK ran for president in 1960, he had been in Congress for 14 years and had served in the Navy four years before that, a total of 18 years of public service. Obama is frequently compared to JFK, but honestly, there is no comparison: Obama is man of manifest talent and no achievement. Only the media's relentless promotion of him has obscured this and the fact that he's lost without coaching and teleprompter. He's the perfect icon for the entitlement mentality. Even Palin, limited as her political career has been, has more on her resumé.

Part of the explanation is that everyone's living longer today and the Boomers and their immediate predecessors, the Depression-war babies, fill and will remain in positions of importance for many years to come. That means advancement for anyone under, say, 50 is harder than it was in JFK's day.

But today's American society, and the Western world in general, is also set up to make adulthood harder than it once was. Adolescence was once a prologue to adulthood. Today, adulthood is a prolongation of adolescence.

.... But not for Bristol Palin, obviously eager to jump into adulthood a little too early. An object lesson for the way we infantilize, not only adults, but late teens on the verge of adulthood. What they need is, not infantilization, but as much responsibility as they can handle, along with a little adult supervision. Without adult responsibility handed to them, the pluckier and more risk-tolerant will seek it out themselves, whether they know what they're getting into or not.

POSTSCRIPT: Bless her heart, Megan McArdle has two very sensible postings (here and here) about the women of the Palin household. (I count Bristol as an adult.)

Shaken up

And I mean in a good way -- congratulations to Alaska governor Sarah Palin on being tapped as McCain's VP nominee. I didn't think John-John had it in him: he's hit not just a home run, but a home run out of the park.

We've been out of the political loop here at Kavanna for the last month or so, busy with many of life's pressing things. I've been meaning to blog for some time on the changing dynamics of American politics and what's gone wrong with the Republican party, and I will soon. (See here for my earlier thoughts.)

Suffice it for now to say that, with Palin on the ticket and the credibility she brings on the "shrink-bloated-corrupt-big-government" front, McCain has now massively confirmed his earlier, tentative push to break the Republicans out of their self-imposed ghetto. They spent ten years building a prison for themselves out of partisan hysteria and attempts to awe and buy off voters with ever more lavish activist big government. But they found instead that they had only alienated larger and larger swaths of the electorate. Except for 2002, it's placed a steepening cost on them in every election since 1998 and now threatens the party's and country's future.

McCain has his core domestic theme down: run against Congress, and don't be partisan about it. The era of Bush, Rove, and braindead loyalty is thankfully over.

Not bad for a guy with an enlarged prostate :)

POSTSCRIPT: Sissy Willis is also happy: "It's a girl!" No confirmation yet on the HRC suicide watch! ;-D

POST-POSTSCRIPT: And progress on closing the "supermodel gap"?

Candidacy or cult?

American politics seems to be, far more than in any time in living memory, falling into an era both silly and dangerous. The most recent sign was the Democratic primaries, a largely empty contest of identity politics where the most qualified candidates were eliminated early on. The ultimate result was Barack Obama's success in getting the Democratic presidential nomination, backed heavily by the wealthy, white, and ultraliberal wing of the party. But it's also hard to remember an election when the news media were so thought-free and ready to divert attention from political substance, while relentlessly promoting a candidate as the center of a celebrity cult. Obama is probably the most underqualified presidential candidate since the 1920s and maybe ever. His candidacy is a testimony to the continuing, if declining, influence of the media. More than anything, Obama is their candidate. One of the few good side effects is that what's left of the media's credibility is being hosed away before our eyes.

Obama's candidacy is also a fantasy of ultraliberal wealthy donors who like the fact that he's a blank slate. They're competing with each other to be the first to scribble it. They want to shape him the same way Bush was "turned" by the neocons after 9/11 -- another sign of a cult, hangers-on competing to manipulate the image of the figurehead. For his supporters, Obama is an exciting Rorschach inkblot. But he's not baggage-free. The notion that Obama is "post-partisan" or all about "change" is the phoniest thing about his candidacy. His political career in Chicago and voting record demonstrate this. Even more striking is Obama's combination of ignorance and arrogance.* While Obama went in six months from "not black enough" to "the black candidate," his politics has always been white-bicoastal-ultraliberal. The cult tendencies are most obvious and disturbing whenever the media's largely successful attempt to protect Obama from questions or criticism breaks down. The campaign reacts with anger: how outrageous, how racist. Isn't this a preview of an Obama administration, both authoritarian and empty, with a lackey press in tow?

There's only one reason to vote for Obama, and that's if you want a seriously underqualified candidate with all the baggage of the Democratic left: semi-isolationist parochialism, free-trade phobia, high taxes, high inflation, greedy interest group paralysis. All the other reasons being kicked around are bad ones. What we're electing in November 2008 is the president for the next four years, not the last four, or the four before that. (As for the Iraq war, it's essentially over.) The attraction of some conservatives and libertarians to Obama especially needs a cold shower of this sort. While a majority of Democratic votes and elected delegates did not go to him, there is also the attraction of the anti-Hillary voter to Obama: how else to explain otherwise rational women falling for him?

My experience with foreigners on this issue continues to be different from what I expected. For the most part, they can't understand why American voters would be attracted to someone so inexperienced, even more than Bush in 2000 or Carter in 1976. Obama's politics are a pre-1980 throwback, with the Democrats' post-60s isolationist-protectionist tendencies added. This isn't just idle talk. People keep tearing their hair out about the price of oil. Most of its recent increase is actually due to the decline of the dollar. That decline, in the last six months, is strongly influenced by a perception outside the US that Americans have entered another period of self-righteous navel-gazing and political weakness. It's true, although the causes are not widely understood outside the US. Without consciously thinking it, the words tumbled out of my mouth while explaining this to a foreign friend: certain voters are attracted to Obama because he's an underqualified blank slate.

Since the 1980s, the left wing of the Democratic party has wanted to tear down the two pillars (economic and security) of post-1945 American leadership under the guise of "progressive" politics. The Democrats were the party that built this system, but they've repudiated it. Keep that in mind when you hear the continuing chatter about American "unilateralism" and "restoring American's reputation." Obama's provinciality on these issues, to the extent he knows anything about them, is astounding. (Mostly, he sounds like the last adviser to brief him.) This is not your father's Democratic party, or even Bill Clinton's. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Hillary is the ambitious 18-year-old Tracy Flick, now forced to attend "Kumbaya" exercises with the 12-year-old set. But Hillary and her husband are no longer the issue: it's the voters who voted for her. The not-surprising upshot is a sight familiar over the last forty years, a large group of voters who would like to vote for a Democrat, but not for the party's candidate. A majority of Democratic primary voters failed to determine the nomination, and the non-Obama Democrats are growing firmer in their rejection. The party has a major problem on its hands. What's more amazing is the repudiation by the party's wealthy elite of what the Democrats once stood for as the main creators of the post-1945 international order. Instead, Democratic politicians and activists have ever more completely rejected free trade and foreign entanglements, being now beholden to narrow interest groups and devoted to non-stop pandering to the party's nutty fringe. It's no wonder the dollar is falling, foreigners are worried, and American voters are disoriented.
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* Like his insistence that Americans learn French before they go to Europe. Really -- Americans should be learning European. Not everyone in Europe speaks French :)

Yet more revisionism and conspiracism about Iraq

Congressional Democrats, in spite of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report, are continuing their campaign to rewrite history and avoid responsibility for their decisions and statements in 2002 and 2003 regarding Iraq.

Via Instapundit, read James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, then view this on YouTube. Circle back to Fred Hiatt's piece in last week's Washington Post. It says something - something really revolting - about the current Democratic leadership in Congress and their enslavement to the "permanent campaign" - in this case, permanent fundraising mode with the wealthy and ultraliberal wing of the party.

Meanwhile, historian Victor Davis Hanson is beating off another outburst of ignorant bullying from Pat Buchanan and his paleocon allies at the American Conservative. Hanson and I don't agree about the Iraq war, but that's neither here nor there: Buchanan is loaded for bear, recycling mythology stretching back to the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist right. He's been doing that since the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if we had a White House more communicative and forthright than the current one. Lots of people out here, both allies and critics of the Bush administration, are doing what the White House itself should have spent the last five years doing. But I guess you go to war with the White House you have.

Is the GOP kaput?

Yes and no.

Looking at it from just this year's election perspective, we can see two seemingly contradictory trends. One is in the presidential race, where McCain has a moderate but distinctive advantage, even against Hillary Clinton, the stronger of the two remaining Democratic contenders. The other is in the Congressional elections, where the Republicans are still in real trouble, as much trouble as they were in back in 2006.

The root of the trouble remains what is was then: no political party has so swiftly abandoned what it purported to represent after achieving such dominance. This development certainly alienated the conservative base, a trend already visible as far back as the 1998 elections. But the party's fecklessness with regard to spending and reorientation towards big guvmint has also alienated right-leaning independent voters and conservative Democrats. Even without being conservative purists, they find less and less reason to vote Republican. It's hard to find a comparable example of a party squandering its natural advantages so completely, so quickly.

It may be past time for what remains of the conservative movement to abandon the baggage of traditional conservatism. It once had a reason and a role. But it's becoming clearer every day that the rhetoric of traditional Anglo-American conservatism - appealing to traditional moral and political authority, patriotism, and religion, while opposing the growth of government - is incoherent, at least under modern conditions.

It leads to weird paradoxes, like the revival of respect for governmental and presidential authority under Reagan, who was opposed to the ambitions and pretensions of modern government; or the abuse of governmental authority by Bush, even while he still uses the rhetoric of conservatism. The ultimate upshot is that such a contradiction has to be solved and has been, by moving in a Nixonian direction - traditional authority, patriotism, and morality tied to massive growth of government. The parallel move of conservative and moderate Democrats to the Republican party means the party has a whole new constituency to serve and a new type of right-leaning populist politician. The most striking sign is the rise of Mike Huckabee, the Christian minister and nanny-statist, who came in second overall in the Republican primaries. Such a politician would have been unthinkable in the GOP even as recently as 15 years ago.

A new sort of coalition is needed, perhaps taking a page from "liberal" parties in other countries, using "liberal" for once in its real meaning: smaller government, market-oriented, and individualist - without the traditionalist, moralistic, and populist baggage. The pieces of such a coalition are at hand. But we don't yet have politicians to lead it. Voters thinking that Obama fits the bill are deluding themselves. He's the most left-leaning presidential candidate in American history, although he lacks much political definition. His politics are a throwback. Even Hillary Clinton, as left as she is, is not such an antique. From the present wreckage of the GOP, such a beginning can be made by liberal Republicans and center-right independents. But it will take a lot more to regroup and reassert the limited government message. (May 29)

POSTSCRIPT: Kimberley Strassel has made a similar argument over at the Wall Street Journal: McCain needs to run against Congress. It's not just that it's controlled right now by the Democrats and has the lowest poll ratings ever recorded. The Congressional Republicans need the wake-up call as well. McCain has contributed in his own way to the present debacle, above all with the ridiculous and unconstitutional McCain-Feingold political speech and finance restrictions.* But he does have significant credibility on spending and not falling into the braindead partisan lockstep that led to the Republican losses in 2006. (May 30)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Jon Henke of the fascinating Web site, The Next Right, concludes about the Republicans in a way very similar to my distinction among liberal, conservative, and big-government-populist (miracles not math!) Republicans. He correctly points to the rise and fall of the third group, the marginalization of the second, and the surprise resurgence of the first. Henke's been guest-blogging over at Megan McArdle's joint. Maybe someone out there is paying attention to me, and I'm not just bloviating into the silence of cyberspace :) (June 1)
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* Ironically, McCain himself has opted out of public campaign financing, because of its onerous restrictions.

The fading Obama cult

It's even getting into the conventional media, a couple months late. Here's Time magazine.

There's a key reason for the Obama-Carter similarities: everyone associated with Bill Clinton is working with Hillary, mostly. Everyone else in the Democratic world is working with Obama - and that necessarily includes the long string of Democratic failures stretching from Carter through the early 90s: Brzezinski, Mondale's 1984 campaign manager, etc., etc. None of these associations augurs well for Obama. Clinton's second term was the only clear Democratic success in a half century.

As for restoring America's standing in the world, Obama's is a case of American narcissism. Every foreigner I've talked with about this is very concerned about Obama, his lack of experience and knowledge, and the fact that when not prepared by aides and given the soft-focus treatment by reporters, he seems in over his head. They're strongly reminded of none other than George W. Bush in 2000 - except Obama is even less experienced. People with longer memories, as the Time article points out, are reminded of Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Probably most foreigners are most comfortable with Hillary Clinton, under the expectation that she would continue her husband's policies. That might or might not be a good assumption, but it's worth considering. Conditions now are different from and less forgiving than the late 90s.

Democrats are definitely experiencing buyers' remorse, and it's not even June yet. It will be interesting to see if, in the next few weeks, the media's generally soft-focus treatment of Obama ends, and they start treating him like any other politician. He'll sink like stone if they do. (May 28)

POSTSCRIPT: I drafted that posting last week, before the Puerto Rico primary. It's getting pretty hard to keep up the pretense of "Obama inevitability." OTOH, it's been clear since January that, if Hillary wanted this thing, she would have to fight for it. It wouldn't be a coronation by acclamation. She's earned some strange respect from critics, while at the same time provoking intense anti-Clintonism from liberals, who sound like Republicans from circa 1998. Whodda thunk it six months ago?

Your Congress at work...

... with your hard-earned tax dollars: the revolting farm bill already passed in the House and now making its way through the Senate, appropriating $300 billion for, for example, those ridiculous ethanol subsidies - you remember those from yesterday, no? But it's also for outright corruption, like paying farm price supports to people who happen to own arable land, don't farm it, and live somewhere else. And remember the evils of corn syrup? This bill adds to domestic sugar subsidies: so watch your food prices go up.

Although Bush's motives are suspect - he failed to veto a single spending bill when the Republicans controlled Congress - he will apparently do the right thing and veto this monstrosity, even though many congressional Republicans are supporting it. It will probably pass with a veto-proof majority in the Senate, as it did in the House. Perhaps Congress can be shamed into not overriding Bush's veto, but don't count on it.

The DC Examiner excoriates the bill here, and the Washington Post casts its skeptical eye. And don't miss these charming little items.

It makes McCain's upcoming campaign easier, though. As we pointed out earlier this year, he merely needs to run against Congress. Oh yeah, McCain needs to vote against this thing too, and he did. Clinton and Obama did not.

Now it gets interesting

The coming fall of PCU, triggered by intolerable costs, is preceded by the final stages of rising prices and hemorrhaging subsidies. This bubble is now the subject of more and more active discussion in the blogosphere and the specialized higher ed press.*

Over at the Yeah Right blog, the mysterious Batman refers to this article on the student loan bubble, following the lead started by Instapundit:

... about "the next market bubble" being higher education, where government subsidies (obstensibly, to improve access to higher education) have had the unintended (but certainly foreseeable) consequence of inflating the costs of college: "Over the last 10 years, after adjusting for inflation, tuition is up 48% at public schools and 24% at private schools."

There are several important parallels with the recent housing bubble; policy goals of extending participation (in higher education, in home ownership) led to people with serious credit risks borrowing a lot to pay a lot for something that, it turns out, isn't worth what they paid....

This bubble, like all bubbles, will have its tragic stories, so I don't want to cheer this on. But if there's a silver lining, it's that it may make people rethink the value of those four years that polite society assumes you need.

Discussion ensues.

How much you wanna bet now on a federal plan in 2009 or 2010 to "save" higher education from a government-enabled burst bubble? And, of course, to keep pushing college education on students who don't need or want it? Just like pushing houses on people who don't need or can't afford them ....

POSTSCRIPT: Nice blog, BTW. Although Batman seems even more mysterious than we are :)

Additional thoughts about how the cultural elite skews education spending the wrong way, from Jerry Pournelle.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Some bloggers caught Megan McArdle's hysterically funny take on HillaryPlan, but not all of us saw it:

What do Americans care most about this election season? The troubled housing market, and the short supply of oil. That's why Hillary is here with a plan. Specifically, a plan to discourage investment in the oil industry through a windfall profits tax, and to destroy the mortgage market by freezing foreclosures and interest rates. That way, no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.

Plus Megan has some really cool economics charts that take me back to college days. I guess my public college education is worth something. And it means Megan is way cool.

And that is why my new life goal is to meet and marry Megan McArdle.
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* Your guides to the academic scene, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Really, it isn't

ANOTHER POST-POST UPDATE: It was +0.6% annualized, not quarterly, but still positive. No 2007-08 recession in sight.
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PRE-POSTSCRIPT: If the rivers of "narrative trumps fact" bullshit of the news media could be summed up, it would look like this non-news article about the non-recession in the Washington Post: "Employers Cut Fewer Jobs Than Expected."

I just saw another yesterday: Hillary Clinton's strong rebound and Barack Obama's accelerating implosion (the real story) were twisted in headlines into something like, Republicans weaken against Democrats in November (the pseudo-story). The media's candidate (Obama) is fading fast, and the real result is, the Democrats have a somewhat better (but still uphill) chance against McCain in November.
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It wasn't a recession, whatever it was that happened this past winter. The economy grew by a little under a percent in the first quarter, at an annualized rate of somewhat more than two percent.* The housing sector did take a big hit, however, and it's not over yet. Housing prices will continue to fall.

But, as Ann Althouse puts it, why can't we reporters just "report" what we feel, dammit - plus move on with that Obama guy :)
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* If I'm interpreting the news story correctly.

The yahoos and snakehandlers strike back

Obama insults the Pennsylvania voters he needs!

Hmm ... this is the end of Obama as blank slate, it is. See here and here for more.

I do believe Mrs. Clinton has this primary in the bag. She did already, but this is more demonstration of how Obama is not really transcending anything. His politics is the usual white upper-middle class elitist liberalism. The fact that he's not "white" is beside the point.

Of course, maybe Obama has a point. I hunted a few times and certainly went fishing plenty of times, all as a kid. But now, as a grown-up, I have put away childish things and have my meat and fish grown for me, at the grocery store, like other civilized people.

(Hat tip to Instapundit.)

POSTSCRIPT: Someone's got Obama's number:

By cracky, it's like the man sees into my very soul!

Thirty years ago, I had a good job in the mill in Pittsburgh. I was bringing in a good income, going to jazz clubs, discussing Proust over white wine and brie, with my gay friends of all colors. I was all for free trade, so that we could sell the steel overseas, and I never bothered to go to church, let alone actually believe in God.

But then, the plant closed down, and I couldn't get another job. I went on unemployment, and found odd jobs here and there, but they barely paid the rent on the loft, and the payment on the Bimmer. I couldn't afford the wine and brie any more, and had to shift over to beer and brats.

Of course, as a result, I started hanging out with the wrong crowd - the beer drinkers.

And it wasn't just the beer. Some of them actually went out in the woods in the fall, and shot animals. And kilt 'em. With real guns!

I was shocked, of course ....

When will the Obama cult end?

This spring? This summer? This November?

It's clear that Hillary Clinton is the better of the two Democratic candidates for the general election in November, and the primary voters seem to agree with this. She has won all but one of the big states (including her almost-certain victory in Pennsylvania coming up) and all of the swing states the Dems will need in November. Obama's entire primary vote lead came from his home district of Cook County, Illinois. If the Dems had more rational primary rules, like the Republicans, she would already be the nominee. The weird inability of Dem primary voters to make the full weight of their voice heard is what's allowing the media and the left wing of the party to "wag the dog," so to speak. This is likely to be the Democrats' final opportunity for the forseeable future to have a large impact on national politics, and they seem determined to blow it.

Obama has on his side an extraordinary alliance of the left wing of the Democratic party and the media, which seem determined to get him nominated. Let's go over this again: He's the most underqualified candidate to run for President in a long time. His political "movement" smacks more of a cult than anything else. Given his views, which are to the left of Clinton and which he tries hard to hide, he has a poor chance against McCain in November. Without the center and center-left vote Clinton has a better chance of getting, Obama stands no chance of winning the general election. The Democrats, in fact, would have to start thinking about how big the loss will be: not just the White House, but one or both houses of Congress as well. The defections will be fatal and leave the Party in a shape similar to what it was like after 1972 or 1984.

The complaints about Bush, his inexperience and provinciality, were well-founded seven or eight years ago. They hold with much more force for Obama. In spite of his talk of "restoring" America's reputation, he's a foreign-policy lightweight, at best - it's more about restoring some fantasy shared by, say, Ted Turner and George Soros. His obvious ignorance of foreign trade and the Middle East make his noises about these issues laughable. With leadership on trade and other international issues, Bush looks profound by comparison. Obama has in addition the heavy political baggage of the people he's chosen to associate with. All of these problems will become far worse in the general election, no matter how hard to media tries to distract people. That only works for so long.

Of course, the Democrats were always going to have a hard time this year: they're no longer running against Bush. Early on, they eliminated their most qualified candidates and, instead, gave us the spectacle of empty identity politics and exceptionally slick levels of political cynicism - more obviously from Clinton, less obviously but even more disturbingly from Obama - that leave any outside observer with a simple conclusion: the Democratic party is politically and morally bankrupt. Its putative base continues to shrink, and an Obama nomination will accelerate the shrinkage and defections to the point that the Dems may cease to be a viable national party at all. Once a forward-looking optimistic bunch, the Dems have become a strange collection of panicked, self-hating rubes.

The cult of Obama feeds on a number of things, including a surprising amount of misogyny. But more than anything, it is the desperation of liberals that makes them prone to bad choices. Democrats can look back on over fifty years and not see (with one exception) a successful Democratic presidency since Truman left office in 1953. The turning point was undoubtedly the awful day in November 1963 that started the liberal "unhingement." The JFK presidency left an ambiguous legacy; Johnson began with great success and ended as a failure. Carter was just a failure. Clinton's second term, after a failed first term, is the only bright spot for the Democrats in half a century - but it came at the price of Clinton's adopting some of the most conservative Democratic policies since - well - Grover Cleveland. This left liberals in the strange position of being ready to do anything to defend Clinton personally but hating his policies. The consequences were bad for the Dems. In 2000, Gore, instead of sensibly running on Clintonism but keeping Clinton at arm's length, ran a bizarre pseudo-populist campaign spooked by the fringe candidacies of Bradley and Nader to his left. The same logic was at work in the fringe Dean candidacy in 2003, heavily promoted by the media and the left wing of the party, and only ended when the primary voters had their say.

The Democrats need to think long and hard before they continue down the road with the Obama cult, drink the Kool-Aid, walk over the cliff - or whatever other cult metaphors you want to use. Cinnamon Stillwell has this to say: "He's not the Second Coming, you know" - but according to some, he is apparently the First :)

When will the Obama cult end? Maybe when Clinton wins in Pennsylvania ... nah. The cult will end when the media lose interest.

POSTSCRIPT: I missed this column by Robert Samuelson in February, but it's worth reading.

A detailed article on Obama's early career, including more disturbing material about the Reverend Wright (see page 8), from the New Republic.

Are we in a recession?

Probably not.

But we're all hearing this hysteria in the media about it, mostly because it's an election year, and many of us having a stake in the housing market. Something big has happened, but it adds up to less than a recession.

A recession means at least six months straight of contraction in economic output. That's unlikely to happen soon and certainly has not happened in the last six months. But the "six month" definition is more of an accounting and political convention. A recession is better understood if you look at it as part of an economy's natural history.

Recessions mark the end of the standard seven-to-nine-year business cycle, which is a cycle of investment, growth of production, and (towards the end) major growth and changes in consumption. The current expansion started at the end of 2001. Recessions are preceded not only by drops in financial markets, but by contractions in investment caused by over-high interest rates. The end of a recession is signaled by lagging indicators, like falls in employment and consumption. Prices are flat or falling. Interest rates finally fall.

Within the standard business cycle are shorter inventory cycles, swings of oversupply and overdemand, lasting two to four years. What we're experiencing now is almost certainly an unusually severe, shorter-term bump like this, connected with the housing bubble and collapse. It's real enough: the housing and retail-consumer sectors have been noticeably hit. But the financial sector, while hurting in areas connected to housing, is not contracting as a whole. Other sectors of the economy, like technology, manufacturing, and especially raw materials and commodities, are doing well or very well. Many prices are still rising, and long-term interest rates have not changed much.

There have been other episodes like this. In late 1994, the US economy apparently contracted for one or two months, and there was a recession scare. The Fed reacted by easing credit, but then left that easing in place for too long, fueling the late 90s stock bubble. Even the 2001 recession lasted less than six months and so technically wasn't one. But it did feature economy-wide contraction, so it deserves the label anyway.

What's distinctive about recessions is not swings of supply and demand in a few economic sectors, but weakness across the whole economy all at once, lasting for the better part of a year or longer. What's happening at the moment doesn't sound like a recession. Another episode is a better analogy, the 1988 savings-and-loan-housing crash in New England and a few other parts of the country. It too was not a recession. But it did provide "coming attractions," foreshadowing the real recession of 1990-91, which featured the same weaknesses in the economy on a larger scale. It's far more likely that a recession is coming our way in 2009 or 2010.

Normal women and the men who love them

From the Wall Street Journal comes this silly story about the alleged "backlash" against Hillary Clinton leading to an alleged "backlash" against women in general. (Hat tip to Instapundit.)

Unlike blacks and whites, who are still too separated from one another, men and women spend enough time together and understand each other well enough (sometimes too well) to make such worries seem pathetic. And listen to the absurd assumptions behind all such sloppy journalism: we need such candidacies to feel "empowered." What a joke: politicians almost always reduce our freedom - they rarely enhance it.

In our society, the position of women and the way men view them, and the way women view themselves, has little linkage to the vagaries of politics and the ups and downs of Hillary Clinton. It was always a mistake for her and her supporters to frame her candidacy this way. Fortunately, relations between the sexes are not much impacted by such things, and the influence that radical feminists once had, 20 or 30 years ago, on our thinking has mercifully faded to almost nil.

Too bad for the identity politics mongers - but nice for the rest of us.

The coming Obama implosion

I probably shouldn't call it "coming" - it's already here, and it's not even April yet. For example, Christopher Hitchens takes another hard look at Obama and doesn't like what he sees. In case anyone's wondering if the Obama candidacy is finished or not, see this and this. There's always a certain amount of BS going on with figures at the fringes of any presidential campaign. But the core of this material is published and publicly available. The problem remains, not so much Obama, as the people around him. If the Clinton people are retreads from a moderately successful administration 10 years ago, Obama's people are failed retreads and would-bes from 20, 30, even 40 years ago.

There's not a lot more to say about the angry Pastor Wright. Long-time Obama-watchers were not surprised by the recent flap. Wright, a well-to-do pastor and child of upper-middle-class privilege, even more than Obama himself, is undoubtedly a cult leader captivating hearts and minds with myth-spinning, half-truths, and "hate speech." But take away the race mongering, and you have a successful cult guru not unlike, say, the Maharishi - and not at all like, say, Jim Jones, who took his beliefs far too seriously. After all, Jones committed suicide. Pastor Wright would never, ever do that to himself. Think instead of all those other angry cultists of the New Left and of how privilege has its price: the Chomskys, the Patty Hearsts, the Weather Underground, etc. - all those children of success acting out some weird personal drama and sometimes inflicting it on the rest of us. Mostly, such people need to heed their own advice and start with themselves.

But back to Obama: while not a full-blown cult follower, he is clearly a cult fellow-traveller of many years. The cult beliefs don't at all fit at all his own biography. But joining the cult was a shrewd political move - it allows him to keep one foot in angry identity politics, even if it's personally irrelevant to him, while still selling himself as "post-racial" to credulous white middle-class boobs. If anyone was paying attention, this whole dynamic was brilliantly captured and dissected last year by Shelby Steele.

Unfortunately, the Obama craze will not go away completely until the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. Clinton will almost certainly win it, by a large margin, leaving the Democrats with two candidates: one with a less-than-even but still serious shot at winning in November, and the other with even more limited appeal and his primary vote lead all coming from his home turf, Cook County, Illinois. The question then becomes, how crazy are those Dems? They specialize in self-destruction, and slavery/segregation/race has been their albatross for more than a century and a half: can they shake it?

POSTSCRIPT: For another slant on what's wrong with the Democrats, see here. Hint: it's more or less the same thing that's been wrong with them for a long time.

Obama the cultist?

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Obama has now made his speech (see here and here). Mickey Kaus parses and arrives at some conclusions.
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More disturbing news about Obama and how he's let other people define him. It just reinforces the point that he's not ready for prime time. There's no indication that Obama shares the inflammatory views of his pastor and the fringe causes associated with his church. But if so, a large question mark hangs over him and his future as a national political figure: why is he associated with such people?*

Is he black enough? Obama remains what he was a few months ago: a questionably "black" candidate - although he wasn't anointed as such until Oprah endorsed him and all the white middle-class liberals rushed out for a look - a political portrait one-quarter or one-third filled in, the rest question marks and blank spaces.

You can see further comment here and here. It's a reminder that much of what passes for "progressive" politics in the West today is a thinly veiled mishmash of hate, conspiracy theories, and juvenile rage. The last thing it represents is progress. It's not about this or that policy; changing those merely leads the hate-mongers to shift their target to something else. Pay attention to the music, not the lyrics. It's the detritus of yesteryear's alliance of the New Left, radical Christian churches, and the mythical "Third World."

Obama has spent most of his adult career with one foot in this fringe swamp of the self- and America-hating left. It is this issue - not the silly rumors about his being a Muslim - that should have been out in front for discussion all along. What's striking is Obama attempts to rationalize his pastor's screeds; these are the feeble excuses of a cult member trying to defend the cult guru.

Off to the races. How serious is Obama about these cult beliefs? Many people have simply assumed that he's fully into it. But there is another, more likely, possibility. Obama's biography looks like a younger Colin Powell: a man of mixed racial background whose life circumvented the main traumas of segregation and desegregation and is comfortable around both white and black culture. Someone in this position has some powerful advantages, but also lives a painful dilemma. One way to resolve it is to play the game, "Are You Black Enough?", and pay your "race dues." That seems to be the case with Obama and the angry Pastor Wright. There's probably an element of cynical calculation involved, but this aspect of Obama's biography also reflects a genuine personal dilemma. For more along these lines, see this by Matthew Yglesias and this by David Bernstein.**

For American liberals, this fiasco is another case of getting burned by their left-leaning political slumming. They get entranced by the slogans, then wake up the next day in a place they didn't expect. The saving grace this time is that they have plenty of forewarning. What's happening now is a striking case of post-facto rationalizing by the supposedly ultrasmart, but in reality very provincial, people with fancy degrees who've been caught - again - with poor judgment and self-deception. It's something they seem good at. It certainly makes all the portentous hairsplitting about, say, Romney and Mormonism, look asinine.

If Clinton wins Pennsylvania (which she probably will), she will have won all the swing states, and all but one (Illinois) of the large states. The Democrats would be crazy not to nominate her. Clinton has a better than even chance at the nomination, one that is growing every day. She is certainly the candidate in a better position to take on McCain. Obama's candidacy is about to enter a terminal tainspin, and by May or June, everyone will be wondering what the fuss was about.†

Paging Senator Obama. Meanwhile, whether Obama will turn out to be a flash in the pan or a national politician of real significance remains open. This election will not decide it. Both he and the voters need another election cycle or two. Certainly, 20+ years of national politics lies open to him. The result hinges on his self-definition, something he hasn't yet taken a stand on. If Obama resolves his dilemma the right way, he can escape the self-ghettoization of identity politics and become a serious national politician. If not, then not.
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* Mark Steyn asks the same question in a different way here. Curiously, Oprah left this church quite a while ago - which only makes the question sharper.

** If he experienced this dilemma, Colin Powell resolved it by becoming career military.

Probably the main motive for angry cults and cult leaders - like Pastor Wright and Louis Farrakhan - is just this dilemma faced by a formerly oppressed minority moving from ghetto to mainstream. The upside is obvious: the minority is no longer held down by legally restrictions and social prejudices and can participate in society like everyone else. The less-discussed downside is obvious from the emergence of the black underclass that started in the late 1950s and still lingers: it's the embarrassing problem of washing your dirty linen in public. American and Caribbean blacks have been from the start a semi-submerged distinctive subculture with only faint connections to Africa: they're far more New World than Old. The major step toward a more just society started when whites started acknowledging this fact. But when a semi-submerged subculture moves into the mainstream, everything is now on view, both strengths and warts.

A telling fact: angry identity politics cults emerge after the oppressed minority achieves some enhanced freedom and opportunity, not before. The origins of the Nation of Islam are not in the 19th-century South, but the mid-20th-century North - Detroit, to be exact, where founder Elijah Muhammad picked up, among other things, Henry Ford's nasty rantings about the Jews. Similarly, contrary to the fantasies peddled by Wright, he and Obama and his congregation are not poor and oppressed: quite the contrary, they're dizzy with freedom and opportunities even their parents could barely imagine. Living next door to the underclass neighborhoods of Chicago, ringing with drug pusher gunfire, makes clear every day that some of the newly freed are making poor use of their new freedom. Conspiracy theories are attractive to people in such situations - they appear to explain everything and distract everyone from harsh facts.

The case of American Jews demonstrates the point in a different way. Although there have been identity demagogues amongst us (Rabbi Kahane being the best-known), the success and acceptance American Jews have enjoyed in the last 60 years greatly limit their appeal.

† Keeping insufferable television journalists in our faces 24/7? Was that the point?

Uh-oh

Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings has another case of "it must be global warming": a once-per-generation snowstorm in Greece. (See here as well.)

And keep up with the Democrats' coming electoral disaster at Rand's as well. Hillary is still hanging on with Ohio and Texas open. If she wins Texas, she still has a chance. If she loses both, she is finished.

And so are the Democrats in November. They will wake up by April at the latest in shock to discover what they've done to themselves and inquire after what exactly they were smoking. More on that in a bit.

I am vast and right-wing, hear me roar

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: Megan McArdle does it again: finally, an explanation for our campaigns.
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The agony and the ... well, no ecstasy yet. Conservatives are in a funk about McCain winning the Republican primaries and the smooth walk he apparently has ahead of him to the Republican nomination. Conservatives deserve a Valentine. So here's a belated one.

How did he do it? Independents, my dear. They can vote in most primaries, and they've recently been the fastest-growing group in American politics. McCain plays well among them. Conservatives are in conniptions, and rightly so, about some of McCain's politics - his support for restrictions on campaign donations and speech (which are unconstitutional, shut out challengers, and have done serious damage to our politics), and above all, his questionable views on illegal immigration, which, for state and local governments, has become a major welfare-state crisis that national politicians, who set the policies or lack thereof, pay no price for.

McCain, like Romney and Giuliani, is a liberal Republican. (Romney spent a lot of time and money unconvincingly presenting himself as a conservative - which is too bad, because he would have done himself and everyone else a favor by just being himself.) Liberal Republicans are the smallest of the three factions of the Republican party (liberals, conservatives, and populists). But they are critical: they are the closest to the center of gravity of American politics, somewhat to the right of center. They do not share conservatives' fatal ambivalence about modern government, but they are also free of faith-driven big-government populism - you know, where miracles are more important than math.

Conservatives should not have been surprised by this. While waiting in vain for a viable conservative Presidential candidate this year, many conservatives are still mentally stuck in the 90s. Conservatism lives on as an ideology, as an intellectual movement, and as an attitude. But as a politics, it's been dead for almost a decade. Conservatives who thought there would be a conservative comeback this year were always deluded. Conservatism didn't die a natural death, of course. It was shunted aside, by the Republican party - it was in the way. The irony is that, the Republicans would be in far better shape now if they had stuck consistently to their earlier conservatism. Like Nixonism, the Bush-Rove-ism approach was too clever by half.

So conservatives are going through separation trauma. They once had enough confidence in themselves that, in the late 70s and the 80s, they were able to take over the Republican party. But the last 13 years have not been kind to them: the Republicans lost their ideological moorings. Conservatives overidentified with the party, which became less and less conservative while becoming more and more partisan. Now conservatives have to go back to where they were in the 1950s and 1960s: they need to disentangle themselves from the Republican party and revisit the basics. They can start by mending fences with libertarians. And they need to figure out what they have in common with the "good government" liberal Republicans. (Hint: nowadays, "good government" usually means "smaller government.") For electoral politics, they need to face what I wrote here last year:

Once Bush & Co. are gone, it will be springtime for Republicans, who are more likely than not to retake the Senate in 2008. But it will not be a new conservative era: the 20-year era of conservative ideological dominance, from the late 70s to the late 90s, will probably not return in our lifetimes. Everyone now loves big government ....

Will the liberal Republicans ride to the rescue? Maybe. Liberal Republicans like politics and don't suffer from the conservatives' fatal ambivalence about being in charge of modern government. And unlike Bush, they value competence above machine politics and loyalty. They also lack Bush's faith-based, blindfolded, trust-walk style, and are not tainted with [it]. Although liberal Republicans are the smallest faction of the Republican party, they sit the closest to the center of gravity of American politics - unlike the conservatives or the Bush fraternity house .... the future of the Republican party, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to them.

Conservatives need to grasp that the game this year is, not pick a viable conservative candidate, but pick an acceptable liberal Republican. Now the primary voters have done that for them and picked McCain. If conservatives don't like the result, they should have been stronger in the primaries for Romney or Giuliani. Instead they were twiddling around with Ron Paul or Fred Thompson.

Conservatives also need to rebuild at the state and Congressional level. They have always had a strong tendency towards ghettoizing their issues as "ideology." They need instead to do what conservatives before the mid-70s did, anticipate and understand what the big governmental crises are going to be, and then be ready when those crises appear. (Back then, they were out-of-control expectations, the post-1965 explosion of federal spending, stagflation, the dead-end of détente; today, they include the coming entitlements crisis, illegal immigration, the possible break-up of the Western alliance system, the rise of the "oil" axis). Conservatives need to disconnect completely from the conventional television media and encourage everyone else to do the same. The news media will do its utmost to obscure important issues and change the subject. Instead of arguing with them, everyone should be ignoring them. If voters do, then the politicians will eventually get it. Those who don't get it, will find themselves less and less relevant.

There is real upside for the Republicans: the cards are still stacked in their favor this year. Bush and Cheney are out of the picture. The negative referendum on them already happened, in 2006. As a proportion of voters, self-described liberals are still shrinking. The Congressional Democrats' poll ratings have been crawling on the bottom since they took over 13 months ago (teens or single-digits) and consistently well below Bush's. If the Republicans are smart, they'll run against Congress. The 2008 presidential race is the Republicans' to lose. The interesting question is whether they have a chance to regain one of the houses of Congress as well.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of which - is it all over for Hillary? Peggy Noonan considers. My answer is, obviously not. She's won most of the big states and will probably win Texas and Ohio. The Democratic race is far from over. And given the Democrats' weird superdelegate rules, we may end up with an old-fashioned brokered convention. Of course, it won't be totally old-fashioned: the back rooms will have women as well as men, and they'll be free of smoke.