‘Obama Has No Plan’ was Always a Bad Talking Point

Now that Barack Obama has announced  that he’ll be releasing a jobs plan, talkers on the right are winding down a long season of debt and budget debates in which it seemed people could not be reminded enough that Obama had not put forth any plan of his own. The day he releases his plan (campaign literature though it may be), he will pull the rug out from under that whole chorus.

Sure it was instructive to note as a matter of process that the Republican House proposed and proposed and the Democrats merely disposed, but that’s hardly the take-home message and it’s not even particularly well-suited to the purpose of deflecting accusations that conservatives were ‘embracing extremism’.

The test is this: if Obama did have a plan, would that satisfy us? Of course not. And it’s not that we have some irrational need to attack him, but because we basically do know what his approach to the issues is and we know that we have better solutions.  The problem with telling people our objection is to the lack of a plan is that it doesn’t express that bottom line: that his plans are based on all the wrong assumptions.

We only have so many terms for growing government or incentivizing businesses and it’s natural to want a new pointed statement to make that ties in to current news, especially when you have the chance to go on TV, but most of the voting (and working) Americans who have lives to juggle outside Washington aren’t going to do background research on your segment to tie process to policy and determine where they stand.

People aren’t stupid but they are busy, so at the risk of sounding like a broken record don’t forget to make the talking points serve the point. We have a superior vision than the left, and we should never forget to say so.

 

Re the Tebow ad: A tactical Retreat

Much has been made over the last week about the Focus on the family Super Bowl ad featuring football star Tim Tebow, and feminists and leftists were up in arms about both the message and the approval of the ‘pro-life’ ad even before it had seen the light of day.  It was a PR win for Focus on the family as they got the kind of attention you can’t pay for as well as the Super Bowl audience they did pay for.  But we got our final confirmation that they had played the whole thing masterfully when the spot was shown to the world and made their critics look like the villains.  As you can see, it more invites the criticism of being too cheesy than being controversial.

This was  a clever tactical retreat.  You don’t win over the public simply by being right or even by proving it.  Maybe it should work that way, but the fact is that there are other factors that cloud people’s view.  Sometimes you win by being yourself and being friendly and approachable, and sometimes you win by catching the opposition in an embellishment or showing that they aren’t exactly as they present themselves.

Those are the things this ad did wonderfully.  It related to people like a friend on the couch or at the kitchen table.  Meanwhile, ‘women’s groups’ howled at this inviting ad without serious complaint about ads from GoDaddy that clearly present women as sex objects and the ‘pro-choice’ movement revealed that it couldn’t stand someone making a choice against abortion and encouraging others to follow.

This is perhaps a  microcosm for a larger tactical retreat on this issue.  We all know the basic arguments: the pro-abortionists believe that would-be mothers can improve their lives by avoiding having unwanted children, and that abortion can prevent bringing children into unforgiving situations while the anti-abortionists believe that abortion constitutes killing  and so should be illegal.  Basically, conservatives are talking about principle while liberals are judging outcomes, but the point is that the two talk past each other and at this point the debate is at something of an impasse.

So it’s smart for pro-life groups like Focus on the Family to concentrate their energies on friendly efforts to build support for their cause rather than taking a confrontational approach which can turn a lot of people off or at least cause them to tune out.  Hence, they no longer make the complete argument that abortion should be outlawed.  This prevents getting into policy specifics like cases of incest, but possibly even more important, it embraces the mantle of choice.

They need only convince people of the first principle that there is value to the life of an unborn infant in the context of making a personal choice during pregnancy.  That alone is enough to serve the cause of defending the defenseless and at that point if you believe that abortion is killing, you’ll want the law to treat it as such.

Of course pro-lifers would like to see a legal ban on abortion, but we need not be so bold.  Pam Tebow shows us that so long as the issue is about choice, we can tackle the issue on those terms and gain ground without worrying that we’re sitting out important parts of the argument.

 

Obama Eliminating Tax Credit He Brags About

Especially in his recent State of the Union address, the President has taken to bragging of his record as a tax-cutter. If that seems incongruous, it’s because it is. For an examination of the specifics from the SOTU, see here, but yesterday we found out that a pet talking point of the Obama administration is being quietly retired.  The Making Work Pay tax credit, which we were told last year would be permanent and the first stage of the middle class tax cut promised during the campaign, is in the budget for 2011, but then set to expire at the end of the year.

It seems the camera-ready tax break for middle class working families was intended as a fix for a Cap & Trade plan that was going to hit them hard with increased costs.  And the administration’s number crunchers were willing to part with the $63 billion only on the assumption that they’d make it up in revenue from the massive new energy tax.  But now, with the fate of health care reform, the administration’s top priority, anything but certain, it’s hard to hold out hope for Cap & trade.

Giving, or taking away?

On the surface, I’d say this is a nice sign that Obama doesn’t expect to be able to get a Cap & Trade bill passed, at least not this year, but on the other hand, this is still a tax hike and if Cap & Trade does pass, it will now lack an important counterbalancing mechanism.

The best illustration, though, is one in contrasts and inconsistencies.  The State of the Union brags of a record of tax cuts, then the budget proposal quietly retires them.  The President insists that the deficit is a problem he’ll focus on immediately and not leave to future generations, then he presides over record deficits, which will of course only grow when the stimulus-esque “jobs bill” is worked out and pushed through. And “as recently as Friday” he praised the virtues of the very “Making Work Pay” credit he intended to couple with a huge new tax and is now proposing to ax.

 

Bringing Terrorists to America: Don’t Ask Why

The White House seems intent on trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other terrorist detainees in the US, though they seem less clear on why. They even hold out hope that they’ll get the venue they want in New York despite growing opposition to the move.

Obviously aware that this agenda at least appears to work at cross purposes with security concerns, the White House messaging on the topic is all tough talk while studiously avoiding the reasons one might choose this approach because they’re deeply unpopular. This leaves them dancing around the point because they’re afraid to actually make an argument in support of the decisions they’re defending.

In other words, the only reason you’d move detainees from military tribunals to civilian courts is to give them additional rights. But there isn’t really a burning need to confer these additional rights while there is in fact a threat posed by doing so and people know it. That leaves them making promises about outcomes instead of demonstrating some need for this new process.

Robert Gibbs gets all fire-and-brimstone about how KSM is going to meet his maker (though only probably due to execution) but gives no justification for the assertion that a US civilian courtroom is the best place to bring him to justice except to say that it was the judgment of the Attorney General.

Gibbs seems so insistent that the process will be produce that outcome that it almost seems like an admission that there’s a greater risk of failing to do so (no one has to defend a military commisions’ ability to convict on Sunday shows in spite of a mixed record).

Putting aside the fact that declaring the verdict in advance makes the exercise look like a show trial, most opponents aren’t even arguing that KSM will be acquitted. If the White House is worried about that turf, then things are pretty bad because they’re not even disputing the conclusions that the trials will provide platforms for jihadist propaganda and they’ll be costly and impractical.

Now of course there’s a leftist cabal that believes (blindly) that civilian trials are needed to better serve the ideal of due process, but since the administration is running up against reality in so many ways on this one, don’t they owe it to themselves if not the rest of us to step back for a second and ask, “why are we doing this?” Paging Eric Holder.

 

Is the Practice of Politics Properly about Pursuing Principle or Popularity?

Re-energized by the rhetoric of last night’s State of the Union address, Democrats who have been feeling defeated lately set out to showcase their fighting spirit today with the message, “We Don’t Quit”.  Maybe this is to reassure their base of their commitment to the liberal agenda, but it’s in conflict with the rhetoric they employed to reassure their base during the Bush administration.  Mindy Finn tweets:

Received emails from Obama and Pelosi with “We don’t quit.” Yet, pursuit of unpopular policies is what they harshly criticized Bush for.

And she’s pegged the left’s inconsistency.  But if the right is supposed to defend the pursuit of your goals whether they’re popular or not, isn’t it at least a little disingenuous for us to suggest that the Democrats have failed to learn the lesson of Massachusetts ie that it was a rejection of the liberal agenda?  Of course Brown’s victory did represent a response to that agenda and of course we’d like the Democrats to abandon it since we oppose it on policy grounds but do we really want to make the statement that politicians are supposed to subjugate principles to poll numbers?

Maybe we do.  There’s a good enough argument to be made that the primary purpose of representatives is to reflect in official action the desires of the people and that being responsive to public sentiment serves the interest of Democracy.  At its root the question is whether inconsistency or unresponsiveness is the greater betrayal of constituents.

But the game in Washington is to change the answer to this question based on the present set of circumstances.  That neither side has an interest in espousing a consistent view of how the game is supposed to be played creates a situation in which there’s no winning, a paradox which probably contributes to Americans’ dim view of politicians in general.

I tend to think the honorable thing to do is stick to your principles and strive for the policy you believe best for the country (and yes, this means liberals are supposed to pursue liberal policies, much as I hope they fail) even if it means bucking the trend or risking your reelection.  But I think I might settle for politicians who are at least clear and consistent on their view of how their craft is supposed to be practiced.

 

Congressional Motto: Don’t Just Stand There–Do Something

You probably missed it in the frenzy and speculation that was the run-up to the recent special election in Massachusetts, but a story caught my eye in which house majority leader Steny Hoyer was quoted as saying that passing the Senate’s health care bill would be “clearly better than nothing”.  Perhaps it was just an odd turn of phrase or an expression of frustration, but the idea that passing nothing can be considered as a possibility, particularly in public, is revolutionary in Washington.  Of course Hoyer was really addressing the difference in preference between the House and Senate versions, but the specter of not passing a bill at all had to be raised.

What this highlights is the notion prevalent among politicians that the worst thing they can do is nothing.  It’s an article of faith and a point of conventional wisdom that passing a bill that deals with an issue is an inherently good act, and politicians find it very difficult to make the case for inaction.  It’s nice to think that this might be borne of a tendency to want to help or to be responsive to constituents, but it would be even nicer to be able to believe they were judging on policy outcomes.

Proposing alternatives provides them with a way out, but few will advocate anything close to leaving well enough alone.  This can be a nice public benefit inasmuch as the alternatives proposed to bad ideas are frequently helpful, but if they’re minor tweaks in response to a call for a massive overhaul, you can end up with a weak argument for something you have to defend instead of a strong argument against something you need only discredit.  This is not to say that you have to make the argument for the status quo as the ideal, but we need to consider whether it’s superior to the specific proposed alternative.

This trap often ensnares even conservative lawmakers who see a smaller role for government–if not for themselves.  Inside the beltway, ‘party of no’ is wielded as the ultimate mark of shame–the brand of politicians not doing their job.  But we shouldn’t think that Congress’ job is to pass legislation so much as their job is to consider it.  If the majority of bills proposed embody bad ideas, we shouldn’t complain if they fail to pass very much.

But many of us don’t think that the Senate bill (or the House bill for that matter) is in fact better than nothing.  At Tea Parties, “party of hell no” is a popular sign and initiatives are springing up with goals from making state legislatures part-time to mandating that Congressmen spend time in their districts.  The public is unhappy with the politicians, but it’s not because they’re not doing enough for us; it’s because they’re doing too much to us.

Of course, explaining this to a liberal amounts to explaining that Americans want smaller government and, well, we’ve been working on that for years.  But conservative politicians with some understanding that government has a tendency to be more the problem than the solution need to remember that this can even apply to them so long as they are part of government.  And awkward as it is to argue against your own power, it might be refreshing to hear some of them articulate it clearly too.

 

Vote Them All Out, or Not

The Tea Party movement has spawned a number of popular memes from “Taxed Enough Already” to “honk if I’m paying your mortgage” most of them on message, clever, and displaying an appropriate attitude.  But I want to take issue with one that I’ve seen a lot, and which seemingly is spreading of late.  It’s the notion that we the people should dump all incumbents and start anew since they’ve obviously failed so badly.  Here’s an example of how it’s put in one recent blog post:

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist. We must vote ALL of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Now I don’t mean to pick on the post, the rest of which I found quite worthwhile, or the blogger who may not even have meant precisely what he said here, but it’s emblematic of what I’m talking about.  Although those 545 collectively share the power of the federal government (ignoring the executive for the moment), and they’re collectively doing a very poor job, they don’t act as one, but rather display competing and opposed interests and agendas.  Luckily, some of those agendas are shared with the Tea Party movement, and it would be a mistake for us to punish the people fighting our fight within government along with those fighting against us.

The problem with this rallying cry is that it assumes incumbency is the problem.  This is a common manifestation of a populist message, but it’s a trap that sets preferences that sometimes depart from our real priorities.  Simply put, incumbency is not the problem, liberalism is the problem.  Incumbency may have some tendency to liberalize, but I think we’re capable of judging individuals by their actions.  The goal, particularly in the case of the Tea Party movement, is to reverse the growth of government and get government out of our business, not to punish people on the basis of our having elected them in the past.  It seems to me that we should consider it a blessing that some of the people who share our values are already serving as it increases our ability to effect policy now and it will tend to help us in upcoming elections.

My guess is that most of the people making this declaration have not really thought through it’s implications.  I’m sorry to make that accusation, especially against so many people who I think are really on the right side of things and offer thoughtful input elsewhere, but I’m trying to let them off the hook on this one.  For instance, would the Tea Partiers demonizing incumbents want that rule to apply to conservative champions like Jim DeMint?  Certainly they would consider celebrity Representative Michelle Bachmann to be an exception.  Although maybe the shame of holding office finally provides a simple and full explanation of Sarah Palin’s resignation.

Certainly, there’s a lot of anger at those controlling government today and I agree that they’re pursuing a dangerously backward agenda and I think that anger is generally a good thing.  But I to want us to be mindful of this point because it gets us saying something that’s not exactly what we mean.  And I think there’s a real danger there of distracting from the important message, which can result in misspent efforts and which risks confusing or alienating those we’d hope would join us.

 

Left Gets a Pass on Correlating Homosexuality with Deviant Behavior

I know the conversation has more or less moved on, but let me take your attention back to Kevin Jennings, who by the way remains in his position as ‘safe schools czar’.  Before we all withdrew from politics (at least a little) to spend the holidays with friends or family, one of Andrew Breitbart’s many Media Matters-taunting tweets caught my eye.  He posted:

LEFT gets media pass correlating homosexuality w deviant behavior: @mmfa claims pedophelia & teaching fisting2kids as ‘gay rights’ issue.

And he’s right: the left defends perversion by extending (overextending I’d say) their arguments on homosexuality and insisting that that’s the issue in play.  And they get a pass.  And the gay community both gives them a pass and gets one itself for not speaking up.

Now I understand of course that the progressive community and the gay community are friends and have a lot of overlap and obviously the left provides the champions of the so-called gay agenda while the right is their boogeyman.  But if there is in fact a unique gay agenda and if gay groups and leaders are in fact representing that interest and not shilling for their political overlords, isn’t this where the gay agenda and the hard left agenda depart?  Put another way, do the leaders of the gay community really want to represent to the world that you have to believe in teaching deviant sexual behavior to children to be a gay rights supporter?

It seems to me that any gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered individual seeking respect for themselves or their sexual orientation would want to get as far away as possible from the issues of pedophilia and teaching sex to children.  Their top objection should be to stereotypes that tie their orientation to an interest in the sexuality of children, but in this case, such slanderous stereotypes are being used by their friends.  And it’s a shame for the sake of the gay community that they seem to lack leaders with the intellectual fortitude to object to the smear.

Update 1-1-2010: Breitbart tweets that Media Matters is prepared to apologize:

Media Matters for America set for Jan 9 apology. Sorry for correlating homosexuality w pedophelia & deviant sexual behavior. @mmfa

 

A Few Thoughts on the President’s Afghanistan Address

First, there’s the big question of how much credit to give him.  The president is walking a narrow line on this so every important player’s response is interesting in that they’re trying to judge whether he’s close enough to their perspective on the issue.  Sarah Palin and others have pointed out that the decision has taken much longer than it should have, a criticism with which I totally agree, but the relevance of that shortcoming is going away now so let’s examine what we’ve been given.

I’d say the strategy laid out tonight is basically a good one (not ideal, but fundamentally more constructive than destructive) especially in the near term.  And I’d say the near term is more important than later term plans because if events on the ground do not proceed as envisioned, that can always be an out giving the President the ability to modify plans as he goes, which hopefully he would.

Gen. McCrystal has said he will need a minimum of 40,000 additional troops to achieve our objectives, but he’ll get somewhat fewer than that.  Now, in the coming days, we can expect him to reassure us broadly that he is receiving the resources he needs to do his job, but there is also a reason he staked a claim to that number and made a public stand of it and it is certainly a fault of the new plan that it falls short of that metric.  But the surge is basically a good thing.

That being said, Obama made a terrible mistake tonight with his talk of limited engagement and imminent withdrawal, particularly his naming of a date to begin a drawdown.  This sends precisely the wrong message to our allies who are being asked to kick in additional resources, to our troops who will bear the biggest burden of this conflict and who risk life and limb on the assumptions that they are achieving a vital mission and their commanders have their best interests at heart, and of course to our enemies.

It’s nice that the “no blank check” policy will put pressure on the Afghans to get their own house in order, but I’m not convinced that sufficient pressure is what they’re lacking, whereas I am pretty convinced that deadline dates are tools of both propaganda and strategy in the hands of jihadists.  And what are the benchmarks we’re hoping to get from them anyway?

Few conflicts are won after the winner sets a date for it to wind down.  If it worked that way, why not pick next week?  The trouble of course is that victory is not the sole aim of this strategy; rather withdrawal is seen to have quite a bit of inherent value.  That these twin goals often work at cross-purposes is what spawns a President’s wartime speech full of the hedging and uncertainties that Charles Krauthammer observes.

The political ramifications, while less important than the security ramifications, are just as interesting.  As I hinted at above, it is now up to each leader, group, and constituency to figure out how to align itself given the President’s triangulation.

The antiwar left obviously will dislike the additional commitment, but they now have the closest thing yet to a timetable for withdrawal, and, as Jake Tapper points out, this much is only to be expected given Obama’s insistence during the campaign that he would expand the scope of the Afghanistan conflict. Congressional Democrats seem to be offering support for the new plan, but as tentatively as possible, themselves walking a line similar to the President’s between allegiance to their base and, depending on your perspective, reelection chances, a need for party unity and the good graces of the administration, or the best interests of the country.

Congressional Republicans don’t have it any easier; they may not have such a clear case of competing constituencies, but they have the challenging proposition of responding to a plan that gives them almost precisely half of what they would want from it and channeling that reaction through a mainstream media uninterested in their arguments and eager to simplify their positions to either “support” or “oppose”.  Grassroots conservatives will have to sort out the good from the bad, which may take some time especially if it becomes difficult to first separate the rhetoric from the reality, but I doubt there will be an immediate or large-scale backlash.  We may be inclined to oppose Obama at a moment’s notice, but we also want to deal in substance as much as possible and this may be better than some had actually expected.

 

The Waste Inherent in the (Cash for Clunkers) System

As I drove by a line of car dealerships yesterday afternoon, a particular display caught my eye.  Car dealerships, of course, are pretty good at this, but instead of the latest model on a high stand or an inflatable inflated icon, today’s display was a showcase of refuse arrayed along the freeway.  Clunkers, traded in and replaced, and indeed all bound to be crushed, lined the edge of a field, each with the “Clunker” label eblazoned accross the windshield like this year’s hottest selling point.

The view from the road

So I couldn’t resist stopping to take some shots of these much talked-about outmoded modes of transportation, that some lucky drivers had both wisely and kindly unloaded.  And more disturbingly, it got me thinking about the fact that every car in that field was functional mechanically, but would be intentionaly broken and destroyed as a result of a federal mandate.

Clunkers on parade: a last hurrah

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Economically, destroying a tool that could otherwise still be useful can hardly be expected to add to the equation or spur things along.  Of couse, the Cash for Clunkers pogram is broader and more complicated than that, but it was sold as a stimulus program, and if that’s the primary purpose, why not let the dealers repair and resell these cars?  After all, that’s the business they’re in, and they’d still be free to destroy them if that avenue made more sense.

And allowing resale would benefit less afluent consumers who make up the market for used cars.  The fact that this run of destruction will shrink the supply of used cars and drive up costs for low income buyers is one of many troubling reasons that leads the Cato Institute to wonder aloud on their blog whether Cash for Clunkers could in fact be the dumbest program ever (h/t to Ed Morrissey).

This minivan will not be driving a low income family's childen to soccer practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 And as long as we’re talking about the poor being hardest hit, it’s worth wondering who the beneficiaries are.  After all, the left is frequestly telling us that it’s the rich ans well-equipped who find the loopholes and get the best deals from the government.  Well, anecdotally, there were definitely some cars in the field that looked newer or nicer than mine (which made me a tad nervous parking there) and which may well have been traded in by someone not so much in need as eager to play the mpg numbers game and hop on the gravy train.  Anecdotes aside though, the fact is that the system only pays rebates to new ca buyers and saps the supply fo those buying used.

Mercedes an BMW were not rare brands in Clunker field.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, this was not just a showing of expensive or late-model vehicles–there were plenty of legitimate junkers in the mix.  But this pesents its own challenge: the truly old an worn among them were doubtless headed to the crusher soon anyway.  Do we really have an interest in paying the owners to scap these cars now rather than next week or next month?  Will that provide a needed jumpstart to  big ticket purchasing?

One of my favorites

And again, this was supposed to be an urgent stimulus program with whatever environmental benefits as an added bonus.  But do temporary rebates on trade-ins really constitute a game-changer?  There may be a few people who were able to buy new cars with the government rebate who otherwise might have gone with a used car, and let’s assume for the sake of argument that that’s a good thing in and of itself, but you’re not really creating a new market; you’re creating a bum rush.  You’re not growing demand; you’re just front-loading it.

But what really sticks in my side isn’t just the ineffectiveness of the program at achieving its stated goal, or even it’s secondary goal (though I haven’t addressed environmental impact here, even environmentalists have been lukewarm about its effectiveness in that arena).  No, what gets me is the idea of mandated waste.  As condervatives, we frequently worry about waste fraud and abuse in government, but usually we’re thinking of beaurocratic bungling, whereas here, it’s more of a stated policy goal. 

Allahpundit says that’s precisely what makes it “a sweet, sweet metaphor for Obamanomics”.  And the shortsightedness, the desire to create the rush rather than change the realities, the haphazard nature of it’s planning and application, and the general backwardness of the approach do promise to be spot-on teaching tools.  But I still wonder if the lessons of cash for clunkers could be lost on Americans who have only a casual acqaintance with the idea.

Take heart, though, because whether or not it’s the idea of removing value from the economy or the effect of driving up used car prices, something is giving the program a bad name.  A recent poll reports that only 35% of adults say the idea was good for the economy, another 27% say the multi-billion dollar effort had no impact, and 23% say it was outright harmful. 

My guess is that this has more to do with the stories of backlogs and the limits on who can cash in than it has to do with careful analysis, but for better or for worse, you don’t win political arguments on the basis of sound macroeconomic theory alone.  You need narratives and anecdotes.  I hope my photos of Clunker Field can help.