Right Wing Nut House

Squabbling over the spoils of victory is a time honored American electoral tradition. After all, the winning candidate has, by definition, been able to cobble together coalitions of somewhat disparate groups and achieved victory by promising them goodies - or at least a friendly ear in the Oval Office.

In Obama’s case, his appeal to the center (which has gotten slightly more liberal over the last decade) has raised suspicions among his more rabid partisans on the far left that Obama just isn’t “progressive enough” and that putting pressure on the new Administration to toe the line and adopt their agenda should begin early.

(Note: I find it fascinating that complaints about ideological purity from both the Republican and Democratic bases could be exactly the same - except one side won and the other lost.)

Regardless of where you think Obama is on the ideological spectrum, it’s a good bet that the new president will try, at least at first, to tack more center-left in his policies than give in to his radical base of hard left activists who feel Obama owes them for their support. Big Labor, NOW, the Netroots, and other extremist elements in Obama’s coalition all think their support was decisive in putting the candidate over the top and now have their hands out. How Obama responds to their entreaties will determine his initial success or failure.

This piece by John Heilemann in New York Magazine details the initial skirmishing by some of these groups over Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff and his mulling over the choice of Larry Summers, former president at Harvard, for Secretary of the Treasury.

Summers is the rumored favorite for the Treasury posting having served in that position the last year of the Clinton presidency. According to Heilemann, he enjoys wide support on Wall Street and among the foreign financial establishment.

But he also brings some baggage that displeases Obama’s radical base. You might recall that he was forced to resign as Harvard president because he dared to quote empirical evidence that women do not do as well in math and science fields as men. He gave as an explanation three possible reasons; more men are willing to make the commitment in time and effort to advancing in these fields; that there were innate differences between the sexes; and that there was discrimination in the workplace and sexism in the socialization process.

All of these hypotheses are probably correct to one degree or another. But such truth telling always gets one in trouble with the left - especially since Summers said he believed that the likeliest explanation was the first reason he gave with the others in descending importance. (Brendan Nyhan has a better summary of the controversy here.)

Not recognizing the victimhood culture advanced by feminists as the main cause of the lack of women in math and science was Summers sin and he paid for it by eventually being forced to resign. Note that it wasn’t that he dismissed the idea, it’s just that he didn’t pander to the notion that every explanation for disparity between the sexes necessarily had to do with discriminatory actions of a male dominated culture.

The long knives on the left came out for Summers almost before the Grant Park celebration was over:

The mau-mauing of Barack Obama officially began less than 24 hours after he won the White House, when National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy piped up about the possibility of Obama picking Larry Summers as his Treasury secretary. Gandy told the Huffington Post she had “mixed feelings” about Summers, saying he “doesn’t seem to get” the economic implications of gender-based wage disparities. She cited Summers’s incendiary comments as president of Harvard about women’s intrinsic inaptitude for math and science—the ones that helped get him booted—as a cause for concern. And she expressed some displeasure that no female economists are being mentioned as contenders for the Treasury job. “We’re gonna be forwarding some names to the Obama transition team,” Gandy said. “It’s important that in this new administration women’s voices are heard and heeded.”

The next day, the HuffPo ran another anti-Summers story, this time revisiting a controversial memo on the economic logic of exporting pollution to the developing world that he wrote (or at least signed his name to) in 1991 at the World Bank—and also suggesting that his having once dated wingnut Laura Ingraham “could become a source of political embarrassment” to Obama. Soon enough, Summers’s inflammatory tendencies were being invoked all over cable news; in a post whose headline called Summers a “fat, hated burnout,” Wonkette declared, “Want change, a fresh start? Hire a notorious ex-Clintonite who masturbates to NAFTA!”

I once wrote of Wonkette that she looked like she was “pushing 40, pre-middle aged, dumpy, lumpy, policy maven” and that her site contained “No original thinking. Dull, drab, almost humorless, and totally without redeeming value. In short, a waste of time and bandwidth.”

She wrote me “You stay classy, guy.” Still something of a blogging newbie, I was somewhat ashamed and wrote a post the next day saying I had gone too far in my description of her personal appearance.

Today, I take it all back. I wasn’t half as rough on her as she deserves.

Besides Cox’s lack of coherence (Shocking sexual imagery to describe someone’s support for a trade agreement? Now that’s what I call a slutty policy maven.), the reaction of NOW and other opponents of Summers shows what Obama is going to be up against during the transition. These are groups that have been out of power for a long time and will seek to hold the new president’s feet to the fire on cabinet and White House personnel appointments.

Take the Emanuel choice for chief of staff. Rahmbo is part of the Chicago East mafia that will be moving to Washington as Obama takes charge. Several higher ups in his campaign, including David Axelrod (former press aide to Mayor Daley), Valerie Jarrett (Machine insider), and Marty Nesbitt (political fixer and moneyman) will also have prominent jobs in an Obama Administration. To claim that any of these folks are “agents of change” is laughable. Nesbitt headed up Daley’s Housing Authority while Jarrett chaired the powerful Chicago Transit Board. You don’t get those plum jobs by reforming anything. You get them by doing what you’re told.

Emanuel is better known as a Clinton attack dog but his roots are all Chicago. He has been called a “pragmatist” which is only slightly wrong. If “pragmatism” means doing anything and everything to win, then that fits Emanuel to a “T.” Policy and ideology are not as important to the new chief of staff as coming out on top. If this means knocking a few liberal heads together in order to shut them up and keep them from trying to push some cockamamie ideas on his boss, Emanuel is perfect for the job.

But Heilemann points out that Obama and Emanuel will have to deliver on something if they expect support for their agenda.

What’s easy to forget is that, in building his administration, the audience that Obama is—or should be—playing to isn’t hard-core, stone-cold Democrats. It’s the broader electorate, much of which has invested great hope in Obama but continues to watch him closely, waiting for proof that his promise of fundamental change isn’t, well, just words. What that audience would regard as more of the same wouldn’t be a handful of Clintonites in high positions but the sight of Obama’s capitulating to the hoary interest-group posse that’s just begun to rear its head, or to the demands of the extant congressional party Establishment. To a striking degree, and by design, Obama’s victory was won independently of these forces. He owes them precious little. And that gives him the freedom to build a government on the singular criteria of its capacity to get shit done.

The heartening thing is that, so far, Obama seems to get this deeply. It’s early days, of course, but both the Emanuel and Podesta appointments reflect clarity of purpose, maturity, and cold-eyed calculation in roughly equal measure. The choice of Summers would demonstrate all these things, too—along with a bracing lack of concern for what the carpers and ankle-biters think. For Obama, the trick will be remembering that change does indeed require change agents, but that agents of change can be found in the unlikeliest of places: the Clinton camp, Old Washington, and even the GOP. In 1992, Clinton promised an administration that looked like America. Obama is promising something much more lofty—transcendence, transfiguration, a new frontier. But a government that actually, you know, works would be a fine place to start.

So where’s the payoff for these groups? In addition to naming the cabinet, the president gets to appoint several thousand assistant secretaries,undersecretariess, members of various commissions - all of the non-permanent part of the bureaucracy. In many ways, these appointments will be even more crucial than his cabinet appointments because the president’s will is translated through the lenses of these true believers. And unless you have a cabinet secretary willing to rein in their excesses, Obama could find himself waking up one morning to headlines like “Department of Agriculture says catsup is a vegetable.”

Groups like NOW, Code Pink, Moveon, and other far left organizations know full well where their real payoff is coming. They are no doubt compiling lists of thousands of the fellow travelers as I write this, all set to hand them to John Podesta or some other conduit for consideration by Obama. These are the real “agents of change.”

And they are to be feared as people in the Middle Ages feared the plague.

An interesting back and forth recently between two of my favorite bloggers highlighted a couple of things that needed airing as well as revealing some on the right to have the intellectual capacity of a chipmunk.

Patterico and Goldstein got into it over something I’ve written about at length; the idea that we should not attempt to delegitimize Obama, that he is the clear winner of the election and that in a democracy, once the people have spoken, the minority accepts the will of the majority and takes on the role of “loyal opposition.”

Patterico took this concept one step farther and posited the notion that Obama was a “good man:”

Good men do bad things, and in the pursuit of ambition, they almost always do. Barack Obama is not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination.

What’s more, I think he will damage this country with bad policies. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Inevitably, he is going to take actions that I think are disastrous, and somebody will come back and say: “Hey, Patterico! I thought you said Barack Obama was a good man!” Yes, but I never said he wasn’t going to do horrible things. It’s quite clear he will.

What’s more, there is no way in hell he is going to do away with the poisonous atmosphere in Washington, and anyone who thinks that he can is a fool. It will be amusing to watch him try.

But I make no apologies for saying he is a good man. He is my President. He is our President. And while he hasn’t always done good, I do believe he is fundamentally a good man and a patriot who wants to make this country a better place.

Goldstein tried for a shot across the bow in response and ended up hitting the main mast instead:

Precisely the kind of self-righteous civility that fried McCain. Want to be clapped on the back for your decorum? Fine. Just say so.

But let’s not pretend you are being honest or principled. Graciousness is one thing; praise is another.

This “good man” was involved in ACORN blackmail schemes. With an attempt to fraudulently undermine the Second Amendment by gaming court rulings. He got rich off of schemes that led to the mortgage crisis — then stood by and let others fix it in order to keep his hands clean during the final stages of an election. He has thrown in with race hustlers,”reformers” who believe that domestic terrorism was a valid form of expression, odious foreign potentates –

There is nothing at all noble about praising a man and a party who reviles you simply because in doing so you appear noble. Jews have tried that. And it’s often ended with skeletons and ash, or the twisted wreckage of a bus in Tel Aviv.

In this case, it will end with more McCains — and so more Obamas and Reids and Pelosis and Olbermans.

If that’s nobility, I’m not interested. Yes, Obama is my President. But that doesn’t mean I’m forced to forget all he’s done to get there — and all that’s been done on his behalf, either by the savage supporters who went after Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, or by the “objective media” that sold its soul for a shot at establishing the government it desired.

I would agree with Goldstein - to a point. In questioning Pat’s intentions and motives in writing the post, Goldstein goes too far. Unless he has been vouchsafed the ability to peer into the souls of men and glean intent, I would suggest he stick with what he recommends and fights for so tirelessly - a literal interpretation of what is written. In literature, we can extrapolate intent from what we know about the author and his times. Can we not grant the same courtesy to Mr. Frey? Pat has not shown himself to be a link whore in the past nor has he necessarily proven to be the kind of blogger who sets himself up as the conscience of the right. (That job is taken and I will not, under any circumstances, give it up.)

In that, I see no attempt at self-aggrandizement on Pat’s part. If Goldstein wishes to make that argument, he must take me and dozens of other righty bloggers to task for writing basically the same thing. (Note: From what I’ve written about this subject, one could infer that I believe Obama to be a man fatally flawed by hubris and ideology but a man with good qualities.) How Jeff could separate those who genuinely feel that Obama is a “good man” from those who are looking for a “pat on the back” would be an interesting exercise that might even tax the abilities of the brilliant Mr. Goldstein.

But where Jeff nails it is in delineating the difference between “graciousness” in defeat and actual “praise” for what some might see as salutary qualities in the president elect. Patterico makes the age old argument, i.e. good men do bad things in the pursuit of power. Goldstein rightly calls Frey on this by listing a slew of bad things this supposedly “good man” initiated. Not to belabor the point but Hitler liked dogs, was good with kids, and generated enormous loyalty and devotion among his personal staff.

No jerks, I am not comparing Obama to Hitler. I am pointing out that even the worst of men apparently had some good qualities. Obama is not the worst of men but, as Goldstein points out, neither can he be termed a “good man” based on the fact that he exhibited many qualities in common with “bad men.” Good men may not be perfect. But they don’t lie for a living nor do they throw long time friends and associates under the bus because they have become a political millstone.

I have grown quite cynical about all politicians over the years. There are a handful I have met and known or covered closely who could be considered “good men.” Obama ain’t one of them and neither, for that matter, is John McCain. The only good man I thought who has run for president in my lifetime was Paul Simon. Much too guileless, gracious, and cerebral to have any chance whatsoever in 1988, Simon nearly won the Iowa caucuses on a shoe string but faded badly after that. Simon was legendary for his courtliness, believing good manners in politics was essential to a functioning democracy.

Obama ain’t no Paul Simon neither.

Stung to the quick by Goldstein’s broadside, Patterico responded, trying to explain:

I’m sick of people who want to write off entire groups of people as Bad People because of what they believe in. I’ve watched the left do that, and I’m seeing a lot of people on the right doing that now as well. (I’m not talking about Jeff here; I think he’s too smart to demonize all Democrats. But I believe some folks out there are demonizing people for their beliefs.)

When it comes to Obama, we’re obviously talking about a different situation. Many here are calling him a bad man because he has done some bad things and associated with some bad people. It’s true, he has, and I can respect the people who write him off for that reason. I’m simply not going to do it, yet. Like Beldar, I’m

deliberately giving Obama the benefit of the doubt on some of his associations, to call that merely “bad judgment” as opposed to evidence that he, himself, is also a “bad man.”

And like Beldar, I may well end up admitting that I was wrong about that.

But I’m not going to write Obama off as a Bad Man because of his beliefs, contrary to the wishes of my former commenter. And I’m not going to write him off as a Bad Man — or the majority of his supporters as bad People — based on what I’ve seen to date. So far, as I’ve said, I see him as a basically good and decent man who, like many politicians, has engaged in some highly questionable behavior in the pursuit of power.

I don’t think too many people are saying that Obama is a bad man because of what he believes - wrongheaded, dangerous, and even illogical as some of those beliefs are. If I were to believe that, I would have to condemn most of my family who believe many of the things that Obama does and that is something I cannot do. Liberalism may be a horrid ideology but it is not in and of itself evil or bad. A denial of the reality of how humans live and interact, yes. An ignorance of how wealth is created and the efficacious nature of private property rights, absolutely. But it is not fascism or Marxism.

And Frey is wrong in intimating that Goldstein was condemning groups of people for what they believed. In fact, it is something of a mystery where he got that idea from Jeff’s response to his original post.

Goldstein disagrees with me that Obama is no socialist but he does have a point about what is important about fighting the Obama Administration:

Patterico accused me of “demonizing” all Democrats, which is patently absurd. In fact, I dealt specifically with denying the appellation “good man” to someone who, through his actions, has proven to be anything but.

It matters who gets called a “good man.” It matters who we say has this country’s best interests at heart. And yes, it’s possible Obama does, to a certain extent — though what is important to recognize is that, at least so far as his governing principles to this point suggest, he doesn’t hold that view from the perspective of the country as it was founded, and as it was intended to be governed.

Which means that Obama’s best interests for the country are really the best interests for a country he’d like to see this one become — a new text that he’d like us to believe will be but an re-interpretation of the original text.

As someone who believes in the principles upon which this country was founded, I refuse to allow that someone whose ideological predispositions compel him to radically redefine that “imperfect document” that is the Constitution, has this country’s best interests at heart.

And I likewise refuse to allow that a man whose thuggish deeds and unsavory associations have defined him be granted the honor of “good man.” Because to do so is to make a mockery of good men, and to cede yet another bit of our ability to evaluate and describe and conclude in good faith into a bit of “hate speech” that won’t help the GOP regain power.

To which I say, outlaws ain’t team players. And it’s time to be outlaws.

And to which I say, sign me up for the “Hole in the Web” gang.

Goldstein’s point cannot be overstated or overvalued. At bottom, the real war between right and left is the destruction of conventions that facilitate real communication. We have all seen and commented on it. The constantly changing definitions of terms like “racism.” The deliberate textual misinterpretation of what conservatives say and write in order to extract a self-selected “meaning” that advances their argument at the expense of the author’s intent (Glenn Greenwald and Dave Neiwert are absolute masters at this).

Such machinations make it impossible to carry on a dialogue with the left about much of anything. And there are precious few on the right who consistently call the left out for their assassination of the language, taking the battle for intentionalism directly to the source. Goldstein is one of them.

We must refuse to allow Obama and his allies any room to breathe when it comes to opposing their stated intent to “remake” America into something it was never intended to be. But we can and should do it if not “graciously,” then certainly by recognizing that our disagreements should not devolve into the kind of mindless deconstructionism that the left has used against us for the last 8 years. Gleaning intent from Obama’s proposals should not concern us as much as fighting what he will attempt to do.

I believe at bottom, this is what Pat was trying to say. There is nothing “noble” in this construct any more than it is “noble” or “patriotic” to pay taxes. I believe it is self-evident to any conservative which is why I am confident that we would shame the left with our ideas of what constitutes a “loyal opposition”…

If the left could feel shame about anything.

UPDATE: 11/13

Patterico emailed me a few days ago asking me to correct what I had written - that he was condemning people who despised all Democrats - including Jeff Goldstein.

In fact, I misinterpreted what Goldstein had written believing that this was something Patterico had actually said rather than Jeff’s analysis of what Pat had written.

Apologies to Pat for the error.

The post election spinning has already begun on the left about just what this election is going to say about the ideological direction of the country. Dominated by the far left, the netroots are already rubbing their hands together in anticipation of altering the foundations of American society, overturning the intent of the Constitution, while sticking it to the “rich” and conservatives through a variety of punitive measures.

But will that really be the case now that the the Democrats have made large gains in the house and senate while winning the presidency?

The unpalatable choices at this point are: Does a Democratic landslide mean that the radical New Left “progressive” agenda - a holdover from the 1960’s with a patina of populist rhetoric and soothing bromides to make the medicine go down (while obscuring the true, radical nature of the change being contemplated) - will be triumphant or will there be a more pragmatic, center-left kind of governance that will certainly be bad enough but stop short of revolution?

The key, of course, is Obama himself. As a candidate, he has talked the talk of a moderate leftist, seeking to alter the tone of political discussion while reforming the political culture by reducing the influence of lobbyists, making ethics reform a top priority, and taking some other unspecified actions that will make Washington more accountable to the people.

Obviously, the devil is in the details. And surprisingly, these issues are not necessarily indicative of a radical leftist revolution that would sweep away the old America and replace it with a socialist utopia. John McCain wanted to do basically the same thing and I doubt whether there are too many on either side of the political divide who would disagree that it would be a good thing if our elected leaders were held accountable for earmarks, pork barrel spending, gifts from lobbyists, and other practices that make Washington such a cesspool of cynicism and corruption.

It is in Obama’s agenda on the economy, health care, education, and social welfare issues that America is to be transformed and where “progressive” ideas that have been percolating for 40 years will finally get a tryout in the real world.

Take health insurance - and by extension - the health care industry. Most advocates of national health insurance agree that unless a very large percentage of the uninsured are induced - or forced through mandates - to buy insurance, health care costs are going to continue to skyrocket.

In fact, as national health insurance supporter Ezra Klein points out, there can be no universal coverage without forcing people into an insurance pool:

I’m hearing a lot of hating on the individual mandate* — and I don’t get it. Some are complaining that the mandate “criminalizes the uninsured,” others are saying “”The uninsured shouldn’t have a financial penalty onto top of the health and financial consequences of being uninsured.” So let me try and say this clearly: Single-payer health care is an individual mandate. The enforcement mechanism, in that case, is taxation. If you don’t pay your taxes, you’re breaking the law. If you decide to withhold the portion of your taxes that go towards health care, you’re a criminal. In fact, there is absolutely no universal health care system that wouldn’t include a mandate of some kind — that’s how you make it universal. Indeed, without a mandate, you can’t have a decent health system: If the healthy can opt-out until they get sick, coverage will be unaffordable for everyone. For a risk pool to work, it needs members at low risk.

Klein drives the universal mandate idea home by pointing out that the federal government will have to subsidize those who cannot afford to buy into the pool.

The question with an individual mandate is subsidization and affordability. If we pass a law levying an individual mandate and subsidizing premiums down to $50 a month, there’ll be few complaints. A mandate with no subsidization, however, is an impossible burden on millions of families. When evaluating an individual mandate, that’s where liberals need to focus: The generosity of the subsidies. The Wyden Plan, for instance, subsidizes up to 400 percent of the poverty line. The Massachusetts plan subsidizes up to 300 percent. The Schwarzenegger plan subsidizes up to 250 percent. That looks too low, and I’ll talk more about it later today. But for now, folks need to keep in mind that you can’t simultaneously demand universal health care and reject mandates. Universal health care is a coverage mandate — whether the enforcement comes through tax receipts or proof of premium payment is not a relevant distinction. Either one can be an overwhelming burden on the poor or the foundation of a progressive, generous system. The focus, always, should be on telling the two apart.

Now Obama swears that he has no mandates to buy health insurance for anyone except parents with children and that he only wants to make health insurance more affordable. Hillary Clinton criticized him heavily for this stance in the primaries. She quite rightly pointed out that without mandates, there would still be millions of uninsured Americans and that the cost of health care (and thus health insurance) would continue to rise. Obama countered that his plan would bring down the cost of health insurance significantly and that every child in America would be covered.

But do you really think the new, far left Congress is going to stop there?

Klein sees subsidizing people 400% above the poverty line as “too low.” Think about that for a minute and you’ll see where this entire mess is heading. Each year, that subsidy will increase (as will the cost of buying into the pool for those unlucky enough to have made a success of their lives). The inexorable rise in health care costs will be matched with higher and higher buy ins to the pool. Eventually, everyone will not only have to be subsidized but the government will be buying their insurance for them. This will necessitate the takeover of the health care system by government bureaucrats who will rationalize this power grab by claiming that since they’re paying for it, they should have a say in how it’s run.

And who enforces this entire draconian system?

Well, it would have to be a federal agency used to going after deadbeats and scofflaws. It would have to have an enforcement division already active and experienced. And they would have to possess a list of taxpayers so that they could check and make sure everyone is with the program.

Roll out the red carpet for our new IRS Overlords.

Universal health insurance has been a goal of the New Left since the 1960’s (pretty much a liberal dream since Henry Wallace included the program in his 1948 Progressive Party platform). There is no doubt that adoption of mandates as a means to achieving universal health insurance would be a radical transformation of the relationship between the citizen and the government. It would place vast new powers at the disposal of the IRS - an agency already bloated and drunk with power. And, despite its backer’s claims to the contrary, it would limit and even eliminate choice in selecting health care providers and treatments.

This is the real danger of an Obama presidency - a vastly more leftist Congress who will push the neophyte president farther to the left than he wants to go. The Pelosi-Reid-Waxman-Boxer-Frank wing of the Democratic party will be in charge and unless Obama stands up to them - something he has failed to demonstrate in his short time in the Senate - we are going to get a revolution not just in health care, but education, environmental policy, social welfare issues, and a host of other areas.

Energy policy is another area where a radical Congressional majority might push Obama further than he wants to go. The new President should probably rename his energy policy the “Global Warming Prevention” policy because everything in it will be geared to reducing our carbon footprint on the world rather than creating growth by supplying industry with cheap oil or its alternative. There will be no growth or slow growth unless we increase our energy supply. This is a fact of economic life and by ignoring it, Obama and the Democrats will condemn us to a stagnant economy for years to come.

Why? Obama wants to reduce our emissions by 90% by 2050. Think about that for a moment. OBama wants to reduce our emissions to where they were in approximately 1930 in 40 years time. He wants to propose this drastic change at a time when there is absolutely no proven, viable alternative to fossil fuels that can be utilized on a continent sized scale. Solar would work - for some. Wind power - for fewer.

Geothermal? Never tried on an industrial scale. Hydrogen? Promising as an alternative to powering vehicles but a long way off - and even longer to mass produce the vehicles and make a dent in the 120 million gasoline burning autos and trucks on the road now. Fusion? Interesting developments in the last few years but as a power generating technology, it is decades away. (Going nuclear is doable and we could replace every existing oil and coal fired plant with the nuclear alternative in less than 20 years. But does anyone expect that the Democrats will do that?)

All of this means that the one means of producing the energy we need to grow our economy - fossil fuels - will be taxed, the companies that pull it out of the ground and sell it will be taxed, we consumers who use it will be taxed, and everything possible will be done to discourage its use. Meanwhile, our dependence on the Iran’s and Venezuela’s of the world will increase while we wait patiently for government bureaucrats to invent the hydrogen powered car or come up with the technology to burn coal more cleanly.

Why can’t we do both? And all of it, the whole shebang? Why can’t we drill for every drop of oil while vigorously working to find alternatives? This idea that we must do one or the other is just plain nuts.

The reason is that we are basically dealing with people who have a bias against business - and especially big business. Why should we think this attitude on the part of liberals will change? Profits are evil and the only way to redeem this dirty money is to “go green” and slavishly adhere to an arbitrary set of rules about how much a company is allowed to make, what it must do with its profits. And God help you if you make “excess” profits (defined, of course, by people who know nothing of profit, loss, meeting a payroll, or re-investing profits to find more energy). Furniture stores routinely mark up their products 400%. I don’t hear too many calls to seize “excess” profits from Joe’s Furniture Emporium, do you?

Of course, none of this nonsense will produce a single erg of energy or lessen our dependence on foreign oil by one drop. But at least it will feel good if we grab money from big oil (who will then pass the increases down to us which is the plan anyway - make energy more expensive by punishing the American people for using it.).

The goal is not more energy but more sanctimony. And in that, liberals are well stocked.

Then there’s Big Labor’s attempt to use government as kind of a super-labor organizer. How liberals can look at us with a straight face and not call the fascist “card check” program undemocratic only shows how much hubris there is on the left. Taking away a workers’ right to a secret ballot, only requiring him to sign a card in the presence of a “union representative” is unconscionable.

In practice, the program will be used to aggrandize organized crime who still today see as their main source of income and money laundering union dues and union pension funds. Those “union reps” in many areas have historically been mob goons. Even the unions that this piece of legislation has been crafted for - government and health care unions - are not immune to mob infiltration. And I guarantee with this legislation enacted, it will only get worse.

These are but a few of the things we have to look forward to when Congress convenes in January. We should consider finding ways to fight all of them as they promise to remake America in ways the Founders never intended.

One of the most hilarious Monty Python sketches is the “Upper Class Twit of the Year” where inbred, palsied, oblivious sons of English aristocracy are put through their paces jumping over matchboxes, “kicking the beggar,” taking the bras off of debutantes, and trying to walk a straight line.

But it is the final test for the twits - so funny it brings tears to my eyes - that is apropos of the current effort by anonymous McCain staffers to trash Sarah Palin. That “test” involves the twits being able to pick up a gun and shoot themselves in the head.

Being upper class twits, it takes them a while to figure it out. They fire the gun in the air or aim at their heads and miss until finally, one by one, it dawns on them what must be done and down they go.

What we see out of the McCain camp is not a circular firing squad but rather a bunch of twits pointing their guns at Sarah Palin and missing only to shoot themselves in head when all is said and done.

These misfires run the gamut from accusing the Alaskan governor of trying to promote her own future at the expense of the present effort in helping McCain win to whispering about her “shopping spree” and her lack of prep for the Couric interview.

Now all of you are probably aware that this kind of backbiting goes on in all losing campaigns so the idea that you can believe anything coming from anyone on the losing side is just preposterous. Exaggeration or outright lying is not uncommon. In the case of McCain twit loyalists, we have a little of both.

First, this breathless report from CNN:

Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator’s campaign last week for what one aide called “trashing” the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.

One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading “disinformation” about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.

“He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain’s campaign message,” said one of the aides.

Evidently, the campaign has fingered Scheunemann as the culprit who fed William Kristol some juicy tidbits about how the McCain camp completely mishandled Palin’s rollout. Apparently, they don’t like to read the truth in the newspapers.

Yes, the McCain campaign blew it with Palin. How could someone be ready to assume the presidency if they are deliberately kept from the press for 3 crucial weeks? Not that Palin was ready from day one - a point that I’ve made on several occasions. But it was a sick joke for the McCain camp to hide Palin from the press the way they did.

Overscripted, over managed, - just plain over. Palin will probably be seen as a net plus for McCain in that she certainly brought a lot of conservatives who otherwise would probably have stayed home to the polls. But her effect was negligible and might also eventually be seen as having a negative effect on independents and women. If Palin had been allowed the normal freedoms of any Vice Presidential candidate, would that have made a difference with those groups? We’ll never know because of the McCain campaign’s belief that she wouldn’t have helped the cause if she had been allowed to interact with the media.

What does all this have to do with Scheunemann? Someone was telling lies to CNN about his firing:

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.

As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”

Bad sourcing by CNN? Or perhaps some wishful thinking by a McCain partisan? Either way, it stinks.

The leaking by pro-McCain staffers about Palin has been incredible. They complain that Palin’s camp kept them in the dark about the French-Canadian comedy duo’s interview with Palin. But the prank call from the Canadians pretending to be French President Nicholas Sarkozy was on her schedule for three days. Are they trying to tell us that nobody - not someone extremely high up in the McCain campaign - checked Palin’s schedule on a daily basis? This would not surprise anyone given the general incompetence shown by these twits in everything from oppo research (where they had to rely on bloggers and friendly journalists to dig up the best stuff on Obama) to scheduling (McCain was in Florida on the last day of the campaign and spoke to about 1,000 people).

The stories about the Palin “shopping spree” have now grown so bad they have to be exaggerations. Some GOP donor evidently paid for much of her clothing no doubt due to the incredible stupidity of the McCain campaign who thought that “3 suits” for Palin would be enough for 9 weeks of campaigning. Michelle Obama was probably wearing three different outfits a day.

Could they have gotten by with less? Of course. But let’s be honest. The McCain campaign was selling Palin’s spectacular looks as much as they were pushing her conservative credentials. Quite simply, Palin wows male voters - even those who wouldn’t vote for her in a million years. And for those females not inclined to be jealous of her looks, her family, and her job, she is a hugely impressive example of a modern American woman who has it all.

Why shouldn’t she be dressed to the nines in order to promote this image? What is coming out of the McCain campaign now is pure poison, trying to shift blame for their incompetence and mismanagement on to Sarah Palin. And the Palin camp is fighting back, trying to answer these charges. What is striking is that they are giving reasonable explanations for issues being raised by McCain loyalists. It makes them much more believable than the wildly exaggerated image the twits are pushing of Palin as a “diva.”

It stinks of cowardice for McCain staffers not to own up to the fact that it was their ideas, their plan, and their piss poor execution that resulted in this landslide loss in the electoral college. There was nothing inspiring about this campaign at all. It didn’t energize the base. It failed to convince other conservatives that McCain would govern much differently than Obama. In the end, the candidate had no recognizable set of principles, no identifiable ideology, and no real issue that would have energized Republicans and conservatives and brought them to the polls. As it was, millions of GOP heartland voters either stayed home or, as I pointed out here, finally pulled the lever for Obama in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.

To blame Palin for this is outrageous. And hopefully, if Erick at RedState gets his way, none of these twits will work in politics again:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

And to that I say, Bravo. The architects of this disaster who compounded their sin by trying to shift blame to probably the one person who prevented a spectacular electoral humiliation a la Walter Mondale should be kept far away from leadership positions in any future campaign.

If they want to help, let them knock on doors and stuff envelopes. At least if they fail there, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

The title of this post is taken from the second volume of Page Smith’s 8 volume social history of America. It refers to the creation of the American republic and how contemporaries of that event  all saw the start of something unheard of in human history - a federal Constitutional republic - as the beginning of a New Age of Man, a new beginning where citizens, unsullied by the infection of class distinction and royalty common in Europe, could create a new Zion - a paradise on earth.

Much has been made by me and others of how important it is to hew to the principles and precepts espoused by our ancestors who invented this country. But perhaps we sometimes lose sight of some uncomfortable facts when it comes to “original intent” of the founders and the stratified nature of American society at that time.

We don’t want to pull forward to this time the notion that African Americans are 3/5 of a person for purposes of the census. Nor would we want to have the view of most of the founders that the elites should run the country while the rest of us shut up and do as they say. Most of those well propertied men distrusted the people (in the aggregate) and were fearful that if the mob ever got too much control of the levers of government, their property would be taken from them.

There is also the shameful treatment of women as it related to the Constitution and the law as well as a decided bias against settlers on the frontier. A failure to live up to treaties with the Indians resulted in regular and bloody wars. Big states hated little states and vice versa.

The Constitution was very much a document of its time. It reflected the very best thinking of enlightenment and pre-enlightenment philosophers. But it is not a perfect document and to say today that Obama will toss it out the window I believe goes too far in describing what he will try to do. It is the difficulties of today that will dictate how he approaches our challenges. And in the context of Constitutional precepts written 220 years ago, he will stretch some of those no doubt to achieve what he wants.

Where he reaches too far, we will smack him down. But I believe he should get some leeway if only because our founders did the same thing when they first confronted the theory of the constitution with the reality of their times.

The problems of early America were enormous, having just come through a ruinously expensive war, a barely united populace behind the idea of a country at all, and squabbling about everything from land grants to borders among the several states. In fact, once the Constitution was ratified, the universal question on everyone’s mind was “Now what?”

How could they even begin to solve these massive difficulties? The Constitution was, after all, just a piece of paper.

It helped that George Washington was the first president. Not a brilliant man by any means, Washington’s strengths were his leadership ability and his sterling reputation - something he used as vintner might pour out wine from a carafe. The longer Washington was in power, the more his reputation suffered, the more empty the carafe became. Washington deliberately expended his most precious resource to keep the country from flying apart.

After 8 years, his reputation was still great enough that he was able to keep us out of what would have been a catastrophic war between England and France while putting the nation (with Hamilton’s scheming help) on a sound fiscal footing.

Obama is no Washington although I believe he has demonstrated some leadership qualities that some recent presidents have not. The guy has to have something inside of him to create the kind of mass movement I saw last night in Grant Park at the Obama Victory Rally. Easily 80% of that crowd of nearly a million were under the age of 25. Media and money help, no doubt about it. But our new president has something else about him as well; the ability to inspire. That is a quality not all politicians have and I have a feeling we will have need of that ability before all is said and done in the near future.

I will probably oppose 90% of what Obama and the Democrats try to do. Some commenters on this site question how I can do that and still claim to see Obama as “my president.” If that’s the kind of attitude Obama supporters are going to have I fear for this country. Such authoritarian impulses are common in mass movements and it remains to be seen whether Obama is strong enough to resist the temptations such support presents for him. It would be easy to turn to his true believers in times of political trouble and simply ride roughshod over the naysayers. Let’s hope he has the moral compass and clarity of vision to see beyond such pettiness and embrace diversity of opinion - even when things get rough.

One thing is certain; Obama, the Democrats, and liberalism are going to be given a chance. There’s not much we conservatives can do about that. Do we work to constructively engage the opposition or do we simply participate in mindless, partisan hackery? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight, and fight hard, for what we believe in. But we shall soon see if Obama is serious about engaging us in a dialogue. If he is, I would think that for the sake of the country, we try to meet him halfway.

We must pick and choose our spots over the next 4 years. Constant caterwauling about every little thing an Obama Administration does will get us nowhere. While we should oppose those things that we believe are detrimental, perhaps it wouldn’t kill us if we actually looked around to see if there was anything we could support him on?

Obama has spoken passionately on issues of individual responsibility for African American fathers and other single parents. This is conservative bread and butter and I would have absolutely no problem in helping our new president make those words a reality.

I know most of these words are falling on deaf ears. But I believe in democracy. And in case you haven’t noticed, the majority has just spoken as loudly and as specifically as they can in a democracy. If it is all or nothing for you - if you wish to oppose the color of the curtains Obama picks out for the Oval Office - then I wish you luck in your solitude.

I plan on being engaged the next 4 years - fighting against those things I believe need to be fought while offering what support I can wherever I see our interests merge. That is the role of a responsible opposition.

Who knows? Perhaps we can teach liberals a thing or two about what it means to be in the minority.

We are in a full fledged Indian Summer here in central Illinois - or, for those sensitive folk who believe it a sin to invoke any racial references even if they are positive, let’s call the 70 degree weather, gorgeous sunny sky, and the light wind sweetly scented with the smell of burning leaves “false” summer.

False, or Indian, it doesn’t matter. It is the last gasp of the seductress Summer, her last shimmy, her last provocative wiggle before her father, Old Man Winter comes barging into the room to check and see if we’re necking.

Nature is doing her yearly Technicolor thing - the autumn raiment covering the trees is really striking; spectacular deep reds on the maple across the street, elegant yellow-orange on the oaks lining the block, somber burnt umber covering the hickory. Is autumn a melancholy time for everyone? Perhaps it’s knowing what’s ahead that depresses me; the annual struggle with snow blowers, biting cold, dark skies, short days, and the lonely winds that whip across the prairie sod seeking a way through the weatherproofing to chill our bones.

Election day in America is held in November with a bow toward our yeoman farmers who would be too busy with the harvest to have time for politicking. Any later in the year and the roads would be impassable due to snowfall. So the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November seemed about right. Farmers could make the long, arduous journey to town and cast their ballot for the state’s electors. Back in the day, the presidential candidate’s name appeared nowhere on the ballot. Citizens elected people to represent them in the electoral college. Of course, everyone knew which candidate the elector was supporting so it felt almost like they were voting directly for Washington, or Adams, or Jefferson.

Eventually, states put the name of the candidate on the ballot, usually alongside that of the elector supporting him. It is an imperfect system and no doubt many Democrats wish to do away with it. But I sincerely hope they don’t if for no other reason than many of the arguments made at the Constitutional Convention in favor of the Electoral College still pass muster with me today. (I make many of those arguments here).

All of that is in the past and today, we find ourselves on the cusp of history. An African American may very well win an historic victory while the Reagan revolution - a cause for which I worked directly or indirectly for almost 30 years - is being swept away. As I have noted, change is part of the bargain if you want to be an American and accepting change is the key to thriving in this country. But I have an old man’s attachment to the causes of my youth and it will be difficult to see something that began with so much promise swept away due to the negligence, the cynicism, and the incompetence of the inheritors of it.

I read Ross Douthat’s melancholy post this morning and found myself nodding in agreement all the way through it. Now, Ross is one of them “elitist” conservatives in that he has more than two brain cells working at the same time and has actually written a book with big words in it - not like conservative hero Sean Hannity who makes it easy for us common folk to read by never using a word with more than 4 syllables in it. “Cotton candy conservatism” I call Hannity’s pablum. And that’s insulting cotton candy.

Here, he articulates my exact feelings about Bush and McCain:

I had a succession of meals last week with smart conservative friends, and I found them all relatively sanguine about the defeat that’s almost certainly about to be inflicted on the American Right. Each of them, in different ways, express a mix of enthusiasm for the “whither conservatism” battles ahead and relief at the prospect of finally closing the books on the Bush years. This has been an exhausting Presidency for conservatives as well as liberals, and for many people on the Right the prospect of being out of power has obvious upsides: No longer will every foul-up and blunder in Washington be treated as an indictment of Conservatism with a capital C; no longer will right-wingers feel obliged to carry water, whether in small or large amounts, for a government that’s widely perceived as a failure; and no longer will the Right have the dead weight of an unpopular president dragging it down and down and down. Defeat will be depressing, of course - none of my friends were Obamacons by any stretch - but it could be liberating as well.

This was how I expected to feel about a McCain defeat, too, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t - why I feel instead so grouchy and embittered (clinging to my guns and my religion, and all that), and more dispirited than liberated. I didn’t have particularly high hopes for a McCain-led ticket in the first place: I never went in for the Mac-worship many journalists have practiced over the years, and part of me was dreading having to spend four years trying to explain that yes, I want a reformed conservatism, but no, I don’t like the kind of reform-ish quasi-conservatism that the McCain Administration is advancing. And then there were all the other reasons to think that a GOP defeat might not be so bad: You can’t win every election; it’s hard for a political party to change its ways without the clarifying effects of a devastating defeat; Obama’s a smart guy who’ll probably make at least some policy choices I support; the election of a black President will be a great day for America; etc.

I stopped “carrying water” for Bush a couple of years ago but I know exactly what Ross is talking about. He has exhausted himself having to defend some basic conservative tenets that, however imperfectly were advanced by the Bush Administration, nevertheless many of us felt obliged to point out the danger of the alternative. That and the constant drone of hyperbolic, rabidly partisan dissent left one feeling as if wrung through a wringer.

Tired, a little dispirited, Douthat takes the words out of my head and puts them on paper:

But I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with something that Jonah Goldberg raised in our bloggingheads chat about conservatism - namely, the sense that the era now passing represented a great opportunity to put into practice the sort of center-right politics that I’d like to see from the Republican Party, and that by failing the way it did the Bush Administration may have cut the ground out from under my own ideas before I’d even figured out exactly what they were. As I said to Jonah. I have all sorts of disagreements with the specific ways President Bush attempted to renovate the GOP, on the level of policy and philosophy alike. But the fact remains that the renovation Bush attempted was an effort to respond to some of the political, social and economic trends that Reihan and I discuss in Grand New Party - and those of us who want a reformed conservatism have to recognize Bush’s attempt, and reckon with his failure.

This is by no means a new insight, but it’s one that’s been brought home to me by the looming end of the Bush Era and the struggles of the McCain campaign. Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America? etc.

Here are my own thoughts from a post I wrote after the 2006 mid term debacle:

The disconnect I speak of above arises from the cage that Republican candidates have been placed in by the various factions of conservatism that makes them slaves to an agenda that is out of date, out of touch, and after 2008, there’s a good chance that it will lead to Republicans being out of luck.

Breaking out of that cage will be difficult unless the party continues to lose at the polls. And part of that breaking free will be making the Reagan legacy a part of history and not a part of contemporary Republican orthodoxy. The world that Reagan helped remake is radically different than the one we inhabit today and yet, GOP candidates insist on invoking his name as if it is a talisman to be stroked and fondled, hoping that the magic will rub off on them. Reagan is gone and so is the world where his ideas resonated so strongly with the voters.

But Reagan’s principles remain with us. Free markets, free nations, and free men is just as powerful a tocsin today as it was a quarter century ago. The challenge is to remake a party and the conservative movement into a vessel by which new ideas about governing a 21st century industrialized democracy can be debated, adopted, and enacted. Without abandoning our core beliefs while redefining or perhaps re-imagining what those beliefs represent as a practical matter, conservatism could recharge itself and define a new relationship between the governed and the government.

But before reform comes the fall. And even if, as Yglesias believes is possible, the party and the movement are able to limp along for a few years with a cobbled together coalition, eventually the piper must be paid and the wages earned. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But it will happen nonetheless.

Ross and I are on the same wavelength although he has obviously given a lot more thought to the nuts and bolts of refashioning the conservative movement. But we both crave big answers to the big questions. How can small government conservatism be relevant in an era (probably permanent) where the people demand more and more from government? What role can conservatism play in a modern, 21st century industrialized democracy? What is the conservative answer to the nationalizing of health insurance or education policy? Is simple opposition all we are capable of?

The old truisms and bromides just don’t work anymore. The context has changed but we are still trying to squeeze the old verities into the framework of people’s expectations and desires with regard to government. There is, as I said, a “disconnect” that is so obvious, the American voter no longer sees conservatism as being relevant to their own lives.

I am not a believer in predestination. I do not think the future is set by any means. The future will be what we make of it - no more, no less. It is this hope that I cling to as I watch with sorrow the beliefs and work of my adult lifetime rejected en masse by the voters.

So be it.

Change we can freeze to death by:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

These remarks were made by Obama on January 17 of this year. Not surprisingly this audio was hidden until now because the interview was with the far left San Francisco Chronicle.

Here’s the entire audio clip:

This illustrates better than anything the folly of “cap and trade” proposals. Obama plans to use his C&T plan as a gigantic club to beat up on power companies and coal companies (and the miners) if they don’t meet his arbitrary and capricious “targets” that drop every year regardless of any progress technologically in finding ways to mitigate the carbon output of power plants.

It will almost certainly cause a lot of smaller coal companies to either cut their work force as the demand for coal - our most abundant energy source - shrinks and probably drive a lot of these smaller concerns out of business.

And what about his gloating about driving businesses to bankruptcy? Has there ever been a presidential candidate who looked forward to the prospect of destroying someone’s life’s work and costing thousands of people their jobs?

But at least the Euro-twits pushing Global Warming won’t be mad at us anymore.

This blog post originally appears in the American Thinker.

I like to think one of the reasons for the modest success I’ve enjoyed from this site is that my writing reflects many of the values, the thoughts, the dreams and hopes of Middle America. My heart is connected to the Heartland in ways I never understood until I returned from my life’s travels 15 years ago and settled in the Fox Valley in Northern Illinois. A distance of about 30 miles from where I grew up in suburban Chicago, it was a lifetime removed from Washington, D.C. and St. Louis where I spent my professional career. The pace and rhythm of life in Algonquin was slower, more deliberate, more conducive to reflection and introspection. I enjoyed it immensely and realized that here was where I was happiest, where I was most content.

Now, comfortably ensconced in Streator, IL, I am finding that the people and place are, if anything, more in tune with what is truly important in life; family, friends, God, and country. To a large degree this is a reflection of something that many in the political class either ignore or denigrate; that Americans are free to know exactly as much about politics and elections that they feel they must - no more, no less - and that this does not make them stupid, or unworthy, or sheep-like.

For Heartland voters, the big issues are subsumed and the election becomes quite personal. Who can I trust? Who do I like? Which candidate makes sense to me? And in these perilous times, perhaps the biggest question is which candidate can keep me and my family safe from the ravages of a dangerous world and unpredictable economy.

This back and forth about McCain’s fascism or Obama’s socialism is largely ignored in the Heartland. As is William Ayers and Obama’s strange and radical associates. As too McCain’s gaffes, Biden’s inanities, and Palin’s alleged unreadiness for office. The reams of paper and giga-bytes of bandwidth expended in promoting, defending, attacking, parrying, lying, smearing, and waxing poetic reaches the Heartland voter, if it ever does, as a confused jumble of noise. It is largely ignored.

Instead, voters out here depend on a well developed sense of being able to judge a candidate as a person - the famous formulation “Would you want to have a beer with this guy?” And surprisingly, a high standard of fairness is employed as part of that character judgement. Which candidate is playing by the rules? Which candidate is delivering low blows? Negative campaigning might “work” in the sense it pulls down the other guy. But it is done at a cost to the attacker.

All of the particulars of the race aside, my friends and neighbors are much too busy working, raising their families, volunteering at the local hospital or Salvation Army, and living simple, meaningful lives to embroil themselves in the issue of the day, the gaffe of the week, or the smears, lies, exaggerations, and deliberate obfuscations of the truth for which this campaign is known to those of us who follow it closely.

They might have a bare bones idea of Obama’s health insurance plan. The same for McCain’s education policy. But it comes to them as an echo from a far distant speaker. This disconnect from the “issues” of campaigns has driven liberals to distraction as they accuse Heartland voters of “not voting their interests.” Conservatives have lately - to their shame - been getting on Middle America for not caring about Obama’s anti-American and terrorist connections, accusing them of being deliberately unaware.

Both sides are laughably off base. Of course Heartland voters vote their interests. It’s just that their “interests” are not the same as liberals. And I have found a superficial knowledge of Ayers et al among my friends who, as they do with other attacks, tune out these matters as irrelevant to their vote. What they’ve heard of Obama - during the debates and some of his speeches - they like. But closing the deal with Middle America has proven to be a problem for Obama. Three days out from the election and I would say that Obama could win in a landslide - if Heartland voters could be sure of him.

It isn’t Ayers and Wright that appear to trouble my friends and neighbors. It’s that Obama is just not enough of a known quantity. But it appears to me that a majority of them - even some who claim to support McCain at this point - are willing to make a leap of faith and cast their vote for the Democrat.

Take my neighbors from across the street. Dana and Curt are about as typically Middle American as you can get. Married for 20+ years, two great kids, a dog, a comfortable house. Hardworking, God fearing, country loving Heartland voters living smack dab in the middle of Middle America. The campaigns have spent the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product of some African countries trying to sway the Danas and Curts of America to vote for them.

How are they doing?

Three days before the election and Dana is leaning toward McCain but might vote for Obama. She is upset at what she sees as the unfair treatment of Palin. She hates being vilified for whatever her choice is going to be. And she wishes that no matter who is elected, that Americans support the new president.

I think that sums up perfectly where much of Middle America is at the moment. Not confusion, but uncertainty. Obama hasn’t yet closed the sale but the voters are unhappy with McCain as the alternative. And I sense the number of undecideds even at this late date to be larger - perhaps much larger - than is reflected in poll numbers.

I have gotten a lot of grief for my posts about the state of the race these last couple of weeks. I still believe that Obama will win rather comfortably - more than 320 EV’s and 5% popular vote victory.

But there is more than just a hope for McCain - more than perhaps I have vouchsafed his campaign these last weeks. If something happens these last 72 hours - if something is revealed or if Obama says something stupid - it could go south in a big way very, very quickly for the Democrat in the Heartland and the biggest surprise in the history of American politics might occur. Something similar could happen to McCain in that a 5 point margin could become a landslide of epic proportions for Obama. That might occur anyway if Obama’s support were to firm up - a distinct possibility.

I would give that scenario about a 30% chance while a McCain surprise comes in at less than 10% - diminishing the closer we get to the election. (Nate Silver gives the Obama blowout scenario a 38% chance of happening while a McCain victory of any kind tops out at almost 4%).

The election will be decided by Middle America. And I can’t think of any group to which I would prefer entrusting our country’s future.

This will be the 12th presidential election that I have followed closely in my lifetime. As a 10 year old growing up in suburban Chicago, I got hooked on politics watching the conventions that summer - two of the most dramatic party conclaves of the 20th century. For Republicans, there was the utter bewilderment and anger as the establishment couldn’t understand what was happening when Barry Goldwater’s insurgency overwhelmed the Rockefeller wing of the party and began the long slide of GOP liberals and moderates into oblivion.

For you younger folk, yes indeed there was such an animal as a “liberal” Republican. And to their eternal credit, they sided with LBJ and the Democrats in passing the two most important pieces of legislation of the era - the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. They also were solid internationalists, beating back the challenge of the remnants of the isolationist Taft faction who would have turned the United States inward at a time of maximum risk to what freedom existed around the world at the time.

Goldwater was right otherwise, of course. The GOP liberals sided with Johnson in his overreach in creating a welfare state that has now handed their ancestors tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities coming due in a few decades. The cry today of “We didn’t know” echoes hollowly. Of course we “knew.” Goldwater told us. Even liberal lion Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that the way the welfare state was set up, it would create a dependency among African Americans and destroy the black family.

As clearly as many conservatives saw the way that the welfare state was designed would lead to eventual catastrophe, I will base the following on my life experience and more than 40 years observation of politics and government; a Barack Obama presidency will result in a radical diminution of American wealth, American power and prestige, and inevitably, a loss of liberty.

Barack Obama is not qualified to be president of the United States. He has little interest in the nuts and bolts of how government works (yes, one can say the same of George Bush and look at us now). Unlike a Clinton or Bush #41 who enjoyed fiddling with the levers of government, enjoining the bureaucracy and Congress to bend to their wills, Obama literally doesn’t have a clue. He will be eaten alive by the striped pants set in the State Department. He will be gobbled up whole by the poverty lobby. And since he has little or no ideology or principles, he will sway with the political winds tacking hard left and then hard right until he angers everybody.

Oh, he will have a “plan” when he comes into office. The first 100 days will be a liberal paradise thanks to an increased and more leftist Democratic majority in the Congress. We will bail out homeowners, his buddies in the unions, finish the job of nationalizing most of our financial industry if not in name then certainly in the practice of it. He will set ambitious targets for carbon reduction. He will nationalize the health insurance industry. He will begin to raise taxes on the rich (a process that any first year government student could inform him will result in eventual tax hikes for all). He will begin to “re-regulate” - a process that will take many years but will eventually lead to where we were at the end of the 1970’s; strangulation and reduced competition in industries affected.

These are all things he has promised to do - and they will get done. But then what? After absorbing the idiotic, slavish, and nauseating comparisons to the greatest presidents in history, just what will this neophyte do?

Well, maybe he’ll start consolidating his power by moving to cut off opposition to what he plans to do:

he Obama campaign has decided to heave out three newspapers from its plane for the final days of its blitz across battleground states — and all three endorsed Sen. John McCain for president!

The NY POST, WASHINGTON TIMES and DALLAS MORNING NEWS have all been told to move out by Sunday to make room for network bigwigs — and possibly for the inclusion of reporters from two black magazines, ESSENCE and JET, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Despite pleas from top editors of the three newspapers that have covered the campaign for months at extraordinary cost, the Obama campaign says their reporters — and possibly others — will have to vacate their coveted seats so more power players can document the final days of Sen. Barack Obama’s historic campaign to become the first black American president.

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Some told the DRUDGE REPORT that the reporters are being ousted to bring on documentary film-makers to record the final days; others expect to see on board more sympathetic members of the media, including the NY TIMES’ Maureen Dowd, who once complained that she was barred from McCain’s Straight Talk Express airplane.

After a week of quiet but desperate behind-the-scenes negotiations, the reporters of the three papers heard last night that they were definitely off for the final swing. They are already planning how to cover the final days by flying commercial or driving from event to event.

Do you also feel the hairs on the back of your head pricking up in reaction to this move? A portend of what’s to come in Obama’s America?

Of course, we’re being silly our liberal betters tell us. No doubt the New York Times and Washington Post will have examples in their columns tomorrow of previous candidates who booted newspapers off their plane. It will be sold as just something that everyone does and there’s nothing to get alarmed about America. Just go back to sleep and don’t forget to wake up long enough to go to the polls on Tuesday and elect our Messiah.

Except this isn’t the Podunk Tribune we’re talking about here. These are three respected newspapers who happen to have critical coverage of a candidate who now deems it necessary to toss them off his campaign plane. No connection?

A sizable number of residents in Virginia buy and subscribe to the Washington Times. Obama is limiting a point of view that residents in perhaps the most vital swing state in America will be getting. Are we to believe that this is an accident? Are we to seriously consider that Obama isn’t trying to affect how reporters cover his campaign?

I would say to the Washington Post and New York Times there will come a day when you too will feel this rope around your neck and your freedom is affected because you are not behind The One 100%. Your cries of “We didn’t know” at that point will be ignored by a public who will wonder where were you when it started?

There’s always energy policy. As long as our economy is sluggish (thus dragging down the economies of most of the planet), oil prices could remain fairly steady, at or near where they are now.

Except they won’t. The Israel-Iran showdown is coming - probably sooner than anyone realizes. Simply put, the Israelis cannot afford to take Iran’s word - or the word of the IAEA - that Iran is not in the process of building a bomb. With their survival at stake, Israel will act pre-emptively and seek to take out or slow down the Iranian program. The resulting spike in oil prices will be a catalyst for Obama to push through a massive energy bill, the end result being anyone’s guess.

The foreign policy ramifications could be Obama’s first real “test” - Biden’s nightmare. Will Obama lead the charge in the UN to censure Israel? Would he cut off military aid? Don’t put it past him. Given his advisors and their views on our relationship with the Jewish state, anything is possible.

“We didn’t know” that he would sacrifice the safety and security of an ally will be the cry.

Meanwhile, less energy means less economic growth - or worse. Obama’s energy schemes alone could hamper the American economy for a generation.

“How could we have guessed?” will be the refrain.

Education reform will no doubt occupy an Obama Administration’s time. What kind of mischief could it cause if this beginner gave the education bureaucrats (no doubt staffed with Ayers-trained acolytes) their heads?

I am not necessarily worried about Obama’s cabinet appointments. It is the 3,000 or so other presidential appointments within his power that scares the beejeebes out of me. Coming as they will from academia and liberal think tanks, here is where the real radicalism of an Obama Administration would manifest itself. The cabinet secretaries are figureheads, chosen as much for how they come off on the Sunday news programs as how knowledgeable and competent they are.

The real power in these departments devolve to the under secretaries and assistant secretaries who are charged with implementing any decisions made by the president. “The devil is in the details” is a literalness I care not to discover when it comes to “school reform” or Obama’s health insurance plan. Unless someone is watching these underlings, the chances are good that they will interpret their mandate to act through their own ideological prism rather than any good intentions of Obama or their cabinet secretary bosses.

“Nobody told us” will be the excuse.

We saw some of this in the Bush Administration with science policy and other areas where lobbyists who had worked for one industry were then named to oversee that same industry in a federal department. This may be good for business but it is bad government. And Obama will probably not want to go to war with a lot of these folks since they will have been put in those positions by his far left base.

Finally, what will the world say when we sell out Lebanon in order to get Syria to play ball with the Israelis on a peace deal? There is only one thing we have that Syria wants - and wants more than anything; our continuing support for a free and independent Lebanon. They don’t want our money or our “good will.” They don’t want any trade agreements or trade goods. They want us to adopt a “hands off” policy on Lebanon so that when Syria moves back in (or their terrorist proxies in Hezballah engineer a takeover of some kind), we do nothing.

Obama wants to talk with Assad. Fine. His no preconditions pledge will come back to bite him in the ass - and not only in Syria. What possible advantage is there to the United States to have the American president meet President Ahmadinejad? “Good will?” Or the world will fall in love with us again?

Whatever small step made in service to internationalism a presidential meet with the Iranians would bring would be dwarfed by the mammoth propaganda coup that would accrue to the Iranians, granting them a legitimacy and stature far beyond anything they have had previously. A similar situation would present itself in Venezuela with a grip and grin with Chavez.

“Well whaddya know, who would have thunk it?” the voters will say.

But we know all this. The world knows it too which is why France’s President Sarkozy is so peeved at Obama. It isn’t meeting with an enemy that is at issue. It is the simple formulation that presupposes a huge advantage being given an enemy for absolutely nothing in return.

But at least we’ll all feel good about ourselves for being so “civilized.”

Obama will not sell us out to the UN. But I have little doubt that we will subsume our national interests in order to curry favor with the lickspittles there. This will result in an erosion of our position in the world and a loss of prestige - and worse. Nation’s that fear us now will not fear us under Obama. They won’t like us any more. They won’t be any more cooperative in keeping the peace. The difference will be that they will be able to cause trouble wherever they wish with no worries that the US would try and stop them - except at the UN. And we know how effective the UN is at dealing with the thugs, the miscreants, and the lunatics of the world.

So sometime in the near future - perhaps within a couple of years or more likely before Obama leaves office - people will wake up one morning and say to themselves, “How did this happen? How could we have known?”

It won’t be an acceptable question to ask then because everything that happens in the next few years will have been predicted by someone based on all the crap that the press either refused to cover or glossed over, denigrated, or called a “distraction” today.

The prospect of being slaughtered next Tuesday is concentrating the minds of some prominent conservatives wonderfully.

Patrick Ruffini, Jon Henke, and John Hawkins are beginning to flesh out their thoughts on what a post election conservative on line community might want to accomplish in the future. Let’s take the meat of their arguments one at a time.

Henke:

Actually, I don’t think it’s ironic at all that the analysis of problems on the Right is similar to the arguments made by the Netroots Left. For one thing, the “claims made by Markos Moulitsas” are in many ways intentional recycling of the movement on the Right.

The underlying systemic inputs are very similar. The political/electoral culture and incentives, and the emergence of the internet as an important social and technological phenomenon impacted both the Left and Right at approximately the same time.

The difference in uptake and evolution is predominantly due to the political cycle. Democrats went through the wilderness from 1995 to 2003; they found their way from 2003 to 2008. Republicans entered their wilderness in 2007, though I would argue that the Right has been in the wilderness for longer. How long the Right wanders in the wilderness depends, in large part, on how seriously they take the lessons they can learn from the Left.

***********

Will the Right’s netroots movement look like that of the Left? To the extent that the tools, and the social/political dynamics, are similar, I’d say the Right’s netroots movement will look a great deal like that of the Left. The question is not what tools are available, but how they are relevant to the surrounding environment. The components will not be identical, but the basic concepts they represent should be very much the same. Or rather, they will be when the Right regains its footing.

Jon also notes that “the surrounding political environment” i.e., the conservative on line community’s relationship with the Republican party, has to change before much progress can be made.

Hawkins makes somewhat the same point and amplifies the idea of using the netroots model for the rightysphere:

Why has the left side of the blogosphere grown so much faster?

Personally, I think there are two reasons for it. The first is that the Right has a large talk radio presence while the Left doesn’t. That means on the left, strongly motivated partisans have little choice other than to flock to the blogosphere while on the right, they can simply opt to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Laura Ingraham to get their daily fill of conservatism.

The other more salient reason for the Left’s growth is simply that they’ve been out of power and that has produced an anger and an energy that has driven them online. There was similar growth on the right during the nineties when websites like Townhall and Free Republic rose to prominence as a response to the Clinton years. If Obama gets into the White House, it will be terrible for America, but my guess is that the right side of the blogosphere will grow like a weed for the next 2-4 years.

The bad news is that the Republican Party looks at bloggers solely as an alternative means to get their message out. In other words, there’s a completely non-functional top down organizational structure. It’s non-functional because the Republican Party organizations and pols issue talking points and press releases, most of which are of no interest to bloggers, and they are largely ignored. In other words, they spend most of their time issuing unheeded orders to people who, by and large, think they’re incompetent and aren’t inclined to pay much attention to what they say.

There are exceptions: Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn, Thaddeus McCotter and a few others — but most of the Republican Party doesn’t really understand the blogosphere or know how to communicate with bloggers.

I would add to Hawkins excellent analysis that the GOP doesn’t want to understand blogs or communicate with bloggers because, in my opinion, they want to maintain control of the message. Not only, as John points out, does the GOP treat bloggers as an appendage of the Republican PR machine, but at bottom, there is a profound disrespect for the blogosphere (except for a select few who have proven useful to them) and they despise the independence of most conservative bloggers.

How many GOP functions will Michelle Malkin be invited to after skewering the party 6 ways from Sunday for immigration, corruption, and incompetence?

Finally, Patrick Ruffini riffs off of both men’s analysis and offers a challenge:

What will it take to turn this around? If you’re a conservative blogger, the question you need to ask yourself is this. Is the main purpose of your blog to express your personal opinion? Or is its primary purpose to build political power for a cause? If you cannot answer yes to the latter, you’re probably not going to be comfortable with making the changes necessary to make online conservatism a political force to be reckoned with.

This is not a criticism, but an observation. Most conservative blogs are still stuck in 2003 — both in terms of the overwhelming focus on media criticism and punditry, and the tendency to outsource electoral politics to the Republican Party. This was in some ways legitimate response to what was happening in 2003-4, when media surrender-monkeys were undermining the War on Terror, Republicans had a kick-butt political operation, and Kos was going 0 for 16.

I don’t fault bloggers for holding on to this point of view in 2003 and 2004. What is unfortunate is that they clinged to it in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 and failed to pivot to the new reality, leaving the Republican Party without a powerful enough force to rein in the self-destructive tendencies of its elite.

Sadly, it’s human nature to cling to the frame in which you came up — traditional media people will never fully reconcile themselves to the blogosphere, talk radio people will always tend to view it as the center of the universe, and even denizens of the “new media” can become easily set in their ways. This is not unlike people who got rich on the housing bubble thinking it could never end. When things first start going wrong, it’s always just a momentary blip, not a sign of an impending crash. Only a catastrophic collapse is usually enough to make people rethink matters.

Building critical mass behind an independent online movement on the right will probably require new people. The old blogs that have been with us since 2003 will not go away. But they’ll need to be joined by people who care more about Indiana’s 8th district than Islamofascism, and MN-SEN more than the MSM.

Allow me to give the perspective of a blogger who has been online for 4 years and may have some unique insights into these matters as a result of my building a modest success of this site and my equally modest success at making a living as a blogger/writer/editor on the net.

All three gentlemen make excellent points about what needs to be done to improve the effectiveness of conservative blogs in making an impact on the political process. Certainly there are things we can learn from the left while at the same time, it is important to recognize that some specific tactics and structural components of the netroots simply aren’t transferable to the rightysphere.

Ruffini and Henke write for The Next Right, an online conservative community. This is the template used by the netroots to organize - large communities of online posters who rail against conservatives, exchange ideas, reinforce their own views on issues, and generally offer a comfortable, enjoyable place to belong.

That is the key - the need to be part of something greater than yourself - that drives the netroots and allows them to connect via these huge communities. The question is, can this model be duplicated by conservatives and further, is it desirable to do so?

Ruffini nails it with his description of conservative blogs being outlets mostly for punditocracy. My one foray into the real world of politics was my advocacy for Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign. This website alone raised more than $10,000 for the candidate in two blog blegs I organized and my efforts to unite conservatives behind Thompson’s fund raising activities in December and January were modestly successful. (I really can’t take much credit when Glenn Reynolds and other large bloggers linked and helped promote both fundraising efforts).

That part of it I didn’t mind. It was burying my native skepticism and critical eye in service to the candidate that discomfited me. In the end, I just couldn’t help myself and wrote critically of the campaign and candidate. But for a while, I was 100% with the program - and I hated every minute, every blog post and article I wrote in service to the cause.

Don’t get me wrong. I actually think Thompson would have been a decent president. He had certainly thought longer and more deeply about many issues than either McCain or Obama and his conservatism was informed by both a love of country and a deep, abiding respect for the Constitution and its principles. But he proved a weak, ineffectual candidate and it was a chore trying to defend him.

Ruffini seems to be saying that he wants bloggers who will shill for the cause. He appears to want bloggers who would subsume their independence and buy into the notion that the “primary purpose” of an individual’s blog is “to build political power for a cause.” That “cause” would be backing specific conservative candidates and issues.

One assumes this would be accomplished by adopting some of the online activist model created by the netroots - the most important in my opinion being the creation of online communities that I mention above. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this idea and I hope it is realized.

The problem, as Patrick mentions, is that many of us old mossbacks are stuck in 2003 and our blogging is unrelated to political activism, except in a roundabout way that presupposes our readers are forced to think about what we write and whose opinion might be altered because of the scintillating brilliance of our logic and reasoning.

Or not.

I am not so full of myself that I actually believe my writing makes a difference. But it is mine, my own, and not beholden to a group, a party, or a cause. I suppose that means I will be left behind when this new conservative on line community begins to take shape. That will be my choice and I will harbor little bitterness towards those who choose another path.

But is it the best way for conservatives to achieve power? Is it a way at all?

There is a definite push back on the right these days against the “elites” who make their living inside the Washington-New York axis; where conservative media and commentators exist side by side with their liberal counterparts and it is believed - wrongly in my opinion - that criticism directed at conservatives in flyover country for their passionate embrace of Sarah Palin and the emphasis placed on social issues like abortion is an attack on “ordinary folk” and indicative of the elites’ desire to be accepted at liberal cocktail parties as well as a lack of ideological purity.

I have written that this smacks of a nascent anti-intellectualism (to go along with the anti-science notions pushed by some of the social cons) and that this is an argument as old as the republic itself (populists vs. elites). Questioning the conservative bona fides of Peggy Noonan or David Brooks - two conservatives who have done more to promote conservative ideas than all of their critics combined - doesn’t make sense in any other context except as an indication that many on the right prefer purges to debate and the guillotine to reasoned discussion.

For their part, the elites are, well, acting like elites - seeking a top down, “Live from Mount Olympus” here it is, rubes, take it or leave it analysis that inherently questions the ability of “ordinary folk” to think and act in their own interest and march to their own drummer. The fact that the conservative movement needs both sides to reinvent itself and thrive is lost in recrimination and threats of excommunication.

I have taken my own shots at the anti-intellectuals because I think their take no prisoners attitude is destructive. And if Ruffini et al believes that these purists will be able to see beyond the end of their own nose and participate in any community or movement that isn’t in absolute lock step with their precious notions of who and what a conservative is, they have a lot to learn. Perhaps, as Hawkins points out, the netroots coalesced because they were in the wilderness for so long and that maybe a few years on the back benches in Congress will bring some sobriety to “the base.” I am not confident that will occur.

Last year, I was one of the few conservatives who attended the Yearly Kos convention at McCormick Place in Chicago. What I saw was startling and, for a conservative, not a little frightening. At the time, I was laughed at and roundly criticized for seeing more into what the netroots were up to than was possible. I don’t think too many conservatives are laughing now:

In the summer of 1980, I was a volunteer for the Reagan campaign in Northern Virginia. There were many of us who had come to Washington to work in Congressional offices or fill positions in the burgeoning conservative lobbying industry and “idea factories” that were popping up every other week, contributing to the intellectual ferment that made conservatism so dynamic. It was pretty heady stuff for a 26 year old political neophyte whose bookish ideas of government and the people who ran it was largely shaped by narrative historians and political philosophers.

What was striking at the time was how confident everyone was and how determined people were to bring about a conservative revolution that would sweep the old order away and bring to power those who truly believed in conservative principles. The ideas themselves were important but only as a means to an end. Shaping the ideas, framing them, and packaging them to move the voting public to cast ballots for conservatives was the subject of much discussion in memoranda, position papers, editorials and articles from the few conservative publications at the time.

Anyone who lived through those times and experienced the feeling that ideology and politics had merged so that the ends and means were exactly the same would recognize what is happening at YearlyKos. Top to bottom, inside and out this movement is first and foremost nothing less than revolution. The ideas driving that revolution are pretty standard liberal fare; anti-war, health insurance, environmental protection, education, and jobs top the agenda here at the netroots convention. But the way the issues are being framed by participants in the dozens of panel discussions, workshops, and forums is where the action is. The nuts and bolts savvy of the political activists fuses with the wonks and wise men of the left’s intellectual brain trust to turn out a brand new way to showcase these ideas to the public.

And the netroots are even farther ahead now. They are organizing not just at the state level but all the way down to the precinct level to make the gains they made in 2006 and are going to make next Tuesday into a permanent, liberal majority. This will drive the Republican party to the left - much as conservative success eventually drove the Democrats to the right - and make conservatism an ideology that will be on the outside looking in.

Unless our online conservative wise men like Ruffini, Hawkins, and Henke can figure out a way to tap the enormous potential of the rightosphere and turn its energies toward creating a network of conservatives that can challenge the left at every digital turn.