Howdy Doody Time - Sanctions Are 'Acomin!'

Bernanke is due credit for avoiding a meltdown but the jury is still out, or should be, when it comes to how the story ends. We have yet to experience his exit strategy. Until we do, were I foreman of this jury, I would avoid a decision.

The second concern, is can Bernanke hang tough and keep the Fed truly independent while mopping up all the debt he flushed into the system? (See 1 below.)

This debt limit proposal tops any proposed toothless commission. (See 2 below.)

Even my wife noticed Rahm has not been seen or heard from lately. Will he be gone by year end? If so he should take Robert Gibbs with him. (See 3 below.)

Der Spiegel now agrees with the report I posted earlier today regarding Iran's nuclear enrichment capability. (See 4 below.)

It is Howdy Doody time as Merkel says the time for more sanctions is growing near. (See 5 below.)

Failed Iran policy, and this from Time Magazine! (See 5a below.)

Fourteen tough questions for Obama. (See 6 below.)

Victor Davis Hanson waxes poetic. (See 6a below.)

Fareed Zakaria makes a cogent suggestion to Obama - start leading! (See 6b)

Dick


1)The Bernanke Nomination

The politicians turn on a political central banker.

The White House said yesterday it has damped down a political revolt against Ben Bernanke and now has the votes to secure the Federal Reserve Chairman's second four-year term. Whether or not Mr. Bernanke is confirmed, the lesson we draw is that overly political central bankers will eventually be undone by politics.

There's no doubt that some of this reconfirmation panic is nothing but political opportunism. When we opposed Mr. Bernanke's reconfirmation on December 3, the facile consensus was that the Fed chief was a master of the universe who had saved the world from depression. But after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts last week, Senate Democrats are suddenly looking for a financial political sacrifice. President Obama doesn't look ready to throw over Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, so Mr. Bernanke is the designated spear catcher.

The Democrats' loudest complaint, moreover, is that Mr. Bernanke and the Fed haven't been easy enough in printing money. Majority Leader Harry Reid declared his support for Mr. Bernanke on Friday, but not before extracting what he said were concessions about future Fed policy.

The Fed chief promised, said Mr. Reid, that he would "redouble his efforts" to make credit available and that Mr. Bernanke "has assured me that he will soon outline plans for making that happen, and I eagerly await them."

Redouble? The Fed has already kept interest rates at near zero for more than a year, and it is buying $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities to refloat the housing bubble, among other interventions into fiscal policy and credit allocation. Is the Fed going to buy another $1.25 trillion, or promise to keep rates at zero for another 14 months?

Mr. Reid's declaration of a confirmation quid pro quo will not reassure global investors who already fear that the Fed lacks the political will to withdraw its historic post-crisis liquidity binge soon enough to avoid new asset bubbles.

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Associated Press Ben Bernanke
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Our own view is that Mr. Bernanke is already far too susceptible to political pressure. As a Fed governor, he was Alan Greenspan's intellectual co-pilot last decade when their easy money policies created the housing mania. When Congress later put political pressure on the Fed to direct credit toward housing, and even to student loans, Mr. Bernanke (who was then chairman) also quickly obliged.

More ominously for the next four years, Mr. Bernanke continues to deny any Fed monetary culpability for creating the mania. Shortly after the New Year, even with his nomination pending, Mr. Bernanke issued an apologia that was striking for its willingness to play to the Congressional theory of the meltdown by blaming bankers and lax regulators. We won't rehearse our decade-long monetary argument with Mr. Bernanke today—see "Bernanke at the Creation," June 23, 2009. But the chairman's refusal to acknowledge any mistakes is one reason the dollar is so weak in global capital markets. Investors are hedging their bets in commodities and nondollar assets.

Yes, much of Wall Street wants to see Mr. Bernanke confirmed. The Street is currently making a bundle off Fed policy, as it borrows at near-zero rates and lends long, and the banks don't want that to end. The banks also loved negative real interest rates in the middle of the last decade, and we know how that turned out. Wall Street always loves easy money—until inflation returns, or the bubbles pop.

Others argue that any alternative to Mr. Bernanke could be worse, and that is certainly a risk. Mr. Geithner and White House economic adviser Larry Summers couldn't be confirmed, even in a Democratic Senate. In the short term if Mr. Bernanke is defeated, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn might run the Open Market Committee, and he shares Mr. Bernanke's contempt for Fed critics. President Obama could also select San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen, but she thinks the Fed should be even easier.

Still, we can think of current or former presidents of regional Fed banks who have hard money credentials. They would also not carry the baggage of whatever Harry Reid extracted as a price of confirmation.

We agree that the Fed needed to ease money precipitously when the financial markets suffered their heart attack in late 2008, and we praised Mr. Bernanke for that at the time and since. But the issue for the next four years is whether the Fed can extricate itself from its historic interventions before it creates a new round of boom and bust. We already see signs that it has waited too long to move.

The Fed as an institution is also under political attack in a way that it hasn't been since the early 1980s, and that was when Paul Volcker was being excoriated for being too tight. That criticism has rarely if ever been leveled at Mr. Bernanke. The next Fed chairman is going to need the market credibility, and the political support, to raise interest rates when much of Congress and Wall Street will be telling him to stay at zero. That is the real reason to oppose a second term for Chairman Bernanke.

2).A Debt-Limit Test: How about spending cuts instead

One message Massachusetts voters sent last week is concern over runaway federal spending. Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is offering Democrats a chance to show they heard that message.

The Senate is debating a $1.9 trillion increase in the nation's debt limit that would lift Treasury's legal borrowing ceiling to $14.3 trillion. After a $290 billion debt-limit raise last month, this giant new increase is intended to get Democrats past November's election without another reminder to voters of how much debt their spending is piling up.

Mr. Coburn has a better idea: Cut spending to a level that would allow the government to stay beneath the current debt ceiling for a few more months. President Obama promised in his campaign to eliminate "unnecessary redundancy" in government, so Mr. Coburn is calling for at least $20 billion in spending cuts on programs that are duplicated across federal agencies. That's about 4% of nondefense discretionary spending, and Mr. Coburn's amendment identifies at least 640 programs that could be consolidated.

A few examples: A 2009 Government Accountability Office report found 69 early education programs, administered by nine different agencies. A 2003 GAO report found 44 job training programs, also administered by nine agencies. The Department of Education runs 14 separate programs for foreign study exchanges. Taxpayers spend more than $300 million annually on at least nine Agriculture Department programs to develop biofuels. Too bad we can't pay for all this with wood chips.

Mr. Coburn's amendment would also rescind an estimated $100 billion in "unobligated balances." This is money that was appropriated by Congress but has never been spent.

The built-in growth of federal entitlements alone will require that Congress lift the debt limit before too many months, and Mr. Coburn isn't suggesting that the feds repudiate U.S. bills. But the debt-limit debate is a good opportunity to see if Democrats are serious when they claim to be horrified at budget deficits. Their new-old idea of a bipartisan deficit commission is nothing more than political symbolism to get Republican cover for the tax increases that Democrats prefer over spending restraint.

The debate is also a test for the Republican Old Guard, some of whom dislike spending cuts nearly as much as Democrats do. If Republicans want to give voters a fiscal choice this autumn, they'll rally behind Mr. Coburn's amendment.


3)A Rahm Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: The chief of staff has been surprisingly absent in the past few weeks
By JOHN FUND

Not everyone is buying the White House's claim that no senior staffer's job is in jeopardy in the wake of last week's debacles. It may not come quickly, but a reshuffling is almost certain even if the shakeup must wait until after the midterm elections in nine months.

For now, Obama political strategist David Axelrod told ABC News his boss doesn't react to "When are we going to throw a body out?" stories that call for White House resignations. "That's not how we roll," he said.

That won't stop the knives from being sharpened in anticipation of a high-level departure. Topping the list of unpopular staffers is Rahm Emanuel, the pit-bull chief of staff who clearly miscalculated when he assured President Obama that the 2008 election and the financial crisis had ushered in a transformational moment that would allow a massive expansion of government.

Republicans have long had it in for Mr. Emanuel, ever since Election Night 2006 when he praised his role as Democratic campaign chief for delivering "a thumpin'" that ended GOP control of Congress. But Democrats have also grown disenchanted with their former House colleague. "I haven't seen Rahm Emanuel except on television," Bill Pascrell, a Democratic lawmaker from New Jersey, told Politico.com last week. "We used to see him a lot. I'd like him to come out from behind his desk and meet with the common folk."

For its part, the Washington punditocracy is bidding down Mr. Emanuel's chances of survival. On this week's McLaughlin Group, all five panelists agreed he would be gone by year-end, with even stalwart liberal Eleanor Clift saying that the Massachusetts defeat will necessitate some personnel changes in Team Obama.

4)Der Spiegel: Iran able to produce nuclear bomb this year

Iran is serious about developing a nuclear bomb and has the ability to produce a primitive, truck-sized version of the bomb this year, the German magaziner Der Spiegel reported on Monday.

An intelligence dossier obtained by Der Spiegel shows that there is a secret military branch of Iran's nuclear research program that answers to Tehran's ministry of defense, according to the report.

Officials who have read this document - which is currently under review by the U.S., Germany and Israel - claim that it shows that their nuclear program aimed at producing a bomb is well advanced.

The officials said to Der Spiegel that the truck-sized bomb which they are capable of producing will have to be compressed to a size that would fit into a nuclear warhead for the strategic threat potential they desire.

Der Spiegel also wrote that Israel and the West were alarmed by the dossier's revelations, as Iran could reach the compressed level of a nuclear bomb between 2012 and 2014.

Tehran has consistently denied that it is enriching uranium for weapons, claiming it is exclusively dedicated to the peaceful use of nuclear technology.

Iran has often warned it would retaliate for any attack on its nuclear facilities, which the West suspects form part of a drive to develop bombs. Tehran denies the charge.


U.S. and Israel have not ruled out attack of Iran's nuclear site


Neither Israel nor the United States have ruled out military action if diplomacy fails to resolve the long running row over Iran's disputed nuclear ambitions.

"The Americans have made conflicting comments [on the possibility of an attack on Iran]," the official IRNA news agency quoted Iranian Brigadier-General Ahmad Vahidi as saying.

Earlier, Vahidi said Iran would strike back at Israeli weapons manufacturing sites and nuclear installations if it attacked the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities.

Israel is believed to be the only nuclear-armed Middle East state. Iran has often said it has missiles able to reach Israel.

Iran, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, says its nuclear work is aimed at generating electricity, not making bombs, but its failure to convince world powers about the peaceful nature of its work has led to UN and U.S. sanctions.

'Attack on Iran too big a mission for Israel'.

According to reports Israel's basic assumption is that diplomacy and sanctions will not gain a thing, and the only way to stop Iran's nuclear program will be by force.

This is also the assessment of the international media, who consider an Israeli strike against Iran a near certainty.

Inside Israel's security-strategic community, opinions are divided. Experts estimate that the air force can reach Iran and strike the nuclear installations.

Some observers note that after the bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981, critics of the attack claimed that Saddam Hussein would be able to rebuild in three to four years, but this never happened.

However, many defense experts say an attack against Iran is "too big a mission for Israel." They raise two main arguments: concerns that Iran's response will be harsh and start a general war, even if the operation fails, and more importantly, the United States' determined opposition to an independent Israeli operation.

This view is held by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The defense experts say that without a green light from Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense minister Ehud Barak will not be able to send in the air force.

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert hoped to neutralize Iran's nuclear program differently, and we can assume that Israel managed to delay the project by a few years; maybe even a decade. But that sort of activity has been exhausted. The Iranians have overcome the difficulties and managed to cross the "technological threshold" of enriching uranium, according to the head of Military Intelligence.

5)Merkel: Sanctions will be a tragedy for the Iranian people

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Iran Monday evening that it may face new sanctions if it doesn't cooperate with the West over its nuclear program.

Merkel told diplomats in Berlin that "time is running out" for Iran. She said additional sanctions would be a "tragedy for the Iranian people."

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim that it was evident that "Iran, which has large stocks of gas and oil, is not developing a nuclear capability for peaceful purposes. Lieberman said the missiles Iran was developing were not intended to spread nuclear energy for the good of mankind.

Lieberman told his Brazilian colleague that Iran was the world's number one sponsor of terrorism, ruled by a government that denies the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist. He also referred to the regime's crackdown on opposition activists, saying "we have seen how the Iranians took care of civilians after the elections [there]."

Lieberman and Merkel made their comments just hours after Der Spiegel reported that new intelligence acquired by Germany's BND conclusively shows that Iran's nuclear program has an advanced military offshoot which answers to the country's defense establishment.

The report said the information was being reviewed in Germany, Israel, the US and the UN's nuclear agency in Vienna.

Aside from exposing the existence of a clandestine weapons development program, the document apparently shows that Teheran is in possession of advanced blueprints for producing a nuclear bomb.

Such documents, as well as information passed on to Western intelligence agencies by Iranian defectors and sources within Iran, are causing growing alarm among US and European leaders. In its report, Der Spiegel assessed that the White House may consequently raise threat levels from yellow to red. World leaders and even the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the newspaper, are beginning to understand that rumors of Iranian defiance, noncompliance and warmongering are neither Israeli propaganda nor a figment of the imagination.

The intelligence document raises questions pertinent to the nature of Iran's nuclear program, which the Islamic republic claims is meant solely for peaceful energy production in a climate of dwindling natural resources, including oil. However, its evasive tactics, spiteful rhetoric and lack of transparency with Western bodies looking to halt the spread of nuclear weapons have caused world leaders to be concerned - and increasingly skeptical.

Reports which have surfaced in recent years hint that Iran's National Energy Council may not be the only body to which its nuclear scientists answer. In fact, according to Der Spiegel, Iranian Science, Research and Technology Minister Kamran Daneshjoo - a close ally of the country's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - worked for several years at a Teheran research and development center devoted to military technology. This government-sponsored scientific body is believed by Western intelligence agencies to have become subservient to Iran's defense ministry. Vague estimates state that the body, headed by 48-year-old Revolutionary Guard officer Mohsen Fahrizadeh, now deals in "high technology" in a manner that differs greatly from that of the country's energy council.

Der Spiegel suggested that the two bodies divide the labor of nuclear research and development between them, with the energy council focusing on uranium enrichment - the production of what could potentially evolve into fissile warhead material - and the defense ministry responsible for research on warheads compatible with Iran's North Korean-developed Shahab ballistic missile line.

As such, the Islamic republic may be able to produce a crude nuclear bomb - too large to be attached to any missile - by the end of this year, with estimates citing 2012 or 2014 as a target date for a fully functional warhead.

Also on Monday, France pushed for tougher sanctions against Iran just as Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini called for greater involvement by Arab countries in international efforts to defuse the nuclear threat from Teheran. China and Russia, though still unpredictable, are likely to agree to sanctions not targeted at the Iranian economy.

France will serve as the European Council's rotating president starting February.

US President Barack Obama has set January as a deadline for Iran to respond to diplomatic outreach. Western states, along with the UN, China and Russia, are still awaiting Teheran's final official response on a proposal which calls for the Islamic republic to ship a significant percentage of its low-enriched uranium abroad in exchange for a similar quantity of nuclear fuel.

5a) To Obama's Pile of Woes, Add a Failing Iran Policy
By Massimo Calabresi

As if President Barack Obama didn't have his hands full at home with his party's loss of Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts, the collapse of health care reform and a disorganized war against the banks, he now faces a major foreign policy setback. Since the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama has promised to curtail Iran's nuclear program by simultaneously offering talks and threatening sanctions. After a year of trying, both approaches appear on the verge of failure.

The President has given Iran two deadlines to demonstrate good faith. Last spring, his Administration told reporters that if Iran didn't show willingness to engage in talks by September, sanctions would follow. Then, in September, when Iran hinted that it might possibly talk, Obama delivered another deadline, this time the end of 2009.

Iran's response to these deadlines has been repeated delays and obfuscation. First, in the spring it delivered a lengthy manifesto about global peace irrelevant to the issues at hand. The summer months were taken up with Iran's election turmoil, but following talks with the U.S. and its international partners in the fall, Iran hinted that it might be willing to accept a deal under which it would export most of its enriched-uranium stockpile to be converted into reactor fuel — and then quickly backpedaled as the proposed deal came under a hail of criticism from across Iran's political spectrum. In recent weeks, Iran has made a counteroffer to export its uranium in small parcels over a longer time period that State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described as "clearly an inadequate response."

The idea behind Obama's engagement effort, though, was that if Iran kept stalling, countries previously opposed to sanctions, such as Russia, China and Germany, could be persuaded to support new punitive measures aimed at forcing Iran to cooperate. "We actually believe that by following the diplomatic path we are on, we gain credibility and influence with a number of nations who would have to participate in order to make the sanctions regime as tight and as crippling as we would want it to be," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in last April.

So, how's that working? Not very well, by all indications.

True, with Iran stalling, the Germans seem to be playing along, although earlier in the year they said they'd only support sanctions if approved by the U.N. And while senior American officials and European diplomats say Russia has come around to supporting sanctions, nothing that has happened publicly has confirmed that claim — and the signals from Moscow remain mixed.

But where Russia had previously taken the lead in blocking sanctions efforts, that role has now fallen to China, which has a rapidly growing stake in Iran's energy sector. Beijing believes that while Iran must be brought into compliance with the international nonproliferation regime, its nuclear program does not represent an imminent danger of producing nuclear weapons and diplomacy should therefore be given a lot more time.

Beijing has bluntly opposed any effort to introduce new punitive measures against Iran, and last weekend China's Deputy Foreign Minister snubbed his counterparts from the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and Germany and sent only a low-level official to a meeting called to discuss new efforts to pressure Tehran. "The meeting we had last weekend was not great," says a European diplomat. "The Chinese sent someone along who said, 'I can't make any decisions.' " Worse, the Chinese have become allergic to the very mention of sanctions. After last weekend's meeting, a senior European diplomat speaking on background with reporters declined even to utter the word sanctions for fear of upsetting Beijing.

Without China, which holds a Security Council veto, there is no prospect of meaningful sanctions at the U.N. That in turn means difficulty getting tough sanctions from all the European countries, some of whom can't act without U.N. approval.

Now Obama faces the unpleasant reality that neither the engagement track nor the sanctions track appear to be going anywhere. His defenders at home and abroad say it was the right way to proceed, but skeptics of Obama's policy are emerging, even in his own party. "What exactly did your year of engagement get you?" asks a Hill Democrat.

So what options does Obama have left? Some European and American diplomats hold out hope that they will be able to bring China around. But privately they say the U.S. and its allies may need to move ahead on their own, without China. "No one wants to go there," says the European diplomat, but "what we're saying to the Chinese now explicitly is there's no point in going forward together" if the current approach isn't changing Iran's behavior.

Splitting the international community has been Iran's goal from the start, and unilateral sanctions could be fatally undermined if a bloc of countries that trade with Iran, such as China, Russia, Turkey and India, don't comply. The very fact that the U.S. and its allies are even thinking of going it alone is a sign of just how much trouble Obama's policy is in.


6)Fourteen questions for Dear Leader
By Dave Weinbaum


Sometime during the next few years, Dear Leader, Barack Hussein Obama, will descend from his pedestal in heaven to grant us worthless peons a press conference. Those in media, who will spend that time groveling before the Great Won, need not read further.

The rest, if you're willing to grow some cajones, may peruse the following questions and take some steam out of Limbaugh and Beck, as it's been a long time since the last presidential press conference.

Time to shake off the cobwebs and hone those questions!

As always, I'm willing to help:

Mr. President:

• After promising no less than eight times that all HC deliberations would be broadcast live on C-Span and legislation would be posted on the net for 72 hours before voting, do you still consider your administration to be the most transparent in history?

• Yesterday, you blamed one of the biggest Democrat defeats ever on the Bush Administration. At what point, if any, will you stop blaming the previous administration for your failures?

• Do you really believe, as your Press Secretary Gibbs said, that people elected Senator-elect Brown because they were angry at their circumstances and not at your and the Dem run Congress' policies and practices?

• The Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson and John Conyers have been critical of you regarding your lack of attention to poor blacks, where unemployment is running two to three times worse than the general population. Can you explain this?

• Everything you do benefits unions at the expense of taxpayers, small business and jobs for non-union Americans. Why?

• Could you explain why you approved the open bribing with taxpayer money of Senate and House votes for health care?

• Warren Buffett, one of your early backers, doesn't understand why you are punishing banks and excluding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mr. President, could you explain it in such a way that even Mr. Buffett could understand?

Break Time


My wife claims that seven power points are the maximum the human brain can tolerate in one sitting. In my capacity to be sensitive and to ensure my present sleeping accommodations, I'll pause now.

This way I can show compassion for both wifey and reader. Therefore by the pundit invested in me, I'm advising a toilet, refreshment, eye rubbing, FB, e-mail or nap break. I've even limited these choices to seven.

Now you can tolerate the next seven power points without your brain exploding.

Thanks, Honey!

Mr. President:

• Did you understand your sworn oath to uphold the Constitution as it was written? Can you explain how you can approve of a federally mandated purchase of health insurance which goes directly against the Tenth Amendment?

• Just how clueless is it to criticize a man for driving a pick-me-up truck in a political campaign? Isn't this evidence you are totally out of touch with the average American?

• How does it feel to be the lowest rated president in American history for the first year in office?

• If you thought there was a credible threat of attack on your wife and children, wouldn't you do everything the Bush Administration legally did to obtain this information from captured enemy combatants?

• Are the rumors about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton resigning to run against you in 2012 true? Care to comment?

• Executive orders 13524 and 13528, signed by you on 12/16/09 and 1/11/10 respectively, gave immunity powers to Interpol and created a committee of ten governors under your control. This group would increase and coordinate military capability within our borders. Based on your earlier comments that the country needs a civil militia as strong and well funded as our regular armed forces, do you plan on declaring martial law anytime around the elections—I mean in a national emergency?

• Finally, how is it possible to go from Messiah to Moron in one year?

6a)Our Philosopher-King Obama
By Victor Davis Hanson

In Plato's ideal society, philosopher kings and elite Guardians shepherded the rabble to force them to do the "right" thing.


To prevent the unwashed from doing anything stupid, the all-powerful, all-wise Guardians often had to tell a few "noble" lies. And, of course, these caretakers themselves were exempt from most rules they made for others.


We are now seeing such thinking in the Obama administration and among its supporters.


A technocracy — many Ivy-League-educated and without much experience outside academia and government — pushes legislation most people do not want but is nevertheless judged to be good for them.


Take the Obama proposal for health care. A large percentage of Americans do not trust those who run the Postal Service to oversee the conditions of one-sixth of the U.S. economy.


No matter. Our philosopher-king president says of our fierce resistance: "I . . . know what happens once we get this done. The American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like."


How about energy policy? Unlike Obama, most Americans believe we should fully utilize our own gas, oil and nuclear resources so that we don't go broke waiting for a promised solar and wind revolution.


In fact, on a number of other major issues, polls show more than half of all Americans are at odds with the Obama agenda: more federal takeover of private enterprise, gargantuan deficit spending, and "comprehensive" immigration reform, for starters.


Why, then, does the Obama administration persist with such an apparently unpopular agenda?


Like Plato's all-knowing elite, Obama seems to feel that those he deems less informed will "suddenly" learn to appreciate his benevolent guidance once these laws are pushed through.


Liberal columnist Thomas Frank once promoted similar assumptions in his book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Frank argued that clueless American voters can't quite figure out what their own self-interests are.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, another Obama supporter, also reflected the philosopher-king thinking in a recent column praising China's "reasonably enlightened" dictatorship. Unlike the messiness of American democracy, he argued, a few smart strongmen in China can ram through the necessary policies "to move a society forward in the 21st century."


President Obama has now apparently convinced himself that his old promises about a new transparency get in the way of giving the American people what they need.


Obama campaigned against lobbyists in government. But lobbyists in government are now necessary to accelerate the Obama hope-and-change agenda.


The president on several occasions promised to air the health-care debate on C-SPAN. But now negotiations take place behind closed congressional doors. That must be a necessary price if the people are going to get the health care they must have.


Obama, in addition, once ridiculed John McCain's idea of taxing so-called "Cadillac" health plans. He promised not to raise "any" taxes on those who make less than $250,000 a year. And he lectured President Bush on his foolishness of pushing Social Security reform when only 35 percent of the people were in favor it.


But now our philosopher-king has determined that he really needs to tax some premium health-care plans — even if that means additional costs will be passed onto those who make less than $250,000. And he certainly doesn't mind pushing noble legislation that most people oppose.


Other past declarations — like the pledge to close Guantanamo within a year of taking office or the deadlines for the Iranians to stop work on their nuclear program — are noble sorts of lies. They at least show us the president's good intentions and his care for our welfare — even if he can't follow through on them.


There is one other trait of this administration similar to those of utopian philosopher kings. Our elite must have the leeway to be exempt from their own rules.


Higher taxes must be levied on many of us. But the guardian of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, now and then can cheat a little. So can the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charles Rangel, who oversees the writing of tax law.


An evil Wall Street makes obscene profits and flies on private jets. But from time to time, Wall Street campaign donations and private jet travel are permissible for our wiser Guardians if they are properly to plan for the people.


There is, however, one difference between Plato's thinking and the Obama administration's agenda. Plato at least assumed that philosopher kings were fantasy ideas and his utopia unachievable.


Our president and his modern-day Guardians in contrast haven't quite figured that out yet. Perhaps after this week's election in Massachusetts they will.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. Comment by clicking here.

6b)Change We Can Believe In: It's time for the president to stop legislating and start leading.
By Fareed Zakaria


How bad do things look for Barack Obama? Some historical perspective is useful. His approval ratings after one year in office are about the same as Ronald Reagan's or Jimmy Carter's and, in fact, are a bit higher than Bill Clinton's. The Bushes fared better than all three of them, but for unusual reasons: 41 because he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union in his first year in office, and 43 because the nation rallied around him after 9/11. As the economy improves, Obama's numbers will surely rebound somewhat.


Still, last week's special election in Massachusetts is a sign that Obama has a big problem. The public has clearly registered a protest vote against him, congressional Democrats, and their signature policy proposal: the health-care bill. The size of the swing, the issues raised during the campaign and in exit polls, and the migration of independents all suggest that Obama is confronting not just generalized anger but dissatisfaction with the course that the ruling party has taken. How he responds will shape the rest of his term.



A great debate has begun on the nature of that response. My own advice would be simple: Barack Obama needs to act like a president, especially the president he campaigned to become.

In his enduring treatise, The American Commonwealth, James Bryce, a British writer who toured the United States in the late 19th century, observed that the Founding Fathers had created a president who would, in a crucial sense, resemble the British king, "not only in being the head of the executive, but in standing apart from and above political parties. He was to represent the nation as a whole … The independence of his position, with nothing either to gain or to fear from Congress, would, it was hoped, leave him free to think only of the welfare of the people."

Obama began his presidency in this vein. In his response to the economic crisis, he steered a clear middle course, refusing to accept the left's cries for bank nationalization but also adopting a far more vigorous and Keynesian approach than the right could accept. In foreign policy, he reset America's image in the world in a manner that earned him kudos from the likes of James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. But that broader, presidential approach was partly set aside in passing the fiscal stimulus and then abandoned altogether in the drive to change the American health-care system.

Over the past six months—which have correlated with his dramatic drop in the polls—Obama has behaved less like a president and more like a prime minister. He has not outlined a broad vision for the country. He has not embraced the best solutions—from left and right—for the nation's problems. Instead he has behaved as the head of the Democratic Party in Congress, working almost entirely with and through that caucus, slicing and dicing policy proposals to cobble together legislative majorities. He has allowed the great policy program of his presidency to be written and defined by a collection of congressional Democrats, accepting the lopsided bills that emerged and the corruption inherent in the process.

If he represents all the people, Obama should remember that for 85 percent of Americans, the great health-care crisis is about cost. For about 15 percent, it is about extending coverage. Yet his plan does little about the first and focuses mostly on the second. It promotes too little of the real discipline that would force costs down, and instead throws in a few ideas, experiments, and pilot programs that could, over time and if rigorously expanded, do so. It is a bill written by legislators to ensure that they never have to do anything unpopular.

Watching the legislative process, Bismarck allegedly observed, is like watching the making of sausages. You see and smell a lot of crap that makes you wince. (Those are my words, not Bismarck's.) The Senate health-care bill is particularly sausage-like. It has special exemptions on future costs for five states, exemptions for unions, concessions of various kinds to almost every special interest in the industry, and of course no reform at all of the crazy legal system because the trial-lawyers bar remains untouchable for the Democratic Party.

Defenders argue that Obama has only acted realistically. Focusing too intently on cost reduction would have alienated all the same forces—insurance companies, Big Pharma—that derailed health-care reform under Bill Clinton. But the result is one that few can honestly call "reform," and one that has steadily lost support as it has moved through Congress. In a Wall Street Journal poll conducted last week, Obama fared reasonably well on all attributes of leadership. His lowest scores came when respondents were asked whether they agreed with his proposals, and whether he had changed the way business was done in Washington.

True, the Republican Party has decided to be utterly uncooperative (although on health care Obama never really reached out to them with serious compromises). But whether or not Republican senators would at first reward Obama for adopting a more nonpartisan approach, independent voters would, which would change the political calculus in Washington. Rahm Emanuel quipped that the task was not to get health-care legislation through "the executive committee of the Brookings Institution, but the U.S. Congress." In fact, proposals that would impress experts would also impress tens of millions of independents, the vast middle ground where elections are won and lost in America. That is how Bill Clinton outmaneuvered Newt Gingrich, and how Tony Blair outfoxed the Tory party for 10 years.

On health care, energy, taxes, immigration, deficits, and everything else, Obama should get away from the politics of legislating and go back to being president. He should put forward the best proposals to help solve America's problems. He may or may not get much support from Republicans, but he will earn political capital and power, which in the long run is the only way to enact a big, transforming agenda. This approach is exactly what Obama campaigned on. He promised that he would reach out to all sections of the country, listen to the best ideas, and appeal to the nation as a whole. "I don't see a blue America and a red America, I see only the United States of America," he said. Obama needs to shift course and govern as the president he promised to become. That's change I could believe in.