Obama, Democrats and Their Cialis Budget!

So what's a little rocket atack while having dinner with the kids? It's all in a day's fun and brought to you by Jimmy Carter's fellow freedom fighters! (See 1 below.)

Hamas cover up - they steal U.N. blankets! Let em eat cake! (See 2 below.)

World leaders should resurrect the ship FDR, Chruchill and Stalin met on in Yalta, rename it "Ship of Fools," then call a meeting to negotiate with the Iran's leaders. Would give Hillary an opportunity to appear presidential. (See 3 below.)

World deflates because governments inflate. Obama and his Democrat friends have discovered how to creat a Cialis Budget! (See 4 and 4a below.)

Honestly did not think being honest was a qualification for higher office. This from The Economist! Oh, it's only the consequences of inexperience? Or maybe its agenda building with abandon. The boomerangs have begun and will only get bigger and ouchier!(See 5 below.)

To my brethren: We got three demon problems! An Arab looks at his world and sends a message. (See 6 below.)

There must be a place to put all this mounting debt? Why not build a big warehouse that would employ 5 million workers? Tom Coburn expresses doubts.(See 7 below.)

Jimmy Carter could be president of this South African dock worker's union. How strange. They don’t want to interfere in Darfur, Zimbabwe or The Congo……But Israel is a different matter………. Harbor hypocrisy? (See 8 below.)

Daschle is gone but the culture that bred the problem remains. (See 9 below.)

Dick Armey and I think alike about the need for Hayek! (See 10 below.)

Some "O" Administration tag lines:

"Oh, I have to pay my taxes too!"
or
"Paying my own taxes is a ticket to spending your taxes."

Dick



1) LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO SDEROT
By Richard Friedman

SDEROT -- There are places in the world, where a city's name has become synonymous with something larger than itself: Munich, New Orleans, Chernobyl. So, too, is the case with Sderot, a modest city in southern Israel about two miles from the Gaza Strip.

Sadly though, for all that has happened to the residents, there are many who've not heard Sderot's story. It's a story that involves eight years of lives lived around and despite more than 10,000 rocket attacks. Lives where 15 seconds -- the time you have to get to a shelter -- can be the difference between survival or death.


Traveling to Sderot from Tel Aviv, I find myself thinking about my last visit to Sderot. The barrage of rockets was already taking its toll on the residents in 2005, particularly the children, and here I am again and the suffering continues.

I find myself wondering what life had been like for these young kids and their families the past three and a half years. I can't fathom it; it is too depressing. The only thing that makes me feel good is the knowledge that over the past few years our Birmingham Jewish Federation has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to help the families of Sderot.

As we arrive in Sderot, our guide, with staccato rapidity, begins saying "there's one" over and over. I quickly realize he is talking about bombshelters that have been constructed throughout the city. Every bus stop is fortified, schools are reinforced. Life centers around how far from the nearest shelter you are at any given time and when the next "Red Color" alert will come.

TRAUMATIZED FOR LIFE

Our first stop is at a facility known as the Anxiety Relief Site, which is helped with Federation funds. This facility provides the primary treatment for those mentally-traumatized by life under constant attack. "After eight years, the population is mentally crippled," a doctor who works there explains. She also reflects on the recent cease-fire and its failure to stop the attacks. The people of Sderot had hoped their nightmare would be ending, but now "everything's coming back -- it's very frustrating."

The impact on the children is the hardest to heal. It's a hard reality as we are reminded that children eight and under have never known any other situation. The continued stress is manifested in behavioral and developmental issues these children will deal with the rest of their lives. They have lost faith in their parents' ability to protect them; they won't sleep alone; they won't go to the bathroom alone.

To punctuate what we heard at the relief site, we walk a short distance to a pre-kindergarten hit recently by a rocket. I watch a group of young children playing and it makes me realize these are the kids the rockets are meant to kill. The caregivers describe how despite their young ages, the kids know what to do reflexively when given a warning that a rocket is headed their way. "It's almost a Palovian response," says an adult at the center. "They raise their hands in the air, anxious for us to take them to a shelter."

INSTRUMENTS OF DEATH

We cross back across the street to our next stop, the Sderot Police Station, where we see a collection of 200 Qassam and Grad rockets that have landed in Sderot the past few weeks. They are hideous-looking instruments of death. Even as we view the rockets, the Israeli army official with us reminds our group that "the only way to understand is to be here during a rocket attack and even then you can't understand."

From the police station we continue on to a local hilltop for a better view of the area. As we climb the hill and face the Gaza Strip, this same army official asks us to turn around. Behind us the city of Sderot is perched below. We're reminded that almost 1,000,000 people throughout southern Israel are within a 15 to 60 second range of incoming rockets.

Descending from the hill, everything seems so quiet and normal.Yet, we all know this serenity could be pierced any minute. We are only here one day; in that time it's impossible to even get a hint of what life's really like for our brothers and sisters in Sderot.

STORY OF SDEROT

To truly begin to digest what we're seeing today, faces need to be put to the situation. Those faces become very clear and memorable as we sit in the home of Laura Bialis, an American filmmaker living in Sderot.

As we watch the trailer for her upcoming documentary, "Sderot -- Rock in The Red Zone," we are struck by images of places we've been to, and seeing through Laura's lens, the realities of life in Sderot. The sound of Israeli army artillery fire a few miles away as we watch the clip reminds us that this is not just a movie, Laura's work is the reality of Sderot.

Our day culminates after 11 hours, by learning of new attacks in southern Israel shortly after our departure. We had avoided the "Red Color" alert. But how had the people we met today coped with it? We are able to return to our comfortable, safe hotel in Tel Aviv to regroup for our next day's visit to Ashkelon, another Israeli city under siege.

The people of Sderot deserve their own safe retreat, and this is where you and I come in. While the Birmingham Jewish Federation cannot stop the rockets, we can make a difference. By supporting our Federation, we can provide badly-needed services and facilities, safe schools for children, counseling for parents and trips away from the conflict zone for these youngsters during the tough times.

(Appreciation is expressed to fellow traveler Pam Ingram, of St. Paul, MN, for her help with this story.)

2) UN: Hamas seized food and blankets from needy Gazans



A United Nation spokesman on Wednesday accused Hamas police in Gaza Strip of seizing thousands of blankets and food parcels meant for needy residents.

Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the UN's Relief and Works Agency, said Hamas police raided a UN warehouse in Gaza City late Tuesday, snatching 3,500 blankets and over 400 food parcels.

"Members of the Hamas police seized by force 3,500 blankets and 406 food packages ready to be delivered to hundreds of poor Gaza families," the statement said.


Hamas and its security forces have administered and controlled the Gaza Strip since June 2007, when they routed security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

But UNRWA has refused to hand the humanitarian aid it has received to the Hamas-ruled ministry of social welfare. The aid is especially vital now because Gazans are facing hardship after Israel's three-week military offensive against Hamas, which left thousands homeless.

"UNRWA condemns in the strongest terms the confiscation of its aid supplies and has demanded that it is returned immediately," the UNRWA said in a statement. "UNRWA has a strict system of monitoring aid delivery and ensuring that its assistance reaches only the intended beneficiaries. Our officials were on the ground overseeing the delivery of our aid and taking all possible steps to avoid its diversion."

Gunness said Wednesday this was the first time Hamas had seized UN aid, but Israeli officials have charged that the militant group routinely confiscates supplies meant for needy Gazans.

Some 60 per cent of the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are refugees receiving aid from UNRWA.

A Hamas government spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Meanwhile, Abbas' West Bank-based government on Wednesday annnounced a $600 million reconstruction prograM, most of which would be funded by foreign donors.

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who heads Abbas' Western-backed government, said the project would cover all houses destroyed or damaged during a 22-day Israeli military offensive.

"The amount of the project is e600 million. Most of it will come from donors," Fayyad said in a speech, adding that the details would be announced in the coming days.

Egypt is to host an international conference in coordination with Abbas's Palestinian Authority on March 2 on Gaza reconstruction, whose cost has been estimated at $2 billion. Saudi Arabia has said it would donate e1 billion.

Last week, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit urged Europe to help with fast aid for the Gaza Strip, saying the reconstruction meeting would require damage assessments and the support of the European Union, the United Nations and others.

3) World powers urge Iran to cooperate with UN over nuclear program


Senior officials from world powers urged Iran on Wednesday to fully cooperate with the United Nations over its nuclear program and said there was a joint commitment to find a diplomatic solution on the issue.

Senior officials from the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany also said they welcomed an offer by the new U.S. administration under President Barack Obama to talk directly with Tehran over its nuclear programme.

"(We will) consult on the next steps as the U.S. administration undertakes a policy review," the powers said in a joint statement after a meeting in Germany.
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The six powers' meeting was their first gathering on the Iran question since Obama took office. A European Union official said the world powers plan to meet agin on Iran once U.S. has reviewed policy, likely in March.

On Tuesday, Iran launched the Omid (Hope) research and telecom satellite, what it called a 'major step in its space technology' timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution that ousted the U.S.-backed shah.

The long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into orbit could also be used for launching warheads, although Iran says it has no plans to do so.

4) Government: The One Price That's Still Rising
By Steven Malanga

Over the weekend, I paid about $2 less per gallon for gasoline than I was paying last summer. My local supermarket desperately tries convincing me it has the lowest prices around by directing me to aisles filled with sale items and private label goods. My credit card statements listing purchases from the holiday shopping season remind me just how many bargains I snagged. Even the price of medical care has been relatively flat the last few months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And then there’s the price of government. My property taxes are going up a whopping 6.4 percent this year, a move that comes on top of similarly large increases in virtually every year since I moved into my house. Although I already live in one of the most heavily taxed states, New Jersey, our governor hasn’t ruled out further tax increases if revenues keep declining--even after an injection of federal money via the Obama stimulus plan.


Nor are we alone by any means. California legislators are haggling over exactly which taxes to increase--contemplating surcharges to their income tax (already one of the nation’s highest) and a sales tax hike. New York Gov. David Paterson proposed a mind-boggling 88 new or higher fees and taxes in his budget, including a so-called ‘obesity tax’ on soft drinks, an ‘Ipod tax’ on music downloads, and new or higher taxes on movie tickets, beer and wine, taxi rides, and massages. Other states are mulling over new or higher taxes on sodas, snacks, alcohol and, of course, cigarettes, although “butt” taxes are already so high in many states that we’ve probably entered the realm of diminishing returns. Many of these tax proposals come on top of increases last year.

As private sector workers battle joblessness, pay cuts and longer work hours, it seems particularly nasty that the one cost that is most difficult for them to escape, the cost of government, is going up steadily. Just about the only ways to ameliorate rising property taxes, for instance, are through laborious and uncertain challenges to your home’s assessment, or by moving. There’s no doubt that people do plenty of the latter, considering that the places with the steepest tax burdens also have the highest rates of outmigration. But trying to sell your home and finding a job elsewhere in an environment of rising unemployment and collapsing housing prices hardly seems like a sound strategy right now.

People will also avoid higher consumption taxes by consuming less, one reason why projections of how much a new tax will raise often overestimate actual collections. Still, the resulting shortfalls often prompt governments to raise other taxes, trapping residents in an upward spiral of taxation.

Local newspapers are now assuring residents that Washington is coming to their aid with a stimulus package that directs billions of dollars to the states. But much of this money is for specific programs, which will limit how states can use it and hence won’t offset tax shortfalls. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the local school board there, for instance, stands to gain $88 million in school construction money it largely doesn’t need because enrollment is declining and 15 school buildings are already empty.

Moreover, you can be sure that as states ramp up new programs with some of this designated federal money, local taxpayers will be left with the tab when the stimulus package disappears. Two years from now those same local newspapers that today are telling residents that help is on the way will be filled with gloomy stories about programs that will vanish unless the state steps in to replace federal funds. Any taxpayer who has lived through a few economic downturns knows that federal aid is largely a chimera.

Although the stimulus package also contains what’s described as significant tax cuts that presumably would offset some of the local tax increases, most of this is in the form of narrow credits that many taxpayers either can’t take advantage of or will fail to tap into because these credits tend to be obscure and complicated. In any case, tax credits hardly produce the kind of relief that comes from finding extra money in your paycheck every week.

It’s not hard to see why the price of government is rising. In the midst of the sharp downturn of the private economy starting early last year, many local politicians let their budgets and workforces continue to increase. In October I observed that state and local public sector jobs were still growing—the 11th increase in 12 months. Even as the private economy contracted by some 750,000 jobs, government added 200,000 positions in that time. Today, although the overall unemployment rate is about 7.1 percent, it’s 2.3 percent in the public sector.

Now, faced with steep shortfalls, politicians are playing their usual budgetary games. In their book The Price of Government, David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson observe that state and local politicians typically rig local fiscal debates by focusing on the small percent of a budget that has to be cut in tough times. That turns budget discussions into a form of horse trading in which advocates and favored constituencies work to preserve their jobs and programs, regardless of whether they are effective or whether citizens really value them. Good governments, by contrast, (and there are vanishingly few), start with how much money they presume will be available to spend and ask, how can we best serve our citizens and accomplish what they most want us to accomplish with this money?

To govern this way, however, requires that local leaders take on the advocacy groups—from public employee unions to social service agencies to private contractors living off public works—who frame even the smallest cuts in apocalyptic terms. Not only have these groups grown ever more powerful and savvy as lobbyists for their interests, but many of our state and local legislatures are now filled with representatives of these constituencies. Their ascendance represents the triumph of the tax-eaters over taxpayers. Where they rule, the pain for taxpayers is especially acute and the economic fundamentals are often the weakest.

4a)Obama's Dangerous Bank Bailout Restoring Citi and BofA to greatness shouldn't be the goal.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Team Obama is wrestling internally over the bank bailout supposedly to be introduced next week. We naturally are on the edge of our seats.


APBut let's understand something: The taxpayer already stands behind the banking system, and is on the hook for its losses in one sense or another. Moreover, that guarantee has become more and more explicit in recent months -- which is not an unmixed blessing, since such explicitness has tended to create new uncertainty among those stakeholders not specifically included in the safety net.

The main uncertainty lately has been whether the safety net includes bank shareholders as well as depositors and creditors. That uncertainty is why we have crazy gyrations in bank share prices, and yet don't have bank runs. Citigroup's shareholders only account these days for a measly $20 billion, in a bank with liabilities of $2 trillion -- yet market speculation over their fate has seemed to be driving government actions.

Here we see the downside of explicitness. By committing specific sums to given banks, policy makers only ended up inviting new speculation about what happens when those cushions are exhausted by fresh accounting writedowns. And now Team Obama seems about to recapitulate this folly with another round of explicit guarantees.

By current leakage, their plan will consist of explicit government insurance for certain bad assets and explicit purchases of other bad assets to be held by a so-called bad bank. For the months or years, then, that it takes to put the plan into effect, the market will have to speculate anew about how each bank's assets will be valued for bailout purposes.

Yet there is a solution better than trying to finalize a division of losses whose size won't be known for years to come. That solution is time, the healer of all wounds.

Remember, this is not the S&L crisis of the 1980s, when hundreds of small banks were incentivized by poor regulation to try to gamble their way out of self-made holes. Today's problems are concentrated on the balance sheets of the biggest, most visible banks. Little banks are relatively easy to close or force into mergers. Banks that are "too big to fail" aren't too big for government to manhandle in a crisis; it's just that the solution is not the same as for a small bank.

Which raises the question: Why not just leave Citi and BofA's bad assets where they are, albeit with regulators sitting at management's elbow to make sure their losses are being conservatively worked off and no wild gambles on resurrection are being taken? The losses would stay with bank shareholders, even if it took 15 years of cash flow to work them off. There'd be no perplexing muddle over how to value assets for bailout purposes. And because the shareholders' stake (much diminished) would remain intact, there'd be every incentive to manage the assets well while minimizing the risk of a bottomless mess like government has made of AIG.

But now we come to the most dangerous assumption underlying the rumored Obama approach -- the idea that we need something called Citi and BofA quickly liberated from their past mistakes so they can go back to serving as the engines of the economy.

They aren't the engines of the economy -- we have a vast and diversified financial sector. Today's real problem is a shortage of reliable borrowers, especially given the uncertainty about house prices. Washington's misguided goal, if you listen closely, seems to be turning these giant banks into public utilities to "jumpstart lending" under political duress. That is, shoveling money at an overleveraged private sector in hopes of stopping the economy from shrinking and markets from clearing.

We should keep in mind that Japan's "lost decade" wasn't so much an accident as a deliberate decision to avoid a rash of foreclosures and bankruptcies and layoffs that might disturb a somnolent "harmony." Whether or not that was the right choice for the Japanese, the U.S. is a different country, and would probably react differently, and not well, to a prolonged government-sponsored stagnation. Yet that's where the Obama bailout may be leading us.



5) The importance of being sinless: From Economist.com

To lose a cabinet appointee may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness


WHEN his transition began, Barack Obama was praised both for the smoothness of his moves and the high-powered people he had brought to unglamorous jobs. No longer. On Tuesday February 3rd Tom Daschle became the second would-be member of Mr Obama’s cabinet to step down over past sins. On the same day Nancy Killefer, who had been nominated as a “performance tsar” charged with scouring government programmes for waste, stepped aside too. Yet a third mini-scandal, over unpaid taxes, did not stop Timothy Geithner from being confirmed as treasury secretary last week.

As a senator Mr Obama championed ethics legislation, and as a candidate he promised a clean White House. One of his first acts was to sign an executive order forbidding people from leaving the administration to join the private sector and turn around to lobby their former colleagues. Good-government types cheered, although Mr Obama has since appointed a former lobbyist from Raytheon, William Lynn, to a post in the Pentagon.

Even before his inauguration Mr Obama saw a first candidate fall because of scandal. Bill Richardson, a former presidential contender himself, was nominated for commerce secretary. But the governor of New Mexico was named in an influence-peddling investigation. He maintained his innocence but bowed out to avoid embarrassing Mr Obama. This week Mr Obama nominated Judd Gregg, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, to become commerce secretary instead. The choice of a moderate Republican was hailed as another canny, bipartisan move.

But the same week has brought the withdrawal of Mr Daschle and Ms Killefer. Mr Daschle, a former Democratic leader in the Senate, was to be secretary of health and human services and the leader of Mr Obama’s efforts to pass a big reform of health care. However it emerged that he had taken the services of a round-the-clock driver and a limousine, an expensive perk for which he never paid taxes, after leaving the Senate in 2005. He also failed to report over $80,000 in consulting income on which he also owed taxes. On Monday Mr Obama “absolutely” continued to back Mr Daschle. On Tuesday morning many still thought he would be confirmed until a joint statement from the president and Mr Daschle announced that he would step down. Later in the day Mr Obama admitted that he had “screwed up” in his handling of the affair.

Mr Obama’s frankness is welcome. But the scandal is an embarrassment in part because Mr Daschle is a former “man of the people” campaigner, who had made so much since leaving office that he could mislay six figures in taxes. A similar irony beset the stepping aside of Ms Killefer. A former partner at McKinsey, a big consultancy, she was to be given the task of going through the budget line-by-line, scouring for waste. In the end she stumbled over another tax peccadillo that has haunted many politicians: failure to pay taxes for a nanny and a chauffeur. Saying she did not want to be a distraction, she too stepped aside on Tuesday.

Mr Obama has let one former tax-avoider through: Tim Geithner, the new treasury secretary, who failed to pay self-employment taxes when he was a consultant for the International Monetary Fund. (Foes of America’s absurdly complicated tax code were delighted to note that even a reputedly brilliant economic mind failed to comply with it.) But with the financial and economic crisis raging, Mr Geithner appeared simply too important to lose. He was confirmed last week.

Republicans, who were tainted by corruption before their loss of Congress in 2006, are enjoying the Democratic stumbles. Mr Obama will claim that the departures of Messrs Daschle and Richardson and Ms Killefer prove that he really is holding his government to a higher standard. And although Mr Obama, two weeks into his presidency, retains a clean image and high approval ratings some doubts are being raised over the competence of those who screened candidates for the top jobs. Mr Obama’s challenges are enormous, not least in pushing through reform of health care. As the shine comes off his halo the real work of governing will grow harder.

6) Three demons plague the Arab world
By Rami G. Khouri



The stark juxtapositions within the Arab world and the wider Middle East-South Asia region were brought home to me one morning this week in Kuwait, where I am participating in a global gathering that seeks to increase the production of indigenous research in the Middle East in order to better influence policy-making. This noble endeavor contrasts sharply with the morning newspaper headlines of suicide bombings in Somalia and Afghanistan, continued military strikes in Israel and Palestine, and the provincial elections in Iraq that happened during a lull between a string of suicide bombings in that country.

Where, in this range of events, is the center of gravity of the Arab world? It is simultaneously in none and all of these developments, for the Arab world is defined both by rampant violence (home-grown and foreign-instigated) and a deep desire to become democratic, productive, and intellectually and culturally vibrant. A key to moving in that direction is understanding the main constraint and the common denominator in all these events. I believe it is the legacy of autocratic, top-heavy, centralized Arab governments that veer into gentle monarchies on the one hand and hard police states on the other.

The modern Arab security state took hold for good in the early 1970s, and has been challenged only in two ways: by foreign armies that overthrew the Iraqi Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, and by slow disintegration or domestic challenge from within, in places like Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Yemen. No Arab country has had the luxury of evolving normally and slowly into a modern, balanced nation-state defining itself and fully controlling its own resources.

The legacy of security-dominated states where power is concentrated in the hands of a family or small group of soldiers has led to two extremes: an almost total lack of indigenous production of cultural capital and intellectual knowledge (with very, very few exceptions, these mostly in Beirut and Cairo), and the widespread use of violence and terror by opposition forces trying to overthrow the incumbents.

The issue being addressed at the gathering of the Global Development Network I am attending in Kuwait clarifies a root problem with sustained Arab autocracy. The production of knowledge and research that can influence policy-making is defined by deep tensions in the region, because autocracy and the production of knowledge are violently contradictory. Those who hold power for decades on end do not have an interest in prompting free intellectual enquiry and free scientific research.


A sign of the problem is that all the institutions of knowledge production - universities, research centers, media - must be approved and licensed by governments. Most Arab governments do not want too many nimble minds openly enquiring into how society operates and power is exercised. This is why most of the best Arab journalists and researchers live abroad.

Where there has been a positive move forward, such as in some Arab satellite channels that openly debate important public issues, the problem remains that providing citizens with more information and a variety of views does not impact on the political process. Better informed citizens do not become more politically empowered citizens.

The lack of real politics is reflected in the absence of peaceful contestation of power and peaceful and regular transitions from one government to the next. When some Arab governments do change, policies do not, because policy is set by a higher authority than official governments. The change of policy that normally accompanies a change of government is on show quite brilliantly these days in the United States, as many men and women move into high government office from positions in universities, think tanks and research centers.

No such thing happens in Arab countries, because independent research institutions and think tanks remain very few in number, and limited in their resources and impact. This situation can only change through homegrown evolution into more democratic, pluralistic governance systems, working with likeminded partners worldwide. Foreign armies cannot do the job for us. Iraq's transformation remains a fascinating ongoing process whose ultimate outcome remains to be seen. It was probably a one-time phenomenon that reflected a unique post-9/11 moment in America that will not be repeated (and should not be).

For now, cross-fertilization between politics and the world of ideas remains weak in the Arab world, which is one reason why our region counts more indigenous terrorists and exiled intellectuals than it does respected resident researchers and public policy analysts. The fact that so many Arabs and their friends abroad insist on reversing this picture is a reason to remain hopeful, and to keep working hard for change, while rejecting the ways of the three demons that continue to plague us: security state autocrats, local terrorists, and foreign armies.

7)The Stimulus Package Is More Debt We Don't Need: Can Obama really defend this 'line by line'?
By TOM COBURN
As the Senate considers a massive $1.1 trillion stimulus bill, it is vital that the American people ask hard questions of their elected officials. When they do, it will become very clear that the bill will not only fail to stimulate the economy, but could seriously delay economic recovery.

As a nation, we got into this mess by spending and investing money that didn't exist. We won't get out of it by doing more of the same.


Yet this is precisely what this bill proposes we do. Less than 10% of the bill could be considered true stimulus, if one assumes tax credits and infrastructure spending will jolt the economy. The other 90% of the bill represents one of the most egregious acts of generational theft in our nation's history, with taxpayer money going to special-interest earmarks, an ill-conceived bailout to states, and permanent spending increases that expand government's reach in areas like health care and education.

The bill's selling point is that three million jobs will be created or saved by this package. What's alarming is that each job will cost $286,000 to create or save. Moreover, one in five will be a government job.

One of the more egregious provisions in the Senate bill is a $166 billion bailout plan for the states that rewards bad budgeting at the state level. Simply sending cash to states without asking for appropriate sacrifices is grossly irresponsible. States will no longer have the incentive to live within their means, because they'll assume the federal government will be there to bail them out.

Instead of a bailout, Congress could offer states an emergency loan that could be repaid at a low interest rate. This approach apparently wasn't considered because the members who wrote the bill aren't simply interested in saving jobs -- they want to push their agenda along the way.

A key example is health care. The Senate bill doubles the amount of the Medicaid bailout requested by governors and lays the groundwork for government-run health care, which invariably leads to rationing. This ideological overreach has led even some Democrats, like Nebraska's Ben Nelson, to express concern that various "sacred cows" in the package are hurting the bill's overall goals.

The bill is also loaded with old-fashioned pork, despite President Barack Obama's insistence that members of Congress refrain from adding earmarks. In fact, the bill contains the most expensive earmark in history: $2 billion for the FutureGen near-zero emission power plant in Matoon, Ill.

Other nonstimulative pork provisions include $88 million for a new polar icebreaker for the Coast Guard, $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees, and $850 million for Amtrak.

What is not in the bill is as troubling as what is. The package does nothing to clear the toxic assets and bad mortgages that helped trigger the credit crisis. It also contains very little meaningful tax relief to make small businesses and American companies more competitive. Instead, the tax provisions of the stimulus are essentially a modest cash handout that repeats the failed policy of George W. Bush's rebate-check stimulus.

Finally, the bill's sponsors have made zero effort to pay for this new spending by eliminating programs that aren't working. Mr. Obama's pledge to go through the budget line-by-line has made no impression on the bill's authors, nor has the plight of millions of Americans faced with tough spending choices.

Dozens of independent watchdog groups, think tanks and elected officials on both sides of the aisle have spent decades identifying areas of the budget that can be cut. Yet Congress remains focused on finding "shovel ready" projects when at least $300 billion in wasteful programs are "scissor ready" today.

One of the lessons I've learned from the practice of medicine is the danger of treating symptoms rather than the disease. Doing so makes the disease worse and causes the symptoms to come back with a vengeance. It's time for government to quit masking the symptoms and deal with this crisis at its source: toxic assets in the mortgage market and a federal government that continues to pollute our economy with pork and failed interventionist policies.

8) South African dock workers say they will not offload an Israeli ship that is set to dock in the harbor of the port city of Durban.

In a Palestine Solidarity Committee news release, the Congress of South African Trade Unions' decision to "strengthen the campaign in South Africa for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against apartheid Israel" is noted. Referring to workers' commitment to "refuse to support oppression and exploitation across the globe," the committee recalls the refusal by Durban dock workers last year to offload arms from China that were destined for Zimbabwe.

The release also says that workers will not allow South African ports to be used as "transit points for goods bound for or emanating from certain dictatorial and oppressive states such as Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Israel."

The release continues: "We also welcome statements by various South African Jews of conscience who have dissociated themselves from the genocide in Gaza. We call on all South Africans to ensure that none of our family members are allowed to join the Israeli Occupation Forces' killing machine."

Calling on the South African government to sever diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, the Palestine Solidarity Committee announced a week of action under the banner "Free Palestine, Isolate Apartheid Israel."

9) Tom Daschle's Washington: His riches illustrate the expanding power of the political class.

Just as Tom Daschle's Senate pals were preparing to grant absolution for his six-figure tax-free limousine -- could've happened to anyone -- the former Majority Leader yesterday withdrew his nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Give Mr. Daschle credit for making the honorable choice, and sparing President Obama from a bipartisan populist revolt.


APBefore this episode vanishes into Beltway lore, however, it's worth drawing a few lessons. Especially because the political left seems to want to make this a morality play about Mr. Daschle's $5.2 million post-Senate windfall as lobbyist and speaking-circuit regular, notably in front of the health-care industry. Apparently these people expected Mr. Daschle to return to Sioux Falls after his 2004 re-election defeat and eke out a hardscrabble existence as a farmer.

But Mr. Daschle's embarrassment of riches is a typical story, and in fact is the result of the liberal ideology his critics have been advocating for decades. The main story of the Obama Presidency so far isn't the contradiction between Mr. Obama's campaign promises and the messier reality of his nominees. That was always inevitable. The real story is the massive transfer of power and wealth now underway from the private sector to the political class. Mr. Daschle could make so much money and achieve such prominence because he was expected to be a central broker in that wealth transfer.

Alston & Bird, the white-shoe law firm that took in Mr. Daschle, is a lobbying shop. Any normal person would therefore consider Mr. Daschle, who does not have a law degree, to be a lobbyist. But he was not technically a lobbyist under Beltway rules, and while it is still unclear exactly what services he performed as "Special Public Policy Advisor" to pile up $2.1 million, we do know he consulted for the insurance conglomerate UnitedHealth Group.

Mr. Daschle cashed in to the tune of nearly a quarter million dollars from various health-care businesses. The Health Industry Distributors Association paid $14,000 to hear him speak in March 2008 about "the impact an Obama administration will have on the industry." America's Health Insurance Plans, the insurers' lobby, gave $20,000 for another speech, as did health-care consulting firms, hospital systems and pharmacy boards.

Mr. Daschle's critics say he breached some fanciful code of honor separating corporate America and government. Please. Business groups spend to get intelligence and minimize political risk. In the case of Mr. Daschle, he was trading less on his career in "public service" than his proximity to and early support for Mr. Obama. While he was the recipient of industry generosity, the going wager was that he'd be White House Chief of Staff.

What Mr. Daschle's lucrative career as influence peddler really illustrates is how much Washington is now expanding its reach over the economy. Politicians and their staffers can make or break fortunes by slipping a rider into a "must pass" bill or dispensing billions of dollars in subsidies to favored constituencies. Naturally businesses are going to protect their interests and hire lobbyists to get the decisions to come out their way.

Had Mr. Daschle been confirmed, he would have been the most important man in a health-care industry expected to be worth $2.5 trillion in 2009, which is larger than the economy of France. With merely a torque to this or that regulation -- to say nothing of the "reform" he was to oversee as White House "health czar" -- he would have channeled all this wealth in one direction or the other. Just another day at the office.

This is all part of the same entitlement mentality that caused Mr. Daschle's former colleagues to barely raise an eyebrow over his "disappointing mistakes" on taxes, as Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus put it. West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller said Mr. Daschle's tax oversights had to be weighed against the value he brings "in terms of the moral necessity of getting universal health care." So tax avoidance is justifiable as long as you're saving mankind.

We have come a long way from liberal outrage over the "K Street Project," Tom DeLay's effort to strong-arm lobbyists into hiring more Republicans. True, when the DeLay GOP settled into incumbency, it dumped the spending restraint and reform that might have limited the ecosystem that allows the Daschles of the world to proliferate. Still, it's amusing to see liberals, who run as the party of government, get momentarily indignant when one of their own cashes in on the spoils of their system.

As for Mr. Obama, as recently as Monday night the President was saying he "absolutely" stood by his nominee before reluctantly accepting his withdrawal. So much for promising to vanquish the lobbyists before banishing the special interests. This was always an implausible bill of goods, considering that the major special interest in Washington is Washington itself.

10) Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek
The late Austrian economist offered good reasons to be skeptical of government action.
By DICK ARMEY

"In the long run, we are all dead," John Maynard Keynes once quipped. An influential British economist, Keynes used the line to dodge the problematic long-term implications of his policy proposals. His analysis of the Great Depression redefined economics in the 1930s and asserted that increased government spending during a downturn could revive the economy.

President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats (very few of whom likely have read Keynes's 1936 book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money") have dug up the dead economist's convenient justification for deficit spending in defense of their bloated stimulus legislation. But none ask the most important question: Was Keynes right?

According to Nobel economist Fredrick Hayek, a contemporary of Keynes and perhaps his greatest critic, Keynes "was guided by one central idea . . . that general employment was always positively correlated with the aggregate demand for consumer goods." Keynes argued that government should intervene in the economy to maintain aggregate demand and full employment, with the goal of smoothing out business cycles. During recessions, he asserted, government should borrow money and spend it.

Keynes's thinking was a decisive departure from classical economics, because arbitrary "macro" constructs like aggregate demand had no basis in the microeconomic science of human action. As Hayek observed, "some of the most orthodox disciples of Keynes appear consistently to have thrown overboard all the traditional theory of price determination and of distribution, all that used to be the backbone of economic theory, and in consequence, in my opinion, to have ceased to understand any economics."

Classical economists up to that time had emphasized a balanced budget and government restraint as the primary goals of fiscal policy. The simplistic notion that "aggregate demand" drove investment and employment threw all of that out the window, but it had one particular convenience for policy makers. Government spending is, according to Keynes's construct, a key component in determining aggregate demand, so more spending, even to resod the Capitol Mall or distribute free contraception, drives the economy in the short run.

A father of public choice economics, Nobel laureate James Buchanan, argues that the great flaw in Keynesianism is that it ignores the obvious, self-interested incentives of government actors implementing fiscal policy and creates intellectual cover for what would otherwise be viewed as self-serving and irresponsible behavior by politicians. It is also very difficult to turn off the spigot in better economic times, and Keynes blithely ignored the long-term effects of financing an expanded deficit.

It's clear why Keynes's popularity endures in Congress. Intellectual cover for a spending spree will always be appreciated there. But it's harder to see any justification for the perverse form of fiscal child abuse that heaps massive debts on future generations.

Today, one problem with manipulating the economy through "discretionary" spending -- that part of the budget not mandated by one entitlement or another -- is that entitlements have grown large enough to influence the economy, a phenomenon unheard of when Keynes was alive. Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and other entitlements are becoming larger factors in economic decision making than what Congress spends on, say, roads. Discretionary spending is becoming irrelevant as a fiscal tool.

Of course, despite Mr. Obama's campaign promises to adhere to "Pay As You Go" budgeting, no one seems terribly worried about paying for what will likely be a trillion-dollar stimulus package. What everyone should agree on is that the money has to come from somewhere, either through higher taxes, borrowing or printing.

If the government borrows the money for the stimulus, then it will either have to print money later or raise taxes to pay it back. If the government raises taxes to pay for the stimulus, it will, in effect, be robbing Peter to pay Paul. If the government prints the money, it will increase inflation, which will decrease the value of the dollar. That would, in effect, rob Paul to pay Paul back with devalued currency.

Taking money out of the private economy -- either through taxes or inflation -- and spending it in a way that doesn't offset the loss of money with real economic gains is worse than doing nothing.

Years ago I developed the "Armey Curve" to explain the negative burden government has on prosperity. The idea, borrowing liberally from Arthur Laffer's curve (which demonstrates that tax revenues fall when the tax burden gets so high that it no longer pays to work), is that at some point the burden of government spending exceeds the private economy's ability to carry it. "Stimulus" spending often does more harm than good, because it takes more money out of the system than it creates and thereby destroys jobs and leads to stagnation and diminished prosperity for all.

Hayek, who famously debated Keynes in a series of articles after the release of "General Theory," gave what I believe to be the most devastating critique of government action to stimulate "aggregate demand." Hayek viewed the boom and bust of the business cycle as primarily a monetary phenomenon created by governments' artificial inflation of money and credit.

Sound money policy, conversely, allowed the disparate knowledge of millions of economic actors to be conveyed through the price system, rationally allocating capital and labor through relative prices. The problem with government attempts to manipulate the economy through fiscal policy -- spending that takes resources away from those who are productive and redistributes it to politically favored interests -- is that it is audacious. It assumes that government knows better how to spend and invest than individuals acting in their families' best interest.

"The real question," according to Hayek, "is not whether man is, or ought to be, guided by selfish motives but whether we can allow him to be guided in his actions by those immediate consequences which we can know and care for or whether he ought to be made to do what seems appropriate to somebody else who is supposed to possess a fuller comprehension of the significance of these actions to society as a whole."

In reality, no one spends someone else's money better than they spend their own. The charade of the current stimulus package, chockablock with earmarks to favored pet constituencies and virtually devoid of national policy considerations, is the logical consequence of Keynesianism in action. It is about politics and power, not sound economics, and I believe that the American people will reject it.

Wish Begets The Thought? Disaster In The Making?

George Stephanopoulos truly has an inside track on the inner thoughts and workings of this administration. But even he was wrong on this one because he had just written why daschle would be approved. (See 1 and 1a below.)

Bret Stephens confronts Obama with some map and geographic reality. (See 2 below.)

Steele may be what the Republicans need but Steele needs to steel himself to some negative statistics. The Democrats will eventually fall on their own sword because power corrupts but that will take a long time. Meanwhile Steele has a tough row to hoe but if anyone can do it Steele probably can. (See 3 below.)

This New York Times Editor thinks Conservatism is dead. If he is correct then so is our nation because practical conservatism is a legitimate restraint on anything goes Liberalism. Rational and thoughtful conservatism provides balance just as rational and thoughtful Liberalism plays a valid and creative role. Does Tanenhaus' wish beget the thought? You decide. (See 4 below.)

James Lewis has deep suspicions about the new O Administration and lays them in out in a withering analysis. He enunciates what I have alluded to and what I suspect we are about to witness. (See 5 below.)

Dick

1) George's Bottom Line: Why Daschle Will Likely Be Confirmed
By George Stephanopoulos


President Obama's pick for HHS Secretary isn't likely to take himself out of the running based on today's facts.

Former Sen. Tom Daschle will, however, get a lot of 'no' votes from Republicans.

But the Democrats are likely going to hold firm for the following reasons:

1) Daschle revealed the problem himself.

2) Daschle has deep relationships in the Senate from his service as majority leader -- he's earned a lot of respect on Capitol Hill.

3) The Driver Problem -- Many members of Congress and senators have drivers or have staff drive them. They don't want this to really open up as an issue.

But while Daschle is likely to be confirmed, President Obama will pay a political price for this.



1a)George's Bottom Line: Why Daschle Withdrew His Nomination
By George Stephanopoulos


Tom Daschle and his team went to bed last night believing they had had a good day after a horrible weekend.

Monday's Senate Finance Committee meeting was not easy. (Ranking Republican Chuck Grassley pushed Daschle hard on his relationship with Leo Hindery and his paid work on healthcare issues.)

But Daschle and his team thought they had done well enough. Finance officials, and even some Republicans, in the room signaled support for Daschle.

And Daschle spent the evening calling finance committee members to thank them.
No question, many Democrats grumbled about the position they'd been put in.

But Senate leaders and the White House -- especially President Obama -- were firm in their support.

Even Senate Republicans believed Daschle would be confirmed after getting roughed up a bit.

So, what happened?

Administration sources insist this was Daschle's decision alone.
That was certainly the line from Robert Gibbs at the podium Tuesday

A source close to Daschle says "he didn't have the stomach for the fight."

The double-barreled combination of a blistering New York Times editorial and a front-page story raising questions about President Obama's commitment to ethics reform in Washington convinced Daschle he had to go.

Already depressed by the recent discovery that his younger brother is stricken with brain cancer, Daschle wasn't prepared for another week of Senate hazing and damaging headlines.

And, he didn't want to hurt his friend, Barack Obama.

The fact that the White House had scheduled President Obama with five interviews with network anchors today is one more piece of evidence that suggests this was not what top White House officials were looking for today, but the President didn't try to convince Daschle to stay and fight.

As sad as he and Daschle's network of White House friends are about his withdrawal, they know how much damage this has done to Obama's reputation. The Administration was appearing to set one standard for its allies, and another for the rest of Washington.

Daschle allies who were hoping that he would prevail in administration debates over whether or not to make a full-court press for universal healthcare this year worry that his withdrawal means the issue will be put on the back burner.

No word yet on who will replace Daschle. The search began only this morning.

2) Iraq Is Obama's Mideast Pillar As an Arab democracy, it's a model for what we would like the rest of the Arab world to become.
By Bret Stephens

Imagine yourself as Barack Obama, gazing at a map of the greater Middle East and wondering how, and where, the United States can best make a fresh start in the region.


Your gaze wanders rightward to Pakistan, where preventing war with India, economic collapse or the Talibanization of half the country would be achievement enough. Next door is Afghanistan, where you are committing more troops, all so you can prop up a government that is by turns hapless and corrupt.

Next there is Iran, drawing ever closer to its bomb. You're mulling the shape of a grand bargain, but Israel is talking pre-emption. Speaking of Israel, you're girding for a contentious relationship with the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, the all-but certain next prime minister.

What about Israel's neighbors? Palestine is riven between feckless moderates and pitiless fanatics. Lebanon and Hezbollah are nearly synonyms. You'd love to nudge Syria out of Iran's orbit, but Bashar Assad isn't inclined. In Egypt, a succession crisis looms the moment its octogenarian president retires to his grave.

And then there is Iraq, the country in the middle that you would have just as soon banished from sight. How's it doing? Perplexingly well.

The final tallies for Saturday's provincial elections aren't in yet. But a few conclusions are warranted. This time, the election seems to have been mostly free of fraud; four years ago, it was beset by fraud. This time, there was almost no violence; four years ago, there were 299 terrorist attacks. This time, 40% of voters in the overwhelmingly Sunni province of Anbar went to the polls; four years ago, turnout was 2%.

In 2005, Iraqis voted their sectarian preferences. Now sectarian parties are out of fashion. "Those candidates who campaigned under the banner of religion should be rejected," Abdul Kareem told Al Jazeera. "They corrupted the name of religion because they are notorious for being thieves. Religion is not politics." Mr. Kareem is a Shiite cleric.

Also out of fashion: Iran, previously thought to be the jolly inheritor of our Iraq misadventure. In 2005, Tehran's political minions in the Iranian-funded Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq -- itself the funder of the dreaded Badr brigade -- swept the field. Candidates loyal to anti-American fire-breather Moqtada al-Sadr also did well. This time, Sadr didn't even dare to field his own slate, and early reports are that the Supreme Council was trounced.

What's in fashion, electorally speaking, are secular parties, as well as the moderately religious Dawa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This wasn't supposed to happen. The Palestinian parliamentary election of 2006 that put Hamas in power was taken in the West as proof that Arab democracy was destined to yield illiberal results. Saturday's election suggests otherwise, assuming there is a structure that guarantees that Islamists must stand for election more than once.

What about security? A month ago, Gen. Ray Odierno predicted that "al Qaeda will try to exploit the elections because they don't want them to happen. So I think they will attempt to create some violence and uncertainty in the population." But al Qaeda was a no-show on Saturday. Meanwhile, more U.S. soldiers died in accidents (12) than in combat (4) for the month of January. The war is over.

So what are you going to do about the one bright spot on your map -- an Arab country that is genuinely democratic, increasingly secular and secure, anti-Iranian and, all-in-all, on your side? So far, your only idea seems to bid to it good luck and bring most of the troops home in time for Super Bowl Sunday, 2010.

That's a campaign promise, but it isn't a foreign policy. Foreign policy begins with the recognition that Iraq has now moved from the liability side of the U.S. ledger to the asset side. As an Arab democracy, it is a model for what we would like the rest of the Arab world to become. As a Shiite democracy, it is a reproach to Iranian theocracy. As the country at the heart of the Middle East, it is ideally located to be a bulwark against Tehran's encroachments.

There was a time when American strategists understood the role countries could play as "pillars" of a regional strategy. Israel has been a pillar since at least 1967; Iran was one until 1979. Turkey, too, is a pillar, but it is fast slipping away, as is Egypt.

Within the Arab world, Iraq is the only country that can now fulfill that role. For that it will need military and economic aid, and lots of it. Better it than futile causes like Palestine, or missions impossible like winning over the mullahs. With Saturday's poll, Iraq has earned a powerful claim to our friendship.

Yes, you'd rather look elsewhere on the map for a Mideast legacy. But Iraq is where you'll find it. Don't miss your chance.

3) Steele’s Challenge:He faces some tough GOP math.
By John J. Pitney Jr.

On winning the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele pledged to “bring this party to every corner, every boardroom, every neighborhood, every community.” He was engaging in rhetorical stretch: Given its limited resources, the RNC cannot literally go everywhere. But his aspiration makes political sense. On the congressional level, Republicans have to expand their reach, because Democrats currently have a bigger playing field.

Democrats can contest just about every kind of House district: rich and poor, rural and urban, black and white. Last year, Montgomery mayor Bobby Bright won an Alabama district that had belonged to the GOP since 1965. In the First District of Idaho, which President Bush twice carried by 2-to-1 margins, Democrat Walt Minnick ousted Republican incumbent Bill Sali. The list goes on.

It doesn’t work the other way around. There was only one 2008 race—an odd one—where a Republican took a deep-blue district. With a delayed election date that depressed turnout, Anh “Joseph” Cao edged out scandal-scarred William Jefferson in Louisiana’s Katrina-depopulated Second District.

That was a fluke. In reality, large swatches of Democratic turf are off limits to the GOP. Ever since the 1960s, Republicans have seldom won more than 10 percent of the black vote, so they are not competitive in African-American districts. Democrats hold 30 of the 31 districts where African Americans make up 40 percent or more of the population (with Cao’s seat as the sole exception). Republicans also find it tough to win Hispanic votes. Democrats have 35 of the 42 districts that are at least 40 percent Hispanic. The few Republican victories are not signs of progress: Three of the seven come from the Cuban American districts in Florida, whose voting patterns differ from those of other Hispanic communities.

New England Republicans have been an endangered species for years, and with the 2008 defeat of Chris Shays, they hold none of New England’s 22 House seats. Now is the first time that the region has lacked any Republican House members since the party’s formation in the 1850s. The neighboring state of New York once had a robust GOP that could win even urban areas. No more. Of New York’s 29 House members, only three are Republicans, none from New York City.

In all, 106 Democratic districts fall into one or more of these categories: black, Hispanic, New England, New York. If the GOP concedes these seats, then it must win about two-thirds of the rest in order to regain a majority. It is hard to see how Republicans could pull off that feat, especially when Democrats can snatch so many GOP seats.

The Senate numbers are just as discouraging. After taking over a number of Republican seats in 2008, Democrats are nearing a 60-vote majority. Bringing down that number will be difficult. According to Gallup, there are seven states in which Democrats have at least a 25-point lead in party identification: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Vermont, New York, Connecticut, and Maryland. (Republicans do not have as large a margin in any state, even Utah.) No Republican has won a Senate election in any of these states since 2000.

But these seven have something else in common: All have elected a Republican governor at least once in the last eight years. Gubernatorial elections are different from senatorial elections, because governors deal with different issues and expectations. Nevertheless, these GOP victories suggest that the Republican label is not totally toxic in blue America. Chairman Steele—who himself won statewide office in Maryland—might give careful analysis to these states to see what Senate candidates can learn from GOP governors.

He might also study the other side. As Democratic national chairman, Howard Dean pursued a “50-state strategy” to rebuild party organizations in places where they had withered. Though the strategy was controversial at first, there is evidence that it has been a major asset. If Steele takes this approach, he may have to work harder than Dean. As long as President Obama is in office, the GOP will make little headway in African American constituencies. And it will take time and patience to crack other Democratic strongholds.

That poses special difficulties, because candidates and their staffs understandably focus on the next election, not the next decade. But if Republicans hope to recover, they need to take a realistic, long-term perspective. They need not aim for radical transformations: A few points here and a few points there can make a real difference.

Such a strategy does not mean that Republicans must renounce the Second Amendment, embrace abortion, or endorse amnesty for illegal aliens. Indeed, it would make no sense to abandon the principles that matter to the party’s most loyal supporters. But Republicans do have to frame those principles in terms that appeal to a wider array of voters. The party cannot think of growing if it depends on a base that is shrinking.

4) Conservatism Is Dead:An intellectual autopsy of the movement.
By Sam Tanenhaus


In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the founding of National Review, the movement's first serious political journal. Ten years later, the right's next leader, Barry Goldwater, suffered one of the most lopsided losses in election history. Yet the "draft Goldwater" campaign secured control of the GOP for movement conservatives. In 1976, the insurgent challenge by Goldwater's heir, Ronald Reagan, to incumbent president Gerald Ford was thwarted. But Reagan's crusade positioned him to win the presidency four years later and initiate the conservative "revolution" that remade our politics over the next quarter-century. In each instance, crushing defeat gave the movement new strength and pushed it further along the route to ultimate victory.

Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal "elites." That these precepts should have found their final, hapless defender in John McCain, who had resisted them for most of his long career, only confirms that movement doctrine retains an inflexible and suffocating grip on the GOP.

More telling than Barack Obama's victory is the consensus, steadily building since Election Day, that the nation has sunk--or been plunged--into its darkest economic passage since the Great Depression. And, as Obama pushes boldly ahead, apparently with public support, the right is struggling to reclaim its authority as the voice of opposition. The contrast with 1993, when the last Democratic president took office, is instructive. Like Obama, Bill Clinton was elected in hard economic times and, like him, promised a stimulus program, only to see his modest proposal ($19.5 billion) stripped almost bare by the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, even though Democrats had handily won the White House and Senate Republicans formed nearly as small a minority as they do today. The difference was that the Republicans--disciplined, committed, self-assured--held the ideological advantage, which Dole leveraged through repeated use of the filibuster. Today, such a stratagem seems unthinkable. There is instead almost universal agreement--reinforced by the penitential testimony of Alan Greenspan and, more recently, by grudgingly conciliatory Republicans--that the most plausible economic rescue will involve massive government intervention, quite possibly on the scale of the New Deal/Fair Deal of the 1930s and '40s and perhaps even the New Frontier/Great Society of the 1960s. All this suggests that movement doctrine has not only been defeated but discredited.

Yet, even as the right begins to regroup, it is not clear that its leaders have absorbed the full implications of their defeat. They readily concede that the Democrats are in charge and, in Obama, have a leader of rare political skills. Many on the right also admit that the specific failures of the outgoing administration were legion. But what of the verdict issued on movement conservatism itself?

There, conservatives have offered little apart from self-justifications mixed with harsh appraisals of the Bush years. Some argue that the administration wasn't conservative at all, at least not in the "small government" sense. This is true, but then no president in modern times has seriously attempted to reduce the size of government, and for good reason: Voters don't want it reduced. What they want is government that's "big" for them--whether it's Democrats who call for job-training programs and universal health care or Republicans eager to see billions funneled into "much-needed and underfunded defense procurement," as William Kristol recommended shortly after Obama's victory.

Others on the right blame Bush's heterodoxy on interlopers, chief among them Kristol's band of neoconservative warriors at The Weekly Standard, who beguiled the administration into the Iraq war and an ill-starred Wilsonian crusade for global democracy. But here again the facts are complicated: Bush's foreign policy owes no more to the neoconservative vision of exportable democracy than to the hard-right "rollback" philosophy of the cold war years. Bush's preemptive war against jihadists, with its promise to "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge," echoes Goldwater's assertion, in 1960, that "given the dynamic, revolutionary character of the enemy's challenge, we [must] ... always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing." And it was Reagan, the hero of the movement's putative golden age, who, in 1982, called for a worldwide "crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation."

Perhaps, then, the explanation lies not in the Republicans' ideas but in the defective marketing of them. This is the line taken by party strategists who think Karl Rove and his team of operatives grew complacent after their victories in 2002 and 2004 and failed to update "the brand" to suit changing demographics in Sunbelt states like Colorado and Nevada, with their socially liberal white professionals and economically liberal blue-collar Hispanics. But this thesis evades a big question: Does the movement have anything to offer such constituencies apart from a plea for their votes?

What conservatives have yet to do is confront the large but inescapable truth that movement conservatism is exhausted and quite possibly dead. And yet they should, because the death of movement politics can only be a boon to the right, since it has been clear for some time the movement is profoundly and defiantly un-conservative--in its ideas, arguments, strategies, and above all its vision.



What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the "organic" unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Burke's conservatism was based not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies. In his most celebrated writings, his denunciation of the French Revolution and its English champions, Burke did not seek to justify the ancien regime and its many inequities. Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead he warned against the destabilizing perils of revolutionary politics, beginning with its totalizing nostrums. Robespierre and Danton, the movement ideologues of their day, were inflamed with the Enlightenment vision of the ideal civilization and sacrificed to its abstractions the established traditions and institutions of what Burke called "civil society." They placed an idea of the perfect society over and above the need to improve society as it really existed.

At the same time, Burke recognized that governments were obligated to use their powers to meliorate intolerable conditions. He had, for example, supported the American Revolution because its architects, unlike the French rebels, had not sought to destroy the English government; on the contrary, they petitioned for just representation within it. Had King George III complied, he would have strengthened, not weakened, the Crown and Parliament. Instead, he had inflexibly clung to the hard line and so shared responsibility for the Americans' revolt. "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation," Burke warned. The task of the statesman was to maintain equilibrium between "[t]he two principles of conservation and correction." Governance was a perpetual act of compromise--"sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil." In such a scheme there is no useful place for the either/or of ideological purism.

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.

How did this happen? One reason is that the most intellectually sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor. In place of the Marxist dialectic they formulated a Manichaean politics of good and evil, still with us today, and their strategy was to build a movement based on organizing cultural antagonisms. Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy--"statist" social programs; "socialized medicine"; "big labor"; "activist" Supreme Court justices, the "media elite"; "tenured radicals" on university faculties; "experts" in and out of government.

But, if it's clear what the right is against, what exactly has it been for? This question has haunted the movement from its inception in the 1950s, when its principal objective was to undo the New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s. This backward-looking program mystified one leading conservative. Whittaker Chambers, a repentant ex-communist, had passed through a brief counterrevolutionary phase but then, in his last years, had gravitated toward a genuinely classic conservatism. He distilled his thinking in a remarkable sequence of letters written from the self-imposed exile of his Maryland farm, and sent to a young admirer, William F. Buckley Jr. When their relationship began, Buckley--a self-described "radical conservative"--was assembling the group of thinkers and writers who would form the core of National Review, a journal conceived to contest the "liberal monopolists of 'public opinion.'" Buckley was especially keen to recruit Chambers. But Chambers turned him down. He sympathized with the magazine's opposition to increasingly centralized government, but, in practical terms, he believed challenging it was futile. It was evident that New Deal economics had become the basis for governing in postwar America, and the right had no plausible choice but to accept this fact--not because liberals were all-powerful (as some on the right believed) but rather because what the right called "statism" looked very much like a Burkean "correction."

Chambers witnessed the popular demand for the New Deal firsthand. He raised milch cattle, and his neighbors were farmers. Most were archconservative, even reactionary. They had sent the segregationist Democrat Millard Tydings to the Senate, and then, when Tydings had opposed McCarthy's Red-hunting investigations, they had voted him out of office. They were also sworn enemies of programs like FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Act, which tried to offset the volatility of markets by controlling crop yields and fixing prices. Some had even been indicted for refusing to allow farm officials to inspect their crops. Nonetheless, Chambers observed, his typical neighbor happily accepted federal subsidies. In other words, the farmers wanted it both ways. They wanted the freedom to grow as much as they could, even though it was against their best interests. But they also expected the government to bail them out in difficult times. In sum, "the farmers are signing for a socialist agriculture with their feet."

To Chambers, an avid student of history, this trend toward government reliance was a function of the unstoppable rise of industrial capitalism and the new technology it had brought forth. Chambers put the matter bluntly: "The machine has made the economy socialistic." And the right had better adjust. "A conservatism that will not accept this situation, he wrote, "is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy." It might well be "the duty of intellectuals ... to preach reaction," but only "from an absolute, an ideal standpoint. It is for books and posterity. It does not bear on tactics or daily life. ... Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles."

It sounded like Burke, though Chambers occupied what he called "the Beaconsfield position," a reference to the Earl of Beaconsfield--a.k.a. Benjamin Disraeli, after Burke the second great figure in classic conservatism. In his long career, which spanned most of the nineteenth century, Disraeli advocated "just, necessary, expedient" policies--that is, the policies the public demanded even when they contradicted his own ideological certitudes. Disraeli conceived this approach during the Industrial Revolution, which had caused a serious rupture in England's social structure and also in its politics, as a rising class of capitalists began to accumulate vast wealth and demanded more say, via voting reform, in a government still dominated by the Crown and landed aristocrats. At first, Disraeli favored the status quo because he believed that the monarchy bound different classes together and that centuries of feudal obligation had instilled in the nobility a deep sense of responsibility to the poor, who were most vulnerable to exploitation in the industrialists' factories and workhouses. But, ultimately, Disraeli realized the futility of this argument. As a statesman, he became an innovative reformer, partly to outflank the Liberals, partly to keep the Conservative party viable in a time of dynamic upheaval, but also because he came to see that, in the modern age, conservatism required an activist government that guarded the interests and needs of the entire population.

Chambers was not alone in seeing a divide between classic conservative thought and the polarizing politics of the movement. Indeed he seems to have been influenced by "The Politics of Nostalgia," an essay by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published in June 1955, five months before the first issue of National Review appeared. Schlesinger's subject was the unexpected rise of "conservatism as a respectable social philosophy" in the postwar period. One book in particular, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, a sumptuously written survey of the classic Anglo-American tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had attracted much attention. But, Schlesinger noted, there was a strange disconnect. Kirk and others genuinely revered traditional conservatism. And yet, once "they leave the stately field of rhetoric and get down to actual issues of social policy, they tend quietly to forget about Burke and Disraeli and to adopt the views of the American business community." Kirk, for example, denounced federally sponsored school lunch programs as a "vehicle for totalitarianism" and Social Security as a form of "remorseless collectivism."

Where in this, Schlesinger asked, was even a hint of classic conservatism, with its concern for the social and moral costs of unchecked industrial capitalism?


Disraeli with his legislation on behalf of trade unions, his demand for government intervention to improve working conditions, his belief in due process and civil freedom, his support for the extension of suffrage, his insistence on the principle of compulsory education! If there is anything in contemporary America that might win the instant sympathy of men like Shaftesbury and Disraeli, it could well be the school lunch program. But for all his talk of mutual responsibility and the organic character of society, Professor Kirk, when he gets down to cases, tends to become a roaring Manchester liberal of the Herbert Hoover school.


For years to come, this paradox would roil the right, which remained split between the Burkean politics of realistic adjustment and the revanchist politics of counterrevolution. The realist Chambers, agreeing at last to write for National Review, clung to the Beaconsfield position. He supported the Eisenhower administration's negotiations with the Soviets, defended civil liberties, praised the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith. Another realist, Garry Wills, National Review's wunderkind in the 1950s and early '60s, urged a consensus conservatism that "can give the practical art of politics a combination of flexibility and stability" and also "seek 'the common good,' not as some ideal scheme of order, or quantitative accumulation of individual goods, but as the real life of the 'commonality,' of community in all its enriching forms." By contrast, the revanchist (and ex-Trotskyist) Willmoore Kendall--a mentor to both Buckley and Wills--advocated a contemporary politics waged in military terms, "a line of battle between two sets of combatants, each fighting to defeat the other ... there is a battle in progress, even a war in progress."

At first these debates were intellectual sideshows, with no overt connection to the actual politics of the time. The 1950s and early '60s were the apex of bipartisan consensus. No matter who was in office, whether it was the tightfisted Eisenhower or the free-spending Kennedy and Johnson, government inexorably expanded, driven by the twin engines of what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" and a booming post-industrial economy that made it possible to improve conditions for the mass of citizens. But, by the late '60s, the situation had changed. Social disruptions similar to the kinds Burke and Disraeli had experienced had come to America. A "communications revolution" created a culture of continual novelty. And the Vietnam quagmire, combined with a civil rights movement shifting from hope to frustration, undermined the authority of the Democratic Party and its current version of New Deal liberalism. The same policymakers who conceived and executed New Frontier and Great Society programs, from the Peace Corps and Vista to the War on Poverty, were helpless to manage a politics of countercultural protest--from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to the March on the Pentagon to riots in Watts and Detroit. The most conspicuous energies flowed outside the bounds of organized government and normative society and, in many instances, against them both.

Conditions were ripe for a resurgent conservatism predicated on reasserting the values of institutional stability. One who saw this was Buckley, whose politics had steadily matured. In 1968, a cataclysmic year in which two political assassinations and a series of riots made it seem that the country might actually descend into anarchy, Buckley, writing in explicitly Burkean terms, affirmed the need to maintain social order, even if it meant preserving the welfare state. Weeks before the two national conventions were held (each eclipsed by a riot), Buckley wrote a column based on a remark Gerry Bush, a young operative in Hubert Humphrey's campaign, had made to a British journalist. "We can win the election in November," he had said, "but then can we govern the country?" Buckley interviewed Bush and reported that Bush's "stated worries were by no means confined to the difficulties that a Humphrey administration would have in governing the country. He meant that the serious question has arisen: Can anyone govern the country?"

Buckley had begun to give serious thought to Chambers's equation: "how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles." The reason was a rapid sequence of election campaigns--Goldwater's for president in 1964, Buckley's own for mayor of New York City in 1965, and Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966. Each episode had reinforced a political home truth: The right had a chance of prevailing, but only if it attracted the broad base of voters who were non-ideological and, in some cases, not even attached to either major party. To attract these voters in the middle, the GOP had to acknowledge that most were as dependent on big government as Chambers's Maryland neighbors had been. What was more, amid the upheavals of the '60s citizens wanted government--specifically the federal government--to exert the authority Burke and Disraeli had claimed for it. It made no sense for conservatives to attack "statism" when it was institutions of "the State" that formed the bedrock of civil society. In 1967, when Reagan, soon after his election, was being accused of having sold out his anti-government principles--not least because he had submitted the highest budget in state history--Buckley wondered what exactly critics expected Reagan to do, "padlock the state treasury and give speeches on the Liberty amendment?"



It was this new sophistication that propelled modern American conservatism to the heights it reached in 1965-1975, its peak period as an intellectual force. In those years, The Public Interest came into existence, with its rigorously nonpartisan policy analysis; Commentary published searching essays by writers left (Richard Goodwin), right (Jeane Kirkpatrick), and center (Daniel Patrick Moynihan); National Review published Wills and Joan Didion along with bracing columns by Buckley (who proposed, in 1969, that the country would benefit from the election of a black president), James Burnham, and Frank Meyer. The period's two most prescient political books--Wills's Nixon Agonistes and Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority--were shaped in the crucible of the right, and drew on its vocabulary, but were exercises in analysis, not in polemics. Sifting through the 1968 election, Wills concluded: "The liberal Eastern Establishment found it was not needed on election day--which made its leaders take a second look at the Forgotten American, at an angry baffled middle class that, paying the bill for progress, found its values mocked by spokesmen for that progress. These voters felt cheated, disregarded, robbed of respect; and unless their support could be reenlisted, the Establishment's brand of liberalism would perish as a political force."

Phillips, meanwhile, was one of several thinkers who examined a crucial distinction between the New Deal and the Great Society. The first had been a response to an economic emergency. A fearful public had been clamoring for help, and the government had met it responsibly. But the Great Society was developed at a time of supreme confidence among the governing class, who were convinced they could preemptively cure ills invisible to others. Policy intellectuals had moved ahead of the public--perhaps too far ahead. The "war on poverty was not declared at the behest of the poor," Moynihan wrote in the first issue of The Public Interest in 1965. "Just the opposite. The poor were not only invisible .. . they were also silent." Coal miners in the Appalachians, the first targeted beneficiaries, "were desperately poor, shockingly unemployed, but neither radical nor in any significant way restive." The radicalism, such as it was, originated inside the Beltway. Once the program got under way, there was "little involvement from the workers themselves."

As liberals unwittingly squeezed themselves into the stereotypes conservatives had invented, conservative intellectuals began to look like prophets for identifying a self-appointed "managerial elite" (Burnham's term from 1941) that was leading a "liberal revolution" (Kendall's, from 1963). The poor--believers in the American dream, content to struggle upward on their own--had become "a project" for technocrats intoxicated with nostalgie de la boue. In his book Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, Moynihan--disillusioned with the programs he helped instate--ridiculed the pretensions of social scientists, "who love poor people [and] ... get along fine with rich people" but "do not have much time for the people in between." "In particular," he wrote, "they would appear to have but little sympathy with the desire for order, and anxiety about change, that are commonly encountered among working-class and lower middle-class persons. The privileged children of the upper middle classes more and more devoted themselves, in the name of helping the oppressed, to outraging the people in between." The absurdities of "social engineering" became sport for observers like Tom Wolfe, who satirized their excesses in Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers: "So the poverty professionals were always on the lookout for the bad-acting dudes who were the 'real leaders,' the 'natural leaders,' the 'charismatic figures,' in the ghetto jungle."

This liberal overreach combined with the right's new sophistication promised a new period in U.S. politics, one in which conservatives, fortified by Burkean principles, might emerge as the most articulate voices of "civil society," separating out the strands of true reform, which drew on inherited values, from "liberal-left" attempts to make those values extinct. Perhaps the Great Society could be retooled, tamed into a legitimate extension of the New Deal. But, to accomplish this, the right would have to deal honestly with capitalism and its many ambiguities.

In 1958, Chambers had declared (following Disraeli): "Conservatism is alien to the very nature of capitalism whose love of life and growth is perpetual change. We are living in one of its periods of breathless acceleration of change." This contradiction and others animated "Capitalism Today," a special issue of The Public Interest published in 1970. In an ambitious essay, Daniel Bell wrote that capitalism was transforming society and that "the corporate class," America's most powerful, had "abdicated" its obligation to reconcile its modernizing impulses with traditional values and so bore some responsibility for a contemporary culture in which "antinomianism and anti-institutionalism ruled." Writing in the same issue, Irving Kristol lauded two intellectuals of the industrial era, Matthew Arnold and Herbert Croly--both "liberal reformer[s] with essentially conservative goals." Arnold, Disraeli's contemporary, had deplored the philistinism of the business elite, its complacent indifference to humanism and the arts, while Croly, in his book The Promise of American Life, had exposed the emptiness of free-market liturgy and its corollary belief that moral and social benefits could be achieved "merely by liberating the enlightened self-enterprise of the American people." Kristol himself lamented "the ideological barrenness of the liberal and conservative creeds" and said that what America needed was a "combination of the reforming spirit with the conservative ideal."

In retrospect, two horrific events, Vietnam and Watergate, crowd out all other memories of the early 1970s. But the decade began with the promise of a mature conservatism. Richard Nixon, who took office as a credentialed anticommunist, had the authority to orchestrate a quick end to the Vietnam war, something voters clearly wanted. The civil disruptions that had plagued the late '60s also seemed soluble since the increasing militancy of the protest movements (the Weathermen, the Black Panthers) had tried the public's patience and created the demand for a return to civil society and respect for its governing institutions. Nixon, a protege of the moderate Eisenhower but also the prosecutor of Alger Hiss, seemed well equipped to combine "the reforming spirit with the conservative ideal." And his presidency initially seemed to pursue this objective. In 1969, Kevin Phillips, the most gifted strategist in Nixon's first campaign, recognized the need for Burkean compromise. Since "the emerging Republican majority," as Phillips called it, was sure to be built on the party's cooptation of Southern conservatives and on the frustrations of restive white ethnics, some of whom were attracted to the provocations of the segregationist George Wallace, it was all the more important that "Democratic liberalism" remain "a vital and creative force in modern politics ... injecting a needed leavening of humanism into the middle-class realpolitik of the new Republican coalition."

Of course it didn't happen. Why not? A big reason was Nixon himself. Rather than reconciling the two strains of conservatism, he played them against each other, sometimes strategically, sometimes cynically, sometimes paranoically, always chaotically. He perpetuated civil rights initiatives in the North, but then tried to appease white Southerners with archconservative Supreme Court appointees. Even as Nixon's most inspired cabinet choice, Moynihan, proposed a dramatic program for transferring cash directly to the poor, Nixon planted Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Economic Opportunity, with instructions to dismantle it. In foreign policy, Nixon sent equally mixed messages. His overtures to the Soviet Union and China angered the right; his secret bombing of Cambodia inflamed the left. His legacy would be "the politics of polarization."

The polarization climaxed with Watergate. That cluster of White House crimes, once uncovered and prosecuted, gave conservatives the ideal occasion to reassert their role as guardians of social order. It was, after all, conservatives--most notably Burnham in Congress and the American Tradition--who had been inveighing for years against the destabilizing dangers of overreaching "Caesarist" presidents. Burnham was incensed when Nixon invoked "executive privilege" to evade congressional inquiry into "[t]he shoddy little trail of this pipsqueak Watergate business."

But the new generation of movement intellectuals interpreted Watergate differently. Just as liberals suspicious of Bill Clinton rallied around him during his impeachment, so Nixon's critics on the right defended him during Watergate. The true culprit, they decided, wasn't Nixon. It was the dark liberal forces arrayed against him. A "long term change in the equation of political power," Jeffrey Hart theorized in National Review, had placed the president at the mercy of "the federal bureaucracy," which, "though nominally part of the 'executive branch,' actually operates with considerable autonomy." But this "long term" change appeared to have happened overnight, with the election of the first president who had ties to the right. Hart also identified a second culprit, the "liberal-left bias of the major media."

The argument that political power emanated from an alliance of liberal government bureaucrats and a sympathetic press became the favored theme in the movement's next phase, elaborated in neopopulist books like Phillips's Mediacracy, Patrick J. Buchanan's Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories, and William A. Rusher's The Making of a New Majority. In assessing the burgeoning literature of "New Right" ideology, Jeane Kirkpatrick detected a unifying set of beliefs she found delusional:


Among these are the idea that there exists in the electorate a hidden conservative majority; that the social division with the greatest potential political significance is not that between "haves" and "have-nots" but between the liberal elite and everybody else; that a realignment of the parties into two ideologically homogeneous groups is both desirable and likely; that the Republican party may not prove an effective institutional channel for the expression of truly conservative politics and should perhaps be abandoned; and that the principal obstacles to the conservative cause are the nation's media monopolies through whose "distorting lens" is filtered "almost every scrap of information Americans receive of their national government, its programs, policies, and personalities."


It was back to civil war, with some of the most intense skirmishes waged inside the GOP. Buchanan and Rusher, in particular, "were offended by the continuing presence in the Republican Party of a liberal minority which, ideologically speaking, belonged on the other side," Kirkpatrick noted. So preoccupied with doctrinal purity, however, New Right analysts missed the real meaning of the country's rightward drift, which had almost nothing to do with movement ideology. It was true that "a large majority of American adults are conservative," Kirkpatrick acknowledged, but in the classic, not movement sense, since "they are attached to the existing society and will support it against challenges to its legitimacy."

The Burkean moment was dissipating, and not only because of New Right populists. In 1975, the same year Phillips's, Buchanan's, and Rusher's manifestos all were published, Irving Kristol, the onetime elegist of the non-ideological "reforming spirit," identified a "new class" of liberal enemies. They were "not much interested in money but are keenly interested in power," Kristol wrote. "Power for what? Well, the power to shape our civilization--a power, which, in a capitalist system, is supposed to reside in the free market. The 'new class' wants to see much of this power redistributed to government, where they will then have a major say in how it is exercised." And who, exactly, populated this new class? "[S]cientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of the government bureaucracy."

This formulation mirrored "the antinomianism and anti-institutionalism" Bell had attributed to the countercultural left. The right, it appeared, was nursing its own version of anti-Americanism. In fact, it had been festering for many years. As Garry Wills, who broke with the movement in the 1970s but continued to call himself a conservative, observed: "The right wing in America is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy of 'conserving' an actual order it does not want to conserve."

The attack on the "new class," rooted in cultural hostility, dominated movement conservatism for the next 30 years, up through the administration of George W. Bush. On one side, as Rusher described it, were "businessmen, manufacturers, hard-hats, blue-collar workers, and farmers." On the other: "a liberal verbalist elite (the dominant media, the major foundations and research institutions, the educational establishment, the federal and state bureaucracies) and a semipermanent welfare constituency."

The great tribune of this new polarity was Ronald Reagan, with his denunciations of "big government" and the Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" it supported and his devotion (with urging from Kristol) to supply-side economics. The New Right was not only anti-Burkean. For all its populist enthusiasms, it reached back to the plutocratic Old Right of the Depression years, when businessmen had opposed federal assistance to the jobless because (as William E. Leuchtenburg summarized the argument in his book The Perils of Prosperity) "the suffering of the unemployed was not the product of an economic breakdown but was the direct result of their moral infirmity."

As Reagan's first term approached its end, it "has achieved as yet hardly anything in bringing the most rapidly growing domestic programs under control," Nathan Glazer concluded, after examining the available budget data. There was a reason nothing was done: The untouched programs benefited the "Reagan Democrats" who had been wooed in 1980 with the pledge that "insurance programs" like Social Security and Medicare would not be touched. The boom had been lowered in only one place: "The advocates of the poor play no role in this administration," Glazer found. "From this fact one can conclude that a certain blindness to their problems at best, and a positive malice at worst, animates the administration's policies." So much for the Beaconsfield position.

With Reagan, the argument between realism and revanchism all but ended. The revanchists had won. They consolidated their power during the 1990s when Republicans spent the better part of Bill Clinton's two terms trying to delegitimize him, even as he collaborated with them "to end welfare as we know it." The movement's new Danton, Newt Gingrich, who became speaker of the House in 1995, proposed "reforms"--"term limits" for representatives, the purging of moderates from committee chairmanships--that would have mystified conservative thinkers, such as Burnham and Kendall, who had contended that Congress's strength derived in large part from its institutional traditions.

The right, which for so long had deplored the politics of "class warfare," had become the most adept practitioners of that same politics. They had not only abandoned Burke. They had become inverse Marxists, placing loyalty to the movement--the Reagan Revolution--above their civic responsibilities. In 1995, the time of Gingrich's ascendancy, Kristol buoyantly spelled out the terms of revanchist strategy: "American conservatism is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Though, inevitably, most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win votes. This movement is issue oriented. It will happily meld with the Republican party if the party is 'right' on the issues; if not, it will walk away." By this calculus, all the obligations flow in only one direction. Parties are accountable to movement purists, while purists incur no reciprocal debt. They determine the "right" position, and the party's job is to advance it. Kristol does not consider whether purists might be expected to maneuver at all or even to modify their views--for the good not only of the party but also the larger polity.

Kristol went on, in this essay, to extol the contributions of two movement subgroups, the neoconservatives and the evangelicals. It was of course this alliance that most fervently supported George W. Bush during his two terms and remains most loyal to him today.

By their lights, they are right to do so. Bush, so often labeled a traitor to conservative principles, was in fact more steadfastly devoted to them than any of his Republican predecessors--including Ronald Reagan. Few on the right acknowledge this today, for obvious reasons. But not so long ago many did. At his peak, following September 11, Bush commanded the loyalties of every major faction of the Republican Party. The big central domestic proposal of his first term, the $1.3 trillion tax cut, extended Reagan's massive "tax reform" from the 1980s. Shortly before the Iraq invasion, Martin Anderson, Reagan's top domestic policy adviser, told Bill Keller (writing in The New York Times Magazine) that Bush was unmistakably Reagan's heir. "On taxes, on education, it was the same. On Social Security, Bush's position was exactly what Reagan always wanted and talked about in the '70s," Anderson said. "I just can't think of any major policy issue on which Bush was different." The prime initiative of Bush's second term, the attempt to privatize Social Security, drew directly on movement scripture: Milton Friedman denounced the "compulsory annuities" of Social Security in Capitalism and Freedom. Buckley noted the advantages of "voluntary" accounts in his early manifesto, Up From Liberalism. So did Barry Goldwater during his presidential campaign in 1964. Bush went further than Reagan, too, in the war he waged against the federal bureaucracy. And his attacks on the "liberal-left bias of the major media" were the most aggressive since Nixon's.

And then there was Iraq, the event that shaped Bush's presidency and, by most accounts, brought both him and the movement to ruin. It was also the event most at odds with classic conservative thinking. It is customary even now to say that the architects of the Iraq occupation failed because they naively placed too much faith in democracy. In fact, the problem was just the opposite. So contemptuous of the actual requirements of civil society at home, Bush's war planners gave no serious thought to how difficult it might be to create such a society in a distant land with a vastly different history. Those within the administration who tried to make this case were marginalized or removed from power.

In one of his prescient early writings, The Vindication of the English Constitution, a pamphlet published in 1835, the very young Disraeli reviewed the parallel democratizing experiments of his own time. In every nation where democracy had flourished, Disraeli observed, the rule of law was already embedded in social custom. This was why America had easily made the transition from a colonial protectorate to an independent constitutional society, while South American nations had not. Democracy was the fruit, not the precondition, of civil order. "Political institutions, founded on abstract rights and principles, are mere nullities," Disraeli wrote. Europe, too, had its pre-democratic places where "a comparative civilisation had been obtained under the influence of a despotic priesthood. And these are the regions to which it is thought fit suddenly to apply the institutions which regulate the civil life of Yorkshire and of Kent!"

In the end, movement conservatives got the war they wanted--both at home and abroad. It ended, at last, with the 2008 election, and the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right.

What our politics has consistently demanded of its leaders, if they are to ascend to the status of disinterested statesmen, is not the assertion but rather the renunciation of ideology. And the only ideology one can meaningfully renounce is one's own. Liberals did this a generation ago when they shed the programmatic "New Politics" of the left and embraced instead a broad majoritarianism. Now it is time for conservatives to repudiate movement politics and recover their honorable intellectual and political tradition. At its best, conservatism has served the vital function of clarifying our shared connection to the past and of giving articulate voice to the normative beliefs Americans have striven to maintain even in the worst of times. There remains in our politics a place for an authentic conservatism--a conservatism that seeks not to destroy but to conserve.

5) Obama may become a disaster
By James Lewis

By their actions ye shall know them. By now we are seeing an ominous pattern of actions by the O administration. We know that President Obama is a very slick liar indeed, but then so was Bill Clinton. But Clinton had a smaller majority in Congress, and was forced to compromise after the Gingrich Congress was elected in 1994. It is still possible that Obama may turn toward the mainstream. But the early omens look dark.


Foreign and military affairs


There is a reason why Israel's voters are suddenly turning to the center-Right Netanyahu and Likud. They fear that for the first time since Harry Truman, an American administration is turning against the Jewish State. Obama's first phone call after the election was made to Mahmoud Abbas. His first television interview was with Al Arabiya. The appointments of Susan Powers and Susan Rice bode ill for the entire Middle East. A meeting with Hugo Chavez -- to negotiate what, exactly? Forthcoming recognition of radical Islamofascist Iran on their terms, not ours, are all ominous straws in the wind. Richard Holbrooke has just infuriated two crucial governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan, by predicting their doom, and still was appointed special envoy to those governments.


The O's just announced a 10% cut for the defense budget, while the overall budget deficit has just risen by two trillion dollars. That may signal a Carteresque drawdown in our burdened military. This is not the time to lower our guard, but like Jimmy Carter, the O administration is betting against history.


We now know that in violation of Federal law, the Obama campaign started negotiations with Iran, Syria and perhaps Hugo Chavez long before American voters elected O. That flagrant disregard for the law and for simple propriety signals a radical turn Left. If that is accurate, expect the Obama administration to start a scapegoating campaign against Binyamin Netanyahu if he becomes Prime Minister. That would be the first time that any American administration has turned against an elected leader of a vigorous, pro-American democratic ally. The voters in Israel may be preparing to go it alone if necessary. It would be difficult, but it can be done.


Flunking Econ 101


The O administration has some sensible economic voices, but they don't seem to carry much clout. Larry Summers is fairly mainstream, Robert Reich is turning radical, and Paul Krugman is a hair-pulling wild man. The so-called stimulus bill is pure political payoff to Democrat city machines, the teachers' unions, and faithful left wing armies like ACORN. Those 1.17 trillion dollars are not designed to stimulate normal economic activity, defined as products and services that Americans want and will work for -- which is what "supply and demand" really means, after all.


The economy is one gigantic incentive machine. Take away the incentive value of work and buying things, and yes, you will get a very bad recession. And no, Nancy Pelosi has it wildly wrong by arguing that more subsidized birth control means more wealth per person, for those who are actually born. The administration is even ignoring the first-grade lessons of the Smooth-Hawley tariff with its buy-American provisions in the House bill. Suddenly alarmist headlines are appearing in the worshipful European press. Will the US turn protectionist under Obama? Watch what the Senate does with the outlandish House bill, and we will know the answer.


Future generations are being burdened with this second trillion dollar payoff in a few months -- after the first trillion bucks for TARP. But fear not. The O administration is promising yet more trillions in spending, under the mad delusion that the New Deal didn't spend enough on things people didn't want. The stock market is signaling fear and doubt. So far, the market looks to be right.


A Commissar style of governance


Vladimir Lenin pioneered a double-layered style of control by Soviet Party Commissars. Every government official and military officer was doubled by a Party Commissar, who wielded the real power. The result was wild swings between radicalization and stagnation in the USSR. Nobody could act without worrying about the local Commissars, who owed their real allegiances to the Kremlin. Obama is using a similar strategy by directing Samantha Power to go wherever new Sec. State Hillary Clinton goes.

Those two ladies hate each other, even before Powers called Hillary "a monster" during the primaries. Power will report on Hillary to the White House. The Obamas are introducing a parallel staff for the major departments in the White House, to keep a jealous eye on its own appointees. The Clintons did this with the Justice Department, where Jamie Gorelick was the real power at Justice, and Janet Reno became the PR front. We know about the results in a suicidal anti-terror policy, the cynical return of the little refugee boy Elian Gonzalez to the Castro tyranny, and the Waco massacre.


A Government-Media fusion


Karl Marx told his followers "First, conquer the Organs of Propaganda." In Marx's Germany there was no free press. Britain was one of the few examples of relative freedom in Europe, which is why Marx ended up being a foreign correspondent in London, as a ferocious public enemy of capitalism and elected governments.


Last week we found out that Rahm Emmanuel, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville and Paul Begala have been carrying on daily, hour-long conference calls for the last 17years, even while they were hopping from one top job to another in the White House, ABC News, and various liberal political campaigns. If you think all the big media sound oddly similar, we now now why.


A lockstep alliance between government and the big media is a marker of radical Leftist rulers. Putin just had a couple of more journalists murdered in Moscow. That is not likely to happen here, but then, it wont be necessary. The big media are already PR flacks for the Left. Well, just to make that relationship of buyer and bought explicit, a Boston Globe journalist has just proposed a special Federal bailout for newsies who have utterly destroyed their own audiences. Somewhere in Hell Jozef Goebbels is smiling.


Appointing openly corrupt officials


Obama's no-lobbyist rule is now a public joke. Confessed tax cheaters were propopsed for top positions, like Tom Daschle and Timothy Geithner. Big lobbyist power couples in Washington are being drawn in, including the Daschles. And of course we have the endless Congressional show of Democrat corruption by Charlie Rangel, Chris Dodd and far too many others.


The appointment of radical Greenies to positions like the "Science Czar" -- a huge self-contradiction -- are sending very bad signals to the giant Federal research establishment.


Moving against conservative media


Immediately after the election, Fox News and Washington Times reporters were thrown off the Obama campaign plane. Obama's first television interview just took place with terror-supporting Al-Arabiya TV, an Islamist riff on CNN. A Republican FCC member has warned that a disguised censorhip rule giving local leftist groups additional "community input" into radio license renewals may become law by administrative fiat.


That's what we are seeing so far. Keep a sharp out in the coming weeks and months. Let's hope the O's will see reason somehow. But so far, the signals sent by their actions are ominous.