Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 9)
Chapter 9 is titled “Family”.
As someone who long ago decided, along with my wife, that only once of us would work outside the home so that the other could raise the children and homeschool, I find Obama’s talk about the hardship of raising kids in a two-working-parent household to be disingenuous and obnoxious. On one meager salary, my wife and I bought a small house and lived acceptably well. Now, it’s a crisis because people can’t send their kids to top schools and have ballet lessons unless both parents are working, and of course, the government needs to help.
Cry me a river.
It’s a manufactured crisis, because people want it all. They want big nice houses and choice communities, they want two nice cars, big TVs, etc etc etc. It’s hard to have all of this stuff on one income, so people choose to have both spouses work. Then they complain that they are stressed and sleep-deprived, and the kids suffer for it.
This is NOT a crisis, except among people with incomes well below the middle class range. This is a choice people make, a choice with consequences that people want to escape. Populist Obama, of course, is very happy to promise people assistance in escaping these consequences.
The solution, of course, is “high-quality affordable day care for every family that needs it.” Federal and state day care tax credits, subsidies to middle-class and low-income people, and improved licensing and training for day-care workers. And since we’ve already got the schools as a pseudo-day-care system, he proposes longer school days, summer school, and more after school programs. Cap it all off with paid parental leave laws, requiring employers to give people paid time off for parental duties.
What all of this amounts to is forcing someone like me, a father in a single income household, to pay taxes that end up subsidizing the lifestyle choices of others, in greater governmental support of day care and schools that I don’t use. Perhaps a large tax credit for homeschooling would be an appropriate offset, but fat chance you’ll see that anywhere in his agenda.
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If there’s one thing that social conservatives have been right about, it’s that our modern culture sometimes fails to fully appreciate the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions – the sacrifices and just plain hard work – of the stay-at-home mom. Where social conservatives have been wrong is in insisting that this traditional role is innate – the best or only model of motherhood. I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best for them and their families.
I can’t even begin to describe how irritating I find this passage.
When people make choices about how to run their families and their lives, they typically need information from others to weigh the pros and cons of their choices. It is usually somewhat difficult for people to experiment with family arrangements to determine what works best for them. Therefore, people rely on observation of others, as well as tradition and societal wisdom to figure out how to structure their lives.
I agree completely with Obama in wanting my daughters to have choices. However, unlike Obama, they will be taught early on that choices have consequences, and that not all choices are equal. Obama wants women to be able to do whatever they want, with the government filling in the gaps to raise their kids via schools and daycare. His message to women is that no matter how thin you spread yourself, no matter how many tasks you take on, the government will be behind you helping to take up your slack.
That is an awful message to send, one that hurts families and hurts children. Children need parents, not daycare workers. There is absolutely no question in my mind that a stay-at-home mom is the best situation for raising children, and in the interests of promoting guilt-free choice for women, Obama is content to blow away all evidence that this is the case and all value judgments about how women choose to live their lives.
I understand completely that compromises need to be made, that some women would prefer to work, that sometimes for financial reasons women have to work. That’s fine, I’m not going to throw stones at women with jobs. People make their choices, and they accept the consequences.
What I can’t stand is a culture that pretends that there are no consequences, or at least no consequences that can’t be effectively mitigated by a federal program. It’s a big feminist lie – one designed to give women the freedom, even the compulsion, to buck their instincts without guilt, to the detriment of themselves, their families, and society as a
whole.
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 8)
Chapter 8 is titled “The World Beyond Our Borders”.
This chapter is fascinating simply as a presentation of how liberals look at foreign policy. It’s not often that you see it all in one place. The chapter starts with a brief summary of American history.
An interesting lesson learned about the liberal perspective - our alliances won the Cold War. Not our military strength or our economic prowess. This is so perverse I don’t even know what to say. Our alliances were necessary but not sufficient components of our victory. If they were as important as Obama thinks they are, why didn’t the Cold War end the day NATO was formed?
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I have to give Obama some credit here.
...at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I didn’t understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that US multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West – in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.
If he’s telling the truth, that’s a surprisingly mature view coming from someone on the left. On the other hand, I’m skeptical that this is the outright truth and that it hasn’t been sanitized a bit.
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As expected, a good chunk of this chapter is dedicated to Iraq. The book was written in 2006, so some of the material in here is outdated and mostly irrelevant, other than to note that his stance is and always has been that our presence in Iraq is illegitimate, and that we should leave no matter what. His consistency to a fault is interesting, especially now that we know he wouldn’t even in hindsight have supported an effective policy (the surge) if he knew it was going to be effective. He’s not one to let practicality get in the way of ideology, apparently.
Then he goes on to talk about foreign policy in more general terms. There are the typical cliched criticisms - “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?” - followed by the statement that we have no coherent foreign policy, and we need one. It seems to me that for someone to reach the conclusion that we have no coherent foreign policy, one must engage in a fair bit of willful blindness. Regardless, Obama first states that he has no “grand strategy in my hip pocket”, but of course, he has some suggestions.
First, we must recognize that isolationism is the wrong approach. Excellent start.
Second, we must recognize that the world has changed – that the major threats to our security come not from “great powers”, but from states on the margins of the civilized world. We need to maintain our ability to “play the role of the world’s reluctant sheriff”, and yet, our military is too large and should be cut. He doesn’t say by how much. In addition, we need to reconfigure the military to be less “fancy hardware” and more troops. In my mind, more fancy hardware means less dead American troops. While I can nitpick here, particularly on the military cuts, I generally agree with the philosophy of his statements.
Third, “the United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to defend itself against attack,” up to and including a preemptive strike against an imminent threat. Merely stating this is virtually meaningless though, as conservatives and liberals are typically going to have widely varying concepts of what an imminent threat is, what constitutes an attack on our nation, as well as what constitutes an appropriate response.
Fourth, any international use of force beyond self-defense should be a multilateral action, with “hard diplomatic work ... obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions.” Then, paradoxically, he states that the UN Security Council should not have a veto over our actions. So in essence – he’s willing to buck the veto of Russia or China, but only if the rest of the world gets on board. Given the limp-wristed response of Europe to pretty much everything lately, requiring their consent for action is de facto deciding to voluntarily tie our own hands. Which, to much of Obama’s base, is exactly the idea.
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I have to give him a lot of credit for this, though the devil is in the details:
I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy.
Absolutely true. He states that he recognizes that the American system has flaws, but he also recognizes that local movements like Hugo Chavez’s socialism or Sharia theocracy are not the way to alleviate people’s suffering. That’s a stunningly mature observation, and I didn’t expect it of him.
However, he also says that democracy cannot be delivered by the barrel of a gun, and that the only way to true reform is via a home-grown movement. This is rather naive, given the obvious counterexamples of Germany, Japan, and dare I say it – Iraq.
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Oh, the irony:
I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history…
Surely not, or his candidacy would not have gotten this far in the first place.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapters 6 and 7)
Chapter 6 is titled “Faith”.
I got my wish – a fluff chapter.
The first third can be summarized as “I’m a Christian.” Congratulations. My gut feeling is that he is Christian only because it is convenient to be so, but that’s just a gut feeling.
The middle third - we need religious people to act on their own outside of government… as long as they work toward progressive goals.
I agree completely with the first part, though I wouldn’t restrict it to religious people. The good functioning of our nation and our government requires a moral and upright citizenry that will do the right thing with the freedom they have, regardless of whether those actions are motivated by religion or something else. However, that’s only part of what Obama is talking about. One specific example he uses is mega-churches organizing fund-raising and lobbying campaigns to prevent cuts in anti-poverty programs. There is something fundamentally disturbing to me about that.
Churches running soup kitchens and food pantries? Great.
Churches organizing campaigns to prevent failed wealth transfer programs from being cut, thus becoming just another nucleation point for people that want to live off the backs of others? Not so great.
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The last third is about the separation of church and state. Though unsurprisingly he’s got the establishment clause all wrong, and he goes into quite a bit of detail about it, he is not a fanatic on the issue. He does not support removal of references to God from all public venues, and he does not support preventing religious groups from using public facilities like schools for meetings. He does however imply that local communities should not be allowed to choose a religious curriculum if they so choose.
Other tidbits:
He’s opposed to gay marriage, though it appears that it is more of a practical opposition rather than a principled one - “...in the absence of any meaningful consensus, the heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians.”
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Chapter 7 is titled “Race”.
This chapter appears to be fluff as well. Racism is bad, mmmmkay. Yeah, that didn’t need to take 30 pages.
It starts to get disturbing when he asserts that since 30% of the people employed in my office park are not black, there is clear evidence of pervasive racism. I don’t understand how he can say that, and two paragraphs later talk about the “lack of emphasis on educational achievement” in the black community. I will not contend that racism is completely gone in America – that’s obviously false. But to claim that salary inequality and lack of minorities getting hard science PhDs is evidence of racism, while acknowledging the very real and severe cultural problems that play a leading role in keeping the black community down, is just strange.
Even worse – he thinks forcing private companies to hire minorities on a quota basis is a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem.
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Then there is a big chunk on immigration. Typically, there were lots of words and little to say. The gist of it seems to be that immigrants are not a threat, we should welcome them, our borders should not be completely open, he’s sympathetic to the threat that a glut of low-wage workers pose to the unions, and increased economic inequality caused by a massive influx of immigrants is to be avoided at all costs. Lots of middle of the road non-committal rhetoric, but that last part I find just odd. America has a long history of taking in immigrants and giving them opportunities to build wealth that don’t exist elsewhere. This so-called increasing economic inequality is merely an artifact of a constant stream of people entering the economic spectrum at the low end and working their way up. Longitudinal studies of individuals have proven that increasing economic inequality is a myth.
Let’s assume for a moment that Obama’s assertion is true – that we need to avoid bringing in a perpetual “servant underclass”. How would he suggest we avoid this? Welfare for the newly arrived? Some other economic handout? Immediate access to our welfare state for newly arrived immigrants is a recipe for disaster, and most European countries as well as Australia and New Zealand have recognized that. Obama doesn’t say what he wants to do. Really, we should do what we’ve always done – get government out of the way and give people the economic freedom to lift themselves up. THAT is the core of American values, and THAT is why people come here.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 5)
This chapter is titled “Opportunity.”
Yay. A sixty page chapter on class warfare. That’s one-sixth of the book, right there.
I had to resist the urge to Fisk the whole thing. I’m sure it would be a bizarre mixture of enraging and fun, but really, we’ve heard most of this, and the rebuttals, before. On the other hand, this is where he starts to get very specific about his policy proposals, and I can’t help but respond a little.
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The chapter begins with a nice long passage giving the liberal version of the Great Depression and events since then. A point-by-point rebuttal would be a distraction, so filling this spot with the usual liberal tripe and the usual reality-based counterpoints is an exercise that will be left to the reader. The only interesting parts here are an admission that Reagan did some necessary trimming of the Federal government, though the valiant opposition of the Democrats prevented him from going too far. Then after getting slapped around on the health care issue, Clinton went to on further Reagan’s legacy with welfare reform, balancing the budget, etc.
I have to admit, I’d never heard quite that spin put on it before – Clinton carrying Reagan’s legacy to it’s natural conclusion.
Then of course, Bush comes along and screws it all up with “even lower taxes, even fewer regulations, and an even smaller safety net.” I don’t even have any idea what he’s referring to when talking about a smaller safety net under Bush.
The overarching theme of the whole discussion is that “we don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic unforgiving capitalism.” The idea is that through proper government management of the economy, people don’t have to be affected by economic upheavals in the ways they have in the past. Government can make those upheavals less severe, and help people to weather them when they do happen.
The problem is – his rhetoric both in the book and on the campaign trail seem to point to isolationism as a solution to preventing economic upheaval. He points out very bluntly that globalism has changed our economy dramatically, and those mean CEOs looking out for profits rather than for communities won’t let people unionize and prevent their jobs from being cut.
Now, I sympathize with those who are forced to change their way of life because of economic changes. I understand – it sucks. But lets think about this for a minute. If the kind of government intervention he’s talking about results in actively preventing companies from becoming more efficient and competing in the global marketplace (or worse, cutting off that global marketplace via isolationist policies), that hurts everyone, including the people the policies are intended to help.
Look at farmers. Something like 1% of the population is involved in agriculture today. Not all that long ago, that number was 50% or more. If someone like Obama had come along and said “we can’t let our farmers be displaced because of changing economic conditions”, we’re basically looking at three different possibilities. One, we can force farmers to maintain primitive farming practices so that more people can be employed. Everyone loses, since productivity is wasted by decree. Two, we can subsidize farmers to give them further incentive to stay in the profession when there is no other economic reason to do so. Everyone but the farmers lose, since this is a raw wealth transfer program. And here too, productivity is wasted. Three, we can isolate ourselves from global trade, so as to prevent our products from being undercut by more efficient overseas companies. Everyone but the farmers lose, since everyone is paying more for the products of the farmers. In essence, this is the same as case two, since external fiat allows farmers to sell their products for more than the true market price, while everyone else is forced to buy those products for more than the market price. It’s wealth transfer without the government as a direct intermediary.
The exact same options are available in every other sector. Forced inefficiency, subsidization, or isolation. Unions, which Obama wholeheartedly supports, push for any and sometimes all of these policies, knowing very well that they are screwing over the rest of the population for their own benefit. Adopting these policies to ease the pain of people being displaced by a changing economy makes as little sense as forcing farmers to continue working with horses rather than tractors – sure, more of them would be employed as farmers, but they would be poorer and so would the rest of us.
Is it really worth hurting everyone in rather substantial ways to ease the pain of the few? In some cases, yes. In the case of a changing economy, where the economy is going to continue to evolve no matter how much we try to protect people from it, our choices are to evolve and adapt, or drag our feet, hurt everyone in the process, and inevitably reach the same point anyway. However, it makes for great campaign fodder in a rural town when a manufacturing plant closes. People don’t want to have to learn something new. Yeah, too bad. Stuff happens, and except in extreme circumstances, people are not entitled to harm everyone else for their own benefit. Yet, that is the crux of Obama’s populist message to the masses.
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Obama’s proposals for government’s place in the economy is that it should be making investments in three sectors – education, science and technology, and energy independence.
He begins talking about education via an anecdote about his 2005 visit to Thornton Township High School, a mostly black school in the south suburbs of Chicago. He says the kids took a poll to decide what issues were most important to them. The top of the list? The school district was short of funds, so everyone was sent home at 1:30 every day, depriving them of the opportunity for “science lab and foreign language courses.” Of course, this is evidence of the poor people of America being screwed, and it is evidence that we need to throw more money at education.
This story smells fishy to me. Aren’t school districts required to meet minimum hours in a classroom in order for kids to graduate? If they are actually cutting below those hours, foreign language courses and science lab are not the biggest worry these kids have. If they are not cutting below those hours, what the heck are they doing with their time? Something doesn’t smell right. I googled around a bit, but nothing clarified this anecdote.
Obama’s specific fixes for elementary and secondary education:
A more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math
Longer school hours and school years
Early childhood education for every kid
Performance based assessments of students
Recruiting and training of “transformative principals and more effective teachers”
Simpler certification processes for non-teachers to become teachers
Pairing new recruit teachers with experienced mentors
Higher teacher pay paired with additional accountability
I’m not going to pick this apart. We all know what the problems with the educational system are. Some of his ideas are good, the simpler certification processes, for example. But that, without fixing the fundamental flaws of the system, is virtually meaningless. Obama’s fix for education is the same one we’ve heard for years – more money, more control, more of the same.
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I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear - the main thing wrong with education at the college level is that we don’t give people enough money to go.
Other specific higher education proposals:
Double federal funding of basic research in the next 5 years
Train 100,000 new engineers and scientists in the next 4 years
Provide new research grants to “the most outstanding early-career researchers in the country”
I spent a couple years at one of the top research universities in the country. I spent a few months at a NASA installation. One thing I can tell you for sure – more money is not what they need. Not when it costs $80 in overhead for me to order $2 worth of bolts. Seriously.
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The energy part was some blah blah blah about alternative energy sources. Typical liberal stuff: spend money, a miracle occurs, puppies and rainbows result. Yawn.
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Obama on Free Trade:
I ended up voting against [the Central American Free Trade Agreement], which passed the senate by a vote of 55 to 45. My vote gave me no satisfaction, but I felt it was the only way to register a protest against what I considered to be the White House’s inattention to the losers from free trade. Like Bob Rubin, I am optimistic about the long-term prospects for the US economy and the ability of US workers to compete in a free trade environment – but only if we distribute the costs and benefits of globalization more fairly across the population.
Translation:
He’s in favor of free trade, as long as US workers are insulated from any hardship that may result. Meaning, he’s not really in favor of free trade at all.
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I’m not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say that Obama has completely bought into the fixed-pie theory of economics. Meaning that if I have a bigger slice of pie, yours in necessarily smaller. We don’t grow wealth, we can only distribute it more equitably. Not a surprise, but it makes this extremely frustrating to read.
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Minimum wage: raise it. He even explicitly acknowledges that it will cause jobs to be lost. And in the very next sentence states “when the minimum wage hasn’t been changed in nine years… such arguments carry less force.” Huh?
Other proposals:
More unemployment insurance
Wage insurance, which pays if you are forced to take a job that pays less than your old one
“Flexible education accounts that workers can use to retrain” - I have no idea what that means
Last but not least, strengthen unions because “since the 1980s, unions have been steadily losing ground”. Good. Let’s continue that trend, and maybe the auto and airline industries will have a chance to recover and survive.
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There are some words in here about Social Security, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what he actually intends to do. I think we are going to “start with a commitment to preserve Social Security’s essential character and shore up it’s solvency”, and then use the word “globalization” several times.
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And now, my personal pet peeve, health care. I’m going to try to gloss over this, so as to avoid the near inevitable fit of rage.
Obama’s health care plan, or at least “one example of what a serious health-care reform plan would look like”, from his perspective:
1) “We have the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) determine what a basic, high-quality health-care plan should look like and how much it should cost.” Along with this, we “make sure patients control their diets or take their medicines regularly… and save the system a great deal of money.”
Wow. He didn’t even wait to step two to get into the authoritarian stuff. Step one is fridge raids.
2) We set up public insurance pools in every state that people can buy in to. Private insurers now have to compete with this public plan, but even the private plans would be required to “meet the criteria for high quality and cost controls set forth by the IOM.”
If you want to get some idea of how absolutely horrible this idea is, take a look at Florida where they are doing this RIGHT NOW with homeowners insurance. National Review had a couple articles about it recently, I think. (I think I may have even written a post about it, once upon a time.) The people running public insurance plans have every incentive to use them for populist purposes rather than actually running a tight ship. Who do you think people are going to listen to – the mean old actuary telling them that using their insurance policy like an ATM is going to make their rates go up, or that empathetic politician who feels their economic pain?
3) Everyone who touches Medicare and Medicaid claims will be required to have electronic claims, electronic records, and up-to-date patient reporting systems. This is going to save us 10% off the top, “with some experts pointing to even greater savings.”
Let’s just say that I know something about this, and “some experts” are full of crap.
4) With this 10% savings, we provide a subsidy to low-income families so they can join the state insurance pools, and then mandate coverage for all uninsured kids.
Voila! It’s like magic. Health care for everyone!
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Obama’s tax policy:
Raise taxes on dividends and capital gains
Leave the estate tax in place
Repeal the Bush tax cuts
Increase the amount and scope of the Earned Income Tax Credit, because 40% of the population not paying taxes just isn’t enough.
I won’t even dignify this with a response.
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Phew. Made it through that chapter alive. I’m hoping the rest of the book is fluff. I don’t know if my blood pressure could take another economics and policy chapter.
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 4)
Chapter 4 is titled “Politics”.
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I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to my mind, there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals – whether they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers – coming together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence.
It is good to see that he has no illusions about being a populist.
I agree with him to a significant extent. Big corporations do have a large negative influence on policy, in that they are self-serving and they use government for rent seeking purposes. However, it must be noted that they do so with the tacit consent of the people, since the people have chosen a regulatory bureaucracy that drives these shenanigans.
The difference is in thinking that big rich companies influencing politics are inherently bad, while teeming masses of bricklayers and textile workers are the “essence” of democracy. Sure they are, up to the point where candidates start exploiting the greed and ignorance of these masses with socialist rhetoric. Then they become just one more rent-seeking group, albeit one with the voting power to actually make their policies stick.
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The rest of the chapter is mostly filler. He brings up JFK’s comments about legislators always making someone mad no matter how they vote, throws in a non-sequitur slam on the Bush tax cuts and shady accounting practices, and ends saying that it would take a truly courageous legislator to stand up to his friends and suggest making structural changes to “strengthen the link between voters and their representatives.” Here’s his list of proposed changes:
Non-partisan districting – sure, if such a thing is even possible
Same-day registration – maybe with proper safeguards
Weekend elections – fine
Public financing of campaigns – I admit, I giggled for several minutes at this point
Free television and radio time – no
Along with unspecified changes in the House and Senate to “empower legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more probing reporting.” What - the filibuster isn’t enough?
Yes, it would definitely take courage to stick to these principles. Funny how once you’re running for president, all of that talk of courage and principle goes right out the window.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 3)
Short version, for the front page:
The man’s ideal Supreme Court justice is BREYER.
Vote McCain! PLEASE!
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My first thought after looking at the title of the chapter, but without reading any of it: Oh crap. And I thought the chapter on values was tedious.
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Robert Byrd – Obama’s example of a stalwart defender of the Constitution. Excuse me while I go dry heave for a few minutes.
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I was going to do a big quote from the book here and comment on it, but after thinking about it, I don’t think there is that much to say. So in summary:
Scalia is a strict constructionist. In contrast, Breyer believes we must take “context, history, and the practical outcomes of a decision into account.” In Breyer’s view, the Founders “have told us how to think but are no longer around to tell us what to think” (italics in original).
Obama says he understands conservatives’ respect for the Founders, but Breyer is right. His three reasons are:
1) The Founders could not have anticipated modern technology, therefore the Constitution as written doesn’t really have anything to say about freedom of speech “in the context of the Internet”. So we have to make that part up as we go along.
2) Our understanding of various Constitutional provisions has evolved over time. Due process and equal protection are specifically mentioned.
3) The Founders disagreed among themselves, so it is impossible for a judge two hundred years later to truly divine their intent.
He mentions that there is a faction that believes that because there was so much disagreement among the Founders themselves, they actually had no clear intent, so searching for that intent is a futile and meaningless exercise. He throws us a bone and rejects that argument, but only because:
Maybe I am too steeped in the myth of the founding to reject it entirely. Maybe like those who reject Darwin in favor of intelligent design, I prefer to assume that someone’s at the wheel.
The implication is that if he were to approach it in a completely rational fashion, he would be forced to conclude that the founding of this country was completely devoid of meaning. There is nothing special about our way of life, nothing important in the Constitution - the Republic we have is simply a random choice selected from an infinite set of equivalent choices. Fundamentally, the man admits that he has no understanding at all of what this country is and what makes great. And he wants to be president.
According to Obama, this is the sum total of what the Constitution is for:
What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery – its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights – are designed to force us into a conversation, a “deliberative democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others if their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent. Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible.
Yes, that is what the portion of the Constitution relating to the structure of the government is for – to set up a democratic republic. The rest of it are rules to follow so that the members of that democratic republic don’t have to repeat grave mistakes that have been made before, again and again.
To be a constitutional law professor teaching at the University of Chicago… to be a presidential candidate… and miss that glaring and vital point?
I’m speechless.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 2)
Chapter 2 is entitled “Values”.
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It’s never the “Bush tax cuts”, it’s always the “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy”. Even when that extra phrase adds nothing in context. Geez.
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He had some nice anecdotes about meeting Bush. He’s quite sure that Bush and his compatriots have good intentions, they just happen to be going about things in the wrong way. That seems to undercut his unity theme, unless of course, by unity he actually means for everyone to agree with him.
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In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.
There’s that nasty stereotype again – conservatives loves their guns so they can shoot things, while liberals love books so they can be all enlightened and stuff. Spare me.
And again there is the implication that if we all just recognized that we are passionate about different things, we would get along better. I am well aware that people are passionate about socialism. I am also well aware that they are wrong, and that their policies, though well intentioned, are dangerous. I can not and do not respect the people that hold these opinions, unless they show sufficient doubt their beliefs that I think there may be a chance at reforming them. The mere state of having an opinion does not entitle one to respect. That opinion must also be grounded in logic and facts before it reaches that state.
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I can’t help but laugh when liberals claim to be more “sensitive to constitutional constraints”. What was that again, Mr. Gun Control? Commerce clause? What’s that? Something about all other powers being reserved to the states or the people?
Oh, you didn’t mean those parts of the Constitution. I understand now.
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This is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose – this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government. Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual successes and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore cultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that culture for the better – or for the worse.
This is why the guy is sneaky. His paradigm is patently non-offensive, reasonable, and appealing. That is, until you get to the last part about government “shaping our culture”. We know very well what liberals mean when they want to “shape the culture” using the government, including the seemingly benign decisions to give people more freedom by letting them make their own moral decisions. Such as drugs, pornography, etc.
“Shape the culture” means destroy the culture and replace it with something else. Something progressive. Something deeply flawed and doomed to failure.
I run onto progressives all the time that point out the flaws in our current culture. Yes, I recognize those flaws too, I am not blind. The difference is that I don’t think we can tear down what we have and replace it with some utopian progressive vision. What we’ve got is pretty dang close to as good as it gets, all things considered.
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The chapter ends with a rousing couple pages about empathy.
I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.
In other words, if you aren’t a liberal, you just don’t care. And you don’t care because those other people are Protestant/Catholic/black/brown/yellow/something-other-than-you, you mean horrible conservative. If only you would open up your heart and feel their pain, you’d be all over universal health care.
It’s the standard near-Godwin argument that I see trotted out all the time – there are no rational arguments against progressive policies, you are against progressive policies, therefore you are a bigot, or a classist, or whatever fits the argument of the moment. Only here, rather than directly denigrating the audience, the argument is delivered with a velvet glove and an appeal to change your ways.
You don’t want to be a bigot, do you?
Vote Obama!
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 1)
Chapter 1 - Republicans and Democrats
The chapter starts with a commentary on how divided we are as a country, and how we should work toward being more unified. I find this to be one of the more condescending liberal arguments – we are divided, and that’s bad, so the rest of you folks should get with the program and start agreeing with us. This is a country with a hugely varied population, urban vs rural, religious vs secular, etc, with different priorities, different values, different problems, and different preferred methods of solving those problems. The argument that uniformity and agreement are either necessary or automatically good is fundamentally flawed. Couple that with the assertion that the only good agreement is agreement with the progressive author, and you’ve got a not-very-subtle brow-beating in an attempt to enforce conformity to the author’s will. As long as there is tacit acceptance by one political party that progressive ideology is the way to get things done, there will be opposition, and attempts to guilt that opposition into conformity are pointless, condescending, and rude.
He reminds me of a modern-day FDR, a charismatic leader that offers to swoop in and save a populace in crisis. The problem is, Obama’s crisis is largely manufactured. In the 1930’s, even though the Depression was largely self-inflicted, with double-digit unemployment, massive bank failures, and a huge decline in GDP, the crisis was real. Today, with low unemployment and a sluggish but growing economy, most of the “problems” Obama points out stem from selfishness and wealth envy. (Example: we can’t afford all of the health care we want, so we want to socialize it and have someone else pay for it.) A politician who’s support comes from solving problems like that no longer has real moral authority, he just appeals to the most banal elements of society, those with an axe to grind, or those who think society should be reformed in some progressive image. Like FDR, I see Obama as somewhere between a useful fool and a malevolent force, with the distinction unknowable and dependent on their intentions. However, in Obama’s case, he doesn’t even have a real crisis to solve, just a populace that has become convinced that it’s “rights” include expensive things for cheap or free.
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Much of the first chapter appears to me mostly a “why can’t we all just get along like they used to in the good old days” lament. Poor naive Obama walks into rough and tumble Springfield (later Washington as well), and discovers that politicians are mean to each other. That’s some glaring historical ignorance right there.
He mentions the good old days of the post-WWII years, when “American politics ... was far less ideological – and the meaning of party affiliation far more amorphous – than it is today.” Everyone got along then, it was a time of “serious men doing serious work”. I find this a fascinating way to look at the era. In the post-WWII era, conservatism was in the background, beaten near to death by the combination of the New Dealers and Eisenhower. Eisenhower went so far as to famously declared that the New Deal programs were here to stay, and that anyone that seriously opposed them was a fool. Of course there was unity, both sides had found the progressive mantra to their liking. Of course politics and politicians were more peaceful, everyone was reading from the same liberal playbook.
This is the sort of unity that Obama wants, a unity where conservatism is dead and meaningful opposition does not exist. The only reason we can’t have those days back is
that the mean old conservatives won’t roll over and play dead like they used to. He’ll have to excuse me, but I’m not going anywhere.
According to Obama, sharply divisive politics started with Reagan, took a break with GHWB and Dole, and then came back with a vengeance under Gingrich and Rove. These folks
are “true believers”, making compromise impossible with their ideological checklists and ostracization of those who were not sufficiently pure. Of course, the hero of all of this is Bill
Clinton, who tried to “transcend this ideological deadlock”, recognizing that the categories liberal and conservative “were inadequate to address the problems we faced”. I don’t seem to remember it working out that way, exactly. Something about socialized healthcare, a rout in 94, and Clinton changing his tune to maintain his popularity after that.
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And then there was the small matter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the shocking efficiency with which a few well-placed ads and the chants of conservative media could transform a decorated Vietnam was hero into a weak-kneed appeaser.
I don’t know which is worse – the implication that Kerry is a war hero, or the implication that he is not a weak-kneed appeaser. It is clear from the way he brushes off everything the Swiftboaters said that the author is a true-believer, writing for true-believer readers. This is the narrative, that the conservative media unfairly sunk upright and wholesome Kerry, and he’s sticking to it.
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All of which may explain why, as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, I understood his appeal.
Gratuitous assaults on the poor? I LOL’ed.
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Instead of the ‘compassionate conservatism’ that George Bush promised in his 2000 campaign, what has characterized the ideological core of today’s GOP is absolutism, not conservatism. There is the absolutism of the free market, an ideology of no taxes, no regulation, no safety net – indeed, no government beyond what’s required to protect private property and provide for national defense.
There’s the religious absolutism of the Christian right, a movement that gained traction on the undeniably difficult issue of abortion, but which soon flowered into something much broader; a movement that insists not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding and alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson. And there is the absolute belief in the authority of the majority will, or at least those who claim power in the name of the majority – a disdain for those institutional checks (the courts, the Constitution, the press, the Geneva Conventions, the rules of the Senate, or the traditions governing redistricting) that might slow our inexorable march toward the New Jerusalem.
Wow. A slow inexorable march toward the New Jerusalem. And this guy claims to have traveled around the heartland and, you know, talked to people?
He’s got one heck of a broad brush, and he’s not afraid to use it.
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Instead, we Democrats are just, well, confused. There are those who still champion the old-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program from Republican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100 percent from the liberal interest groups.
I LOL’ed again. Isn’t he the one with the near perfect rating from liberal interest groups?
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If Obama is supposed to be a uniter, why does this book follow so closely to the standard DailyKos narrative of recent history? The language, the narrative, the assumptions, it all reads like it was ripped from some liberal blog. It is painfully clear that this guy is not actually interested in being a uniter, given his disdain for this opposition, he just wants to browbeat people into agreement.
Raise your hand if you are surprised.
Anyone?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Prologue)
Several months ago, while the Democratic primary was still raging, I made a promise to myself that when a candidate was finally selected, I would do some “know thine enemy” research by reading either The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, or It Takes A Village by Hillary Clinton. If I were locked in a room with only those two books, I’d pick up Hillary’s book first. But hey, I didn’t get much say in who was selected to be the nominee.
Anyway, a couple days ago I put a paper bag over my head and went to the library to pick up The Audacity of Hope. I managed to get out without anyone recognizing me, thank goodness. Now I’m using the most recent issue of National Review as a bookmark, or as a convenient outer cover, whichever is more appropriate for the situation in which I find myself.
I have asked myself several times recently why I insist on torturing myself. The simple reason is that I want to know first-hand who this guy is, what he believes, and what he intends to do to this country. I’ve learned that if you can’t speak with someone directly, the best way to get into their head is to read their writing. Sometimes the writing is impenetrable, sometimes it’s murky, sometimes it’s crystal clear, and even if the content itself fails to enlighten, the style, the straightforwardness or lack thereof, and the language used tends to give valuable information about the person’s mindset and paradigm. Obama’s book seems halfway between crystal clear and murky, simply because without some grounding in the history and the language of progressivism, it sounds like an offer you can’t refuse. Why can’t we all get along? Do you really not care about your neighbor? When did you stop beating your wife?
My intent is to do a post about each chapter, more as a selection of reactions and comments as they come to me, rather than as essays. Something may blow up into an essay, but I’ll deal with that if it happens. We’ll see how long the informal style works.
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The Prologue:
The first thing I noticed is that it is well-written, and there is no ghost author. This is pure, unvarnished Obama (up to editing, obviously). But there can be no claim that the words here are not his and his alone.
It’s part “I’m so cool, everyone wants to be my friend”, part “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, part “We’re all in this together” collectivism foreshadowing. It has an air of excessive sincerity that only politicians and car salesmen can achieve.
The thing that concerns me the most is the seeming immersion in progressive rhetoric and ideology. He acknowledges cultural problems, and hasn’t really commented on solutions for them yet (it is the prologue, after all). Then he goes into the modern equivalent of “a chicken in every pot” rhetoric (living wage, health care, etc), implying that if we all band together, presumably with government leadership, we can get it all straightened out. The thing that popped to mind during that passage was how much he sounds like the real live socialists and communists I know. The rhetoric is the same.
I’m trying to decide if I’m seeing what I expect to see in it, or if it’s actually there. Thus far, it feels like the guy is nothing more than progressivism from the last 100 years, warmed over, repackaged, and represented for an audience ignorant of it’s own history. However, I acknowledge at this point that I’ve got rhetoric and no specific policy points, which I assume are coming. I am sure the following chapters will enlighten me as to if my assumptions about progressive policy points reliably following progressive rhetoric are accurate.
Way Back
Inspired by this.
It’s funny how your perspective on things changes with time. If you had asked me five years ago when and where I would choose to live, I would have said anytime in the last three-hundred years, in an Amish community. I’m tired of corporate America, tired of mortgages and cars, tired of all of the conveniences and pleasures that result in tearing families apart. Why not live in a community that values stability, family, honest labor, and working the land? Our ideals seem to line up perfectly.
As I did more research, I discovered a few things that bothered me about the Amish. Religious dogmatism, some evidence of domineering sexual inequality, and a blanket condemnation of anything foreign. I began thinking about how the Amish react to technology, how new automatically equals bad, and I realized that they have fallen into an unthinking conservative trap. Technology in itself is not bad, the problem comes in how we as individuals and as a society choose to use that technology. Sure, automobiles and airplanes have resulted in the scattering of families and to some extent the disintegration of neighborhoods. On the other hand, building walls around your community making it stifled and insular creates unnecessary hardship and societal problems as well.
Fundamentally - human behavior causes problems, not things. Both as individuals and as a society, we can choose to act right or wrong in any circumstances.
That is not to say that as a society are unjustified in working to minimize harm from the misuse of things, only that blanket solutions are rarely as simple as they seem.
Soon after deciding that Amish life was not for me, I ended up reading the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This fun, fascinating series about a family’s lives on the American frontier in the late 1800s was inspirational, to say the least. I could not imagine a more free, more happy life than that spent working one’s land in a small rural community, leading simple lives while still appreciating beauty and knowledge. What more could one ask for? The midwest or great plains in 1880 - that was where I wanted to be.
Then, I read a short book that served as a post-script to the series - On The Way Home. It was put together from journal entries made as Laura Ingalls Wilder, along with her husband and daughter, moved from South Dakota to Missouri.
After reading this book, it became clear that the rest of the series had been sanitized for popular consumption. All of the ugly reality was hanging out in this book, and it left me feeling deceived by the rest of the series. Dying kids, years of crop failures, extremely low success rates for homesteaders, land speculation and fraud… The frontier had a dark side.
Why would I want to do constant backbreaking labor, live in a shack, and watch my kids die, knowing in the end that even that meager lifestyle was likely unsustainable?
So much for the frontier.
As I’ve thought about it some more, I’ve come to appreciate what I have, and to identify the elements of the eras I admire so as to attempt to incorporate those elements into modern life. Just as technology can be abused, so can it be thrown out the window.
I intend to work the farm without a tractor, using horsepower instead. The elegance, simplicity, sustainability, and efficiency of horses for a small operation greatly appeals to me. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, mechanized equipment became available that made horses amazing efficient at their tasks. I intend to cherry-pick that element of frontier life and bring it to the present.
Similarly, I intend to cultivate a closeness of family that is rarely known today, by including the kids in the labor we do, the fun we have, and the education we provide. Not that I intend to raise them to be sheltered, but I want them to identify first with their family and only later with their peers. Modern schooling has largely destroyed this notion, much to our detriment. Another element of frontier life brought to the present.
I admit it - I really like flush toilets and electricity. I’ve told people that my ideal time and place is 1880s rural America, but with a few 1950s perks.
But even that isn’t quite right. It is only in the modern era that I have the luxury to choose these things, the wealth to try farming and screw things up without my family starving, the internet to form virtual communities and research things that are no longer passed down through the generations, and modern medicine to treat my family when they are ill.
While I intend to pick and choose the good things from many eras, and reject the bad things from the modern era, I’ve come to recognize that it is only in the modern age that I have the luxury to even make those decisions. So when it comes right down to it, I think right here right now is good enough for me.
