1. You really do need to be checking out NO LEFT TURNS now and again to keep up with the astute insight of Pete Spillakos. He explains–riffing off an article by Beran–that Obama is no Bill Clinton. He’s both better and worse: He’s positioned to be able to protect the CHANGES he and Congress imposed on our country, and he won’t trade principled reform for popularity. And he probably really believes that his real problem is that CHANGE is just coming to slowly for impatient voters.
2. Still, our Carl Scott reminds us in the thread of the convincing evidence in the Kurtz book that our president for most of his adult life was a follower of Michael Harrington and his Democratic Socialists. (Kurtz also shows that Harrington and his socialists were a lot less admirable and somewhat less democratic than we’ve tended to believe.) But Carl goes on to doubt the common view that our president IS a socialist. He WAS a socialist seems more accurate, but now he seems at least somewhat ideologically adrift. If he really is drifting a bit more than Pete thinks, there’s reason for hope, in my opinion.
3. In a previous post (just scroll–I’m too lazy to link twice in the same post), Pete explains why the Republican gains in the SENATE were disappointing. Angle (NV) and Buck (CO) weren’t necessarily more extreme than the fabulously successful Rubio (FL). It’s just that they only felt comfortable preaching to the converted, and they were incapable of arguing effectively with those who disagreed with them. Maybe extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, but liberty still has to be defended in intelligent and persuasive speech.
November 7th, 2010 | 6:26 pm
Pete is surely one of the most responsible commentators regarding partisan politics these days. I say this as my students want to read and speak of Michael Savage. I happen to find Savage’s commentary to be well–”savage.” I am not as intelligent as others, and I cannot tell them to beware of Michael Savage. I don’t know Michael Savage but he seems like one who has argued himself into a position from which cannot be argued. I too am stuck with what I know, but I refuse to say I am stuck with the argument with which I have been thrown.
It seems to me that Michael Savage is a racist, but my friends on this page are too busy making distinctions between neo-con and paleo-cons.
Meanwhile I deal with fans of Michael Savage. This is so asinine I can’t even believe it is even a question. Nonetheless, in south Texas Michael Savage’s racist rants count as real commentary. These are the folk I deal with in my political science class. I find myself way over my head. You tell me what to do. No matter how much we read the Federalist or Lincoln they are confirmed in their white supremacist thought. This is a serious failure on my part, but then they pull out David Barton to push some nitty gritty point of what the founding fathers said.
I am stuck with the cosmopolitan nightmare of making one’s own the truth of what is. This ignorance is so stupid that it takes David Barton and makes it a religion. I’m sure that a private school can weed out the ridiculous, but I have to deal with home schooled assholes who think that they know the truth apart from what his been taught in government schools. This is disruptive in the class as I have to ask why someone home schooled bothers to go to a community college.
So the Michael Savage gut who works (even if the most jackass working) keeps challenging me on each and every assertion made–even if that assertion is typical texts like the Declaration, the constitution, the Federalist, and anti-federalist. Whether we read Calhoun or Lincloln (vs. Douglas), W. Wilson or Herbert Croly these white supremacists (without knowing that they are white supremacists) hate law, the government, anything that ells them what to do. Many of them are Iraq War veterans, but they hate government. They’re basically anarchists.
They have no care for understanding their government. They are open for a revolution. Meanwhile I teach the Federalist to no avail. This is a community college–and most of the students have zero ambition and if they exhibit ambition it shows itself in ordinary professions like nursing. They are already so immersed in the therapeutic culture that no matter what I say, they think I am crazy. In fact they are right, I am crazy.
So this is my rant.
November 8th, 2010 | 1:35 pm
Shelby Steele on differences between Obama and Clinton: “Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America. Stewardship meant responsibility even for those segments of America where one might be reviled. Surely Mr. Obama would claim such stewardship. But he has functioned more as a redeemer than a steward, a leader who sees a badness in us from which we must be redeemed. Many Americans are afraid of this because a mandate as grandiose as redemption justifies a vast expansion of government. A redeemer can’t just tweak and guide a faltering economy; he will need a trillion- dollar stimulus package. He can’t take on health care a step at a time; he must do it all at once, finally mandating that every citizen buy in.
. . . . People now wonder if Barack Obama can pivot back to the center like Bill Clinton did after his set-back in ’94. But Mr. Clinton was already a steward, a policy wonk, a man of the center. Mr. Obama has to change archetypes.”
Ed Morrissey on a possible evolution in Obama’s thinking: “On the plus side, perhaps Obama has a glimmer of insight on why command economic policies don’t work. . .
Has Obama started reading Hayek?”
On the other hand,
“There are two ways for a government to be ‘pro-business.’ The first way is to avoid interfering in capitalist acts among consenting adults – that is, to keep taxes low, regulations few, and subsidies non-existent. This ‘pro-business’ stance promotes widespread prosperity because in reality it isn’t so much pro-business as it is pro-consumer. . . .
The second, and very different, way for government to be pro-business is to bestow favors and privileges on politically connected firms. . . . When this second way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing politicians. Competition for consumers’ dollars is replaced by competition for political favors.
The fact that more than 200 American business executives are in India with the President is cause to fear that any pro-business policies he might adopt will be of the second, impoverishing sort.”
I’m really not sure how Obama will deal with the changes brought about by the election. So I stay worried. Or, maybe concerned. This is certainly no time to stop paying attention.
November 14th, 2010 | 4:23 am
As one educated in Jesuit colleges both under and graduate school. I am am so pampered that i can call my baccalaureate an under degree. So recognize that this is is a privileged white male making these remarks. Why do I say it in this manner? Well I answer who the hell is surprised about what Kurtz says in his book? An Why is this considered radical? The PIRGs and ACORN were always recruiting at the Jesuit colleges I attended. One summer I even was seduced. I had no job, and in typical community organizing manner I was approached to work for the common good. It was some environmental issue in front of the Massachusetts legislature, and MASSPIRG was gonna start a grass roots petition movement against whatever development program was at stake. I had no idea of the issues, but I was promised a days wage and a free lunch. All I had to do was take a bus to Plymouth and garner signatures door to door. Not being a Mormon, this was weird to me. I drove out to Plymouth not knowing a soul on the bus. I befriended one person and corrupted him immediately. We knocked on person’s door–knocking in a way that we thought we were seriously intruding on their privacy. They kindly did not sign our petition. At that point I decided I would not knock on anyone else’s door on the principle that it would be a violation of their time on a Saturday. Who knows? The next door may have been totally liberal celebrating our cause. But our cause was no longer my cause. The self righteous moral indignance of the young undergraduate who led us on our crusade on the bus was a caricature of bad pushing his agenda in your face. Me an my friend ate our free lunch in a lovely tree lined street. We got back on the bus with no signatures. Needless to say I did not go back the next day. nor did I ever ask for my day’s wages realizing that this was not the way to make money. The next week I found a job working as a bus boy for catering companies providing food for Bostonian conventioneers. Looking at these conventioneers, I realized that money was poorly spent and prioritized. But I would never join evil PIRG types making suburbanites feel guilty for the despoliation of the environment. So my one day of community organizing–and glimpsing of the power and wealth (but actually total bullshit and utopian nonsense for causes that in a way worthy but not as worthy as they seem) made me realize that Kurtz’s book on Obama is old hat, Hat you gone to BC or SLU in the 1980s or 1980s you would be so familiar with this jack-ass left wingism and its talk of Paolo Friere that you would laugh.
Is this hopey-changey stuff–as the Marxist theology types who never read Marx or theology put it–PRAXIS gonna save us? What a joke, but it is a big well-intentioned movement that has no idea of the rule of law, liberty, constitutionalism, the question of rights and virtue, the limits of rights interms of obligation, the need for the proper definition of liberty in terms of virtue (moderation, justice, prudence), etc.
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