The President Risks Getting Stale
Continuous TV appearances can't rescue a bad argument.

By KARL ROVE

It sounded to White House advisers like a good idea. Put President Barack Obama on five Sunday morning talk shows. This would focus attention on health care, re-establish momentum, and show off Mr. Obama's passion, intelligence, and persuasive abilities. It didn't work.

Mr. Obama made a classic mistake of politicians on a downward-bending arc. He jumps out in front of the cameras without having something fresh to offer.

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Associated Press
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As a result, he was on the defensive and failed to win over the slice of America that opposes his plans. His refusal to sit down with Fox News's Chris Wallace made him look petulant if not fearful, and his answers weakened his credibility.

Take, for example, his dustup on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" over whether requiring Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine was a tax. Legislation in the House and Senate defines it as a tax, and Mr. Stephanopoulos said it fit Merriam-Webster's definition of a tax. But the president insisted it was not a tax. That's because by favoring the mandate Mr. Obama is breaking his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. He already signed a cigarette tax increase in February, but this tax could be as much as $3,800 a year for a family and is therefore a more material breach of his promise.

On "Face the Nation" Mr. Obama said he would pay for two-thirds of his health-care proposal by redirecting Medicare funds that are "just being spent badly." "This is not me making wild assertions," Mr. Obama said, "waste and abuse" can provide "the lion's share of money to pay for" health-care reform.

If that is true, Mr. Obama could flip the health-care debate to his advantage by offering a stand-alone bill that would cut the $622 billion from Medicare and Medicaid that he sees as badly spent. Such a bill would show that Mr. Obama can be trusted when he says overhauling health care will be painless. But the White House won't do any such thing because those cuts aren't easy to make. If they were all "waste and fraud" they would have been cut already. And such a bill would force Democrats to either stick with the president or side with constituents who would be hurt by the cuts.

Mr. Obama opened a different can of worms on "Face the Nation" when he told Bob Schieffer health insurers and drug companies "are going to have to be ponying up" more in taxes because "they're making huge profits." Everyone except for the president seems to know that such a tax increase would be, in Mr. Schieffer's words, passed "right on to the consumer." That would drive up health insurance costs for everyone. How does that help the middle class afford health care?
About Karl Rove

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.

Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.

Or, you can send him a Tweet@karlrove.

Mr. Obama's dig at profits reveals a certain disdain for markets. Health insurers have a 3.3% profit margin, less than the 4.6% average for all businesses in the country. Drug companies do enjoy, on average, a 17% profit margin. But that's still less than software companies, which earn on average a 22% profit margin. Brewers make 18%. Are these industries the next targets for a revenue hungry Obama administration?

By the way, some of those drug-company profits are now paying for an ad blitz favoring Mr. Obama's health-care plans. There would be a little justice if drug companies succeed at increasing their own taxes.

To turn things in his favor, Mr. Obama needs to start thinking about making substantive concessions that will really improve health care. He could adopt Republican proposals to allow people to buy insurance across state lines, permit small businesses to pool risk to get the same discounts large employers receive, and crack down on junk lawsuits through medical liability reform. By doing so, he'd actually be lowering costs and expanding access instead of just pretending to—and at an infinitesimal fraction of his proposal's cost.

Americans have taken the measure of Mr. Obama's health-care plan and, as his falling poll numbers attest, increasingly don't like it. His health-care initiative is not only losing public support on its own merits; it is diminishing Mr. Obama's credibility. Most amazing of all, the president's constant chattering runs the risk of making him boring and stale. His magic dissipates as he becomes less interesting.

Mr. Obama doesn't need more TV time. He needs a new health-care plan that comes from actual bipartisan negotiation and compromise—one that most Americans see as something that will actually improve their health care. He needs his facts to align with reality.

More talk doesn't automatically lead to greater public support, but it can erode public confidence in your leadership. Mr. Obama is capable of flooding the airwaves with his words. But what he needs most is a message that wins the attention and support of most Americans.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Mexico's embattled president

Calderón tries again

Assailed by difficulties, Mexico’s president is demanding radical reforms just when his power to achieve them has diminished

IF MEXICO’S president recognises that his conservative National Action Party (PAN) was crushed in a mid-term election two months ago, there was little in his annual report to Congress on September 2nd to suggest it. Setting out an ambitious agenda for the remainder of his six-year term, Felipe Calderón called for ten reforms, including action on politically controversial matters such as labour laws and telecommunications regulation. Mexico had to overcome the constraints imposed by partisan political calculation, he said, and embrace “fundamental changes” to break “inertias”. Days later he himself illustrated how hard this will be with a cabinet shuffle, including the firing of the powerful attorney-general, which seemed to create as many problems as it solved.

If crisis were indeed opportunity, Mr Calderón would have enviable scope to act. Taking office in December 2006 with a narrow mandate after a disputed election, he launched the army against violent drug-trafficking gangs. Despite the government’s repeated assurances that it is turning a corner in its battle against organised crime, the violence continues. Increasingly, its victims are politicians: on September 6th, a legislative candidate in Tabasco state was murdered, along with his wife and children. Battered by recession in the United States, the economy is set to shrink by up to 7% this year. The pace of decline is slowing—GDP contracted by 1.1% in the second quarter of 2009, compared with 5.9% in the first. But unemployment has soared to 6%, while a further 13% of the labour force is underemployed. An outbreak of swine flu in April has receded, but not before wreaking havoc on the tourist industry. Oil output is plunging because of the inefficiencies of Pemex, the giant state oil monopoly.

Before the mid-term election, the PAN was the largest party in Congress, though lacking a majority. Mr Calderón settled for only modest reforms, of energy, education, pensions and the public finances. Now his ambition has grown but his power has waned. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for seven decades until 2000, regained a congressional majority (with a small allied party) in the midterm election. With only 143 of the 500 seats in the lower house, the PAN cannot even sustain a presidential veto.

Mr Calderón is not yet a lame duck: a poll this month gave him an approval rating of close to 70%. The cabinet changes seemed aimed at cementing his own authority. Eduardo Medina Mora, the sacked attorney-general, was a former businessman and a powerful and independent figure. Though damaged when one of his senior lieutenants was accused of corruption last year, his conduct of the fight against the drug gangs had gained the confidence of the United States. But he had clashed repeatedly with Genaro García Luna, the public safety minister, a former policeman and Calderón loyalist.

The new attorney-general, Arturo Chávez, is a PAN loyalist who, as chief prosecutor of the northern state of Chihuahua, was criticised by human-rights groups for failing to investigate properly the murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez. His promotion looks ill-judged, given that many in the United States Congress want tougher human-rights conditions attached to American anti-drug aid to Mexico. But Mr Calderón appears to want to centralise security policy in his own office.

The other big change is at Pemex. Its chief executive, Jesús Reyes Heroles, a former PRI minister, has been replaced by Juan José Suárez Coppel, who has a private-sector background but also has ties to a different PRI faction. His appointment suggests that Mr Calderón will try to stretch the limited scope for private investment in oil contemplated by the energy reform.

But his first battle will be over the 2010 budget. Tax revenues have plunged, jeopardising Mexico’s investment-grade credit rating. At the same time, recession has increased the demand for social spending. The draft budget announced this week involves a careful balance. It includes a temporary rise in income tax from 28% to 30% for the highest earners, a new 2% sales tax and a tax on telephones. Public spending will fall by 1.8% of GDP, with three ministries scrapped and other austerity measures. But the government wants to raise spending on Oportunidades, its targeted anti-poverty programme, and on achieving universal health care. All this would trim the budget deficit to 0.5% of GDP, from around 2% this year.

The fate of this budget, along with much of the rest of Mr Calderón’s agenda, now lies with the PRI. Ideologically amorphous, the party’s priority is to win back the presidency in 2012. That requires walking a political tightrope. Unconditional support for Mr Calderón’s programme would both strengthen the president and burden the PRI with the cost of unpopular reforms. But uniform opposition would expose the party to the charge of putting partisan advantage ahead of the national interest at a difficult time for the country.

The budget seems tailored to secure PRI support. For example, the new sales tax finesses its election commitment to block the extension of VAT to food and medicines. The party has its own reasons for wanting stronger public finances, since they would yield more resources for state governors, of whom the PRI has a majority. But it is certain to tinker.

Lacking its old subordination to executive power, the PRI is more than ever an agglomeration of factions and barons. Its attitude to substantive reforms, such as another energy law or modernising the political system, will depend in part on the battle inside the party for its presidential candidacy. For the next year or so Mr Calderón can expect grudging support, at best.

“The PRI does not have a joint responsibility with the national government,” insists Enrique Peña Nieto, the governor of Mexico state, who is one of the party’s presidential hopefuls. “All we have is a majority in one house and our governorships. The executive has its agenda, and we have ours.” Those Mexicans who agree that their country must change will hope the two coincide.

A Protectionist President
Like Hoover, Obama is abdicating U.S. trade leadership.

President Obama traveled to Wall Street yesterday to press his case for more financial regulation, but the bigger economic issue of the day concerned other White House policies. To wit, what does it mean for the world economy if America now has its first protectionist President since Herbert Hoover?

The smell of trade war is suddenly in the air. Mr. Obama slapped a 35% tariff on Chinese tires Friday night, and China responded on the weekend by threatening to retaliate against U.S. chickens and auto parts. That followed French President Nicolas Sarkozy's demand on Thursday that Europe impose a carbon tariff on imports from countries that don't follow its cap-and-trade diktats. "We need to impose a carbon tax at [Europe's] border. I will lead that battle," he said.
[Protectionist]

Mr. Sarkozy was following U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has endorsed a carbon tax on imports, and the U.S. House of Representatives, which passed a carbon tariff as part of its cap-and-tax bill. This in turn followed the "Buy American" provisions of the stimulus, which has incensed much of Canada; Congress's bill to ban Mexican trucks from U.S. roads in direct violation of Nafta, prompting Mexico to retaliate against U.S. farm and kitchen goods; and the must-make-cars-in-America provisions of the auto bailouts. Meanwhile, U.S. trade pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea languish in Congress.

Through all of this Mr. Obama has either said nothing or objected so feebly that Congress has assumed he doesn't mean it. Despite his pro-forma demurrals, Mr. Obama's actions and nonactions are telling the world that the U.S. is abandoning the global leadership on trade that Presidents of both parties have worked to maintain since the 1930s. His advisers whisper that their man is merely playing a little tactical domestic politics, but he is playing with fire, as the last 80 years of trade history should tell him.
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The modern free-trade era began during the Great Depression, after the catastrophe of the Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930. Hoover also thought he was shrewdly playing tactical politics by adopting a tariff that the economist Joseph Schumpeter said was the "household remedy" of the Republican Party at the time. But the tariff ignited a beggar-thy-neighbor reaction around the world, and the flow of global goods and services collapsed.

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FDR's Secretary of State Cordell Hull recognized the damage, and he began rebuilding a pro-trade consensus with a series of bilateral accords in the 1930s. In the aftermath of World War II, John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and others on both sides of the Atlantic continued this progress by negotiating the Bretton Woods currency accords and creating the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Like Britain in the 19th century, the U.S. has been the linchpin of this liberal trading order that despite occasional setbacks has moved in the direction of lower tariffs and fewer nontariff barriers. As the world's largest economy, the U.S. has largely kept its market open, using access to U.S. consumers as a lever to open other countries to foreign goods and services. Even as Big Labor broke with this consensus, Bill Clinton continued this bipartisan tradition by supporting Nafta, and prodding Congress to ratify the World Trade Organization and most-favored nation trading status for China.

Following America's lead, countries that were once largely closed economically—especially China and India—have in turn opened up to foreign goods and services. The result has been an explosion in world trade, especially since the 1980s, as the nearby chart makes clear. This boom has coincided with rising incomes in countries connected by trade and the free flow of capital, especially in the developing world but also in America. While some U.S. jobs have vanished, new industries have emerged, and the U.S. has maintained its lead in manufacturing productivity.
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This 80-year history of free-trade progress is now under threat from the global recession and Mr. Obama's abdication of U.S. leadership. Labor's antitrade views now dominate in the Democratic Congress and liberal think tanks. As ominous, protectionism is increasingly justified by Democratic economists on political grounds.

Paul Krugman, the chief economist for House Democrats, has endorsed a carbon tariff. And Clyde Prestowitz, who insisted in the 1980s that Japanese mercantilism would rule the world, went so far as to argue in the Financial Times last week that imposing tariffs on China would strike a blow for free trade. As economic logic, this compares to the argument that the way to reduce government health-care spending is to pass a new trillion-dollar entitlement.

President Bush and his trade negotiator Robert Zoellick also claimed that the protectionism of their 2001 steel tariffs would lead to more free-trade support, but the move merely exposed U.S. hypocrisy and undermined global trade talks. The reality is that without the U.S. leading by example, the world trading order is likely to deteriorate into every country for itself. This is especially dangerous amid a global recession in which world merchandise trade volume fell by roughly 33% from the second quarter of 2008 to June 2009. Reviving trade flows is crucial to restoring global growth.

Mr. Obama may not intend to start a trade war, but then Hoover didn't set out to pick one either. His political abdication is what made it possible, however, and trade passions once unleashed can be impossible to control. On his present course, President Obama is giving the world every reason to conclude he is a protectionist.

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

by Declan McCullagh

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."

Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.

A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.

When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.

The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.

Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.

The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."

Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."

Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:

The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response.

Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for an on-the-record answer to these four questions that I asked her colleague on Wednesday. I'll let you know if and when I get a response.

Baby Bush: The Worst President in History?

By Doug Casey

Vancouver, British Columbia

I recognize that I’ve antagonized many of my subscribers over the years with “Bush Bashing.” In January, just after OBAMA!’s election, I said I wouldn’t mention Bush again, his departure having made him irrelevant. I only feel bad that he and his minions will apparently get away scot-free with their crimes; better they had all been brought up before a tribunal and tried for crimes against humanity in general and the US Constitution in particular. But that is objectively true of almost all presidents since at least Lincoln.

Most of our subscribers to The Casey Report appear to be libertarians or classical liberals – i.e., people who believe in a maximum of both social and economic freedom for the individual. The next largest group are “conservatives.” It’s a bit harder to define a conservative. Is it someone who atavistically just wants to conserve the existing order of things (either now, or perhaps as they perceived them 50, or 100, or 200, or however many years ago)? Or is a conservative someone who believes in limiting social freedoms (generally that means suppressing things like sex, drugs, outré clothing and customs, and bad-mouthing the government) while claiming to support economic freedoms (although with considerable caveats and exceptions)? It’s unclear to me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism, by whatever definition, rests on.

Which leads me to the question: Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it’s because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere. Bush’s tendency to fumble words and concepts contrasted to Clinton’s eloquence, which made him look “slick.”

I’m forced to the conclusion that what “conservatives” like about Bush is his style, such as it was. Because the only good thing I can recall that Bush ever did was to shepherd through some tax cuts. But even these were targeted and piecemeal, tossing bones to favored interests, rather than any principled abolition of any levies or a wholesale cut in rates.

Is it possible that Bush was actually the worst president ever? I’d say he’s a strong contender. He started out with a gigantic lie – that he would cut the size of government, reduce taxes, and stay out of foreign wars – and things got much worse from there. Let’s look at just some of the highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime created.

• No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department of Education. Bush made the federal government a much more intrusive and costly part of local schools.

• Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts the 2nd Amendment, like 20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws before it.

• Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ and will cost the already bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.

• Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive change to the securities laws since the ’30s. A major reason why companies will either stay private or go public outside the US.

• Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement, featuring martial law.

• Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current financial crisis lies in Bush’s encouragement of easy credit to everybody and inflating the housing market.

• Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created, he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far the largest bailouts in US history (until OBAMA!).

• Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war protesters away when Bush appeared on camera, they’re now used to herd.

• The Patriot Act. This 132-page bill, presented for passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how is it possible to write something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects. Warrantless searches. All kinds of communications monitoring. Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.

• The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which Bush also expanded) is exceeded only by the war on nobody in particular but on a tactic. It’s become a cause of mass hysteria and an excuse for the government doing anything.

• Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush started two completely pointless, counterproductive, and immensely expensive wars, neither of which has any prospect of ending anytime soon.

• Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous of all agencies, now with its own gigantic campus in Washington, DC. It will never go away and centralizes the functions of a police state.

• Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them (like the Uighurs recently in the news) guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for years. A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an “enemy combatant” to be completely deprived of any rights at all.

• Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands of foreign nationals, Bush made it a US policy to use torture to extract information, based on a suspicion or nothing but a guard’s whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things to the reputation of the US ever. It says to the world, “We stand for nothing.”

• The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the names of over a million people on this list, and it’s still growing at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other purposes in the future…

• The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000 middle-aged people who were willing to go through their fellow citizens’ dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously. God forbid you’re not polite to them…

• Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis of the free market. Rather than trying to abolish or cut them back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.

• Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress did than any other president in history.

The only reason I can imagine why a person who is not “evil” (to use a word he favored), completely uninformed, or thoughtless would favor Bush is because he wasn’t a Democrat. Not that there’s any real difference between the two parties anymore…

As disastrous as he was, I rather hate to put him in competition for “worst president” in the company of Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon. He is simply too small a character – psychologically aberrant, ignorant, unintelligent, shallow, duplicitous, small-minded – to merit inclusion in any list. On second thought, looking over that list of his personal characteristics, he’s probably most like FDR, except he lacked FDR’s polish and rhetorical skills. I suspect he’ll just fade away as a non-entity, recognized as an embarrassment. Not even worth the trouble of hanging by his heels from a lamppost, although Americans aren’t (yet) accustomed to doing that to their leaders. Those who once supported him will, at least if they have any circumspection and intellectual honesty, feel shame at how dim they were to have been duped by a nobody.

The worst shame of Bush – worse than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars – is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro-free-market rhetoric in the very process of destroying those institutions. That makes his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters Bush caused on the free market simply because Bush constantly said he believed in it.

And he’s left OBAMA! with a fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars.

Regards,

Fear of a Foreign President

Making sense of the birther conspiracy theorists

Jesse Walker

If you're obsessed with the president's birth certificate, the political class is now obsessed with you. Over the course of July, the media have devoted ever more attention to birthers, that unruly faction obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama and his allies are covering up the true circumstances of his birth. The exact details vary from theorist to theorist, but the usual payoff is that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and therefore is ineligible for the presidency.

Once a subterranean enthusiasm, birther talk is bubbling up on TV and in Congress. Several significant media figures, including Lou Dobbs of CNN and Glenn Beck of Fox News, have given birtherism a sympathetic hearing, and 10 House Republicans co-sponsored a birther-backed bill this month that would require prospective presidential candidates to release their birth certificates before running. The reaction to all this activity has been a mix of glee from Democrats, dread from mainstream Republicans, and occasional spasms of fear-mongering, as when Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center told NPR that such conspiracy theories might presage another Oklahoma City bombing.

Everyone should just calm down. The birthers are silly and wrong, but they aren't uncharted territory. At any given time, the base of a political party—often, but not always, the opposition party—is apt to grab hold of a conspiracy theory that's considered déclassé in Washington. Sometimes the idea has at least a grain of truth; other times it's simply ridiculous. Either way, if the notion becomes popular enough with grassroots activists, some of the Beltway's rougher-edged pundits and politicians will start bringing it up. The other party will ridicule them, and their more uptown co-partisans will wince.

This is normal political behavior. It does not signal the implosion of the Republican Party, and it will not "erase what remains of the GOP's credibility with the electorate." At worst it will make some specific Republicans look like jackasses, which may or may not hurt their political prospects down the road. The electorate is down on the GOP because it associates the party with a recession, a series of scandals, and an unpopular war, not because a few congressmen are playing footsy with a fringe theory.

But if birtherism doesn't say much about the future of the Republicans or the general state of American politics, it still might yield some insights into the minds of the believers themselves. On the surface, Obama's place of birth is a pretty bizarre fixation. Birtherism is frequently lumped together with trutherism, the dubious belief that George W. Bush either had advance warning of 9/11 or actively planned the attacks. But say what you will about the truthers' standards of proof, at least the intensity of their anger makes sense. If a new piece of evidence emerged that suddenly, conclusively proved the truthers right, the most loyal Bush Republicans would start howling for the heads of the conspirators. If a new piece of evidence emerged that suddenly, conclusively proved the birthers right, the most loyal Obama Democrats would just shrug. Speaking as an Obama critic: Even if I believed the birthers were onto something, the possibility that the president is covering up his origins would rank approximately 435th on my list of complaints about his administration, just ahead of his reported fondness for Michael Bay movies.

So what's the appeal? I see at least three deeper motives running beneath the birther milieu, each inflaming different (though sometimes overlapping) segments of the movement.

Wishing for a magic bullet. This is the most obvious explanation: the search for that bolt of lightning that will end Obama's career without the pain of political persuasion. The birth-certificate obsession started to take off during the Democratic primaries last year, when Hillary Clinton's hard-core supporters started looking for a magic bullet that would remove her chief rival for the nomination. After Clinton left the race, the theory continued to attract new believers—but suddenly they all hailed from the right, because that's where Obama's new foes were to be found. First came the political need, then came the belief. If you went to a birther convention today, one pair of sentences you would almost certainly not hear is: "I strongly support Obama's ideas about global warming, health care reform, and transforming the automobile industry. It's just too bad he's ineligible to be president."

It's a bit like an old Doonesbury strip. Two congressmen are commiserating over their trouble getting across the idea that Richard Nixon committed impeachable offenses. "If only he'd knock over a bank or something," one of them finally sighs. "By George, we'd have him then!" the other replies excitedly.

Fear of foreign influence. For many birthers, Obama's origins are bound up with a general suspicion of the foreign. It's no surprise that the highest-profile media figure to give the birthers a friendly venue is Lou Dobbs, the fiercely protectionist and anti-immigrant TV and radio host. Discussing Obama's birth certificate last week, Dobbs declared that he was "starting to think we have a, we have a document issue. You suppose he's un— no, I won’t even use the word undocumented. It wouldn’t be right."

It was a joke: a pun on the word "document." I assume Dobbs doesn't believe Obama is actually an illegal alien. But jokes have meanings, and Dobbs—perhaps intuitively, perhaps by design—was bringing an implicit link into the open: the connection between the fear of foreign settlers and the fear of a foreign president.

Where Dobbs will only joke and wink, others will speak in earnest. Later that week, on the TV show Hardball, G. Gordon Liddy—one Watergate figure who probably would have knocked over a bank if the president requested it—was asked what Obama would be if he were born abroad and never naturalized. "An illegal alien," Liddy replied.

There's already plenty in the president's biography to make nativists anxious. He spent a chunk of his childhood in Indonesia. His father came from Kenya. When young Obama did live in the U.S., it was in Hawaii, the one American state that isn't actually a part of the Americas. If you don't conceive of the United States as a multicultural nation, the president's life is reason enough to consider the man metaphorically foreign. And if there's one thing conspiracy theories are good at, it's transmuting the metaphorical into the real.

Excessive reverence. In a perverse way, birtherism is the flip side of the Obama cult: It's a way to keep your respect for the Oval Office intact while hating the man who occupies it. In his 2008 book The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy noted that while trust in our presidents has declined since Watergate, "the inflated expectations people have for the office—what they want from a president—remain as high as ever....From popular culture to the academy to the voting booth, we curse the king, all the while pining for Camelot."

What happens when someone who reveres the presidency despises the president? In the past you might, say, denounce Bill Clinton as a "stain" on the institution, thus mentally separating office from officeholder. But if you could challenge the president's legitimacy entirely, that's all the more satisfying. The throne is still the throne; it's just that the man sitting in it is a pretender.

I can't claim credit for that metaphor. Surf through the birther hangouts online and you'll see a lot of semi-royalist rhetoric on display. One writer declares that "when Barack Obama officially entered the office of President, he became, in essence, a 'pretender to the throne.'" Another calls him "our present Pretender to the Presidency." An "open letter" suggests that the man might be a "usurper." Yet another writer, mixing monarchist and nativist rhetoric, jumps from describing Obama as "the quasi-Muslim, marginal American in the White House" to calling him—yes—"almost certainly a Pretender to the Throne."

Of course these people aren't actual royalists. But their reflexive rhetoric reflects one of the worst things about the birthers—and one way they do resemble many far more respectable Republicans. Some of us object when Washington tries to take control of car companies and banks because we don't like to see so much power concentrated in one place. Others are more interested in the identity of the man in power. The problem with Barack Obama isn't that he's not qualified to be president. It's that no president is qualified to do the things Barack Obama wants to do.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine.

Honduran President Overthrown

A Weak American President

Anne Bayefsky

Behold Obama on Iran.

President Obama has staked his reputation on being a human rights guru to people around the world. But his remarks at Tuesday's news conference and behavior since taking office have instead exposed a different persona--that of human rights charlatan.

On June 15, three days after the phony Iranian elections and the same day that seven Iranian demonstrators were murdered, Obama's UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, made a speech in Vienna promoting the Saint Obama vision: "The responsibility to protect is a duty that I feel deeply. … We must prepare for the likelihood that we will again face the worst impulses of human nature run riot, perhaps as soon as in days to come. And we must be ready. … We all know the greatest obstacle to swift action in the face of sudden atrocity is, ultimately, political will. … It requires above all the courage and compassion to act. Together, let us all help one other to have and to act upon the courage of our convictions."

A week later there were multiple casualties, injuries and threats, and 46 million voters wrenched away from that doorway to freedom that had opened--if only a crack. But when the president was asked Tuesday: "Is there any red line that your administration won't cross where that offer [to talk to Iran's leaders] will be shut off?" He answered: "We're still waiting to see how it plays itself out."

And when asked again, "If you do accept the election of Ahmadinejad … without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?" He answered: "We can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places."

And asked again: "Why won't you spell out the consequences that the Iranian people…" He answered: "Because I think that we don't know yet how this thing is going to play out."

And yet again: "Shouldn't the present regime know that there are consequences?" He answered: "We don't yet know how this is going to play out."

This is a man who embodies the opposite of the courage to act. His appalling ignorance of history prompted him to claim at his press conference that "the Iranian people … aren't paying a lot of attention to what's being said … here." On the contrary, from their jail cells in the Gulag, Soviet dissidents took heart from what was being said here--as all dissidents dream that the leader of the free world will be prepared to speak and act in their defense.

The president's storyline that we don't know what has transpired in Iran is an insult to the intelligence of both Americans and Iranians. Our absence from the polling booths doesn't mean the results are a mystery. The rules of the election were quite clear. Candidates for president must be approved by the 12-member Council of Guardians. As reported by the BBC, more than 450 Iranians registered as prospective candidates while four contenders were accepted. All 42 women who attempted to run were rejected. So exactly what part of rigged does President Obama not understand?

Instead of denouncing the fake election, President Obama now tells Iranians who are dying for the real thing "the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Whose sovereignty is that? The Hobbesian sovereign thugs running the place? Sovereignty to do what? To deny rights and freedoms to their own people? In a state so bereft of minimal protections for human dignity, why should the sovereignty of such a government be paramount?

But President Obama didn't want to dwell on the daily reality of sovereign Iran: A criminal code that permits stoning women to death for alleged adultery and hanging homosexuals for the crime of existing. Instead, he repeatedly invoked "respect" for "their traditions and their culture."

This is the same mantra he espoused to the Islamic world in Cairo when three times he spoke of the "rights" of Muslim women to cover up their bodies. Knowing full well that women in the Muslim world face the contrary problem of surviving after refusing to cover up their bodies, he never once dared to mention that this was also a human right. What part of cultural relativism and traditional oppression does President Obama not know how it plays out?

In his scripted remarks, the president gave the impression of talking tough: "The Iranian government … must respect those rights [to assembly and free speech]. … It must govern through consent and not coercion." But with the "or else" pointedly missing from his lines, he made it plain that he continues to have high hopes of partnering with this current Iranian theocracy. "I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people."

This Iranian government has told us in deeds, as well as in words, exactly what path it has chosen. President Obama has told us his path also: pandering to Islamic radicals and empty posturing. Ironically, the rest of the world claimed they wanted a weak American president whose foreign policy would read "apologize, capitulate and stand down." Now that they have what they asked for, real human rights victims are being forced to pay the piper.

Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and professor and director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust in New York.

President Barack Obama's poll numbers start to wilt

By MICHAEL FALCONE & ANDY BARR

Eroding confidence in President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy and ability to control spending has caused his approval ratings to wilt to their lowest levels since he took office, according to a spate of recent polls, a sign of political weakness that comes just as he most needs leverage on Capitol Hill.

The good news for Obama is that his approval ratings — 57 percent in a Gallup tracking poll over the weekend — remain comfortably high by historical standards for presidents.

But the trend lines among a variety of polls over the past several days are unmistakable: Independents and even some Republicans

who once viewed him sympathetically are becoming skeptical, and many people of all stripes are anxious about economic and fiscal trends.

Obama’s approval rating has dipped below 60 percent on other occasions, according to Gallup, but though those slumps lasted only a day, this one appears to be more persistent.

So is the intensity of partisan reaction to Obama, who ran on the promise of softening ideological divisions and unifying Americans. On Sunday, a Rasmussen Reports tracking poll found that 32 percent of Americans strongly approved of the president, while 32 percent strongly disapproved.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, said the Obama administration should look at the new results “as a warning sign” but added that the new numbers were “not an indication of a loss of fundamental political support.”

“The real driver is not the president’s personal popularity,” which remains robust, Kohut said, “but faith in him to deal with the nation’s No. 1 problem”: i.e. the economy.

This highlights how some of Obama’s political fortunes remain outside his control, dependent on employment figures which have continued to worsen even as the federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on measures to stimulate the economy and bail out the financial services sector.

Surveys released last week by Pew, NBC News/Wall Street Journal and The New York Times/CBS News show a similar pattern. The Pew survey, for example, registered an 8-percentage-point drop in public approval for Obama’s handling of the economy — falling from 60 percent to 52 percent between mid-April and June. The percentage of Americans who disapprove jumped by 7 percentage points during the same period.

Though Democrats are still generally more supportive of the administration overall, the slide in the president’s economic numbers defied partisan boundaries. The Pew survey, for instance, showed support for Obama’s handling of the economy sliding 6 percentage points among Democrats and independents.

Other factors driving the numbers will figure importantly in the debate this summer and fall over how to overhaul the nation’s health care system — a popular goal but one that comes with a trillion-dollar price tag.

Analyzing her firm’s latest poll, Gallup’s Lydia Saad said it is “not clear what’s behind the decline” in the president’s numbers, but she pointed to growing concerns over the administration’s deficit spending as a likely cause.

In last week’s New York Times/CBS News poll, where the president’s approval stands at 63 percent, 60 percent said the Obama administration has not developed a “clear plan” for dealing with budget deficits. Additionally, 52 percent said the government should “not spend money to stimulate the economy and should focus instead on reducing the deficit.”

Obama’s intervention in the auto industry is a source of concern — and is likely a major engine of controversy if the bailout does not show positive results over the long haul.

According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, nearly 70 percent said they were concerned “a great deal” or “quite a bit” about the government’s takeover of General Motors. Pew found a nearly even split on the administration’s approach to helping troubled automakers: 47 percent approve, while 44 percent disapprove.

The specific weaknesses in Obama’s standing with the public come in the context of general strength.

Even the Pew numbers registering rising disapproval of his handling of economic measures still showed public optimism — 65 percent to 28 percent — that Obama’s policy will cause the economy to improve.

And the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which gave him his lowest job approval (56 percent) since taking office, also showed him to be uncommonly popular at the personal level: Sixty percent view him favorably, compared with 29 percent who view him unfavorably.

Those are numbers that most politicians would crave. For instance, the favorability rating of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stood at 24 percent in the poll, just below former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 26 percent. In addition, the Democratic Party is viewed favorably by 45 percent of those polled, compared with 25 percent for the Republican Party.

Obama’s strategists seem to be reading the same polls or similar ones of their own. Within the past few weeks, the Obama team has been trying to trumpet what it sees as the successes of the stimulus package as well as a series of fiscal responsibility initiatives like pay-go legislation. And although the president changed the subject to health care last week, economic questions lingered.

Bill Beach, an expert on fiscal issues with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he detects “tonal changes” in the way the administration is communicating about the economy, and, he suspects, “the president’s sense [is] that things need to be fine-tuned.”

Mickey Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, offered an explanation for why his own national survey and many others show a gradual rise in disapproval of the president’s handling of the economy: “Maybe people are starting to say, ‘Where is the money going to come from?’”

Republicans are seizing on both the vagaries of Obama’s economic programs and the public’s growing anxiety in hopes of turning a soft spot into a political opening. In response, White House aides cite the president’s promises to shave $100 million from the federal budget over the short term and halve the deficit in four years.

Ed Goeas, a longtime Republican pollster, said that it is clear the White House is aware the public is casting a skeptical eye on the administration’s economic policies and job creation claims and subtly shifting its message as a result. White House officials, he said, used to talk about “saving or creating” jobs, and now they’re just focusing on “saving” them.

“The biggest lagging indicator is not the unemployment rate, it’s consumer feeling about the economy,” Goeas said. “If this economy isn’t showing strong improvement by the second quarter of next year, that is going to be the framework for the 2010 election, and the Obama people know it.”

Just Make Stuff Up
President Obama’s war on the truth.

By Victor Davis Hanson

In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years. The prevarication is ironic given the Obama campaign’s accusations that the Bush years were not transparent and that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, was a chronic fabricator. Remember Obama’s own assertions that he was a “student of history” and that “words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.”

Yet Obama’s war against veracity is multifaceted.

Trotskyization. Sometimes the past is simply airbrushed away. Barack Obama has a disturbing habit of contradicting his past declarations as if spoken words did not mean much at all. The problem is not just that once-memorable statements about everything from NAFTA to public campaign financing were contradicted by his subsequent actions. Rather, these pronouncements simply were ignored to the point of making it seem they were never really uttered at all.

What is stunning about Obama’s hostile demagoguery about Bush’s War on Terror is not that he has now contradicted himself on one or two particulars. Instead, he has reversed himself on every major issue — renditions, military tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, Predator drone attacks, the release of interrogation photos, Iraq (and, I think, soon Guantanamo Bay) — and yet never acknowledged these reversals.

Are we supposed to think that Obama was never against these protocols at all? Or that he still remains opposed to them even as he keeps them in place? Meanwhile, his attorney general, Eric Holder, is as voluble on the excesses of the Bush War on Terror as he is silent about his own earlier declarations that detainees in this war were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.

Politicians often go back on earlier promises, and they often exaggerate (remember Obama’s “10,000” who died in a Kansas tornado [12 perished], or his belief that properly inflating tires saves as much energy as offshore drilling can produce?). But the extent of Obama’s distortions suggests that he has complete confidence that observers in the media do not care — or at least do not care enough to inform the public.

The “Big Lie.” Team Obama says that Judge Sotomayor misspoke when she asserted that Latinas were inherently better judges than white males. Yet the people around Obama knew before Sotomayor was nominated that she has reiterated such racialist sentiments repeatedly over many years.

Obama complained that his deficits were largely inherited — even though his newly projected annual deficit and aggregate increase in the national debt may well, if they are not circumvented, equal all the deficit spending compiled by all previous administrations combined.

The president lectures Congress on its financial excesses. He advocates “pay as you go” budgeting. But he remains silent about the unfunded liabilities involved in his own proposals for cap-and-trade, universal health care, and education reform, which will in aggregate require well over a trillion dollars in new spending on top of existing deficits — but without any “pay as you go” proposals to fund them.

By the same token, his promise that 95 percent of Americans will receive an Obama “tax cut” is impossible. Remember, almost 40 percent of households currently pay no income taxes at all — and the $1.7-trillion annual deficit will necessitate a broad array of taxes well beyond those assessed on incomes above $250,000.

Obama talks about cutting federal outlays by eliminating $17 billion in expenditures — one-half of one percent of a $3.4-trillion budget. Here the gap between rhetoric and reality is already so wide that it simply makes no difference whether one goes completely beyond the limits of belief. Why would a liberal “budget hawk” go through the trouble of trying to cut 10 or 20 percent of the budget when he might as well celebrate a 0.5 percent cut and receive the same amount of credit or disdain? If one is going to distort, one might as well distort whole-hog.

Outright historical dissimulation. On matters of history, we now know that much of what President Obama says is either not factual or at least misleading. He predictably errs on the side of political correctness. During the campaign, there was his inaccurate account of his great-uncle’s role in liberating Auschwitz. In Berlin, he asserted that the world — rather than the American and British air forces — came together to pull off the Berlin Airlift.

In the Cairo speech, nearly every historical allusion was nonfactual or inexact: the fraudulent claims that Muslims were responsible for European, Chinese, and Hindu discoveries; the notion that a Christian Córdoba was an example of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition; the politically correct canard that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were fueled by Arab learning; the idea that abolition and civil rights in the United States were accomplished without violence — as if 600,000 did not die in the Civil War, or entire swaths of Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Los Angeles did not go up in flames in the 1960s.

Here we see the omnipotent influence of Obama’s multicultural creed: Western civilization is unexceptional in comparison with other cultures, and history must be the story of an ecumenical, global shared brotherhood.

The half-, and less-than-half, truth. At other times, Obama throws out historical references that are deliberately incomplete. To placate critical hosts, he evokes the American dropping of the bomb. But he is silent about the impossible choices for the Allies — after Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, andOkinawa — facing the necessity of stopping a Japanese imperial killing machine, determined to fight to the death.

He lectures about equivalent culpability between Muslims and Americans without mentioning American largess to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians. He mostly ignores American military efforts to save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia — and American criticism of Russia’s and China’s treatment of their own persecuted Muslim minorities.

When Obama contextualizes the United States’ treatment of Muslims, does he do so in comparison to the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs, the Russians in Chechnya andAfghanistan, or the European colonial experience in North Africa?

When he cites European colonialism’s pernicious role in the Middle East, does he mention nearly 400 years of Ottoman Muslim colonial rule in the Arab-speaking world? Or the Muslim world’s own role in sending several million sub-Saharan Africans to the Middle East as slaves? By no stretch of the imagination is purported Western bias against Islam commensurate with the Islamic threats that have been issued to Danish cartoonists, British novelists, the pope, or German opera producers.

Obama surely knows that a mosque is acceptable in America and Europe in a way that a church is not in most of the Gulf States, or that Muslims freely voice their beliefs in Rotterdam and Dearborn in a way Westerners dare not in Tehran, Damascus, or Riyadh.

Here we see the classic notion of the “noble lie,” or the assumption that facts are to be cited or ignored in accordance with the intended aim: Interfaith reconciliation means downplaying Muslim excesses, or treating Islamic felonies as equivalent with Western misdemeanors.

Why has President Obama developed a general disregard for the truth, in a manner far beyond typical politicians who run one way and govern another, or hide failures and broadcast successes?

First, he has confidence that the media will not be censorious and will simply accept his fiction as fact. A satirist, after all, could not make up anything to match the obsequious journalists who bow to their president, proclaim him a god, and receive sexual-like tingles up their appendages.

Second, Obama is a postmodernist. He believes that all truth is relative, and that assertions gain or lose credibility depending on the race, class, and gender of the speaker.In Obama’s case, his misleading narrative is intended for higher purposes. Thus it is truthful in a way that accurate facts offered by someone of a different, more privileged class and race might not be.

Third, Obama talks more than almost any prior president, weighing in on issues from Stephen Colbert’s haircut, to Sean Hannity’s hostility, to the need to wash our hands. In Obama’s way of thinking, his receptive youthful audiences are proof of his righteousness and wisdom — and empower him to pontificate on matters he knows nothing about.

Finally, our president is a product of a multicultural education: Facts either cannot be ascertained or do not matter, given that the overriding concern is to promote an equality of result among various contending groups. That is best done by inflating the aspirations of those without power, and deflating the “dominant narratives” of those with it.

The problem in the next four years will be not just that the president of the United States serially does not tell the truth. Instead, the real crisis in our brave new relativist world will be that those who demonstrate that he is untruthful will themselves be accused of lying.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.