Obama

Political Ragnarök, or, Obama’s Boldly-Played Budget Battle Bet-The-Ranch Blowout

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Newt Gingrich led the GOP to a massive victory in the 1994 elections.

He and Clinton went nose to nose, Clinton won.

The battle was the Federal Government shutdown of late 1995.

I remember it well. The country was outraged by the shutdown, Clinton successfully blamed the Republicans, his popularity went through the roof, Gingrich became a pariah, and the GOP gave up on any reform agenda and went native in DC. It was an unconditional, unmitigated victory for Clinton.

Obama has sent a budget to Congress. Obama’s budget makes no effort whatsoever to cut spending.

Obama is not “failing to lead” as some people are claiming. That is all wrong.

All suggestions to that effect are all wrong. Obama knows exactly what he is doing.

Obama is setting up a confrontation and he plans to win.

Obama is betting that he can force the GOP to make their proposed cuts, which he can blame them for, which he can truthfully say he does not support. Then he can attack the Republicans for making the cuts. He will appeal to the people who are suffering from the cuts, and strip away GOP support. They will be angry and mobilized.

Obama then plans to force the GOP into a funding crisis just as Clinton did. Obama plans to destroy the GOP reform wave of 2011 just as Clinton destroyed the GOP reform effort in 1995.

Obama’s team attempted to use the Tucson massacre in the same fashion that Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombings, to discredit the GOP. Obama is acutely aware of the Clinton playbook. This is another re-run.

If Obama wins, then the GOP / Tea Party effort is over and the Democrats have won the whole ball game. Obama gets reelected, the GOP is finished as a political party, and we have a mess for some number of years while a new party forms. But odds are it will be too late by then. A majority of people will be dependent on the Government.

It is that serious. Obama’s brazen, no-cuts budget proposal is not a sign of weakness.

It is a bold chess move that demands a strong response.

Obama has chosen to make this budget the big confrontation. This is the decisive political moment. Obama is prepping the battlefield.

Will the GOP win, lose, fold, get clobbered and not know what happened? Or will they call Obama out, see him and raise him, and make their case to the American people? Do the American people really care about the fiscal insanity and national bankruptcy? Or will the people who personally lose from the budget cuts have all the energy and outrage? Does the GOP have the courage to push ahead, no matter what?

Lenin said there are decades where nothing happens, then there are weeks where decades happen. We are heading into months where decades are going to happen.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Instapundit responds: “It’s not 1995 anymore, though.” Yes. True. I agree. It is better now. But, is it better enough? Boehner is not an eccentric visionary like Gingrich, and I cannot see him and McConnell getting punked by Obama the way Clinton did to Gingrich. Obama is not nearly as good as Clinton. The GOP members are, I think, much wiser and more realistic than the hopeful but ultimately naive class of 1994. The new crew is committed to reform, and they have the example of 1995 in front of them. May they learn the right tactical lessons. Plus, things are just way worse now. There is more at stake.

Interesting times, baby.

UPDATE II: Powerline gets it:

Obama’s game is transparent, isn’t it? He is playing a game of chicken. He puts forward a series of proposals that he knows are more or less insane; but he also believes that Republicans will come to his rescue. They, not being wholly irresponsible, will come up with plans to reform entitlements–like, for example, the Ryan Roadmap. Ultimately, some combination of those plans will be implemented because the alternative is the collapse, not just of the government of the United States, but of the country itself. But Obama thinks the GOP’s reforms will be unpopular, and he will be able to demagogue them, thus having his cake and eating it too. Is that leadership? Of course not. But it is the very essence of Barack Obama.

(Emphasis added.) Yes. That’s it. That’s the trap.

Let’s see the GOP, and the Tea Party, and everyone else who wants this mess really fixed work this problem, avoid the trap, and turn the table on Obama and his allies.

Thinking caps on, team.

UPDATE III: Good pushback in the comments. Message: 1995 =/= 2011. OK. Groovy. So, let’s see a good outcome here. It is doable.

UPDATE IV: Cool: Stanley Kurtz link, mostly agreeing with me. He says my “vision of permanent Republican meltdown is overdrawn.” Maybe so. But I would rather the GOP and the Tea Party overestimate the hazard of the coming confrontation with Obama than not be aware it exists, as seemed to be the case in the initial round of responses to Obama’s budget proposal. Obama’s budget is not a failure of leadership, or a lack of imagination, or something that happened in a fit of absence of mind. It is a deliberate political play, with a goal of creating useful issues for 2012, breaking up and defeating the GOP opposition, reversing 2010, getting reelected, and continuing to expand the power and scope of government. Will it work? I hope not. But if we take it seriously for what it is, the odds of it working are greatly reduced. (I very much want to read Kurtz’s book Radical-in-Chief, but right now the pile of books in front of it is ceiling-high.)

UPDATE V: Good post from Keith Hennessey (via/Instapundit). Hennessey says:

The President is choosing both a policy path and a campaign strategy. He is betting that having no proposal to address the looming fiscal crisis is better for his reelection prospects than having one.

This is exactly right. Hennessey also says:

The President has made his strategic choice: we are headed toward a two year fiscal stalemate in a newly balanced Washington.

But this is wrong. It will not be a stalemate. It will be an open conflict. 1995 was not a stalemate, it was a duel, and Gingrich and the GOP lost. The GOP in 2011 will have to propose cuts, and Obama is going to attack them for each and every one, and blame them for every bit of hardship that any cuts impose on anyone. The President is betting that Mancur Olson is right, and that focused opposition will defeat inchoate and widespread public interest, as usual. Is 2011 “different”? Is it “different” enough? Cue portentious music: On that question turns the fate of our Republic.

There Is No Place Like Home

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Obama donor who brought in big money for the Presidential campaign is rewarded by being named Ambassador to Luxembourg.

To the victor goes the spoils, and she acted like the perfect little dictator in her vitally important posting. She could do as she pleased, right? After all, The Pres had her back! Might as well use legation funds to live the high life, act like a raging crone to the staff, and otherwise make the lives of everyone around her a living hell.

What blows my mind is that some of the diplomats assigned to her post actually requested reassignment to Afghanistan! Give up the cushy conditions in a modern European city, and trade it for the poverty and physical danger found in Kabul. Anything to get away from that harridan!

The author of the news article linked to above says that such is the danger when amateurs meddle in a field that clearly calls for career diplomats. I think it shows the danger of passing out important positions to political supporters without first bothering to ask if they are suited for the job.

But now she is going to retire to a quiet life with her family. Why is it that these people always claim to find a sudden burning desire for the home fires after their excesses are found out?

“We are going after the rent-seeking corporations feeding at the public trough.”

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Next Tea Party Target: Corporate America.

New polls show “companies could suffer when conservatives are told of their support for Obama’s agenda.”

How about that?

“For too long, big business elites have leveraged their special interest group politics to profit from the size and growth of government. The poll demonstrates that the days of easy money through back room deals are over.”

So sayeth FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe.

Well all right then.

About damn time.

“It’s never been a free market; it’s never gonna be a free market. That’s just the way it is.”

Jeffrey Immelt

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm

“. . . now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.”

Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor

Wisconsin Makes A Move On Illinois Business

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Our new Governor (Wisconsin) Scott Walker has signed legislation giving businesses that relocate to Wisconsin two years “free” – no corporate OR personal income taxes:

MADISON (WKOW) — Governor Scott Walker has signed a bill that gives income tax breaks for companies that relocate to Wisconsin.

The bill will forgive corporate and personal taxes for two years for companies that move to the state. The company could not have been located in Wisconsin for at least two years in order to qualify

I think they mean personal income taxes such as if you were running the company as a pass through like an LLC. I assume that is what they are talking about. Any way you slice it, this is fantastic news.

This got through the legislature with lightning speed, helped out by the fact that all three of our branches are Republican controlled now up here behind the cheddar curtain. I also read today that the public employee unions are getting ready for some very bad news for them in the near future.

We have just begun with the Walker administration, but I am very hopeful and happy by this stroke. Walker also sent back the Obama buck$ that would have started out the sham “high speed” rail network that would have been a boondoggle for the ages.

We may as well pick off what is left of the Illinois corpse before other states do.

Hopefully Walker will end up being a star like some other up and comers such as Mitch Daniels of Indiana.

Afghanistan, Egypt and Obama

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I have previously posted my opinion that Afghanistan is not worth the cost. I stated my reasons why we should leave here and here and here. Nothing has changed there but a lot is happening elsewhere in the Middle East.

Egypt’s escalating tensions amount to the first real foreign crisis for the Obama administration that it did not inherit. The crisis serves as a test of Obama’s revamped White House operation. Daley, a former Commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, is now running a staff that is briefing Obama regularly on Egypt.

They have handled it badly. This is a very dangerous time for us. The Egyptian Army seems to be siding with the protesters. That may or may not last.

The left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz says that Egyptian army officers in Cairo’s central square have tossed aside their helmets and joined the crowd. “The Army and the people are one,” they chanted. MSNBC’s photoblog shows protesters jubilantly perched on M1A1 tanks. The real significance of these defections is that the army officers would not have done so had they not sensed which way the winds were blowing — in the Egyptian officer corps.

And even as Mubarak tottered, the Saudi king threw his unequivocal backing behind the aging dictator — not hedging like Obama — but the Iranians continued to back the Egyptian protesters. The Saudi exchange tumbled 6.44% on news of unrest from Cairo. Meanwhile, the Voice of America reports that Israel is “extremely concerned” that events in Egypt could mean the end of the peace treaty between the two countries. If Mubarak isn’t finished already, a lot of regional actors are calculating like he might be.

But Washington will not be hurried. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that President Obama will review his Middle Eastern policy after the unrest in Egypt subsides. The future, in whose spaces the administration believed its glories to lie, plans to review its past failures in the same expansive place. Yet time and oil wait for no one. Crude oil prices surged as the markets took the rapid developments in. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu observed that any disruption to Middle East oil supplies “could actually bring real harm.”

Of course, Mr Chu should not worry as we have wind and solar to take up the slack. Actually, we get our oil from Canada and Mexico but the price of oil shifts with the world’s supply.

The present Obama commitment to Afghanistan is ironic since he promised to bring troops home but he has declared that Iraq was NOT necessary and Afghanistan is. This is slightly crazy. The Iraq invasion was an example of US power being applied in a critical location; right in the middle of the Middle East. Afghanistan is a remote tribal society reachable only through unreliable Pakistan. It has minimal effect on world events. We went there to punish the Taliban for harboring the people who attacked our country. Thousands of them have been killed. We have little of interest there now. We should have left last year.

With a Shi’ite dominated government in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a Muslim Brotherhood that may keep Egypt in neutral or tacitly accept Teheran’s leadership, how could things possibly get worse?

They can if Saudi Arabia starts to go. And what response can the U.S. offer? With U.S. combat power in landlocked Afghanistan and with the last U.S. combat forces having left Iraq in August 2010, the U.S. will have little on the ground but the State Department. “By October 2011, the US State Department will assume responsibility for training the Iraqi police and this task will largely be carried out by private contractors.” The bulk of American hard power will be locked up in secondary Southwest Asian theater, dependent on Pakistan to even reach the sea with their heavy equipment.

This is not where we want to be. The problem is that Obama and Hillary and the rest of this administration have no concept of strategy.

The Obama administration made fundamental strategic mistakes, whose consequences are now unfolding. As I wrote in the Ten Ships, a post which referenced the Japanese Carrier fleet which made up the strategic center of gravity of the enemy during the Pacific War, the center of gravity in the present crisis was always the Middle East. President Obama, by going after the criminals who “attacked America on 9/11” from their staging base was doing the equivalent of bombing the nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu from which Nagumo launched his raid. But he was not going after the enemy center of gravity itself.

For all of its defects the campaign in Iraq was at least in the right place: at the locus of oil, ideology and brutal regimes that are the Middle East. Ideally the campaign in Iraq would have a sent a wave of democratization through the area, undermined the attraction of radical Islam, provided a base from which to physically control oil if necessary. That the campaign failed to attain many of its objectives should not obscure the fact that its objectives were valid. It made far more strategic sense than fighting tribesmen in Afghanistan. Ideology, rogue regimes, energy are the three entities which have replaced the “ten ships” of 70 years ago. The means through which these three entities should be engaged ought to be the subject of reasoned debate, whether by military, economic or technological means. But the vital nature of these objectives ought not to be. Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence is what the politicians constantly deny.

Events are unfolding, but they have not yet run their course; things are still continuing to cascade. If the unrest spreads to the point where the Suez and regional oil fall into anti-Western hands, the consequences would be incalculable. The scale of the left’s folly: their insistence on drilling moratoriums, opposition to nuclear power, support of negotiations with dictators at all costs, calls for unilateral disarmament, addiction to debt and their barely disguised virulent anti-Semitism should be too manifest to deny.

Leftism is making common cause with Islamic terrorism. Why ? I don’t really know. Some of it may be the caricature of Jews making money and being good at business. Some may simply be the extension of animosity to Israel extending to all Jews. The people behind Obama are not free of these sentiments. His Justice Department is filled with lawyers who defended terrorists at Guantanamo. Holder seems uninterested in voting rights cases if a black is the offender. He was even unwilling to say that Islamic terrorism was behind 9/11.

Because it will hit them where it hurts, in the lifestyle they somehow thought came from some permanent Western prosperity that was beyond the power of their fecklessness to destroy. It will be interesting to see if anyone can fill up their cars with carbon credits when the oil tankers stop coming or when black gold is marked at $500 a barrel. It is even possible that within a relatively short time the only government left friendly to Washington in the Middle East may be Iraq. There is some irony in that, but it is unlikely to be appreciated.

I would add a bit to this from one of my favorite essays on the topic. It compares Gorbachev to Obama.

Nor are the two men, themselves, remotely comparable in their backgrounds, or political outlook. Gorbachev, for instance, had come up from tractor driver, not through elite schools including Harvard Law; he lacked the narcissism that constantly seeks self-reflection through microphones and cameras, or the sense that everything is about him.

On the other hand, some interesting comparisons could be made between the thuggish party machine of Chicago, which raised Obama as its golden boy; and the thuggish party machine of Moscow, which presented Gorbachev as its most attractive face.

Both men have been praised for their wonderful temperaments, and their ability to remain unperturbed by approaching catastrophe. But again, the substance is different, for Gorbachev’s temperament was that of a survivor of many previous catastrophes.

Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

In another passage:

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

The turmoil in Egypt is a test that, I fear, Obama and his Secretary of State, will not pass.