BaldGOP

A Blog for Bald Republicans, and anyone else!

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Inaugural Address

Just some thoughts I jotted down whilst watching the Inauguration. 


Three things in particular amazed me about President Obama’s inaugural address.
First, I was surprised how much President Obama had to say that I agreed with. His theme of making “real for every American” the promise of our Declaration — “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” –  is central to the Republican credo. What Republican could dispute that?
He’s the only president who has ever quoted the passage in full in his inaugural address.
President Obama may very well draw something different from that passage than we would, but that’s the heart of the argument we’re about to have.
Second, I was surprised by all the paragraphs that were missing.


The president made virtually no mention of the economy, at a time when millions of Americans are struggling and unemployed. All he said was, “An economic recovery has begun.”


He said, “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult,” but he failed to mention the oil and gas revolution taking place in the United States that offers the promise of low cost oil and natural gas for many decades to come, if we’ll only seize it.
The president said, “A decade of war is now ending,” and spoke of “winning the peace,” but ignored the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention new danger in Mali, Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran — and for that matter, Libya. He said nothing of Mexico, where just below our border lawlessness continues to rule.
These omissions recalled in my mind the Trotsky line: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” President Obama won’t have the choice to ignore these matters in the real world, even if he could in his speech.


Finally, I was amazed at the gaps in his discussion of “collective action.”
Much of it we could agree with: “No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future.” This is undeniable.
Nor, the president argued, could a single person “build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.” No Republican could dispute this. In fact, no thinking person could dispute this.


Yesterday wasn’t the first time President Obama has appealed to the importance of “collective action.” We’ve heard often from him in the past few years that “there are some things we do better together.”


Indeed, as a Republican I would agree and extend the claim: we do virtually everything better together.
Collective action, the cooperation and collaboration of many millions of people, is the rule, not the exception, in the modern world. It is so common that President Obama seems not to have noticed how many people are already peacefully working together every day on their own volition.


Yesterday as he was inaugurated, thousands of Americans worked to get all the necessary food into New York City. They didn’t even have to be told.
Somehow, without any vote in Congress, those well-fed New Yorkers could drive to the gas station and pump fuel into their cars which thousands of people collaborated to refine from oil. Still more people worked together to extract that oil from two miles below ground, and still others worked to transport it to each of the hundreds of gas stations in the New York area. All so that their fellow Americans could drive their cars wherever they liked, on a whim.
And those cars: Somehow they were assembled from pieces made all over the world, in China and Japan, in Germany and Mexico and in the United States. Probably tens of thousands of people worked together to make each of those cars which crowd the streets of New York City.


None of them could have done these things on their own. All required collective action.
But the president’s definition of “collective action” runs into trouble when he limits it to things we can do “as one nation, and one people.”
When the president speaks of doing things as one people.
It doesn’t sound like he’s talking about the kind of collective action that feeds New York City, provides it with affordable energy, and builds its cars — the collective action of small groups and large groups, businesses and charities and variously associated individuals.


The “collective action” the president speaks of is actually an inversion of real collective action, of true cooperation, of genuinely working together.
Obama’s “collective action” transfers to the federal government, to someone else, tasks that we the people now do together, ourselves.
The vision he describes outsources cooperation among citizens, to government — to him, and an army of federal bureaucrats.


Those items he listed as things we must do “as one nation, as one people” are precisely the things the federal government is poorly equipped to do.
The “networks” he referred to? They’re known as the internet, and we didn’t make it “as one nation.” Millions of us, collaborating in small groups, created it together.
Training the math and science graduates of the future? For decades, government has failed to provide equal opportunity in education for all Americans. When we achieve that goal, it will be because government frees students and teachers and parents to choose the education that’s best for them, as charter schools have done in many communities across the country.


The federal government is not, as President Obama implied, the only sphere for collective action. It is not the only place where we work together.  Go through his speech and replace the words “together,” “one nation,” and “one people” with “the federal government,” or “bureaucrats”  and you will have a better sense of why he is wrong.

Jim Holland
Cleveland, Ohio
(Not Newt Gingrich, from Atlanta, Georgia)  

Monday, January 21, 2013

House GOP

Have the House Republicans come up with a winning strategy on the debt ceiling and spending cuts? Or just a viable one? Maybe so.

They certainly need one that is at least the latter, if not the former. Barack Obama is up in the polls since the election, as most re-elected presidents have been. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows him with 52 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval. Other public polls have similar results.

In contrast, the NBC/WSJ poll reports that only 26 percent have positive feelings about the Republican Party and 51 negative feelings. Toward Speaker John Boehner only 18 percent have positive feelings and 37 percent negative feelings.

It's usually true that groups get lower ratings than individuals and congressional leaders get lower ratings than presidents. Still, these results represent a pretty negative verdict on House Republicans' attempts to wrestle Obama into supporting their preferred fiscal policies.

Defections by enough House Republicans to defeat Boehner's Plan B approach to the fiscal cliff ended up producing a compromise considerably less to their liking. The agreement reached by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did limit effective tax increases to those with incomes over $400,000.

But it also gave Democrats something they want -- a permanent fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax, which threatened to engulf high-earning Democratic voters in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California. Republicans used to dangle a one-year AMT fix as a negotiating chip in fiscal battles. Now they can't.

The House Republicans seem to be emerging from their Williamsburg retreat with a united approach to the debt ceiling issue, however. Raise the debt ceiling for three months and couple it with a cut off of congressional pay if the Democratic-majority Senate fails to pass a budget, as it has for the last three years.

This is similar to the approached advocated by former Bush budget negotiator Keith Hennessey: Give Democrats an alternative between short-term debt limit increases with no immediate spending cuts and a long-term increase with serious spending cuts.

Senate Democrats are a more attractive target than the president. The NBC/WSJ poll shows only 16 percent with positive feelings toward Majority Leader Harry Reid and 28 percent with negative feelings.

Fully 36 percent have no view, significantly more than the 22 percent with no view about Boehner. That leaves plenty of room to drive Reid's negatives up. The no-budget, no-pay provision is perhaps a gimmick, but may strike a chord with voters.

And it may help united the 234 House Republicans, 43 percent of whom were first elected in 2010 or are freshmen first elected in 2012. Most share the views and impulses of the tea party movement and are determined to cut government spending.

The tea party movement, like the peace movement four decades before, injected many new people into an old party. Tea party voters, like peacenik voters, tend to prefer the purest candidates in primaries, and tea party congressmen, like peacenik congressmen, tend to take confrontational and purist stands on issues.

But just as peacenik Democrats learned that the public will not tolerate cutting off defense spending when troops are in the field, so tea party Republicans seem to be learning that the public won't tolerate defaulting on the national debt.

They feel quite differently about spending cuts. A poll by the Republican Tarrance Group for the Public Notice group showed 74 percent agreeing that the federal government spends too much and rejecting Obama's notion that "we don't have a spending problem."

So far this year the spotlight has been on divisions among Republicans. Twice Boehner has brought to the floor bills opposed by most House Republicans -- the fiscal cliff deal and the Sandy appropriation.

That violates former Speaker Dennis Hastert's rule never to schedule a bill opposed by a majority of the majority party. But Hastert served for only two years with a Democratic president, at a time when we had budget surpluses.

If Boehner can get a Republican majority for a short-term debt limit increase, the spotlight falls on Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. Reid has been blocking budgets because he can't get a majority of 50 Democrats.

House Republicans are learning they can't govern from just one house of Congress. But they can shine the spotlight on Senate and White House Democrats' inability or unwillingness to govern.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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