Published in Politics

While he was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

Why bring up that story now, as President Obama comes home from Asia? Because it has considerable relevance to his meetings in China with President Hu.  Obama went into those sessions like Kennedy: with great hope that his charm and appeal to reason - qualities so admired in the United States - would work well with Hu. By numerous accounts, that is not at all what happened: reports from correspondents on the scene are replete with statements that Hu stiffed the President, that he rejected arguments about Chinese human rights and currency behavior while scolding the U.S. for its trade policies, and that he stage-managed the visit so that Obama - unlike Clinton and Bush before him - was unable to reach a large Chinese audience through television.

Scott Johnson of Powerline recently reminded us that "Bill Buckley used to characterize a liberal as someone who wanted to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature of the water." 

Today's Wall Street Journal reminds us that they also want to adjust the water. Since the 1990s, the federal government, under what provision of the constitution I'm not sure, has claimed the right to regulate our showers. "Tthe 2.5-gallon-per-minute shower head remains the legal standard."  Having lived in Southern California, I can understand the need to manage the water supply.  The question is how. Should it be a one-size-fits-all regulation like this?  How about (in those communities where there's a shortage) charging a fixed price for the first x gallons, and then y for every gallon above that.  That way each of us can decide for himself.  Those who want large lawns can pay for watering them.  Those who wish to take longer, stronger showers may do so.  Those who wish to save money by doing one, but not the other, may do so.  Etc.

Some of us may recall that Dave Barry got angry when Congress reached not only into our showers, but into our toilets as well. (The follow up column is available here).

What happened was, in 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which declared that, to save water, all U.S. consumer toilets would henceforth use 1.6 gallons of water per flush. That is WAY less water than was used by the older 3.5-gallon models -- the toilets that made this nation great; the toilets that our Founding Fathers fought and died for -- which are now prohibited for new installations.

As Mr. Barry notes, the result has not been pretty:

Unfortunately, the new toilets have a problem. They work fine for one type of bodily function, which, in the interest of decency, I will refer to here only by the euphemistic term "No. 1." But many of the new toilets do a very poor job of handling "acts of Congress," if you get my drift.

All kidding aside, there's a political cost to such regulations teach us to have contempt for the law. "I checked this out with my local plumber, who told me that people are always asking him for 3.5-gallon toilets, but he refuses to provide them, because of the law."  I know many people who quite willingly pay cleaning people cash and don't report social security.  I know others who have simply ignored building codes, or, worse, filed false renovation plans for their homes when they deemed the regulations to be unreasonable.   When regulations get out of hand, more and more of us become criminals because they start to force us to choose between cowing before petty authority and living comfortably.  The more regulations we have, the more citizens will ignore them.  (Part of the reason why President Clinton got sympathy during the impeachment trial, I suspect, is that many Americans thought he was being pursued under an unreasonable law. That he signed the very sexual harassment law that made the case possible into effect only compounds the irony).

Finally, as Philip Howard notes in his latest work, the excess of law keeps us from being free, responsible adults. 

P.S. Would it be fun to create a list of things the government won't let us do in our own homes?

The best news about the health care bill is that only one Republican voted for it and most moderate Democrats voted against it.  Even the few moderate Democrats who were persuaded to push it over the top are saying apologetically that, of course, compromise with the Senate is bound to improve it.  It's also good, of course, to see Speaker Pelosi, someone most Americans deeply distrust, gushing about her personal triumph.

What we have here, as with the stimulus package, is a failure of presidential leadership.  Obama's deference to Congress has pushed his party too far to the left for its own good, united the Republicans, and pushed independents and moderates in the GOP direction.  As Yuval Levin pointed out in NEWSWEEK, the Republicans are now far more united against the president than are the Democrats united with him.  The moderates from the swing districts fear losing their jobs.  The unapologetic liberals from the safe districts are complaining loudly that our liberal president ain't boldly liberal enough when it comes to both social issues and additional stimulation.

Now the Republicans clearly don't need to moderate themselves to get with the tide of History.  They need to distinguish themselves clearly to give a real choice to voters anxious about a tide they don't really remember voting for (although in a way they did).  Even genuinely left-of-center moderates don't fear right-of-center, socially conservative candidates at this point.  The point now is to elect savvy antidotes to the president and especially Pelosi.  Let's hope that this great opportunity--partly the result of unforced errors by our president--brings forward Republican leaders worthy of it.   

In the NRO symposium on Barack Obama's first year, Bill Voegeli observes, "The Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez often said, 'I'd rather be lucky than good.' One of the problems in trying to assess Barack Obama is that he has been such a lucky politician over the past six years that it's still hard to know how good he is."

This reflection calls to mind the extraordinary Charles McCarry novel, Lucky Bastard. McCarry was for many years a CIA agent, stationed abroad, and is justly hailed as the master of his genre. His hilarious 1998 spy novel recounts the career of the bastard son of John F. Kennedy, who blazes like a comet from obscurity to a serious presidential contender--aided every step along the way, from his days at Columbia University, by Soviet intelligence. David Skinner recently wrote an appreciation of McCarry's work in The Weekly Standard (subscriber only).

With his eye on John F. Adams' sexual adventures, McCarry of course had the then-incumbent president in mind. But his description of how Soviet intelligence paved the way for Jack Adams' rise reminds us how easily American media and other institutions can be swayed by shallow elite opinion. The 1998 novel is a highly instructive work for our time.

In an interview for the Wall Street Journal, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman exclaims: "The days of the defensive NEA are over!" Indeed, the offensive NEA may steal some of the Obama Administration show, as Landesman's NEA would return to giving the individual grants that encouraged so much offensive and, more to the point, trashy art. Landesman defends graffiti and hip-hop as examples of art worthy of public subsidy. See my previous posts on Landesman here and here.

"It's a very clever initiative to improve people's lives, but it's not a complete success," a user of the bikes said.   "For a regular user like me, it generates a lot of frustration," she said. "It's a reflection of the violence of our society and it's outrageous: the Vélib' is a public good but there is no civic feeling related to it."

• A growing 40 percent of all Americans self-identify as conservatives, about 36 percent as moderates, about 20 as liberal, according to Gallup.  I wonder whether they factored in the reluctance of Republicans/conservatives to speak to pollsters. 
• All politics is local: Local Chinese officials make school kids salute all cars on the road (as a safety measure).  (I can imagine the compelled salutes American kids might give.)  But the other examples of Chinese local tyranny are far less petty--killing dogs, compulsory liquor and cigarette purchases, licenses for harvesting one's own corn, and prohibiting women from being secretaries.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is #15 on the NY Times trade paperback bestseller list and rising.  I'm not sure what this Zombie business means--it's all over comics strips, and kids talk about it.  Something to do with the "end of history," but there may be other meanings of brain-eating.

As I rarely parse an Obama speech and I never watch Fox news (not getting it and other cable news in my basic cable package, so I have no idea who Glen Beck is), maybe I can offer some unprejudiced insight into the recent contretemps.  Krauthammer attempts a principled objection--though he misses the point about Madisonian factions:  Factions are not "legitimate"; they are by definition unjust groups, who misuse the fundamental commitment to liberty.  So the real objection to Obama's shunning of Fox (he spent a couple hours before a group of leftist journalists dismissing it as "talk radio") is his assault on liberty--his misunderstanding of the freedom of the press.

For all their leftist inclinations, a significant number of journalists don't want to be known as anyone's stooge.  The Fox infection will spread quicker than the swine flu.

As evidence see the NY Times on Fox's effect on the MSM:

White House officials said [...] they noticed a column by Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The Times, in which [leftist Clarence Thomas hater] Jill Abramson, one of the paper's two managing editors, described her newsroom's "insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio." The Washington Post's executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, had already expressed similar concerns about his newsroom....

"This is a discussion that probably had to be had about their approach to things," [Obama political strategist David] Axelrod said. "Our concern is other media not follow their lead."

In fact, perhaps the most effective media purveyor of conservatism (next to Rush and Fox) is C-Span radio and news.  (Have I let the cat out of the bag?)  For without its coverage of otherwise obscure think-tank speakers and panels, many eminent conservative voices would get no significant hearing at all.  And their book programs may be the best thing on tv (save the excellent baseball playoffs this year).

David Bobb has a sound and perceptive commentary on President Obama's refounding of the nation's political principles.  Whether it be health care or eroticism for autos, Obama's refrain has been for a "new foundation."  Bobb, Director of Hillsdale College's Washington, DC Kirby Center, documents this reckless audacity and commends the real founding and the discipline it demands and the freedom it protects.

Do we recognize the threat and have the resources and spirit to resist it?  Do we know what we will have lost?

Not according to Dr. No, aka Senator Tom Coburn, md, who seeks to kill National Science Foundation funding for the eclectic discipline.  Political scientists banged their begging bowls to save their fed funding.

The latest Nobel Economics Prize winner, political scientist Elinor Ostrom, might note the disappearance of a free rider:  No "tragedy of the commons" here, just the comedy of con-artists.  Ostrom, former President of the American Political Science Association, presented this paper on her approach to the study of politics, known as public or rational choice, a school of thought that often supports conservative policy objectives.  A President who earned her Nobel!

UPDATE:  I hadn't noticed that Ostrom's paper is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.  More on the limits of rat choice later.

1. Several people have written fearing or hoping that I might be near death because I haven't been posting lately.  I appreciate the concern, I guess.  But we postmodern conservatives or 21st century Thomists don't believe that the doctrine "I blog, therefore I am" is realistic.  All is well and I'm at a nice conference in Savannath, maybe the most beautiful city in America.

2. This conference is rife with young conservatives.  And, naturally, they were all grousing with disbelief at breakfast over Obama's big Nobel win.  The African American lady who was serving breakfast was glaring at them, thinking, I'm sure, that these people won't pass up any opportunity to let our president have it.  She may, properly understood, have a point.  Who cares who gets that fairly silly prize?  It's not like Obama ran for it, as far as I can tell.  No good president could possibly get it.  And if they want to give it for pretty words that signify almost nothing, it doesn't pick my pocket or break my leg. 

3. Whether the Republicans make big gains in Congress in 2010 will depend mostly on the state of the economy unless there's the reality or perception of dangerous foreign policy weakness.  It would be better if the Republicans had either big brains or an effective leader or two, but that probably won't be the key.  Anxiety is trumping ideology with the swing voters these days.  No two economists agree on what things will be like a year from now, and it's difficult for we Republicans to know what to hope for.

"Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?" Steve Hayward asks in the Washington Post. His diagnosis is that the patient is, at least, on the critical list: "The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining."

The source of the ailment is the unhappy and unbalanced relationship between conservative intellectuals and activists. There used to be, in the golden "Age of Reagan" from 1964 to 1989, a sustainable division of labor between them. The activists relied on the intellectuals for ideas and rhetoric, and the intellectuals were happy for the activists to mobilize voters and constituencies. "Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance," says Hayward, "with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas."

Perhaps, says Hayward, conservative intellectuals are "simply out of interesting ideas," the kind that would provide "compelling alternatives to Obama's economic or foreign policy." Nature abhors a vacuum. If the National Honor Society types have stopped saying illuminating and useful things, the sarcastic kids who jeer from the back of the classroom at Right Wing High will speak up more often, setting a different tone.

Important as it was to conservatism's political strength, the old division of labor between intellectuals and activists will be hard to restore. John Derbyshire laments the absence of "middlebrow conservatism." The lowbrow conservatism of talk radio is "energizing and fun," he says, but routinely caters to "reflex rather than thought." Talk radio reassures down-the-line conservatives that there's no need for them to reassess and modify their old ideas, investigate new ones, or doubt their own intellectual and moral superiority to liberals. What it doesn't do, according to Derbyshire, is "speak to that vast segment of the American middle class that lives sensibly - indeed, conservatively - wishes to be thought generous and good, finds everyday politics boring, and has a horror of strong opinions."

Winning a hearing and votes from that vast and electorally crucial segment is partly a matter of tone. Derbyshire laments that conservatives can't or won't express themselves with the "studied gentility" and "affectless voices" of National Public Radio, relying too often on "bullying bluster" rather than "bringing a sportsman's respect for his opponents to the debate."

Even if a new, pitch-perfect conservatism gets all that right, however, there's still the problem of substance. As Ramesh Ponnuru writes in the current National Review, ""The principal sources of the Left's revival are not difficult to identify: the years of denial that our strategy in Iraq was failing; stagnant wages; Republican corruption; the financial meltdown.... Republicans must... present plausible solutions to voters' concerns about health care, wages, and so forth--particularly if the results of Democratic policies are not unambiguously disastrous."

David Frum makes the same point: "We lost in 2008 in large part because we had not governed successfully over the previous eight years. More than political tactics, more even than media, what matters in politics is results. If national incomes had grown by 1% a year under George Bush instead of stagnating, Al Franken would have lost [Minnesota's Senate election] in a landslide."

Wonky inventiveness will be a necessary condition for discharging this political duty, but not a sufficient one. Conservatives still have to resolve, or at least manage, the tensions within their coalition. In a huge, diverse country with a strong historical and structural bias toward a two-party system, large, strange and tense coalitions will be a permanent problem for both parties. Some of the strains within the liberal coalition were made clear during the 2008 contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (They were voiced memorably by the national president of the machinists' union.)

John Derbyshire outlined one of the fault lines in the conservative coalition six years ago when he discussed 'metropolitan conservatives," an issue he revisits in We Are Doomed. Metro-cons, to take a couple of particulars, believe in evolution and oppose laws outlawing homosexual acts between consenting adults. According to a fair amount of polling data, these positions put the metro-cons to the left of more than 40% of the America population, which means it probably puts them to the left of at least 80% of the people who voted for McCain/Palin. Derbyshire describes the metro-con's anomalous situation concisely: "I dislike modern American liberalism very much, and believe it to be poisonous and destructive; yet I am at ease in a roomful of New York liberals in a way that, to be truthful about it, I am not in a gathering of red-state evangelicals. Setting aside our actual opinions about this, that or the other, I am aware that in the first gathering I am among people with whom I have, at some level, a shared outlook; and in the second gathering, not."

His resolution of this tension in 2003 was unpersuasive. Admitting that it would be "the legions of real, authentic conservatives out there in the provinces" who would keep conservatism politically potent Derbyshire says, "God bless them all for keeping America strong, free, and true to her founding principles. If the price to be paid is a sodomy law here, a high-school Creationism class there, well, far as I am concerned, that's a small price indeed."

This doesn't sound like a sufficient basis on which to hold together a political movement. Rather than indulging ideological preoccupations they cannot endorse, conservative intellectuals need to emphasize a posteriori reasoning in their thinking and writing. The best way to make conservatism viable is to focus relentlessly on the tangible, the particular and totally legitimate preoccupations of their fellow-citizens. In a speech at the outset of his New York mayoral campaign in 1965 William Buckley said, "The purpose of politics is to do, to the limited extent it is possible to do anything by government action, something for the people of New York, to whom is owed, by good government, the security of their liberties: to work without harassment, to live without a crushing fiscal overhead, to educate their children with minimum interference from extrinsic distractions, to walk confidently in the streets, and sleep quietly at night. Public action is needed to secure these private ends."

Ronald Reagan employed the same idiom to great effect, such as when he asked Americans, in his debate with Jimmy Carter, "Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was four years ago? Do you feel your security is safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago?" One of the reasons those questions helped elect Reagan president was the subtle and powerful way they drew wider and wider circles, starting from private and mundane concerns, then connecting them to ones about the nation's economic vigor and its strength and reputation in the world. The rediscovery of those habits of thought and speech will be necessary to restore the intellectual and political health of American conservatism.

NYT quotes at length Matt Spalding's Senate testimony on ever-expanding government and the Czar controversy:

And I conclude by noting that we have a dilemma between the current Congress that tends to give away large amounts of authority -- for instance, in the TARP bill, which gave the secretary of the Treasury extensive delegation of power, $700 billion to purchase troubled assets; low [sic.: that's "lo"--where is the proofreader!  :-).  UPDATE:  The NYT goofed; my apologies] and behold we now own General Motors and we have a "car czar." Setting aside the policy, was that Congress's intention?

Matt's full statement to Senator Feingold's subcommittee is here.