No mandate

Obama thinks he has a mandate for change. But this is the man who ran for president in 2008 promising to “cut net spending” and to shrink the federal government; a man who promised that his “stimulus” spending was only temporary.

Obama hid regulations from view until after his reelection. The press maintained the fiction that Obama supports the Second Amendment and is no threat to citizens’ keeping guns for self-defense. Yet the day after his reelection, Obama called for the UN Arms Trade Treaty negotiations to be started again, and a few weeks later he promised to put the full force of the federal government behind a push for massive new gun control.

    A Barack Obama who will never face the voters again doesn’t have to worry about public opinion.

Even on taxes, Obama’s post-election demands contradicted the positions on which he campaigned. Sure he promised higher taxes on “the rich.” But during the campaign he said that he wanted $800 billion from them. As soon as Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner, agreed to raise that amount by eliminating various credits and deductions for high-income taxpayers, Obama announced that he really wanted twice that amount.

Does a candidate who won re-election with just less than 51 percent of the vote and who has adopted a second-term agenda that he never talked about during the campaign really have a “mandate”? Hardly. Certainly not a mandate for the radical changes that he has in store for Americans. Indeed, the Republican members of Congress have a mandate to stop him.

There is a growing awareness in the United States of the mounting debt problem, and opinion polls show increasing acceptance of budget cuts. But a Barack Obama who will never face the voters again doesn’t have to worry about public opinion. He wants to raise taxes to redistribute wealth, not to reduce the deficit. As investments that would have come to the United States are diverted to other countries, federal revenue will fall short of Obama’s optimistic estimates. The nation’s metastasizing debt will overwhelm the small increases in incomes.

What can we expect of a second Obama term? Obama will continue to try to pick winners and losers. He will continue to pursue the agenda of organized labor at the expense of the unemployed, especially young people. He will continue to try to achieve through the regulatory power of the executive branch what he cannot get through Congress. He will continue to try to grow the government at the expense of the free market and of individual freedoms, especially the free exercise of religion and the right to bear arms.

SOURCE

*******************

Leave Liberal Hollywood to the Liberals

Jonah Goldberg seems a bit complacent below but he has a point

"We need to buy a movie studio."

Amid the umpteen conferences, panels, meetings and informal conversations in the wake of the presidential election, this idea has been a near constant among conservatives who feel like the country is slipping through their fingers. Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee combined raised just more than $1 billion, and all we got are these lousy T-shirts. Since conservatives are losing the culture, goes the argument, which in turn leads to losing at politics, maybe that money could be better spent on producing some cultural ammo of our own?

It's a bad idea.

Let's first acknowledge that Hollywood is overwhelmingly, though not uniformly, liberal. Hollywood constitutes a major part of the Democratic Party's financial base and, arguably, the constituency liberal politicians fear -- and revere -- most. That's why all of the post-Newtown talk of the Obama administration "going after Hollywood violence" was nonsense from the outset.

In August, New York magazine's Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting essay arguing that the right-wing culture vultures of the 1990s were essentially right: Hollyweird really was eroding traditional conservative values. A committed liberal, Chait is grateful for this effort: "We liberals owe not a small measure of our success to the propaganda campaign of a tiny, disproportionately influential cultural elite."

Chait makes a strong case. But just as there's a problem with conservatives drawing straight lines from the silver screen to social decay, there's a problem with drawing similarly unwavering lines to progressive triumph.

Hollywood produces culture, but it also takes its orders from it. For instance, according to today's pieties, the gun is an evil right-wing talisman. And yet, every year Hollywood vomits up a stream of films that cast guns as the solution to any manner of problems. Martial arts stars notwithstanding, you'll be hard-pressed to find an action movie in which the star's most trusted sidekick isn't his gun.

During the Bush years, Hollywood tried valiantly to do its part by churning out big box-office antiwar movies. It consistently failed. Liberal frustration grew so intense, then-L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein celebrated James Cameron's sci-fi extravaganza "Avatar" as proof Americans really do like liberal movies with, among other things, antiwar themes. "Avatar," according to Goldstein, also proved that the global-warming message sells. And yet, after not just "Avatar" but "The Day After Tomorrow," the remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (not to mention academic and media drum-beating), a 2012 Pew poll found that most Americans still don't buy that global warming is caused by humans.

The point isn't that Hollywood has no influence. It's just that its influence is agonizingly hard to predict or dismiss as unthinkingly liberal. Studies of "All in the Family" found that viewers in America, and around the globe, took different lessons from the show based on their politics and cultural norms. Despite Norman Lear's liberal best efforts, many found Archie Bunker more persuasive than his "meathead" sociologist son-in-law. HBO's epic series "The Wire" was a near-Marxist indictment of urban liberalism and the drug war, making it quite popular among many conservatives and libertarians. The popular BBC series "Downton Abbey" is shockingly conservative in many respects. The aristocrats are decent, compassionate people, and the staff is, if anything, more happily class-conscious than the blue bloods. And yet, as far as I can tell, liberals love it.

Obviously, the market is a big factor. No doubt many Hollywood liberals would like to push the ideological envelope more, but audiences get a vote. And that vote isn't cast purely on ideological grounds.

There's a difference between art and propaganda. Outside the art house crowd, liberal agitprop doesn't sell. Art must work with the expectations and beliefs of the audience. Even though pregnancies are commonplace on TV, you'll probably never see a hilarious episode of a sitcom in which a character has an abortion -- because abortion isn't funny.

The conservative desire to create a right-wing movie industry is an attempt to mimic a caricature of Hollywood. Any such effort would be a waste of money that would make the Romney campaign seem like a great investment.

SOURCE

******************************

Book Review: Coolidge

If there was ever a time when the president could simply preside, it has long passed. As early as the Eisenhower era, political scientist Clinton Rossiter observed that the public had come to see the federal chief executive as “a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen, and father of the multitudes.” Under the pressure of public demands, the office had accrued a host of responsibilities over and above its constitutional ones: “World Leader,” “Protector of the Peace,” “Chief Legislator,” “Manager of Prosperity,” “Voice of the People,” and more.

To that daunting portfolio add “Feeler-in-Chief,” a term coined in all earnestness by The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd in 2010 while lashing out at Barack Obama for being insufficiently emotive about the BP oil spill. Obama, she wrote, had “resisted fulfilling a signal part of his job: being a prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel so they know he gets it.”

Poor MoDo would have kicked the cat in sheer frustration if confronted by the implacable, inscrutable Calvin Coolidge, whose reaction to the job’s more unreasonable demands was a Bartleby-like “I prefer not to.”

Shortly after taking office in 1923, Coolidge informed the press that he did not intend “to surrender to every emotional movement” toward executive cures for whatever ails the body politic. In the midst of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which killed hundreds and left some 600,000 Americans homeless, Coolidge resisted calls for federal relief, even refusing a request by NBC that he broadcast a nationwide radio appeal for aid.

In her new biography, Coolidge, Amity Shlaes suggests that in our current era of fiscal and emotional incontinence, we have much to learn from this parsimonious president.

“Debt takes its toll,” Coolidge begins. Shlaes underscores that point with an absorbing anecdote about one of Cal’s forebears, Oliver Coolidge, who in 1849, for want of 30 bucks to pay off a creditor, suffered through a stint in debtor’s prison. “Lame in one leg from birth,” Oliver, the brother of the president’s great-grandfather, had never been able to farm the rocky land of southeastern Vermont as well as the other Coolidges. And so, at age 61, he found himself behind bars, cursing his brother, sending out “despairing letters to one family member after another.”

In Shlaes’ hands, Oliver’s captivity and subsequent redemption—after his release he headed west, where he and his family began new lives—serves as a metaphor for the horrors of debt and the virtue of Yankee perseverance. “The very area that plagued Oliver,” debt, saw “the greatest persevering of Calvin Coolidge,” Shlaes writes. “Under Coolidge, the federal debt fell”; under Coolidge, after “sixty-seven months in office, the federal government was smaller” than when he’d found it.

Here was “a rare kind of hero: a minimalist president,” Shlaes argues. And though history remembers “Silent Cal” mostly for his reticence and frequent napping, Shlaes reminds us that “inaction betrays strength.” In politics, it’s often easier to “do something,” however unwise, than it is to hold firm: “Coolidge is our great refrainer.”

Alas, after Coolidge’s elegant introduction, the sledding gets much tougher. Long stretches of this 456-page tome read like an info-dump from Shlaes’s clearly formidable research files. Like the hardscrabble farmers of Plymouth Notch, you need to set your jaw grimly and persevere through a long winter of sentences that should have been left on the cutting room floor, like: “Coolidge met with [Budget Director Herbert] Lord six times and reduced a tariff on paintbrush handles by half, his second cut that year, the other a reduction in duty on live bob quail.” Shlaes should have followed the example of her famously taciturn subject, who in his 1915 opening address as president of the Massachusetts Senate delivered a crisp little homily of 44 words, ending in “above all things, be brief.”

Still, the level of detail she provides inspires reflection on the vast gulf between today’s GOP and the grand party of old. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge cut taxes and shrank spending. They were pro-peace and anti-wiretapping. They embraced “normalcy” instead of stoking fear. And—go figure—they were also popular. Today’s Republicans could profit from studying their example.

Tax cuts were central to Coolidge’s legislative program, and he believed, correctly, that under the prevailing conditions (the top rate had crept above 70 percent during WWI) they’d lead to increased revenue. But unlike modern supply-siders, Coolidge attacked the beast head-on, instead of hoping to “starve” it indirectly. “I am for economy,” he said in 1924, “after that, I am for more economy.” He vetoed farm subsidies and new veterans benefits, and Shlaes reports that he spent a great deal of time “plotting to fend off military spending demands.”

The tax cuts that Coolidge and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon orchestrated took millions of people off the tax rolls. Unlike Mitt Romney, Coolidge and Mellon didn’t worry that they’d created a new horde of “takers.” By 1927, as it became clear that top earners were providing more revenue at lower rates, Mellon boasted that their policy had transformed the income tax into “a class rather than a national tax.”

Coolidge “deemed international law the best approach to prevent war,” backing the somewhat quixotic Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw it. Coolidge being Coolidge, he took a green-eyeshades view of the matter: “It pays to be at peace.” But peace also allowed greater protection of civil liberties. Coolidge “removed William Burns, the head of the Bureau of Investigation, and curtailed wiretapping, one of Burns’s favored tools.” (Alas, he replaced Burns with young J. Edgar Hoover.) Coolidge also finished the job of freeing the World War I protestors jailed by Wilson. Harding had pardoned 25, including Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs. Coolidge ordered the release of Wilson’s remaining political prisoners.

An admirable record, particularly considering the shape the country was in after Professor Wilson’s reign. Weighed down by debt and wartime controls, plagued by unemployment, the country seemed “lost, if not cursed,” Shlaes writes. “Yet within a few years the panic passed and the trouble eased,” she says. “The reversal was in good measure due to the perseverance of one man”: Coolidge.

“One man”—Coolidge? Poor Warren G. Harding: He’s become the Rodney Dangerfield of American presidents. The odious Wilson is a perennial top 10 favorite in the presidential rankings, those “polls by which court historians reward warmarkers and punish the peaceful,” as Bill Kauffman recently put it. Harding, Wilson’s successor, is nearly always dead last. (Was the Teapot Dome scandal really worse than 117,000 dead doughboys?) It pains me to see Warren G. get short shrift here too, especially from an author who appreciates presidential minimalism. Shlaes writes that “Coolidge hacked away at the federal budget with a discipline sadly missing in his well-intentioned predecessor.” Harding may not have been the most disciplined of men, but of the two, he was the more accomplished budget-cutter. By the time Coolidge took the oath after Harding’s death, federal spending had been cut nearly in half, leading to large government surpluses.

But this is a biography, after all—so what about Coolidge the man? At times Shlaes lets her admiration for her subject drift into hagiography: “Always, a philosophy of service inspired Coolidge,” she insists. That’s one way of putting it. Another is H.L. Mencken’s: “Coolidge is simply a professional politician,” he wrote in 1924, and a very “dull one” at that. “He has lived by job-seeking and job-holding all his life; his every thought is that of his miserable trade.”

At times, Coolidge makes it hard not to agree with Mencken’s harsh assessment. Despite her best efforts, Shlaes’s Coolidge often seems like a grim, boring striver, given to expressions as petulant and morose as Morrissey lyrics. Writing to his father from his berth at Amherst College, young Cal groused, “I never earned any money and I do not know as I ever made any happiness.” “I am so tired,” he signed off in a letter telling a onetime love interest he forgave her rejection.

Clearly, this was a man with a melancholic temperament. It would get worse after the death of his 16-year-old son, Calvin Jr., in 1924 from sepsis after developing a blister playing tennis on the White House courts. In his 2003 book The Tormented President, Robert E. Gilbert argues that this tragedy is key to understanding Coolidge’s performance in office, which, like most presidential rankers, he views negatively. Cal Jr.’s death left Coolidge “clinically depressed” throughout the bulk of his presidency, Gilbert writes, “a broken man, waiting passively, distractedly, indifferently to lay down the heavy burdens of office.”

Interesting, if true. But aside from passing references to Calvin’s crabby moods and the distance between him and the first lady, Shlaes isn’t terribly interested in the president’s psyche.

For my money, she makes too little use of Coolidge’s spare and powerful Autobiography. There’s a passage therein about the death of his son where Silent Cal’s Old WASP reserve cracks just slightly. You can tell that as a dad, he wasn’t full of hugs, but the pain and anger that lie under the surface of these words is all the more palpable for his tight-lipped refusal to let it gush forth:

In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not.

When he went the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.

The ways of Providence are often beyond our understanding. It seemed to me that the world had need of the work that it was probable he could do.

I do not know why such a price was exacted for occupying the White House.
Well, the conventional wisdom overvalues presidents who enjoy the job. In his influential 1972 book The Presidential Character, political scientist James David Barber argued that we should pick presidents by their personality type. The “active-positive” president—the ideal voters should seek—tackles the job with manic energy and zest and “gives forth the feeling that he has fun in political life.” The “passive-negative” sees the office as a matter of stern duty, and his “tendency is to withdraw.” Among Barber’s “active-positives” were troublemakers FDR, Truman, and JFK; his “passive-negatives” included the Cincinnatus-like figures Washington, Eisenhower, and, of course, Coolidge. Maybe we should only give the job to people who are so depressed they can barely get out of bed.

Mencken’s initial disdain for Coolidge mellowed as the ’20s receded. After the ex-president’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1933, Mencken eulogized that, for all Coolidge’s faults, “the itch to run things did not afflict him….He never made inflammatory speeches….No bughouse professors, sweating fourth-dimensional economics, were received at the White House.” After Wilson’s reign of terror, Americans wanted peace, “and simple peace was what Dr. Coolidge gave them.” Given the “World-Savers” that preceded and followed Cal, “he begins to seem, in retrospect, an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen. His failings are forgotten; the country remembers only the grateful fact that he let it alone.” There are, Mencken observed, “worse epitaphs for a statesman.”

SOURCE

*************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************