In the February 2009 edition of the Atlantic, Joshua Green wrote an excellent profile of Senator Charles Schumer. In it, he details Schumer’s—and Democrats’ generally—theory for why they won the 2008 election:

By contrast, Schumer’s agenda is primarily offensive, a series of mainly tax policies designed to support and encourage middle-class aspirations. The underlying rationale is to create a government that is more active on behalf of the middle class.

…

When I returned to see him just after the election, Schumer had the satisfied air of someone who feels thoroughly vindicated. The middle class had delivered a broad Democratic sweep, ratifying his view that the country had reached a pivotal moment. The Republican era that began in 1980 with Ronald Reagan had come to an end. “This almost always happens when people redefine their relationship to government,” he told me. Schumer saw the presidential election as having turned on the simple question of which candidate recognized this new relationship. “You look at just about every policy difference between Obama and McCain,” he said. “Underlying it was a more active government.”

When Democrats hear the phrase more active government, all sorts of well-established programs leap to mind. Schumer is dubious of them, and focuses instead on his idea of a redefined relationship. The last time voters redefined their relationship to government, in 1980, they wanted less of it: fed up with an onerous, spendthrift bureaucracy, the middle class chose Reagan, who promised to “get government off your back.” Schumer believes that the reason Republicans dominated for the past 28 years is that the standard Democratic agenda, though intended to serve the broad middle class, has too often missed the mark. To satisfy an electorate now eager for government to do more and not less, Schumer believes that his party must recognize how it erred over the past three decades. This entails changing the way Democrats think about the middle class and introducing new policies to serve it.

I haven’t found a more accurate explanation of how Democrats conceived their 2008 election victory than this. Democrats believed it to be a shift in the public’s politics away from less government involvement, less taxes and free markets to a society where government leads. There is a reason many Democrats have characterized Barack Obama’s presidency as FDR-like, and Obama has taken every opportunity to chastise Republicans for their small government policies (an inaccurate charge if there ever was one): they earnestly believed that Obama was elected because the American public changed its mind and decided that it would like more government in their lives.

It couldn’t be, of course, that Americans were fed up with the corruption and hypocrisy displayed by Republicans in Congress during Bush’s presidency, the Iraq war, the financial crisis and bank bailouts (all of which happened while Bush was president, whether he deserved final blame or not), and wanted to punish them for it and bring in some new people. Nor was it because the Republicans fielded a weak presidential ticket. No; that certainly isn’t possible. Clearly Democrats won big in 2006 and 2008 because they wanted Democrats to pass every part of their agenda.

This is a brilliant example of how easy it is to delude ourselves about reality, and what happens when we do so. Democrats thought the election meant the public had handed them a mandate to do as they please; actually, they had given both parties a warning to act responsibly. Democrats kept their eyes shut and their imagination firmly stuck on dreams of higher spending and government-controlled healthcare, and as a result face a tough midterm election this November.

Republicans, should they take control of the House and even the Senate, must resist this same temptation. The public, although more conservative than it is liberal, won’t vote Republican because they’re suddenly enamored with their agenda (there isn’t much of one right now to be enamored with)—they’re voting against Democrats, not for Republicans. Republicans must learn this lesson: the public doesn’t want them to attempt to force through their agenda. It wants a government that acts responsibly, in the best interests of the country.

Matt Welch:

What’s perhaps more frightening than the existence of such an all-powerful enforcement apparatus is the argumentation supporting it even in the face of public outrage and ridicule. Car wash signs need four months of approval because there has to be some type of structure. Lemonade stands need to be forcibly shut down because, in the words of Portland City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, “The county has the responsibility to fairly enforce the rules on permits.” U.S. News & World Report columnist Mary Kate Cary, while pointing out that ObamaCare is “not fiscally responsible” and “creates a nearly trillion-dollar new entitlement program that doesn’t pay for itself,” nonetheless gushes that the new calorie count requirement “may change American diets.” Once you take it as a given that the government has an important say in what you do with your property or put in your body, a whole universe of appalling actions and apologia becomes possible.

That Obama administration favorite, that only 3% of small businesses have income above $200,000, is a lie:

Vice President Joe Biden harshly rejected House Minority Leader John Boehner’s assertion that the hikes would harm small businesses, saying that “he has created this myth that a tax cut for millionaires is actually a tax cut for small business. There aren’t 3% of small businesses in America that would qualify for that tax cut.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flipped the number around, saying that the planned tax increases would exempt “98% of American families and about 97% of small businesses.”

The impact is far more severe than Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Biden suggest. In fact, the sound bite about 3% of small businesses, which has been picked up by numerous pundits, is one of the more misleading statements in the long history of economic propaganda.

The 3% figure, which is computed from IRS data, is based on simply counting the number of returns with any pass-through business income. So, if somebody makes a little money selling products on eBay and reports that income on Schedule C of their tax return, they are counted as a small business. The fact that there are millions of people in the lower tax brackets with small amounts of business income may be interesting for some purposes, but it is irrelevant for the assessment of the economic impact of the tax hikes.

The real figure is more like 48%.

You mean the administration lies, too? My whole world is off-kilter now.

Perhaps they should set up an email address for us to report fishy information from the White House.

(Via Greg Mankiw.)

E.J. Dionne thinks the Obama administration is doing poorly because he stopped campaigning:

There was a revealing moment in early August when Obama told an audience at a Texas fundraiser: “We have spent the last 20 months governing. They spent the last 20 months politicking.” Referring to the impending elections, he added: “Well, we can politick for three months. They’ve forgotten I know how to politick pretty good.”

Obama’s mistake is captured by that disdainful reference to “politicking.” In a democracy, separating governing from “politicking” is impossible. “Politicking” is nothing less than the ongoing effort to persuade free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions. Voters feel better about politicians who put what they are doing in a compelling context. Citizens can endure setbacks as long as they believe the overall direction of the government’s approach is right.

So, Dionne’s argument is that if Obama just ran his administration like a “campaign,” if he only made his case better, then his poll numbers would be better.

Uhm. I’m not sure what Dionne would propose Obama do that he hasn’t done, since campaign is about all Obama has done. The administration sent out a memo in July saying that in the preceding 18 months, the president, vice president, first lady or other senior administration officials had participated in 187 fundraising events for 2010 Congressional candidates. That’s about an event every three days.

That’s just fundraising events. Let’s remember what else Obama has done. In June 2009, the president was interviewed on Good Morning America from the White House’s South Lawn and a town hall-like event during primetime on ABC, and he spent most of 2009 touring the country, putting on “town halls” to promote his reform.

During that time, he also used a typical campaign tactic—trashing any opposition. I detailed this particular favorite of his last November. After buying off health insurance companies to support his reform, he vilified them when he needed a scapegoat; he kicked off his presidency by identifying Rush Limbaugh as the Republican’s leader; he made demeaning Republicans a daily ritual; he warned Democrats that voted against his legislation that he was “keeping score”; and on and on. That’s what you do when you are campaigning, not when you’re the president.

Dionne’s logic has been continually trotted out since Obama’s poll numbers began declining. Here it is: Obama’s poll numbers aren’t declining because the public dislikes him or there is something actually wrong with his administration—they’re declining because the public is ignorant and is being misled. Thus, if Obama just explained it more, then he would be doing better. Nancy Pelosi used a particularly twisted form of this logic when she said that they have to pass healthcare reform so we can see what’s in it—we’ll like it better once it’s law! There’s an apt word to describe this logic: denial.

Not only does it have no basis in reality, since Obama has spent so much time campaigning for Democrats and his agenda, but it’s a particularly strong case of self-delusion. If Obama’s poll numbers are declining because the public is ignorant and misled, then that means there’s nothing wrong with the Democrats’ agenda. It’s a nice way to avoid painful truth.

There’s a simple reason Obama’s poll numbers are declining: when he ran for president, he argued that the question wasn’t whether government is too large or too small, but rather whether it’s effective. In other words, he argued that government could act responsibly to help the economy and move our country forward. The reality, though, has been this: while the administration said that with their stimulus, unemployment would never rise above 8 percent, it rose to 10.2 percent and currently is at 9.5 percent. And while the economy suffered, and our debt soared, he pushed for a healthcare reform bill that added more than $400 billion over the next decade to our ruining entitlement spending and mandated taxes increase by $500 billion in the same period.

So that’s his track record. Obama made his administration’s mantra “effective government,” by which he apparently means a federal government that plays an even larger role in our economy and lives, and it’s been embarrassingly ineffective. He’s done this all while using the presidency, an office that is supposed to be treated with respect, to trash his opposition.

No, I don’t think the answer is for Obama to get in our faces more. He’s done quite enough of that. Perhaps—and I know this is a wild idea—he should try governing.

The CBO just released data showing separately showing how much the Democrats’ healthcare reform will increase entitlement spending, and how much the bill will increase taxes.

They estimate that over the next decade, entitlement spending will increase by $401 billion and taxes will increase by $525 billion.

I (and many others) dispute these numbers, but that’s not the issue here. During debate on the healthcare bill, the CBO refused to break out this information. Instead, they combined the two together and only showed their estimate of the net effect of the healthcare bill.

Keith Hennessey nicely explained today why this is so misleading:

This is a very different picture. Imagine two scenarios of a lawmaker who was on the fence last March. He or she is a Blue Dog Democrat, or a Democrat from a fiscally conservative red district, and is deeply concerned that the legislation may be fiscally responsible. He is presented with two different statements from CBO:

1. “CBO says these bills will reduce the budget deficit by $124 billion over the next decade.”
2. “CBO says these bills will increase federal entitlement spending by $401 billion over the next decade, and will increase taxes by $525 billion over that same time period, for a net deficit reduction of $124 billion.”

Both are accurate re-statements of their estimates, but the second, more illuminating statement, presents a much different picture than the first. The first statement just says the bill will reduce the deficit (free lunch!), while the second says we are significantly increasing our (already disastrously high) entitlement spending, and substantially increasing taxes.

They had this data during the spring and didn’t present it to us when it would actually be useful. They left out useful information. Hennessey continues,

CBO should not bury this information in a parenthetical in their mid-summer update, five months after the legislation was considered by Congress. It should have been part of the official scores presented to Congress before they voted. If you compare the final scoring of the stimulus law, the tables clearly separate out spending, revenues, and deficit effects.

Based on CBO’s normal scoring practices and the intense scrutiny of both CBO and this legislation, this cannot possibly have been an oversight. I would bet heavily that CBO was pressured not to show this information.

The Democrats’ healthcare reform may mean colleges can’t offer affordable health insurance plans to students:

Colleges and universities say that some rules in the new health law could keep them from offering low-cost, limited-benefit student insurance policies, and they’re seeking federal authority to continue offering them.

Their request drew immediate fire from critics, however, who say that student health plans should be held to the same standards that other insurance is.

I guess this is what Nancy Pelosi meant when she said they have to pass the bill so we can see what’s in it.

Megan McArdle comments:

Now they’re in an awkward position. Do they change the law to offer students less generous coverage? That’s not going to sound good. Do they leave it, forcing universities to either end coverage entirely, or make it much more expensive? Cue angry students demonstrating about the cost of their health care policies.

Idiotic decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

So let’s see if I have this right: the police can walk onto my property, place a GPS tracking device on my car, and track me indefinitely, because I don’t have an expectation of privacy on my driveway? What the hell sense does that make?

Their conclusion not only doesn’t logically follow from their premise, but it has no relevance to it whatever. While I do not expect to have privacy on my driveway—that is, I wouldn’t do anything I don’t want publicly visible—my driveway is my property, and thus I have the right to decide who can and cannot access it. If I don’t consent to the police being on my driveway, and they don’t have a warrant, then they cannot be there. And they sure as hell don’t have a right to place a tracking device on my car.

This ruling is, if allowed to stand, incredibly dangerous. This basically makes it legal for the government to track everyone’s location at any given time, whether they are reasonably suspected of a crime or not. This is one giant leap toward a police state.

Ron Paul chastises that are seeking to stop the New York mosque from being built:

The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”
…
Conservatives are once again, unfortunately, failing to defend private property rights, a policy we claim to cherish. In addition conservatives missed a chance to challenge the hypocrisy of the left which now claims they defend property rights of Muslims, yet rarely if ever, the property rights of American private businesses.

Absolutely right. I do find it amusing, though, that liberals are enthusiastically quoting Ron Paul on this, when many on the left just as giddily portrayed him as a racist in the 2008 primaries.

Paul went on to say:

This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.

There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

This is a terrible misunderstanding on Paul’s part of what motivates Islamists. Paul, and others, believe that Islamists are fundamentally only interested in the Muslim world (which is usually conveniently, but inaccurately, defined as the Middle East), and attack the U.S. because of our involvement in the region.

While the U.S.’s involvement in the Muslim world certainly is a motivating factor, it isn’t their primary motivation. For groups like al Qaeda, their goal isn’t to change the Middle East, but to change the world. Their goal is to restart the caliphate and extend Taliban-like rule across the Muslim world—from North Africa to China—and from there, Islamize the world. From this perspective, the U.S.’s involvement in the Muslim world is incidental. The U.S. must be defeated not because it has hurt Muslims, but because it is the world’s superpower and thus the largest threat to their ultimate goal.

Handing Iraq and Afghanistan to Islamists, renouncing Israel and withdrawing all forces from the region may, in the short-term, placate them. But the short-term is, well, short. Would we rather deal with al Qaeda as a group forced into the mountains of the Pakistani-Afghan border, or as a movement in control of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Home sales declined precipitously in July:

Economists and forecasters were predicting an awful 13% decline in existing home sales for July, to 4.65 million units.  This, we were told solemnly, would be the worst since 2009.

In hindsight, those making the predictions seem to have been the sort of wild-eyed optimists whose sunny belief in the strength of the housing market got us into this mess in the first place.  The actual figure for home sales, according to the National Association of Realtors, was 3.83 million–a 27% decline.

The home buyers tax credit ended in April and this is the result. The credit didn’t create new demand—it took existing demand and artificially compressed it into a smaller period of time. In this way, it inflated demand while it was in effect and inflated housing prices as well, and thus put off (but didn’t avoid) a necessary contraction after the 1997-2006 housing bubble. We will now live through that contraction.

We could have suffered through it earlier, but we decided to delay the pain.

Keith Hennessey breaks down a favorite rhetorical trick used by welfare state supporters:

In this view of the world, revenues belong to the government and are allocated by policymakers as gifts to those who need or deserve them.  When you hear that “we cannot afford to cut taxes” and “we should not give tax cuts to ______,” you are hearing this philosophy.

Money doesn’t just magically appear in the government coffers. A private citizen or firm earns income and the government takes a portion of that income. The money initially belongs to he or she who earned it. Using “we” to refer to the government suggests the funds being spent by the government belong to the government. This matters because if the money belongs to the government, then elected officials should apply their moral principles to figure out who needs or deserves it most. If the money belongs first to he or she who earned it, then elected officials should apply their moral principles to figure out whether they should take it from the earner and spend it on something else or give it to someone else. Those are fundamentally different decisions.

In this case, Keith is responding to Paul Krugman’s use of this convenient lie, but it’s widespread. When welfare state supporters discuss reducing taxes, they refer to it as “giving” money to some group. Krugman et al love using it, because it makes tax cuts sound like a plot to make the wealthy wealthier. In reality, of course, this is absolutely false—a tax cut merely reduces how much the government forcibly takes from someone.

Nancy Pelosi:

“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she said.

What a ridiculous issue all around. There’s no reason the mosque shouldn’t be built, and many people who oppose it—like Newt Gingrich and Harry Reid—are absolutely doing so for political advantage.

Yet now we have Pelosi criticizing them for making this a political issue, and then trying to politicize it herself by calling for an investigation.

This is an excellent example of just how broken our political system is. We have conniving fools like Newt Gingrich using people’s prejudices for their own gain, gutless idiots like Harry Reid trying to gain a little support by opposing it, and Nancy Pelosi doing the only thing she apparently knows how to do: threatening to use government power.

Oh, and I forgot the President. Can’t forget him! For his part, he decided to opine on a local issue (I’m rather sure Obama wants to add “Opiner-in-Chief” to his official title) and support building the mosque, then when he realized that might invite some criticism (God forbid!), he “clarified” that he only supported the general right to freedom of religion, but not necessarily this mosque. That sure clears that up.

The Economist has a excellent, in-depth look at David Cameron’s reforms in Britain:

Where does this radicalism come from? Ruddy-faced and shire-bred, Mr Cameron looks and sounds like the stolid, middle-of-the-road High Tory he is often thought to be. Part of the answer lies in the company he keeps. Among the most evangelical of the Tocquevillian Tories is Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron’s strategist. A former advertising man who grew intrigued by the potential of businesses and other non-state organisations to bring about social change, he joined his old friend’s campaign to remake the Conservative Party.

John Richardson has an excellent piece on Newt Gingrich in Esquire.

In short, he lusts for power. Gingrich scares me.

Last week, Paul Krugman published a column where he called Congressman Paul Ryan a “flimflam man”:

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

Krugman’s justification for this all too typical heated rhetoric is that when the Congressional Budget Office scored Ryan’s “Roadmap for America”—his plan for making social security, Medicare and Medicaid solvent over the longterm, reforming healthcare and our tax system, and placing us on a sustainable fiscal path—they only scored the effects from his plan’s spending cuts, but did not analyze how it would affect tax revenue. Instead, the CBO assumed a baseline revenue of 19 percent of GDP. The CBO’s scoring concluded it would cut our deficit in half by 2020.

Krugman points to a Tax Policy Center analysis of the Road Map which concludes that, in its current state, it would reduce tax revenue to 16 percent of GDP, or by about 4 trillion dollars. Krugman’s implication is that Ryan requested the CBO only score the spending cuts side of his plan, and thus intentionally gave a false view of what his plan would do for our budget.

There’s two teensy little problems with Krugman’s argument. First, the CBO doesn’t score changes to the tax code—the Joint Committee on Taxation does.

Oops. So, Krugman’s calling Ryan a charlatan based on his own misunderstanding. In the three days he wrote his column, he wrote four posts on the subject (with one of which he congratulated himself on how good he is at spotting “flimflammers”), and extended his claim. On Sunday, however, he indirectly addressed it by quoting Ryan’s reply to him, instead of admitting his error. In the section Krugman quotes, Ryan says that he did not request the CBO to score his plan’s effect on tax revenue because it is the JCT’s territory, and the JCT could not do it because they do not do longterm revenue estimates (more than ten years).

Krugman then assumes that Ryan chose not to get the JCT’s ten-year estimate; that is, rather than call Ryan’s office for a direct answer on whether they did, Krugman made up his own answer:

In other words, Ryan could have gotten JCT to do a 10-year estimate; it just wouldn’t go beyond that. And he chose not to get that 10-year estimate. So it was Ryan’s choice not to have any independent estimate of the 10-year revenue effects.

Perhaps one of the perks of the Nobel prize is making stuff up, because like the original argument in his column, this isn’t true. Megan McArdle did what was apparently too much work for Krugman and called Ryan’s office. Their answer: yes, we asked the JCT to make an estimate, and they said they couldn’t. Ryan further clarified for the Weekly Standard:

Krugman wrote on his blog on Saturday that “Ryan could have gotten JCT to do a 10-year estimate; it just wouldn’t go beyond that. And he chose not to get that 10-year estimate.” Ryan says that’s not true. “We asked Joint Tax to do it,” Ryan told me. “They said they couldn’t. They don’t do them long-term outside the 10 year window. They couldn’t do it in the first 10 years because of just how busy they were.” Ryan says Krugman could have cleared this confusion up with a simple phone call.

After the JCT refused to make an estimate, Ryan went to experts at the Treasury Department, and they apparently said his plan would hit his numbers. Yeah, Ryan sure seems dishonest, doesn’t he?

So, let’s get this all straight here: Krugman calls Paul Ryan a “flimflam man” based on Krugman’s own ignorance of how the CBO works. Then when he apparently realizes his error, he chooses not only to not admit it—but lies about what Ryan did. That’s Paul Krugman. I’m loathe to use rhetoric like Krugman’s, but it seems to me Krugman is the charlatan.

I did say there were two problems with Krugman’s argument. Here’s the second: Ryan has said all along that his intention with the Roadmap was to keep tax revenues approximately at their historical level of 19 percent of GDP. The Tax Policy Center (yes, the same group Krugman cited in his original argument) said this in a post titled “In Defense of Congressman Paul Ryan”:

Ryan has explicitly stated that he is willing to work with the Treasury department to adjust the rates on his tax reform plan to “maintain approximately our historic levels of revenue as a share of GDP.” Since 1980 the federal tax revenue has been about 18 percent of GDP.

So, Paul Ryan puts out a serious plan¹ for tackling our disastrous deficit, social security, Medicare and healthcare, makes all attempts to get it properly scored, and says he intends to modify it as necessary to keep spending and revenues together—in other words, he acts in an honest manner, something most politicians will never do—and Krugman calls him a flimflam man.

Ryan, as far as I can tell, is one of the few genuinely well-intentioned and intelligent people in Washington, D.C. Many on the left acknowledge this. Krugman’s actions are unjustifiable and show him to be what he is: a partisan who serves his ideology, but not his country, faithfully, and will throw anyone under the bus who gets in the way. Honesty be damned.

1. Something Democrats have refused to do. Democrats have decided to punt all responsibility to the commission they created. This makes their “party of no” rhetoric all the more crassly hypocritical. [↩]

Jay Cost:

Was there an alternative approach the President could have taken? I think so. Such a tactic would have acknowledged the sizeable McCain bloc. McCain won 22 states, making his coalition a politically potent minority. Obama should have governed in light of this. I don’t mean in hock to it. He didn’t have to make Sarah Palin his domestic policy advisor, but he should have ignored the hagiographers who were quick to declare him the next FDR. These flatterers always manifest themselves anytime a new Democrat comes to the White House, and they are of very little help for Democratic Presidents who actually want to be great.

What he should have done instead was disarm his opponents. If he had built initial policy proposals from the middle, he could have wooed the moderate flank of the Republican party, marginalized the conservatives, and alleviated the concerns of those gettable voters in the South and the Midwest. This is precisely what Bill Clinton did between 1995 and 2000, and it is what the President’s promises of “post-partisanship” suggested.

In January 2008, that’s precisely how I hoped Obama would govern: like a post-1994 Bill Clinton. I had reason to, despite my fears; Obama’s “post-partisan” politics rhetoric and more moderate healthcare reform proposal (during the election, he adamantly opposed the individual mandate) all at least signaled he could try to unite non-partisans across the political spectrum to work together.

As Cost argues, this would have been a powerful strategy for Obama. If, from the beginning of the administration, he governed as a moderate, he would have split the Republican party in two. Moderates would support many of his initiatives and avoid stinging criticism on those they did not not because they saw him as a reasonable man. The party’s strong opposition wouldn’t exist. And more importantly, independents would still support his administration. In this alternate history, Democrats would be looking forward to a successful midterm election this fall.

Of course, that never happened. Rather than honor what he said during his campaign, he decided to use his election for all it was worth. He lost the respect of non-partisan conservatives and, most damagingly, of independents.