Columnist.
I hate to break it to those deniers who believe that President Obama's tax-guzzling capacity has somehow been diminished by the fiscal cliff provision to fix "permanent" tax rates. You're dreaming. Several smart columnists and respected conservative editorial pieces tell us that a major silver lining in the crisis deal just concluded is that by agreeing not to reinstitute the Clinton tax rates (and leave the Bush rates in place) for all but the "wealthy" (income of $400,000 for single filers and $450,000 for marrieds), Obama and the Democrats made a major concession. They argue that if Democrats couldn't do better after Obama was just re-elected and when the debt is so high, they'll never be able to. They'll have to realize that they will never be able to sustain their desired welfare state through raising taxes alone and have to come to the table on serious spending cuts and entitlement reform.
NBC's David Gregory interviewed President Barack Obama on "Meet the Press" Sunday, and a conversation ensued that would have been more fitting for a show called "The President Meets One of His Many Mainstream Media Enablers." Let's take a look at just some of the exchanges and fantasize how different the nation's political and electoral climate might be if the liberal press were doing its job as watchdog instead of taking sides. Obama said, "We're seeing signs of recovery ... in employment numbers improving." Might Gregory have asked Obama how he can continue to put an unrealistically positive spin on such persistently dismal numbers? If this were a Republican president, do you think Gregory wouldn't have pointed out that the only reason these numbers appear to be slightly improving is that more people have actually given up looking for work altogether?
The reason President Obama and Republicans can't come to an agreement on the fiscal cliff negotiations is that they don't share the same goals. This is also the key to understanding why President Obama appears far less worried about going over the cliff. Republicans are focused on restoring the nation's financial health by promoting economic growth and reducing our horrendous deficits and debt. President Obama's primary aim is to complete his project of fundamentally transforming America. I ask you loyal Democrats to please consider these things. Obama has demonstrated almost no concern for our crushing debt or deficits -- at least not since calling President George W. Bush unpatriotic for presiding over deficits and debt dramatically smaller than his own.
At the very core of Christianity is the historical authenticity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. But for His resurrection, we would not be celebrating His birth. The Apostle Paul said, "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." Christian apologist Josh McDowell spent more than 700 hours studying the subject of the resurrection and concluded that it "is one of the most wicked, vicious, heartless hoaxes ever foisted upon the minds of men, or it is the most amazing fact of history." When a university student asked him why he was unable to refute Christianity, McDowell responded, "For a very simple reason: I am not able to explain away an event in history -- the resurrection of Jesus Christ."
I can't imagine anything more painful for a person than the loss of one's child, and so I won't pretend that I can adequately express the horror of the savage murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. When such tragedies occur, most of us engage in sober reflection about the preciousness of life and especially of our own loved ones. As much as we hurt for the families who lost children at the hands of this murderer, we thank God our children are safe. But we know it can happen to any parent; these victims did absolutely nothing to provoke this wanton act of evil.
At this stage of the fiscal cliff pseudo negotiations, do the American people have any idea what the Republicans stand for other than to protect the wealthy and cut Medicare and Social Security to harm the sick and aged? People constantly invoke Ronald Reagan, but one thing is certain and very relevant: If Reagan were on the national stage today, the public would not be confused about what the Republican Party stands for and why it matters. The GOP is having difficulty even consolidating around a central message, much less selling it to the public. There is no excuse for that. Though following its election defeat the party has all the confidence of an abandoned stepchild, it needs to shake the dust off, stand up and begin fighting like it truly believes the nation is worth fighting for.
It is really getting old to hear liberal politicians and pundits complaining about conservative media as being destructive, as if the country would be better off returning to the halcyon days of the monolithic liberal media. That seems to be the view of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who complained about "the right-wing control of the American media, particularly starting with Fox News." During a discussion on HuffPost Live, Kennedy said, "Ninety-five percent of talk radio in our country is right-wing ... so a whole section of our country that's what they're hearing." "Twenty-two percent of Americans," continued Kennedy, "say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and it's empowered these large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United States Congress elected -- the tea party ideologues who control the Republican Party."
Something is very wrong in the world when the most dogmatic and inflexible president in recent memory can make unreasonable demands of his GOP budget opponents and yet be confident they'll be blamed for the impasse. It is past time Barack Obama be held accountable for his intentionally irresponsible fiscal policies that are guaranteed to take us into national bankruptcy. It is outrageous enough that he is steering us into insolvency, but it is unbearable that he's fraudulently blaming the Republican Party for it to boot. This is not a close call, and reasonable people, if they understood the facts, would not support Obama. The problem is that so many people who trust him, inexplicably, look no further than his disingenuous statements and the liberal media's slanted reporting, and the Republican Party leadership simply cannot seem to get its message across. It would help if they evidenced more faith in the wisdom of their own approach.
Some commentators wonder why President Obama always engages in brinksmanship. Why can't he meet Republicans halfway, like Clinton did, they ask. Let me try to respond. One blogger suggests that Obama prefers to play chicken, taking the nation right to the edge of a fiscal disaster because it will increase the likelihood that the GOP will cave. Perhaps, but there's more to it. Many of us warned that Obama is not, by nature or ideology, a conciliator. He is not a centrist, and he's not someone who is interested in the other side's ideas. He knows what he wants to do, and he is hell-bent on doing it. He is not just playing hardball as a matter of strategy; he has no interest in compromise and is angling to get his way entirely. And he wants to further damage the Republican brand in the process.
We can get back to discussing GOP minority constituent recruitment soon, but in the meantime, we have a fiscal cliff issue that beckons -- the real fiscal cliff (America's imminent financial collapse), not the government shutdown molehill everyone is agonizing over. Congressional Republicans should look at their party's loss in the presidential election as liberating. They surely now understand that the strategy of soft-pedaling Obama's record and agenda doesn't work. They surely grasp that its fear of calling President Obama out on his real intentions and the disastrous consequences of his destructive policies just plays into his hands and enables the advancement of his agenda.
One of the largest elephants in the GOP's post-election room is the fate of Christian and other social conservatives. Party honchos can't just wish this problem away -- or, maybe they can. There has been increasing hostility toward Christian involvement in politics, and the animus hasn't been solely from the left. To be sure, Democrats have taken the lead, demonizing conservative Christians as science-challenged scolds who don't care about women's "reproductive rights," but there is plenty of antipathy from certain elements within the Republican Party, as well. Many establishment and some libertarian Republicans have long looked upon Christian conservatives with mild, condescending contempt. Party leaders from Barry Goldwater to Alan Simpson have openly derided Christians and lamented their negative influence on the party and on the overall political climate.
Isn't it tragically ironic that the man who rode the perfect storm into public office on the horse of national unity has now perfected the politics of division so spectacularly that he won re-election despite the worst record in decades? For when you sift through the rubble from the Republican Party's 2012 nuclear catastrophe, you find consistent clues pointing to a simple explanation: We lost because Barack Obama convinced enough voters that he cares more about people than Mitt Romney, a rich white guy who is contemptuous of the poor, women, blacks and seniors. Never mind results; Obama cares and Republicans don't. In his fundamentally transformed America, Obama has replaced "e pluribus unum" with "us against them."
Obama's first post-election press conference, if you could call it that, tells us a great deal about his attitude and the approach he intends to pursue in his second term, which is the same failed policy mix on steroids. Obama's re-election, of course, gives him the right to pursue these policies, but it doesn't deny elected Republicans the right or relieve them of the duty to oppose them. If Obama can glean any intelligible mandate from his victory, it is that relentless negative campaigning, demagoguery, divisive identity politics, deceit and superior political strategists targeting essential voters and voting districts work. So it should be no surprise that Obama is taking that lesson to heart and is already applying the same strategies going forward.
We conservatives may never reach a consensus among ourselves as to the main factors that caused our election defeat, but surely we can agree that we must do a better job of selling our ideas. Never mind, you say. The electorate has irreversibly become a taker class, and conservative ideas of self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual liberties will never appeal to a majority again, especially with demographics working against the GOP. We must reject that, or we are as good as surrendering. To accept it, we are confessing our skepticism of the power of ideas, which itself is contrary to the conservative spirit.
Has the nation gone irreversibly blue? Did intraparty disunity sabotage Mitt Romney's presidential quest? Or is there some other explanation for the nation's re-election of a president with the worst record in decades? I received an email from a brilliant conservative friend who wonders whether Republicans can ever win another election and thus whether the nation is forever lost. I ran into a college student at church the Sunday before the election, and despite his strong conservatism and high intelligence, he admitted confusion about the candidates' respective positions after the presidential debates. My first reaction after the election verdict was to fear both that America's financial collapse is now inevitable and imminent and that America's implosion is inevitable because the election seemed to reveal that the majority of Americans no longer embrace America's founding principles.
Mitt Romney was very wise to pivot on Barack Obama's impromptu statement that "voting is the best revenge" and frame the campaign in the final days as a choice between that negative message and Romney's "love of country." I wouldn't say that if I thought Obama's statement was merely a slip of the tongue. Rather, I believe that in another unscripted moment, he once again revealed who he really is and the essence of his mindset. When his soul mate and spouse said that her husband's ascendancy was the first time she'd been proud of America in her adult life, she wasn't just throwing out words. She was telling us who she is and what kind of hang-ups she has about pre-Obama America.
I want to give you an updated list of reasons I believe that Mitt Romney will win the election Tuesday. So much information, so much confusion, so much uncertainty. But I don't think it's so complex as it seems. In 2008, a perfect storm developed for Barack Obama: an economic crisis, which was effectively, though unfairly, blamed on Republicans; war fatigue, which had been stoked by six years of Democratic anti-Bush propaganda; a messianic illusion personified in Obama, who was promising incomprehensibly wonderful yet undefined change and utopian-level bipartisanship; and a Republican opponent who all but forfeited the election to Obama (with the glorious exception of his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate).
Two recent ads illustrate the great cultural divide in this nation and which parties and presidential candidates represent these competing worldviews. In the handling of the economy and national security, President Obama has shown he's not capable of being the adult in the room. After four years of perpetual campaigning and cheerleading for his pet projects, he still isn't prepared to deal soberly with the consequences of his ideological indulgences. His community organizing fantasy has been to remake America in his more socialistic image, and in the process, he's taken the nation dangerously close to financial ruin. Yet like the unsupervised children in "Lord of the Flies," he refuses to make mature decisions to reverse this fiscally suicidal trend.
OK, President Obama, if you and your defenders insist on denying that you've repeatedly apologized for America, then let's quit mincing words and acknowledge you've done worse than apologize. That works for me. Maybe it is technically inaccurate to attribute the word apology to you, because you would have to identify with America more before you could apology on its behalf. Besides, I suppose we should not be surprised in this Clinton-inspired age of word meaninglessness -- an age in which the simple word "is" no longer feels comfortable in its own skin -- that you would deny you have apologized because you didn't use the precise word "apology" in any of your shameful outings.
President Obama, I'd like to follow up on my most recent column and ask you a few more questions, please. I am assuming you don't dispute that our nation faces a very serious financial problem, with unfunded liabilities in excess of $100 trillion. I use the word "assuming" because I don't remember you ever spending much time talking about this problem, which is odd because the very subject haunts so many Americans and makes them fearful for the future of this country. Yet if you do recognize that these liabilities threaten our nation's solvency, how is it conceivable that you've not made the problem one of your foremost priorities? Yes, you established a bipartisan deficit commission, but you refused to meet with it and you ignored its findings, so that doesn't get you off the hook.
