Columnist.
The problem with reality is that it can get so, well, real. As when it storms through the door, kicks over a chair or two and demands recognition, when the problem of immigration has done, as signified by eight senators, both Republicans and Democrats, this week. The process of normalizing, so to speak, the status of 11 million illegal immigrants now in the United States is not an unusually attractive one, particularly to those who set store by observance of laws and norms. What the alternative may be, one isn't sure. To eject 11 million people from the country? I do not think anybody has ever believed that can happen. Something messy and disagreeable to many would get done instead. That was always the muted, mumbled understanding. Reality has crossed the United States border demanding admission.
There's an upside, naturally, to the power grab ("We are made for this moment, and we will seize it."), the president announced to the whole world Monday. The upside comprises of two parts: the now-we-know part and the ain't-likely-to-happen part. What we now know is that an unabashed president elected by a slight majority of his countrymen means to go full throttle with the "progressive" agenda as his collaborators in the major media commonly owers identify the liberal agenda in its advanced form. "We understand," said Barack 0bama, "that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. So we must harvest new ideas and technology to remake our government." Whoa. Wait. "Remake the government"? That's what goes on here? Who knew, last November?
Here's the really nice thing about being president of the United States: You can hold a press conference, make any cockeyed statement you like and glare down all critics, inasmuch as you're King of the Microphone. You can, that is, if you're a certain kind of president. Let's say, theoretically, you're a president like Barack Obama, who, standing before the media on Monday, declared up to be down, red to be green and wolves to resemble sweet little lamb-y pies. With four more years to run in his engagement with the American people, Obama may yet startle us by representing up to be up, red to be red and wolves to have large teeth. We should not hold our breath. The likelier strategy would be to assume our present president incapable of anything resembling straight talk about his varied strategies, or, where capable of it, unwilling to indulge his hearers.
Forty-odd (exceedingly odd, I might add) years ago, who would have envisioned a national war against drugs? Nobody took drugs -- nobody you knew, nobody but jazz musicians and funny foreign folk. Then, after a while, it came to seem that everybody did. Drugs became a new front in the war on an old social culture that was taking hard licks aplenty in those days. I still don't understand why people take drugs. Can't they just pour themselves a nice shot of bourbon? On the other hand, as Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy argue, in a lucid piece for the Wall Street Journal's Review section, prison populations have quintupled since 1980, in large degree thanks to laws meant to decrease drug usage by prohibiting it; 50,000 Mexicans may have died since 2006 in their country's war against traffickers, and addiction has probably increased.
What's this? Joe Biden in weekend conversation with Mitch McConnell over how to step back from the fiscal cliff? Isn't Biden the man in charge of solving The Gun Problem? How does he have the time or energy -- not least the ideas -- to launch another rescue mission? Apparently he had none of these. Not much came, reportedly, of the Biden-McConnell negotiations. One is struck anyway by an infinitely larger question -- how did we as a society, as a nation, get to this point: wrapped in suspense while the government of the United States works out, or tries to, the solutions to our greatest problems? The government? Joe Biden? The Senate? The House? The presidency? The courts? What has a structural arrangement devised for the maintenance of ordered liberty got to do, legitimately, with all it's got to do with?
It's always best, I find, not to talk too rapturously about Ye Olde Days: days which, on careful inspection, yield evidence of problems aplenty. I won't assert, therefore, that no public figure ever received in earlier times a public evisceration comparable to that inflicted on the late Robert Bork, presidential nominee in 1987 to a seat on the U. S. Supreme Court. I will make just two claims: 1) The political-journalistic assault on Judge Bork was indecent, slanderous, and hysterical -- a disgrace to ethics and standards all across the board; and 2) it ought to have warned us what a mess our national life was becoming. Americans under 35 or so won't remember the scandal of the Bork hearings: the slimy attacks on a distinguished jurist, the distortions of his record, and most of all, the out-and-out lies spun by public figures unwilling to admit they knew better.
The notion of the president as comforter-in-chief fits snugly with the notion of political "solutions" -- e.g., gun control -- to essentially moral and theological problems -- e.g., schoolhouse massacres. In a well-meant message of consolation delivered Sunday at Newtown, President Obama declared that "These tragedies must end. And to end them we must change." He again used the word "change," in gainsaying the idea that America does enough to protect its children. "We are not doing enough," said the president, "and we will have to change." "Change" what, exactly? That would be the question, wouldn't it? Change the laws? By instituting really tough, really meaningful gun control, whatever "meaningful" means in a nation that constitutionally protects the right to own and carry weapons? Possibly we could put a cop (with arms-carrying authority) in every school; on every bike path, every street corner. We've yet to hear the details.
Reason No. 1 not to tremble at the prospect of liberal ascendancy, world without end: Liberalism doesn't work. At any rate, not the way liberals commonly suppose it's going to work when they devise enormous taxpayer-funded, government-run programs, minimally connected, if at all, to the realities of human existence. An article in the Dec. 9 New York Times, of all places, gleams in the darkness of the present political moment as the Obama administration works to rub away resistance to its vision of an all-encompassing federal government. "This is painful for a liberal to admit," admits Nicholas D. Kristof, a Times columnist who, oddly, doesn't see his job as requiring regular trashing of conservatives, "but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America's safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire." Do tell. Kristof's careful examination of anti-poverty programs in Appalachia presents a viewpoint far more nuanced than, say, a Barack Obama speech urging the overhaul of capitalism. He finds that giving people too much free money for too long can create disincentives to live non-dependent lives. He talks about parents who pull illiterate kids out of literacy programs to avoid forfeiting a $698 monthly Supplement Security Income check meant to "help" the intellectually disabled.
Remind me -- what was the college course Barack Obama used to teach? Constitutional law? Or was it "Machiavelli for Beginners"? If it was the former, did it cover the American system of checks and balances and separation of powers? Did it dip, however briefly, into the dangers that the founding fathers wished to forfend, such as accumulation of unchecked power in a single governmental branch? Or in a single man? If the course taught by the future President Obama tended to evade such considerations, and instead to emphasize princecraft, the art of prevarication and the hidden dagger -- yeah, it shows; more and more dismayingly all the time. Semi-buried in the White House's fiscal-cliff-avoidance offer to the Republicans last week was a pernicious proposal giving him executive authority to raise the debt ceiling without consent of Congress. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell reportedly laughed at the proposal as a whole. He might better have wept. A president bent on usurpation is in the end no laughing matter.
Muh fellah Amurricans -- I reproduce the speech patterns our media correlate with conservative thought -- hit looks like we ain't getting out of this here Union, what with secession not legal, way them educated fellers tell it. Not legal? Rather a bold statement, I would say. Last time anyone attempted formal withdrawal from the United States, something like 125 years ago, the armaments of the United States blocked the path to independence. The Union endured. But that settled only the practical, not the theoretical, side of the question. Enough said anyway about the Late Unpleasantness of 1861-65. What about the secession movement -- if you care to call it a movement -- suddenly drawing so many gasps of horror and indignation, so many hoots at the screwballs whooping it up for flat out withdrawal from the Union, any state that might want to? More than 700,000 signatures on various secession petitions around the nation! Northwards of 100,000 in Texas alone! It's hard not to notice.
"Barack Obama won because he recognized a new America." Or maybe an America more fluid, more insubstantial than post-election wisdom is ready to grant. You can't always tell about "new" -- a truth the human race rarely acknowledges. We'll see whether James Carville's and Stan Greenberg's words from a Democracy Corps survey stand up better than the consensus of November 1965, following the Lyndon Johnson-led slaughter of almost every Republican downwind from Barry Goldwater. Johnson, father of the Great Society, was all but run out of Washington on a rail after mucking up the Vietnam War.
We mighta, coulda, woulda, shoulda, still-some-day-may elect a president serious about the matter of the nation's freedoms. Or, possibly, not. The second possibility -- so an ancient mariner reflects -- arises from a sea change in our culture. It could be that more than half of us - a fast-rising proportion -- don't understand "serious" the way it was understood until half a century ago. The loose, lax, louche United States of 2012 seems dissimilar in important respects to the country that chose Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. A week after the Nov. 6 debacle, the post-mortems go on: the if-onlys and why-didn't-we's, the slams on Mitt Romney, the moans over Superstorm Sandy and the putative treason of Gov. Chris Christie.
Before he touted "revenge" as a motive for supporting his reapplication for the presidential job, Barack H. Obama wished voters to appreciate how icky-yucky he finds "top-down economics." He renewed the theme in his closing electoral appeal. "The folks at the very top" (with Obama, it's always folks, never "people" or "citizens," but let that go), we learn, "don't need another champion in Washington." Did the gentleman ever get that one right! The top-down philosophy of governance -- I'm on top, and you're not -- has no more unbending champion in American politics than B. H. Obama himself. What Obama wishes "folks" to envision when he talks his "top-down" talk is a suite-ful of bankers, hedge fund managers and the like, all dressed in pinstriped suits. "Top-down economics," the way the president means it, is they run the show while mere middle-class strivers battle for jobs and bread.
While Hurricane Sandy exercises her gift for inflicting misery, upstaging the biggest presidential election since at least the last one, it might not come amiss to look on the bright side of the relationship between humans and nature. The election campaign has dealt only in passing with energy -- the product, if you want to look at it that way, of a joint collaboration between the two worlds we inhabit: one world consisting of rocks and water, the other of flesh and spirit. I say we fill in some gaps here. We're winning the battle for abundant energy. That's the sum and substance of it. Anybody who sat 40 years ago in a gasoline pump line -- as I did -- waiting to pay prices then viewed as exorbitant (but now cheap-seeming) should appreciate what goes on around here. Everyone else should also, come to think of it.
The paltriness of the Obama presidency comes vividly to mind as the debates wrap up. Crotchety and defensive about a stewardship that half of likely voters find, well, inadequate to present purposes, Barack Obama in the foreign policy debate trafficked most memorably in pre-planned insults to his opponent. "[W]e have these things called aircraft carriers ... these ships that go under water," was the retort to Mitt Romney's expostulation concerning shrinkage of our navy.
Let's cut Smilin' Joe Biden a little slack, which is no heavy lifting for his fan base in the media. Common civility? The vice president showed none whatsoever toward Paul Ryan. Wisdom and insight? Not much of that escaped his lips during the televised encounter. Our No. 2 elected leader clearly had not come all the way to Kentucky to show his command of Emily Post, or impress future historians with examples of 21st century oratory. Smilin' Joe had come chiefly to prevent Ryan from making substantive points concerning the nation's varied messes and conundrums. The idea wasn't to enlighten or inform; it was to obfuscate, cover up and change the subject. He got the job done. "Mr. Biden," reported The New York Times, "showed no hesitation in hectoring, heckling and interrupting his challenger."
The big government liberalism that Republicans denounce and Democrats, in election years especially, portray as deep compassion, is again on national display, looking fossilized. Big government liberalism tsks-tsks at any social/cultural/economic problem it sees as curable through government regulation, and, where regulation exists already, more of it, as much as the old wagon will hold. Big government liberalism, from its Olympian perches in the media and the academy, can't envision a set of perplexities irremediable by law, regulation or court order. Observe how well it works out.
We seem to be in the midst of another one of our periodic battles over liberal bias in the media, as denoted in recent days by Paul Ryan and various other conservatives vexed with the tone of campaign coverage. "It goes without saying that there is definitely media bias," Ryan said on Fox News. "I think most people in the mainstream media are left of center and, therefore, they want a very left-of-center president versus a conservative president like Mitt Romney." I think so myself after more than four decades of membership in that same suspect category, the gatherers and dispensers of news and commentary. The subjective question left dangling is, so what? Does it matter? Can Barack Obama's acolytes in the media tip the electoral scales for him?
Thus far, we know what the Obama administration won't do in response to the obvious decay of U.S. standing in the Middle East. It won't stop deploring the video for which it originally blamed attacks on our diplomatic facilities in the region, worsened by the murders of our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. It won't schedule a meeting this week between Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and the president, who seems to need more time on the campaign trail. And so on. What the administration *will* do to make its attitudes and responses feared throughout the region isn't likely to take up much space in public communications inasmuch as the administration seems generally bent on the projection of softness -- softness of manner and of tongue; softness, if truth be told, of the brain cells.
In commerce, it's closing the sale that counts. Sell to the walls if you can; if you can't, at least outsell your competitor. Such is the free enterprise ethic -- the ethic that Mitt Romney, in this year's presidential field, would seem to represent supremely. As between Romney and his competitors at Obama Inc., there's no question who better grasps the essence and the processes of competitive capitalism. So why isn't Romney's political store crawling with customers right now? How come there are so many budget-busting clearance specials down at Obama's entrance when so many should know better? Why isn't Romney closing the sale? Can he? Will he?
