President Obamas Problem - Road to the Middle Class

WE CONSERVATIVES wish President Obama well. Of course we do. Conservatives are decent people who believe in saying and doing the right thing. But still, we wonder. We wonder whether President Obama really understands the problem.

If you read the retrospectives of the Bush administration you realize the problem that the global media elite had with the last eight years. It wasn’t that they didn’t like the policies of the Bushies. After all, as Charles Krauthammer noted last week, so far the Obama administration transition looks like “continuity-we-can-believe-in.” No. People just didn’t think that the Republicans had the right tone, the right attitude to run the government of the United States.

A prime example of this is the Bush retrospective in the London Economist last week, “The frat boy ships out,” a long recitation of everything that was wrong with the administration of President Bush. This “‘timeless fraternity boy’ wanted to be a great president.” “He regarded Reagan as a man who had unleashed free-enterprise and defeated the Soviet Empire, and he tried to do the same with his huge tax cuts and his global war on terror.” He even echoed Reagan with his use of the word “evil.” Bush is an “inverted snob,” a “convert to an evangelical Christianity that emphasises emotion” over reasoning. The Bushies suspected intellectuals and “conspicuous intelligence,” and Cheney pushed Bush “forcefully” to the right on everything. It all added up to the “three most notable characteristics of the Bush presidency: partisanship, politicisation and incompetence.”

Does all this seem eerily familiar to you? Does it all sound like the Democratic talking points that have been endlessly recycled in the national and global media for the past eight long years?

Earth to Economist. The three most notable characteristics of politics and government are partisanship, politicization, and incompetence. That is why conservatives believe that the best kind of government is the government that does the least. That way you get to minimize the amount of partisanship, politicization, and incompetence.

There is a word for people who think like the writer at the Economist: Deluded. People like that live under the delusion that everything would be a complete mess without conspicuously intelligent, educated, enlightened people to run things.

That’s why the Bush years were such a disaster, you see.

The Bush disaster had nothing to do with conspicuously intelligent people in the government goading the banks to lend money to bad security risks. It had nothing to do with conspicuously intelligent people devising fiendishly clever credit default swaps that they confidently assured us would safely reallocate the risk from all that bad paper spewing out of Fannie and Freddie. Oh no. As the New York Times wrote a couple of weeks ago, the mess was all because Bush’s “philosophy stoked mortgage bonfire” in 2002 and 2003. You would think that the conspicuously intelligent people at the New York Times could think of something better.

That leads us to President Obama’s problem. For over a year, our Democratic friends have been telling us how intelligent Barack Obama is. Conservatives weren’t impressed. But now even Larry Kudlow, who got to attend that Obama dinner with conservative pundits last week, is on board. “He is charming, he is terribly smart, bright, well-informed, he has a great sense of humor,” he marvels . What do you think, Larry? Could it be that Barack Obama possesses “conspicuous intelligence?” If he does, then I think we have a problem.

The signal achievement of the last century was to fill the grave-yards with the results of conspicuous intelligence. First there was Bismarck. Germany has never been the same since. There was Lenin. Russia still hasn’t recovered from his brilliance. President Coolidge called Herbert Hoover “Wonder Boy.” I wonder why? President Roosevelt and his Brains Trust put the Great in Great Depression. President Lyndon Johnson was a legislative genius. His War on Poverty wrecked the African-American family.

Here’s who I want for president. I want a dull dog who takes the oath of office and says: My fellow Americans! For the past century we’ve been conjuring up all kinds of crazy things for government to do and we’ve sluiced trillions of your dollars at them. But what do we have to show for it? We’ve made government so big and complicated with programs and corporations and subsidies and exciting jobs for people of conspicuous intelligence that now everything is too big to fail.

My fellow Americans: I make this solemn pledge. I will protect you from the never-ending tsunami of conspicuous intelligence.

Somehow, I don’t think that the intelligent President Obama sees it that way. And that’s a problem.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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