US Elections

Yet Arizona’s governor, lately in the news for trying to do something about the estimated 450,000 (out of a population of 6.6 million) illegal immigrants, has just signed a law that should be applauded, for it injects a good deal of sense back into an American school system that had reportedly been riven by separatist ethnic studies programs. The bill targets anodyne stuff: classes that promote the overthrow of the United States government; promote resentment toward a race or class of people; are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; and advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

Of course, this is seen by some as yet another step towards the arrival of fascism in America (though as Tom Wolfe famously said, fascism seems to always be descending on the United States, but somehow always lands on Europe). And in Arizona’s favour, among the legislation’s critics are six UN human rights “experts": brickbats from an organisation that puts the Saudis, the Syrians and Sudan on the Commission for Human Rights are a sign you’re doing something right.

More broadly, there is good reason for attempting to wind back ethnic chauvinism in schools, and Arizona is to be applauded for attempting to stop the rot that has crept in across American academia from trickling down to primary and secondary schools. Interestingly, this legislation comes at a moment when research is beginning to confirm what many of us suspected, namely, that a mindless focus on ethnic separatism, cloaked behind support for the increasingly meaningless concept of “diversity” is doing more harm than good. Steve Chatman of the University of California, Berkeley, has just published a paper that strongly suggests that academia’s attempt to raise racial consciousness may do more harm than good, and lead to more rather than less-polarised campuses.

All of this is a challenge to American liberals who have, over four decades, comprehensively abandoned Martin Luther King’s vision of a country where the content of one’s character reigns supreme in favour of a country Balkanised by identity politics. Pointing this out is a threat, and why they are so quick to deploy charges of racism at every turn. At the more benign end of the spectrum, this leads to feel-good motherhood statements such as Sonia Sotomayor’s claptrap about the superiority of a wise Latina’s jurisprudence, but this quickly descends to the notion that in-born characteristics lead to shared solidarity and wisdom. From there things can get much more sinister – watch this video to the end to see how poisonous things can get when students are encouraged to allow "solidarity" to trump humanity.

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[G]iven that there are so many excellent candidates who have a long, clear commitment to a progressive judicial philosophy, why would Obama possibly select someone who -- at best -- is a huge question mark, and who could easily end up as the Democrats' version of the Bush-41-appointed David Souter, i.e., someone about whom little is known and ends up for decades embracing a judicial philosophy that is the exact opposite of the one the President's party supports? ... Why would any progressive possibly want to take risks like that given how large the stakes are, and given how many other excellent, viable candidates Obama can choose who have a long and clear record?

This was exactly the argument which conservatives such as David Frum made to force George Bush to withdraw Harriet Miers as his replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor and instead choose Sam Alito.

 As I said, this is sure to be interesting.

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While the whole Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ has become something more akin to a religion than a reality (as Aaron David Miller lucidly explains in Foreign Policy), under the Obama administration, supporters of the Jewish state have seen its status, like that of so many other traditional allies, downgraded. This has led to some pretty outrageous moral equivalencies: Obama has even gone so far as to compare the plight of the Palestinians to that of African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South. Of course, American blacks fought a peaceful campaign that never sought to deny their white counterparts’ existence. The Palestinians? Not so much.

The latest – though surely not final – nail in this coffin is the widely-reported news that the Obama administration is considering support for a “nuclear-free Middle East”. Again, sounds great in theory. But in this construction, a modern, pluralistic democracy – Israel – which has been under attack by its neighbours literally since its modern Day One, is being treated as morally equivalent to neighbouring dictatorships where it is capital crime to sell property to a Jew.

Of course, it is not just Israel. If one over-arching theme can be teased out of the Obama Presidency it is this: a strong America at home, a weak one abroad. Thus, domestically, the White House and their Democratic allies see no area of life or commerce that cannot be improved by their intervention. Whether it is bailing out the auto companies, writing student loans, restricting recreational fishing, or sneaking a crackdown on vitamins (!) into Wall Street “reform” legislation (and perhaps one of my co-bloggers can explain just what is going on with the increasingly mercurial Henry Waxman thinks he's up to these days), Barack Obama is working hard to make good on his promise to “fundamentally transform” the way the US works.

Abroad, however, it is a different story. When it comes to foreign affairs, Barack Obama sounds like nothing so much as that miserable American archetype, the second-year university student who’s come home for Thanksgiving full of the news that the US “democracy” is a sham, that Hugo Chavez is a really exciting character, and that everything grandpa fought for was a lie. Iran is free to pursue its nuclear ambitions, historic allies like Britain are not so special, and the US drops the alpha pose and shows the scruff of its neck, not realising – or caring – that the other dogs in the yard don’t necessarily want to play nice.

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Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, have added a Montecito-area property to their real estate holdings, reports the Montecito Journal.

The couple spent $8,875,000 on an ocean-view villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains, a real estate source familiar with the deal confirms. The Italian-style house has six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms.

I don't begrudge the Gores their purchase, but it does seem a little odd, given that environmentalists are supposed to be all about sustainable architecture. But since Gore has made no small part of his fortune preaching that sea levels could rise by 20 feet (or 7 metres) due to unrestrained consumerism, doesn't his buying a seaside mansion seem a bit hypocritical, like a preacher being caught coming out of a brothel?

Or is it only the little people who need to live "sustainably"?

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For the uninitiated or suspicious, this is no right-wing front group – it’s run by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s old pollster. And while Carville and Greenberg’s analysis also suggests anti-incumbent sentiment will take its toll on Republicans in the mid-term elections as well as on Democrats, the fact is, Barack Obama remains dead in the water. And Americans remain unconvinced by health care reform that, as they suspected, will turn out to cost far more than promised. Note Congressman Henry Waxman’s embarrassing cancellation of hearings during which he hoped to publicly touch up corporations for committing lese majeste in suggesting that Obama’s reforms might hurt their bottom line.

So what next for Obama? Certainly not climate change.

As my colleague Tom Switzer points out  in the Wall Street Journal, the defection of Sen Lindsey Graham all but killed the prospect of near-term climate change legislation in the US. Which, for an economy that is still reeling from the Global Financial Crisis and which will spend many decades paying off the empty sugar hits of Obama’s so-called “stimulus” plans, is all to the good. Even better, the political climate around the world has changed with hysteria over man-made climate change starting to recede as voters realise that sloppy science and economic suicide pacts don’t mix.

Immigration reform? Possibly more likely: certainly after the passage of Arizona’s controversial anti-illegals measure this week, the Left is looking to goad the more extreme ends of the Right into embarrassing over-reach. But again the President, who came to power with virtually no experience in the mechanics of legislation, has less and less power to make the machinery of Capitol Hill do its will.

Finally, Jonathan is of course right in looking at the big picture that it is easier to oppose than to propose. Left-of-centre governments have a built-in advantage in that they pick others' pockets on the behalf of voters, and offer a warm fuzzy feeling of moral virtue in the process. It is an infantalising approach to be sur and is an in-built failing of a system that allows people to, as PJ O’Rourke famously put it, “vote themselves rich”. It is also at least a partial explanation of why young people tend to grow more conservative as they mature, and why so many wealthy people supported Obama. It’s easy to be generous with other peoples’ money, or when self-regarding virtue is just another luxury good.

But Obama is not offering much in the way of the positive, either. The man who came to power on a mantra of hope and change lately seems more the man of demonise and destroy. In personally taking on everyone from Glenn Beck to bloggers, bankers to Sarah Palin, he is not only being unpresidential and divisive, but damaging his own tarnished brand in the process.

UPDATE: Immigration reform? Fugghedaboudit!

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"I want to get a better picture of what our options are."

Well, Obama's been doing everything else he could -- from running up massive debt to privileging the public sector to insulting traditional democratic allies while currying favour with dictators and despots -- to turn the US into a flaccid European welfare state, so I guess it was only a matter of time before he mooted a VAT as well.

UPDATE: Link to Obama's VAT quote above fixed. And although the idea may for the moment be radioactive, Democrats have been mulling this for quite some time. I'd also note that while we in Australia live under a dual income-VAT regime, when the GST was introduced it was widely blamed for pushing the country into recession. The last thing the American economy needs right now is a further slug on private sector growth and activity.

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According to the blog that broke the story, Watch Sonoma County, “North Bay firefighters launched a boycott of a Napa Valley winery this weekend after its owner criticized their wages and benefits in a letter published in the St. Helena Star.” But more than a boycott was launched, as the winery owner has received veiled threats online from some public safety employees, potentially refusing to fight a fire at his home or winery, or save him from choking in a restaurant.

 Hopefully it is not. After all, no one would commit arson for political purposes in Hopey-Changey America, would they?

On the other side of the country, meanwhile, New Jersey’s teachers’ unions are showing their stuff, demonstrating they won’t take Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s calls for salary freezes and budget cuts lying down:

 In Facebook messages visible to the world — not to mention their students — the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.

"Never trust a fat f...," read one profane post on the Facebook page, "New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze," which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.

"How do you spell A-- hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E," read another.

That's all very well and good, but isn’t anyone taking President Obama’s advice to “punch back twice as hard”  literally? Yes, but you have to go to the Big Easy  to find it:

A brutal beating in New Orleans following the Southern Republican Leadership Conference — held in that city from April 8-11 — has challenged the myth regarding the preferred residence of political thuggery.

Circumstantial evidence is piling up that far-left anarchists viciously attacked a staffer to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, putting Allee Bautsch and her boyfriend Joe Brown in the hospital with broken bones. The story has been, unsurprisingly, ignored.

New Orleans is also the setting for Treme, the coolest show on television. How do I know it’s cool even if it’s not airing in Australia? Because Barack Obama apparently watches it, and Barack Obama is the arbiter of cool - at least among the remaining handful of Americans who still like him.

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This is of course old hat for Clinton: As Byron York explains, Clinton and his svengali Dick Morris worked hard to use the tragedy (provoked, for those who believe that any act of terrorism can be explained by root causes that redound to the US government, by his own administration’s bungled raid in Waco) to shore up what was then a sinking presidency.

Deciding it worked, he would go on to make it a hallmark of his career. Readers who lived in or visited the US in 1996 likely heard him using a phony “epidemic” of arson attacks directed at black churches to garner votes and thump Republicans with the racist card. Today, he is just the latest example of failed leadership on the American Left: Allegedly the home of the smart, the reflective, the tolerant, the people too busy to hate, it is falling to intellectual pieces now that it is confronted with a grass roots movement that has taken its old playbook and is using it, successfully, for very different ends.

To put it another way, they cannot understand that what is happening in the US is that after spending decades debunking the idea of homo economicus – i.e., the notion that humans are perfectly rational economic beings who always vote their pocketbook – while at the same time preaching the virtues of political protest, Democrats are suddenly confronted with a large number of people who can’t be bought and are taking it to the street to fight those who would buy them. These individuals do not believe that the government is necessarily the thin line that stands between order and chaos, nor do they think the state is the proper intermediary for civil society. They do not see dignity in dependence, which is what five decades of failed welfare theory have preached. And they resent terribly the idea that because they might get a tax break they ought to be grateful, rather than annoyed.

Be careful what you wish for, indeed.

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Now, I like red meat as much as the next guy, but racist rhetoric? Count me out – indeeed the idea that I do is personally offensive. And count Bachmann and Palin out while you’re at it: there’s no support for this sort of defamatory claim about their speechifying anywhere in the link she provides.

Nor, for the record, is there much in the way of proof that Tea Party protesters shouted racial slurs at legislators.

Indeed, if race is a problem for people on the right, it is because the left makes it one, virulently stigmatising minorities who fail to tow the party line.

Anyone who is in the market for some rabid racism or lunacy would do worse than to hang out with Obama’s pals at the SEIU – which is apparently race-obsessed and shot through with bigotries in every direction – or better yet, attend any lefty protest march.

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