A Question of Strategy

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“Hence the import of the current moment – its blinding clarity. Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang on to the gains of their glory years – from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking.”

How do you top a line like that? Charles Krauthammer is brilliant.

It is no longer that clear to me, however, that the Democrats in Wisconsin or anywhere else are simply trying to hang on to their glorious past. At this pivotal moment—and if ever America faced a pivotal moment this is one—one must be tempted to at least entertain suggestions by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh that this group of miscreants is deliberately trying to collapse the government, ala Cloward-Piven-Alinsky.

Here is truly blinding clarity for you. The recent labor unrest—and I use the term ‘labor’ loosely when referring to teachers—in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio is clearly being orchestrated by the White House. What we are witnessing is unequivocally classical radical organization, from the top down.

Neither am I as keenly optimistic as Charles that the public in Wisconsin or across the country understands what is at stake. Tip O’Neill was not being condescending when he said, ‘All politics is local.’ Yes the Democrats are taking bad press but they have also, as Charles points out, been masterful at changing the focus of the debate.

The question is whether or not the denizens of urban Madison and Milwaukee will take up tea party signs and join the march when the weather warms this spring and teachers in the inner city schools are being laid off in droves. Will they appropriately blame the Obama administration and Democrats when gas and food prices skyrocket? Or will they accept the party-line shuck ‘n’ jive the Left has so successfully used on them for decades?

Because layoffs and skyrocketing prices are coming.

For the past week and a half I have been severe on Scott Walker and Mitch Daniels, but I am not ignorant of the fact that the nation is soft on collective bargaining, whether in the private or public sectors. The public has not yet felt the sting of the price tag in their pocketbooks, or at least it has not associated that sting with the enormous costs of school teachers’ and firefighters’ benefits packages.

Government unions will survive, that is a given. We can neither afford them nor do they fit into any rationale of a free society, but the Democrats slipped them in, in the early 1960s, and we are stuck with most of them.

What is far more disconcerting is how the Democrats have chosen to approach the same kind of defeat that the GOP faced in the Pelosi House during the ObamaCare fiasco. Instead of standing their ground and taking up the debate they have walked away and deliberately crippled the government. That is just about as radical a move as we have seen in the 230-plus years of this nation.

Are we to expect the same behavior when the GOP retakes the Senate in 2012? Will the elected Democrats in the House and Senate simply disappear and allow the opposition to stew in its juices?

Charles concludes:

“We have heard everyone – from Obama’s own debt commission to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – call the looming debt a mortal threat to the nation. We have watched Greece self-immolate. We can see the future. The only question has been: When will the country finally rouse itself?

“Amazingly, the answer is: now. Led by famously progressive Wisconsin – Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level – a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?”

I sincerely hope that Charles is right in his optimism; we need to turn this corner fast if we are to stabilize the economy. But I am more than mildly concerned that the Democrats are simply better chess players than the Republicans and that they are still thinking two moves ahead.

“Palin, Bachmann, and … Christine O’Donnell? OMG! And They’re So Hot!”

I’m doing this YFI so forgive a little rambling and the various typos.

This, the Democrat chitchat at DNC headquarters in D.C. right about now. Of course this is only the rumor, but one can almost hear them. “Someone get Hillary on the phone! Hillary, yeah, it’s me. Hey, I thought you said 1992 was the Year of the Woman.” Pause. “Or was that 2008, right before Barack Obama’s Double Eagle bus put tread marks up your, er … presidential bid? Actually, Hillary, we may need your help in 2012 … Right … we’ll get back to you.” Click. Buzz.

In the meantime, the DNC and its public relations arm, ABC, NBC, the New York Times et al launch a media blitz against roughly 60 percent of the American public. Right. Makes sense to me.

This all started when David Letterman went on a 10-month-long sex-obsessed monologue about various parts of Palin’s anatomy. (Personally, way back in the 1970s, I suspected Letterman was a panty sniffer. The guy creeps me out.)

But has any of it worked?

In two short weeks Christine O’Donnell, has gained six points against Chris Coons in Delaware. What is wrong with this picture? Even Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer said she couldn’t win. Rove said she was a crazy. But wait a minute … How long has it been since Rove and Krauthammer have been out of Washington?

Okay. O’Donnell may not win in Delaware. Then again, she just might. But that is not the point. Whether Sarah Palin can win a bid for the GOP nomination in 2011 is irrelevant as well. The point is that these women, along with Nikki Haley, Sharon Angle, Michele Bachmann and a host of others are garnering more attention than a papal visit, with absolutely no assistance from the national media.

C’mon, all you big government Republicans in Laguna Niguel. When is the last time you saw a major national political figure run a presidential primary fishing expedition off a FaceBook page? Try never. Yet Palin has had astounding success.

The DNC, Democrats in general, recognized early on what the Republican establishment has yet to get its head around: Palin is dangerous to their hopes of ever achieving a national mandate again in our lifetime. She has systematically broken rank with the RNC time after time and has a dazzling primary endorsement record. And her candidates have a knack for coming out of the hole to win.

So the sexual, homophobic, racist and wacko attacks are understandable. These women scare the bejesus out of them. In fact, all conservative women do; they are counterfactual to the Left’s understanding of the modern woman.

Democrats see everything as sexual, homophobic or racist in nature when it comes to the Right. And so now Barry From Washington has kicked off a road-show campaign to scare the American public into believing that the Tea Party movement is somehow the most recent incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Well, that is certainly the subtext here.

Nathan Bedford Forrest would roll over in his grave. Question: How did this President get elected? I mean, if these people are, indeed, throwbacks to the Reconstruction-era racist South, then just how is it a handsome, intelligent black man gets elected in twenty-first century America? Liberals make up less than 20 percent of the electorate.

Could it be they are not racists, just fed up with the racial politics of the past? Hmm.

This all comes under the heading of Any Port in a Storm. A prayer for a last minute deus ex machina in the face of a landslide that will not only sweep many career Democrats out of office in November, but will sideswipe the left flank of the Republican Party as well. The ones who have forgotten who sent them to Washington and why they are there. Who woulda thunk John McCain would get religion?

I hope Christine O’Donnell and Sarah Palin both fool all of us in the next two years. It would serve lazy, out-of-step Republicans right. It will send the DNC back to rethink its 40-year campaign to destroy the most perfect form of government in human history.

The GOP Disconnect: How Obama Can Win in 2010

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There is a ticking time bomb in Washington and few in the Republican Party are talking about it, at least not in terms palatable to the majority of Americans, who take their news fifteen minutes at a time, and then only in headlines.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the GOP in this age of instant information is its near-total lack of communication skills. Were it not for Roger Ailes the Republicans would have no message at all. Most people may be unaware that Ailes is the broadcasting genius who introduced Rush Limbaugh into the morning Commute during the 1990s, and made Fox News the most powerful cable network in the U.S. today.

Barack Hussein Obama has been outstandingly successful in his primary mission as president. Even Fox News and Limbaugh and the 100-or-so other conservative Talk brands out there are not enough derail his success.

As a leader Obama has been abysmally deficient—some would say even incompetent—but as a counterculture strategist he is arguably the greatest American liberal political genius since FDR. He has embedded an IED in the economy that will be almost impossible to disarm by any subsequent administration. And for the most part it has gone unnoticed by the public.

With national healthcare—and you’d have to have been on Mars not to have heard this—Obama took over one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Add to that the Financial Reform package passed this week that will control U.S. financial institutions in perpetuity; then factor in the nearly 300 new regulations on small business owners and manufacturers, credit bureaus, homebuyers, well, everyone in the country.

Obama has taken complete control over the nation’s health care and financial institutions. But we are not finished: figure in to all of this, Obama’s $1 trillion stimulus. He has effectively bankrupted the nation in 18 short months and at least one-third of the country’s voters still think he’s doing an outstanding job.

It gets worse for Republicans

That number may not mean a lot until one looks at congressional elections where one or two votes can throw a race either way. All you ADD Republicans in Laguna Niguel, think Loretta Sanchez.

Hardwired into every phase of this president’s blitzkrieg-like legislative and regulatory agenda are measures that will be irreversible if he or any other Democrat is in office, or if either of the houses of Congress has large blocs of Democrats, after 2012. In other words, any Democratic president coupled with a heavily Democrat Congress, can effectively block reversal, regardless of which party has control.

This is the mother of all “teachable moments” for Republicans. They cannot deliver a health care repeal and they know it. They cannot reverse financial reform and they know it. And, if by 2012, they have not come up with a coherent message and a plan of action, their negligence could cause a catastrophic backlash in the GOP’s bid for the White House.