Obamas First Fumble - Road to the Middle Class

LAST WEEK America blew a raspberry at the House “stimulus” bill. The Wall Street Journal edit page reckoned it out at about 12 percent stimulus. What about the other 88 percent? It was mostly the usual liberal special-interest spending, 40 years of pent-up pet projects. Things looked so bad that the Journal’s other edit page, the liberal news side, decided to put out a calming analysis piece. Obama aides “say this is a baseball game in its early innings, or a football game at halftime,” Gerald F. Seib assured us.

You’d think the Democrats would do a better job of camouflaging their real agenda, given the effort they have put, starting with the 2006 mid-term elections, into wooing the middle class. According to pollster Alex Lundry, “middle class” is the number one positive thing that people associate with Democrats. But the stimulus bill proves that it’s not about the middle class. It’s about the Democratic patronage state. Always was, always will be.

You wonder: what did the Obama people think they were doing allowing the House Democrats to come up with this monster? They must have understood that the great American middle class, the folks that don’t have big credit-card balances, that don’t have unaffordable mortgages, that do shell out for health insurance would expect President Obama to deliver on post-partisan and fast. Voters were told that the new administration of President Obama was going to put the corruption and the partisan wrangling of the Clinton-Bush years behind us and clean up government. But right now it looks like same-old-same-old. Now the president will be faced with a bunch of horse-trading if he hopes to get a fig-leaf of Republican support for the Democratic special-interest payoff bill.

How does this politics-as-usual affect the voters? According to Michael Barone, Republicans did dismally with black and young voters in 2008. In addition, the “affluent suburbs” have gone Democratic too. He uses that information to propose that Republicans should “go upscale” when looking for votes in the future. Forget downscale and Sarah Palin, he urges. Go where the votes are.

But Barone’s election data could be telling a different tale. You could just as well say that upscale voters were giving Barack Obama a try because they could afford to. They wanted to show that enlightened people like them were ready to elect an African American to the presidency. Combine that with a certain Pharisee attitude towards Christian conservatives and it was easy to vote for Obama.

That was then; this is now. If President Obama were to govern as just a politics-as-usual liberal, unable to break out of the identity politics of the Democratic party, those upscale voters could be voting Republican as soon as 2010. People with skills and a well-tended 401(k) can afford to take a risk or two, but not when it threatens their children’s futures.

A couple of weeks ago President Obama called for a new era of responsibility, a Responsibility Nation. Yet across the street last week in Rights Nation, House Democrats passed a huge bill that established new rights to health care that Americans could claim against their fellow citizens. Which message are Americans supposed to believe in?

It’s not just a two message problem; it’s a Two America thing.

The vast majority of upscale Americans, particularly those that work in the non-union private sector, live a life that you never see on the MSM, and you never hear about from a liberal politician. They work in Ownership Nation where they are encouraged to “own” problems and solve them rather than squabble about who was to blame. It’s different in the political world of government and unionized work-places. In political Blame Nation you get ahead by sticking the blame on the other guy before he gets a chance to blame you.

Most ordinary people work in Team America. They are trained to work in teams, competing according to the rules against other teams. It’s different in the political world of government and unionized work-places. There you’ll find Gang America, where you stick together, go along to get along, to game the rules and loot the system.

What are upscale Americans to think when the leader of a political party—the one that gangs up on Ownership America to fund its endless programs—tells us work responsibly?

What are ordinary Americans to think when the leader of a political party—the one that blames greedy bankers for the mortgage meltdown and gets VIP Friends of Angelo loans—wants America to work together like a team?

After twelve years of a Republican Congress and eight years of President Bush upscale voters were fed up with Republicans and ready for a change. They wanted hope, change, and serious attention to the nation’s problems. Since the September collapse of Lehman Brothers they have been expecting that the politicians who coo about hope, change, and the middle class would get serious and urgently fix the economy.

But when the new administration fumbles the ball on the first play of the game, Americans have a right to wonder what they voted for. Upscale Americans might want to call in their bets on a pleasing young man and might forget the snobbish attitudes they had about social conservatives. Upscale or downscale, can’t Aspirational America just get along?

One thing is for sure. The Obama administration is starting out with plenty of rookie mistakes, rather like the presidency of another young Democrat sixteen years ago.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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