Why we're failing

In this post from Powerline is the real story behind the last election debacle.  The fundamental point:  Too many Americans are fundamentally unaware of how capitalism works to create wealth, jobs, rising incomes, and more opportunities for improving one's material well-being.  How capitalism works to achieve these ends is not taught anywhere but in graduate schools of business.  Mostly what's taught elsewhere about this crucial subject is counter productive.

 POSTED ON NOVEMBER 24, 2012 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

THE CASE OF THE MISSING VOTERS [WITH COMMENTS BY JOHN]

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard Jay Cost undertakes a retrospective on what happened in the election just passed. Cost detects a mystery. It’s the case of the missing voters:

In 2008, some 131.5 million Americans went to the polls; while the votes are still being tallied, this time around there probably were between 127 and 130 million votes cast. Most of the decline came from white voters; in fact, between 6 and 9 million white voters went missing this year, relative to 2008. It is a reasonable guess that the number of white votes in 2004 roughly equaled the number in 2012, despite the fact that millions of new whites have become eligible to vote and the aging white population has entered peak voting years.

Much has been made of the increasing whiteness of the GOP coalition, with the implication being that Mitt Romney lost because he failed to attract enough support from ethnic or racial minorities. Without doubt, this was a problem for the GOP nominee and certainly made a difference in key swing states. In Colorado and Florida, Romney’s support among Hispanics was lower than that of George W. Bush and even John McCain.

But Romney’s problems were much bigger than this, as he failed to pull enough white voters into his coalition to win. In Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, Romney improved on McCain’s share of white voters, but these states saw notable declines in white turnout. Meanwhile, in Iowa and Virginia—where white turnout was roughly constant—Romney failed to match the levels that Bush pulled when he won both states.

This suggests that the identity politics explanation is insufficient to explain Romney’s electoral problem. It was not merely a failure to attract Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, African Americans into the GOP coalition (preliminary data actually suggest that Barack Obama won fewer African Americans in 2012 than he did in 2008). There seems to have been an overall hesitation among many types of voters—white or not—about entering the GOP coalition. It looks as though many backed Obama over Romney, and many more simply chose not to vote.

An examination of the exit poll makes it easy to see why. Obama’s campaign against Romney, which portrayed him as an out-of-touch plutocrat, appears largely to have been successful. Romney’s favorable rating in the exit poll was just 47 percent, with 50 percent holding an unfavorable view. By 53 to 43 percent, voters said that Obama was “more in touch with people like” them, and by a staggering 53 percent to 34 percent, they said Romney’s policies would favor the rich instead of the middle class.

In other words, Romney lost in large part because of a yawning empathy gap. Typically, this plagues Republican candidates to some degree, even victorious ones, but it was pronounced this year, and appears to have been determinative. The voters who showed up on Election Day identified more closely with Obama than Romney, and those who stayed home presumably identified with neither. Importantly, this problem transcended age, race, ethnicity, and gender. Compared with Bush in 2004, Romney simply failed to connect with people.

What of the Democratic performance? There is little for the left to celebrate here beyond the fact that their candidate won a second term in the Oval Office. After all, President Obama won fewer popular votes, a smaller share of the popular vote, and a smaller share of the Electoral College. The last president to be reelected with such a diminished coalition was Franklin Roosevelt in his third and fourth terms. No president in American history but Barack Obama has ever entered a second full term with his coalition diminished across the board.

Cost’s analysis suggests to me the devastating effect of the Obama campaign’s personal attacks on Romney during the months after Romney sewed up the GOP nomination. The Obama campaign turned Romney into dead man walking.

The Romney campaign had no funds to respond to those attacks. Prior to the convention, Romney was prevented by law from accessing the funds he had raised for the general campaign. After the convention, Romney had plenty of money, but many voters had tuned him out. Why didn’t Romney self-fund a response to the merciless attacks he was sustaining from the Obama campaign in the battleground states prior to the GOP convention? That is a mystery for another day.

Cost offers this to unravel the case of the missing voters: “Voters did not trust Obama to handle the tough issues, but even less did they trust Romney to represent them in the Oval Office.” Looking ahead, he sees both hazard and opportunity: “It is not hard to see how the nation’s deep disgruntlement could produce a major upheaval in two or four years’ time.”

FOOTNOTE: For a good companion to Cost’s retrospective, see John Podhoretz’s Commentary essay “The way forward,” while Pat Caddell offered a variety of related thoughts in his post-election analysis at David Horowitiz’s Restoration Weekend earlier this month. And Michael Barone is wrestling with the case of the missing voters as well.

JOHN adds a couple of thoughts: First, Romney’s tactical error went beyond not using his own funds pre-convention. Money that was raised after Romney had the nomination sewed up could nevertheless have been designated for the primary phase of the campaign, but the Romney campaign believed that money spent during the summer is basically wasted, since undecided voters don’t make up their minds until October. The two campaigns followed opposite strategies here, and it seems that the Romney camp was proven wrong.

Second, I fear that Republicans are making a serious mistake if we blame the election’s outcome on Romney’s failure to connect with voters. Obviously that happened to some degree, but the real question is, why? The most alarming statistic quoted by Jay Cost is that, by a wide margin, voters believed Romney’s policies would benefit the rich and not the middle class–this despite the fact that Obama’s policies had already proven to be a disaster for the middle class. I am afraid that this demonstrates, not just a lack of support for Romney, but a lack of support for free enterprise.

Despite all of the nonsense that surrounded the campaign, I think nearly all voters understood that Romney’s policies favored smaller, less intrusive government and more reliance on free enterprise, while Obama stood for more government. A generation ago, the idea that free enterprise only benefits the rich would have been regarded as ridiculous in the light of history. Today, I fear that a great many Americans believe that free enterprise only favors the rich, or something close to that proposition. This is reflected in the survey done a few months ago that suggested young people have a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.

When Ronald Reagan said that in the present crisis, government isn’t the solution, government is the problem, he was appealing to something that most Americans already believed. I am concerned that the bedrock belief in free enterprise that was taken for granted in our youth may now be mostly gone. It is not hard to see why that might be the case, since all of the organs of our culture, from the public schools to the television networks to the comedy industry to Hollywood to higher education to the women’s magazines have been diligently working to undermine faith in economic freedom for several decades now. I fear that what failed to connect with voters in 2012–with enough voters, anyway–was not Mitt Romney the man, but rather free enterprise, the philosophy. There is no way conservatives can undo the baleful effects of our culture on political assumptions in the course of a presidential campaign, no matter how eloquent our candidate may be. And, of course, the problem is compounded by the fact that increasing numbers of Americans live outside the free economy, either as public employees or as dependents on government benefits.

The black blame game

Jonah Goldberg, who is top-tier amongst all pundits, has hit upon the real problem in politics today, and why we are making no progress in solving many of the major issues out there.  In short it's called "white guilt" and black "victimhood".  The problem in all this is the fear of talking about issues between the races for fear of being labeled "racists" on the part of the whites.  The "racists" victimhood strategy is just that, a strategy employed by blacks to gain disproportionate power over issues while only representing a relatively small percentage of the population (13%).  Obviously this strategy has worked quite well for black leadership, not so much for blacks and society at large.  In the case of elections, blacks vote as a block more than any other racial or ethnic group.  They are the authors of all kinds of destructive and societally fragmenting programs like Affirmative Action.  They support and promote economically disastrous programs like the CRA which led directly in an straight line to the housing mortgage meltdown that nearly brought down the entire financial structure in this country.  Finally they are largely to blame for the massive Welfare State that pays them not to work and promotes all manner of dysfunctional behavior that abets crime all in the name of "fairness".  Had Barak Obama spent his first four years in office encouraging his own race to face up to and deal with what's pathological in their behavior, rather than stoking racism and fear mongering, he might have had a successful presidency.  What's wrong in this country is not the result of whites repressing blacks, rather blacks demonizing and blaming whites for their shortcomings.  At some point Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and James Clyburn and Barack Obama and all the others living in shadow of the civil rights movement of the '60's will pass from the scene.  At that point in time maybe the new black leaders will be open to solutions in lieu of the blame game. Right now the blame game pays better than the solutions game.

The pilgrim's message

In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Paul Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his recent work on “soft despotism” (cited below) is not far from his Thanksgiving reflections, neither is his older work on republics:

On Thanksgiving, it is customary that Americans recall to mind the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers This year, it is especially appropriate that we do so–as we pause, in the midst of an economic maelstrom, to count our remaining blessings and to reflect on the consequences of our election of a President and a Congress intent on “spread[ing] the wealth around.”

We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

In practice, “the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

Naturally enough, quarrels ensued. “If it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men,” Bradford notes, “yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And [it] would have been worse if they had been men of another condition” less given to the fear of God. “Let none object,” he concludes, that “this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The moral is perfectly clear. Self-interest cannot be expunged. Where there is private property and its possession and acquisition are protected and treated with respect, self-interest and jealousy can be deployed against laziness and the desire for that which is not one’s own, and there tends to be plenty as a consequence.

But where one takes from those who join talent with industry to provide for those lacking either or both, where the fruits of one man’s labor are appropriated to benefit another who is less productive, self-interest reinforces laziness, jealousy engenders covetousness, and these combine in a bitter stew to produce both conflict and dearth.

Following the democrats

Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard offers very sage advice to Republicans regarding the identity politics of the Democrat Party:

Finally, any discussion of the GOP's Official Stance on Wooing Hispanic Voters that envisions policy changes as a means to attract a targeted ethnic demographic assumes stasis in Democratic policy world. But do you really think the Democratic party—which is officially signed on to the diversity spoils system—would ever allow itself to be outbid in such an auction? Me neither. All of which is why the talk about the GOP changing course on immigration so that it can win Hispanic votes is wrongheaded. If Republicans are going to go in a new direction on immigration, they should do so on the merits of the policy. Because it’s the right thing to do. Not because they think it's politically expedient. The party just saw what happens when you run on political expediency. It's far too late to do anything about the destructive, misguided immigration policy put in place by Ted Kennedy and the liberals in the '60s, however, to make matters worse by playing their cynical game of politics is to abdicate the moral high ground. The answer to the conundrum of no growth and the destructive politics of the democrats and many republicans lies in this comment from a Powerline reader responding to an economist who thinks any growth in the economy is behind us forever: "... we really don’t know what drives economic growth over the long term..." Au contraire! We know what drives economic growth, it is the result of people trying to improve their lives. It's workers doing more in order to make their companies more profitable and get themselves raises. It's entrepreneurs starting businesses in hopes of improving their lives. It's brilliant people figuring out things that other people want to buy. It's people willing to spend the money they make buying things that make them happy. And we know what causes the opposite, stagnation, recession and depression. These take place when confidence and ambition are sucked out of the economy, when people with money don't spend it, when people with ideas don't start a business to exploit that idea. This is what is happening now. There is little optim ism on the horizon. People with money to spare aren't willing to spend it because they fear higher taxes and higher costs of gas, health care and food. Companies with money aren't willing to 'invest' (more equipment and more people) because they don't think they'll get a positive return on their spending. Banks with money aren't willing to lend it because they don't think the borrowers will be successful and thus won't pay the loans back. And unfortunately, with Obama being re-elected, I see no reason why this outlook is going to change anytime in the next four years. I don't want to bet against the US, but what is there that would make anyone think that Obama is going to cease his anti-success, anti-business policies?

The truth from no matter where

This quote was originally attributed to a Prague newspaper but subsequently disproved.  No matter where it comes from it expresses the sentiments of many of us dating to the campaign of '07.  We are and are going to continue paying a very heavy price for electing this man to leadership of this country.

The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency.  It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.  The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America.  Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.  The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool.  It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president.

A diet to live by

An important diet:

Backstory: In October I realized that if I didn’t lose weight and get my blood sugar under control, I was going to die.  I didn’t like that. I decided to try a 13 week experiment: cut out carbs and add  a small amount of high intensity exercise and see what happened. This is the continuing story of that experiment. Follow it every week here at PJ Lifestyle — including some sort of embarrassing “before” pictures — and follow my 13 Weeks Facebook page.  I’ll report more on results next week, but right now, I’ve lost 21 pounds since 19 October and my blood sugar is down from 157 mg/dL to 119.

I started worrying about my weight — and being teased about it — by the time I was six or seven. At twelve or so I was an experienced dieter, and my experience was pretty much uniformly negative: I’d try dieting and maybe lose a little weight. Then the weight loss would stop. This would be doubly traumatic, as on a “balanced healthy diet”. I felt horrible, I was hungry all the time, and my pediatrician would yell at me that I had to be cheating, no one could not lose weight on that diet.

I could lose weight on the Stillman Quick Weight Loss Diet — nothing but lean meats boiled or broiled, cottage cheese, and poached or boiled eggs — but then I got yelled at by my pediatrician, my gym coach, and random people who happened to hear about it because it wasn’t a balanced diet. Also, after five or six weeks, it got a little boring: I remember breaking into tears one night when presented with another skinless, boiled half-chicken.

So my feelings about “going on a diet” have a lot of baggage. Skipping about 40 years, I read Gary Taubes first New York Times article, “What Really Makes Us Fat“, which said some things I knew from personal experience but had been told real science disputed. Like “all calories are not created equal,” and “what you eat is more important than how much you eat.” I bought Taubes’ books, Good Calories Bad Calories, and Why We Get Fat and read the primary literature, which makes a strong case that the underlying culprit is refined carbs.  Sure enough, cutting out refined carbs helped me lose weight. This time around, I’ve lost 21 pounds since the 19th of October, and my blood sugar is also down a good bit.

But what about the boredom?

What I’m eating now is, thankfully, far more interesting than boiled chicken and cottage cheese. I thought today I’d tell you about some of them.

Breakfast

Most mornings, I’m up at 6AM and about to write. I feed the cats, and stumble about waiting for the coffee — the worst part about getting your first cup  in the morning is needing to make it before you’ve had it — and I’m not up to doing anything complicated, so I zap bacon in the microwave, take cold boiled eggs out of the refrigerator, and have

Charlie’s “Diet” Breakfast

• 3 boiled eggs, sliced with an egg slicer and drizzled with about a tablespoon of mayonnaise
• 4 strips of bacon

Except some mornings I have 4 eggs and 8 strips of bacon. I slice the hard boiled eggs because otherwise they last about two bites, and I add the mayonnaise because it tastes good.

Lunch

I  usually go out for something because someone who can’t cope with cooking eggs in the morning isn’t going to handle making lunch very well either. There are really lots of options — a diner where I can get bacon or ham or pork chops and eggs, a buffet restaurant where I get salad and roast chicken, or MAD Greens, where I make up a salad with lots of protein:

MAD Greens Salad Example

• baby spinach
• feta cheese
• Oil-marinated tuna
• Red wine vinaigrette

Mad Greens actually has a calorie and nutrient calculator on their web site, which scores this out as 41 grams of protein and 6 grams net carbs (9 grams – 3 grams fiber),

Another thing I’ve done is make a big bowl of tuna salad.  One variant is my Mediterranean Tuna Salad, based on something I used to get at a sprouthead restaurant in Durham, NC 20 years ago.

Mediterranean Tuna Salad

• 1 medium red onion, finely diced
• 4-5 stalks celery, finely diced
• 4 cloves garlic, smashed, diced, and made into a paste with a little salt
• 3 12-oz cans of water-packed tuna (cheap non-albacore is perfectly fine)
• 1/4 cup olive oil (it pays to use extra virgin, but not super-good extra virgin)
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/4 tsp dried dill weed
• salt and ground black pepper to taste

make a rough vinaigrette by whisking together oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, garlic, and dill in a large bowl (you need a bigger bowl than you think.) You can add a little dry or grey poupon mustard as well, which will help the vinagrette stay together, but I don’t much like mustard with tuna. Add other ingredients, breaking up the tuna to match with the vegetables. Toss until well combined. It’s good now, even better after a day or two in the refrigerator.  By the way, oil-packed tuna would be just fine; around here, though, it’s hard to find and significantly more expensive than the water-packed.

Dinner

Okay, most nights dinner is rotisserie chicken from the store — the King Soopers “family size” garlic and herb is my favorite but you’d have a hard time making a roast chicken I didn’t like. Fairly often I’ll cook microwave-in-the-bag broccoli and toss it with from-the-jar chili con queso. This is a high-protein high-fat diet, which opens up a lot of choices. Some nights I’ll cook, and in fact last night as I came home from the gym I suddenly decided what I wanted for dinner was the 10 year old’s nightmare: liver with bacon and onions, and roasted brussels sprouts.

Here are the recipes:

brussels sprouts

• 1 cup fresh sprouts, cut in half.
• 1 Tsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced fine

preheat oven to 425. While it preheats, toss the sprouts with the oil and garlic, and add a good teaspoon of salt. (I like sea salt. What can I say, I live in Boulder.) The way I do this: I have a saute pan that goes comfortably in the oven, so I basically put everything in the pan, toss it as if I were sautéing them until everything is nicely coated, and into the oven it goes.

They should roast for about a half-hour; around 15 minutes, take out the pan and toss them thoroughly, put it back in.

liver and bacon and onions

• 2 slices (about 8 oz uncooked) liver
• 4 strips bacon
• about 1 half medium onion, sliced into very thin slices
• 1/4 tsp mexican oregano
• salt and black paper to taste.

In a large frying or saute pan, start with the bacon. I did it as strips this time, next I might cut the bacon into lardons instead. (Isn’t that a great word? “Lardon”. Sounds so sinful.) Cook the bacon until it’s done enough for you and take it out of the pan. Turn the heat up on the pan to medium-high and add the onions, spreading them out to make more or less a single layer. Now walk away for about 5 minutes. The onions will cook in the bacon fat; when you come back, they will have started to caramelize (get brown) and will be pretty transparent. Turn them over and stir them up so the unbrowned side is down and let them cook a little more.

Now for the liver. If you know where to find fresh beef liver in the Denver area, I’d love to know, but I end up buying it frozen at King Soopers. The package has 1 lb of liver in four individually packed, frozen slices. Take two slices out and put them on the counter when you start the sprouts and they’ll have defrosted sufficiently by the time you get to this point. (If you do find it fresh, you need to slice it and devein it. I’ll presume you’re enough of a foodie then to know what to do. The frozen stuff is already prepped.)

Push the onions aside in the pan and turn the heat up to near high. Put the two pieces of liver in the pan and wait for about a minute — the liver will be getting gray around the veins and there’ll be a good bit of steam. The side against the pan will be getting nicely browned and a little crusty; turn the slices over and grab a plate RIGHT NOW. If you wait more than about another 30 seconds, the liver will get overdone, with the result that you have something that looks like a shoe sole but doesn’t taste as good.

Liver on plate. Nicely browned onions on top, and then the bacon. Salt and pepper now — I don’t like to season this stuff first because the salt impedes browning the onions, and I think the pepper tastes a little burned because of the high heat. Take the sprouts out of the oven and add them — they should have some nice golden brown edges on them.

As you can see, I’m not exactly being deprived here — I’m having plenty to eat, and it’s good food.  As a “diet”, this one is a winner.

Charlie Martin writes on science and technology for PJ Media. Follow his 13 week diet and exercise experiment on Facebook and atPJ Lifestyle

Dreamworld of liberals

This article from the NYTimes this weekend, tells the reader everything wrong with the liberal worldview.  The author, Ross Douthat, a conservative, makes the point that liberals are now celebrating their electoral win as confirmation of their enlightened progressive view of an emerging, diverse and more equal, better America.  This view is 180 Degrees from the conservative one that the win represents the continuation of the decline of America as a leading economic and social force for good in the world.  Where one sees the liberal worldview in all its cloying preening is in the comments following the presentation by Douthat, all 622 of them, before the Times shut down posting availability.  Reading more than a dozen or so of these self congratulatory missives it is clear liberals are greatly relieved that Obama won saving the world from the retrograde Republican policies of the Reagan and Bush I & and II years.  In their eyes these were years of  untamed, unregulated capitalism that led to income inequality, the destruction of the middle class and all their other perceived ills of America.  Nowhere in these comments was there any mention of the millions of new jobs created during the those years.  Mostly their conversation is about how the rich got too rich.

There are several other observations to make about this liberal lockstep points of view.  First there is no discussion of how wealth and jobs are created, none!  There is a lot of talk about fairness and other liberal nostrums that mostly come down to envy of wealthy, and lots of complaints about lack of regulation and control over the behavior of greedy businessmen.  It truly makes one wonder if these people live in the same world as those of us who work in for profit corporations, or are self employed and who understand that in the commercial world the consumer is everyone's boss.  The so-called overpaid CEO of the large corporation, the greedy entrepreneur who puts up or finds the risk capital to start a business,  the banker who makes a loan to launch the expansion of a business,  none of these individuals has a business or a job if consumers don't buy their product or service.  One comes away from reading their remarks that liberals think jobs grow on trees, or maybe are created by some government programs.  They are oblivious to the risk dynamic that makes a business happen in the first place, and become successful creating wealth and job opportunities for others.  Somehow all this just happens whether or not there are destructive governmental regulations that impede growth by the job creating private sector companies.  There is among these people much talk about taking care of the sick, the poor,  the disadvantaged but no talk about where to find the means to pay for this appropriately necessary societal altruism.  In short, liberals put the cart before the horse,  failing to recognize that only wealthy societies have the means to take care of those in need.  Only wealthy societies have the means to capitalize new businesses that create tax paying employees.  All their ideas on fairness, equality and social justice are meaningless in poor societies.  Their ideal society has been tried many times in the last 150 years but has never worked.  They might read more history before trying to create the perfect society.  Mr Obama is not the answer to finding their nirvana.  It doesn't exist.