What The People Want

I happened to see some clips last night from the recent Democratic debate in which Hillary and Obama savaged each other.

It was great television. The two sparred like alley cats. Obama tossed out barbs about not knowing which Clinton he's running against. As well as reminding everyone that Hillary was, for the most part, just a lawyer in Arkansas who happened to be on the Wal-Mart board.

Hillary, for her part, shown a spotlight on Obama's many 'present' votes in the Illinois Senate, as well as his involvement with a Chicago slumlord now under indictment.

What was really entertaining, though, was watching two Democrats, a self-styled female 'strategist' whose name I can't recall, and NPR/Fox News pundit Juan Williams, go at it on Bill O'Reilly's program about the clips and catfight.

The woman called it mudslinging, and said that Obama won, because he got Hillary down in the mud, where only Bill, her husband, is supposed to be.

Juan Williams claimed that Obama lost, because he got dirty, when his overall message is supposed to be about positive, sparkly-white change.

Williams inadvertently tipped his loyalties when he used a word like 'unfortunately' or 'regrettably,' to describe Obama's mistake. O'Reilly pounced on this immediately, but Williams was backtracking at warp speed. Not credibly, mind you, but he tried to gracefully extricate himself from the very partisan gaffe.

That said, the woman decried this 'mudslinging,' saying that voters don't want this.

Actually, I think we do. We love it. It's the very bone and sinew of American politics, and, Goddammit, it's our right to see it on display every four years.

In fact, it's gotten better during this election cycle. With these overly-ambitious egotists out running for President a full year earlier than last time, voters get a thorough look at them for much longer than we've been able to in the past.

With the internet, blogs, and YouTube, no gaffe goes away. No errant, honest admission dies silently. It's available on YouTube forever.

I think we all want to know about Hillary's taking Wal-Mart money then, and now trying to crucify corporate America.

Or that Obama smoked pot as a kid, and maybe sold it. Defended slumlords in the Chicago ghettos, and essentially skipped taking positions on an awfully lot of Illinois Senate votes.

The politicos- candidates, their handlers, the party operatives- all want voters to think they want to know only about 'the issues.'

But we know it's about character as much as, if not more than, issues. What did these candidates do for the past decade or two? How did they make their living? Who do they owe? Who have they taken into their confidences, their lives, and their campaigns?

How do they behave under stress? The stress of a heated exchange with a rival candidate?

That's what is most interesting. Watching Hillary and Obama fence directly with each other in that debate earlier this week. Trading blows in front of a catcalling crowd, while Edwards watched from an ever-more distant perspective.

I think this is what American voters want to see. Counterpunching up close between candidates, where we know they will unveil what they believe their opponents' worst secrets and greatest weaknesses are.

How better to know these things, than to let an opponent expose them for us? For free? We want total information. We don't want any more Jack Kennedy secret administrations, in which the press failed to print what it new about his affairs, mob contacts and health issues. Or the hidden secret of FDR's near-total immobility.

The political class don't want this, because it's easier to control campaigns that only focus on 'the issues.'

But, being America, in an era of unbridled, unmatched communications and access to information, that hope is long gone now. I'm not even sure Bill Clinton could have backed, filled and covered up sufficiently in this modern era to win the Presidency, if it were him running in 2008, instead of his wife.

Long live the mudslinging and investigative efforts of the rival candidates. It's the only chance we voters have to learn the total truth about him, or her, to whom we would entrust our most powerful office for the next four years.

Hillary, Obama, the Race Card & the November Election

It occurred to me this weekend that a very interesting and not yet discussed situation could easily develop by the November elections.

Suppose that Hillary, through sheer firepower, organizational depth and grit, outlasts Obama Bim Baden to become the Democratic standard-bearer in the general Presidential election this coming November.

Whether by alleging Obama played the race card, or playing 'too' rough, Hillary may trump her very junior opponent to win the Democratic nomination.

If she does, could the black voters of Democratic persuasion hand whichever Republican faces Hillary in November by simply staying home?

What if many of the blacks now moving to support the first 'real' black Democratic Presidential candidate become angry at the Clintons for playing 'hardball' a little too hard? Or just become disenchanted that the Clintons don't think one President in a married couple is sufficient, and have to ace out the black candidate running against Hillary?

Could it be that an unforeseen consequence of Hillary beating her black opponent won't be to unite black voters behind her, but, rather, see them move either to the middle, uninvolved, or even, in extreme cases, actually vote for her Republican opponent?

It would be a rich price to pay, indeed, for Hillary's and Bill's relentless, no-holds-barred style of campaigning.

To my knowledge, nobody's considered this effect. Sure, pundits constantly opine on whether the presumed ultra-right Christian vote will turn out for Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney. But what about the other side? What about blacks who feel similarly disenfranchised and ignored?

Couldn't that group easily account for the margin of victory for a Republican in a close-fought Presidential election?

What If? Bill Clinton's Impeachment Conviction

Last week I was discussing the current Presidential campaign with a friend. Remarking on Hillary's trust problems among the electorate, I mused about something I had never really explicitly considered before.

Both Al Gore, Bill Clinton's VP, and Clinton's wife, Hillary, have had uphill struggles when trying to leverage their connection with the two-term President into their own stint in the Oval Office.

Let me be clear. While I don't like BIll Clinton, and disagreed with most of his policies, and his perspectives on what was and is good for America, I respect his rare accomplishment of winning two terms as President of the United States. That's more than many accord our current President, George W. Bush, also a man of uncommonly high achievement.

How is it that Clinton's own VP failed to win the White House? And prospects for his wife are similarly clouded as I write this piece.

How would the fortunes of Gore and Hillary, and US and world history have changed, had:

Hillary divorced Bill over Monica's blue dress and his own obstruction of justice and the trail of victimized, openly confessed women with whom Bill had sex over the years as governor and President; and

Gore resigned as VP upon viewing the wealth of evidence that Bill Clinton obstructed justice, using the vast machinery of the Executive branch, to impeded his impeachment and threat of criminal trial?

It's my contention that those two events, especially if they occurred within about six months of each other, would have damaged Bill Clinton's efforts to avoid conviction in his Senate impeachment trial.
If Gore had resigned, perhaps the Republicans, in concert with the Democrats, could have arranged for a Nelson Rockefeller-type VP to be confirmed, who would agree not to run again in 1996. Then both parties' Senators could have safely convicted Bill and ousted him.

I believe that Gore's defeat in 2000 was at least in part due to his defense of an obviously deceitful sitting President. Much in the manner in which voters held Ford's pardon of Nixon against him, and elected Carter in 1976, it's reasonable to assume that a fair number of voters in America's heartland never forgave Gore for defending Clinton.

Had Gore resigned as Clinton's VP for ethical reasons, he could have probably won the 1996 election with ease, had he faced Dole. A convicted Clinton would be out of the running.

Had Clinton still evaded conviction for obstruction of justice, Gore might have given Democrats a better hope of winning the White House than a damaged President abandoned by both his VP and his wife.

The 1996 election would probably have been too early for the current President Bush to have entered, especially with his father having only vacated the White House four years earlier. And it's not certain that Bush could have defeated a sitting President Gore in 2000, unless the bursting of the stock market's tech bubble contributed to a Gore defeat.

Turning to Hillary, her divorce from Bill would have garnered the emotional sympathy of women everywhere, as well as potentially smoothed some of the rougher edges off of her public persona.

Next to the sympathy she'd generate, though, such a move would have helped her answer the constant suspicion that she is purely calculating, including her seemingly unemotional, unloving marriage to her husband.

A Hillary thus softened and playing victim could have more easily followed Gore to the White House.

Would any of this have happened? Who knows. But I think it's quite reasonable to suggest that Gore could have at least followed Bill Clinton, should the latter have managed to evade conviction in his impeachment, and hung onto the Oval Office for another four years.

To me, the moral of this hypothetical scenario would be that both Gore and Hillary might have achieved their ultimate objective, the Presidency, had they 'done the right thing,' rather than sticking by a President so obviously involved with obstructing justice in the case of the probe into his lies regarding his affair and sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky.

By supporting a President who became a laughingstock for attempting to redefine the word "is," I believe both Hillary and Al Gore damaged their own plans to become President as well.

The voting public would almost certainly have trusted both associates of Bill Clinton more had they done the ethical thing and voted with their feet when evidence clearly pointed to his sexual activity with his intern, while he continued to deny it and attempted to obstruct the inquiry about his misuse of power to protect himself.

They are interesting questions to ponder.

By doing the "right thing," both Gore and Hillary may each well have been able to capture the prize that eluded the former, and may still prove unreachable for the latter.

After New Hampshire

Well, here's my obligatory post-New Hampshire primary post.

For me, the salient moment of the New Hampshire campaign had to be Hillary's "tears on demand" faux-emotional moment in the Q&A session.

I think Glenn Beck's take on that moment was correct- Hillary, if being truly emotional, was bemoaning the 'falling back' of her and Bill's crusade to remake America in their liberal image. Not for the country 'falling back.' That would involve too much genuine caring for the welfare of others, rather than Hillary's more simple brand of blind ambition to rule.

Fox News had a commentator who opined,

"The Clintons don't have an unplanned bone in their collective bodies,"

or words very close to that effect.

Hillary accomplished two things with her faux-crying act. First, she dared people to criticize her for finally appearing to show emotion. This alone bought her nearly hours of free analysis time and endless replays of the clip, shown here on YouTube.



Second, she evidently duped a large number of Granite state voters, allegedly including many single women, into now believing she really does have genuine emotions.

Crazy? Yeah, like the proverbial fox. Imagine Obama Bim Baden outmaneuvered by something as old as a woman's tears.

Well, that's politics for you.

Meanwhile, Edwards and Richardson sank even lower.

Hillary's win, coming as it did after a solid day of erroneous predictions of Obama's anticipated double-digit trampling of the Ice Queen, was all the more attention-getting. If Hillary had been predicted to win, it would have been largely a yawner. As it was, the result seemed that much more remarkable.

Still, as one Sean Hannity pointed out, Hillary winning the state by only a few points margin, seen from a pre-Iowa perspective, is like losing twice in a row.

To his credit, though, Hannity's co-host, Alan Colmes, complained that if Hillary won, critics say it wasn't by enough. If she lost, they pile on her for losing. She can't win either way.

And that's true. That's what generally happens to frontrunners. Romney and Giuliani have experienced that on the Republican side.

I listened to Obama's defeat speech, with the idea that one should get better acquainted with the enemy. Boy, is he scary, too. Like Edwards. He positively oozes this faux-unity theme, when you know, below a shallow surface, he's going to bludgeon the beJezzus out of American business if he ever gets into the Oval Office.

All he really has going for him is two things- he's relatively youthful and energetic, and he's black. As I wrote here,

"The same is true for Obama. He has nothing remotely resembling the experience one would like to see in a President. Again, the Journal article made it seem as if a vote against, or not for, Obama, is a racist vote.

But that's not true. It totally overlooks Obama's nearly-total absence of any legitimate experience which would prepare him to lead this country. He's had only two years in the Senate- which is composed of largely do-nothing legislators. Prior to that, he served in the Illinois state legislature, and was an aide to former Illinois Senator Paul Simon. The guy with the braying voice and funny bow ties.

You wonder if Obama knows how to do anything- anything at all.

As with Hillary, I'm not against Obama because he's black. I don't think he's qualified a qualified person, no conditionality, to be President.

To reject Obama is not to reject minority candidates. Only that minority candidate. Jesse Jackson wasn't elected, either. And not because he is black. He was totally ill prepared to be President- and still is."

Let's be honest- if Obama wasn't black, his campaign wouldn't be happening at all. Back in the spring of last year, very senior Hawaiian Senator Dan Inouye bemoaned the fact that Obama hadn't even made it through one term in the Senate yet. He voiced the opinion that the very junior Illinois Senator had no business even contemplating running for President.

Nobody would seriously entertain any other similarly-inexperienced, two-year Senator running for President. Kennedy had seen combat in WWII and served several terms as a US Representative before running as a sitting Senator. And, as a Senator, he had received a fair amount of public exposure by participating in hearings on organized crime.

Obama is just a very young, naive, fresh-faced windbag in the tradition of Senatorial windbags from Illinois- Simon, Percy, and Durbin, to name a few.

On the Republican side, Romney is now being jumped on by the media as nearly finished. I think the reality is closer to his simply now being in a competitive foot race with McCain for the next month.

With luck, Hickabee will simply run out of gas and money. McCain probably will receive a lot of funding after last night's showing. And Giuliani has his big shot as the primaries come to the larger states.

One comment I found thought-provoking last night on Fox was that New Hampshire is no longer the Republican bellwether it once was. Many of its governmental positions have gone blue since the Reagan and Sunnunu days. It's not the tight-fisted, conservative bastion of old. Thus, the pundit's view was that results out of both Iowa and New Hampshire are more telling for Democrats than for Republicans.

On a final note, I find myself torn over McCain. Lately, he seems to have 'gotten religion' on conservative fiscal policies. And he talks a good game about his character. Plus, he did a good job supporting successful evolution of tactics and strategy in Iraq, which has led to its successful progress during 2007.

As I wrote here last March, though, McCain in many ways reminds me of Bob Dole. And not in a good way. He seems to have an enduring sense of entitlement regarding the Presidency. As with Dole, he's horse-traded his way through the Senate, making him suspect at leading change through that chamber. McCain is, without question, a veteran combat aviator and brave man. He's undergone far more suffering for his country than anyone could ever ask.

That doesn't mean he deserves to lead us as President.

I remain deeply distrustful of McCain for one very large reason. As co-author of McCain-Feingold, the campaign finance 'reform' bill, he has shown himself to be a naive idiot. And willing to gut the First Amendment free speech provisions in the name of incumbent protection.

That anyone would think more 'campaign finance reform legislation' can ever do more than hopelessly complicate an already unworkable situation shows they lack the fundamental brainpower, common sense and perspective to lead this nation as President.

All McCain's bill did was try to rob voters of their right to speak freely about candidates, on their own, and provide new ways for the always-smart campaign managers to outmaneuver the latest legal nonsense that poses as campaign finance 'law.'

This low-water mark of McCain's legislative career, dating from almost a decade ago, troubled me then. And still does.

On to Michigan and the south!

Re: Iowa Caucuses

The Iowa caucuses results are now old news. New Hampshire's primary is tomorrow. If I'm going to make any insightful comments after the former, and before the latter, it better be today.

Being from the Midwest originally, I perhaps have a different perspective on Iowa than many Easterners.

Regarding Hickabee, I think he's just a flash in the pan who got lucky by tapping into the Iowan evangelical base. That isn't going to be happening twice.

Just last night, on Fox News' panel of the leading five Republican Presidential candidates (Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, McCain and Romney), Huckabee scored nearly the worst of the five with Fox's focus group. One of the group's members, when asked what she didn't like about Huckabee, promptly said,

"I am voting for a President, not a minister."

Apparently, though I missed the opening of the debate/panel, Huckabee fumbled the very first question badly. Several focus group respondents thought he 'waffled 3 or four times' on just this first question.

Romney, on the other hand, was the nearly-unanimous choice among the focus group for his responses, his experience, and his leadership-projecting demeanor.

Personally, I was moved by a Wall Street Journal editorial shortly before the Iowa caucuses by an Iowan. He noted that not since Jimmy Carter had Iowa's choice led the nation after the ensuing election.

Thus, I have even stronger feelings that Hickabee's 'win' in Iowa is an aberration.

Thompson, my personal, unelectable favorite, was the nearly-unanimously worst performer on the Fox panel last night. He was characterized by the focus group members as,

"an actor," and

"he has good ideas but communicates poorly."

That's pretty much where I am. If I could wave a wand to get my wish, I'd make him President. But the reality is that he is too thoughtful and slowish for today's media environment. He's likable, experienced in legislative government, but just not dynamic enough in a race that features Hickabee and Romney.

I'd like to believe that Thompson could be someone's running mate, but I'm not sure that would ever happen.

To me, the biggest question for the Republicans is whether Giuliani's 'wait for the South' strategy will work, or whether he'll be hopelessly behind and running short of funds after ceding Iowa and New Hampshire.

I expect either Romney, Giuliani or McCain to eventually be the party's nominee. Hopefully, one of the first two.

As to Iowa's results for the Democrats, I will admit that I could not be more pleased. Obama Bim Baden and John-boy Edwards both beat Hillary.

Confusion to our enemies! Can it get any better than this for a start?

Obama is long-term unelectable. As Kim Strassel wrote in a Journal editorial recently, Obama claims to want 'change,' but change to what?

He claims to want to 'unite,' but his real message, if you listent closely, is old-school American politics,

'Let's get the White House, and then use our control of Congress, too, to ram our 'changes' down everybody's throats!'

As Rudy Giuliani said last night on the Fox News panel, Democrats all want 'change,' and, in fact, in an election without an incumbent, everybody is for 'change.' The question is, change to what?

I don't believe many people will, once the voting booth curtains close, actually vote for Obama. He's just too green and inexperienced. Do you really want this guy at a table across from Putin's successor, the Iranian President, or the Chinese leader? I don't. He's a baby with literally no accomplishments to his name.

And, no, he's not like Abe Lincoln, also from Illinois. Lincoln was a combat-tested leader of militia in the Blackhawk Wars, a successful local trial attorney and noted state legislator at a time when states had comparatively more control and influence over its citizen's lives than they arguably do today.

And, despite Peggy Noonan's belief, Obama is playing the race card, hard, by implicitly daring people to not be for him, thus being racist.

Edwards may have tapped into some disaffected Iowans, but his message of doom and corporate greed doesn't have legs. People vote for positive visions, not vengeful agendas. Edwards continues to stump for demonizing and crippling the US private sector, according to John-boy's own personal opinions.

But the fact that each of these two inept Democratic Presidential candidates beat Hillary shows she is now damaged. She can't make people like her.

Her shrill, braying plea the next day in New Hampshire,

'Ask us anything you want to know about us!' conveys her newly-desperate condition. And who's this 'us,' anyway? The legendary Team Billary?

I believe her loss in Iowa will push Hillary further into the sort of panic mode that will reveal her true, innate, unlikable and untrustworthy self. Her armor is cracked, blood has been drawn.

Though I'm not a Democrat, I believe Hillary will, eventually, beat Obama for the nomination. Her funding and organization may well finally edge the babe out, but at the cost of a deeply flawed and weakened candidate who lacks passion and an impassioned voter base.

For what it's worth, the Fox News New Hampshire focus group last night felt that Romney, their favorite, could beat the Democrat they believe will win the nomination, Obama Bim Baden.

I think the important aspect of Iowa, though, is that Hillary was caught looking ahead to see Edwards and Obama both in front of her. Panic must now be truly setting in. How many early contests can Hillary afford to lose?

Wouldn't it be wild if, with all the front-loaded primaries this year, the Democrats, and/or, for that matter, the Republicans, ended up with one of these two dilemmas:

-a genuinely 'open' convention in which no one candidate has yet achieved the necessary votes to win their party's nomination?

or

-a 'winner' with whom the party is actually not happy, by the time they get to the convention?

The early packing of delegate selections could well hand someone unqualified, such as Obama or Hickabee, a victory that their party knows can't be sustained in the general election.

Perhaps an important outcome from the 2008 elections will be another trip to the drawing board to attempt to arrange state primary schedules so that they neither disenfranchise late states, nor unduly hurry the process. Perhaps either a later, one-day primary date for all states, or a carefully crafted grouping of several states together on one day in each of several consecutive months.

Whatever it is, I think this year's primary scramble will leave both parties seeking a better way in 2012.

John Edwards' Scary Plans For Corporate America

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial from ultra-liberal, class-warrior Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards.

I found the editorial so shockingly socialist and terrifying that I'm reposting it in its entirety, in italics, below. The bolded sections are those which cause me the most fright, and on which I'll comment among the piece's italicized paragraphs.

My Plan to Stop Corporate Abuses
By JOHN EDWARDS

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

January 2, 2008


The basic bargain of America -- that everyone should have a chance to work hard and build a better future -- is falling apart. Families are working longer hours, but skyrocketing education and health-care costs, the foreclosure crisis, and stagnant incomes have made it harder for working Americans to provide a better future for their children.

Not everyone in America is struggling. Investors on Wall Street took home a record-setting $38 billion in bonuses this past year, even after losing millions in the credit meltdown.
In 1960, the average CEO made 41 times what the average worker made. But in 2005, the average CEO made over 400 times the average worker's salary. The share of corporate profits going to CEO pay has doubled since the 1990s. Meanwhile, the value of the minimum wage has plummeted 30% since 1979.

Investors are not just 'on Wall Street,' and haven't been for some time. The investors of which Edwards writes are your basic trade, municipal and educational workers' union and corporate pension funds.

Next, as the Economist noted this past year in a special section article, corporations are some 4 times larger, by asset size, than they were in the 1960s. Thus, CEO scope of control is at least, on average, 4 times as large. Much of the rise in CEO incomes has to do with supervision of, and accountability for, larger amounts of assets. But CEO tenure has decreased markedly in the forty-plus years since 1960.

Get your facts straight, John-boy.

Don't get me wrong -- it is a good thing that some Americans are doing well. The son of working-class parents, I have been blessed with extraordinary success in my own life and now want for no material thing. The problem is that the successes of the U.S. economy are no longer shared. Forty percent of all economic growth over the past 20 years has gone to the top 1% of American families.

Edwards evidently is unaware that, in America, the bottom segment of income earners is not stagnant. See this post.

The success of the U.S. economy demands that Americans uphold their country's values: fair reward for work and opportunity for all. To meet these goals, America must renew its basic bargain with the middle class and remove the stranglehold that entrenched corporate interests have on Washington.

I don't recall any political "bargain," between any class and our government. In fact, the salient feature of America is that government generally keeps its hands off of the economic life of its citizens. We like it that way. But to my knowledge, our bureaucratic government has made no 'bargain' with me. I won't even see my Social Security contributions again. How's that for a 'bargain,' John?

The first thing America needs to do is to make affordable, high-quality health care a part of the social compact. Not only are health-care costs putting a huge strain on American families and U.S. competitiveness in the global economy, but a system that leaves 47 million Americans without health care is a moral disgrace. As president, universal health care will be my No. 1 domestic priority.

Second, America also needs to adapt retirement savings to the modern work environment. In the past, it was common for people to stay with the same company their entire career, and so it made sense for pensions to be connected to employers. Today, the average American worker will probably hold jobs with multiple companies.

As president, I will create a new universal retirement account requiring every business to automatically enroll its workers in at least one plan: a traditional pension, a 401(k) or an IRA. Workers will be able to choose to have their contributions deducted automatically from their paychecks, and they will be able to carry these accounts with them from job to job.

Is this guy for real? This 'news' is about a decade old. Does anyone even have defined-benefit pension plans anymore? Please tell me this guy is more current than this.

America can't allow fundamentally healthy companies to go into bankruptcy just to avoid keeping their promises to employees, or to emerge from bankruptcy with millions for executives and nothing for workers. As president, I will ensure that corporations honor the pension promises they've made to workers, by giving workers a claim for lost pensions, just like lost wages.

Third, American companies should be run for the benefit of workers and shareholders as well as insiders. Today, too many companies in America are putting far too much of their earnings into excessive CEO and executive pay, when this money could be going to increased worker salaries, better benefits and investments in plants and equipment.

Really? Is John Edwards about to become the economic central-planning czar for the US economy? I thought that failed in Russia a few decades back. Who better to allocate money among competing interests- labor, capital, materials- than the market, via investor purchases and sales of equity shares? What in God's name does John-boy think he's going to do that is so much better than the market? He's so socialist that he makes FDR look like a Reagan Republican conservative.

As president, I will immediately cap untaxed deferred compensation for executives. I will also give shareholders new rights and responsibilities so that they can call shareholder meetings, remove directors who aren't acting responsibly, and have a say on executive pay.

Sorry, John, but the market already provides the ultimate protection- inexpensive buying and selling of equity shares. As I have written on my companion business blog, The Reasoned Sceptic, any minority shareholder who thinks he can, or should affect corporate policies of this nature should have his head examined. Unless he's a hedge fund or private equity investor looking to actually control the firm, he should just buy better-performing companies, and leave the mediocre to badly off ones alone.

Globalization, technology and demographic change have transformed the U.S. economy. Corporations have adapted, but the basic bargain with America's workers has not. We are living in a 21st-century economy, but are asking American workers to compete with a 20th-century set of tools.

How's that again? I don't see corporations struggling to use "a 20th-century set of tools." They seem to be doing fine competitively, where productivity matters. But when it's just labor costs, who really wants to try to compete in a downward wage spiral with Southeast Asia or Africa?

In order to fulfill its obligation to future generations of Americans, the U.S. must restore balance between America's corporations and America's working families. Only then will it be able to guarantee that anyone who is willing to work hard and do the right thing has the opportunity to share in the nation's prosperity.

I truly did not realize anything was out of balance. In fact, many families now own shares of American private enterprise. As to "America's working families," they have the ultimate mobility- within the US, or abroad. If they don't like the jobs on offer, they are more than welcome to seek elsewhere.

Mr. Edwards, a Democrat and a former senator from North Carolina, is running for U.S. president.


In summary, I found this screed to be incredibly small-minded, naive and dangerous. Perhaps that is why the Journal ran it prior to the Iowa caucuses.

Given Edward's second-place finish there, I thought it worth doing my part to circulate his wacky ideas in their entirety, and original form.

If Edwards ever becomes President, I think the economic horror of low growth and high inflation of the Carter years will look like heaven on earth by comparison.

Revisiting The New Deal, Employment & Private Investment

Monday's Wall Street Journal, the last edition of 2007, featured a wonderful editorial by Amity Shlaes entitled "The New Deal Jobs Myth."

She begins her article with these passages,

"Is a public-sector job really as good as a job created in the private sector? I've been wondering about this a lot lately, in part because I just finished a book about the period of the first great American experiment in public job creation, the New Deal. Critics have written that I failed to appreciate the value of New Deal emergency jobs. But the quality of government-paid jobs is also relevant because of the Democratic presidential candidates' interest in that 1930s experiment.

To hear the candidates talk, a repeat of 1930s-scale government job creation is dangerously overdue. John Edwards has proposed that government take the lead in creating types of jobs -- "green collar" and "stepping stone" -- to serve the two goals of protecting the environment and giving lower earners new skills. Dennis Kucinich is calling for a new green version of FDR's Works Progress Administration.

Academics are backing the politicians up. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution recently suggested that intelligent planning is the key to success: "smart policies and investments on infrastructure can foster productive growth in our economy, sustainable growth."
Given this Edifice Complex, the actual quality of New Deal spending, job creation and growth are worth a second look. The record is less impressive than the rhetoric implies."

This alone is rather scary. Schlaes documents several Democratic Presidential candidates alluding to the need for government-sourced infrastructure and/or jobs programs. Thus, her focus on whether or not the New Deal efforts were all they are now remembered as being.

I should note that even in my youth, during the mid-1960s, it was often acknowledged that Roosevelt's various New Deal programs didn't pull America out of the Depression- World War II did that. Back in post-Eisenhower America, Democrats were regarded as the party that took our country to war. Seems silly to write that now, but it was true- Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson. But, I digress.

Putting her finger on the key aspect which differentiates most public and private sector employment, Schlaes writes,

"What was wrong with those public works jobs? Many created enduring edifices -- New York's Triborough Bridge, for example, the Mountain Theater of Mount Tamalpais State Park outside San Francisco, the Texas Post Office murals, which were funded by Henry Morgenthau's Treasury. But the public jobs did their work inefficiently. That was because the jobs were scripted to serve political ends, not economic ones."

Short term, politically motivated job creation might provide some temporary, albeit inefficient, ways of increasing demand by paying people for 'work.' But it can't, in more than the short term, help but become wasteful of a nation's resources. It's rather like throwing Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage into reverse, and pouring resources into things for all the wrong economic reasons.

But this waste wasn't limited to simply labor resources. Schlaes also points out,

"One could interject that such arguments do not take into account the context -- the paucity of other jobs, the dust storms, the deflations, the homelessness, the incomprehensible real privation of the period. But in the later part of the 1930s, the same model infrastructure projects did their part to prolong that privation. The private sector, desperate, was incredibly productive -- those who did have a job worked hard, just as our grandparents told us. But the government was taking all the air in the room. Utilities are a prime example. In the 1920s electricity was a miracle industry. There was every expectation that growth in utilities might pull the country through hard times in the future.

And the industry might have indeed done that, if the government had not supplanted it. Roosevelt believed in public utilities, not private companies. He created his own highly ambitious infrastructure project -- the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA commandeered the utility business in the South, notwithstanding the vehement protests of the private utilities that served that area.

Washington sucked up much of the available capital by selling bonds and collecting taxes to pay for the TVA or municipal power plants in towns. In order to justify their own claim that public utilities were necessary, New Dealers also undermined private utilities directly, through laws -- not only the TVA law but also the infamous Public Utilities Holding Company Act, which legislated many companies out of existence. Other industries saw their work curtailed or pre-empted by government as well.

At many points during the New Deal, net private investment was not merely low, but negative. Companies were using more capital goods than they were investing in.

All this tells us that while some companies were gunning their engines for the moment -- the industrial production -- they had little hope for productivity gains in the years ahead. Business no longer believed in business. Five years into the New Deal, companies across the country were mounting what Roosevelt himself described as a "capital strike.""

This is the socialism for which FDR is justly criticized. He inherently distrusted private enterprise, and granted sweeping powers to public utilities while crowding out the private, investor-owned ones. People in the current era seem to forget how rampantly socialist FDR was considered to be. To illustrate his father's economic conservatism, and the Midwest's distrust of FDR's socialist programs and interference with the market economy, my father has told me many times,

"I was thirteen before I knew Roosevelt's first name wasn't Goddam."

I've written elsewhere in this blog that it's unrealistic to believe that civil servants will ever, on average, be motivated to solve a major economic problem better or more quickly than private enterprise. Further, who among us knows of many intelligent, well-educated people who head for middle management jobs in federal cabinet agencies? I'd never trust career administrators in the federal government to solve economic or social problems better than the private sector.

Yet FDR's failed programs have now become a mis-remembered beacon to today's liberal leaders. Rather than budget for infrastructure projects and let contracts to industry, or allow industry to determine the types of jobs it needs, Kucinich and Edwards are busy planning to have taxpayers fund their own visions of new training programs and public works agencies. The faith that America has placed in its profit-driven, entrepreneurial private sector since World War II would soon be replaced by the American version of Soviet central planning.

Schlaes concludes by writing,

"The relevant points for today are simple. The famous "multiplier effect" of public spending may exist. U.S. cities do indeed need new highways, new buildings and new roads, maybe even from government. But these needs should be weighed against damage that comes when officials create projects and jobs for political reasons.

An emergency such as a Great Depression, a Sept. 11, a Katrina, can serve as a catalyst for an infrastructure project and for job creation too. But the dire moral quality of that emergency does not guarantee that the project undertaken in its name will be more efficient than your standard earmark.

In other words, candidates may want to be careful as they climb onto FDR's shoulders. The New Deal edifice may look solid, but it doesn't form a good basis for the American future."

One wonders how much more FDR could have done, had he used Congress to appropriate funds for his visions, but left industry to organize and implement them.

Let's hope we don't let today's liberal Democratic Presidential candidates attempt to repeat the worst features of FDR's multi-term reign.