The first major speech of President Obama’s 2012 reelection
campaign will be given tomorrow night before a joint session of
Congress.
The White House — through its media avatars such as the
New York Times — have begun setting the narrative for the
campaign. According to the narrative, Obama is the second coming of
Bill Clinton, craftily morphing his liberalism into centrism
without alienating his liberal base, eager to move the nation
forward in compromise with the Republicans returned to power in
November.
It is a fiction: Obama is not moderating in any respect,
and he won’t compromise except to the extent that he will be forced
to do so by the Republican House.
As the Times “reported”
yesterday, Obama’s purported moderation “…means emphasizing job
creation, deficit reduction and a willingness to compromise in a
new period of divided government. But it also means a willingness
to make the case for spending — or investment, as many in his
party would prefer to call it — in areas like education,
transportation and technological innovation when it can be
justified as essential to the nation’s long-term
prosperity.”
Barry will be playing a fiscal con game in his State of
the Union address. Barry’s game isn’t a Ponzi scheme: his fiscal
con game is the budgetary equivalent of one of those diets that
promises you’ll lose weight no matter how much you eat. Spend more,
he will say, to reduce our deficit.
(If only one of the Republicans were a ventriloquist. He
could sit next to Harry Reid or Dick Durbin, shout “You Lie!” at
Obama, and make it sound as if it came from Dick or
Harry.)
Obama will compromise only when cornered. As part of any
deals with the House Republican majority, he will insist on
increasing the size and cost of government as much as he is allowed
to get away with. To beat this, the Republicans need to have better
ideas.
They usually do, but the Obama media don’t report them.
How many times did the media bemoan Republican “obstructionism” on
healthcare, telling American voters that the Republicans had no
alternative to it? The simply refused to talk about the
conservative healthcare reform bills Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) and
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) had introduced because the ideas in those
bills were solid and didn’t include nationalizing 16% of the
nation’s economy.
Now, of course, the media won’t report — except to
criticize in passing — the conservative ideas for spending cuts
which should be the price extracted from Obama in any legislation
to raise the federal debt ceiling: the House Republican Study
Committee’s forthcoming bill to slash federal spending.
Ohio’s Jim Jordan, the new House Republican Study
Committee Chairman, isn’t yet well known, but he will be soon. A
champion wrestler in his high school days, Jordan is one of those
quick, wiry guys who has enough energy to propel a medium-sized
ship. He sizes up issues and people quickly and — in what I’ve
seen of him over the past few years — he’s an effective leader. He
and his Senate counterpart — Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) have precisely
the right idea at the right time: to cut $2.5 trillion off the
federal spending tree over the next ten years. Their proposals, to
be introduced this week, don’t just freeze spending at an
already-too-high level. They take the Federalist approach to get
the federal government out of many of the parts of our society in
which it just doesn’t belong.
A spokesman for Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the top
Democrat on the House Budget Committee, called the proposal
“radical.” Thank heaven it is.
Shortly after the November election, Virginia Gov. Bob
McDonnell
told me that we need to have a serious
conversation about federalism, and that conservative governors —
himself and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, among others — were going
to work with Congress to devise a way to get the government out of
the parts of our economy and our culture in which it has no
constitutional mandate to intervene.
That theme is reflected in the RSC and Senate proposals.
They would halt any further spending of the “Obama stimulus” money
(some $45 billion still in the kitty), eliminate federal control of
mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (saving about $30
billion) cut from the federal budget and eject the government from
a host of areas it shouldn’t be involved in.
That point is the most important ideologically and the one
that will resonate most strongly with American voters.
Many of these terminated programs are totems of Washington
liberalism: they are so perfectly unrelated to the constitutional
purpose of government that every federal dollar they spend is an
affront to every taxpayer. They include, among many others, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the liberal government
broadcasting arm, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and
the National Endowment for the Arts, Amtrak subsidies and the Legal
Services Corporation.
But as ideologically important as those cuts are, the big
money lies elsewhere. They get to $2.5 trillion by reducing
non-defense federal spending to 2006 levels and — with many more
Federalist-type cuts included — by reducing the federal
bureaucratic workforce by 15% and freezing federal workers’ pay for
five years. They also save $1 billion per year by repealing the
Davis-Bacon Act which requires federal building contractors to pay
union-set wage levels, hugely increasing the price of construction
projects.
Just how radical the proposals are was outlined by Dana
Milbank in Saturday’s Washington Post. Milbank believes
it’s just those awful conservatives hitting the liberal eastern
elites with some payback. He
wrote, “The cuts they did spell out were
relatively small — $330 billion over 10 years — but their choices
left little doubt that they were trying to stir up cultural and
political mischief…Those eastern elites, in addition to losing
their NPR, PBS and other cultural offerings, would have to part
with their Amtrak subsidies and their money to fight beach erosion.
Greens would lose funds for the National Organic Certification
program.”
The liberal elitist Washington Post columnist has
come close to the right conclusion missing by one quantum of
reasoning. The DeMint-Jordan proposal is not a payback aimed at
causing personal pain to liberals. But it is payback of a sort,
seeking to roll back a lot of their worst initiatives that placed
the government in control of parts of our economy and culture from
which it should be banished.
In the next month, the debate over whether to increase the
federal debt ceiling will reach a high pitch. Republican leaders on
both sides of the Hill should insist that the spending cuts
proposed by Jordan and DeMint be included in the
legislation.
They should refuse to bite on Obama’s phony “moderation”
bait, and demand that the Federalist approach that Jordan and
DeMint offer be included in any deal. For the Republicans, it’s
either that or follow the
example of young Sasha Obama and start
learning to speak Chinese.
