How to Lose to Obama

It's easy if you try.

by John Hayward

Some observers think that President Obama’s awful record should make it easy for any of the GOP candidates to beat him. That’s a dangerous delusion. No incumbent should ever be underestimated, especially one the media loves. Also, each of the Republican candidates has proven highly adept at techniques for losing the 2012 election. Here are a few of their favorites.

1. Engaging in academic discussions on the campaign trail: Newt Gingrich​ and Ron Paul​ are especially prone to doing this. Phrases like “hypothetically speaking” should be absolutely shunned by a presidential candidate. The voters are not eager to participate in a dorm-room bull session about the theoretical limits of American government, nor do they wish to be used in a laboratory experiment. Likewise, they’ll respect a command of history, but be turned off by long lectures about prior centuries. Dwelling at length upon the past is a good way to seem out of touch.

2. Forgetting about your own platform: The big thing Herman Cain​ did really well was talking up his own platform (although sometimes he was much better at delivering enthusiasm than details.) He brought everything back to the 999 Plan, and conveyed the sense he passionately believed in it. In fact, he’s still working on promoting it, even after suspending his campaign.

On the other hand, Rick Perry​ and even idea factory Newt Gingrich often neglect to bring up their own core proposals, some of which are quite dramatic. Both of them favor a flat tax, for example. That’s a huge change to our system. The 999 Plan is essentially a flat tax fused to a consumption tax, and Cain always knew it would rattle a lot of cages. Perry and Gingrich act like their flat tax plans are minor curiosities that can be looked up on their Web sites, should voters feel suitably motivated.

Worse, Perry has actually forgotten about important details of his own plan. Appearing in Iowa with Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal on Tuesday, he forgot that his plan included a standard deduction. Jindal had to remind him about it. Coupled with the infamous moment in which Perry couldn’t remember the third department he wanted to eliminate during a debate, it’s an unsettling tendency.

Treating a major policy change with this kind of neglect turns voters off. It makes them think the candidate hasn’t thought his plan all the way through, isn’t serious about implementing it, or hasn’t considered all of its ramifications. The candidate ends up taking the heat for proposing a bold idea, without reaping any of the rewards.

3. Picking fights with the Republican base. Some pundits wonder why Jon Huntsman has never managed more than an asterisk in the polls. Simple: he launched his campaign by aggressively insulting the conservative base, and declaring himself the moderate alternative to those Tea Party extremists. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and Huntsman’s first impression was awful. His relatively conservative campaign has never been able to overcome this.

In a similar vein, one of the reasons Mitt Romney​ has such a persistent ceiling on his appeal is that he’s either alienated various elements of the conservative movement in the past, or he’s patronizing them now. Ron Paul’s casual assertions that those who disagree with his foreign policy views are bloodthirsty warmongers alienates both Republican and general election voters. He actually said of Michele Bachmann​, on national television, “She hates Muslims. Yeah, she wants to go get ‘em.”

There’s always a tendency for candidates to “tack to the middle” during the general election, at the expense of their base. Hopefully none of the Republican candidates are under any illusions about the willingness of significant portions of their base to endure outright insults and betrayals. No matter how much they want Obama out of office, some of them can be persuaded to stay home on Election Night, arms folded in disgust.

4. Opposing Obama’s policies without understanding why they’re wrong: This is one of Mitt Romney’s big problems, courtesy of RomneyCare. Republican voters have spent years worrying that he would be an unreliable or ineffective opponent of ObamaCare… and in all those years, he still hasn’t found a way to reassure them. This is not merely peevish behavior on their part. They know moderate and independent voters need to hear an argument against ObamaCare that is not just convincing, but devastating. After all, they will be frequently reminded that repealing it will be a huge political and bureaucratic struggle.

Newt Gingrich will also face challenges in this area, because as sharp as he has been in debates, a little bit of his political soul will always be glued to that couch, next to Nancy Pelosi​.

5. Getting carried away: Michele Bachmann’s consistent mistake has been going too far with initially valid criticisms, and leaving herself open to chiding that she “doesn’t have her facts straight,” as Newt Gingrich put it during the last Republican debate. Imagine what that will be like when it’s not a grumpy Gingrich, but a school of “fact-checking” media piranha, ready to pounce on her.

A running theme of the Obama 2012 campaign will be that criticism of the President is morally illegitimate – in other words, the Republican candidate hates him because he’s black, or because they’re servants of the Evil Rich, et cetera. Sloppy criticism will play right into that storyline.

6. Losing control of the narrative: The great danger of media bias is not so much outright obfuscation or propaganda, although we’ll probably have some of that, too. The real danger is narrative control. To put it simply, the media decides on a plot line for the election, and it guides their coverage. This plot line will not be friendly to the GOP nominee.

The candidate should not underestimate his or her power to change the narrative. In 2008, John McCain​ was particularly horrible at this. He couldn’t put together a winning storyline of “How President McCain Won the White House.” He couldn’t even cobble together a good reason for voters to vote against his opponent, apparently terrified that strong criticism of Obama would blow up in his face.

Excessive timidity against Obama will result in a loss of narrative control, as media-influenced moderate voters begin wondering why the mousy GOP candidate wasted everyone’s time and money with an election. At some point, criticism of policy inevitably becomes "personal" criticism of the incumbent - who must, by definition, have been either malicious or foolish to insist on such disastrous policy for years.

A big part of narrative control is understanding how to engage the media, draw them along a desired path, and give them something positive they can’t help talking about. Rick Santorum​ and Jon Huntsman seem to have a lot of trouble grabbing the spotlight and doing this. It’s hard to suddenly become exciting.

7. Freezing up: By this I don’t just mean brain freezes on the debate stage, although those are plenty bad enough. Unexpected events will occur during the campaign. Some of these candidates have long histories, elements of which will be popping up at carefully timed moments. The campaigns must be ready to adapt. Herman Cain’s campaign gave us a couple of sharp lessons in how not to do it. Confusion and disarray among campaign operatives can be disastrous. Responses must be swift and coordinated.

As for the debate stage itself, there’s no doubt that mumbling and verbal lockups are bad news. Obama is a fairly smooth speaker, particularly in formal settings. He can say some remarkably weird things, but the way he says them conveys poise. He’s good at deploying stock phrases like “As I have always said” and “Let me be clear” when he needs to buy a little time. Both style and substance will be part of this campaign, and the Republican’s style will inevitably be judged more harshly.

President Obama is very beatable, but losing is easy too. Far too many post-mortems for failed campaigns begin with the observation that the candidate never really understood the forces aligned against him. The result of the 2012 campaign needs to be something better than a best-selling 2013 book by a defeated candidate, reviewing all the ways he or she was treated unfairly. Write that book in your heads right now, GOP contenders… and then run a campaign that tears it to shreds.

John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.

Union Leaders Blast Obama For Keystone XL Pipeline Delay

The President's rigid ideology is not worth thousands of jobs.

by John Hayward

Last night, Larry Kudlow of CNBC interviewed union leaders Brent Booker of the Construction Department Laborers’ International Union of North America and David Barnett from the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters. The topic was the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would create an enormous number of jobs for these two unions.

Booker wasn’t quite ready to agree with Kudlow’s assertion that President Obama was “turning his back” on the labor constituency, but he did profess himself to be “disappointed” that the President was “delaying his decision on the pipeline.”

“We’ve been supportive of this project for several years now,” noted Booker. “Our members, construction workers, and middle-class Americans are in desperate need of jobs, and we think that this project could create those for us.”

“We do need this pipeline,” Barnett agreed, clearly conscious that a whole lot of pipe fitting would be involved, while unemployment is currently running at 20-25% in that sector – among the most dire straits he can remember. “We’ve worked very hard in the last three years to get this permit for this pipeline.” He noted the extremely high environmental standards the project will meet, and how much America needs both the jobs and oil.

“You know, the American people are the ones who are going to jump-start this economy, and that’s the argument that I don’t think people are understanding,” Barnett astutely noted. Oh, rest assured, the President understands all that. He just doesn’t care. Remember, he was outspokenly willing to torpedo his own sacred “payroll tax cut” – which he claims is integral to job creation, and is in fact one of the only three ideas he has ever advanced for enhanced job creation – just to stop this pipeline project.

Obama’s other two job-creating ideas are extended unemployment benefits and infrastructure spending. “Infrastructure” is an ancient Greek word meaning “huge construction project.” Trans-continental pipelines, for example.

The President’s ideologically and politically motivated indecision could do a lot more than simply “delay” the pipeline, which Canada could route in other directions, if America doesn’t want it. Booker correctly fears such an outcome. “We already know [the Canadians] have got plans to ship the pipeline, ship the oil west, more than likely to Asian markets,” he said. “Asian markets” is an ancient Greek phrase meaning “China.”

“Quite frankly, the American people are tired of Washington D.C. politics going on, and their jobs are waiting in line for these decisions,” said Barnett at the conclusion of this remarkably candid interview. He declared himself a big believer in “green energy,” but is nevertheless realistic in his understanding that “we need oil today to drive this nation.” Perhaps the looming demise of the Keystone XL project will convince him that he, and the members of his union - along with the rest of job-starved America - are indeed looking at Barack Obama’s back.

John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.

ObamaCare Reaches the Supreme Court

It’s all or nothing in the court battle that had to happen.

by John Hayward

On Wednesday, the National Federation of Independent Business petitioned the Supreme Court to review a decision from the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding ObamaCare. The Obama Justice Department feels good about its general track record defending the law in appeals courts, and has also filed a petition with the Supremes.

The Administration could have kept things bottled up in the 11th Circuit for a while, but most observers agree it would go all the way to the highest court sooner or later... and if "later" meant after the 2012 elections, there might have been a very different Justice Department arguing the government's case, with decidedly less enthusiasm.

A Supreme Court battle fought during the height of the election would make the unpopular law into dinner-table conversation at a moment when the President doesn't want voters choking on all the things his signature legislation forces them to do. Victory now would give Obama some campaign talking points, while defeat at this early date would leave him with time to recover.

From a legal standpoint, this is the main event: the heavyweight title fight between Obama’s health care scheme and the nation that never wanted it.

The 11^th Circuit made two important points in its ruling. First, ObamaCare’s individual mandate is unconstitutional. Second, the court “severed” the mandate from the rest of ObamaCare, leaving the rest of the beast to shamble mindlessly forward after surgically removing its pulsating heart.

The individual mandate is the core rationale of ObamaCare, which socializes health insurance costs by requiring everyone to purchase insurance. In essence, insurance companies would be given a guaranteed income stream, in exchange for providing lavish mandatory benefits, enumerated in the thousands of pages of regulations that would re-shape the American economy to accommodate the President’s agenda.

Remember, at one point ObamaCare was going to require small businesses to fill out millions of 1099 tax forms, in an effort to capture a little previously uncollected tax revenue, and defray some of the immense cost of the program. Thus was a “health care” bill intended to change the way American small businesses paid for paper clips.

The “mandate” concept, ruled unconstitutional by the 11th Circuit Court, was introduced for a simple political reason: it allowed the architects of ObamaCare to pretend it was not being funded by a “tax.” The bill was already a tough sell when the public was bamboozled by wild claims of deficit neutrality, and hypnotized by thousands of rapidly spinning clauses and sub-clauses. The public mind would have been sharply focused if they had been told they were about to be hit with a new multi-trillion-dollar “tax.” Mandates are taxes the IRS doesn’t collect.

Without the individual mandate, both the funding mechanisms and basic logic vanish from a bureaucratic nightmare that was already poised to blow our stratospheric national debt into whatever comes after the stratosphere. (I looked it up. It’s the mesosphere. After that you’ve got the thermosphere, which America’s debt should pass through sometime around 2020. Then it’s out of the blue, and into the black.)

It’s highly unlikely that ObamaCare could have passed Congress without the individual mandate in place. It barely crawled off Capitol Hill as it was, leaving a grisly trail of kickbacks, payoffs, and backroom deals glimmering in the moonlight behind it.

Nevertheless, there’s not a chance that the white-knuckled statists of the Democrat Party would allow the rest of their health care takeover die after losing its heart. The only way to put this thing down for good is to nullify the “severability” ruling, and that’s what the National Federation of Independent Business is shooting for. As Heartland Institute Research Fellow Ben Domenech put it:

It is absolutely essential that the Supreme Court take up the matter of severability along with giving us its ruling on the individual mandate within President Obama’s health law. The Court must decide this as a whole issue, as soon as possible, to end the uncertainty that has continued to cloud economic decisions by thousands of American small businesses and firms.

States, firms, and citizens need to know what to expect, and legislators will soon learn if there is any limit to the power granted to the Congress via the Commerce Clause, or whether Washington can command anyone to purchase any product for the entirety of their life.

This case has implications beyond even ObamaCare, which might at least face political repeal someday, if it survives its rendezvous with the Supreme Court. As Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett​, a staunch ObamaCare critic who represents the NFIB, told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday:

We’re claiming that they’re making people engage in economic activity, not regulating or prohibiting them from doing so. And that’s something, the government’s doing something here they’ve never done before. In fact, all the courts who have heard this case, Hugh, whether they’ve upheld the mandate, struck it down, or said we can’t decide because of jurisdictional issues, they’ve all agreed nothing like this has ever happened before. There is no Supreme Court precedent that allows Congress to do this. And now, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide if they want to allow Congress this additional new power they’ve never had before, the power to make every man, woman and child in the country buy, do business with a private company, and do so for the rest of their lives.

(Emphasis mine.) ObamaCare was so badly written and hastily cobbled together that even today, we’re still discovering billion-dollar glitches. The National Bureau of Economic Research just released a study that shows "official budget forecasts ignored the cost of insuring many employee’s spouses and children,” because the Congressional Budget Office​ was “expressly told to do their modeling on single coverage” when analyzing ObamaCare.

How big was this little goof? Oh, a mere $50 billion per year. It’s going to throw off the formula used to determine which families are eligible to join the budget-blasting “federal exchanges.” That just happens to be another core concept of ObamaCare. Some of the valves in this monster’s heart have already clogged up.

The case before the Supreme Court is our last line of legal defense against a fundamental reconstitution of the relationship between American citizens and their government. ObamaCare will make them forever wards of the State, who can be compelled to do whatever the State thinks is good for them… even when that involves making formerly voluntary transactions with private corporations into compulsory requirements of citizenship. May the Supreme Court put an end to this abomination now, and may the people who unleashed it upon us be held accountable at the ballot box.

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John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.

Palin And The Ryan Roadmap

by John Hayward


Writing for the Wall Street Journal today, Sarah Palin unfurls the fiscal “road map” prepared by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and likes where it leads.

She didn’t much care for the recommendations of the President’s bipartisan deficit reduction panel, co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, although she commends the authors for taking the problem seriously. “The report shows we're much closer to the budgetary breaking point than previously assumed,” Palin says. “The Medicare Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2017. As early as 2025, federal revenue will barely be enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on our national debt. With spending structurally outpacing revenue, something clearly needs to be done to avert national bankruptcy.”

I personally think 2017 and 2025 are generous assessments of the fiscal “doomsday” date, because those dates don’t properly account for the dynamic affects of a shrinking economy as fiscal collapse approaches. If we don’t get on a road map to fiscal sanity very soon, we’re going to arrive in 2017 on a roller coaster, picking up speed as it rattles down the tracks.

Palin judges the deficit commission’s report inadequate because it leaves three major financial tumors largely untreated: Social Security, ObamaCare, and our incredibly convoluted tax system. The commission would address Social Security by raising the retirement age, long after the point where the system would have become insolvent – and even at that, it would be making an already rotten deal for future retirees even worse. Ryan’s “Roadmap For America’s Future,” on the other hand, offers a program for younger workers to opt into a private retirement account, while preserving existing benefits for those 55 and older. There is, quite frankly, no other approach that will save the system.

“On health care,” Palin continues, the Roadmap “would replace ObamaCare with a new system in which people are given greater control over their own health-care spending. It achieves this partly through creating medical savings accounts and a new health-care tax credit - the only tax credit that would be left in a radically simplified new income tax system that people can opt into if they wish.” It also reforms Medicare for those under 55 into a “voucher with which people can purchase their own care.” The one thing we’ve never tried to do, in the course of “reforming” health care, is give individuals more control over it, coupled with more incentives for health care providers to win their business through competition.

On taxes, the Ryan plan would “replace our high and anticompetitive corporate income tax with a business consumption tax of just 8.5%. The overall tax burden would be limited to 19% of GDP (compared to 21% under the deficit commission's proposals).” From World War II to the 1970s, the government spent less than 20% of GDP. Our fiscal health went terminal when that limit was exceeded. There is a school of economic thought that suggests it’s essentially impossible for any government to indefinitely sustain spending beyond the 20% threshold, as the recessive effects of excessive taxation and spending cause the economy to begin deflating. I think we’ve gotten close enough to proving this theory to suspend the experiment.

Ryan’s plan also simplifies the tax system to two rates, 10% for single filers up to $50,000 or joint filers up to $100,000, and 25 percent for higher amounts, with a generous standard deduction. It eliminates double taxation on savings, investments, and estates, taxing only income. Aside from the health care credit, the rest of the complex maze of deductions, subsidies, and penalties that turn our current tax code into an instrument of social control are eliminated.

“Together these reforms help to secure our entitlement programs for the 21st century,” Palin concludes. “According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Roadmap would lead to lower deficits and a much lower federal debt. The CBO estimates that under current spending plans, our federal debt would rise to 87% of GDP by 2020, to 223% by 2040, and to 433% by 2060. Under Rep. Ryan's Roadmap, the CBO estimates that debt would rise much more slowly, peaking at 99% in 2040 and then dropping back to 77% by 2060.”

It’s important to see one of the most popular figures in the conservative movement throwing her weight behind a carefully thought-out set of proposals like Ryan’s. As Palin concedes, the Roadmap for America’s Future isn’t perfect, but it’s clearly not a bunch of cockamamie ideas Ryan tossed out in a beer-fueled rant after realizing he couldn’t handle Speaker Nancy Pelosi for one more instant. Ryan’s ideas are also consonant with a lot of interesting things Mike Pence has been saying lately.

The common liberal knock on the Tea Party movement in general, and Sarah Palin in particular, is that they have no ideas, only complaints and sound bites. Palin expresses her own concrete proposals on a regular basis, and now she’s signing on to the reinforced concrete of Paul Ryan’s comprehensive plan. As Americans watch the Democrats dissolve in a petulant meltdown over their own childish demands, economic fantasies, and utter irresponsibility, they would do well to learn that people like Palin, Ryan, and Pence are the adults in the room.

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John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.

The Blue Bloodbath

by John Hayward

In a recent interview, former First Lady Barbara Bush said of potential presidential candidate Sarah Palin: “I sat next to her once, thought she was beautiful, and I think she’s very happy in Alaska… and I hope she stays there.”

This prompted Palin to respond, in a radio interview with conservative host Laura Ingraham, "I don't think the majority of Americans want to put up with the blue bloods. And I say it with all due respect - because I love the Bushes - but the blue bloods want to pick and chose their winners, instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners."

This prompted Meghan McCain, improbably employed as a professional writer by The Daily Beast, to declare she had never heard the term “blue bloods” before, so she had to Google it, and found herself boiling with rage by the time the page finished loading. Actually, the first hit returned by Google for the search phrase “blue bloods” is a link to watch the CBS cop drama of the same name, so maybe Meghan paused to enjoy Tom Selleck’s fine performance as a police chief (whose name, coincidentally, is “Reagan”) before she began seething. Here’s a sample of the fiery stew slopping over the edge of her literary pot:

“I actually had to Google what the meaning of ‘blue bloods’ was, although I could surmise that it was some kind of knock against education and coming from a family of some success. Yes, in essence that is what this statement meant. Families that work hard and achieve a long line of successful people are ‘blue bloods’ and thus, she implied the opinions of said people are jaded and elitist, even if that family lineage has a long history of public service and leadership within Republican Party.

[…] None of this is all together surprising except for the fact that historically it is the moderates - or people like yours truly - who get accused of starting party infighting and this statement from Sarah Palin showcases that on a very basic level the underlying cultural separation in this country is also happening within the Republican party itself.”

McCain seems to have lost track of who “started” this round of “party infighting,” but leaving that aside, this is not just a case of cultural separation. “Blue blood” is a term that resonates with a frustrated nation, weary of serving at the pleasure of an insular ruling class. The inheritance of power, through family or party machinery, is of far greater concern to middle-class Americans than the inheritance of wealth.

Meghan McCain makes a show of willfully misinterpreting “blue bloods” as a slam at educated people from successful families. It is actually a derogatory term for unearned privilege. The phrase does not conjure images of a new generation skillfully managing inherited wealth and running productive family corporations. The defining characteristic of the blue blood is their immunity from consequence. They don’t live in the same world as the rest of us. They are not crushed in the gears of a system they control from above.

For example, a group of super-wealthy liberals recently made news by openly begging for the government to raise their taxes. They spoke in support of a system that drains only a few drops of blood from their ample financial arteries, while plunging needles directly into the hearts of the middle class. Tax increases, short of outright confiscation, will not destroy an opulent lifestyle, especially for those who can afford the finest accountants and lawyers… but they’re murder on the humble lives of all the people those billionaires could hire, if they kept their money and invested it, rather than handing it over to the government. Soaring tax rates won’t make the rich live in poverty, but they will prevent the middle class from becoming rich.

The Bushes were painted as blue bloods long ago, when the Clinton campaign hammered George Bush with a phony story that he’d never seen bar code scanners in grocery checkout lines before. It wasn’t true, but voters recoiled from the perception that Bush was disconnected from their hardships in a down economy. If there had been absolutely no substance to the caricature, Bush would have overcome it easily.

What Barbara Bush said about Sarah Palin is equally out of touch. Palin’s Facebook page is brimming with substantial essays, including a letter to freshman Republicans packed with policy ideas, and serious criticism of the monetary policy known as “quantitative easing.” Treating her like a pretty little bumpkin that should stay put in the hinterlands feeds a Democrat narrative that will suppress her ideas, by ensuring the public doesn’t take her seriously enough to listen to them. Mrs. Bush is under no obligation to support her, but she isn’t doing the Tea Party-infused Republican base any favors with her sneering dismissal.

The larger point about aristocracies forming like barnacles around family fortunes, lifetime congressional seats, and ancient bureaucracies is important. We all labor under the dead hand of the past, forced to pay for commitments made before we were born. The way things are going, it will be even worse for our children. The modern Democrat Party is one huge, useless royal family, gaping in helpless amazement as the “family business” they inherited comes crashing down around them. The last thing the Republicans should do to compete in 2012 is trot out the latest tired old scion from their own political dynasties. It isn’t money, a venerable family name, or time spent in exclusive schools that make a “blue blood.” The key ingredients are arrogance and inertia.

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John Hayward is a staff writer for HUMAN EVENTS, and author of the recently published Doctor Zero: Year One. Follow him on Twitter: Doc_0. Contact him by email at jhayward@eaglepub.com.