The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
For reasons that I spelled out in some detail yesterday, it once made sense for conservatives to be disheartened and even defeatist. They have been fighting a rearguard action for nearly one hundred years. But, as I argued, circumstances have changed dramatically. Barack Obama has brought us to the edge of a precipice, and a majority of Americans now recognize that things cannot go on as they have in the past. The welfare state is bankrupt. The Social Security trust fund is paying out more than it is taking in. The Medicare entitlement is unsustainable, and Obamacare threatens to hurl us into the abyss.
We must either roll back entitlements and the administrative state or raise taxes to a level that is bound to extinguish growth and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs – and Americans now recognize the fact. The speech that Barack Obama delivered at George Washington University on 13 April was a reprise of his performance when he accepted the necessity of extending the Bush tax regime in December. He was angry, petulant, and rude to the guests whom he had invited to attend, as is his wont on such occasions. But he caved.
Consider the graph that accompanied John B. Taylor’s discussion in Friday’s Wall Street Journal of the budgets proposed by Barack Obama and Paul Ryan:
As you can see, the President’s original budget envisaged sustaining federal spending at a percentage of GDP (24%) dramatically above the level it reached in the penultimate year of George W. Bush’s Presidency (ca. 19.6%). Paul Ryan’s budget is aimed at bringing it back down to the latter level, and Barack Obama’s second budget, though hardly austere, is considerably less extravagant than its predecessor.
Why did so radical a President give so much ground? The answer resembles the reasoning that explains why he gave in on the Bush tax regime back in December. He may bitterly hate the fact, but he is trapped, as he has often been trapped while President, between his own heart-felt convictions and reality. The economy is sluggish and slowing. As even The New York Times has been forced to acknowledge, Ben Bernanke’s strategy of quantitative easing has failed to generate growth and reduce unemployment. It seems to be producing inflation, instead. We are also on the verge of a fiscal crisis. PIMCO has dumped its treasury bonds, and the Chinese hint that they may throw up their hands and stop purchasing them. S&P has raised questions about the reliability of the federal government’s credit. The dollar is plunging in value, and the price of oil and other commodities is going through the roof. Can you imagine what the misery index is going to look like on the first Tuesday in November, 2012?
The truth is, as Irwin Stelzer intimates, that Barack Obama is going to have to give much more ground. He is not doing at all well in the polls; the independents who put him in the Oval Office have fled. Right now he is grudgingly, reluctantly on the run. But events are moving at a considerably faster pace; he is virtually certain to get the blame for the stagflation on the horizon; and he knows as much. He has to try to dodge responsibility, and he has no hope at all of doing that if he does not to a considerable degree acquiesce. Even then, if truth be told, he is likely to get the blame. A President who pretends to be a Messiah can run, but he cannot hide.
Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Obama’s greatest problem is that he has lost the debate. Politely, calmly, steadily, patiently, and over a considerable period of time, Paul Ryan has in his gentle way explained to our fellow citizens that we cannot continue to live beyond our means – not, at least, on the scale that President Obama has in mind. In the meantime, the housing market has not cleared; unemployment has not fallen appreciably; no one wants a tax increase; and Congressman Ryan’s stock has gone steadily up.
Let me add that Obamacare has not fared well with the public. Time has passed, and sentiments have hardened. The latest Rasmussen poll suggests that, by a margin of almost three-to-one, Americans think that Obamacare will increase, not lessen, deficits and medical costs; that by a margin of two-to-one they think that it will worsen, rather than improve, the quality of medical care; and that those wanting repeal form a majority of the populace and outnumber the measure’s supporters by thirteen percent.
So, what is the upshot? Barring a major foreign policy crisis (Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran?), the election in 2012 is going to turn on two issues: the economy and Obamacare. There is very little chance that either will play to President Obama’s advantage. My judgment is that the presidential election in 2012 is the Republicans’ to lose.
If the Republicans nominate one of the living dead, as they did in 1996 and 2008, the President may eke out a victory. If, on the other hand, they nominate a woman or man capable of articulating the case for limited government on principled grounds, the case for a balanced budget on prudential grounds, and the case for repealing Obamacare and dismantling the administrative state on every conceivable ground, the Republicans could sweep in such a fashion as to usher in a new political era defined by balanced budgets, low taxes, and decentralization. All that we have to do is find the right standard-bearer.
About the identity of the appropriate standard-bearer I have a thought or two. Stay tuned.
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Feb '11
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
Paul A. Rahe
Hang On:
Edited on Apr 27 at 07:13 am
Your points are well made. John Taylor's graph is based on an expected rate of growth, and that expected rate could well be too optimistic. The graph's only utility is that it allows us to compare the three plans. Ryan's is plausible. Neither of Obama's is. As Yogi Berra once remarked, you can predict anything but the future. · Apr 27 at 7:44am
If the assumptions in all three about growth and interest rates are similar, they are comparable. That's what I was assuming (though I don't know that). And certainly under those circumstances, Ryan's is definitely preferable.
Your analysis is a tour de force. That's one reason I kind of think this blue/red mapping game that others have posted on here may very well be illusory because it is based on past election results and we may be on a transformational election.
Edited on April 27, 2011 at 7:03pmMay '10
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
nordman
Scott Reusser:
If the take-home message of the final couple years of Bush and the first couple years of Obama is that government and the politicians who run it are, by their very nature, inept and untrustworthy, then Americans haved inched toward a more conservative outlook, even if they might not identify it as such. · Apr 27 at 6:11am
What makes you assume that the lost of trust and goodwill will cause people to necessarily drift towards conservatism and not towards a breakdown of the sort Plato speaks of in The Republic ?
I assume nothing but note only that a general lack of trust in government (you left out that word above, which changes the meaning) is a core precept of conservatism.
Whether this fact will translate into independents voting conservative, I don't know. They're a rather ignorant bunch, frankly, so they might not grasp the proper implications of their cynicism toward government.
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
Hang On
Paul A. Rahe
Hang On:
Edited on Apr 27 at 07:13 am
Your points are well made. John Taylor's graph is based on an expected rate of growth, and that expected rate could well be too optimistic. The graph's only utility is that it allows us to compare the three plans. Ryan's is plausible. Neither of Obama's is. As Yogi Berra once remarked, you can predict anything but the future. · Apr 27 at 7:44am
If the assumptions in all three about growth and interest rates are similar, they are comparable. That's what I was assuming (though I don't know that). And certainly under those circumstances, Ryan's is definitely preferable.
Your analysis is a tour de force. That's one reason I kind of think this blue/red mapping game that others have posted on here may very well be illusory because it is based on past election results and we may be on a transformational election. · Apr 27 at 10:02am
Edited on Apr 27 at 10:03 am
Remember 1980. And this guy makes Carter look competent.
Mar '11
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
Agreed, but... Carter at least had more respect for rule of law and some degree of morality. Barry has shown time and again that rules are for suckers. I don't trust him to play the game and not cheat. GM and Chrysler, Boeing, Acorn, NLRB, EPA rulemaking, FCC "net neutrality", quantitative easing (printing money) - all of these speak to the character of our adversary.
What's to stop him from pulling some new "emergency powers" out of thin air? He's been building the framework to do just that.
Add to that: About 40% of the electorate is wedded to the Holy One and the Big Brother state - they won't give that up without a fight. We can't afford to be too gradual in our reduction of the state, yet if we push too hard we'll have an open revolt on our hands al la Wisconsin.
And now we have Trump playing the spoiler part like Perot - I don't buy Trumps antics for a minute - he's there to split the vote.
Sep '10
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
If the Bushes knew any thing about the concept of limit government they kept their knowledge will disguised. As best I can tell the the GOP's only plausible argument still is "we're not as bad as the Dems." I find it difficult to view Ryan's proposal to continue deficit spending for the next 10 as a laudable thing. Much too little, much too late!
Dec '10
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
Thank you Professor Rahe. You have explained my sense of optimism about the Republican's chances in 2012 better than I understood it in my own thinking.
However, I'm much less sanguine about the country's economic survival over the next year and a half. I hope you are right that Paul Ryan has Obama right where he wants him. But I find myself bemused, to use the President's word, when I hear that the economy is improving, and employment will improve by 2012. Did Bernanke really say that inflation will be down then? Did I miss a complete reversal of the feds QE policy over the last day or two? What strings are the puppet masters pulling which would make any of this happen?
As I've said before on Ricochet, what American officials say, which increasingly bears no resemblance to reality, and what the American public perceives are not the critical factors for our economic survival. It is what the Chinese and our other creditors believe about the advisability of continuing to invest in America which determines our future. This is what makes Obama's reticence on the subject so dangerous in the near term.
Sep '10
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
Paul A. Rahe wrote:
All that we have to do is find the right standard-bearer.
About the identity of the appropriate standard-bearer I have a thought or two. Stay tuned.
As Ross Perot once quipped, I'm all ears.
He also wrote: My judgment is that the presidential election in 2012 is the Republicans’ to lose.
This is what I fear, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Feb '11
Re: The Road Ahead: Victory in Sight
THE SKY IS FALLING…THE SKY IS FALLING!