Politics, Religion and Broadcasting

Could it be that broadcasting rewards the worst instincts in both politics and religion?

What kind of religious leader is most successful on television, for example? The slickest, greediest, most egomaniacal and self-absorbed—Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell. The best work in that field is done at the grassroots level by the “foot soldiers” in their places of worship, or by a Billy Graham, who took his ministry to the people, not to the sound stage.

In politics, what kind of commentator is most successful on the airwaves? The confrontational, judgmental, provocative, egomaniacal and self-absorbed—Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity.

What a shame that broadcasting has eclipsed the written word in our culture. Writing fosters reflection, depth, self-criticism. Broadcasting fosters shallow spontaneity, emotionalism, self-promotion.

The best political commentary on television tends to come from writers and columnists like George Will, David Brooks, Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, and Michael Kinsley. The cable news and talk radio commentators so predominant today can’t hold a candle to Walter Lippmann and Bill Buckley.

The most profound religious thought, I believe, comes from our best writers—Henry David Thoreau, or, if you read his less popular works, Mark Twain.

Quote for the day: Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. —Thoreau

Newsprism

Something Has to Give—and It Ain’t the Taxpayer

Pat Buchanan’s latest column repeats his ongoing plea for sanity in American fiscal policy. Spending has been out of control for decades, and in response, we’ve been adding entitlements rather than eliminating them. Current levels of spending for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security cannot be sustained. Our foreign policy includes billions of giveaways. We welcome legal and illegal immigrants who, in sum, take more than they give to this nation.

This kind of irresponsible spending, however well intentioned, cannot be sustained without seriously eroding, and eventually destroying, America’s economic stability.

We just dodged an economic collapse of historical proportions. What sense does it make to set out immediately on the same path—a path that leads off a cliff?

If you think Buchanan is an extremist and/or an alarmist, take note—the director of the nonpartisan and highly credible Congressional Budget Office came out yesterday with a chilling statement:

Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run.

Unsustainable.

Nature imposes limits on everything, including generosity. We as a nation can heed those limits, or march like lemmings off the cliff of good intentions.

Newsprism

Giving the Republican Party a Bad Name (or Two or Three)

At his speech to Republican Party state chairs today, RNC Chairman Michael Steele engaged in some fascinating name dropping.

First, he invoked three conservative legends: Edmund Burke, William Buckley, and Ronald Reagan. Burke is the intellectual founding father of conservatism; Buckley was its greatest American proponent; and Reagan its most compelling American icon. The renewal of the GOP couldn’t be based on a more stable foundation, and by invoking these three, Steele demonstrated a depth sorely lacking in other contemporary conservative figures.

Steele went on to suggest that Republicans should stop attacking Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Tim Geithner, and Barney Frank and concentrate their fire on President Obama and his policies. Again, Steele demonstrated depth and directness where too many on the right have become loose cannons engaged in a circular firing squad.

Finally, Steele alluded to the two most toxic voices on the right, a “conservative talk radio host” and a “former vice president,” without actually naming them. While his criticism was implicit rather than explicit—testament to the ruthlessness and viciousness of both Limbaugh and Cheney—Steele clearly sees them as liabilities, and rightly so.

The fact that Cheney actually prefers Limbaugh over Colin Powell as the face of the party shows how out of touch the former veep has become. Limbaugh’s character alone should disqualify him from that role, while Powell’s is beyond reproach. Limbaugh is an entertainer with zero governing experience of any kind, while Powell has served as Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during nearly half a century of exemplary public service; how can any serious person even compare the two, much less dismiss Powell and lionize Limbaugh?

The most serious problem conservatism and the Republicans face is the success of shallow, mean-spirited, hyper partisan, McCarthyesque ideologues like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage. These entertainers aren’t fit to shine the shoes of thoughtful figures like George Will, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Newt Gingrich, and Pat Buchanan—the heirs of intellectual conservative giants like Buckley and Walter Lippmann.

If conservatism is to make a comeback, its leaders must go back to its roots in Burke’s foundational philosophy and Buckley’s brilliant rhetoric. Re-establishing conservatism’s intellectual integrity may be the first step towards finding its next Ronald Reagan.

With the exceptions of fundamentalists and senior citizens, the Republican Party is losing adherents across the board, but especially among the college-educated.

With a childish clown (and college dropout) like Rush Limbaugh as its most prominent voice, is it any wonder?

Newsprism

Freedom, Order, and the Limits of Individualism—A Crisis for American Conservatism

The 2006 and 2008 elections were, at least in part, rejections of the extreme individualism of American conservatism in favor of a more collectivist approach to governance.

As a libertarian conservative, I value individual liberty above all else. But I also recognize that social order is a fundamental necessity if liberty is to thrive.

Absolute freedom is anarchy, and anarchy inevitably subverts individual freedom to the tyranny of the strong and the ruthless. What good is your absolute liberty if you’re oppressed by others who will inevitably abuse theirs?

Absolute freedom is not perfect freedom; far from it.

In its original conception by Edmund Burke, modern conservatism had at its center the wisdom inherent in tradition. Social traditions evolve out of social order; that which works to create and maintain order wins out over that which destroys or erodes it. Over time, traditions may change, but their essence always tends towards the maintainance of order.

To the Burkean conservative, society is conceived of not as a collection of individuals, but as a single organism, as in Herbert Spencer’s sociology.

In the West, a tradition of individual liberty and individual responsibility has nonetheless produced a dynamic and relatively stable civilization. Liberty unleashes the most innovative and creative human faculties. The French and American Revolutions (which Burke strongly criticized at the time) produced a paradox: a high degree of individualism can lead to a thriving and prosperous, well-ordered social organism.

Individualism and social order aren’t opposed to each other, but rather depend on each other. Still, there are limits, and over the last sixteen years, the limits of individualism have been stretched to the breaking point. The reckless and selfish indulgences of Bill Clinton, while damaging to the presidency, were, compared to the policies of the Bush years, superficial distractions from an otherwise relatively centrist administration.

The character and politics of both Baby Boomer presidents were formed in the social turmoil of the sixties, but with very different results. The Great Irony of post-Reagan conservatism is that the sixties generation so famous for its leftist radicalism has produced a kind of conservatism so undisciplined, and so self absorbed, that the label is nearly meaningless. If sixties leftism made a fetish out of progress, contemporary rightism has made a fetish out of self interest.

While he has plenty of company, most notably Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush is the poster child of this undisciplined, shallow, idealistic conservatism, which has no intellectual roots, little knowledge of its history, and a poor understanding of the singularity of circumstance. Neoconservatism as practiced by Bush isn’t conservatism at all. It’s far too radical and far too rigid, rejecting the vital center—social, cultural, and political—so brilliantly elaborated in the sociology of Edward Shils.

Neoconservatives, and to a lesser degree Republicans in general, act as if self interest is all that is needed to maintain social order. What Burkean conservatives understand is that enlightened self interest undergirds social order, while merely crass, atomistic self interest erodes it. In addition, Burkeans understand that social order evolves slowly, step-by-step and institution-by-institution, with every society unique, every circumstance singular. To attempt any radical change in a society is to invite unintended consequences, and to ignore the latent virtues that exist in traditional, socially centrist institutions like marriage.

This is why on the economic front, Bush and Limbaugh’s ideology has brought such disastrous consequences. The current crisis is largely the result of unregulated and unenlightened self interest, of naked greed masquerading as virtue, of an “I’ve got mine” attitude that isolates the individual from the traditional social context so necessary to true human liberty. Gated communities and McMansions, much like the sky-scraping commercial fortresses of our cities, where the affluent are insulated from the realities of the larger society, are sad, lonesome icons of the times.

On the foreign policy front, the Bush agenda has been an equally tragic disaster. The naive and idealistic notion that American-style democracy can be transplanted into the Middle East makes as much sense as the hope that one can chop down a fig tree and expect a cherry tree to spring up in its place. Does anyone really believe that if China were the world’s hegemon, she could impose communism on America by force? Iraq and Afghanistan can’t be transformed by brute force or good intentions. To attempt to do so was the height of arrogance, and of ignorance.

The more intellectual conservatives—George Will, Pat Buchanan, David Brooks, the late William Buckley—realized early on that Bush is no conservative, at least not in any sense that retains the essence of conservatism. Similarly, intellectual conservatives, like those at The American Conservative magazine and (sadly, less and less so) National Review hold their noses while their powerful ally, Rush Limbaugh, sacrifices far-sighted traditionalism on the altar of short-term individual self interest.

Imagine Limbaugh, who quite literally advocates gluttony and ridicules frugality in our use of oil, trying to explain to Burke (or to future generations) how maximizing consumption of natural resources, rather than conserving them, is conservative!

Buckley put it this way:

Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress. And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge.

The reaction to President Obama’s stimulus plan illustrates the crisis American conservatism faces as it attempts to balance individual liberty with social order. The same congressional Republicans who slathered bill after bill with pork during the Bush administration are suddenly aghast that Obama is spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in order to stabilize the economy they helped to devastate.

Hypocrisy reveals self indulgence and a lack of intellectual discipline, as when the same Rush Limbaugh who celebrates imprisoning marijuana users was found out to be a narcotics addict. Now, Limbaugh would rather see Obama’s social policies fail, with all the damage that would do to the greater society and the world, than see them succeed and discredit even slightly the extreme individualism of the contemporary far right. Conservatism is by its very nature center-ist, if I can coin a word, not radical or extremist.

Earlier this week, Rick Santelli of CNBC went on an on-air rant about how unfair it is that some citizens who made poor financial decisions may be bailed out by those of us who made wise ones. But wouldn’t a true conservative understand that sometimes circumstances demand some sacrifice by the few to maintain the social order necessary for all? To whine about necessary, albeit perhaps overreaching, solutions to a social crisis because you might lose a few dollars yourself is short-sighted and selfish, not conservative.

The conservative American Issues Project  condemns the $787 billion stimulus package in a TV ad that shows the three wise man as the narrator says, “Suppose you spent $1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born — and kept spending through today. A million dollars a day for more than 2,000 years. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.” The upshot of the ad is that Jesus would oppose the stimulus… But what true conservative actually believes that Jesus, the champion of the poor, would oppose taxing the prosperous to protect those who are at risk in a communal crisis?

David Brooks, as usual, gets right to the heart of the matter. While he bemoans the irresponsibility of those whose greed and dishonesty led to the economic crisis, Brooks accepts, in “Money for Idiots”, that the stimulus package is, from the perspective of social order, a necessary evil. He begins,

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible. Over the last few months, we’ve made a hash of all that. The Bush and Obama administrations have compensated foolishness and irresponsibility.

But unlike all but three Congressional Republicans, and Limbaugh, Santelli, and the American Issues Project, Brooks is able to put rigid ideology and his own self interest aside and think about what’s best for the social order. He concludes:

The responsible have been punished along with the profligate….(But) it makes sense for government to try to restore some communal order. And the sad reality is that in these circumstances government has to spend money on…people who have been idiots.

The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

I don’t relish the advance of socialism under the Democrats. But after eight years under Bush, maybe we need to turn left to get right.

And as conservatism demands, ideology must not trump the contingencies of the moment. The natural enemy of conservatism is radicalism, not liberalism. Part of the genius of the American system is that the people, that reservoir of traditional wisdom, can choose leaders suited to the circumstances of the day.

Excessive individualism subverts social order, which in turn threatens individualism itself. Freedom requires order. Until American conservatism learns that lesson, it risks being increasingly marginalized.

American conservatism must return to First Principles. We must reject the pop culture conservatism of Rush Limbaugh and the neoconservatism of George Bush in favor of the philosophical roots of conservatism: Edmund Burke’s traditionalism, Herbert Spencer’s organicism, and Edward Shils’ center-ism.

Newsprism

Pat Buchanan Infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome

In a now-famous column from December 2003, Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to classify those liberals whose fear and hatred of President Bush could only be ascribed to a mental condition. The sarcastic column by Krauthammer echoes the assertion by some on the far right that liberalism isn’t merely wrong, it’s irrational (see Michael Savage’s book, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder.)

Just over six years later, BDS appears to have infected not just liberals, but some of the most respected and knowledgeable conservatives as well.

In his two most recent columns, Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative pundit most grounded in a deep understanding of the past, makes the case for George Bush’s place in American history.

Either Buchanan is deranged, or maybe, just maybe, some sufferers of BDS weren’t so much mental as prescient.

In fact, a survey of presidential historians conducted by the non-partisan C-SPAN found that Bush ranks 36th out of the 42 American presidents who served before the end of 2008. In earlier surveys of historians by the partisan History News Network, Bush was judged by the vast majority of historians as either among the worst, or actually the very worst, of American presidents.

Buchanan’s evaluation makes the historians’ look charitable. In “Metrics of National Decline,” Buchanan focuses on economic issues:

Beginning and ending in recession, the Bush presidency added a net of 407,000 private sector jobs over eight years, less than 51,000 a year, the worst eight-year record since 1927-35, which includes the first six years of the Great Depression.

By January 2009, the average workweek had fallen to 33.3 hours, the lowest since record keeping began in 1964.

From Jan. 31, 2001, through Jan. 31, 2009, 4.4 million manufacturing jobs, 26 percent of all of the manufacturing jobs in the United States, disappeared….

Between this unprecedented loss in manufacturing capacity and jobs, and the $3.5 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods alone, run up by George W. Bush, the correlation is absolute….

Since 1982, the United States has run $5.7 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods, and $2.1 trillion in trade deficits in auto parts, trucks and automobiles. In the Bush years alone, the United States ran more than $1 trillion in trade deficits in auto parts, trucks and cars.

These statistics, these realities — factories closing in the United States, manufacturing jobs being outsourced in the millions to China and Asia, enormous, endless trade deficits in goods — testify to a painful truth: America is a receding and declining world power.

In “The Long Retreat,” Buchanan focuses on America’s stature and influence in the world:

America had best brace herself for difficult days ahead.

For stepping back from the dreary prognosis for Afghanistan, a new reality becomes clear. The long retreat has begun.

Whether it is in the 23 months Gen. Petraeus favors, or the 16 months Obama promised, the United States is coming home from Iraq.

The retreat from Central Asia is already underway. Expelled from the K-2 air base in Uzbekistan in 2005, the United States has now been ordered out of the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ripped away from Georgia by Russia last August, are never going to be returned. And we all know it.

Georgia and Ukraine, most realists now realize, are not going to be admitted to NATO. We’re not going to fight Russia over the Crimea. And the U.S. anti-missile missiles and radars George Bush intended to deploy in Poland and the Czech Republic will not now be deployed.

For Washington has fish to fry with Russia, and the price of her cooperation is withdrawal of U.S. military forces from her backyard and front porch. And the warm words flowing between Moscow and Washington suggest the deal is done.

With tensions rising in Korea, too, it is hard to believe President Obama will bolster ground forces on the peninsula, when even Donald Rumsfeld was presiding over a drawdown and a shifting of U.S. troops away from the DMZ.

In Latin America, the United States seems reconciled to the rise of an anti-American radical-socialist coalition, led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and embracing Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Partisans of President Bush may blame Obama for presiding over a strategic retreat, but it is the Bush administration that assured and accelerated such a retreat.

Buchanan ends his two-column critique with a challenge to the new administration:

Obama’s assignment: Rebuild U.S. productive power, and execute a strategic withdrawal from non-vital commitments.

Economic decline at home, political retreat abroad. This is the verdict of an arch conservative who, unlike many right wing pundits, says exactly what he believes, even if that means alienating the superficial patriots who worship Rush Limbaugh. Buchanan is to Limbaugh what Ruth’s Chris Steak House is to McDonald’s .

The Republican Party risks becoming a regional, as in Southern, party if it continues down the road paved by Tom Delay, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and George Bush.

Our economic and geopolitical fall should be no more worrisome to conservatives than our moral fall. Torture, detainee abuse, extraordinaty rendition, secret prisons, suspension of habeus corpus at Guantanamo Bay, violations of the Geneva Conventions, suppressing global warming science, exploiting Terry Schiavo’s death, squandering the Clinton budget surplus, outing a CIA agent for political revenge, warrantless wiretapping, signing statements, contempt for the separation of powers, Katrina—the Bush legacy is tainted bydepravity, failure, and arrogance.

Krauthammer’s diagnosis of Bush Derangement Syndrome wasn’t entirely off base. Extemists on the web (www.dailykos.com, www.democraticunderground.com) and ideologues on the airwaves (Keith Olbermann, Randi Rhodes) demonized Bush unfairly and prematurely.

Now, while the liberal media have certainly given President Obama less scrutiny and skepticism than he deserves, many conservatives seem to be suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome. Blaming Obama for our economic and geopolitical woes is, at best, premature.

At least those of us who now condemn the Bush legacy have eight years’ worth of evidence to back our diagnosis.

Newsprism

Constructive and Obstructive Conservatives Evaluate Obama

Rush Limbaugh wants to see President Obama fail. Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter are obsessed with magnifying anything negative about the new pres. Matt Drudge runs transparently inaccurate stories trashing Obama. Why?

Because they all follow the money. The more rabid elements of the right clamor for the emotionally laden rhetoric these partisans peddle, and that’s a market easily exploited.

Now the Republican Party seems to be splitting along lines drawn less by ideology than by simple class and decency, and the stakes may be very high for both the party and the nation.

Two of the most respected conservative pundits, both of unquestioned integrity, refuse to fall into line with the pop culture conservatives who take home big bucks at the expense of our democratic discourse. Their initial assessments of Obama’s presidency, based largely on his inaugural address, parallel the president’s desire for conciliation and compromise.

Pat Buchanan, in “A Neo-Reaganite Inaugural,” calls Obama a ” a mature and serious man who knows his county is in deep water, who seems to understand what got us there and who appreciates that, on some things, the right has indeed been right from the beginning.” Compare that to the shallow accusations that pervade far right rhetoric: Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, a pal of terrorists, and worse.

Peggy Noonan, in “Meet President Obama: He begins with a serious, solid Inaugural Address,” echoes Buchanan: ”This was not the sound of candidate Barack Obama but President Obama, not the sound of the man who appealed to the left wing of his party but one attempting to appeal to the center of the nation. It was not a joyous, audacious document, not a call to arms, but a reasoned statement by a Young Sobersides.”

Buchanan and Noonan are serious thinkers and genuine patriots. They deserve a fair hearing from the right, just as the new president does.

Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter and Drudge shouldn’t be taken too seriously. They exploit the most shallow and bigoted kind of partisanship which, though it may sell, damages the nation. Considering the challenges we face, it is incumbent on conservatives to offer constructive criticism, not mere obstructionism.

Those who voted for John McCain could learn a lesson from him about losing with grace and governing with honor; they should remember his admonition of “country first.”

If Obama succeeds in establishing a centrist administration that encompasses the more sober elements of the left and the right, the Republican Party—if it chooses to follow the blowhards—could be left in the dust.

Newsprism

Big Three Bailout—Good Money After Bad?

Three of the most thoughtful and philosophically grounded conservative pundits—David Brooks, Pat Buchanan, and George Will—have weighed in on the proposed bailout of the Big Three American auto makers.

Brooks, in Bailout to Nowhere, argues that the free market should be allowed to work its “creative destruction” on the automakers. That’s how capitalism works, says Brooks. Those who made the best and most forward-thinking decisions deserve to reap the benefits of that foresight; those who made poor decisions must be made to suffer the consequences, in this case, bankruptcy.

Brooks makes the case against the bailout by appealing to the dynamism that “creative destruction” brings to a capitalist economy:

This is an excruciatingly hard call. A case could be made for keeping the Big Three afloat as a jobs program until the economy gets better and then letting them go bankrupt. But the most persuasive experts argue that bankruptcy is the least horrible option. Airline, steel and retail companies have gone through bankruptcy proceedings and adjusted. It would be a less politically tainted process. Government could use that $50 billion — and more — to help the workers who are going to be displaced no matter what.

But the larger principle is over the nature of America’s political system. Is this country going to slide into progressive corporatism, a merger of corporate and federal power that will inevitably stifle competition, empower corporate and federal bureaucrats and protect entrenched interests? Or is the U.S. going to stick with its historic model: Helping workers weather the storms of a dynamic economy, but preserving the dynamism that is the core of the country’s success.

George Will agrees with Brooks. In “In Detroit, Failure’s a Done Deal,” Will notes that the automakers have already failed, and that they’re not “too big to fail.” The question, Will asserts, is what should be done about those failures?

The answer? Do nothing that will delay bankrupt companies from filing for bankruptcy protection, so that improvident labor contracts can be unraveled, allowing the companies to try to devise plausible business models. Instead, advocates of a “rescue” propose extending to Detroit the government’s business model for the nation — redistributing wealth from the successful to the failed, an implausible formula for prosperity….

…a “rescue” without bankruptcy will make those four entities wards of government. Doing so would make the five entities (including Washington) collaborators in unfair competition with America’s thriving automobile industry that employs 113,000 Americans making vehicles containing many American-made components, but with foreign, mostly Japanese, nameplates. As Detroit continues to shrink, many American jobs “lost” will be regained in this industry, and its American suppliers, as Americans continue to buy cars.

Like Brooks, Will has faith in the market’s ability to adjust to a new circumstance in a rational way. The result may be painful for many, but good for all in the end.

The dissenting voice among the Big Three Conservative Thinkers is Pat Buchanan. Ever the champion of the industrial base and the working class, Buchanan, in “As GM Goes, So Goes the GOP,” writes:

When workers, execs, engineers, dealers, salesmen and suppliers are all factored in, the Big Three employ 3 million people who contribute $21 billion a year to Social Security and Medicare, and $25 billion in federal income taxes. Add in all the businesses that depend on the auto industry, and we are talking about one-tenth of the U.S. labor force….to let the auto industry die is to write America out of much of the economic future of the planet.

But Buchanan doesn’t suggest a simple bailout like the one offered to the financial industry. Instead, he favors trade restrictions aimed at giving American automakers an advantage, or at least an even playing field, compared to foreign automakers:

Nancy Pelosi is talking about tying loans to a restructuring of the industry. But Congress is not competent to do that.

What needs to be restructured is the U.S. tax-and-trade regime.

Dump globalism. Instruct Japan, Canada, Korea, Germany and China that if they wish to sell cars here, they will assemble them here and produce the parts here. And we shall have the same free access to and same share of their auto market as they have of ours.

To accomplish this, use the same import quotas and tariffs Ronald Reagan used to save the steel industry and Harley-Davidson.

Reciprocal trade. Even Democrats like FDR used to practice it.

Brooks, Buchanan, and Will all agree that writing another blank check isn’t in the best interests of the taxpayer, the nation, or the automakers themselves. Other means to the same end—a vibrant, comepetitive US auto industry—make more sense.

While these three conservatives should be heeded, a fourth voice with more experience in business and a background in Detroit puts it more bluntly and adds some much-needed specificity. Mitt Romney, whose father George helped save American Motors five decades ago, believes a bailout would be ruinous. In “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” he writes:

IF General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Romney proceeds to give sage advice to both government and industry, the goal being to end competitive disadvantages under which US automakers have worked, to rethink the management/labor dynamic (under new management!), and to target government investment in ways that will help ensure the long term success of the Big Three. In the end, Romney says “yes” to government involvement, but “no” to a cash bailout: 

It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition. I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration. The federal government should also rectify the imbedded tax penalties that favor foreign carmakers.

But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.

The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.

In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.

Barack Obama clearly favors a bailout; a principled conservative opposition—not the short-sighted apologetics and obstructionism of talk radio—is needed to prevent Obama’s good intentions from leading the Big Three straight to Hell.

Newsprism

Hey Joe, Pass the Cheetos

I’d like to call out Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s enlightening and entertaining Morning Joe. (Where else can you find Pat Buchanan and Peggy Noonan conversing with Zbigniew Brzezinski over a hot cup of coffee?)

While I love the show, Joe does take great pleasure in ridiculing us bloggers, whom he caricatures as sitting in our underwear in our parents’ basements, eating Cheetos and wiping Cheeto dust on our bare chests as we spew inanities. (See an example of Joe’s blogger-bashing here.)

Well, Joe, please find me one mainstream pundit who called this race as early or as accurately as Newsprism (apparently) did. And how is it that this Cheeto-dusted blogger got it right when you thought Obama didn’t have a chance? You said the idea that Obama could win was nothing but ”a leftist pundit’s dream.”

Nearly nine months ago, on February 13, Newsprism looked into our crystal ball and published “Prediction—Obama Landslide in November”. Our reasoning:

Barack Obama is inspirational and transformational without being confrontational…. he’ll defeat Hillary Clinton handily before the Democratic Convention, and then defeat John McCain handily in an historic election.

One reason is his natural charisma, that charming halo that’s been missing in American politics since Kennedy and Reagan were swept into the White House. Another is his skill at public speaking, which probably surpasses that of either JFK or Ronaldus Magnus. A third is his command of the issues, which belies his lack of experience.

These three reasons coalesce around an overriding consideration: history. Obama has the potential to restore our reputation around the world, to effectively erase the stain left by George Bush’s heavy-handed imperiousness. Obama could also unite the country by rejecting the politics of division, including the identity politics he pointedly rejects, in favor of inclusiveness and collegiality. And then there’s the potential election of our first non-white president. The nation’s demographic makeup, the implosion of the Republican Party, and the sentiments of most independent voters all favor Obama; the times they are a-changin’. To many, he’s the right man at the right moment.

We added to our rationale on March 3 in “The Reagan Factor—Why Obama Will Win”. Some excerpts:

The right risks losing the White House in a landslide if it keeps “misunderestimating” Senator Obama. He is, like Reagan, a master of the rhetoric of hope and optimism. After seven years of the worst leadership in a century, the time is ripe for such a leader, just as it was after four years of Jimmy Carter’s weakness and malaise, or before that, five years of Nixon’s paranoia and criminality. When times are darkest, we are most drawn to the light.

In addition to that optimism, both Reagan and Obama match(ed) rhetoric with demeanor. The resemblance is hard to miss: a ready smile, a confident carriage, a sense of humor, a calm generosity towards the opposition, a face that beams with vitality and benevolence, an undeniable charisma….

…(A) candidate who convincingly promises better times and the renewal of hope and pride is hard to beat. Add a dash of charisma, and you have the potential for a landslide, just like we saw in 1980.

Reagan rose to power at just the right historical moment. Obama has a similar opportunity to make history. He offers, quite literally, a new face to show a world weary of George Bush’s reckless and unilateral foreign policy. He offers a new face to show that America has overcome racial prejudice and elected a nonwhite president.

Republicans have been looking for another Reagan, and they’ve found one—on the other side of the aisle.

Were Newsprism’s predictions right? We’ll all know tomorrow evening.

Newsprism

Update: Obama wins in a landslide, taking the Electoral College by nearly 200 votes, 364-174.

Hey Joe–pass the Cheetos.

Buchanan Joins Limbaugh on Low Road to the Right After Powell Endorses Obama

Do Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh support John McCain because he’s white and oppose Barack Obama because he’s half black?

The question is inappropriate and impossible to answer. Only Buchanan and Limbaugh know why they’re supporting McCain and why they’ve never supported a black candidate for high office. Race could be part of their reasoning, whether consciously or subconsciously.

The fact that both Buchanan and Limbaugh have asserted that Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama because of race says more about the accusers than the accused. Powell’s announcement on Meet the Press last Sunday (video) was backed by clear reasoning, and his decision was made only after giving both candidates and their runningmates a fair hearing over a period of many months.

Powell believes, as do many conservatives, that the Republican Party has moved too far to the right. On MTP, General Powell made a solid case that the choice of Sarah Palin as his runningmate moved McCain’s campaign into dangerous territory. The exploitation of Obama’s association with Bill Ayers, for example, was beyond the pale according to Powell. In addition, said Powell, Palin is clearly underqualified, and her rhetoric has led the campaign to become “narrower and narrower” when it should be becoming more and more inclusive. McCain’s erratic response to the economic crisis also troubled Powell.

Obama, on the other hand, strikes Powell as a candidate with “intellectual vigor” and the “ability to inspire.” At a time when America’s stature in the world is falling rapidly, Obama has the capacity to redeem. Powell sees Obama as a “transformational figure” who combines style with substance. Powell also praised the “inclusive nature” of the Obama campaign.

Regardless of what General Powell said, and regardless of his unquestioned integrity or the thoughtful lucidity of his argument, all Buchanan and Limbaugh took away from the endorsement was an unfounded accusation: Powell endorsed Obama because of race.

Powell watched, reflected, and then decided, which is far superior to the knee jerk partisanship practiced by Limbaugh and, at least in this instance, by Buchanan.

When Pat Buchanan joins Rush Limbaugh on the low road to the right, conservatism sinks deeper into the rut that has sidetracked the movement in recent years.

Newsprism

Conservative Commentators (Belatedly) Write Bush’s Political Obituary

The top tier of conservative pundits have begun writing George Bush’s political obituary. While Mark Twain’s famous obituary was greatly exaggerated, Bush’s is greatly belated.

Peggy Noonan, in addition to noting “the aggression, and phony populism, of the Bush White House,” has this to say:

We’ve never seen a presidential meltdown like this. George W. Bush’s weakness is not all lame-duckship… We witness here a great political lesson. When you are president, it matters—it really matters—that a majority of the people support and respect you. When you squander that affection, you lose more than mere popularity. You lose the ability to lead when your country is in crisis….

David Brooks writes of The Decider,

…if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice. And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence…. (And) Bush…seems to compensate for (his) lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Prescient as usual, Pat Buchanan has been documenting the death throes of the Bush presidency for years now.

As early as November 2005, Buchanan labeled the invasion of Iraq “perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in US history” and concluded,

What killed the first Bush presidency and is ruining the second is the abandonment of Reaganism and his embrace of the twin heresies of neoconservatism and Big Government Conservatism…True to the neoconservative creed, Bush launched a global crusade for democracy that is now bringing ever closer to power Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, and Shia fundamentalists in Baghdad and Basra.

Democratic imperialism is still imperialism. To Arab and Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders.

When Ronald Reagan went home to California, his heirs said, “Goodbye to all that,” and embraced Big Government conservatism, then neoconservatism. If they do not find their way home soon, to the principles of Taft, Goldwater and Reagan, they will perish in the wilderness into which they have led us all.

In February 2006, Buchanan wrote, “Americans…wonder if the man they entrusted with the nation’s security has not lost his marbles,” adding, “(Bush’s) foreign policy takes on an aspect of incoherence. Ideology is the antithesis of conservatism, Russell Kirk wrote. The tragedy of George W. Bush may be that he was converted by courtiers to the ideologies that are failing as visibly now as the discredited ideologies of yesterday: Wilsonianism and Marxism.” 

In April 2006, Buchanan called Bush an “imperial president” and noted that “There is a reason the Founding Fathers separated the power to conduct war from the power to declare it. The reason is just such a ruler as George W. Bush, a man possessed of an ideology and sense of mission that are not necessarily coterminous with what is best for his country.”

In July 2006, Buchanan declared the “End of the Cowboy Era” with this judgment:

As one reviews the ledgers of his foreign policy, Bush seems to have alienated or antagonized just about everyone on earth, with precious little to compensate us for our war losses. And if we are about to jettison his cowboy diplomacy, perhaps it is time to look again at the successful policies Bush and the neocons dismissed and deplore. For, unlike theirs, these policies never failed America.

What are they? The anti-interventionism of the Founding Fathers from Washington to Wilson, and the conservative policy of containment and deterrence pursued by Eisenhower and Reagan.

Both deserve a hearing in the politics of 2008…

In October 2006, Buchanan asked rhetorically, “Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?”, called the Axis of Evil speech “a blunder of the first magnitude,” and counselled the president, “put the bellicose bluster on the shelf. It has done less than nothing to advance America’s security.”

In March of 2007, Buchanan elaborated:

In the catechism of the Bush Revolution, liberty is indivisible. If the whole world is not free, America’s freedom is not secure, and we must thus use American power in perpetuity to liberate mankind and, as Bush declared in his Second Inaugural, “end tyranny on earth.”

No more utopian ambition has ever been declared by an American president.

In 2006, however, reality intruded.

The elections Bush championed as way stations on the road to global democracy produced, from the Mideast to Latin America, defeat after defeat. In Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the real winners were the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and Moqtada al-Sadr. In Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, free elections gave Hugo Chavez three new allies, and radicals almost captured Peru and Mexico. Populism, socialism and anti-Americanism are surging in Latin America.

In August of 2007, Buchanan opined that “(Bush) embraced the interventionism of Wilson, the free-trade globalism of FDR, the open-borders immigration ideas of LBJ and the budget priorities of the Great Society. It was a bridge too far for the party base. The Republican Party needs a new architect. The firm of Bush & Rove was not up to the job.”

In October 2007, Buchanan wrote that “one may conclude then that America is not only rejecting Bush the man and his record, but the philosophy behind both” and offered a litany of Bush’s failures:

Interventionism gave us Iraq, the worst strategic blunder in U.S. history. Big Government conservatism wiped out the surplus, fattened the federal bureaucracy and enlarged its share of GDP, and destroyed the Republican reputation as America’s bastion of fiscal prudence.

The Bush immigration philosophy was repudiated by Middle America, which rose in righteous wrath against his amnesty plan and demanded he enforce the law and secure the border. Americans are unreconciled to the idea that the America they grew up in will be morphed into some mammoth multicultural Mall of Mankind.

Now, the returns have come in from the Bush policy of free-trade globalism…. Since 2002, America has run five consecutive world record trade deficits. Three million manufacturing jobs have disappeared. The euro has almost doubled in value against the dollar. The Canadian dollar has reached parity. Plants have been shutting down across this country for years. The wages of Middle Americans have stagnated. The trade deficit with China last year reached $233 billion, a world record between any two nations.

In November 2008, Buchanan wrote “Ideology Was Bush’s Undoing”:

If there is a one root cause to the Bush failures, it has been his fatal embrace of ideology.

Ideology is substitute religion, a belief system based on ideas that are often contradicted by history and common sense. Yet men will adhere to ideologies with a zealotry that borders on fanaticism.

Marxism, fascism and socialism were are ideologies, gods that failed. So, too, is democratism, the Gospel of George W. Bush.

In March of this year, Buchanan offered this stinging rebuke: “On reading George Bush’s discourse to the New York Economic Club last week, Cicero’s insight came to mind: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” And he elaborated with this:

In smearing as nativists, protectionists and isolationists those who wish to stop the invasion (of illegal immigrants), halt the export of factories and jobs to Asia, and stop the unnecessary wars, Bush is attacking the last true conservatives in his party.

Which is understandable. For after the judges and tax cuts, what is there about Bush that is conservative? His foreign policy is Wilsonian. His trade policy is pure FDR. His spending is LBJ all the way. His amnesty for illegals is Teddy Kennedy’s policy.

Two-thirds of the nation says we are on the wrong course. Two-thirds rejects NAFTA and amnesty. Two-thirds wants out of Iraq. Two-thirds rejects Bush. Bush says that people are being misled by those wicked old isolationists, protectionists and nativists.

In May of this year, Buchanan gave us this litany:

Looking back on the years since 9-11, it is hard to give the Bush foreign policy passing grades. We pushed NATO eastward and alienated Russia. We have 140,000 Army and Marine Corps troops tied down in Iraq in a war now in its sixth year, from which our NATO allies have all extricated themselves. We have another war going in Afghanistan, where the situation is as grave as it has been since we went in.

The Bush democracy crusade was put on the shelf after producing election triumphs for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, after Iraq, appears to be headed there, as well.
 
America remains the first economic and military power on earth. But after seven years of Bush, we no longer inspire the awe or hopes we once did. We are no longer the world hegemonic power of the neocons’ depiction. And the reason is that Bush embraced their utopian ideology of democratic empire and listened to their siren’s call to be the Churchill of his age.
 
Of Bush, it may be said he was a far better politician and candidate than his father, but as a statesman and world leader, he could not carry the old man’s loafers.

For nearly three years, Pat Buchanan has been dead right about the Bush presidency. Like Cassandra’s, his foresight has been ignored even as its validity has unfolded so clearly.

To those who have demonized Buchanan over the years, and to those who have come somewhat late to the same conclusions as he has, three words:

Listen, and learn.

Newsprism

Beyond Bias—Sarah Palin Rises to the Occasion as Liberal Journalists Sink to New Lows

Thirty or forty years ago, the liberal bias so pervasive in the American press was relatively mild and counterbalanced by a strong, principled minority led by the likes of William Buckley. Liberals and conservatives fought their ideological battles with honor, and at the end of the day they laid down their arms and socialized, much like the Union and Confederate soldiers who sang, drank, and played baseball together between hostilities during the Civil War.

With the growth of cable news, talk radio, and the Internet, American journalism has become increasingly adversarial. Ethical standards have plummeted. Such are the vagaries of decentralized decision making in an era marked by proliferating media and a broader erosion of civility in our culture.

If liberal bias once predominated, we’ve moved well beyond bias, even beyond contentiousness, to a journalism more akin to professional wrestling than its older iterations.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in the treatment of Sarah Palin’s daughter this week. If Rush Limbaugh’s brand of sneering Machiavellianism took political commentary beyond mere bias, a new generation of cable news anchors, radio hosts, and bloggers have descended even further into a clownish, contemptuous, contrived confrontationalism that blurs the line between journalism and (sports) entertainment.

Worse yet, even the old guard has been increasingly sucked into a downward ethical spiral. Lately, the New York Times’ Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd have peppered their columns with the kind of churlish sniping usually reserved for us amateurs in the blogosphere.

Peggy Noonan puts it like this:

The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.

Crazy cable news anchor Keith Olbermann, who derides Rush Limbaugh as a “comedian” and regularly lambasts Bill O’Reilly as his “Worst Person in the World,” leads the way into perdition at MSNBC, which has been drifting to the left ever since Tucker Carlson departed and Olbermann took over in prime time. (We’ve moved it four positions to the left at Newsprism.com.) DailyKos stooped lower than anyone, suggesting that Palin’s infant son Trig was actually born to her teenaged daughter. (The post has since been removed.)

The broadcast networks, CNN, and print outlets includingThe New York Times all used Palin’s daughter as fodder in an ugly ideological barrage that Gerard Baker describes as a ”frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion…” The degree of defensiveness displayed by news executives in response to Republican protests at least suggests a sense of guilt, if not shame.

Conservatives shouldn’t be too quick to judge, either. Sean Hannity consistently lives up to the label once applied by Bill Moyers: “vile.” WorldNetDaily makes Hannity look classy, running unfounded accusations that Obama had gay sex and did methamphetamines. Then there’s FoxNews, which has inexplicably returned Geraldo Rivera to mainstream journalism. (Who’s next—Jerry Springer? If he can draw an audience, why not?)

Sarah Palin handled the attacks on her family brilliantly. She fired back at the liberal media with both force and good humor, and with her traditional principles and small town authenticity, she rejuvenated a conservative movement that has been floundering on K Street. As David Brooks writes, “(Palin) embodies the spirit of the moment: impatient, fed up, tough-minded, but ironical. Even in attack, she projected the cheerfulness of someone confident about the future.” Sounds like Ronald Reagan to me.

Pat Buchanan adds, “The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly loathes — the liberal media elite who savagely ‘Bork’ every true conservative who gets on the path to national power — has been reignited.” A double win: the base is energized with optimism while its most powerful enemy takes a firm public spanking.

Even the Mafia has a hands-off policy when it comes to family; many a journalist could take a lesson in ethics from La Cosa Nostra.

Newsprism

Never Mind the 50 Most Influential Pundits—Here Are 10 of the Best

After the success of its “Top 100 Liberals” and “Top 100 Conservatives,” the UK’s Telegraph has now unveiled its “Top 50 Political Pundits.” All three lists have had many in the media buzzing (like flies around a fresh, steaming cow patty.)

Before you check the lists out, a warning: they’re broken down into mini-lists of 10 or 20, so that to peruse them all, you’ll wind up clicking on 17 separate web pages—a cynical ploy aimed at maximizing the Telegraph’s web traffic to drive up advertising rates.

So never mind the Telegraph’s gimmicky lists, which confuse popularity with influence. Influence is a poor measure in the first place, especially when the news media have become more oriented towards entertainment than analysis. By what criteria are comics like Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh, or a superficial confrontationalist like Hack Hannity, or Glenn Beck, considered alongside the best journalists and political pundits of our time?

For what it’s worth, here are Newsprism’s Ten of the Best Political Pundits in America, all on the same page and commercialism free:

10. Michael Kinsley—while he occasionally veers off into liberal la-la land, Kinsley is thoughtful, lucid, and incisive. He’s the most reasonable voice from the far left, idealistic yet practical in a Pat Moynihan sort of way.

9. Charles Krauthammer—a solid bedrock conservative with unmatched acumen in foreign policy, Krauthammer’s analysis of the Middle East is spot-on. He’s as hard-nosed as Bush is hard-headed, staunchly nationalistic without succombing to the naive idealism of the neocons.

8.  Christopher Hitchens—an exceptional writer, Hitchens is also stubbornly independent. He defies categorization in an era marked by polarization; he’s loyal only to his own judgment, never taking sides or pulling his punches, lefts or rights.

7. Dick Morris—he’s as sleazy as the Clintons, and as brilliant, a Karl Rove without the charm (or loyalty.) His cynicism is matched by his insightfulness. A mean streak and his hatred for his former employers make him fun to follow.

6. David Brooks—while the market rewards extremism, especially on the right, Brooks is a moderate conservative devoted to what’s best for the country rather than winning an argument. Brooks is highly intelligent and knowledgeable, and his columns range across critical social and political issues.

5. Frank Rich—a writer on par with Hitchens, Rich anchors the New York Times opinion pages and has the ear of journalists left and right. His background as a critic of culture adds depth and dimension to his political analysis.

4. Karl Rove—the man got George Bush elected. Twice. George Bush. He’s been demonized by the left and stained by his association with the policies of his most famous client, but Rove understands American politics as well as anyone. He’s been outthinking the pack for nearly thirty years.

3. Peggy Noonan—both the woman and her writing are graceful and wise. Never pretentious, she has a way of making profound points effortlessly. Her wit is elegant, simple but never simplistic. Noonan may seem as soft as a feather, but that feather cuts like a scalpel. Her criticisms of George Bush, for example, go right to the heart of a presidency with no moral or philosophical foundation.

2. Pat Buchanan—with the best grasp of history in the business, Buchanan puts contemporary issues into a sweeping historical context. His perspective spans the breadth of Western civilization in an era whose memory barely reaches beyond the 24-hour news cycle. To “get” Buchanan, you should read his books and columns; his appearances on MSNBC don’t do him justice.

1. George Will—nobody connects the dots like Will. His commentary reflects attention to the highest principles while at the same time being grounded firmly in contemporary American culture and history. Will compares favorably with William F. Buckley and Walter Lippmann. His wit isn’t dry, it’s arid, a droll sarcasm befitting his bemusement at our increasingly uncivil society. A collection of his columns like The Leveling Wind transcends punditry; he’s a philosopher who happens to write columns.

Newsprism

Pat Buchanan Gives George Bush a History Lesson

Who better to give George Bush a painfully overdue history lesson than Pat Buchanan?

As much a historian as a pundit, Pat doesn’t pull any punches in his latest must-read column.

Buchanan begins,

On reading George Bush’s discourse to the New York Economic Club last week, Cicero’s insight came to mind: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”

With Iraq entering its sixth year, the dollar sinking to peso levels, the economy careening into recession, and 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens roosting here, Bush alerted us to what really worries him:

“I’m troubled by isolationism and protectionism … (and) another ‘ism,’ and that’s nativism…”

Buchanan proceeds to lay out the historical results of what Bush belittles as ”isolationism, protectionism (and)… nativism”—a dynamic global power inrivaled in wealth, power, and influence. A litany of Bush’s failures follows, concluding with this incisive summation of Bush’s philosophy:

In smearing as nativists, protectionists and isolationists those who wish to stop the invasion, halt the export of factories and jobs to Asia, and stop the unnecessary wars, Bush is attacking the last true conservatives in his party.

Which is understandable. For after the judges and tax cuts, what is there about Bush that is conservative? His foreign policy is Wilsonian. His trade policy is pure FDR. His spending is LBJ all the way. His amnesty for illegals is Teddy Kennedy’s policy.

The real tragedy of the Bush misadministration is that so many of its failures could have been avoided if the president had grounded his decisionmaking less in an obsession with power politics, and more in a conservative  understanding of American history.

Newsprism

Pop Culture Conservatism—The Shallow Going Off the Deep End

American conservatism has been dealing for decades with a rift between the social conservatism of evangelical Christians and culture warriors on the one hand, and the libertarian conservatism of free-market individualists on the other. Part of the genius of Ronald Reagan was his ability to energize both factions while smoothing over their differences. Too many conservatives today are altogether ignorant of this rift and therefore risk widening it. 

Over the last couple of decades, another rift has been opened, one that has benefitted conservatism significantly but may at the same time have begun an erosion of its core principles in favor of the superficial and the marketable. This rift separates intellectual conservatism—that practiced by Bill Buckley, Newt Gingrich, George Will, and Pat Buchanan, for example—and a more populist strain that dominates talk radio, the popular book market, and cable news. Instead of “populist conservatism,” however, I think it would be more accurate to label it pop culture conservatism, since its primary home is in the popular media.

Pop culture conservatism emerged out of a long era of American journalism in which liberalism dominated public discourse. The Media Elite, an influential 1986 study of political bias, found that nearly 90% of leading journalists had voted for Democratic candidates in prior presidential elections. When Rush Limbaugh demonstrated in 1988 that a huge audience of disaffected conservatives was ripe for the picking, pop culture conservatism burst onto the scene, and it’s been flexing its muscles ever since. Now, slickly-marketed popular figures like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and Laura Ingraham exert far more influence over the conservative movement with their confrontationalism and intemperance than more substantive and measured voices do with reasoning and balance.

Intellectual and pop culture conservatism worked together brilliantly in 1994, when Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” consolidated the Republican base and swept Republican candidates into majority positions in both Houses of Congress. The result: the Clinton administration was forced to control the growth of government, so that by the time George Bush took office in 2000, the federal budget was in surplus.

A conservative Republican president inheriting a budget surplus should have set the foundation for a serious, measured restructuring and contraction of our imperial federal government. Instead, Bush has grown the government from a $2 trillion “enterprise” to one that will spend well over $3 trillion in 2008, with disastrous economic and monetary results. The numbers speak for themselves:

The federal government’s budget has grown from under $2,000,000,000,000.00 to over $3,000,000,000,000.00 per year!

The very core principles of conservatism—limited government, individual responsibility, individual liberty, market dynamics, free enterprise—have been buried under an avalanche of big government programs and out-of-control spending. It was Republican Senator Ted Stevens and Republican Representative Don Young who tried to push through billions in funding for Alaska’s infamous Bridges to Nowhere.

Intellectual conservatives have strongly condemned this liberal spending spree, but their voices aren’t being heard over the loudmouthed shouting of the pop culture talking heads.

Pop culture conservatism has created a class of citizens and politicians who don’t seem to value or understand the historical and intellectual foundations of classical American conservatism. These surfacy conservatives just spent seven years in power in the White House, most of that time with like-minded Republicans controlling Congress, yet they have done more damage to the institutions of free enterprise and individual liberty than any liberal in memory.

Shallow creatures of the media going off the deep end have helped put conservatism at risk of drowning in the warm, therapeutic waters of liberalism: naive idealism, spiraling debt, and dependence on government.

Newsprism

Obama Emerges from Briar Patch Wearing Crown of Thorns

When the inflammatory sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright first exploded onto the political landscape, probably due to machinations by the Clinton campaign, Barack Obama was leading Hillary Clinton in the national polls. Within 24 hours, however, Clinton had regained the lead in some polls and had temporarily gained ground in others.

After yesterday’s speech on race in America (video, text,) Obama is now being compared to Martin Luther King, Jr., and his speech to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s high praise indeed; experts in the field of rhetoric consistently judge “I Have a Dream” as the greatest speech in American history.

While Obama has clearly been damaged among many Republicans and conservatives—both Pat Buchanan and Thomas Sowell consider his association with Reverend Wright to disqualify him for the presidency—the real question is, has this controversy hurt him among independents and Reagan Democrats?

It’s too early to tell, of course, but the media seem to have reached a consensus: Obama just raised his profile considerably and may now go down in history as an icon of racial reconciliation (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) If he wins the Democratic nomination, his acceptance speech will be made on August 28, 2009—the 45th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Whoever is responsible for the Jeremiah Wright tapes bubbling to the surface intended to cut him to the quick with the dagger of race. Instead, they seem to have handed him the mantle of Martin Luther King.

His enemies just threw Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, and he emerged wearing a crown of thorns.

Newsprism

Old Gray Lady Lifts Her Skirt

The New York Times is running a front-page story about an alleged affair between Senator John McCain and a lobbyist three decades his junior. The story is attributed to anonymous sources. This is just the kind of smear we expect from blatantly partisan and brazenly personalistic sources like WorldNetDaily, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter on the right, or DemocraticUnderground and HuffingtonPost on the left.

But The Times, the so-called “Old Gray Lady,” the gold standard in American journalism? Senator McCain is answering these charges as I write, and the New York tabloids have already begun running sensationalist headlines. You can also expect to hear the story repeated ad nauseum on talk radio (left and right) today. The New Republic has an interesting take on the writing of the story and the timing of its publication.

Undue influence and conflicts of interest are, of course, fair game, but nine-year-old sexual rumors clearly are not. This is yellow journalism, tabloid journalism, and not worthy of The Times.

Pat Buchanan’s latest column lays out the case even-handedly, noting that the McCain campaign called the Times story “a hit-and-run smear,” which echoes but doesn’t plagiarize the metaphor Rush Limbaugh uses to bash such behavior in the liberal press, which he regularly calls the drive-by media.

I’ve taken some flak for putting The New York Times so far to the left at my political news portal, Newsprism.com. In my defense, while many aging drivers choose UPS-style routes with only right turns, lately the Old Gray Lady has been looking more like a NASCAR race: all left turns.

Newsprism.com