The Switch In Time That Betrayed Nine

Veteran Supreme Court reported Jan Greenberg reports what many had speculated—that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote on ObamaCare, saving the bill from being declared unconstitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the crucial “swing judge” even tried to get Roberts back on the side of the Court’s conservative bloc, but to no avail.

Chief Justice John Roberts of the United States Supreme Court (AP Photo)

What Roberts did, in other words, was a betrayal of his principles as a judge. Greenberg explains why Roberts switched his vote:

Some of the conservatives, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, deliberately avoid news articles on the court when issues are pending (and avoid some publications altogether, such as The New York Times). They’ve explained that they don’t want to be influenced by outside opinion or feel pressure from outlets that are perceived as liberal.

But Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As chief justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the court, and he also is sensitive to how the court is perceived by the public.

There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the court – and to Roberts’ reputation – if the court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the president himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.

Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint.

It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, “wobbly,” the sources said.

It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.

The problem with Roberts’ switch is that it doesn’t accomplish what he was apparently tempted to do. Yes, right now the left-wing media is praising Roberts for taking their side and saving ObamaCare, but does anyone believe that will last? If Roberts presides over another 5-4 defeat of a major liberal initiative, he’ll be damned and criticized as before. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court will always be called into question by the left so long as the Supreme Court does its job in enforcing substantive limits on the power of the federal government. All Roberts has done is buy some temporary credit.

And that temporary credit comes at the expense of the Constitution. Ostensibly, Roberts’ opinion limits the government’s ability to use the Commerce Clause to justify mandates on individuals. But there is reason to believe that future Courts will not be bound by that language as precedent. The benefit of Roberts’ alleged limitation of the Commerce Clause may not be anywhere near as great as some conservative commentators are making it to be.

Not only that, but the logic used to justify upholding the mandate as a tax is not consistent. That argument was generally rejected by lower courts, and not taken seriously during oral arguments. The whole point of a tax is to raise revenue—which the individual mandate is not supposed to do if it actually works. If you refuse to pay a tax, the government can fine you or put you in jail—yet the individual mandate is not enforceable in that manner. Congress did not intend to turn the individual mandate into a tax, and as much as Congressional intent matters in interpreting a statute, Roberts’ decision contradicts it. The dissent treats Roberts’ arguments on the tax issue with a thinly-veiled contempt—and largely for good reason.

Roberts’ decision comes off as nakedly political—and even Roberts himself seems to want to back away from its full consequences, painting it as a choice that he did not want to make by one he made because the law demanded it. But his legal arguments are so thin that his protestations ring hollow: the argument that Roberts upheld ObamaCare in the vain hopes of preserving the legitimacy of the Court in the eyes of The New York Times seems to be the most likely explanation.

But a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, no less the Chief Justice, should not answer to the editorial board of The New York Times. Roberts’ initial vote was the correct one: the individual mandate is an unprecedented intrusion upon the individual liberties of the people of the United States. It is not justified in a system where we have a federal government of limited and enumerated powers. Seven Justices voted that the federal government cannot use federal funding to coerce a state into enacting a federal policy: so why can the federal government use the coercion of taxation to force individuals into supporting a federal policy that would not be otherwise justified under the Constitution? The answer should have been that the federal government can no more justify the individual mandate through taxation than they could demand that individuals quarter soldiers in their homes or pay a tax “penalty.” Both are a naked end-run around the limits placed upon the federal government by the Constitution.

Chief Justice Roberts may have justified his decision by saying that it would preserve the reputation of the Court: but he is wrong. The Court should be above the whims of politics and should act in accordance with law rather than than the opinions of newspaper editorialists. Roberts’ switch on ObamaCare was a betrayal, and however justified it diminishes the legitimacy and the independence of the Supreme Court. That was clearly not the Chief Justice’s intent, but will be the outcome.

Scott Walker, Wisconsin, And Union Desperation

After spending tens of millions in what is now the most expensive political campaign in Wisconsin history, the union-led crusade against Gov. Scott Walker is now headed towards the finish line in what is looking to be a likely victory for Gov. Walker, who leads in the RealClearPolitics average by over 6%. Gov. Walker is running against Tom Barrett, the Mayor of Milwaukee and the man that Walker beat in the 2010 governor’s race. Now, it looks like history will repeat itself.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI)

Walker pushed through a controversial package of reforms designed to limit the power of Wisconsin’s public sector unions, by limiting their collective bargaining powers and ensuring that union dues were not automatically deducted from employee paychecks. The reaction from the left in Wisconsin was instant and vitriolic. By the tone of the anti-Walker protests one would think that he’d rounded up all public employees and had them drawn and quartered on the Capitol lawn. But despite months of protests organized by the unions and left-wing special interests, it looks like by Wednesday morning Scott Walker will remain Governor of Wisconsin and his efforts to limit the power of union special interests will remain. But how did this firestorm of political protest end up backfiring so decisively on the unions and the Wisconsin left?

The unions turned the battle against Walker into a full-on political crusade, first attacking Justice David Prosser of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and forcing a recall election against him. They lost decisively.

Then the union-led forces continued their attack, forcing recalls on 8 Republican state Senators. Republicans pushed back in recalls against 8 Senate Democrats. In the end, the attempt to shift the balance of power to the Democrats failed—while two vulnerable Republicans were recalled from office, the Senate majority did not shift to the Democrats.

Now, the left and the unions are hoping that the third time will be the charm, a wish that is looking to be yet another sure-fire loser for the Democrats. And the fact that they’re facing a losing battle has engendered a level of political desperation that would be almost comical if it weren’t so dangerous.

For instance, the union-led thugs have reached into the classical bag of dirty tricks and accused Scott Walker of fathering a child out of wedlock—an accusation that a reporter quickly and utterly debunked.

But what is happening in Wisconsin goes beyond mere dirty tricks and directly to voter intimidation. Ann Althouse details an incredibly creepy mailed being sent to Wisconsin residents that shows the voting histories of the recipient and 12 of their neighbors. While the information on the mailer is public record, the intent of the mailer is clearly intimidation—not only does the mailer reveal whether someone voted in the past, but it says that whether someone votes tomorrow will also be part of the public record. Althouse gives the right response:

This is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting, and it is truly despicable. Your vote is private, you have a right not to vote, and anyone who tries to shame and an harass you about it is violating your privacy, and the assumption that I will become active in shaming and pressuring my neighbors is repugnant.

Not only is it repugnant, it’s counterproductive as well. Someone who receives that mailer, which was apparently sent by an anti-Walker group, is not going to be more inclined to vote against Walker when they receive something like that. Such a ham-handed attempt at voter intimidation is not going to play well in Wisconsin.

To demonstrate just how badly things are going for the left in Wisconsin, President Obama has failed to offer any more than token support for the recall. He flew from Minnesota to Illinois last weekend, skipping any appearance with Barrett or on behalf of Barrett. The Democrats have been trying to pretend like the Wisconsin recalls don’t really matter—which would certainly not be the case were Barrett cruising towards victory this week. Watch the campaign spin on Wednesday try to downplay the importance of this race. But the truth is far more complicated than the inevitable political spin, and what is going on in Wisconsin signals a potential shift in the political winds of great consequence to Democrats everywhere.

The Unions’ Last Stand

Why have the unions spent tens of millions of dollars (taking money away from the 2012 Presidential contest) to recall Scott Walker? Walker’s bill that limits (but does not remove) collective bargaining for public sector unions does something even more harmful to unions: it cuts off their money. Under the bill, union dues are no longer automatically removed from a public employee’s paycheck. If the public worker wants to be in the union, they have to affirmatively choose to do so. And what the unions have found is that if it’s a choice, public workers would rather keep the money. The Wall Street Journal notes that internal figures show that membership in the Wisconsin branch of AFSCME has declined precipitously:

Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—the state’s second-largest public-sector union after the National Education Association, which represents teachers—fell to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011, according to a person who has viewed Afscme’s figures. A spokesman for Afscme declined to comment.

Much of that decline came from Afscme Council 24, which represents Wisconsin state workers, whose membership plunged by two-thirds to 7,100 from 22,300 last year.

Union money is crucial to the Democrats, and without the massive amount of cash from public employee unions, the Democrats are at a decided disadvantage. That’s why the unions went after David Prosser, why they spent tens of millions to try and wrest control of the Wisconsin Senate, and why they’re trying again to unseat Scott Walker—because Walker has gone after their gravy train. The real reason for these recalls has little to do with the rights of public employees and everything to do with making sure that money flows into the Democratic Party.

And that’s why tomorrow’s likely defeat of the hapless Democratic Mayor of Milwaukee is such a major blow to the unions—not only did Scott Walker win, but it’s exposed a harsh reality for unions: their source of money and power is in jeopardy.

Is Wisconsin In Play?

The next question is whether this means that Wisconsin is in play in 2012 for the Presidential race. In 2004, Kerry only barely won Wisconsin, slipping past Bush by a fraction of a percent. In 2012, however, Barack Obama crushed John McCain in a 14-point blowout in the Badger State. The 2012 polls have been all over the place, but some have shown Romney closing in on Obama. But even polls showing Walker comfortably ahead also show Obama with a strong lead.

But here’s where the Democrats made a mistake: the Republicans have been out organizing in three recall elections. They’ve developed a much better ground game then before. The electorate in Wisconsin have had to put up with three Democratically-led recalls and are getting sick and tired of all the constant political ads. The Democrats and the unions have put their best game on, but have fallen short. Instead of defeating Scott Walker, they’ve raised his national standing, and concomitantly his ability to raise money for Romney. All these factors redound to the benefit of the Republicans in a state that is seemingly in play.

It’s still unlikely that Romney can win Wisconsin, although it’s within the realm of possibility. But what Romney can do is force Obama to defend it. Not only that, but Romney can use the main media markets in Wisconsin to reach into parts of Minnesota and Michigan, also putting Obama on the defensive there as well. Romney doesn’t have to win Wisconsin to win the election, but if Romney could pull away Wisconsin and Iowa, he could lose Ohio and still win. Even though that’s a highly unlikely scenario, it shows just how in flux the 2012 race could be.

The Lessons Of The Walker Recall

What is most troubling about this recall election is how dirty it is. The unions, the “progressive” left, and the Democrats have demonized Scott Walker. They’ve invented a narrative in which the Koch Brothers have engineered a takeover of Wisconsin. The rhetoric against Walker is ridiculously over-the-top, and has demonstrated just how obsessed the left has become in trying to crush their opposition. The mailer that Althouse posted is just the tip of the iceberg—there’s a very good chance there will be attempts at direct voter intimidation tomorrow. The left has put all of their chips down on a quest to defeat the object of their hate and derision: what will happen when they lose a third time, and on their biggest target?

The Democrats have tried to turn this race into an attack against Scott Walker, but after pouring millions of dollars into the race and filling the airwaves with attack ads, they’ve failed. Now they’re resorting to desperate allegations of a love child to try and sway the electorate away from Walker. Yet nothing has worked.

And herein lies a lesson for other Republican candidates, especially Mitt Romney. Gov. Walker did not run away from his principles. He did not bow to Democratic attacks, he did not campaign while on the defensive, and he kept his message clear: his reforms led to lower taxes and more private-sector growth for Wisconsin. He kept on message, stayed on message, and did not give an inch against relentless Democratic attack. And he’s likely to win tomorrow because of it.

The Democrats ran a classic attempt at an Alinskyite campaign, and it failed. That is exactly the strategy that the Democrats have used and will use against Mitt Romney in the fall. The GOP has got to be ready for such tactics, and as Scott Walker has ably demonstrated if the Republicans can stand firm on principles, elucidate a clear message focused on jobs and the economy, and recognize the campaign landscape, they can win.

Why Obama’s Attacks On Bain Capital Will Backfire

President Obama has unveiled his latest attack against Mitt Romney, focusing on Romney’s days with the private equity firm Bain Capital. But just as the Obama campaign was getting ready to launch their attacks, a curious thing happened: Mayor Corey Booker, the Democratic mayor of Trenton, New Jersey and a rising star in the Democratic Party threw a monkey wrench into the President’s attack plans on Bain Capital. Booker said on Meet The Press that:

I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. . . Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And [Obama’s attacks on Bain], to me, I’m very uncomfortable with.

Needless to say, the Obama campaign was furious with Booker, and he was later forced to recant his heresy, in a video that disturbingly resembles a hostage tape. But the damage had already been done, and Obama’s anti-Bain narrative appeared to be stillborn.

Despite this, the President has doubled down, saying that Bain Capital is “what this campaign will be about.”

Now, even former Obama supporter David Brooks is noticing just how poor a strategy the Bain attacks are for the Obama campaign. Brooks observes that Obama’s populism is painting him into a corner:

While American companies operate in radically different ways than they did 40 years ago, the sheltered, government-dominated sectors of the economy — especially education, health care and the welfare state — operate in astonishingly similar ways.

The implicit argument of the Republican campaign is that Mitt Romney has the experience to extend this transformation into government.

The Obama campaign seems to be drifting willy-nilly into the opposite camp, arguing that the pressures brought to bear by the capital markets over the past few decades were not a good thing, offering no comparably sized agenda to reform the public sector.

In a country that desperately wants change, I have no idea why a party would not compete to be the party of change and transformation. For a candidate like Obama, who successfully ran an unconventional campaign that embodied and promised change, I have no idea why he would want to run a campaign this time that regurgitates the exact same ads and repeats the exact same arguments as so many Democratic campaigns from the ancient past.

Brooks makes a very important point here: the Obama campaign is running a highly traditional Democratic campaign. They are using the politics of division to attract traditional Democratic constituencies: women (and by that mean single women), African-Americans, students, environmentalists, and the tony class of well-healed limousine liberals. The arguments that the Obama campaign have been making have all been targeted with a laser-like focus on bringing those elements of the Democratic base together in support of his campaign. Everything from the “war on women” to Obama’s pivot on gay marriage have been focused on that end.

But that’s a problem for Obama. Even he has privately admitted that he’s running against the Obama of 2008—but the Obama of 2008 managed to beat the tar out of John McCain and took a majority of the electorate in a decisive victory. He did it by convincing independents and even some squishy conservatives (like David Brooks!) that he was a moderate, post-partisan, post-racial, transformative figure who would get things done for the betterment of the country.

If Obama could rekindle that magic in 2012, he’d be doing very well for himself. But he can’t—because the 2008 magic was built on an image of Obama that has been dashed apart on the rocky shoals of his record. He can’t campaign as a post-partisan figure when he’s constantly blaming the “Republican Congress” as being a bunch of “obstructionists”—an argument that’s rather silly considering that the Republicans won because Obama pushed through an expensive and unpopular health care bill. He can’t run as a transformative figure when his signature “achievements”—ObamaCare and the stimulus—are not popular with the American electorate. Obama has a record now, and while he’s done his best to try to change the subject to something else, that record will be the issue in this campaign.

What Romney Can Do

But Obama still is running neck-and-neck with Romney. Romney still can lose, and he can lose big if he fails to adapt to the changing condition of the campaign. All one has to do is look back at 2008 to see how this can happen: after picking Sarah Palin, the McCain campaign was riding high in the polls, even beating Obama in most polls. But then the wheels came off of the McCain campaign: the media savaged Palin and the campaign failed to use Palin’s natural political talent in an effective way. When Lehman collapsed, McCain first said that we was canceling a debate and running to Washington to play the elder statesman—which he did, but only half-heartedly. McCain failed to come up with an adequate response to the crisis, and never recovered. He went from running ahead of Obama to being shellacked by him. The rest, as they say, is history.

So what must Romney do? He has got to start shaping his message now: and while he’s done part of that with his ads focusing on the state of the economy. But it’s not enough to merely suggest that the economy is a bad state— Romney has to make an at least plausible plan for what to do about it.

Here’s why I ultimately think Romney’s Bain experience is relevant to this campaign: Romney needs to make a connection in the voters minds between what Bain did—taking dying companies and fixing them—and what needs to be done for the economy in general and government in particular. Right now the Romney campaign is doing a great job of reacting to the President, but sooner or later (when the voters start paying attention to the race), Romney will have to define himself.

And here’s why the President’s Bain attacks play right into that: they’re opening the door for Romney to make this argument. For every ad that the President cuts showing someone who allegedly lost their job, Romney should have ads prepared showing the people whose jobs were saved by Bain Capital. Romney has to know that Bain would be a major issue in this campaign—as it was in Romney’s prior campaigns. If the Romney campaign doesn’t have a response ready to go by now, they’re in trouble. They may not need to run those ads yet (better to keep their powder dry for when it’s needed), but they had better have them ready for deployment.

And those ads should support the larger narrative: this country needs a turnaround artist. This country needs someone who will make government more responsive, more efficient, and simply better. And yes, that means cutting a lot of dead weight from government, including making sure that workers who don’t pull their weight can be fired. Romney has to make the case that old way that government does things is not working. Indeed, that the government has become just like one of those failing companies that Bain used to deal with: it’s losing money hand-over-foot, it has a dysfunctional management structure, there’s a lack of leadership at the top, and its customers (the citizens) are not happy with what it’s doing. Romney has taken those kind of dysfunctional organizations and turned them around before: and that’s just what this country needs.

The President can talk until he’s blue in the face about “vampire capitalism:” in fact, the more the President goes on the attack the further away from the post-partisan ultra-cool figure of 2008 he gets. Romney can use that to his advantage if he’s smart enough and nimble enough.

The President is unwittingly providing the Romney campaign with a winning strategy for 2012, as David Brooks points out. Even some of the President’s backers, like Mayor Booker have figured this out. Luckily enough for Romney, the President doesn’t understand how he can be outflanked. The real question is whether the Romney campaign can be deft enough to take advantage of the opening that he’s been given. If he can, he can put the President in a defensive posture—exacerbating Obama’s tendency to become whiny and petulant. John McCain’s campaign failed to do this—if Romney wants to win, he’s going to have to learn from that failure.

Whether Obama realizes or not, his attacks are opening a door for Romney. The question is whether Romney will seize the opportunity to use that opening to craft a winning message for his campaign.

Can Romney Win? Yes, He Can!

The New Yorker warms the hearts of Republicans everywhere by asking a question no true-blue liberal Democrat wants to even contemplate: can Mitt Romney really beat Obama?

In my neck of artisanal, hormone-free Brooklyn, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which shows Mitt Scissorhands leading “The First Gay President” by three points, landed with a nasty thud. “I can’t believe he might lose,” my wife said when she spotted the offending numbers on the Web. “People are really willing to vote for Mitt Romney? They hate Obama so much they’d vote for Romney?”

Evidently so—not that you’d know it from a casual read of the print edition of today’s Times. The editors buried the lead in the fifteenth paragraph of a down-page story on A17. (I’ve got a helpful suggestion: if Romney’s ahead in next month’s poll, maybe it could go in the Metro section—the one that no longer exists.) Not surprisingly, conservative news sites made rather more of the story. Under the headline “Kaboom: Romney Leads Obama by 3 in New CBS/NYT Poll,” Guy Benson, the political editor of Townhall.com, pointed out several other noteworthy findings [i]n the survey, including the facts that Romney leads Obama by two points among women (so much for the gender gap) and seven points among independents. Two thirds of the survey’s respondents said the economy was in “very bad” or “fairly bad” shape, and Obama’s favorability rating is still stuck in the mid-forties—at forty-five per cent, to be exact.

Now, the piece does explain why Romney still has a long way to go to win, but the fact that The New Yorker is running a piece worrying about Obama’s electoral chances is in itself telling.

But there’s even more interesting data. Wisconsin was a state that Obama won handily in 2008 and Kerry very narrowly won in 2004. Wisconsin hasn’t really been on the radar as a swing state – but a poll commissioned by the ultra-liberal ghouls at the Daily Kos finds that Obama is leading Romney by only a single point in the Badger State. That result is somewhat shocking, but perhaps less so when you consider that the unions have spent tens of millions to recall Gov. Scott Walker and that same poll shows Walker beating his Democratic opponent by a 4%. Wisconsin is a state where Romney might have a chance, especially given massive voter fatigue on the left.

And there’s gay marriage. While it wasn’t clear whether the gay marriage issue would hurt or help Obama, the polls show that it’s hurting him. As The New Yorker piece mentions, a supermajority of voters think that Obama’s sudden “evolution” on gay marriage was little more than a political stunt. More people dislike Obama’s newfound old position on gay marriage than like it. And North Carolina, the site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention and a potential swing state, is starting to look redder and redder. None of this news is fatal to Obama’s reelection chances, but the slow drip of bad news for his campaign, combined with the Obama campaign’s relatively ham-fisted attempts to shape the narrative suggest that 2012 will not look much like 2008.

Behold, A God Who Bleeds!

This is all starting to remind me of a classic Star Trek episode (as many things often do). In that episode, Captain Kirk’s memory is wiped and he ends up being treated as a god by the local Native American stereotype aliens. One jealous alien manages to cut his hand, and exclaims, “Behold, a god who bleeds!” The same thing is happening here: during 2008 Obama was the epitome of cool, a demi-god in American politics with a following that bordered on a cult of personality.

Today is much different. Obama is just another politician. The American people don’t buy his gay marriage conversion. Obama has a record now, and cannot be what he was in 2008: a blank slate upon which voters could project their hopes and dreams. Instead, Obama has to run on what he’s actually done: and Americans are not feeling the “hope and change” any longer.

That’s the problem with being a cool cipher – the minute you start losing your mystique, the game is over. The same quasi-messianic messaging that worked so well for Obama in 2008 will not work for him in 2012—now it just comes off as creepy. The American people are seeing an increasingly whiny President who is running a tight race against someone who is ostensibly a weak candidate and saying “Behold, a god who bleeds!”

But Romney Has To Define Himself

But don’t count Obama out or Romney in. The American people have soured on President Obama to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that Romney is in the clear. He still has to define himself, and Romney has thus far failed to do so. Voters know that they don’t like Obama, but just that is not necessarily going to be enough for Romney to pull ahead. Voters need to have a clear answer to the question “who is Mitt Romney?”

This is Romney’s Achilles heel—he does not have the “common touch” of someone like Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. He’s hard to relate to on a human level because he doesn’t open himself up in the way that other politicians do. But to win national election, Romney has to define himself as a person. He doesn’t have to be the guy you have beers with, but he has to be someone who voters can trust and relate to. Ann Romney has helped humanize her husband, but Gov. Romney can’t rely on surrogates to make that connection.

The Obama campaign is already running ads trying to define Romney to voters—if Romney can’t define himself first, he’s going to have a lot of trouble winning in the key states he needs to win.

One thing is certain, however: if the Democrats are thinking this will be another 2008, they’re wrong. The political environment has changed, and it has not changed in a way that benefits President Obama.

The State Of The Race 2012 – Part I

The dust has settled from the contentious GOP primary battle, and it looks like Mitt Romney will be the GOP’s 2012 nominee. It’s now on to the general election, where the future of Barack Obama’s Presidency will be tested.

Even though polling this far out is of limited usefulness, it does give us some idea of how the race could turn out in seven months. There are certain factors and historical data that can give us some idea of where this race will go. But elections are shaped by current events rather than past history—in September 2008, John McCain was briefly ahead of Obama until Sarah Palin flamed out and McCain’s bizarre campaign suspension eliminated his momentum through the end of the race. In 2000, George W. Bush was looking to beat Al Gore by a substantial margin—until DWI allegations put him on the defensive and cost him votes, resulting in one of the closest races in American history and a popular vote loss. We have no idea what may happen in 2012 that could have a profound impact on the race.

But, with those caveats in mind, we can start to see the shape of the race as it stands now, and what it means for President Obama and Governor Romney:

This Race Will Be A Referendum

First, this is a race between an incumbent President and a challenger – which means that the 2012 election will largely be a referendum on Barack Obama. (Joe Klein’s arguments notwithstanding.) In general, an incumbent President either stands or falls based on his performance in office. If the American electorate is generally happy with the performance of a President, he’ll be reelected. If they are not, and the other side puts up a credible challenger, that President will lose.

That dynamic appears most clearly in the President’s approval ratings on a state-by-state basis. An incumbent President’s approval ratings are a good predictor of whether they will be reelected or not. As it stands right now, President Obama’s approval rating is at 47% in the RealClearPolitics polling composite. He’s slightly underwater with his disapproval rating at 48%. For an incumbent, that’s a danger zone—not fatal, but not where an incumbent President wants to be. As a point of comparison, President Bush was at 52% approval in mid-April 2004.

As we dig down to the state level, this becomes more important. Traditionally, an incumbent with approval rating over 50% is regarded as “safe” and one with an approval rating under 50% is regarded as “in trouble.” Political prognosticator Ronald Brownstein, writing in the National Journal, argues that 47% is the real “tipping point”, and if a President’s approval rating is below 47%, then he’s in real trouble.

So, we can assume that if President Obama is over 50% approval in a state, he’s likely to win that state’s electoral votes. On the other hand, if he’s at 45% or below, he’s not going to win that state unless his approval rating changes dramatically. If he’s at 47% or less, that state would lean towards the Romney, and if Obama’s approval rating is over 47%, the state would lean towards Obama.

Obama’s Electoral Battlefield

Gallup performed state by state polling in 2011 that gives some contours to where Obama stands in each state. It isn’t pretty for Obama. He is above 50% in only a few states. If we use the 47% approval rating as a guidepost, Obama is cruising towards a huge loss in the Electoral College. He would lose 215 to 323, an electoral blowout. Crucially, he’d lose the key states that he needs to hold to win: namely Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Iowa. He’d also lose Oregon, a state that has tended to be Democratic, but only by a close margin.

Obviously, Obama losing Oregon seems like a rather distant proposition, and Gallup’s numbers are fairly old, and were taken before the GOP race had settled. But, what this does show is that the race is far from over: Obama’s approval rating on a national and a state-by-state basis indicates a much tighter race than 2008.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

The biggest factor in this race will be the economy. Unemployment is trending downward, but the results are mixed at best. But, it’s hard to judge just what effect the unemployment rate really has an election—electoral data doesn’t give us much to go on in predicting how unemployment will effect the race. It’s true that no President since FDR has won reelection with more than 7.2% unemployment, but that by itself does’t give us much to go on. The sample set is simply too small.

But subjective feelings will matter. If in the fall of 2012 people really do feel that the economy is getting better, they’ll be more inclined to reelect the President. If they feel that they are no better off than they were in 2008, they’ll be more inclined to get rid of him. The data on Obama’s economic record spells trouble for Obama—high gas prices are hurting his rating on economic issues, and the electorate doesn’t really seem to think that the economy is truly turning a corner.

That’s why the data points will only tell you so much. In the 1992 election the economy was recovering, but George H.W. Bush still lost to Bill Clinton (thanks in large part to Ross Perot). People don’t respond to economic data, they respond to their subjective feelings. Unfortunately, that’s hard to measure and doesn’t follow the raw data—it could well be that unemployment drifts down by November 2012, but that doesn’t mean that President Obama is a lock for re-election.

The Hope And Change Is Gone

There is one more subjective factor worthy of mention: this isn’t 2008. In 2008, Obama could run as a cypher, a blank slate upon which voters could project their hopes and dreams. His campaign of “hope” and “change” and his ability to position himself as a post-partisan, post-racial figure helped him appeal to independents and even some Republicans. He ran less on his record (scant as it was), and more on a set of vague promises. But four years later, that is no longer an option for the President. He has to run on his record now, and his policies from from bailouts to Obamacare have been more divisive than uniting. The 2010 election could also be considered a referendum on his performance, and that should give the Obama team pause.

Obama simply doesn’t have the option of running as the Obama of 2008—but that doesn’t mean that he can’t reinvent himself into a form that’s palatable to enough independents to get reelected. But that also means that the unprecedented wave of support that lifted him up in 2008 may not materialize this time: in 2008 Barack Obama was the Next Big Thing, the great figure that would bring the country together and wipe away the supposed sins of the Bush years. Now, he’s just another politician. The Democrats may have a deep reserve of support to draw upon, but they’ve always had that. At this time, it doesn’t seem like Obama can rekindle the magic of 2008. It’s safe to assume that even if Obama is re-elected, it won’t be by the same margins he got four years ago.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So, with all those factors in play, what can we say about the current state of the race? The honest answer is that it’s looking close, but we don’t know much more than that. It’s too early to say that Obama is a shoe-in for re-election or Romney should start thinking about Cabinet appointments. This is anyone’s game, and with such partisan polarization, it’s very likely that it will stay a tight race for most (if not all) of the race.

That being said, the structural factors give a slight edge to Romney. Obama has a weak approval rating for an incumbent President. The economy may recover, but it’s questionable whether it would be enough. Obama’s state-by-state approval ratings show weakness in key swing states. But that slight edge is very slight indeed, and could disappear if trends change.

As the race continues other factors will start emerging—the most important of which may be the discipline and effectiveness of Romney’s campaign. The McCain campaign was horrendously mismanaged, botching McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign, mishandling Sarah Palin, and was generally weak and ineffective. So far Romney has shown great discipline and messaging—but also a tendency to put his foot in his mouth. If you want to know how the dynamics of the race may play out, watch how well organized the Romney camp is over the next few months. Because when it gets down to the post-Labor Day crunch time, campaign discipline can make or break a political campaign.

It’s Time For ObamaCare To Face A Death Panel

The Supreme Court is currently conducting a marathon three-day session of oral arguments on the challenges to ObamaCare, an almost unprecedented amount of time for the Court to consider any case. But the ObamaCare issue isn’t just another case, or even just another case involving weighty constitutional issues. If the Court upholds ObamaCare’s individual mandate, it will put the final nail in the coffin of the federal government being a government of limited, enumerated powers. If the federal government can force everyone to buy health insurance, there’s not much holding the federal government back from forcing us to buy certain foods, drive certain cars, or engage in any other activity that the federal government deems (in its infinite wisdom) to be for the “common good.”

ObamaCare supporters argue that health care is somehow different from everything else: because we will all use the health care system at some point in our lives, the government has a higher interest in regulating it and making sure that costs are allocated “fairly.” There’s a huge flaw in that argument: it’s a license for unlimited government power. As the example goes, why couldn’t the government make everyone buy broccoli? After all, you must participate in the market for food. Even those wraith-thin supermodels have to eat at one point or another. And broccoli is good for you, which would reduce health care costs. So why can’t Michelle Obama make everyone eat broccoli, or choose to pay a “penalty?”

For that matter, since the Chevy Volt is a massive taxpayer-financed boondoggle, why not mandate that everyone must buy a Chevy Volt or pay a “penalty?” After all, everyone must somehow participate in the “transportation market,” even those people whose only interaction with the market is when they buy their motorized wheelchair to carry their beached-whale bodies to the local buffet. So why not just mandate that everyone buy a Chevy Volt or pay a fine?

In fact, since Disney is taking a bath on John Carter, why shouldn’t they lobby Congress to make everyone in the country see the movie or pay a fine? After all, everyone participates in the “entertainment market” too.

And that’s the major constitutional problem with ObamaCare: a broccoli mandate, a Chevy Volt mandate, a John Carter mandate, they’re all separated from the individual insurance mandate by degree, not by principle.

The individual mandate is the most sweeping power grab of our generation—in terms of real-world impact it makes the PATRIOT Act look timid. And yet there’s been nowhere near the outcry about ObamaCare as they has been about the PATRIOT Act.

The Tax Man (Doesn’t) Cometh

The government has argued that the individual mandate’s penalty really is a tax. The reason why the government makes this argument is because of a federal law called the Anti-Injunction Act. The Anti-Injunction Act is a federal law that prevents people from challenging taxes in courts as a way of getting out of paying taxes. In other words, if the Court bought this argument, the challenges to ObamaCare would fail.

The government’s argument that the ObamaCare penalty really is a “tax” doesn’t save them. For one, it’s an argument that goes against the facts: nothing in the health care law makes the penalty into a tax other than the fact that it was shoved into the Internal Revenue Code. The President and Congressional Democrats were adamant that it was not really a tax, otherwise they would be accused of breaking their promise not to raise taxes on the middle class. Nor is the tax But when it became legally convenient to say that the “penalty” really was a tax, the government is now making that argument. But the penalty isn’t a tax in either form or substance, so that argument is unlikely to go anywhere. And, based on the Court’s skeptical questions in today’s arguments, it looks like the tax argument isn’t likely to carry much weight.

Kill (the) Bill

The problems with ObamaCare are legion, not only is it bad policy, but it sets a precedent that wipes away the system of checks and balances that keep our system of government functioning. The Supreme Court has this opportunity to stand up for the established constitutional order and strike down the individual mandate as a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. If they do not, the costs could be grave. There’s not only the risk of eroding freedoms, but there’s a much more concrete risk as well: ObamaCare is bad law. It won’t make health care cheaper, it won’t make it easier for people to see a doctor, it won’t save lives. It will create a system where medical care is artificially limited by the government (both directly and indirectly). If that sounds a bit like a “death panel” concept, it should. Because that’s what has to happen: the government has no magic fairy wand that they can waive over our healthcare system to make health care cost less. The only way to reduce costs is to ration, and that’s exactly what would have to be done in order to make ObamaCare work.

But the Supreme Court isn’t concerned with health care policy, at least not directly. Their concern is with the question of whether ObamaCare is consistent with our constitutional order. It is not. The individual mandate in ObamaCare is no less unconstitutional than a broccoli mandate, a Chevy Volt mandate, or a mandate to see John Carter. The Commerce Clause isn’t a blank check for the government to take effective control of an entire sector of the American economy. The Supreme Court should serve as ObamaCare’s “death panel.”

Leviathan Unchained

Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect argues that Americans are “hypocrites” because we dislike regulations in general, but like specific regulations:

Last Thursday, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a survey that revealed what Pew termed “Mixed Views of Government Regulation.” But “mixed,” in this case, means anti-regulatory in matters of ideology and pro-regulatory in practice. Asked whether they believed that government regulation of business was necessary to protect the public or that such regulation usually does more harm than good, just 40 percent answered that regulation was necessary, while 52 percent said it did more harm than good.

But then came the specifics. Pew asked whether federal regulations should be strengthened, kept as is, or reduced in particular areas. When it came to food production and packaging, 53 percent said strengthen, 36 percent said keep as is, and just 7 percent said reduce. In environmental safeguards, the breakdown was 50 percent strengthen, 36 percent keep as is, 17 percent reduce. In car safety and efficiency, the split was 45, 42, and 9 percent. In workplace safety and health, it was 41, 45, and 10 percent. And with prescription drugs, it was 39, 33, and 20 percent.

This is hardly a new discovery—public opinion polls have shown similar results for decades. In general, Americans dislike government regulations, but they want stronger regulations in specific areas.

The Overreaches of the Regulatory State

Meyerson thinks that this is hypocrisy and that Americans are “in denial.” Meyerson misses the point:
when Americans are directly effected by regulations, they oppose them. But it’s easy for Americans to want those “other guys” to be regulated. And in fact, the numbers are not that heavily weighted towards more regulation. A plurality thinks that there’s too much regulation, a slightly larger plurality thinks that there are two little. A smaller plurality thinks that the amount of regulations are fine the way they are. Together, the number of people who want fewer regulations or the status quo outnumber those who want to expand the regulatory state.

And as the regulatory state grows and the state and federal level, we will likely see the number of people wanting to roll back government regulation rise. Take these examples:

A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

Imagine what will happen when something like that becomes commonplace. It’s one thing for a government regulator to go after “big corporations” with stupid and destructive regulations. But the second those stupid and destructive regulations effect the average American, it will be time to break out the tar and feathers.

And the school-lunch police aren’t the only example of regulatory insanity going on in America today.As one Nevada farmer found out, the regulatory state doesn’t give a damn about common sense or your rights:

I can’t tell you how sick to my stomach I was watching that first dish of Mint Lamb Meatballs hit the bottom of the unsanitized trash can. Here we were with guests who had paid in advance and had come from long distances away anticipating a wonderful dining experience, waiting for dinner while we were behind the kitchen curtain throwing it away! I know of the hours and labor that went into the preparation of that food. We asked the inspector if we could save the food for a private family event that we were having the next day. (A personal family choice to use our own food.) We were denied and she was insulted that we would even consider endangering our families health. I assured her that I had complete faith and trust in Giovanni our chef and the food that was prepared, (obviously, or I wouldn’t be wanting to serve it to our guests).

I then asked if we couldn’t feed the food to our “public guests” or even to our private family, then at least let us feed it to our pigs. (I think it should be a criminal action to waste any resource of the land. Being dedicated to our organic farm, we are forever looking for good inputs into our compost and soil and good food that can be fed to our animals. The animals and compost pile always get our left over garden surplus and food. We truly are trying to be as sustainable as possible.) Again, a call to Susan and another negative response. Okay, so let me get this right. So the food that was raised here on our farm and selected and gathered from familiar local sources, cooked and prepared with skill and love was even unfit to feed to my pigs!?! Who gave them the right to tell me what I feed my animals? Not only were we denied the use of the food for any purpose, to ensure that it truly was unfit for feed of any kind we were again threatened with police action if we did not only throw the food in the trash, but then to add insult to injury, we were ordered to pour bleach on it.

There was nothing wrong with the food, other than it didn’t meet the purely bureaucratic whims of the health inspector. And this wasn’t one deranged idiot going off on a whim: the state health inspector was constantly on the phone with her superior, who not only ratified each decision, but was apparently calling the shots.

This is the face of government regulation in America: it’s not about protecting people, it’s about power and control. Was the state protecting that elementary school student from anything? No, the options she was later given were worse than what her parents had packed. Was there any danger to the guests of that Nevada farmer? No, but because the government doesn’t want any deviation from their narrow rules, they acted like tinpot dictators and made the farmers throw away the food and pour bleach on it.

In a sane world, the people responsible for those decisions would be fired immediately. But this is not a sane world. It’s a world where too much power has been abdicated, too much common sense abandoned, and too much authority ceded ever upwards. And that is why Americans hate regulation—and as more Americans experience this kind of rampant idiocy, the number of Americans who see the regulatory state as the enemy will only increase.

And when Americans say that there are too many regulations on small business, they are absolutely right. Take for example what happened to a small business trying to operate a beer garden in Arlington, Virginia. Government bureaucrats at the local level are ofter just as rapacious and just as foolhardy as their compatriots on the state and federal level. For another example, watch this video outlining the many needless hurdles a small business owner has to go through to open an ice cream parlor in San Francisco.

We talk about how important it is to foster the growth of small businesses and how critical it is to get Americans working again. But as the above examples demonstrate, our system of massive government overregulation costs jobs and takes thousands of dollars out of the economy and into the hands of the government apparatchiks who administer this maddening system.

So yes, it’s easy for the average American to say that someone else should be regulated—given that the media has turned big corporations into mustache-twirling villains at every opportunity it’s no wonder that a plurality support more regulation. But when Americans look at the issue of regulation holistically, they see the reality that regulations hurt more people than they protect.

Meyerson thinks that the problem with America is that government isn’t powerful enough. But a government powerful enough to make BP, GE, or any other company do whatever government wants is a government that is powerful enough to make you do whatever government wants. And that doesn’t even get into a discussion of regulatory capture. Big business doesn’t hate government regulation—they’ve learned to use it as a cudgel to beat down competition before they can rise up to challenge the established players. That beer garden in Virginia can’t afford an army of lawyers and lobbyists to negotiate with the regulators—but a chain restaurant can. What is the result of this nonsensical regulatory overreach? Fewer small business and more powerful big ones.

American’s aren’t hypocrits—at least not in the way Meyerson accuses them of being. Rather, Americans need to understand that the same sort of regulatory insanity that causes schoolchildren to be given chicken nuggets or farmers to have to throw away perfectly good food is no less idiotic and no less harmful when it’s applied to big corporations.

Tom Friedman: Losing The Future

Tom Friedman phones it in again, in yet another New York Times column filled with the same old cliches we’ve heard a thousand times. This time, instead of kissing the asses of the Butchers of Beijing, Tom Friedman decides to give the GOP some unsolicited and unwelcome advice. Apparently, what the Republican Party needs to do is just agree with the Democratic Party on everything, and all will be well.

The problem with Friedman’s ideology is that we’re already watching it fail. The blue-state model is failing here, and the European welfare-state model that the Democrats want to emulate is teetering on the edge of chaos. (Just observe the inevitable end-state of the European welfare state as exemplified in Greece.)

Friedman argues that we need spend more on infrastructure and education—the same old cliched thinking we’ve heard before. The problem with such spending is that it doesn’t produce anything: it’s the equivalent of digging ditches to keep people busy. Take “high speed rail,” the fetish of statophiles everywhere. Nearly every rail project in this country goes massively over-budget and few people ride in them. Yet we spend billions of dollars developing “solutions” no one wants to problems no one has. But that’s how America is supposed to compete in the 21st Century.

What we don’t need is more bureaucratic pipe-dreams. We don’t need more top-down initiatives made by Washington D.C. that have no basis in the needs of real people. Have we learned nothing from the 20th Century: central planning does not work. No government agency, no matter how well-functioning, has the level of knowledge necessary to make better economic decisions than the people who are actually effected by those decisions. Trying to direct the economy from afar does not work, never has worked, and won’t work in the future.

And of course, Friedman wants to “raise revenue” to fulfill all of his dreams of high speed trains and elaborate (and pointless) fights against global warming. The problem with “raising revenue” is every dollar taken out of the productive economy and put into wild-eyed government initiatives is a dollar that can’t be invested in something actually worthwhile—the fact is that the “Keynesian multiplier” is a myth and $1 in government spending does not magically produce more than $1 in growth.

And that’s why we shouldn’t listen to people like Tom Friedman. It’s not that the Republican Party lacks ideas, it’s that the Democratic Party is threatened by change. The poles of American politics have reversed. From the union battles in Wisconsin to the 2012 Presidential race, it’s been the conservative upstarts trying to overturn the sclerotic and malfunctioning status quo while the left tries to defend their fiefdoms from substantive change.

Friedman doesn’t want to embrace the 20th Century, he wants to repeat its mistakes. The 21st Century is all about the decentralized over the centralized, autonomous and intelligent networks over large institutions, the agile over the cumbersome. And there is nothing that is less agile, less intelligent, and less willing to delegate power and authority than the United States federal government. Yet Friedman and his ilk would imbue that same broken system with more and more power over every facet of our lives. It’s like arguing that we should take down the Internet and put everyone on Minitel.

If the United States is to be successful in the 21st Century, it can’t emulate the failed policies of the last century. If there’s one side in this equation that is horribly out of step with the times, it’s the one embracing the failed strategies of the past. Perhaps it’s President Obama and his cast of Clinton-era retreads that should simply give up.

Crystal Ball Watch 2011

It’s that time already (where did 2011 go?!)—time to see how my New Year’s predictions faired in the cold, hard light of reality.

Last year’s New Year’s predictions forecasted an unpopular Obama, an unraveling Europe, and a Verizon iPhone. And, surprisingly enough, we had an unpopular Obama, an unraveling Europe, and a Verizon iPhone. On the other hand, Fidel Castro hasn’t yet gone off to his villa in Hell, and the Bush tax cuts aren’t permanent—yet. Let’s see how I did:

Politics

President Obama, increasingly embittered by the political process and the Republican House, retreats from the public eye and rumors swirl that he will not run for a second term.

More-or-less right: President Obama made a few speeches through the year, but for a politician that was elected based on his oratory, he’s made himself scarce over the past year. As his approval ratings have declined, the President has been trying to sell his unpopular policies to a diminishing office. But he’s made no bones about it: he’s running again.
The GOP won’t have a much better year. Their commitment to fiscal discipline will be continually tested, meaning that there will be plenty of difficult votes on spending in 2011.

Right: Indeed, the Tea Party-backed GOP has been trying to be fiscally-responsible, but have not been able to do much to slow the rapacious growth of government.
Sarah Palin will continue to tease a run for the Republican nomination in 2012, but won’t actually commit to anything.

Wrong: Sarah Palin is, mercifully, not running for President, and while she remains popular with the Republican base, her celebrity is fading.
The Democrats will once again learn the wrong lessons from their 2010 drubbing, and will embrace the far left instead of running to the center.

Correct: Instead of moving to the center, the Democrats have decided that it’s time to stop pretending that they’re anything but a party owned by the left. Their supportive reaction to the Occupy movement and their embrace of populist rhetoric demonstrates foretell their strategy for 2012.
Redistricting battles will end up getting fought in court as the Democrats try to fight to keep as many Democratic seats as they can.

Correct
ObamaCare suits will be appealed, and will eventually end up on the Supreme Court’s docket. But because Congress will end up removing the mandates from the bill, the Supreme Court will declare the issue moot.

Half-Right: The Supreme Court will take up the ObamaCare issue in three days of oral arguments this March. But despite Republican opposition, the GOP just doesn’t have the votes to repeal ObamaCare… yet.

International

The last vestiges of democracy in Venezuela will be cast aside as Hugo Chavez extends his emergency rule into a lifetime dictatorship.

Correct: And even though the Venezuelan dictator is nearly ready to join Osama bin Laden, Mohammar Qadafi, and Kim Jong-Il in Hell, what will happen to the country he has plundered is still very much in the air. But it looks like Chavez will be the Venezuelan dictator for life—what little life he has left.
The conflict in Afghanistan will continue to be bloody and difficult. By the end of the year the conventional wisdom will be that Afghanistan is Obama’s Vietnam, and the future of the US mission there will be in doubt.

Partially Right: As the mission in Iraq winds down, the mission in Afghanistan continues to drag on. But the media, ever faithful to Obama, has avoided turning Afghanistan into another Vietnam. But if the situation there continues to destabilize over the next year, it may become harder to sweep it all under the rug.
North Korea will continue to rattle their saber, but they will stop just short of provoking a full-scale war.

Right: And now that Kim Jong-Il has shuffled off this mortal coil, and his son is (allegedly) in power, all bets are off for the future.
Iraq’s biggest problem in 2011 will be corruption rather than terrorism, and civilian casualties will remain low.

Right, Maybe: So far Iraq has been relatively quiet, although now that the U.S. has pulled out, the country is once again in danger of flying apart. The fact that sectarian tensions are once again bubbling to the surface may mean that Iraq will be a hotspot once again. Let’s all hope the Iraqis will be able to keep a republic.
Fidel Castro will die, and Raul Castro will begin implementing policies similar to the glasnost and perestroika of the old Soviet Union in order to liberalize the Cuban economy and pave the way for a free-market system.

If Only It Were True: Even though Cuba is very slowly liberalizing, it has a very long way to go.

Economics

The US economy will improve, but much too slowly. Unemployment will remain high, only retreating to around 8%.

True: Unemployment has retreated—but much of the decline is due to people leaving the workforce. The endemic level of unemployment is both an economic and a societal disaster that we will be dealing with for a very long time.
The Bush tax cuts will be made permanent, and while President Obama will complain, he will still sign the tax reductions into law.

Wrong: The tax cuts were extended, but have not yet been made permanent. And while Obama campaigns on raising taxes for the rich, he still signed off on extending the Bush tax cuts.
The Eurozone will face collapse as the fiscal crisis in nations like Greece and Portugal tug at the Euro’s foundations. Germany will refuse to bail out European banks and will threaten to leave the Euro.

Right and Wrong: The first sentence was right on the money, as we’ve seen in the last few months. But Germany has (thus far) gone along with bailing out the debts of the countries on the periphery in order to keep the Eurozone afloat—but they will not be willing or able to do that for very long, especially if a large country like Spain or Italy starts failing.
The Chinese economy will begin to slow, stoking fears of another worldwide economic panic.

Not Yet: There are serious concerns about China’s economy, but they haven’t yet manifested themselves as serious worries yet. The world seems more concerned about the situation with the Euro.

Society/Culture/Technology

The iPhone will come to Verizon, and will sell like hotcakes. The next version of the iPad will also come to Verizon, and will be accompanied by a major push by Apple to get the iPad into the business market.

Correct: I got this one right, but it wasn’t that bold a prediction…
The battle between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS will continue, but the Verizon iPhone will put a serious dent in Android’s growth.

Wrong: Android continues growing like gangbusters. But don’t think that means that Android is “winning.” Apple does not compete based on market share, they compete based on making the best products and making the most money selling them. On that front, Apple remains the key player. Given that Apple is using the 3GS to try and compete in the entry-level market, they are not ceding anything to Google. Android’s growth seems to be more driven by people trading in their dumbphones or featurephones for smartphones—just try and buy a cellphone that isn’t a smartphone these days, it’s not easy. And most of those cut-rate smartphones that the carriers are pushing run some variant of Android.
The SyFy Channel will stop airing real science fiction.

Correct: SyFy has a few decent shows that arguably qualify as science fiction (I’ve heard Warehouse 13 and Eureka are good), but is basically a dumping ground for B-movies, shitty reality shows, and wrestling. NBC/Universal have completed what former channel head Bonnie Hammer started in killing what made the network unique.
Global warming hysteria will officially jump the shark after 2011 sees record cold temperatures.

Correct, Sort Of: Winter 2011 was miserable, and Summer 2011 was not the scorcher that some were predicting. But despite even more leaked emails demonstrating that “climate science” has become an echo chamber, global warming hysteria has not gone away. That’s because global warming is less about science than it is about creating a quasi-religion, complete with all the trappings.
SpaceX will successfully dock a Falcon capsule to the International Space Station and will announce that they will be ready to bring tourists to the ISS before 2016.

Not Yet: But it looks like they will dock with the ISS early in 2012, and that 2016 date might be optimistic, but it’s within the realm of possibility.
The 3D movie trend won’t save Hollywood from declining box office figures and their own creative stagnation.

Correct: Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy knows no ends: now they’re re-releasing the same old crap, but this time in 3D! Kids, the extra D in the re-release of Star Wars: Episode I is for an extra dose of disappointment…

Wrapping Up

So, I didn’t do too badly on my predictions, although a lot of them were fairly obvious even back then. What I didn’t predict is notable: I wouldn’t have thought that this year would have seen the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Mohammar Qadafi, and Kim Jong-Il. I would not have imagined that the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit dealer would lead to a wave of revolution that would remake the Middle East. I wouldn’t have imagined in December 2010 that Newt Gingrich would have been a front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination (albeit briefly).

And sadly, I wouldn’t have predicted that Steve Jobs would leave us, even though it wasn’t that great a surprise. Genius is often fleeting.

What a long, strange year it has been—and who knows what 2012 may bring… but that won’t stop me from making another set of predictions for the next year…

Andy Stern’s Liberal Fascism

Andy Stern, the head of the SEIU and one of President Obama’s biggest supporters has a shockingly honest piece in The Wall Street Journal calling for the United States to mimic China’s model of state-run economic development. Say what you will about Stern’s piece, it’s probably the most honest description of where the American left wants this country to go.

Let’s ignore the fact that China, while having improved its human rights record somewhat, is still a single-party totalitarian society that routinely arrests political dissenters, engages in torture of political prisoners, and censors the free exchange of information. Even beyond all those horribles, China is no model for the United States.

Here’s what Stern has to say about China:

. . .I was part of a U.S.-China dialogue—a trip organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Center for American Progress—with high-ranking Chinese government officials, both past and present. For me, the tension resulting from the chorus of American criticism paled in significance compared to reading the emerging outline of China’s 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development.

Some Americans are drawing lessons from this. Last month, the China Daily quoted Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, as saying: “I think we have come to realize the ability to plan is exactly what is missing in America.” The article also noted that Robert Engle, who won a Nobel Prize in 2003 for economics, has said that while China is making five-year plans for the next generation, Americans are planning only for the next election.

There are times when I think that it’s hyperbole to accuse the left of being closet socialists, when that attack is over the top. Then I see something like this. Here is the head of one of the Democratic Party’s most important constituency, a friend and informal advisor to President Barack Obama, saying that America should start adopting a five-year plan. Stern doesn’t even try to hide his arguments, or finesse them as does Sinophile Thomas Friedman. He goes right out and says that America should emulate a country that is 100% controlled by the Communist Party.

Liberal Fascism Is Right

Stern’s argument is the same argument that has been made time and time again about totalitarian states. The phrase “Mussolini made the trains run on time” came from somewhere—and as Jonah Goldberg demonstrated in his important and utterly misunderstood book Liberal Fascism, the statist intelligentsia of the 1920s and 1930s saw Fascist Italy as a model for the rest of the world. Stern’s love letter to Communist China is in the same vein.

In the 1930s, American journalist Walter Duranty of The New York Times covered for the crimes of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and held Stalinism as a model for the West to follow. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his work. Stern is just following in Duranty’s footsteps.

Stern argues that free-market capitalism has failed, and that the state-run model as exemplified by China is superior. Anyone who believes that has some screws loose—China’s development is not a model for anyone, not even the Chinese. Yes, the Chinese have boosted their economy and are rapidly industrializing and becoming a 21st Century powerhouse. But their fortune is not due to their model of government. If anything, within my lifetime we are likely to see a catastrophic economic collapse unless China fundamentally reforms.

Clean energy vehicles? Look at China’s high speed rail system—the one held up as a model by Sinophiles like Andy Stern and Thomas Friedman. It is not only massively over-budget, but what has been completed is shoddily constructed and unsafe. This has already lead to fatal accidents and a reexamination of the whole project.

Environmental protection? The environmental ruin of China provides more evidence why the China model is not one to emulate. Beijing and other major Chinese cities are filled with smog, and the government has been attempting to hide the truth about how bad China’s air is from its own citizens. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam caused massive environmental and cultural damage, but the Chinese government steamrolled it through. There’s no Chinese equivalent of the Sierra Club to lobby against the government on projects, at least nothing with anywhere near the power of the American environmental lobby. Is that a model that Stern would like the U.S. to adopt?

Economic equality? China’s level of corruption is endemic, as Freedom House notes in its Index of Economic Freedom. Bribery is all too common in China at all levels. The Chinese system is a system where the politically well-connected receive the spoils, and the rest mire through. Now, for someone like Andy Stern, who is part of the politically well-connected set, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. But for those not part of the political elite, Chinese-style corruption is the antithesis of economic equality.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. China is rapidly industrializing in the way that the post-World War II Soviet Union rapidly industrialized. The Chinese government is not as totalitarian as the Soviets were, but the result will be the same. China can produce all the “five-year plans” that it wants—just as the Soviet Gosplan did for decades. But the 20th Century was filled with the littered husks of governments that tried and failed to execute state-run central planning and failed. Even the ones that didn’t practice Stalinism failed. They failed not because they weren’t good enough at central planning, they failed because central planning of an economy doesn’t work.

And let me make a bold prediction—within my lifetime the Chinese system will either substantially reform or end up in a messy collapse that sends ripple effects across the globe. In fact, I don’t think that prediction is particularly bold, because that is what has happened every time a state has embraced central economic planning.

This Is What They Actually Believe

All of this supports Jonah Goldberg’s thesis in Liberal Fascism—not that American liberals want to strap on jackboots and invade Poland, but that American liberals have an ideological blind spot that causes them to embrace state control of the economy, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism. What liberals like Andy Stern miss is that the Chinese government has the power to implement “five-year plans” because it also has the power to arrest dissidents, attempt to culturally eradicate the Tibetan people, and censor the free expression of its citizens. Once you give the government virtually unfettered power to control the economic affairs of the people, you’ve given them virtually unfettered power to control everything else.

That’s the lesson of the 20th Century, the one that American liberals never seem to have grasped. You cannot get to Bismarck’s welfare state without eventually getting to Adolph Hitler. You cannot get a Mussolini that makes the trains run on time without getting a Mussolini that oppresses the people. You cannot have a Chinese economy without emulating the bad parts of China either. Political power in a controlled market is a zero-sum game—every bit of power and authority you give to the government has to be taken from somewhere else.

That’s why America should not emulate China. America should start emulating America. Our Founding Fathers figured out, centuries ago, that the best way to have a successful and prosperous country was to unleash the people and allow them to flourish. The Founding Fathers didn’t fully understand this concept at the time, but they got it right.

Stern argues that free-market capitalism is failing America. Bullshit. What is failing in America is the very model that Stern wants—a system where the government controls ever more functions of the economy. Over the last few decades the size and scope of government has grown at an almost exponential rate—but has life gotten better because of it? What parts of the economy are the biggest messes? We have an education system that’s a basket case and is harming the future of this country. The education system is controlled almost entirely by the government, either directly or indirectly. Our healthcare system is a mess. Who’s the biggest power in healthcare? It’s Uncle Sam, through Medicare and Medicaid and a whole host of other programs. Our financial system has lurched from one disaster to another. And contrary to the spin, the financial fatcats by and large supported President Obama and have been getting rich off of his largesse since he was elected.

No wonder Stern wants more of the same. His union has gotten fatter and more powerful under President Obama, and if the United States emulated China, Andy Stern would be even more powerful.

China is no model for the United States. China is no model for China. The fact that one of the most powerful figures in American liberalism in the Democratic Party would openly embrace central planning in such stark terms is shocking—even though it’s been clear for some time that’s what they believe in private.