Two weeks ago, I wondered if Obama’s Big Jobs Speech would be, like his other big speeches, full of sound and fury, specifying nothing. Yesterday, in a similar vein, Jim Geraghty quipped, “Wait, a ‘major speech’? I thought he promised a ‘very specific plan.’”  That blogger was responding to an USA Today piece on the president’s claim that creating jobs was “our urgent mission.”

So, as the president prepares that speech, I’m wondering whom he’s consulting, representatives of left-of-center interest groups whose resources he needs to win re-election, political consultants who have poll-tested various ideas or economists who have theories of how markets work.

Perhaps, he would better to consult instead with economic historians, asking them to study each major economic downturn over the past century or so, perhaps going back to the Panic of 1893, and see how the respective presidents responded to those recessions  – and to see how markets responded to those policies, whether the economy grew in response and whether or not jobs were created.

Instead of consulting economists who have put forward various theories of how markets works, he would to wise to seek out individuals who have studied what actually happened.  But, methinks, alas, Mr. Obama is too dependent on various big government theories; he just believes they work.  Seems he puts more stock in his theories than in the actual results of government policy.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  John the Egyptian offers:

The liberal narrative always transcends reality. Liberals are to be judged upon their intents, their hopes, and their empathy; not on their results.

Indeed.

As I drive to Colorado to celebrate my father’s upcoming birthday, I have been listening to Ron Chernow’s wonderful biography of George Washington.  Last night, when crossing Nevada in the dead of night, but with the temperature fluctuating from the mid-90s to low 100s, I learned of the trials that great man faced when first taking charge of the Continental Army, then little more than a ragtag collection of  state militias, in 1775.

Among other things, the then-green Commander-in-Chief was concerned about the spiritual welfare of his men.  From his “General Orders” of July 4, 1775 (one year before that day would become the most significant one on an American’s calendar):

The General . . . requires and expects, of all Officers, and Soldiers, not engaged on actual duty, a punctual attendance on divine Service, to implore the blessings of heaven upon the means used for our safety and defence.

Wonder how the ACLU would have reacted had it been around at the time.

Contrast the father of our country with the the current Mayor of New York City:  ”New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will not reconsider his decision to exclude clergy from the ceremony marking 10 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, a spokesman said Friday.“

Until recently, when I read about the Revolutionary era, I devoted most of my attention to my three favorite Founders, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, studying less the events which inspired them to rebel, focusing instead on the ideals which inspired them to establish our republic.

In recent years, I have expanded that list of favorites to include not just the father of our country, but also a man dubbed the “First American“, Benjamin Franklin.  And in studying these two great men, I considered not just their actions during and after the American Revolution, but also in the period which lead up to it.  As I read (and listened via Books on CD) to their biographies I learned why both Washington and Franklin, once loyal British subjects, broke with the “mother country.”

Fighting in the French and Indian War, Washington learned that a “colonial” could not advance in the ranks as could a counterpart born in Britain, particularly one born there wealth and privilege.  One’s birth, not one’s merit, determined the rank to which he could rise — and the leadership posts he could assume.

Building his own business from scratch, Franklin learned that in a “Proprietary” colony, there were two sets of laws, one which applied to certain families, the other to everyone else.

They believed that the law should make no distinctions based on class.

Yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal, Harvey Golub, a former chairman and CEO of American Express, responding to Warren Buffett and the president, critiqued the current American tax system and showed that it now privileges certain favored “classes”:

. . . the extraordinarily complex tax code is replete with favors to various interest groups and industries, favors granted by politicians seeking to retain power. Mortgage interest deductions support the private housing industry at the expense of renters. (more…)

You know how Democrats was nostalgic about the Clinton years when, they claim, the Arkansas Democrat’s economic policies lifted us out of a lingering recession and the charismatic Southerner single-handedly balanced the budget.  There are a number of problems with this narrative, the first being that the recession ended before Clinton took office.  He was just lucky that it appeared to linger through the 1992 campaign.

Now, to be sure, I do give the Democrat credit for learning from his mistakes and his party’s setbacks at the ballot box.  After the 1994 elections, he pivoted to the center and worked with congressional Republicans to enact real reforms and balance the budget.  Indeed, the unemployment rate in November 1992 was 7.4%, down from its peak of 7.8% in June of that year.

There’s another thing to bear in mind when talking about Bill Clinton’s economic policies.  Senate Republicans blocked his “stimulus”. From the April 22, 1993 New York Times:

Senate Republicans killed President Clinton’s economic stimulus program today, maintaining their filibuster until Democrats surrendered and agreed to limit the bill to $4 billion for extended unemployment benefits.

Mr. Clinton’s first serious legislative defeat was marked by complaints from Democrats in the Senate and the White House. But Bob Dole, the Senate minority leader, was satisfied that the Republicans had shown that they deserved to be taken seriously. He avoided gloating, and promised occasional cooperation with the President.

A brief, harsh outburst from Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who heads the Senate Appropriations Committee, served as the eulogy for Mr. Clinton’s original $19.5 billion measure, which was proposed in February.

Emphasis added.  $19.5 billion dollars ($31.4 billion in today’s dollars), chump change to the guy who has Clinton’s old job.  Does look like Bob Dole actually did some good while in the Senate.  Had Republicans succeeded in filibustering the Illinois Democrat’s stimulus plan, we might have seen a less anemic recovery.

Do hope the president recalls that Clinton’s success may well have derived, in part, from his failure to pass his “stimulus.”

I’ve been listening to Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington in the car.  A number of things struck me about this great man who faced much adversity in the early days of the French & Indian War.  Chernow points out how although the young officer in the British army made some, well, bone-headed military decisions, like establishing Fort Necessity, a frontier outpost near French lines “poorly situated to withstand and incursion,” he, by and large, learned from those mistakes.

The current occupant of the office he would be the first to hold seems to lack that ability.  As the fetching Stephen Green observes:

Obama can’t recognize mistakes — even though the evidence is as plain as last month’s hideous jobs report. He will continue to demand that reality conform to his theories, no matter what damage he does to this country. He doesn’t doge, he doesn’t weave — he keeps pursuing failure in the face of failure.

(Via Instapundit.)  Even after the failure of his “stimulus”, with the depletion of our coffers and the diminution of our nation’s once good credit, the Democrat still calls out for more spending* and fails to recognize that the regulations his administration has increased have reduced those he identified as those “produce most of the new jobs in this country“ to hire new employees.

The president’s policies haven’t worked.  A real leader would understand that his goal was not to demonstrate the rightness of his approach, but to shift course and find an approach that did.

George Washington did that.  And because of that capacity, he won an unwinnable war and fathered a nation that offered opportunity for tens of millions, inspired others yearning to be free in distant corners of the globe and provided a level of prosperity that few had even imagined.

Our nation achieved all this in large part because George Washington learned form his mistakes.  Would it that Barack Obama could follow his predecessor’s example.

* (more…)

And that was back in ’69.

The last four times the federal government ran surpluses, Republicans ran the federal legislature.

Today in 1993, President Clinton signed one of the most landmark anti-gay rights laws ever passed in the United States of America — the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law.

Gay leftist revisionist history types like to blame Republicans in Congress for *making* Clinton sign a law.

FACT: Democrats controlled the US House under Bill Clinton until 1995

FACT: THE leading elected official advocating for outright ban of gays in military and then DADT was US Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA)

FACT: Bill Clinton ran radio ads in his 1996 re-election campaign heralding his support of DADT and the Defense of Marriage Act

Facts are stubborn things.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

“Clearly, Jefferson’s own conception of individual freedom,” Joseph J. Ellis wrote in his study of the Virginian, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson in the decade after Ronald Reagan’s presidency and before the rise of the New American Tea Party, “was more restricted than modern day notions”:

His vision was essentially negative:  freedom from encroachments by either church or state.  It was all a piece with his antig0vernment and therefore incompatible with our* contemporary conviction about personal entitlements, whether it be for a decent standard of living, a comfortable retirement or adequate health care, all of which depend on precisely the kind of government sponsorship he would have found intrusive.  His was the freedom to be left alone, which has more in common with twentieth-century claims to privacy rights than more aggressive claims to political or economic power.

That vision closely parallels my own — and I would daresay that of many conservatives today, including a certain Mr. R. Reagan and many who join the various Tea Party protests.

* (more…)

“America needs you/Harry Truman,” sang the band Chicago in 1974.”  They added later that the straight-talking Missourian knew “what to do.”‘

Over at Powerline, Steven Hayward paraphrases “Those Were the Days,” the theme song to the 1970s hit sit-com, “All in the Family,” so suggest that given Herbert Hoover’s predilection for government solutions to the Great Depression, we could instead use a man like Warren Harding again.  Hoover, he reminded up, citing Dan Mitchell and others

. . . increased government spending 47 percent in his one term, raised taxes, and signed off on the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff, which first caused Franklin Roosevelt to run against Hoover’s profligacy, but later caused Rex Tugwell to say later that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”

Turns out that to confront the recession he “inherited” (to borrow a word) from his predecessor, the Ohio Republican

. . . cut government spending sharply and rapidly (by almost 50 percent), began cutting tax rates across the board, and allowed asset values and wages to adjust freely as fast as possible.  Harding’s administration, Paul Johnson observed, “was the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-fairemethods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level . . .  By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again.”  (more…)

When I learned as a young man that I had been born on Betty Ford’s birthday, I saw it is a good sign.  I always admired the class with which she handled her role as the nation’s first lady, taking over the very year she expected her husband would retire from politics.  And she set an example by her public battles, first with breast cancer, then later, after her husband left politics, with her addiction to alcohol and pain killers.

And she used what she learned in her own struggle to help others, helping found in 1982 in the Betty Ford Center, a Alcohol Addiction and Drug Addiction Treatment in Rancho Mirage, California.  That accomplished woman died on Friday Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage.

Former President George H. W. Bush called her “a wonderful wife and mother; a great friend; and a courageous First Lady. . . . No one confronted life’s struggles with more fortitude or honesty, and as a result, we all learned from the challenges she faced.”

And she always spoke her mind.  Yet, her class, along with her husband’s Midwestern decency, helped the nation recover from Watergate.  As first lady, she seemed to rise above politics.  People may have attacked her husband, but they admired her, her simple elegance, her pleasant demeanor.

Deeply saddened by the news, the newly nonagenarian Nancy Reagan reminded us that her fellow first lady “was Jerry Ford’s strength through some very difficult days in our country’s history“.  Indeed, the woman born Elizabeth Bloomer may well have been the only first lady to have delivered her husband’s concession speech.  That good man had lost his voice, barnstorming the country in the final days of the 1976 campaign.

They were married for 58 years until the 38th president’s death in December 2006

She will be missed, but her example will inspire all of us.

At the capital area Pride festivities last month, a gay libertarian wanting to see some symbol to remind us that not all gay people toe the statist agenda of the national gay groups, that some of us value freedom and just want the state to leave us alone to live our lives as we choose.  To that end, he wants to craete a Gadsden Pride flag those free-loving homosexuals like us to hoist.

You can buy just such a T-shirt now at Cafe Press. If you’re interested in helping support this enterprising individual in his plan to produce such flags, please e-mail him. The greater the order he makes, the less cost it will be for each individual flag.

For Jefferson’s congenital suspicion of Hamilton’s cavalier way with budgets merely hinted at his much deeper suspicion that Hamilton’s real intention was to increase the national debt in order to justify expanding federal power over the economy, including the power to tax, manipulate credit rates and establish all the accoutrements of a modern nation-state along English lines.  (On this score he was not entirely wrong.)  Debt, then, was the key device that made the whole Hamiltonian scheme possible.

Emphasis addeed.

Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

While it was the force of arms (under the shrewd guidance of George Washington that secure the independence we celebrate today, it is the force of ideas preserved in the document declaring that independence that endures, ideas which remain as potent today as they were 235 years ago on a humid summer’s day in Philadelphia, PA.

As we remember those powerful words which served to sever us from a King (and Parliament) who denied his American subjects the rights those inhabiting his sceptered isle had been acquiring piecemeal for centuries, we recall also how hesitant was Mr. Jefferson to write them.  He had little idea then that his words would come to define a nation and inspire men and women suffering under the lash of tyranny around the world for centuries after he was all but dragooned into writing them.

At the time, writes Joseph J. Ellis in his insightful study of the Virginian, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, ”no one . . . regarded the drafting of the Declaration as a major responsibility or honor.  [John] Adams, like [Richard Henry] Lee, would be needed to lead the debate on the floor.  That was considered the crucial arena.”  In that arena, Adams excelled, delivering a three-hour address that exceeded all expectations and moved many of his colleagues.

But, because Adams spoke extemporaneously in an era without recording equipment, his address, powerful at the time has been lost to the ages.  Without his words, Congress may never have ratified Mr. Jefferson’s.  The Virginian even called his Massachusetts colleague “the Colossus of Independence.”

(more…)

When a friend questioned why we honored the military on July 4 when the day was about “about US independence and the wonderful aspects of the American experiment,” I replied:

Well, without the military, there’s be no US independence nor any American experiment for that matter. Remember, he was General Washington before he was President Washington. It was his success on the battlefield that made him first in war so he could later become both first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.

The martial leadership that General Washington showed, both in achieving the victories which followed the crossing depicted above and in managing the defeats his armies faced against a better equipped and trained military than his rag-tag militia not only earned him the acclaim he enjoyed among his compatriots, but also allowed our nation to fulfill the promise that Thomas Jefferson so beautifully articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the promise Mr. Jefferson’s fellows in the Continental Congress ratified 235 years ago today.

I remember this footage like it was yesterday. It is vintage Reagan, vintage 80s, and vintage America.

Happy Birthday USA!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)>

When Michelle Bachmann makes a mistake when talking about American history, it makes national news. And the mainstream media are beside themselves. Meanwhile, many of my liberal friends rush in with Facebook posts to show what a dunce she is.

When, however, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid makes such a mistake, in apparently prepared remarks on the Senate floor no less (as opposed to Bachmann’s slip-up in an unscripted interview), well, then the media pay it no heed, attributing his error, not to ignorance, but to human imperfection.

(They do hold Republicans to higher standards now don’t they?)

Take a gander at the clip below, starting at 0:51.

Reid is claiming that congressional Democrats balanced the budget. Problem is is that the only Congresses to pass balanced budgets in the 1990s were Republicans ones.  Unlike Bachmann, Harry Reid is not just wrong about history, but about history in which he played a part.  He served in Congress in the 1990s when the Republican majority balanced the federal budget.  Mrs. Bachmann wasn’t around in the founding era.

Jim Hoft who alerted me to Reid’s attempt to rewrite history has the details.

Daniel Mitchell, one of my favorite Fellows at one of my favorite think tanks (which I heartily encourage you to support) takes Andrew Sullivan to the woodshed today for suggesting that Herbert Hoover wanted to reduce the burden of government spending:

I went to the Historical Tables of the Budget and looked up the annual spending data. As you can see from the chart, it turns out that Hoover increased government spending by 47 percent in just four years (if you adjust for falling prices, as Russ Roberts did at Cafe Hayek, it turns out that Hoover increased government spending by more than 50 percent). . . .

Sullivan’s mistake is understandable. The historical analysis and understanding of the Great Depression is woefully inadequate, and millions of people genuinely believe that Hoover was an early version of Ronald Reagan.

The historical record shows that Herbert Hoover was a big spender and the stock market crash that occurred under his watch (not, as Joe Biden has suggested, under FDR’s) led to a prolonged downturn.

When in the White House, Ronald Reagan, even facing off against a big-spending Speaker of the House, did his utmost to hold the line of federal spending.  And the economy boomed.  Perhaps, the incumbent president would do well to emulate the Gipper instead of following in Herbert Hoover’s footsteps.

Via Instapundit.

* (more…)

Yesterday, two of my favorite blogger/pundits, Glenn Reynolds and Michael Barone, linked a post where Walter Russell Mead compared the incumbent chief executive not just to the worst president of many of our lifetimes, but also to the man considered by many the worst president of the century just concluded, Herbert Hoover. That big-government Republican . . .

. . . had long been known as a leading progressive, and in the face of the Depression he was ready to countenance a significant expansion of the government’s role. His Reconstruction Finance Corporation would be taken over by FDR; it lent money to distressed companies in an effort to jump start the economy. He proposed the creation of a federal Department of Education; he was willing to countenance significant budget deficits and supported important public works projects (like Boulder Dam) as a way of stimulating employment and rebuilding confidence in the economy. . . .

With great intelligence and serious goodwill, both men set about to address the most important issues facing the country and the world — only to find that their chosen remedies failed one by one. . . . (more…)

If Bill Clinton did not have Newt Gingrich to play off and work with, he would not have been as successful a domestic policy president as he was. In many ways, the Democrat flailed around until Republicans won Congress in 1994.

Did Gingrich learn anything in their exchanges which would enable him to craft a consensus domestic policy as Clinton did? Does he have the political skills to work with Congress and appeal to the public?

Every Memorial Day as I try to craft a post to remember those who gave their lives so that we might be free, I find myself struggling for words.  How can one man use language to convey the power of other men’s deeds, those who made the greatest sacrifice, not just for their own families, but for their country.  Particularly in this day of an all-volunteer military, we are all humbled by their sacrifice as we’re grateful for what they accomplished through that sacrifice.

Today I recall the youthful braggadocio of one of the first patriots to give his life for our freedom, Nathan Hale who regretted that he had but “one life to lose for my country” at a time when his country wasn’t even five months old.  How many men (and women) in the ensuing 235 years have recalled Hale’s bold statement as they set out to fight for his, for their, for our country, knowing that they too may have to lose their life for its cause to triumph.

And that is true courage, knowing that they might have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

There are signs, Walter Russell Mead writes,”that we are aiming to repeat a compromise of that kind [made after Vietnam] when it comes to the war in Iraq.”  ”Regardless of the merits of the war, those who did honorable service in it or laid down their lives at their country’s call, deserve our respect and our thanks.”

Those who opposed the war and those who supported it can unite in tribute to the loyalty, the courage and the sacrifice of those who served there.

That is something, but it is not enough.  The Americans who served, suffered and died in Iraq — and who still serve there today — changed the world and won a great and a difficult victory.  No account of their service, no commemoration of the dead that ignores or conceals this vital truth is enough.

Read the whole thing.  (H/t:  Instapundit).  It wasn’t just on battlefields in Iraq where American soldiers changed the world by winning a great and difficult victory.   (more…)