Hypocrisy, thy name is Barack

You may have heard, or heard about, this Barack Obama ad criticizing John McCain for McCain’s opposition to requiring government to buy American products.

Interesting, isn’t it, that Obama is criticizing McCain for his position against mandating buying American products when there’s one American product Obama refuses to purchase — American oil. Obama’s (and his congressional predecessors’) stubborn refusal to drill for oil in this country has helped make gas prices higher than they otherwise would be, helping lead to the demise of GM’s Janesville plant. (The more supply, the lower the price. You know that, but this and other Obama assertions make me wonder if Obama skipped economics in college, particularly, in this case, the class that discussed competitive advantage.)

As it is, the concept of buying American is a patriotic-sounding canard. (I’d be curious about what Obama’s well-heeled supporters drive.) Apparently Obama drives a Chrysler 300, which is manufactured in Brampton, Ont., which, last time I checked, is not in our 50 states. (Perhaps Ontario is in Obama’s 57 states.)

Buy-American government mandates pose a problem for governments given that the American option may be more expensive, assuming an American option actually exists. The police car following you is likely to be a Ford Crown Victoria, which is built in St. Thomas, Ont., or a Chevrolet Impala, which is built in Oshawa, Ont., or a Dodge Charger, which is built alongside Obama’s 300 in Brampton. Your favorite municipality could purchase a Chevy Suburban or Tahoe, but GM is closing its Janesville plant, leaving Suburban and Tahoe production in Arlington, Texas, and Silao, Mexico. If a police department wants to buy American by all definitions, the department’s choices are a Ford Explorer, built in Louisville and St. Louis, or Ford Expedition, built in Wayne, Mich.; neither, however, are rated for pursuits.

Our driveway features the flip side of this issue. (Not because of police cars parked in it, of course.) My Subaru Outback, as well as its predecessor, was built in Lafayette, Ind. Our Honda Odyssey was built in Alliston, Ont. (Odysseys are now also built in Lincoln, Ala.)

What about police motorcycles, the subject of this pseudocontroversy? Kawasaki used to build police motorcycles in Lincoln, Neb., but stopped in 2005, leaving Harley–Davidson (and, now, its Buell brand) as the only manufacturer to build police motorcycles in the U.S. Some police agencies have determined that Harleys are too large for urban police operations. Moreover, the police motorcycle market is a pretty small market, at least up here in the land of the 14-month-long winter.

So which is it? Is my Outback an American car because a Japanese manufacturer pays Americans to build it? Is Obama’s 300 an American car because a U.S.-based manufacturer pays Canadians to build it? Moreover, is it more important to buy American, or buy what the government agency needs, regardless of which company produced it or where it was built?

As with many other issues, Obama hasn’t been consistent on trade during this campaign. He pledged to reopen negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement, but now has backed off.

McCain has consistently supported free trade. During a Senate debate in 2005, he said, “I firmly object to all ‘Buy America’ restrictions, as they represent gross examples of protectionist trade policy. From a philosophical point of view, I oppose such policies because free trade is an important element in improving relations among all nations, which then improves the security of our nation. Furthermore, as a fiscal conservative, I want to ensure our government gets the best deal for taxpayers and with a ‘Buy American’ restriction, that cannot be guaranteed.”

Few reputable economists (or, if you like, only economists employed by unions) oppose free trade. In addition to the obvious benefits of choice and price competition to consumers, free trade benefits workers too. Not only does protectionism not benefit consumers; it doesn’t benefit presidential candidates either; the main protectionist candidates of the primary season, Democrat Hillary Clinton (whose husband was much better on trade) and Republican Mike Huckabee, aren’t running anymore, are they? The candidacies of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Pat Buchanan, H. Ross Perot and John Kerry similarly failed.

One other oddity about Obama’s ad, as WTMJ radio’s Charlie Sykes pointed out Tuesday: The ad repeats one of McCain’s best lines from his campaign so far: “Not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I’ll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.”

President Obama?

On Monday, I pointed out that to say that Barack Obama, who visits Kaukauna today, is preferable to Hillary Clinton is not the same thing as saying that Barack Obama is preferable to John McCain.

There are, in fact, at least two gigantic reasons to not vote for Obama — his inexperience and his overreach. His campaign is a curious mix of naïveté and arrogance, as typified by his bizarre assertion a week ago suggesting that, by his clinching the Democratic nomination for the presidency, “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Obama has been in the U.S. Senate for not even one full term. Before that, he was an Illinois state senator for eight years. Unlike, say, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Obama has zero experience in anything approximating managerial-level experience in government. Obama’s most significant executive experience, in fact, is his presidential campaign, which, once you look past the hype, has been something less than smooth or original, as seen in how Obama handled the controversy over his former pastor.

That controversy, incidentally, gets to the question of personal judgment (a persistent issue, you may recall, with the last Democrat in the White House), which is a subset of the experience issue. It is inconceivable that Obama could have sat in his church for 20 years, heard the Rev. Jeremiah “God damn America!” Wright, had his children in the same church, and then claim that, well, he wasn’t paying attention. Had any pastor of my church said something like that, either he would have left, or I would have left, and it wouldn’t have taken 20 years to figure out that Wright’s comments are inappropriate from a pulpit.

Obama not only has no legislative record, but his claim that he can bring people together is a crock. No one with as liberal a legislative record as Obama can prove that he has any interest in bipartisanship, unless his definition of “bipartisan” involves Republicans’ caving in to whatever Obama and Democrats want. (Which could happen if the predictions of a GOP Congressional disaster in November come true.) And, whether Obama likes it or not, his wife Michelle has some explaining to do for her apparent shame over being an American. (The precedent that, yes, presidents' spouses do matter was set by Obama's last opponent in the Democratic primary race.)

Who are Obama’s supporters? According to Project Vote Smart, they are the left-leaning National Farmers Union, Citizens for Tax Justice, Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants (an anti-jail group), the National Education Association, Campaign for America’s Future (the words “left wing” should be in its title), Comprehensive Sustainable US Population (which claims that “many higher costs, inconveniences and hardships, inequities, and lowered quality of life and standard of living are due to people longages more than to resource shortages”), Citizens for Global Solutions, State PIRGs Working Together, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the AFL–CIO, the Service Employees International Union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, American Federation of Government Employees, Americans for Democratic Action, the Alliance for Retired Americans (an anti-Social Security reform group), and the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (a “non-partisan, non-profit think tank providing ideas that fuel the progressive movement”).

On the other side, there is the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform, FreedomWorks, the National Tax Limitation Committee, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Business, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, the American Land Rights Association and Citizens Against Government Waste. The only remotely business-friendly group that gave Obama even a C grade was USA Engage, a pro-trade group.

The National Journal gave Obama a liberal composite score of 95.5 — higher than anyone in Congress — and a conservative composite score of 4.5 — lower than anyone in Congress. That doesn’t appear bipartisan, postpartisan, inclusive or unifying. Bill Clinton looks like a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy compared with Obama, who seems to be patterning his views on Clinton’s Democratic predecessor in the White House, Jimmy Carter.

Obama is a native of Illinois, one of the two states of the U.S. famous for endemic corruption (in Illinois’ case, bipartisan corruption) in state government. We have read quite a bit already about Antoin “Tony” Rezko, fundraiser for five Obama political races who earlier this year was convicted of 16 corruption charges and faces a fraud trial next year. The fact that Obama’s Democratic primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, no stranger to corruption herself, brought up all of Obama’s weaknesses during the recent campaign doesn’t make her charges less valid.

Moreover, if Obama’s words are to be believed, he appears to be ready to use the courts to enact revenge upon his White House predecessors upon arriving at the White House, including, yes, war crimes trials. As American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson puts it, “This kind of change — putting your predecessors on trial for their conduct of policy — may not be what most Americans really want or expect from someone with Obama’s gauzy rhetoric of unity. But unity has a dark side in the hands of people who regard their opponents as criminals. America has two centuries-plus of history lacking the totalitarian practice of jailing the predecessors when a new president takes office.” And Obama and his supporters better realize that the next Republican president will have all the incentive in the world to do the same thing to his or her Democratic predecessors, permanently poisoning our politics.

I'd love it, by the way, if a Democrat running for president grasped the fact that free markets are far superior to government control, because free markets and freedom are too important to be entrusted to one political party. As First Trust Portfolios chief economist Brian Wesbury put it in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, “In contrast to what some people seem to believe, having the government take over the health-care system is not change. It's just a culmination of previous moves by government. And the areas with the worst problems today are areas that have the most government interference — education, health care and energy. … In the midst of all the natural change, the last thing the U.S. economy needs is more government involvement, whether it's called change or not.”

This is the third, and I’ll bet not the last, time I’ll bring up the sage words of Ben Stein, whose news bulletin points out that we are in fact responsible for our own lives, not Obama nor John McCain nor any other past or future presidential candidate. This Barack Obama Superstar thing that seems to be going on among the most gushing of his admirers is going to leave a lot of disappointed people in its wake if Obama is elected president. Every president, you see, is a disappointment because, at some point, every president (for that matter, every presidential candidate) compromises. Neither Obama nor McCain nor Bob Barr nor Ralph Nader nor anyone else will actually “give us change, offer us hope, make our breath sweeter, make us more prosperous, more productive, happier, better educated, and healthier if we cast our votes for him or her.”

Cynical? Yes. Reality? Yes.

And take Slick Willie with you

Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton pulled the plug on her presidential bid ... we think.

To say that Barack Obama is preferable to Hillary Clinton is not the same thing as saying that Barack Obama is preferable to John McCain. (More on that point Thursday.) However, here's hoping that Clinton's defeat marks the end of the Clintons as a political force in this country.

The most important letter in the word "Clinton" is the letter I. This space has long advocated a more cynical view toward politicians, but everything negative you believe about politicians can be seen in the Clintons. Though politicians are stereotypically said to be willing to do anything to get elected or re-elected, the Clintons are willing to do anything to get elected. Remember the "permanent campaign"? Bill Clinton's 1990s complaints about the "politics of personal destruction" were simply the echo chamber throwing his own strategy back at him. The Clintons attracted scandal (Whitewater, the Travel Office, various bimbo eruptions, etc., etc., etc.) like magnets attract metal, despite all their media sycophants who parroted off-the-record comments about how brilliant Bill's politics were, and if anything, it's gotten worse with Hillary's chief political advisor. (For Bill’s reaction to that devastating Vanity Fair piece, read this.) Had I suggested before Saturday that Hillary Clinton was going to bolt the Democratic Party and run as a third-party candidate for president, you might have been able to think of valid reasons for her to not do that, but you probably wouldn't have been surprised at such a self-centered move.

It's become obvious that the Clinton magic is gone, if in fact it really existed. Let's remember that Bill Clinton's first two years in office went so well that the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress after the 1994 elections, never to get them back during Clinton's term in office. A large reason that happened is, of course, Hillary Clinton's health care plan, which even Democrats in Congress could see wasn't going to work. Bill Clinton was such a popular president that he failed to get a majority vote during either of his elections, even though aided in his first election by a third-party candidate who siphoned more votes from George H.W. Bush than he did from Clinton, and even though aided in his second election by a Republican Party that essentially conceded the election right after it selected a candidate. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who was successful in getting his vice president, George H.W. Bush, elected, Clinton could not get his vice president, Al Gore, elected. (Thankfully for all of us.)

Clinton's successes as president, beginning with the North American Free Trade Agreement, were largely due to Republicans, who prevented him from trying much more stupid ideas when they took over Congress. The canard that Clinton was responsible for the economy we all enjoyed through most of the 1990s comes from people who don't grasp that American business, not Clinton, fueled the 1990s expansion. (The only economic expansion Clinton fueled was among lawyers.)

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, was simply disastrous as a candidate. She has none of her husband's positives (his ability to appear as though he cares about the person to whom he's speaking, his interest in finding common ground with selected political enemies), and most (obviously not all) of her husband's weaknesses. The same person who touted the (unconstitutional) assault weapons ban during her husband's presidency suddenly became a Second Amendment fan because it suited her candidacy. Recall how often her "accent" changed during the campaign? Recall those crocodile tears in New Hampshire?

What's worse is that Hillary Clinton abandoned the things that made Bill Clinton less objectionable than most other Democrats — mainly free trade and support of investment-related tax cuts — positions, incidentally, that Bill Clinton had as a primary candidate. Had Clinton gotten elected (and note that first paragraph), she would have been well to the left of her husband when he was president.

Hillary Clinton is, interestingly, the Democratic version of Richard Nixon — a person uncomfortable in her own skin. As author Camille Paglia puts it:

Though she would specialize in women's and children's issues, Hillary's public statements have often betrayed an ambivalence about women who chose a non-feminist path. "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies," she sneered during Bill's 1992 presidential campaign. Then, defending her husband against the claims of a 12-year affair by Gennifer Flowers, Hillary snapped: "I'm not sittin' here like some little woman, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette" - a sally that boomeranged when Hillary had to make an abject apology. The irony is that Hillary had offended the very group of stoical, put-upon, working-class women who are now proving to be her staunchest supporters. ...

The argument, therefore, that Hillary's candidacy marks the zenith of modern feminism is specious. Feminism is not well served by her surrogates' constant tactic of attributing all opposition to her as a function of entrenched sexism. Well into her second term as a U.S. Senator, Hillary lacks a single example of major legislative achievement. Her career has consisted of fundraising, meet-and-greets and speeches around the world expressing support for women's rights.

It is the lament of the loser for Hillary Clinton's supporters to claim that she lost because of sexism. The Democratic primary race was pretty much the Democratic Party at its identity politics zenith, appealing to the aggrieved instead of to the actual voter, who may be facing economic strains, but who will not be well served by positions within the mainstream of the Democratic primary season such as universal health care (imagine your health care being provided by the Internal Revenue Service or the Division of Motor Vehicles). Voters are willing to vote for a woman for president; not enough voters were willing to vote for that woman for president, particularly with the Boeing 747 of baggage the Clintons bring with them. (Go back to that link and note the irony of complaints of "blatant sexism" by the creator of Emily's List, which raises money for women political candidates, as long as they're Democratic women who favor abortion rights.)

Obama should choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate only if he wants to guarantee losing. I think he's smarter than that, but he may not be. The Clintons are not only bad people, they are like vampires, so if Obama wins in November, expect to see one or both of the Clintons in other places where they can do actual damage to our country — the Supreme Court or the United Nations, for instance.

The better thing for our country would be for Hillary to announce she's not running for re-election to the U.S. Senate and for the Clintons and their Sherman's-march-to-Atlanta politics to go away. The fact that every campaign for president and most campaigns for U.S. senator or governor now look like a years-long slog through a mud bog is the Clintons' real legacy.

Official photo from HillaryClinton.com.