2008 was no realignment

Adding considerable luster to the achievement of the Founding Fathers in building success and stability in the infant Republic is the fact that five of our first seven Presidents not only won and served out two terms but also departed office popular enough to insure the election of approved successors. What was achieved by five of the first seven has eluded all but four of the eighteen men elected President since 1900. Only Theodore Roosevelt (1908), Calvin Coolidge (1928), Franklin Roosevelt (1948-posthumously), and Ronald Reagan (1988) left office with sufficient popularity to effect the election of their chosen successors.

Any hope George W. Bush had of being the fifth President since 1900 to see his party win the White House three consecutive times was decisively crushed last November 4th. Instead he becomes the sixth president since 1900 to see his party driven from the White House, losers in two consecutive Congressional election cycles, and himself under a cloud of immense unpopularity. Thus W. joins Hoover, Truman, Johnson, Nixon and Carter.

Of the initial five history has largely restored the reputation of Truman; LBJ and Nixon have made only slight recovery; and Hoover and Carter are generally viewed as beyond redemption. Some time must pass before History instructs us how to think about George W. Bush.

Beyond the great distinction of becoming our nation’s first African -American President, Barrack Obama also joins FDR and LBJ as the only Democrats since 1900 to win the Presidency in a landslide.

In what Yogi Berra called “déjà vu all over again” the punditocracy is now proclaiming fundamental political realignment and the descent of the GOP, into permanent minority status.

In 1964 when LBJ crushed Goldwater many pundits opined that the Republican Party might like the Whigs disappear altogether. Four years later the GOP was in the White House and Democrats in chaos.

In 1972 when Nixon won forty-nine states and McGovern just one, everybody was reading Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority and saying that just as the Civil War had destroyed the Democratic Party in the 19th century, the Viet Nam War had destroyed it in the 20th. Four years later the Dems were back in the White House and the Republicans were in chaos.

In 1988 following three consecutive landslide Presidential defeats many Democrats thought their party had to be reinvented by jettisoning liberalism. Four years after the Democrats were back in the White House and liberalism was very much alive and well.

Finally in 2004 after consecutive Presidential victories and a remarkable three straight victories in Congressional election cycles Republicans were hailing Karl Rove as the Architect of a permanent GOP majority. Four years later -well, we all know what happened in 2006 and 2008.

So, what does all this tell us about American politics?

First, and foremost things can change mighty fast. It is extremely unwise to read too much into even the most stunning partisan triumphs. The American people will punish most severely even those men and parties they have extravagantly affirmed just a few years before.

Second, electoral landslides happen frequently; genuine political realignments occur very, very rarely.

Fully half (13 of 27) of the Presidential elections since 1900 have resulted in landslides.

Yet only twice in our entire history have we seen full-blown political realignment and it required the massive trauma of the Civil War and the Great Depression to trigger those.

Finally the margin between victory and defeat even in a landslide (usually defined as six or more percentage points) is very narrow. If even one voter in twenty voted the “other way” Obama’s landslide becomes a decisive victory for McCain.

Two thirds of the electorate is pretty fixed in their partisan attachment. It is the loosely bonded or independent third in the middle that decides all elections. If just one in seven of those voters switch sides from one election tot the next- pretty likely if the country is experiencing an unpopular war, a sagging economy or both- the entire electoral configuration can be transformed, hence the old adage that “All of American politics is played between the forty yard lines”.

The moral of the story ? It’s a little early to place your bets for 2012 or even 2010.

William Moloney’s columns have appeared in The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, and Rocky Mountain News.

Primer: Repeat after me

It is not the government’s responsibility to save Chrysler, GM, or Ford. Looking back, it was not the government’s responsibility to save AIG, Citigroup, or any other financial institution. Looking ahead, it is not the government’s responsibility to save coal companies, homebuilders, retailers, manufacturers, or hot dog carts. It is not the government’s responsibility to “protect” jobs – even when those jobs are held by member of politically powerful labor unions.

It is not the government’s responsibility to “create” jobs – the only jobs the government has the power to create are government jobs, and the world doesn’t need more bureaucrats.

It is not the government’s responsibility to prevent foreclosures, where people took out loans they cannot afford to pay back.

It is not the government’s responsibility to make sure that everyone has high-speed internet and cable TV. For that matter, it is not the government’s responsibility to pay for anyone’s personal expenses, be they medical costs, gasoline, or pedicures.

It is not the government’s responsibility to address “income inequality.”

To be clear, it IS the government’s responsibility to provide an environment where people and businesses can – through innovation, effort, and personal responsibility – achieve success, be self-reliant, and have the opportunity to strive for ever-greater achievement.

The ingredients are a fair, predictable legal system; dependable property rights; low taxes; and light regulation. That’s all.

The dangers of temporizing with passion

Temporize (verb): To act evasively in order to gain time, avoid argument, or postpone a decision. Washington Post, November 14: "The backlash against those who supported a ban on same-sex marriage continues to roil California and nearby states. Protests and vandalism of churches, boycotts of businesses and possibly related mailings of envelopes filled with white powder have followed the passage of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriages."

Surely readers are familiar with many of the details of the lengthy Post article. The "gay" backlash against the popular will shows no signs of abating. For no matter how much we compromise with the homosexual lobby, it will not be satisfied with anything less than our full moral blessing.

We are in this mess today because we were willing to temporize with a passion that admits of no moderation. This error has its roots in the sexual revolution that hit with full force in the 1960s. The central idea was, "if it feels good, do it." The plain truth is that all manner of things which don’t feel good or are downright repulsive to most people, feel good to others.

Given society’s then generally heterosexual point of view, what felt good at first was the pleasure of sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex. However, those who accept the pleasure principle have no real quarrel with those who derive pleasure from members of the same sex. "Hey, man, if that’s your thing, go ahead."

The first victim of the sexual revolution, of course, was marriages, strained by men and women trying to "find themselves," or to regain the pleasure that somehow had gone out of their marriages. Accompanying but also enabling the sexual revolution was the invention of the birth control pill, which made it possible to avoid pregnancy, the primary argument against sex outside of marriage.

Just as the sexual revolution unhinged relations between the sexes, so did it change the practice of homosexuality. Previously the province of "intellectuals" in rebellion against the allegedly confining mores of bourgeois society, homosexuality became more popular and, hence, more vulgar. The broader public’s impression of that practice soon became dominated by news of bathhouse orgies and the spread of the HIV-AIDS virus.

Along the way, the personal became the political. If these liberated urges were to be freed from social or political limitations, their practitioners needed to organize and to importune friendly politicians to make speeches and pass laws on their behalf.

Governor Jerry Moonbeam Brown of California (1975-83) persuaded the legislature to remove laws against the practice of sodomy, one of those "blue laws" which were honored more in the breach than in the observance anyway.

When the AIDS crisis developed in the early 1980s, elite opinion was already poised to ignore the overwhelming evidence linking homosexuals’ reckless behavior to the disease and to maintain the fiction that it was as likely to spread by heterosexual contact as it was by homosexual means.

Having for all practical purposes put homosexuality on the same moral footing as love between the sexes, it was but a small step to the establishment of civil unions. Knowing that the vast majority of Americans understood marriage to be the union of a man and a woman, the advocates of "domestic partnerships" paused at a halfway house that was marriage in all but name.

I am convinced that civil unions were designed to prepare the public mind for what it could not accept back in 2000, when Californians voted overwhelmingly to preserve marriage, just as all of mankind had understood it for millennia. But then along came, first, the Massachusetts, then the California and Connecticut supreme courts, to decree that the "right" of same-sex marriage was entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Anything less would be unfair to this oppressed minority.

In short, the path to the present state in which angry mobs (and zealous lawyers) demand what no society in its right mind has any reason to grant, began with the intellectual and moral errors that characterized the sexual revolution. Nothing less than revisiting and rethinking those errors will suffice to avoid a chaotic future for us and our children.

He who says A must say B. If we have a right to do "whatever turns us on," there is no objection to same-sex marriage. If, on the other hand, same-sex marriage is wrong, its premise must be also.

Obama vs. the Constitution

A recently revealed 2001 Chicago radio interview is very telling as to the intent and political philosophy of Barack Obama. The dissimulation of some in the Main Stream Media would have Americans focus on the semantics of “redistributive change” in this interview. They would also have us think that Obama’s detractors have taken his words out of context.

So take Obama’s words in full context. It is clear that Obama does not think much of the US Constitution.

Although the Warren Court did not, Obama certainly would like to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.” He just thinks there are better ways to do it than through the courts. Even so, Obama thinks “Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts.” But he admits that to do so would be problematic.

To “order changes that cost money” runs into “separation of powers issues” between the Judicial and Legislative Branches. That’s the least of the constitutional impediments for Obama.

Rather than respect America’s deliberate constitutional barriers to Socialism, Obama doesn’t have any problem with using “political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” Communist thugs everywhere would be proud. What Obama proposes would shred the Constitution and is clearly in violation of his US Senate Oath, as it surely is with regards to the Presidential Oath of Office. It is also an act of tyranny and violence.

Cutting through Obama’s rhetoric, he feels that with sufficient socialist legislators and executives (“politic”) who don’t mind violating their oath of office (“break free … the Constitution”) and with an adequate Marxist mob (“community organizing and activities on the ground”) you can unconstitutionally “bring about redistributive change.”

America’s Constitution was deliberately designed to LIMIT what the Federal government can “do to” the American people. It is an anti-Socialism and anti-Marxism restriction upon the Federal government. But it isn’t worth the paper it is written on if dishonest people occupy all three branches of government.

The Declaration of Independence, which founded the United States of America, requires such a Constitution, as well as a republican form of government (not a democracy) whose sole purpose is to secure (not give or take) individual rights. Government’s purpose is to protect the smallest minority there is, the individual, from government tyranny.

In America, these individual rights are inalienably bestowed by the Creator, not government. This is not an opinion. The Organic Legal Documents of America, enumerated in US Code, clearly state this.

That the Left, in both the Democratic and Republican parties, through ignorance or willful disdain, ignores these facts should alarm all Americans. To be sure, both Republicans and Democrats have violated their Oath of Office in not insignificant ways these last 75 years, as is evidenced by the unconstitutional growth of the Administrative State.

In the context of Obama, though, this isn’t politics as usual; but rather a quantum leap in the subversion of the Constitution.

It is understandable that Obama/Biden take exception to their Marxist tag because of the growing awareness it reflects:

• Obama’s childhood mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, Communist enemy of America;

• Obama wrote in his memoir of his college days that "I chose my friends carefully ... The Marxist professors;”

• Obama’s ally Ayers proclaimed in 2002 "I am a Marxist;"

• Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer, who hand-picked Obama as her successor, was an official of one of the KGB-funded Communist Party USA’s front groups, the U.S. Peace Council. I t is no coincidence that many key years of Obama’s life, with the complicity of the MSM, have been kept undisclosed; that the Marxists whom Obama has spent a lifetime allying himself with have been kept out of the spotlight. Together they seek to “break” the Constitution in a spectacular way.

Like Salvador Allende, Hugo Chavez and many other Marxists, the chosen strategy of Obama and his cohorts is to use a presidential electoral run to subvert a nation. Perpetrators of such subversion do not want to call attention to their intentions.

The fact that in contemporary presidential elections the Communist Party USA does not field a candidate but backs the Democratic Party candidate should speak volumes as to the convergence of the principles of these two parties. It also begs the question as to what happened to the Democratic Party.

It is to the shame of the MSM that the American public has such a meager record on Obama and his cohorts with which to assess his candidacy. That shame is compounded by the fact that it took a children’s book illustrator to dig up this 2001 interview.

Race & the Constitution: Remedial 101

While the mortgage mess gets sorted out, let's circle back to an important moment the other day when Whoopi Goldberg the celebrity and John McCain the presidential candidate both displayed abysmal ignorance of how durably the U.S. Constitution has fulfilled its declared purpose "to establish justice" for over 220 years now. Appearing on ABC's "The View," McCain said he'd appoint judges "who interpret the Constitution of the United States the way our Founding Fathers envisioned," to which panelist Goldberg flippantly retorted: “Should I be worried about being a slave, about being returned to slavery? Because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change.”

McCain then conceded, heaven help him: “I understand that point. That’s an excellent point.” The video is here; notice from the applause that many in the audience seemed to think it an excellent point as well.

Ross Kaminsky took Mac to the woodshed, but good, for his constitutional and historical illiteracy on PoliticsWest.com a couple of days later. Excellent post. What Ross didn't do, and what I haven't read anywhere, is suggest an actual answer, suitable for the moment on live TV, that the GOP candidate should have given. As a onetime speechwriter, let me give it a try.

Thanks for asking that. I know it's a question in many people's minds, as a result of confusion spread by historians, educators, and politicians who don't know better. But here are the facts.

It is only because of the Constitution and judges who were faithful to it that black Americans are free and equal citizens today

The Constitution enabled the northern states to battle the southern states, first politically and then militarily, at the cost of half a million white people's lives, until slavery was ended and blacks were emancipated. After that victory, the Constitution was strengthened from a document that disapproved slavery into one that forever disallows slavery.

The Constitution is also what Dr. King, Justice Marshall, and Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson used to finally end segregation and guarantee civil rights for all.

Going forward, the Constitution and courts faithful to it are the best protection our country has for securing majority rule and minority rights in a free society. You and I should be grateful for that, and vigilant about it.

The last thing we want in America today is public officials who ignore the Constitution like the judges who denied black citizenship with the Dred Scott decision, the slave state governments who seceded and went to war, or the southern governors who resisted school desegregation.

That's what I want to prevent by appointing judges who will keep their oath to the Constitution without fail.

And by the way, Whoopi, those Dred Scott judges and secessionist states and Jim Crow governors were all Democrats, all of them. The Democratic Party has had a really shameful record on racial equality until very recently.

It was my party, the Republicans, who freed the slaves, led the way on school desegregation, and passed the first civil rights bill of modern times. Our country's historic ideal of liberty and justice for all, the envy of the world for over 200 years, is safest in Republican hands for this new century.

The above argument is less developed and documented than Ross's fine piece on Sept. 15, but it's plausible, I think, as something a real politician with his civic compass in working order could have said under those real circumstances in which McCain found himself on Sept. 12. Too bad he didn't; this now becomes one more reinforcement of the Big Lie that our country was founded on hypocrisy, amorality, and racism.

The best refutation for that lie that I know of is a pair of books in which massive, conclusive evidence is presented for the case which I've made here and which Ross made in his earlier post. Those books, both by colleagues of mine at the Claremont Institute, are Vindicating the Founders by Thomas G. West and Vindicating Lincoln by Thomas Krannawitter. Buy them, read them. Maybe buy extras to send Mr. McCain. They'd be wasted, I'm afraid, if sent to Ms. Goldberg.