SL 01-13-2012

Time to Wake Up

January 13, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



Given the news of the last few weeks, I have to confess for the first time in a long time I’m scratching my head.  This was supposed to be our year.  Everything we have done since President Obama’s inauguration was to culminate in 2012, to ensure he would be the last lesson of a failed experiment in left wing governance.



I have long-maintained that people had forgotten what a left-wing President was, they had forgotten the Jimmy Carter years and that if anything good would have come out of the Obama presidency, the one-term Obama presidency, it would have been a reminder to us of  seven words: We Never Need To Do This Again.  And yet here we are, after the takeback of the House in 2010, after electing Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey and a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat, after all the organizing and import of the Tea Parties, here we are with most of the major Republican nominees tearing themselves up and almost all of the national polls showing Obama beating our candidate, whoever he is (with the exception of two distant outliers).



Let us start with the attacks or the challenge to Mitt Romney on Bain Capital.  Of course Bain is fair game.  As has been pointed out, when you make your resume or any specific part of your resume, a campaign point, you fairly open it up to challenge.  And you want that resume vetted before the general election.  That said, three things more need to be stated.  I)  Of course not every business is to be beyond criticism and it is ridiculous to argue that a challenge to how one business or industry conducts its affairs is an attack on capitalism itself.  Do we truly want to say certain companies, legal companies, even lucrative, profit-driven companies are beyond any and every level of criticism and that if they are criticized that is an attack on capitalism?  When some of us challenged Hollywood and the music industry for the filth they were putting out, glamorizing drugs or sex or violence, that we were attacking capitalism?  Of course not.



II)  Having said that, this should mean that there can be a challenge to Mitt Romney’s stewardship of or the work of Bain Capital.  And if it is to be defended, it is up to Mitt Romney who has made it a chief part of his political resume, or business background, to stand up for his work at Bain.  He has yet to convincingly do that.  There is a defense of Bain, I’m sure of it because I’ve heard parts of it…But from others.  It will do no good to have a candidate in the general election or President of the United States who relies on others to defend his positions.  We have had quite enough in previous experience of outsourcing our rhetoric.  So the message there is either Mitt Romney needs to start making a convincing case for his experience now that it has been challenged (and I mean responsible challenges, not Michael Moore-type challenges) or he needs to talk about something else to bolster his credentials.  The truth is, he has said that as a businessman he knows how to create jobs.  Let’s hear more, much more, beyond that talking point—especially now that it has been questioned.



III).  That all said, I have to borrow from Barry Goldwater in saying “Let’s grow up, conservatives.”  We all want someone who can take it to Obama.  And we want to give Independents and Reagan Democrats and those not already planning to vote Republican, because they are self-identified Republicans, a reason to vote for our candidate and against President Obama.  Here, I salute Rick Santorum for not making his case based on Romney and Bain.  And sure, yes, Ron Paul, too:  These are conviction politicians.  You know well where they stand and they have stayed focused on their case for themselves and against Obama.  Paul is beyond the pale on many fronts, however, actually to the left of Obama on many issues from foreign to defense to domestic policy—and this is all I am going to say in praise of him: At least he sticks to his case.



But we now face an election where it is time for the candidates to stand on their own platforms, for their own cases, and show us what they have against Obama.  Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman have done reasonable work for most of their campaigns to do that.  They haven’t in the past few weeks, however.  And so now we are cannibalizing ourselves.  And Mitt Romney has not shown he can defend himself against such a campaign either.  That should all be telling.  Because there is a fourth point and it is this:

Obama needs to go, and our race is not over.  Yes, of course, Romney seems like the front runner, and he seems that way because he is—in every poll, in money, and by almost every other calculation.  But that is not all there is, and he is not all there is.  We don’t coronate—or shouldn’t.  And if you can’t defend your biggest calling card on your curriculum vitae, you have a problem.  Bill Kristol put it best this week, saying this:



[A]fter winning by eight votes in Iowa, getting 40 percent of the vote in his basically, his second home state… this race is not over. It's just not, 25 percent and 40 percent in two states and everyone else is supposed to go, oh, sorry, we have to go home. That is not going to happen….The fact that the delegates are proportionally allocated, most delegates are not Romney delegates. Most delegates in Iowa were not Romney delegates and most the delegates in New Hampshire where he got 40 will end up not being Romney delegates….The media here is desperate to end this thing. Two states voted. There are 48 left. Let's end it. Let's call the football season off after the first two games.





So it’s not over yet.  This puts an extra-heavy civilizational, democratic, and election burden on the voters of South Carolina and Florida now.  I hope they do their due diligence and think long and hard about who the best candidate will be to attract other voters and beat Barack Obama in a general election.  My own thoughts are that I think the party, just now, deserves a Romney – Santorum race. That is how we typically do it: an establishment figure versus a different kind of Republican.  Sometimes it goes to the establishment figure and sometimes not.



But the point now is this:  We have the worst foreign and defense and domestic policy president in recent memory, perhaps in my lifetime, and we are not on track to beat him right now—even after all our post-2009 efforts.



Here is the case, or at least a case:  When President Obama was inaugurated, the average price of a gallon of gas was $1.85.  Today it is well over three dollars.  Is that an accident?  You tell me.  In September of 2008, Steven Chu said “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”  Three months later he was made our Secretary of Energy.  In his second month in office, President Obama’s Interior Secretary cancelled 77 domestic oil and gas leases.  Knowing of our domestic energy reserves that could take us off foreign oil and put us on a path to energy independence and increase employment all at once, did this President facilitate that? No.  He gave us yet more moratoria.  And just two months ago, President Obama turned his back on a job-packed Canadian deal to bring more oil to the United States from Canada.  Result: no 20,000 jobs for the XL Oil pipeline, less oil from an ally, and the upsetting of our Canadian allies.


When President Obama was inaugurated, the Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment) stood at 7.8.  The lower it is, the better.  It went well over 12 points last year and sits at 12 points right now.  It hit a 28 point high under President Obama.  When President Obama was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.8.  His policies, his advisors told us, would keep unemployment from reaching beyond 8 percent.  We got Obama’s policies and unemployment went to over 10 percent and it is well over 8 percent now—and the only reason it is not higher is because so many have simply taken themselves out of the calculation, having given up looking for full time employment.



When President Obama was inaugurated, our national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars.  Today it is over 15 trillion dollars.  There is much more to say here, from attacking the State of Arizona for trying to stop illegal immigration rather than trying to stop illegal immigration to mandating that each and every American purchase something each and every American may not want to purchase.  And setting a very dangerous precedent with such a law.



Going to war but avoiding going to Congress; voiding law passed by Congress and previous presidents.  All kinds of constitutional violations.



And on the foreign and defense policy fronts, so much to say there too:  From cutting our defense budget as he makes the needs for our defense so much the greater.  From helping turn Egypt from an ally to an enemy and bolstering the Muslim Brotherhood to siding with Iran’s mullacracy when the people on the street in Iran had a brief, shining moment to change their government toward the better.  From canceling our missile defense systems in Europe and upsetting our Czech and Polish allies while disarming ourselves in our arsenal against Russia.  From blaming Israel for its quest to defend itself and dictating to it her borders and comparing its policies to apartheid while its enemies (and ours) continued to launch attacks against her.  From snubbing the Dalai Lama to snubbing the British Prime Minister.  And then there is Iraq and Afghanistan.



Starting next week, I am going to be tolling the human cost of our precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.  For now, just recall this in Afghanistan: We are now negotiating with the Taliban, the very organization that gave safe haven to al-Qaeda, worked cheek to jowl with them, and brought us 9/11.



I will conclude with the under-reported story out of Iran this week.  Fact: An Iranian nuclear engineer responsible for helping build an Iranian nuclear bomb was killed there this week.  Fact: Iran wants to wipe Israel and the United States off the face of the earth. Fact:  Iran is an enemy of ours that has killed countless Americans and supported terrorism that has killed countless more.  Fact: There is an American hostage in Iran right now who has been sentenced to death.  Fact: We don’t know who killed the engineer. Fact:  Israel is an ally of ours and is the first target of Iran with the United States being the second.  Fact: Iran blamed Israel and the United States for the killing.  And Fact:  The State Department condemned the killing, and left Israel out to dry while telling Iran—yet again—we are not serious about what they are doing.



Let me give you the quotes:

Hillary Clinton:  "I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran."  Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman, added: "The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this. We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this." Victoria Nuland, Clinton's spokeswoman, said the state department condemned "any assassination or attack on an innocent person and we express our sympathies to the family.”


We can engage in drone attacks and targeted killings, even in countries not at war with us, even against American enemies of the state; but against Iran we take Iran’s side and in the process put Israel in greater danger by siding against her and with Iran and its complaint.  The dictionary leaves me speechless to describe this kind of thinking.


That is but the very beginning of our case-but nowhere near a comprehensive statement of it.  It is not Bain Capital.  It is not that Rick Santorum lost one race in the worst year for Republicans in recent memory.  It is not Newt Gingrich’s pugnacity. It is, instead, the weakening of America.  We cannot afford four more years of even part of the Obama indictment, and yet we are not now on the path to making our case.  Indeed, conservatives, let’s grow up.