RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fifty years from now, no one will remember the names of the one-term Democratic senators or candidates who were washed out in the 2014 midterm elections—Hagan, Udall, Braley and the others. What they will remember is that the Democrats in 2014 became the party of a modern Herbert Hoover. In Barack Obama , they were led by a detached president whose name history will attach to a prolonged, six-year economic catastrophe. They became the party of economic despair. The party of economic despair will always lose.

That is the one certain thing we learned in the 2014 midterms: Low economic growth in the modern U.S. economy is a total, across-the-board, top-to-bottom political loser.

In Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker represented everything progressive Democrats abhor, exit polls said eight in 10 voters were worried about the economy in the coming year. Pre-election polls in Gov. Pat Quinn ’s Illinois said the same thing. He lost. In truly blue Maryland, its new Republican Governor Larry Hogan built his come-from-behind campaign around the state’s stumbling economy.
Normally “economic growth” is an economist’s term of measurement. But during these six lost years, that bad data was physically felt. Barack Obama kept calling it the Great Recession. He got that right. Even the government’s statisticians felt it. Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election:

“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”

This was a year when the War on Women messaging — previously employed so successfully by the Democrats — failed to yield the desired results. Most of the discussions about that failure have focused on Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado. Udall’s obsessive focus on the “War on Women” playbook became so annoying that journalists and even his own supporters dubbed him “Mark Uterus.”

But it is absolutely unfair that Udall be tarred with all the failures of the War on Women messaging. No one better encapsulates the Democratic playbook than Wendy Davis, who ran for governor of Texas.

Her campaign was launched in vintage War on Women style. By filibustering a popular late-term abortion ban in Texas, she immediately gained the support of many in the mainstream media. They feted her with free in-kind advertising in the form of puffy profile pieces, cover stories, and other effusive coverage.

Sarah Kliff, who famously dismissed the Kermit Gosnell story as nothing more than “local crime” and therefore unworthy of coverage, covered Davis extensively while at the Washington Post and later when she moved to Vox. For instance, she tweeted this on the night of Davis’ filibuster:
Even on election day, the Washington Post continued its coverage of Davis as Philip Bump, previously receiving attention for not having the slightest clue how babies are made, gushed “*This* is how you go vote for yourself on Election Day.” He wrote an entire story about — and I’m not joking here — what t-shirt Wendy Davis wore to vote.

In between these stories were who knows how many articles and video packages claiming that Texas might turn purple, that Wendy Davis would be a formidable candidate, that the War on Women was a weakness … for Republicans.

Planned Parenthood treated Mark Udall and Wendy Davis as their most important races, knocking on a million doors and making two million phone calls, they claimed, to drive votes to them.

The most important election in the country yesterday was the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin. In its historic implications, Scott Walker’s victory was on a par with the GOP’s winning control of the Senate, arguably as important as all the other gubernatorial and congressional elections put together. And the reasons have nothing to do with his presidential prospects. Walker has now proven that his reforms in Wisconsin are both a model for conservative reform and a winning electoral strategy. But those reforms still have a long way to go. The crucial question was whether Wisconsin’s voters were going to give him the chance to keep pushing.

Walker came to office inspired by the advice of Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who told him to think bold and strike fast. The spearhead of Walker’s reform agenda was Act 10, which broke the stranglehold of public-sector unions on Wisconsin’s deplorable finances. Act 10 essentially turned Wisconsin, one of the leading lights of the labor-union movement, into a right-to-work state. (Wisconsin is still technically a union state with respect to the National Labor Relations Act, but private-sector unions in Wisconsin have waned to the point of irrelevance, so the major union presence was in the public sector.)

The challenge Walker faced was that reforms take time to work, and – initially, at least — generate much more opposition than support. His approval ratings in Wisconsin plunged to 37 percent as the venomous reaction of entrenched special interests (in this case, public-sector unions) took its toll. Those special interests enjoyed enormous political support both in Wisconsin and across the country, and Walker had only four years to demonstrate that the benefits of conservative reform could outweigh that support among moderates and independents.

Progressives correctly identified the threat that Walker represents to them nationally. If the most sacred privileges of their special interests could be undone in the birthplace of progressivism, those perks wouldn’t be safe anywhere in the country. But if Walker had lost, it would have meant that sweeping conservative reforms of government would face uncertain prospects in virtually every state and at the national level.

There is no substitute for abundance. A country that produces more food and steel and aircraft and microprocessors is going to be, ceteris paribus, better off than one that produces less. A country with a larger share of its population working is going to produce more than a country with a smaller share of its population working, as has been the unhappy trend in the United States during the presidency of Barack Obama. All the blue-ribbon panels and price-control trickery that the progressive hive-mind can dream up will do little or nothing for the quality and affordability of health care compared with increasing the supply of doctors, hospitals and clinics, pharmaceutical manufacturers, makers of medical devices, and the like. “Less is more” might work in the context of the aesthetic of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or the poetry of Robert Browning, but in the economy of real things, more is more. And the new Republican majority in Congress is well positioned to implement a more-is-more philosophy in a critical economic sector: energy.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of energy in the U.S. economy: The energy market affects almost every company and every industry, from AAL to AAPL, and we have an abundant supply of it, from oil and gas to coal and other sources. Getting government out of the way and allowing those industries to flourish even more fully than they have is a project that is, unlike some of the more ambitious items on the conservative wish list, well within reach, even with President Obama’s veto pen potentially standing between bill and law.

A little history for context. The immediate postwar U.S. economy was in many ways an atypical and unsustainable situation, given that the country’s commanding position in manufacturing — some 60 percent of the world’s industrial output — was predicated in part on the fact that the rest of the world was trying to rebuild its factories after the ruinous war. That wasn’t going to last forever, but manufacturing wasn’t the whole story, either.

Their refusal to acknowledge the administration’s failures did not make them go away.

The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French “came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.”

Something like that happened to the Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as they lost the Senate, a few more seats in the House, and additional governorships. They came on with the same old strategy, but this time they went down with it.

Obama and the Democrats chose not to defend the administration’s record of the last six years. On foreign policy, no Democratic chorus seconded Obama’s 2013 claim that this chaotic period in world affairs has been the most stable time in recent memory.

No Democratic senator insisted that Obama’s Russian reset had calmed Vladimir Putin.

Democrats did not argue that Obama had rightly distanced the U.S. from Israel.

Could Democratic candidates have pointed to the Middle East — the Iranian bomb-making efforts, the civil war in Syria, the collapse of post-surge Iraq, the rise of the Islamic State — to confirm Obama’s diagnosis that these were mostly manageable problems?

On the home front, why didn’t Democratic candidates run on their own prior overwhelming support for the Affordable Care Act, which passed without a single Republican vote? Could they have told voters that, at some future date, Obamacare, as promised, really would lower premiums and deductibles, reduce the deficit, expand coverage, and ensure that people could keep existing plans and doctors?

Could a few Democrats have at least made the reelection argument that stimulatory policies of adding $7 trillion in new debt, maintaining continual near-zero interest rates, and approving a $1 trillion stimulus had led to a robust recovery after the end of the recession in mid 2009?

THANKS TO JERRY GORDON:

Just before his Senate electoral victory, Cotton weighed in on the West Wing campaign against Israel and PM Netanyahu with a statement released on October 29th:

I’m appalled at recent media reports suggesting the Obama administration is seeking ‘détente’ with Iran, while unnamed administration officials disparage Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with vulgar ad hominem attacks. I call upon President Obama to renounce these reports and disclose the names of these officials and fire them. Iran remains our worst enemy and Israel our closest ally. The Obama administration’s weak behavior will only embolden Iran to continue its headlong rush to nuclear weapons and terror campaigns against America and our allies, while destabilizing the region and further eroding our interests.

Finally, for the record, I must note that Prime Minister Netanyahu in his youth was a member of Israel’s elite special-operations forces, where he displayed great courage. He and his family have made grave sacrifices in the fight against our common enemies. On behalf of all Arkansans, I want to thank Mr. Netanyahu for his bravery and service.

Just prior to last night’s resounding GOP mid-term victories in the US Senate, the House and a host of gubernatorial contests, I had an opportunity to speak with Shoshana Bryen. She is the executive director of the Washington, DC – based Jewish Policy Center. We were preparing for last Sunday’s Lisa Benson Show, which had a midterm election theme of “Vote to Protect America and its Ally Israel”. We talked about a wide range of issues. In addition to Shoshana, we had as other guests on the show, Ken Timmerman, veteran Iran watcher and author of Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happend in Benghazi, and Navy Seal veteran, Ben Smith. Listen here to the discussion on the November 2, 2014 Lisa Benson Show.

When I asked Bryen about emerging figures in the mid-term elections, she pointed to Rep. Tom Cotton (R-4th CD AK) running a competitive campaign against incumbent two-term US Democrat Senator Mark Pryor. Pryor was the scion of a long serving Arkansas political dynasty. His father David before him had served as both Governor and US Senator.

Cotton, I knew from reading a profile of him by retired Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) had a career that resonated. He was a highly educated double Harvard graduate who voluntarily served as an Infantry officer in the US Army during the Iraq-Afghanistan conflict. Wisse’s WSJ op-ed was an unabashed endorsement, “Vote for Tom Cotton—and Redeem Harvard”. So, I asked Bryen on last Sunday’s broadcast to talk about Cotton and another Army veteran Lt. Col.Joni Ernst of Iowa both running for the US Senate in their respective states.

Cotton and Ernst won their respective Senate races last night. A colleague called last night from a cheering Iowa GOP celebration to give me the news about Ernst’s victory. Cotton trounced Pryor by running against “Obama’s failed policies”. He won by 16 percent. His campaign played up his Army service. Cotton, 37 years old, will enter the 314th Congress in January 2015 as its youngest member.

Cotton is a sixth generation Arkansan from a cattle raising ranching family in the small community of Dardanelle, Arkansas. A graduate of both Harvard College and Law School, motivated by the events of 9/11, he rejected a JAG Commission. Instead, he volunteered to go through OCS at Fort Benning and trained at both the Infantry and Ranger Schools. Cotton served from 2005 to 2009. He had two tours, one in Iraq and a second in Afghanistan with the famed Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne, rising to the rank of Captain and received a Bronze Star for his combat actions. At 6’5″, he was selected as Platoon Leader at the Old Guard that provides the honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington Cemetery.

Watch this mini-documentary on Senator-elect Cotton:

It will be tempting to ride the red wave for a while. A startling Wall Street Journal report, however, reminds us that the urgent business of reining in President Obama’s recklessness — in this case, on Iran — cannot wait until the new Republican-controlled Congress takes over in January.

In a nutshell, Obama granted exemptions from congressional sanctions against Iran in order to promote the mullahs’ investment in Afghanistan – where American troops are still fighting jihadist terrorists, who, as even the Obama State Department acknowledges, have been armed and trained by the Iranian regime, the world’s chief state sponsor of jihadist terror, for nearly a decade.

You read that correctly.

As the Journal reports:

Twice in the last two years, [a Pentagon] task force [on “business and stability operations”] secured special permission from the U.S. government to seek help from Iran in setting up Afghanistan’s first pharmaceutical company and in developing four mines, according to government documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with people directly involved in the unusual outreach effort….

The unusual and quiet cooperation with Iran represents one small example of the Obama administration’s tentative efforts to allow for a closer relationship with America’s longtime adversary that would make it easier to work together in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. From last year’s ice-breaking phone call between Mr. Obama and Iranian President Hasan Rouhani to ongoing nuclear talks, the two nations have been trying to repair their relationship—much to the dismay of American allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are wary of Iran’s intentions.

The biggest takeaway in this second historic midterm shellacking of President Obama’s tenure is how much executive lawlessness, recklessness, and incompetence upset voters, across party lines. As I argued in Faithless Execution, although there is insufficient political support for impeaching the president, executive maladministration is a very powerful political issue. We saw that last night.

Voters may want Obama out of office, but they do not want him removed from office. They want him reined in. They want normalcy: a relief from constant crisis that involves a restoration of strong American leadership in the world (which would have a sobering effect on enemies who are now emboldened), and a return to regular governance at home – not monarchical directives to fundamentally transform the country by, for example, unilaterally purporting to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens when over 90 million Americans are out of the workforce.

That being the case, the worst thing Republicans could do is cut a lame-duck deal with the very Democrats the voters have just ousted and the very president the voters have just rebuked to fund through the end of next year the very agenda the voters have just rejected. If they cut the deal, they surrender the constitutional authority to do what voters have entrusted them to do.

Impeachment is plainly not on the table. And Speaker Boehner’s lawsuit against the president, as I observed when it was floated, is such an absurdly ineffective gambit for reining in executive lawlessness that Republicans never even bothered to file it. The incoming Republican majority will have only one way to stop the president: Use the power of the purse to cut off the money Obama needs to do the lawless things the voters are up in arms about.

Republicans will be toast with the people who have empowered them if they now turn around and agree to fund Obamacare, the Homeland Security’s immigration agencies and the Justice Department that refuse to enforce the laws, the IRS that colludes with Democrats to intimidate the Left’s ideological opponents, and all the rest of it. The prattle from GOP leaders that they must show the country they can “govern” is ridiculous. It is not possible for them to “govern” when the chief executive does not faithfully execute the laws they enact. Besides, voters did not elect them to govern – they elected them to stop Obama.

“Yes we need to combat the Islamist threat, but this is not the way to do it…. You can’t protect democracy by undermining its very foundations…. Freedom of expression is an essential freedom for any democratic society.” — Colin Hart, Director, The Christian Institute.

“They made us feel threatened about our religion. They asked, ‘Do you have friends from other religions?’ They asked this many times until we answered what they wanted us to say.” — Eleventh grade student at a Jewish Orthodox school for girls.

Trinity Christian School, a small independent school in Reading, is being downgraded and may even be closed for not inviting a Muslim imam to lead a chapel service.

“Individuals who criticize the spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain could be deemed to be racist and silenced…. Without precise legislative definitions, deciding what [is extremism] is subjective and therefore open to abuse now or by any future authoritarian government.” — Keith Porteous Wood, Director, National Secular Society.

The British government has unveiled a new proposal that would require Islamic extremists to have their social media posts pre-approved by the government.

The plan—which is aimed at curbing the spread of jihadist propaganda in Britain—is part of a wide-ranging effort to strengthen the government’s counter-terrorism strategy ahead of general elections set for May 2015.

The new policy is so broad in scope, however, and the definition of “extremist” is so all-encompassing, that the government could ultimately silence anyone whose views are deemed to be politically incorrect, according to free speech activists.

The so-called Extremism Disruption Orders (EDOs) would prohibit any individual the government considers to be an “extremist” from appearing on radio and television, protesting in public or even posting messages on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, without permission.