Couldn’t have said it any better myself. This from an oped written by Al Hubbard and Noam Neusner from the WSJ Op-ed section.
Even before John McCain shook up the presidential race by tapping Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate, polls weren’t showing the late-August lead that Barack Obama (and many Republicans) expected. Why so?
It’s not because of the brilliance of the McCain campaign. Rather we believe that — despite the media’s best efforts to exempt Mr. Obama’s policies from critical examination — American voters aren’t sheep. They pay attention to the candidates and positions and make wise decisions about who should lead the country.
True, Mr. Obama enjoys several advantages. Republicans are struggling nationwide in head-to-head contests. Democrats lead in voter registration, and have a well-funded presidential candidate.
Yet Americans have not committed to Mr. Obama. Why?
Clearly, Mr. Obama’s weakness on foreign policy is a factor. He has a knee-jerk preference for diplomacy with China, Europe and Russia over the security of the American people and our closest allies. He hasn’t explained his shifting positions on Iraq and Iran, among other hot spots. And he felt compelled to make up for his experience gap with Mr. McCain by picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate.
But here’s the thing: It’s not that Mr. Obama hasn’t been specific enough in his governing plans. To the contrary, he has been very specific about his tax policy, health-care and energy proposals. It’s that voters are paying attention and appear not to like what Candidate Obama is saying.
Mr. Obama has proposed a massive tax increase on investors, business owners, and the “wealthy.” At a time when the American people rate the economy as the central issue of the campaign, a tax hike doesn’t make a lot of political sense. Voters know that a tax hike won’t help the economy.
Moreover, Mr. Obama’s tax plans would directly or indirectly harm U.S. investors by raising the capital gains and dividend taxes. More than half of U.S. households are equity owners, so Mr. Obama’s proposal risks alienating half the population.
Mr. Obama claims to offer a tax cut to moderate-income families, but a significant portion of Mr. Obama’s tax plan is a welfare giveaway costing more than $648 billion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center.
How so? He would authorize a hodgepodge of refundable tax credits covering everything from education, mortgage payments, child care and other items for people who do not pay income taxes now.
About 38% of U.S. households pay no income tax today. Under a President Obama (whose policies would shave 15.3 million households off the tax rolls) that share would grow to nearly half of all American households.
We have been repeatedly told that everyone should pay their fair share. So this sounds grossly unfair and like a return of tax-and-spend liberal economics. No wonder there is a lot of doubt about the wisdom of the junior senator from Illinois.
Mr. Obama’s health-care proposal is not quite HillaryCare, but it comes close. A national health insurance, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, would be offered to the currently uninsured. Mr. Obama’s instincts on health care are always to move more people onto rolls of government-paid and government-mandated insurance, while depriving the marketplace the oxygen it needs for greater innovation, life-saving cures, and efficiency.
Americans have heard the refrain for government-provided health care before and know an expensive government giveaway when they see it.
Mr. Obama’s energy policy is to drill less, consume less, tax more, and spend more. With barely a nod to nuclear energy — the only meaningfully large, carbon-free source of domestic energy — he is promising a massive increase in domestic, noncarbon-based energy from sources that produce only a fraction of our energy now.
He has also proposed massive tax increases on U.S. oil and gas companies while continuing to cut off vast swaths of U.S. territory to drilling.
Again, Americans are wiser than they are given credit. They know that if you restrict supply and tax production, prices go up.
The economic wisdom of Americans should not be doubted. They can see through Mr. Obama’s proposals. They know that they will have to pick up the bill if Mr. Obama sends checks to people who already don’t pay taxes; they know a centralized government-controlled health-care system will be more expensive, less efficient, and less friendly to patients and doctors. They know that the most effective way to bring down energy prices is by keeping all our energy options open, including more drilling in the U.S.
And they know that if a candidate has spent his entire career taxing more and spending more, that’s what you’ll get — and more of it.
Mr. Obama is wondering why he can’t shake Mr. McCain. His problem isn’t his plans for the campaign. It’s his plans for governing the country. Americans just aren’t buying into them.
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
September 4th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I think the “Community Organizer” issue is also beginning to resonate. For starters, what on earth is a “Community Organizer”? Are we supposed to cast our eyes on the slums of Chicago, behold how well organized they are, and exclaim in wonder, “Wow, Barack Obama did that!”?
And Sarah Palin really nailed this one: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities.”
Responding to this mockery, the Obama campaign issued the following statement today:
Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies. And it’s no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.
That’s right–community organizing consists of helping elect Barack Obama president! This fits right in with Obama’s claim, noted here yesterday, that he is more qualified to be president than Palin is to be vice president because, whereas she has run a mere town, he has run a campaign for himself.
So, let’s get this straight: The community Barack Obama has organized is, in the campaign’s words, the community of those who admire Barack Obama. So I guess he is mayor of Obamaville and aspires to be president of Barackistan! At the center of it all is a man who, like Hans Christian Andersen’s naked emperor, may or may not believe that his veneer of accomplishment is real.
September 4th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I don’t think anyone should mock a man who went to an ivy league school and chose to give back to the community instead of making a 6-digit figure salary. Every politician starts somewhere–wether it be city council, as an alderman, or just a campaign administrator, everyone starts somewhere. I think you should ask the people of Chicago if it’s right to mock someone who helped the lives of some of the poorest and most misfortunate people in the country.
And Mr. Durbanlad…. lets get one thing straight. The people of Chicago were not a community of people who respected Obama before he helped them. Respect and admiration are earned sir. The people admire him because of what he did for them
September 8th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
For those of you who still cling (yes, that “C” word again!) to the notion that Obama has actually done something useful in his life as “community organizer”, I reproduce in full a post by Jame Taranto, a blogger for opiniojournal.com that totally eviscerates all claims that this presidential wannabe has any quals, beside hos own elevation, worth bragging about:
Last week we wrote that ” ‘community organizer’ is to Barack Obama what ‘war hero’ was to John Kerry.” We didn’t know the half of it.
Kerry staked his claim to the presidency on the pretense that he was a war hero, notwithstanding his showy repudiation decades earlier of the war and his fellow veterans. According to a new exposé in the liberal New Republic, Obama, before embarking on a career in politics, similarly, albeit quietly, repudiated “community organizing,” only to re-embrace it decades later, apparently out of political expediency.
TNR’s John Judis tracked down Jerry Kellman, who in 1985 “hired Obama to organize residents of Chicago’s South Side.” Kellman describes a conversation the two “community organizers” had at a conference on “social justice” in October 1987:
“[Obama] wanted to marry and have children, and to have a stable income,” Kellman recalls.
But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him “to make major changes in poverty or discrimination.” To do that, he said, “you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials.” In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. . . .
And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community organizing and go to law school.
Another way of putting this might be that Obama left community organizing because he wanted a job in which he had actual responsibilities (and, of course, earned more money).
But Obama did not decide only that “community organizing” was not for him. Judis reports the future senator took part in a September 1989 symposium in which he “rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself.” Later, Obama “would begin to construct a political identity for himself that was not simply different from his identity as a community organizer–but was, in fact, its very opposite.”
Judis offers the closest thing we’ve heard to a job description for “community organizers.” What they do, he writes, is “unite people of different backgrounds around common goals and use their collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be.” To help illuminate this rather vague description, Judis also enumerates some of the tasks Obama and his colleagues undertook.
Before Obama’s arrival in Chicago, Kellman and his “partner,” Mike Kruglik, set out “to revive the region’s manufacturing base–and preserve what remained of its steel industry–by working with unions and church groups to pressure companies and the city; but those hopes were quickly dashed.” Apparently the presence of “community organizers” is not a strong selling point for companies making location decisions. Go figure.
Obama set his sights lower, but still missed the mark. He “got community members to demand a job center that would provide job referrals, but there were few jobs to distribute.” Then “he tried to create what he called a ‘second-level consumer economy’ . . . consisting of shops, restaurants, and theaters. This, too, went nowhere.”
These efforts at economic development having failed, Obama “began to focus on providing social services for Altgeld Gardens,” a government-owned and -operated apartment complex:
“We didn’t yet have the power to change state welfare policy, or create local jobs, or bring substantially more money into the schools,” [Obama] wrote. “But what we could do was begin to improve basic services at Altgeld–get the toilets fixed, the heaters working, the windows repaired.” Obama helped the residents wage a successful campaign to get the Chicago Housing Authority to promise to remove asbestos from the units; but, after an initial burst of activity, the city failed to keep its promise. (As of last year, some residences still had not been cleared of asbestos.)
It is both funny and scary that one of America’s major political parties would offer this record of sheer futility as its nominee’s chief qualification to be president of the United States. Even more striking, though, is how alien the world in which Obama operated was by comparison with the world in which normal Americans live.
Reader, when your toilet breaks, do you wait around for some Ivy League hotshot to show up and organize a meeting so that you can use your collective strength to wring concessions from the powers that be?
Or do you call a plumber?
As a “community organizer,” Obama toiled within a subculture of such abject dependency that even home repairs were “social services,” provided by government (or, in Obama’s Chicago, not provided). It was an utterly bizarre intersection between the cultural elite and the underclass. By Judis’s account, Obama’s Columbia degree was useless. He would have been more helpful if he’d gone to vocational school instead.
Judis quotes an Altgeld resident as telling Obama, “Ain’t nothing gonna change. . . . We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can.” Certainly no one can fault Obama for doing the same thing. But what did Obama move outta there do to? To become a politician–specifically, an “idealistic” politician who wants “to make major changes in poverty.” Guys like that created this mess in the first place.
In his political career, has Obama done or even said anything to suggest that he has a different approach to “poverty,” one that would reduce dependency rather than promote it? His recent rediscovery of the glories of “community organizing” certainly isn’t an encouraging sign.