Jeb Plants His Flag

Laura Ingraham notes Jeb Bush's incessant repetition of the term "center-right" in his plea for a long-term outreach strategy to Hispanics, most obviously, but maybe also to anybody else who doesn't seem inclined to vote Republican. Laura asks "Query: Have the Bushes decided to start moving away from the word "conservative"? I think we can answer that one with the a clear "Yes". The dad never liked being associated with conservatives except at primary time, and brother George had to paste the "compassionate" disclaimer on before he would use it. Jeb is clearly going to differentiate himself from the Palins and Huckabees and anybody else who doesn't have who don't have a clear business agenda.
No surprise that Jeb is going to do a lot of pandering to Hispanics. Absent from his pitch is both the word and the concept of "immigration", showing that Jeb isn't going to doom any future candidacy immediately by showcasing his softness on the subject. Notice the vacuity of the Jeb agenda:

A center-right agenda means keeping taxes low and easing the regulatory burden on small businesses to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit and job growth. A center-right agenda means instituting real education reforms that reward outstanding teachers and empower parents with choices if their children are trapped in a failing school. In short, a center-right agenda provides opportunity for those willing to work hard."

Yawn. Looks like a "center-right agenda" is marketable as an insomnia cure. Observe the complete absence of any social conservatism in the agenda, along with the commitment of redoubled efforts at the kind of incoherent and off-the-point education reforms also dumped unto the national agenda by little brother. If he keeps this up Jeb is going to have to switch quickly to a long-term outreach strategy to conservatives.

The Unbearable Lightness of Obama

I’m still working on what may be my great composition, a set of theses explaining Barack Obama and all the mysteries surrounding him. Is he a hard-line progressive or a closet centrist? Does he really dream of a new post-partisan commitment to consensus or is this just a ruse to sneal behiud the city gates a legion of standard left-liberal politics?

Tony Blankley examines Obama’s early blunders and sets out their possible causes. Obama took the fall for the inept vetting of Cabinet nominees, saying that he “screwed up”.

But from a management perspective, the unanswered question is: How did he "screw up"? Did he actively design the failed vetting process and actively assess the various negative pieces of information and fail to see their significance? Or did he "screw up" by letting others design the failed system and assess the data inflow? The former would show poor substantive judgment. The latter would show he wasn't paying sufficient attention to a presumably vital matter.

Then we have the preening display of signing an executive order closing Gitmo -- not now, but within one year. And what is to be done with those present inhabitants too dangerous or unwanted by other countries to be released, but not susceptible to conviction through the mechanism of the criminal law, which is designed to regulate offenses between members of the same community who have committed themselves to upholding the same set of social values?

Thus, it was breathtaking that at the signing ceremony, President Obama didn't know how -- or even whether -- his executive order was dealing with this central quandary.
President Obama: "And we then provide, uh, the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed, uh, no later than one year from now. We will be, uh. ... Is there a separate, uh, executive order, Greg, with respect to how we're going to dispose of the detainees? Is that, uh, written?"
White House counsel Greg Craig: "We'll set up a process."
To be at the signing ceremony and not know what he was ordering done with the terrorist inmates is a level of ignorance about equivalent to being a groom at the altar in a wedding ceremony and asking who it is you are marrying.

But the critical clues must be found in Obama's handling of his stimulus package. Here is a mystery packed with satifactorily intriguing puzzles. Was Obama's desire to reach a genuine consensus with a substantial number of Republicans real or charade? Was the decision to delegate preparation of the package to Speaker Pelosi and her minions an inevitable byproduct of Obama's newness to office, a sign of irresolution and weakness, or a clever ploy to ensure that his fingerprints would not appear on a package full of social liberalism and plain silliness that was desired by Obama but known by him to be unacceptable to Republicans? FWIW, I believe that Obama's desire for post-partisan consensus, if arrogant and ill-considered, is sincere. It's arrogant because Obama's belief is that everyone should abandon their petty grievances, outworn notions and unthinking allegiances. Republucans and Democrats should sit down and think things through practically, whereupon they will come to the same conclusions that Obama does, which also happen to be the conclusions of standard fossilized progressive ideology 98.7% of the time. Republicans accepting the conclusions in principle are welcome to toss in a few ideas -- for example if they had had a few ludicrous projects for which they desired excessive government funding, those ideas would have been welcome. Everyone then votes for what Obama wants; that's what's called "postpartisan consensus".

Blankley:

I can think of four possible explanations for this almost unprecedented presidential detachment from the decision making of policies the president publicly declared to be vital to the country and his presidency:
1) He is a very, very big-picture man, and he delegates decisions even on the central points of vital issues.
2) For tactical reasons, he decided these matters were not worth using up political chits.
3) He is either hesitant or unskilled at management, and he let matters drift until it seemed too late to intervene personally.
4) Or his personality type leaves him surprisingly uninterested in things that aren't personally about him.

I'll eliminate #2. Tactically this was the perfect time both to make it clear to congressional Democrats that he would be doing the producing and directing on matters important to him, and to make cooperation with him as attractive as possible to Republicans .
There's no doubt truth in #1, but it doesn't explain Obama's non-decisions on the stimulus package. The necessity of insisting on absolute unity of purpose in items in a bipartisan emergency stimulus package is big-picture enough for the most visionary leader to isolate and insist on.
#4 can't be discounted wholly. A man who writes two memoirs and compares himself favourably to Lincoln has an very healthy sense of self-esteem even for a politician. It is this type of personality also which sees itself as rising above the pettiness and self-interest that afflict everyone else.
But I say #3 is the winner. Obama was quite skilful or lucky in selecting a campaign team and setting a campaign tone, but the quantity, urgency and importance of the policy and personnel decisions to be made now overwhelm him.
This should ensure for Americans a very entertaining if perhaps somewhat painful presidency. The President's stated goals of civility, practicality and bipartisanship will be subverted and sabotaged at every stage not only by congressional Democrats but by his own appointees. Obama's rhetoric and style will ensure that his approval rating remains high despite an unending series of unpopular and disastrous policy ventures. Public anger will be continually directed not at the king, but at his counsellors, whose heads will roll regularly in response to repeated failures of judgment, achievement and ethics.

David Frum's NewMajority.com

This week brings the launch of David Frum's new website NewMajority.com. If you haven't read Frum's 2008 book Comeback, the new venture's statement of purpose will leave you in doubt about just what these people are up to. The key words are these which sum up the basic attitude expressed in Comeback:

Our party has now taken two bad beatings in two consecutive cycles. It looks very likely we are heading for a third. It's not a sign of lack of commitment to our party or our movement to acknowledge these hard facts.

Our goal here at NewMajority.com is to renew and reform our Republican party and the conservative philosophy so that we can again earn the confidence of the American people and govern responsibly and effectively. We don't claim to have all the answers. We are sure that we are asking the right questions.

Comeback ruffled some feathers in the conservative aviary. There are three components to the worldview expressed in Comeback; at least two if not three of them challenge the default position, or at least the default for-public-consumption position, of the conservative establishment. First is an assessment of the future prospects of the Republican Party as they appear at the moment. Frum's is bleak. Significant portions of the electorate, portions that are growing, seem to becoming increasingly hostile to the party. Aversion to Republicans by Hispanics, women, suburbanites, the college-educated -- these things are not going to magically melt away. Many of the GOP's signature issues have exhausted their appeal. For example, income tax cuts? Further significant middle class tax cuts are unsustainable economically; almost 40% of Americans pay no income tax at all and have no need of reductions; 80% of American workers now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes.

The second issue is what to about all this. Here's where the participants take off their coats and the brawling begins. Much of the movement believes that all that is needed is to return to true conservative principles, to march as in days of yore behind banners of bold colours not pale pastels, to be the party of Ronald Reagan again. Frum isn't buying it, and neither am I. Ronald Reagan didn't prevail by urging his party to ask "What would Barry Goldwater have said? What would Robert Taft have done?" The retrenchment purists are people whose plan if they could redo the Charge of the Light Brigade would be to try to think of a way to make the horses run faster. Frum urges a full, ruthless, corner to corner and ceiling to floor review of the policies the GOP has been running on. This is where Frum is right, and Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and the official voices of the conservative movement are wrong. Why do we laugh at the way Democrats acted during the Reagan years? Because they refused to look at and think about their now vote-losing positions and kept on losing as a result, always unwilling to believe that their ideas had been rejected again because the public didn't agree with them. There's a chasm here between those who want to be or at least look thoroughly orthodox and those who want to win elections.

The third component of the approach is a grab bag of new policies and strategic revision of old ones to recapture the public imagination. This isn't the place to go through them. I'll just say that Frum certainly used his imagination. I would never have thought of prison reform as a big vote-winning issue, and a government led "war against obesity" seems likely to be effective only in giving Letterman, Leno and every other comedian in the land a free joke every day of the week. I probably disagree with two-thirds of Frum's policy prescriptions, but that's not the point. I think that he's got the right attitude, the willingness to strip down the whole machine and reevaluate the design of every part, and that's what matters. Since the book Frum has gotten into issues that conservatives never touch such as income equality and the failure of the middle class to gain anything from the income growth of the Bush years, even before the meltdown.

About the future of Frum's new website and movement I have no prediction. I confess to know nothing about Frum's stable of opinioners and journalists or whence they have been rounded up. Frum has closed it up at NR and it looks like he's going to be prolific here so the site will always be worth looking at for that alone. Skimming the titles and summaries of the hefty pile of opinion pieces in the first week there might be some danger that the website become something of a nest of social liberals, malcontents and defeatists. In the worst case scenario Frum could be written off as someone who's "gone over to the liberals", and marginalized and ignored.

But I'm wishing the New Majority good health. A lot of the next 4 years is going to be a defensive trench war. It's nice to have someone thinking about new weapons for when we can go on the offensive again.