Will there be an Obama Derangement Syndrome?

Remember when President Bush pushed that expensive new prescription drug program through Congress?

Sure you do. It came straight out of the liberal playbook: people had a need, and government was going to fill that need no matter how much taxpayer money it took. The first cost estimates were $400 billion over 10 years. Then it was $532 billion. Then $720 billion.

And remember when Bush pushed enormous increases in federal education spending through Congress? Sure you do. Between 2001 and 2007, federal aid to Wisconsin schools has grown over 50% - about 7.2% per year.

Immigration? Pro-amnesty, open arms, don’t let those pesky laws bother you none.

No U.S. President has ever invested so much taxpayer money in stem cell research. No U.S. President has done as much for Africa. All of this, liberals should have loved.

They didn’t. No matter how liberal President Bush tried to be, liberals still hated him. Hated. Him. I’m using that word on purpose. Democrats and liberals still hate him, and no amount of pseudo-liberal kissing-up has changed that.

Which brings me to President-elect Barack Obama.

Democrats, liberals, progressives are getting nervous about the direction the Obama administration seems to be taking. He’s making noises about maybe not closing down Guantanamo. He’s calling for spending cuts and might at least “put off” raising taxes.

He’s appointing relative hawks to his foreign policy team. Hillary Clinton, who, along with Joe Biden, voted yes on Iraq. Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, who also supported the war, for Homeland Security. Gen. James Jones, a McCain supporter, for National Security Council. Eric Holder, who in 2002 argued against Geneva Convention rights for terrorists, for Attorney General. Worst of all, Bush’s own Secretary of Defense for…Secretary of Defense.

This, the Left finds itself wondering, is Change?

It’s raising hackles on that side of the political chasm. Those Left and Way Left who campaigned for Obama expected the arrival of a New Liberal Utopia. They expect liberal! They expect green! They expect retreat, and indictments, and Cabinet secretaries with hemp on their feet and flowers in their hair and the vague, stale scent of 1960s counterculture!

And so far, they aren’t getting it.

Granted, it’s early. We’re still T-minus 54 days until Obama officially takes over. Whatever he’s saying now…it’s a fairly simple matter to shift course later on. Surely, he’s just smoothing the path: keeping his head down, placing his forces and planning strategery before fully engaging the dark forces of the Right.

Still, it reminds me of something. Maybe…the Right’s disappointment with the Bush administration.

Bush gave us tax cuts, Supreme Court nominations, and a strong foreign policy (even though he hadn’t planned to). The rest looked like attempts to mollify the Left. Keep the Center happy. Prove to the world that Republicans don’t really want to throw old folks into the grinder right after the baby seals and the elementary school teachers.

If that’s what it was, it didn’t work. One could interpret President-elect Obama’s recent decisions as exactly the same tactic.

This raises the question: if, as current events indicate, President Obama governs further to the Right than we expected, how much credit do we give him?

If he keeps the Bush tax cuts; leaves Guantanamo be; continues pursuing the war; combs the budget for waste and pork; restrains his party on health care, guns, the First Amendment…

Sure, I doubt he’ll do all that. He’ll throw something – probably health care – to his liberal constituency. And liberalism is sneaky: it can move in tiny, bureaucratic steps, rather than bold legislative ones.

Still: he’s hardly holding high the Soviet flag as he moves into the starting gate.

So what do we – conservatives, Republicans, the loyal opposition – do? Oppose him, tooth and nail, no matter what, like the Left did with Bush? Or give credit and support when it’s due, and argument and opposition otherwise?

I’m rather in favor of the latter. The former’s more fun, but surely, with Pelosi and Reid playing Laurel and Hardy, we’ll have plenty of opportunity to swing as hard as we can. But we want to encourage responsible, conservative-ish Democrats, don’t we?

And we sure don’t want to be the Left.

It's as if Governor Doyle wants a ginormous deficit!

From today's column over at FoxPolitics.net:

Governor Doyle is calculating the “deficit” as if the agency requests are a done deal. As if state agencies will get everything they want, simply by having asked for it.

They won’t, or they shouldn’t. If Governor Doyle simply says “no budget increases,” then boom. Over half the “deficit,” wiped out. Fell swoop.

Sure, what’s left is still pretty big, but it’s not unprecedented. It’s not historic. It’s not entirely ridiculous in its size.

So why, do you suppose, is Governor Doyle out trumpeting the bigger, scarier number? It’s as though he wants a historically, ridiculously enormous deficit.

In fact, he probably does.

Also, I seriously endanger my Star Wars nerd cred. And make a deer hunting reference. Yes, all in the space of one 600 word column!

It's like a circus act, for crying out loud. Go read the whole thing.

Gotta go…gotta date with a tree stand…

…and hopefully with at least one deer. This is the year Son #1 gets one.

But before I go, I’m going to get this off my chest.

On Monday, I wrote a column for FoxPolitics.net called: "Be Honest, Campaign Finance Reform limits free speech." An excerpt:

Campaign Finance Reformers say that stricter limits on money are the answer, and they’re right: if we outlaw all third-party spending and force campaigns to use public financing, then we’ll have beaten the scourge of Big Money once and for all!

At the expense, of course, of free speech.

That isn’t what the CFRers want. At least, they say they don’t want that. They want to reduce the influence of money over our elections and our leaders: a worthy goal. But achieving it means placing serious restrictions on individual rights. Be honest. That’s the only way.

Emily Matthews commented:

The very first "campaign finance reforms" were passed over 150 years ago, with the intent to silence opponents. Not much has changed.

Jack Lohman, one of Wisconsin’s biggest supporters of CFR, responded to her thus:

...full public funding of campaigns would increase speech by allowing challengers at least some money to advertise. It would level the playing field, and that's why incumbents oppose it.

The cost? About $5 per taxpayer per year. The cost of the current system? Hundreds of times more than that.

Note the date: a CFRer has admitted that having money to spend helps people exercise their free speech rights. It may not be the first time, but it’s the first time I’ve noticed.

Still, though, even if Jack is right (which he is, but only in very limited circumstances), that’s hardly the whole story.

See, Jack’s talking about the candidates. But the candidates aren’t the only agency of spending – there are the independent, third-party groups, too. My column was about them, because the Government Accountability Board is looking at them – looking to curtail their ability to influence the political process.

We could provide full public funding to the candidates themselves. We could require that those candidates take the public money. We could forbid them from accepting other monies, making the public money their only source of campaign expenditures.

But it wouldn’t make any difference: the money would simply find another way to flow, and in all likelihood that new direction would be toward the independent groups.

We’ve seen this before: when Congress limited “soft money” contributions to political parties, the money didn’t disappear. It simply flowed to the “527s” which continued the fight, but with far less accountability than had been the case before.

And here we are, still kvetching about all the money in politics.

For Jack’s idea to work, we must – must – limit (or end) political spending by independent groups. In other words, we must place limits on speech, and not just speech: political speech. And political speech is the whole reason the Founding Fathers wanted a freedom of speech in the first place.

Hey, nobody likes negative ads. Everybody knows there’s at least an implied request for mutual back-scratching when one group or another spends five, six, seven figures to get a particular candidate elected. Everybody understands that the potential for underhanded under-the-table wink-and-nod shenanigans exists.

Trying to end those things is a fine way to spend one’s time. But those efforts have to be self-limited by the understanding that we mustn’t limit the people’s ability to make their opinions and voices heard. Sometimes, the people will make themselves heard by joining several thousand other like-minded people, pooling their resources and forming an organization to speak for them. That’s their right, and it has to remain so.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

Old and busted: speculation about Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential run. New hotness: speculation about Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential run.

Well, no, that's not actually in the news. Pundit-like, though, I warp whatever the news is into what I want the news to be.

The story:

There's a lot of buzz in DC about the fact that the Obama Transition Team is, according to one knowledgeable source, "very serious" about Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, being under consideration for Secretary of State.

Okay: this is where we're supposed to discuss Hillary's qualifications, how she'd probably do the job, how independent she'd be in an Obama administration.

Or, we could discuss how the dynamics between Obama and Hillary made this happen – whether it's payback, or Keeping Your Enemies Closer, or something like that.

Both are legitimate angles on this story. Naturally, I choose neither.

Come on! It's Hillary! There's only one angle: speculation on what it all might mean for Hillary for President, 2016!

The story absolutely drips Hillary '16. For example: why would she want to leave the Senate and, likely, a prime-time Chairmanship? Sure, that job isn't quite as prominent as State, but she'll never be lacking for media attention, regardless.

In the Senate, she's her own boss: she can do what's best for Hillary 24/7. As a Cabinet secretary, she'd have to toe the Obama line and...yeah, Obama'd be able to set her up and fire her.

So there's no real hurry for her to leave the Senate…unless she wants to establish some more prominent foreign policy cred before pushing New York Governor David Paterson down a flight of stairs.

That's really Hillary's best avenue - getting a Governorship before running again. But: the Governor of New York is a Democrat - he was Lieutenant Governor under the now-resigned-in-disgrace Eliot Spitzer. If Paterson decides to run in 2010…well, Hillary can't run against an incumbent Dem.

If he doesn't run, Hillary should.

If Paterson runs and loses, then she'd have another shot at the Governorship in 2014. But then she'd have to start running for President right away, without establishing any gubernatorial record.

Ha. Start running. I crack myself up. I mean keep running.

All this, of course, ignores the possibility that Hillary might move again. You know, discover roots in some other state, pack up the carpet bag and declare herself...oh, I don't know. Maybe a Dodgers fan, this time.

Anyway, if she's gotta take a Cabinet post right away instead of spending more time in the Senate – and the offer might not come more than once – then she'll take it, see what happens in 2010, and, if there's no Governorship for her, then it's the prominent Cabinet post followed by a high-profile and lucrative series of speaking tours and private sector/nonprofit chairmanships.

All those options are high-profile. All are financially lucrative. All burnish her resume for her next shot at the Big Chair.

Either way, keep those Hillary jokes warm. There'll be another chance.

He may be a lot of things, but Jim Doyle is no lame duck

Jo Egelhoff of FoxPolitics.net has graciously agreed to let me continue writing once a week over there, which means I'll be excerpting what I write over there over here once a week.

This week, I'm taking a look at the speculation over Governor Jim Doyle's possible move to a D.C. Cabinet post. I begin:

Everybody knows what a “lame duck” is, right? A politician on his way out; just marking time until his successor takes over. He has legal power, but no leverage. No carrots, no sticks.

President Bush has been a lame duck since the 2006 mid-terms – a situation made worse by his miserable poll numbers. Governor Doyle would be a lame duck – or something very like it – if he said publicly that yes, he’d love to have a place in President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet.

That’s one reason he doesn’t say that.

There are other reasons, too. Read them all.

They said Obama would bring Hope, and they were right!

Got Hope?

Maybe not: there isn't a lot of doe-eyed hopefulness to be found among conservatives and Republicans these days.

And why not, I ask? Why not?

Two days after Election Day, and I find myself absolutely full of hope. I'm serious. Having spent much of my time during the election ridiculing Obamaniacs for their insipid faith in Hope and Change, President-elect Obama's victory has, indeed, shown me the path to hope.

What, you don't believe me? What hope can there be, you ask, with a socialist in the White House and a seething mob of his ideological brothers and sisters staining the Congressional rugs? A Republican Party with no credibility on formerly key Republican issues, heading for the wilderness for, at least, the foreseeable future?

There's no hope there. None whatsoever.

Pish posh, I say. The Obama administration has, indeed, brought us hope. Little else, maybe, but lots and lots of hope.

For example, we can hope that Democrats fail to heed the warnings of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who said: "He became so powerful... the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did."

Wise words that Republicans might once have heeded: no matter how you try to hang onto power, power slips away. So don't lose yourself in the part.

Now, we hope, Democrats will follow Republicans' example: protect the power they've recently gained with such fanaticism that they, too, lose whatever identity they once had.

And then still lose their power, despite their efforts.

Don't risk the midterm elections by being liberal now, Democrats! Resist those urges: come out of the gates conservative. Cut some spending, lower a little tax here or there. Get the budget under control. Just until the economy gets moving again.

That way, you see, when conservatives say things like this…

“We’ll see increases in every kind of state tax you can imagine,” said Brad Briney, president of the Independent Business Association of Wisconsin.

…liberals and Democrats can say: Hah! See? They're all wrong about us! What a bunch of liars!

What better way to prove how wrong we are than to give us everything we want!

If that's not hope, I don't know what is.

Failing that, I have another hope: I hope Democrats do give in to their most liberal tendencies: that they do attempt to enact socialist health care, business-killing taxes and regulations; that they really do try to cut military spending by a quarter; that abolishing the borders and mandating grade-school "gay studies" is at the top of their agenda.

Just watch what happens in 2010 then.

Yeah, sure, I doubt they'll do all that. Well, I doubt that last one. But it's not about reality. It's about hope. And man, I'm hoping!

We can hope that Republicans in the U.S. Senate find a collective backbone and stick to it, so they can at least force Democrats to negotiate over things like judicial nominations.

We can hope that national-level Republicans in general are somehow able to regain their credibility on spending issues, and particularly on pork projects. Electing leaders like Paul Ryan would be a good start.

We can hope that our nation's future never depends on Joe Biden's ability to make a cohesive statement that lasts more than ten seconds.

We can hope that some of President-elect Obama's cabinet choices are as entertaining as Joycelyn Elders was.

We can hope that Obama isn't as naïve about foreign affairs as he seems; that he is wise enough (or lucky enough) to pick strong, experienced Cabinet members.

We can hope that Santa brings us the 3200-piece Lego Death Star with the incredible array of minifigure-scale scenes and accessories for Christmas this year.

And we can hope that being on the offensive – rather than constantly having to defend old turf with too little help from the Big Chair – helps reenergize the Republican Party. We can hope for the electoral pendulum to start swinging back the other way, now that Democrats hold total sway over our government.

No hope? I beg to differ. President-elect Obama promised us hope, and boy has he delivered.

Finally!

I'm busy, so instead of excerpting this column I wrote for FoxPolitics.net, I'm re-posting the whole thing here. That means you don't have to click over to read the whole thing, but you should click over anyway, just for the round-ups of news and opinion. It's good.

Onward.

Wow, November already. Where has the year gone?

At least, that's what people usually say. Somehow, people aren't. Not this year. Instead, they're saying: "Thank God November's here. Now we can finally get this election over with."

Some of us will be happier tomorrow than others of us, of course, but that's the way things go. The important thing is: by this time tomorrow, and probably (hopefully!) earlier, we'll know.

We'll know who the next president will be, and what kind of Congress he'll have. We'll know whether Wisconsin's government will be all-Democrat, or whether we'll still have a Republican Assembly to stand in the way of the worst liberal excesses.

We'll finally know.
In some ways, having it all over will be a relief. It started so early. It's gone on forever. Remember when Hillary was still inevitable? When McCain was a broken-down also-ran?

It wasn't really so long ago, but it sure seems that way.

On the other hand, why does it seem that way? Compared to other recent elections, this one hasn't been so bad.

In October of 2004, for example, there was no such thing as a commercial break without a political ad. As November rolled around, sometimes the breaks were nothing but political ads. Those, and Peyton Manning commercials. You couldn't get away from them.

This year, not so much. I think I saw three political ads during the Green Bay game Sunday. Compared to 2004, this election has been quiet.

Unfortunately, that's because both campaigns think Wisconsin's a done deal. A few double-digit poll leads for Obama and, bam. We're out of the Battleground State club.

I wished for that not too long ago. To not live in a Battleground State. I was ready for a break from the radical intensity of the last two presidential elections. Of course, I was wishing we'd be a safe Republican state, but…well, you can't have everything.

John McCain is maintaining that it's not over – the votes still have to be cast, and counted, and a comeback isn't out of the question. Sure, the fat lady's warming up, but she'd be doing that by now anyway. Demographics are changing; more people have gone landlineless; the major media are clearly pulling for Obama, which is blinding them to their own mistakes. It's entirely possible that the polls are wrong, and McCain can pull it off.

Part of me believes all that, and part of me doesn't. By this time tomorrow, one part of me will be teasing the other part of me for being so wrong.

Regardless, today will end at the same speed as other days. Tomorrow will come, and we'll know. And we'll adapt, and we'll go on with our lives, and January's peaceful transfer of power from one person to another – maybe from one party to another – will occur. Republicans will fight over the "soul of the party," Democrats will act like starving cats fighting over a chicken bone (I hope), and six months from now we'll be getting ready for the mid-term elections, and wondering what they'll mean for the 2012 presidential race.

The battle will have been won or lost, but the war will go on. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Because that's what it does.

And the worst part of it all? I mean, besides the higher taxes, and protectionist trade policies, and weakened foreign policy and gutted military and continued reliance on foreign oil and endangerment of First and Second Amendment rights?

We pundits will have to find something else to write about. And I may have forgotten how.