And Rightly So

February 12, 2010

This Bulletin goes to press just a few days after Scott Brown's astonishing victory in the Massachusetts Senate race. I don't know about you, but I couldn't really believe he was going to win until the results were final.

Despite all the polls showing Brown's lead . . . despite Coakley's cascading blunders (sneering at Brown for shaking hands with voters at Fenway Park, looking on as one of her goons manhandled a conservative reporter, misspelling Massachusetts, using a photo of the Twin Towers to represent greedy Wall Street, calling Curt Schilling a Yankees fan, opining that Catholics probably shouldn't work in emergency rooms, accusing the Republicans of election- day fraud in a letter dated the day before the election) . . . despite the overwhelming anecdotal evidence of enthusiasm for Brown and near-universal disgust with Coakley in Massachusetts . . . it just seemed too good to be true. Who could imagine that the voters of Massachusetts -- Massachusetts, for crying out loud -- would put a Republican into the seat that the Kennedys had controlled since 1952? But the people of Massachusetts showed that it was their seat, after all. And went some distance to proving that America is fed to the teeth with the Democratic Party, the Obama Administration, and their plans to remake America as a bankrupt second-rate power.

Not that they see their plans that way. They just want to guarantee everybody healthcare, restructure American finance, persuade anti-American dictators across the globe to love us, run the car industry from Washington (for the benefit of the unions whose contributions keep them in office), stop the oceans from rising -- and borrow another couple trillion dollars in our name whenever they run out of money to spend. They can’t imagine why anyone would doubt their competence to carry out this rather ambitious agenda, or their right to wreck America’s credit in its pursuit.

Seriously, a lot of the Democrats -- I'm pretty sure Barack Obama is among them -- are motivated in large part by good intentions. They want sick people to be able to get medical care; they want to punish the greedy and uplift the downtrodden; they want good relations with other countries. But they're horribly handicapped by their ignorance, which is both a result and a further cause of their arrogance. The more you watch the Obama Administration stumble from one disaster to the next, the more they seem to be suffering from appalling naivety.

Because the Obamas nobly bypassed corporate careers for (highly remunerated) "public service," they don't know how business really works. So it doesn't seem to occur to the President that the enormous uncertainty he's continually introducing into the business climate -- first cap and trade, then Obamacare, now bank reform -- might be staving off the recovery and especially the jobs that he must so desperately want.

Obama's a product of the modern education system shaped by the Left. In fact, he's the first President we've had whose entire education was in institutions radicalized in the 1960s. In that kind of education, history is nothing but a series of conflicts in which some oppressed, marginalized, discriminated against, or colonized group wins equality with the help of enlightened Leftists and government intervention. Education like that nurtures the mindset Obama seems to be operating out of, as he marks his disrespect for Winston Churchill and the Queen of England while kowtowing to non-Western rulers and currying favor with seedy dictators. So how should we expect Barack Obama -- when, say, confronted with dangers from abroad -- to be able to draw on the kinds of historical lessons that past Presidents were able to draw on, from their wider historical knowledge?

And we certainly can't expect Obama to profit from the insights of Adam Smith, or F. A. Hayek, or Milton Friedman. Of course he's heard free market arguments in some form, or at least he's heard of them. But how could ever it occur to him to take them seriously? In the circles he's always moved in, those are simply the ideas of the naysayers and the bitter clingers.

Given the unexampled ignorance of today's Left, there's little hope that Scott Brown's election will inspire a course correction by the Obama Administration or its allies in Congress. The hope is that the American people will take enough power out of their hands to stop their agenda. Starting this past Tuesday.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com