Roger L. Simon: Spengler, Obama, Goolsbee

My friend Mike Reynolds tipped me to Spengler's article in the Asia Times on Barack Obama--Obama's women reveal his secret. Most political opinion is dross, including much of my own. Spengler often tends to go off half-cocked, but he's often interesting. Here he may even be right. If you haven't read it, take a look.

Meanwhile, as I watch the continued NAFTA-baiting by Clinton and Obama, I find them increasingly despicable. What utter liars. Can the American public be so stupid they don't recognize this? We shall see.

MORE REGARDING NAFTA: I don't know about the rest of you, but I am highly disturbed reading the following paragraph on Marc Ambinder's blog (via Instapundit):

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I haven't followed the NAFTA issue enough so can't say. I mainly fear an Obama administration as a probable foreign-policy disaster. I think he'd be likely to make unforgiveably stupid decisions that we'd all have to pay for, maybe even in terrible ways.

If he is elected, he is going to have to knock that crap off and make a decision.

The thing is the NAFTA agreement was signed after much debate in both houses of Congress. There are international trade organizations that an internationalist like Obama can go to if he wants to voice grievances. There the WTO and if I am not mistaken there is actually an international labor organization as well. There are in fact environmental and labor standards in NAFTA, people like Al Gore actually worked to put them in there.

Now what do we hear? Demagoguery plain and simple. A lot of the jobs that have been lost in the midwest have been lost to technology and they are not coming back. It is a big fat lie to say otherwise.

Add to that fact, the sneakiness and the arrogance and the outright dishonesty of some of this rhetoric and I don't see change. I see just another televsion preacher.

When Barack Obama speaks (incessantly) about change, he probably doesn�t mean changing his positions to suit his audience. Yet this is becoming the change Obama is best at. Earlier today, I noted that, while Obama promises Ohio voters to renegotiate NAFTA, his "lead" economic adviser assures Canadian officials that this is just campaign rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Obama, again through a surrogate, is signaling a change in his position with respect to meeting with Iranian president Ahmadinejad. Thus, Rep. Robert Wexler, Obama�s main Jewish outreach guy, has told JTA that Obama does not necessarily have Ahmadinejad in mind when he says he will meet with Iran's leaders. Wexler (most recently seen providing misleading information to the Jerusalem Post about the role of Robert Malley in the Obama campaign), says that �Ahmadinejad may not be the one to meet with" because �he is not the person that ultimately controls power in Iran." Maybe Obama will be like the guy in the old 1960s joke who arrives on Mars and says, �take me to your leader.�

But as recently as November, Obama was pretty clear that he would talk to Ahmadinejad even though the Holocaust denier might not have ultimate power. According to JTA, Obama told Meet the Press:

"Look, part of the reason it�s important for us to talk to countries we don�t like and leaders we don�t like, it's not that I think that in a conversation with somebody like Ahmadinejad that I�m going to somehow change his mind on everything, but what we do is, we send a signal to other leadership in Iran, to the Iranian people and to the world community that we are listening and that we are willing to try to resolve conflicts peacefully."

A lot of the jobs that have been lost in the midwest have been lost to technology and they are not coming back. It is a big fat lie to say otherwise.

Obamanation seems to be convinced that this isn't the case with this simplistic "Patriot employers" bill that's cosponsored by two of his fellow senatorial stooges, Sherrod Brown and Dick Durbin. Without getting into the prodigious details of this delusional transfer of money away from successful businesses to subsidize big labor and other donk faves, it would turn the rest of the nation into Lorain, Ohio or Detroit.

Usually, though, they wait until they're in office to tergiversate. Here, it's as if Obama was saying in a stage whisper, "Relax, Frostbacks. It's all campaign pandering."

Austan Goolsbee appears to be another yuppie academic who feels he can lie because it is important that Democrats win elections. They are mostly motivated by the cultural war issues and dishonest pacifism. This has been going on for a long time. One thing is said to the poorly educated Democrats---while an entirely different message is offered to the "elites." Only recently Hillary Clinton also publicly blasted the very profession that employs her own daughter! You can take it for granted that she called Chelsea immediately afterwards and reminded her that she is merely throwing red meat to the bubbas.

Obama and others who oppose free trade focus on just one effect -- the jobs lost in one area -- and evade the benefits to the rest of the economy.

For instance, yes, under NAFTA, some jobs were lost to Mexico and Canada -- but only because those jobs could be done more efficiently there, resulting in lower costs of production and hence lower prices for the goods being produced. As a result, everyone who purchases those goods now spends less for them -- and thus has MORE TO SPEND ON OTHER GOODS. The increased purchases of other goods results in increased employment in the industries producing those goods -- including industries here in America.

(Even if the lower costs of production are simply retained as profits instead of being passed on to consumers -- which generally will only happen if competition is suppressed by government -- these extra profits are ultimately spent on SOMETHING.)

So Obama and other anti-free traders travel to an area (like Ohio) that has experienced job losses under NAFTA and promise to bring those jobs back. But they don't tell the rest of the nation that this means they will now have to pay MORE for the goods produced by these jobs -- and they don't tell the nation that this will result in less spending for other goods, with an inevitable loss of jobs in those industries.

All economic advances are premised upon the principle of creative destruction. In the early part of the previous century, for instance, the horse and buggy industry was devastated by the arrival of lower cost automobiles. Many people inevitably lost their jobs. Think about how much economic damage would have occurred if these jobs were politically protected? The sad fact is that these individuals had to be trained for other employment.

"Progressive" politicians cannot be open about their intentions, or at least they cannot be very specific about the myriad socialist programs they wish to implement. Watch them dance around any question about tax increases to pay for said programs, or the word "liberal" - which is just as well as classical liberal values are no longer championed by the left anyway. Victimhood and a weird self-loathing are.

David Thomson is absolutely right: As I look around the Detroit area where I live, I don't see many blacksmiths. I do see and talk to a lot of people in complete denial about the auto industry's need to morph and streamline, and their own need to change on a personal level. Soda jerks, court jesters, powdered-wig makers, these folks have all moved on. "Change" right? It's what used to be called life - it ain't always easy so you'd better learn to deal with it.

I understand that Michelle Obama has discouraged blacks student from going into the corporate world, and told them to become nurses and blue collar; the doctrinal opposite of Cosby and Oprah.

Also that her thesis "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," proposes that the more time educated blacks spend with whites the less they will care for their own black people.

The wife of the future president of the United States Michelle Obama may very well be a re-segregationist. Obama should be asked what role his wife will play in his administration.

Interestingly enough the leading civil rights leader in London says that an Obama presidency would prolong the US racial divide. The article left me feeling that he was holding back.

http://tinyurl.com/32vaur

Michele Obama makes over $300,000 a year. That is not blue collar. Just another do as I say not as I do...do gooder.

If these things attributed to Michelle Obama are true, they should as politically damaging to the campaign, if not more, than Kitty Dukakis battle with depression.

Obama is the blank slate, after all. And his campaign may morph into the Audacity of Hope that voters don't Change their minds after they learn more about him.

"And his campaign may morph into the Audacity of Hope that voters don't Change their minds after they learn more about him."

Barack Obama is too leftwing to be elected president of the United States. He is another George McGovern and the MSM will not be able to con the middle-of-the-road voter into believing that he is some sort of centrist. When everything is said and done, Obama is merely a more refined version of Jessie Jackson who knows how to manipulate guilt tripped white Yuppies.

Living in Southeast Michigan without cable, I get to see the political ads from Ohio. Obama is engaging in blatant protectionist rhetoric. An unemployed auto worker says how he lost his job because of NAFTA, and then we learn about Obama's policies: stick it to corporations that send jobs overseas, i.e., boilerplate, old school Democratic crappola. Change? Hmmm.

Of course if Obama is telling the Canadians, "don't worry, be happy", he's simply saying that he can't be believed.

Yet, it is essential to remember that large segments of the country are fatigued of the war in Iraq and of the resulting frictions in the country. Obama implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) promises to end all the fighting and to make it all nicey nice. This is a seductive elixir for many.

I don't disagree with all of Spengler's remarks about Obama. I, myself, don't see Obama as black, I see him as the son of an academic with all the deficits that implies. But I still think Spengler is nuts. Remember when he predicted Russian troops showing up in Iraq? He is a good read in the same way that Lovecraft is a good read, and his stories have about as much connection to reality.

Yup, and that's why "Barry" Obama will earn forty percent of the vote. This is roughly the same total obtained by Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. Never forget that the United States is a democracy and even the loser in a two way race for the presidency still receives a hell of a lot of votes.

I am not sure people are prepared to believe all that stuff anymore. I know people who think NAFTA is bad blah blah blah...but I am not sure they would vote for Obama because of it. It is one thing to bitch and moan and whine...it is another to undo a longstanding treaty with your neighbors. I think a lot of these same people are worried that a million Mexicans might come pouring over the border if NAFTA is killed. And when someone reminds them that Canada sells us gas and oil...all that stuff about protectionism might seem like less of a reason to vote for Obama. Especially if it is all just rhetoric anyway.

The jury is still out on whether NAFTA is good for our country overall, or good for Mexico. There is some research suggesting that it has decimated Mexican agriculture, driving a lot of the illegal immigration in recent years.

Still, even if you can make the arguement that NAFTA has been good for the USA, what is undeniable is that NAFTA has been bad for Ohio. A state with no competitive advantages, as well as a state that will always have as many seats in the Senate as every other state.

People who say Obama has no record are wrong. He has a record. It's as a classical Daley-machine Illinois Democrat. The back-channel reassurance to the Canadians -- "Don't take our rhetoric too seriously" -- is absolutely consistent with that. The real message to the Canadians is, "We need you to cooperate with us in ways that we can portray as face-saving victories to our base. But business is business, we can be bought under the table, and you'll be taken care of, just trust us."

Over that Chicago ward-pol skeleton is a Harvard Law-trained intellect and facility with phrasing. The most interesting observation in Spengler's piece is the proposition that Obama learned from his mother the anthropologist's technique of learning to interact nonjudgmentally in a way that makes him/her seem (but only seem) to mirror his audience's values.

History repeats itself. Harvard Law-educated John F. Kennedy, whose politics furnish so many other parallels to Obama, also provided hope, rhetoric, and charisma. Underneath were the politics of a millionaire Boston Irish bootlegger and ward-pol who knew how to hold a grudge and cut a deal (viz, "Welcome to the ticket you absolute bastard Lyndon Johnson, now find enough dead people in Duval County, Texas, to vote in alphabetical order to ensure that we get Texas' crucial electoral votes in 1960.")

We live in interesting times, of the exact sort the Chinese curse was intended to reference.

Obama is an American Hugo Chavez, and we may be at the tipping point, after 50 years of dumbing down, aborting ourselves of our progeny, and then welcoming the immigration tsunami of the world's least-educated, but somehow deserving, people of color. Makes my blood curdle, and not just for this election. The American future seems dark; another Argentina, then, instead of Venezuela?

I'm really tired of hearing this. Pandering is bad for Ohio. Resisting change is bad for Ohio. Playing the victim and acting pathetic is bad for Ohio. Settling to go on the dole instead of picking yourself up and making your place in the world is bad for Ohio. Electing governors that suggest adding Keno in bars is economic stimulus is bad for Ohio. Having extremely high corporate taxes is bad for Ohio. Having local income taxes is bad for Ohio.

February 29, 2008: Spengler, Obama, Goolsbee - it's a stew

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