Are You Sure Dems - Road to the Middle Class

IF YOU SCRATCH a Democrat this year, you will probably find someone who feels like they are waking up out of a bad dream, the bad dream of 28 years of conservative backlash against rational, progressive governance.

To put it another way, Democrats have learned nothing from the last 30 years. They still believe in top-down expert-led central government programs to organize and direct the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and the culture.

But here’s my prediction. After Barack Obama gets elected president and the Dems increase their majorities in Congress they are going to get a wake-up call. Americans really don’t know what they want, but they don’t want liberals bossing them around.

Here are four issues that show the Dems just don’t get it.

Universal Pre-K It’s not just Hillary Clinton with a lovely wrapped present of universal pre-kindergarten schooling and care. It’s Obama. Writes Terence Jeffrey about Obama’s plan to raise our kids for us:

We used to do it ourselves. Now, convinced we have better things to do, many of us leave the job to others.

Encouraging this flight from parenthood, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has proposed what he calls his "Zero to Five" plan. It is a collection of programs aimed at getting the government involved in the raising of your children from the moment they are born.

Are you really sure about that, Sen Obama? Given what a wonderful job government has done with K-12 education, do you really think that a centralized, top-down, bureaucratic approach to early childhood education is really going to be anything other than a big plum for the education blob?

Energy and Global Warming Sen. Obama has said that $5 per gallon gasoline is inevitable. He just wished it hadn’t happened all of a sudden. As Sheldon Alberts reports, Obama is against “dirty oil” like the Alberta tar sands play that is ramping up north of us in Canada.

Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America’s addiction to "dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive" oil if he is elected U.S. president — and one of his first targets might well be Canada’s oil sands.

Obama says "The possibilities of renewable energy are limitless." Well, yes, Senator. But until renewable energy actually comes in cheaper than fossil fuel it is just a possibility. You can’t commit the people of the United States to a possibility. And that means that you can’t commit the United States to a radical move away from fossil fuels merely on the prediction of advocates that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have catastrophic results a century from now. What if they are wrong?

What you can do is spend a little here and there on research and on easing the development hurdles for new technologies. But a rigid top-down energy program is going to fail. “Plans are useless, but planning is essential.” That’s what President Eisenhower said about military plans. The same applies to any top down plan. It doesn’t survive the first few minutes of battle, but it’s essential to have thought and planned about the future, so you can adapt when you find out that your assumptions were all wrong.

Fairness Doctrine

Nancy Pelosi told a group of journalists recently that she was in favor of reviving the Fairness Doctrine, according to John Gizzi. It’s understandable that Democrats are frustrated by the success of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio. But the answer isn’t to try and shut them up. The answer is for elite liberals to think seriously about their agenda and about why “liberal” has become a dirty word.

Actually, Rush gives the impression that he is hoping for a revival of the Fairness Doctrine. It would make him the most popular man in America, and probably propel a Republican into the White House.

Universal Health Insurance Democrats still can’t get beyond the century-old idea of cradle-to-grave government-controlled health insurance. What will it solve? Not much. But it will create a crisis in health care that will reverberate through the political system with unknown results.

Raising Tax Rates Senator Obama is promising to raise tax rates on the wealthy, by extending the FICA payroll tax and by increasing capital gains taxes and dividend taxes. Apart from the fact that the rich are already paying a bigger share of income tax than before and the bottom half of taxpayers are paying nothing, there is the international problem. Worldwide, governments are lowering tax rates. Does Obama really think he can raise tax rates in the US without a negative hit to the economy?

All these issues tell me one thing. Democrats haven’t really tried to think about the meaning of the last 30 years of American politics. They just want to forget the nightmare of Reagan and Bush and get back to politics as usual. That means that they are in for a nasty surprise.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.