Dont Blame The Help - Road to the Middle Class

For weeks, conservatives have been reporting on the rookie mistakes of the Obama team. Now the media bigfeet are waking up to the problem. “A Turning Tide?” asks Howard Fineman.

Obama still has the approval of the people, but the establishment is beginning to mumble that the president may not have what it takes.

But dear sweetie-pie Camille Paglia wants to blame the staff. “Free Barack!” she writes.

Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama’s first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection.

What’s the line from the management gurus? To govern is to choose. Management is people. Your people tell the world who you are. An army or a church or a corporation reflects the personality and the personnel choices of the general, the bishop, or the CEO.

Don’t blame the help, Camille. That’s the worst thing you can do. No, the place to start is right at the top. If President Obama’s adminstration is getting off to a rocky start, the guy to blame is the guy at the top.

And the trouble is that we still know nothing about the guy at the top. Is he as smart as the Democratic partisans tell us? Is he a front man, an empty suit, as conservatives want to believe? Is he a radical lefty? Is he just a corrupt Chicago pol?

Nobody knows, except a few insiders, and they aren’t telling.

Maybe the most obvious explanation is the truth. President Obama is a bright, but inexperienced politician who has gathered a more-or-less mainstream liberal crew about him. In that case, you would expect a rather liberal administration, executing out of a 30-year-old playbook, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say. You’d expect such an administration to push out all the old liberal wheezes, from health care to education to global warming. And you’d expect a rather clumsy approach to the economy, since liberals are mainly interested in spending other peoples’ money instead of helping them earn it.

But then there are “events, dear boy.” There’s the swirl of international power politics, and there are the ups and downs of the global economy.

For the president, there are only two things that really matter: keeping the peace and turning the wheels of commerce.

I wonder what the Obama plan is for keeping the peace, now that it’s handed out the “Reset” buttons to general acclaim.

And how about a credible plan for the banks and the economy?

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

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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