Hope No More

A President who came to office one way has decided to pursue re-election in quite another. "Hope," "Change," and post-partisanship replaced by cynically scapegoating every ominous force imaginable -- the rich, Republicans, events.

In fairness, he cannot run on much else. As a would-be he could run on promise. As an incumbent he must run with a record -- a record that isn't very good. The economy is as bad as the one he inherited (more Americans are out of work), he has expanded government beyond Constitutional limits and most American's comfort zones, our debt has increased exponentially and our credit decreased inversely, and we are slowly but steadily retreating from the world.

This or any president cannot win with popular focus fixed on such a record.

And so he tries to deflect the spotlight, redirecting it towards those nefarious Republicans and plutocrats who are the true culprits, the authentic masters of our present misery.

Not him. Not Barack Obama. Not the One.

Our chief executive, in other words, plans to win this election at the lead of an angry mob of sorts.

"Change we can believe in" gives way to "To the lanterns!"

Herman Cain

The problem with Herman Cain is that Republicans cannot do anything more than make an educated guess about him.  He is entirely likable, understands the need to dramatically reduce the federal government's footprint, and is a happy warrior akin to the Party's patron saint, Ronald Reagan.

But he struggles with specification.  He has failed to go in depth defending "9-9-9" or refuting the substantive concerns raised about it, nor has he given much indication that he has thought out his positions on other relevant issues like foreign policy or the judiciary.

Of less reassurance is the fact that he is just now beginning to assemble something approximating a campaign structure.  Heretofore it has been entirely ad hoc.

Going into an election we cannot afford to lose, Mr. Cain asks Republicans to make a large leap of faith.

Iowa & New Hampshire

The current presidential nomination process of both parties has justly received criticism for the dispositive roll it gives to the small, idiosyncratic states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

To be fair though, if you are going to have such an intensely flawed and unrepresentative system there is at least the minor consolation that the two states given such absurd preference are fairly distinct from each other ideologically.

On the Republican side, the rural social conservatism of Iowa is balanced in short-order by the individualistic, libertarian-conservatism of New Hampshire. The Midwest is countered by the Northeast, which is then countered by the South in South Carolina.

There are better ways to do it (a string of regional primaries perhaps), but the system does have some Madisonian logic undergirding it.

OWS

The naked, in-your-face sense of entitlement of the OWS protestors is of a certain kind with the recent rioters in London and the indignant hordes in the streets of Athens.

These are the children of the welfare state; a generation conditioned by state largesse to neither expect nor desire being masters of their own fate. It is to the state to provision for them, and it is upon the state to make some kind of restitution when they do not enjoy the standard they feel is their right. Thus the demand for the federal government to take actions such as taxing wealth to a greater degree or to forgive all student debt.

It is, in many respects, the reverse of JFK's inaugural exhortation: not what you can do, but what society is supposed to do for you.

The Charmed Campaign of Mitt Romney

National polls of Republican voters now place Herman Cain either dead even or slightly ahead of putative frontrunner Mitt Romney.

So continues Romney's charmed candidacy.

Cain's sudden and soaring ascension from fringe to front means one thing: the scrutiny the other contenders began to direct towards him in the last debate will increase exponentially in the next.

Not by Romney, mind you.  He has no political need right now to so much as cast a sidelong glance towards Cain, at least not when all the other would-be nominees have every need to do so.  It is Cain who now occupies the space the rest of them seek: tribune of the conservative movement and principle challenger to the establishment's favorite, Romney.  Unless and until they are able to assume the ground Cain now treads upon, they have no plausible path to the nomination.  Their political lives depend upon them attacking Cain and taking the support among movement conservatives he presently enjoys.

Romney could not ask for more.  As has been the case throughout this campaign, movement conservatives continue to attack each other and splinter that constituency.  His new nearest competitor Cain -- as with Perry before him and Bachmann before him -- will now face the preponderance of that scrutiny (the charge that his 9% national sales tax will provide the government a new avenue to raise taxes in the future has the potential to be especially damning).

To Romney's triple benefit he continues to enjoy a reprieve from heavy scrutiny, he is saved from having to dirty his hands attacking his nearest competitor and, in turn, his nearest competitor will be forced to spend his time defending himself instead of going after him and his heresies, principally "Romneycare."

It is as if the field is going out of its way to clear a clean and even path for Romney to the nomination.

With enemies like these, who needs friends?

The President's Mess

At issue three years into Obama's presidency -- and as he begins his campaign to extend it -- is not whether he inherited this or any "mess," but whether he has done anything useful to remedy it.

He has not; quite the contrary, in fact.  Unemployment has rested comfortably at 9% for months, worse than the rate he inherited and greater than the ceiling he promised his "stimulus" would provide.  Neither is there much hope for a turnaround, with quarterly growth standing at a mere pittance of what any meaningful recovery should entail.

Much of the fault for this lies at the feet of the President -- or at least at the feet of the policies his administration has pursued and adopted.

This is so for the simple reason that the economy would be in better shape had President Obama walked into the Oval Office in January '09 and done absolutely nothing; no stimulus, no cap and trade, no Obamacare, nothing.  Instead the sum effect of these and other pursuits has been to load a recessionary economy with more debt, more regulation, more costs on employment and now, if he gets his way, more taxation.

Unsurprisingly, the state of the economy has failed to improve. Arguably, it has only become worse.

That is not your predecessor's fault, Mr. President.  It is your own.