Quote of the Day
It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that make the master's fame.
Orison Swett Marden
American Female Politicians:
The Need for Fresh Leadership
No doubt that misandrists will accuse me of being a misogynist. You couldn't write a commentary like this one under the progressive groupthink in academia. But you would think, after 6 decades of feminist ideology has been so baked into modern society, one would think that one shouldn't need the crutch of counterproductive morally hazardous public policy and stealth backdoor activist lawsuits.
Take a simple example of feminist ideology run amok: the just completed Wimbleton tennis championships. The top gender winners have been awarded, since 2007, the same prize money. In the progressive ideology of Barack Obama and others, this appears to be fair--until you realize that for men to win the championship they have to win a best of 5 sets, while ladies play a best of 3 sets. And whereas there are some solid women tennis players out there, the top men players are generally better athletes, have more powerful serves and, in my judgment, their matches are more entertaining (longer rallies, more aggressive play, and more diversified shot selections). In a truly free market, I would be willing to pay much more to see a late tournament match among top male stars like Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer. Here's the point: when you use a fairer pay standard, i.e., a per-game compensation model, men are vastly underpaid. I seriously doubt that the British would ever allow a free market solution, say, which segregates gender matches, allows for market-based ticket pricing and decides winner purses by ticket revenues. (As an aside, congratulations to the east European champions.)
Probably the highest well-known American female politicians out there at this time are (making my choice, a pair each by ideology): Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton (D) ; Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann (R). And I would submit there isn't a legitimate leader (e.g., of the caliber of a Thatcher, Gandhi, Meir, Merkel or Bhutto) among the lot of them.
Let's be clear: Hillary Clinton would never have been elected a NY Senator, never mind nearly winning the 2008 Democratic nomination without having been the wife of a naturally charismatic Governor and President Bill Clinton, the closest thing to a Democratic centrist over the past 20 years. I have little doubt about Ms. Clinton's being a studious policy wonk and dutiful senator, but her politics were to the left of her husband's, and she has a far more polarizing personality. All of the major 2008 Presidential candidates had the same or similar views on salient policy issues. What mostly propped up Ms. Clinton wasn't her public speaking skills, her constituent services, her Bush bashing, and the like: rather, it was that her candidacy represented the second coming of Bill Clinton to the White House and a return to the 90's boom. This mythology of a Clintonian Camelot is unearned; Clinton lost control of the House after his first two years with an unpopular tax hike (having running a Presidential campaign on tax cuts and attacking Bush's trustworthiness by his compromising on a budget by reluctantly agreeing to Democratic Congressional leaders' demands for a tax hike) and his unsuccessful, unpopular health care reform initiative. Clinton also inherited the collapse of the Cold War (and ensuing defense spending reductions), the emerging information technology revolution and easy Fed monetary policy fueling a stock market bubble and easy capital gain revenues. Of course, Obama recruited the same Clinton Administration Keynesian economists, and the results are clear for anyone with a functioning brain to see.
I certainly think Hillary Clinton is an intelligent, capable professional woman, however misguided, obvious and trite her political views. But leadership requires more than professional competence or being one of the many predictable Democratic partisan senators. What I consider leadership is something like how an anti-Communist like Nixon reset our relationship with China, Reagan redefined the political landscape over the past 3 decades, or Gingrich provided a new political agenda with his innovative Contract with America. It requires more than throwing good money after bad in the evolution of an unsustainable failed Democratic political agenda. It means more than a series of change elections where one side tries to impose its ideology on the government and the country. Among other things, it requires flexibility, putting the overall interests of the country over one's political supporters. (Be clear: each partisan has the hubris his or her characteristic policies are in the overall interests of the country. What I'm talking about is utterly lacking in the Obama Administration. You have a President whom, with an unsustainable deficit, is engaging in sheer partisan rhetoric, declares over 80% of the budget untouchable, and refuses to deal with the realities of the last election.) It means being able to communicate persuasively, not in style, repackaged rhetoric and spin but directly and substantively.
Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker, has the unique capability of being able to say the most delusional, crackpot, Alice-in-Wonderland political quotes without skipping a beat I've ever heard: it's like the political equivalent of a poker face. I don't really think I need to push on a string here: Rasmussen's most recent popularity ratings show her 30% favorable / 60% unfavorable. Despite the Democrats spending around nearly $10T and adding almost $4T to the national debt, no net new jobs have been generated during Obama's Presidency--in an economy where we need over 1 million jobs per year just to sustain net new labor force entrants. In fact, when you take into account new laborers, Obama is roughly 5 million in the hole (never mind making up the jobs on Bush's side of the ledger since December 2007, over 4 million), 2 years into a recovery. Pelosi is arguing the unprecedented 2-year tenure for unemployment benefits is a job creator, when in fact it is morally hazardous public policy which subsidizes people to defer their day of reckoning while encouraging people in good times to spend money they don't have (and the government doesn't have) instead of saving for a rainy day. I should maintain a comprehensive list of every off-the-wall thing Pelosi says, but the obvious examples include saying that the Congress needed to pass the Democratic Party Health Care "Reform" Bill to see what surprises are in the 2000+ page bill and hikes in tax brackets nearly 8 years old are not tax hikes. One would think if there is one candidate the Democratic Party, the home of feminist ideologues, would promote would be the one whom has assumed the highest-profile leadership position in Congress; not even Hillary Clinton was in the Senate's party leadership.
As on the GOP side, Sarah Palin, a second-year governor from a resource-rich state where residents don't pay income tax, was plucked out of obscurity by John McCain, principally as a tactical move hoping to attract women voters after Obama beat Clinton for the nomination and decided to bypass her for the VP position even after she publicly lobbied for it. The pro-life activists in the social conservative wing of the party immediately embraced her given the fact that she elected not to abort her Down Syndrome son born months before the McCain nod. The rabid attacks on Palin by the Democratic partisans, including a defensive Obama ludicrously arguing his symbolic leadership in running a national campaign was more credible executive experience than that of a sitting governor, immediately ignited the chivalrous base. Initially the charismatic Palin seemed unnerved playing the red meat role of the Veep, constantly checking her approval ratings in Alaska where she had earned sky-high approval ratings even from independents and Democrats for taking on the GOP old guard. But it was becoming embarrassingly clear that the Palin crowds were outdrawing McCain's.
Clearly Palin's natural charisma and masterful use of the media stand apart in a party where the two best, most qualified and accomplished Presidential candidates of either party, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, seem to have all the personality of your Grandfather's Oldsmobile. But what has Ms. Palin offered in terms of leadership? Co-opting a political faction of the Tea Party, which was formed as part of the backlash against Obama's morally hazardous policies, simply because she is good at trashing Obama, isn't leadership. In fact, many of the things the Tea Party is against--high business taxes and prolific government spending--are characteristic of her brief tenure as governor. And her resignation as governor of a sparsely populated state is not the stuff of leadership and Presidential folklore. In the aftermath of the economic tsunami, with shrinking revenues and the need to balance your budget, you welcome the opportunity to prove your mettle; I know in my careers as a professor and as an IT professional, I have taken on tough assignments. In contrast according to a prominent Palin staffer, Palin decided to cash out and sign lucrative agreements for books, speeches and as a news contributor.
Michele Bachmann, a third-term Congresswoman who spent 4 years under Speaker Pelosi, is also attempting to co-opt the Tea Party and has little to offer beyond predictable anti-Obama rhetoric, some modest communication skills and a solid conservative voting record. Like Palin, she also lacks what GHW Bush once famously termed "the vision thing". Probably she was best known in Minnesota state politics for her prominent opposition to gay "marriage". In my view, gay "marriage" is a phony symbolic issue. If gay people want to live with each other (assuming they are functionally independent, consenting adults), voluntary association is a Constitutionally-protected right. Whereas I prefer alternative terminology for a cluster of marriage-like legal protections for a committed couple (e.g., domestic partnership or civil unions), I wouldn't lose sleep over legislatures or justice system calling a domestic partnership a "marriage"; I find it more annoying than substantive in nature. We know what marriage means from thousands of years of Judaic-Christian or other civil/religious traditions. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. The point I'm trying to make here, though, involves Bachmann's vision and choice of priorities. After the State of the Union, she upstaged Paul Ryan's comprehensive vision. What I want to see in terms of a female conservative, an American version of Margaret Thatcher, goes over and beyond predictable talking points, which are the only things Palin and Bachmann have to offer.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
ELO, "10538 Overture"
